The Ice Queen, the Engineer and the Vampire Prince56.52%

Appalling guests

Chapter 26: Appalling guests

Eleanor pinched the bridge of her nose, fighting off the pounding headache brought on by hours of poring over maps and arcane diagrams. Shane and Amethyst's bickering hadn't helped matters, their heated exchange echoing off the walls of the guesthouse's study.

"Enough, you two!" she finally barked, silencing their latest spiral into quasi-mystical insults and technobabble bravado. "We're getting nowhere with this incessant grandstanding."

She leveled a reproachful look between the abashed engineer and sorceress. "Honestly, it's like I'm trapped between a pair of preening toddlers rather than supposed savants of their respective disciplines."

Shane harrumphed around his pipe stem, but wisely held his tongue as Amethyst brushed an errant lock of iron-gray hair back with a haughty sniff. Eleanor held up a forestalling hand before they could retort.

"Save it, both of you. We're just going in circles and working ourselves into an unproductive lather at this rate." She rose from the table with a weary grunt, massaging the knots of tension at the nape of her neck.

"What we need is to step back and clear our heads for a bit. All this navel-gazing over doomsday auguries won't mean a damn if we're half-addled from fatigue and stress when the real confrontations begin."

She allowed her gaze to sweep over them both, lips pressed into a thin line. "So here's what we're going to do - take a break and recharge for a few hours. It's just gone noon, so we'll adjourn to the courtyard and have a light lunch brought out while we... I don't know, discuss something other than esoteric armageddons for once?"

The mere thought of simpering conversation about mundanities like beverage selections or gardening tips seemed utterly ludicrous given the stakes looming over them. But Eleanor recognized the increasing frenzy of their scheming as self-defeating at this point - they risked locking themselves into dogmatic viewpoints.

Shane opened his mouth, clearly intending to object. But in a rare moment of circumspection, he seemed to reconsider at Eleanor's expectant look.

"Oh, very well," he grumbled at last, snapping his notebook shut with poor grace. "I suppose even paragons of my caliber require the occasional repast to, ah...recalibrate synaptic efficiencies. Wouldn't do to have my neurons all awhirl when puncturing the cosmogonic continuum."

Amethyst rolled her eyes at the litany of buzzwords but conceded with a weary nod of her own. "As you say, Majesty. A period of respite from...certain fixations may prove clarifying."

Eleanor allowed herself a tight smile, appreciating the overtures toward restraint from her two most headstrong subordinates, however begrudgingly offered. "Glad that's settled then. I'll have the courtyard arranged--"

She broke off as the study door thumped open to admit a harried-looking footman, slightly out of breath. "Apologies, Your Majesty!" The young man sketched an aborted bow. "But there are... unexpected arrivals at the gate. Demanding audiences most insistently."

Eleanor traded a bewildered look with Shane and Amethyst. Unexpected arrivals? Out here in the remote Quothan Archipelago? Her brow furrowed in consternation.

"Did these 'arrivals' give any indication of their identities? Or intent for that matter?

The footman's adam's apple bobbed as he shook his head. "No details, milady. Only that they bore sigils of...of someplace I've never heard uttered." His next words came out half-garbled by his nervous stutter. "N-N...Nehralem? Nehelrin? And they insisted their business was of the utmost cosmic pertinence that could not be delayed."

A faint thrumming pressure made itself known at the peripheries of Eleanor's senses, like reality itself beginning to quietly hum in almost subliminal dissonance. She exchanged a sharp look with Amethyst, whose expression had drained of all color.

"Nehellderen..." the sorceress breathed, a glamour of dread creeping over her features. Before Eleanor could demand an explanation, Amethyst straightened with an abruptness that made Shane flinch.

"Quickly," she snapped, sweeping toward the door with a sense of unmistakable urgency. "We must convene these...arrivals without delay. If my worst trepidations are accurate..." Amethyst swallowed hard, uncharacteristic apprehension lacing her tone.

"We may have just been granted an untimely preview of the stakes we truly face in unraveling Vincent's profanities."

With that ominous proclamation hanging over them all like a curved blade, Eleanor could only follow in the sorceress's wake, anxiety spiking once more. So much for taking a restorative break - it appeared the Endgame might be accelerating upon them far sooner than any had anticipated.

As Shane hurried along behind her, muttering what sounded like calculations under his breath, Eleanor found herself hoping her earlier bravado about staring down cosmic stakes wasn't about to be put to the severest test imaginable.

A chill whisper at the nape of her neck suggested grimly otherwise.

Eleanor's sense of trepidation only mounted as she, Shane, and Amethyst made their way to the courtyard's entrance pavilion. The footman who'd delivered the ominous message scurried ahead, throwing open the carved wooden doors.

Two figures awaited them on the flagstone dais, swathed in heavy robes that looked utterly out of place in the midday Quothan heat. Stylized symbols adorned the rich fabrics - geometric whorls and embellishments that made Eleanor's eyes ache trying to focus on them.

"Your Majesty," the taller of the two strangers intoned in a voice like brittle glass cracking. It bowed low, cowl brushing the stones. "We bring most grievous circumstances from realms...elsewhere."

Before Eleanor could demand clarification, Amethyst stepped forward, surprising them all. "Peace, emissaries of the Dreaming Court. We have been...apprised of certain resonances your arrival might portend."

Shane shot her a bewildered look, mouthing something about "dreaming what now?" But the sorceress ignored him, focused entirely upon their unexpected guests.

"Speak your grim cause then, if you must. But withhold nothing from its full cosmic scale - fates more vital than you can fathom hang in dizzying balance already."

For a moment, the two emissaries regarded Amethyst in silent consideration, as if weighing whether she was worthy of their revelations. Then, in eerie synchronicity, they each reached up to pull back their cowls.

Eleanor barely stifled a gasp at the sight that was revealed. Their features were...fragmented, oscillating in constant kaleidoscopic flux between humanoid and bestial visages. Eyes bled from sockets to slitted serpentine oculars and back, while fanged maws split their cheeks in permanent apering rictuses.

"You profane dwellers of the material elsewhere have always scrabbled in blessed ignorance of the greater cosmic stratas," the taller emissary ground out in a rasping wheeze. Neither's mouth moved in concert with its vocalizations, the sibilant words seemed to pour forth from the fragmented fabric of their beings themselves.

"But no longer. That upstart sorcerer Vincent has enacted depravities that can no more be overlooked or absolved according to edicts merciful and immemorial!"

Comprehension bloomed on Amethyst's face like a blood blossom in fast-motion. "He mage hacked the Vril? No, more than that - he's breaching Out realm!"

The second emissary nodded in a series of juddering, inhuman motions. "MaisOui, sorceress. His rituals and punishings have warped reality's firmament into calcified inflexion. The old laws bend, groan, on the verge of shattering like overripe fruit!"

Eleanor shivered despite the midday heat, a preternatural dread crawling up her spine at the incomprehensible cosmic speak. As if punctuating her unease, the world seemed to...shimmer faintly for the span of a fevered heartbeat.

"So doom comes to find new hosts to visit its dissolution upon," Amethyst surmised grimly. "We surfacers have breached the pact membranes beyond which we were never meant to gaze."

She threw a glance over her shoulder to where Eleanor and Shane stood in shell-shocked silence. "It appears we will be delaying our respite a while longer, Your Majesty. Unless either of you object to receiving envoys of the Omega Terminite itself?"

Shane swallowed hard, seeming to gather himself. "Well, when you put it like that, I dare say crumpets and exposition can likely wait a bit longer yet."

A hysterical edge tinged his forced levity. Eleanor could only shake her head numbly, gripping her ceremonial knife's hilt until her knuckles shown pale.

Reality itself was hemorrhaging, perceptions swapping on fundamental levels. And apparently the very agents of existence's conclusion had arrived to castigate them.

"Very well then," she managed in a voice gone scratchy from tension. "Let's...convene with these trans-cosmic bailiffs and ascertain whether we're facing mere doomful reckoning or total ontological collapse, shall we?"

As they moved to follow Amethyst and the disturbing emissaries deeper into the courtyard's shade, Eleanor realized with a dull sort of dismay that her prospects for that light reprieve had well and truly evaporated.

For better or worse, the Endgame's opening gambit was thundering down upon them. Best they deferred any thoughts of rest and relaxation until after.... well, whatever cataclysmic upheaval was descending to rewrite their reality's tenuous rule-set.

In that moment, a fleeting nap seemed perhaps the most prosaic indulgence Eleanor was ever likely to be afforded again.