Chapter 71: Angelic Edict (Patreon)

After that mess, it was a relief to get out of the manor the next morning.

The other me had said something about acquiring parts, and Liliana had waved her hand with an impetuous, 'if that is what you require' before turning back to her own experiments. 

I hadn’t missed the look she gave me either, or rather, the smoldering glance she’d given the pocket of my coat, where I’d stowed Trigon’s offered power the night before.

And then I’d pulled it back into my soul, but Liliana hardly needed to be bothered with such details.

“Still can’t believe this is what you went with,” Ritz said.

I sighed as the four of us Taylor, Taylor, Raven and Ritz—and didn’t that just sound like a legal firm or something else asinine—meandered our way down from the Stensia highlands on a narrow trail. Getting out of the manor was also an excuse to finally let Ritz out of the scroll, but that was turning into a mixed blessing.

“I told you already,” I said. “Whatever trap or Faustian bargain Trigon is peddling, Liliana can deal with it after we’re gone.”

Ritz bumped my shoulder, dragging her fingers over the back of my hand. I gave her an annoyed huff, the road wasn’t that narrow. “What if that’s what he wants?” Ritz asked. “Didya really thing he just happened to mention Liliana without expecting you to go running back to her for help?”

“We could spend a century playing that game,” Raven chimed in quietly. “It never amounts to anything.”

“Raven…” I started, but she just shook her head, sending purple locks shimmering in the morning light.

“I’m fine,” she said. 

She looked anything but.

Raven glowered at me. “I’m fine.”

I raised my hands, tamping down on my emotions. “Alright, alright.”

Raven gave me the gimlet eye for a moment more, before crossing her arms. “I agree,” she said. “No matter what his plan is, I want nothing to do with it.”

“And if he takes over the multiverse or something?” the other Taylor asked. Ritz nodded.

“He already has,” Raven said. Her voice was even more monotone than usual as he added. “Trigon has already conquered an entire universe, if not more…Until we have the power to stop him…” She shrugged.

Taylor shot me a wry glance. “And we thought our family was bad.”

I huffed. “We’re close.” At my double’s raised eye, I added. “If you counted Emma.”

That got a laugh from the other version of me. “Christ.”

The conversation lapsed into silence for a moment.

“So what do you need, anyway?” Ritz asked as we wound our way down through the pines.

Stensia, I was given to understand, was the least settled region of this Plane. And though Liliana’s manor sat only on the fringes of area, it was a trek back to the nearest settlement.

“Anything I can get my hands on, really,” the other Taylor said. “It’s not like I’m expecting an industrial iron foundry or anything, but some ingots alone would go a long way. Copper too, though probably wire would be too much to ask for.”

Ritz tossed her hair. “Can’t you just magic it up?” she asked. “I mean, I’m all for a good hike, but these are not the right shoes.”

I held back a snort. “You used to traipse all over Ivalice in heeled boots that went up to your thighs.”

She waved a hand. “So you were looking at my thighs?”

My foot caught a rock.

Ritz laughed. It was almost enough to make me miss the tinge of annoyance from Raven. I glanced over, but my half demon friend remained as stoic as ever. I supposed their personalities were rather antithetical. If it wasn’t for Ritz dragging me out of my shell back at the start, I probably wouldn’t appreciate her so much either.

“Anyway,” Ritz continued. “Can’t you just summon a bunch of metal and stuff?”

“Did we go over this when we were stuck in the dream world?” The other me asked. “Summons are rigid, you try and change them and the best you can get is a partial mana refund as it breaks down.”

“That’s underwhelming.”

I shrugged. “There are limits to everything. If Liliana could just magic up the parts she needed, then there wouldn’t be a need for her giant lightning rod in the first place.”

“Plus the patterns,” other me added. “If you don’t have perfect memory, trying to remember spells for every little thing, especially when some of them are functionally the same except for the smallest internal details?”

Ritz quirked her lips. “Hence the need for sheet metal.”

“That our other summons can then pound into a proper shape, yes,” I said. “Not that I expect to be much help on the technical side of things.”

Ritz hummed, twirling a strand of snow white hair around her finger as we finally broke out of the woods. At the bottom of a distant dell, I caught a glimpse of buildings. They looked like cottages. One or two even with thatched roofs. 

“I doubt we’ll be finding much by the way of industry in that village.”

The other me shrugged at the words. “Any port in a storm.”

Even after we caught sight of our destination, it took the better part of an hour to make our way through the gently rolling hills towards the village proper. By that time, the sun was already high in the sky, chasing off last night’s chill.

And as the distance between the four of us and the village shrunk, more and more details became clear. Most importantly, it revealed a hastily constructed wooded palisade, complete with a half dug dry mote. There were still gaps, places where the work was half finished.

Even an entire section of wall that looked significantly older than the rest, with new additions added on where the old wall had been torn apart.

It presented an image of a village trying desperately to repair defenses it thought it would no longer need.

My mind flashed back to the comments Liliana had made, about Angels and other such things lurking in the night. “There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Beside me, the other Taylor cracked a smirk. “Denmark? I guess we’re really not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

We shared a glance, my smile wry to her own melancholic one.

Ritz looked back and forth. “Uh?”

“Just something…” I started.

The other me shrugged. “Something…our parents used to say,” she said. “Mom was an English professor.”

“Dad was not,” I finished. 

Ritz huffed. “You really are twins.”

“Except for the name,” Raven murmured.

I shrugged.

“I’ve been thinking about that, actually,” other me said. I blinked. “It’s probably gonna be confusing going forward, isn’t it.”

Ritz snorted. “You say that like you didn’t both respond to ‘Taylor’ three times this morning.”

Taylor, as in the not me Taylor, coughed and shuffled. “Yes well, given that I’m the guest here, it only seems right that I take the bullet this time. So, hey.” She gave a jaunty wave. “You can call me Rose.”

I rubbed my eyes, a little pang of something inside my chest. “You don’t have to do that.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s better than everyone trying to call you by a different name. And it’s fine. I did an infiltration once back on my Earth, and Rose was my cover name.”

Ritz’s eyes gleamed. “You were a spy?”

“More like I subbed in for one,” The—Rose admitted. “I had a hell of a teacher though.” Her grin goes distant for a moment. “But for real though, there must be something with us and Redheads.”

I hold back a wince. “What do you mean?”

“Ran into way to many of them,” Rose said, ticking them off on her fingers. “There was Natasha, of course, and then on Remnant I met Pyrrha, and of course there was Jessica Rabbit.” She went vaguely cross-eyed for a second. “Now that was a trip.”

I coughed into my fist. “We should be focusing.”

“No changing the subject!” Rose said. “Don’t think I didn’t hear the comments about Ritz being a red the first time you met.”

“More pink, actually.” I felt Ritz’s amusement thrumming through the air. “But it still counts.”

I sighed. We still had a ways left on the road to the village, and I could see that my ‘friends’ weren’t about to let this one lie. “Then there was M’gann, but she’s a shapeshifter anyway.”

“Still chose red,” Raven said. “In both of her forms.”

“Et tu, Brute?” I asked.

She tilted her head. “M’gann chose how she appeared. Doesn’t that make her appearance more valid, instead of less?”

“Deep,” The other—Rose—­Rose said. Nodding. “As a quasi-shapeshifter myself, I think I agree.”

“As interesting as that is,” Ritz said. “I’d love to hear about all the other Redheads my Taylor has run into since we first met.”

“I think M’gann was the only one…” Then I paused. “No, there was the engineer on the Kotetsujo. We didn’t talk much but…she was good people. I don’t believe there was anyone from Nirn.”

“It’s crazy, how many we run into!” Rose said. “You see it too, right?”

“I see confirmation bias at work,” I said.

She turned her gaze to Raven and Ritz, gaze imploring.

“Well,” Ritz said, smirking. “You haven’t found one on Innistrad yet.”

“Exactly,” I said.

Rose laughed. “There’s still time.”

“Hopefully not that much of it.”

“I’m with Raven on this one,” I said. “The faster we’re through here and can move on with our lives, the better it will be. I don’t trust Liliana as far as I can throw her.”

Ritz hummed. “To be fair, you could probably chuck her pretty far.”

“Hence why we’re here at all,” I said. And with that, we crested the last hill between us and the village. This close, I could even pick out a few sentries on the walls. There were men dragging lumber back to the village, cutting it and putting it up into the palisade, but far fewer than I would have thought.

“This is gonna be a shit show, isn’t it,” Rose said. “Here, I’ll see if I can at least get us inside without resorting to blades. You have the money Lili gave us?”

I sighed. “She’d love to hear you call her that, I’m sure.” Still, I tossed the small bag of local currency to my double. Liliana had been surprisingly free with it, but then, given our status as Planeswalkers, money took on a slightly different value.

Useful to have some around when you were on the plane, but hardly something worth hording.

“Might need to grease some palms,” she said. “Visitor taxes and all of that.”

Ritz frowned. “Place seems a bit small to have a mafia.”

“Desperate times make desperate people,” Rose said. She took a few steps ahead of us, coming up to the wall. Raising an arm she called, “Greetings!”

“Who goes there!” came back the answering cry. There were, I noted idly, a few more crossbows on the wall than I was comfortable with. There were many more crossbows than I was comfortable with being pointed at me.

The bolts themselves were less worrying than the silver tips gleaming in the sunlight.

“Travelers!” Rose called back. “Looking to purchase supplies before being on our way!”

“I don’t see no horse no wagon!” The sentry shouted.

“We lost ours on the road,” Rose said without missing a beat. “If there are mounts in the village to be bought, I’d love to come to an arrangement!”

Men and women shuffled around on the wall, and I think I caught a glimpse of a runner returning from deeper in the village. After a moment, the reply came.

“There will be no entry! Be on your way!”

Rose frowned. “Unfortunate,” she murmured, before raising her voice again. “We’re willing to pay for entry and abide by any rules you put forth!”

“Be on your way! Or we will treat you as an enemy! There will be no further negotiations!”

Rose crossed her arms. “Whattaya think?” she asked in a more conversational tone. “I mean, we could probably force entry pretty easily, but…”

“Yes,” I said. “it doesn’t look good. For now lets…”

But my words were cut off by the ringing of bells, and the sound of wingbeats on the wind.

Everyone looked up. There, winging in from the opposite direction of Stensia, I caught sight of a dozen winged figures.

“Angels,” Raven hissed. I stepped towards her on instinct, pressing my shoulder against hers.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll have to go through me first.”

There was a sudden feeling of surprise and gratitude from my friend, as she stepped into me, pressing into my back almost as if to hide behind my taller frame.

“I will take that bargain,” she said.

“The heck is up with their wings,” Ritz asked.

I blinked, looking back, to the sky as I realized she was right. The wings were white, like every depiction of a heavenly host I’d ever seen…except for the part where the feathers ran red towards the tips.

Like someone had wicked them all in blood.

“I don’t like this,” Rose said.

But, at the moment, it didn’t look like we were the target. 

The host came to a pause in the air over the battlements. The humans of the village appeared just as lost as we were, and for a few moments, nobody moved.

Then the angel leading the host raised her blade. “Rejoice, those of iniquity!” rang her clarion voice. “We have come to liberate you from your mortal suffering!”

She swung her sword, but my arm was already moving.

A pane of air slowed the blade for long enough for the man on the battlements to throw himself aside as a blade of moonsilver split the air.

Cries rose up, people ran.

And the angels above turned to face the group of interlopers on the ground below.

That would be us, for those not paying attention.

“Who art thou, who places herself in the path of divine retribution?” the lead asked.

To my side, Rose nodded sagely. “See?” she said. “I told you it was all gonna go to shit.”