After

Éva

She asks to meet with him, after. It is a Tuesday or perhaps a Wednesday and it is daylight, though the daylight is failing and the ordinary workday is done. They are in Denver, but not in the Cold Crescent building. She has offices there but sometimes eschews them. She has offices elsewhere, too.

North and west of the downtown core, a wide four-lane road, the open ended sort framed by strip malls of a certain vintage, Jiffy Lubes, Tire Americas, mediocre Mexican restaurants and on and on. This building is older, two or three stories, faded red brick with strong stone lintels beneath the windows. Across the street, there is a KFC and one of those combo A&W/Long John Silver's fast food places and the scent of grease is sharp in the cool fall air.

The entrance to the second floor is a single nondescript door, frosted security glass, tucked between a nail salon and a Jackson Hewitt storefront with huge signs promising that TAXES PAY plastered across its windows. He is: buzzed in, and Eva admits him to a spare, non-descript office suite, a receptionist's very plain desk - no computer, just a phone with a red dome light, a calendar blotter, and a vase full of pens - surrounded by lateral filing cabinets full of redwelds and the sort of plastic-looking plants one always finds in offices. Then ushers him into the conference room.

The furniture is from the 1970s, and the windows have a view of the KFC and A&W / Long John Silver's parking lot across the way.

It is not glamorous. It is forgettable. It is merely out of the way.

--

"Mr. Reinhardt," and she is aware of the dissonance between his name and tribe, but makes no comments on this point and asks no questions. They have no points of commonality beyond tribe: his spiritual, hers -

- well.

Perhaps hers is spiritual as well. It bears no comment.

The Garou she knew well are gone; dead and buried beneath concrete and steel.

"We met with Warning Threshold last night." There is a spare gravity to the clear darkness of her eyes. At some point Eva invites Erich to sit and offers him a drink. She does so with a subdued irony, and seats herself across from him, watching him with an attention that feels meticulous, but still slides easily away from him to the view through the window of the gathering gloom of the fall evening.

"Briefly." Her half-smile is so wintry it feels like a wince. There is a backbone of irony, beneath and around whatever grief she allows herself to display. "He was taken into custody, as it were, by representatives of Forgotten Questions mid-way through the meeting."

--

"He told us that the Elders of Forgotten Questions are considering closing Cold Crescent. Shutting the doors and barring the gates and closing the chapter on the nightmare of the death of the Guardians. Retreating - and for all that we know about what happened there and what lies beneath, it will indeed be a retreat - to the safety of the wilderness.

"What happens, then? For that matter, Mr. Reinhardt, tell me what happens now?

"It is easy and false to claim that the Elders of Cold Crescent, Warning Threshold and the rest, lied to us about the purpose and the strength of the Sept. But," a quick hook-curl of a half-smile, an advocate's pleasure in a well-wrought trap. " - did you ever once question the history of the place? Why it was purchased - not built, purchased - so recently; why it merited a Sept without a Caern, why the elders and guardians stood there and what they stood over?

"Warning Threshold called the hidden levels beneath Cold Crescent a mine, a mine of nightmares upon nightmares. The enemy need only stand at the mouth of the mine and call and Things will come, which are not of Gaia and not of the Wyrm and not of anything the theurges know. Warning Threshold and the Guardians and Elders of Cold Crescent have stood over that mine of nightmares and barred the Beloved Horror's access to the mouth of that mine for years.

"What happens when creatures with that sort of power - " a short, sharp breath. For most of this speech Eva is not looking directly at Erich, but markedly away from him. Focused on the striated reflections of the overhead lights in the picture window looking out over the busy if nondescript street beyond the window. " - what happens if the withdrawal that now seems quite nearly a foregone conclusion is finally complete, and the Beloved Horror - in all their unnatural and perverted power - at last have access to that which they have been seeking so singlemindedly not for weeks or months, but for years.

"My mate Andraj was an Adren Philodox and a Guardian. He died in battle against the Beloved Horror. They called it an honorable death.

"My friend Jane - Circuit Runner, you called her." There is a quiet brightness to her eyes in that moment; the grief is fresher, is more raw, is leavened by a sort of perilous outrage that makes her reset her jaw as if she is stiffening herself against it; straightening herself to withstand its battering force. Finding the strength to see her through. "She died in battle, too.

"Oh, I know what happened. Know well-enough what happened, but you see, it was another sort of battle, against a hitherto unknown weapon. But it was still a death in battle against the enemy-who-seeks-to-devour-the-world. She lost. They all lost. We all lost and perhaps someone should have put an end to Champion of Honor's suffering when he was found, but the line between their sort of mercy and the other, iron sort is much harder to cross than anyone can know.

"Except for those who have crossed it."

--

"Everything, everything that the Beloved Horror have done; all of their strength, all of their power; their rituals, their attacks are focused on the singular goal of reclaiming what is beneath that building. This retreat that the elders contemplate is nothing short of a full-on surrender to an implacable enemy of unimaginable power.

"I don't know how to stop that retreat.

"I don't know that you can.

"But you must."

--

"As for Warning Threshold and the rest. I do not pretend to know the litany as I know human law, but why have they been taken? It weakens us all. What crime have they committed? They failed to anticipate the unknown and unknowable power of that implacable enemy. Failed to discern the hidden seed of destruction planted quietly in one of their own. Out of mercy perhaps or a kind of grief - I don't pretend to know.

"What would you have done? How can you hold that ground without them?

"What sort of payment is death for death? The only way to honor the dead we knew is to live for them, and to fight for them. And this is a fight that must be won."

--

"If nothing else, Mr. Reinhardt, ask yourself - ask them, over and over and over again, ask them: what happens when the Beloved Horror win through, and stand at the edge of that pit from which they have been barred for years,

and howl and howl and howl."