In Which the Samhain Trio Awaken
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
It was always hardest to wake up in October. That was because it was always hard to go to sleep in October. Astronomical, astrological, transluminary, psionic, geologic…the whole of October in the Gregorian calendar just thrummed with energy. Imagine living in an apartment above the wildest live music club on the planet, with set after set of the greatest musicians ever heard, and with the alarm clock set to about maybe an hour after last call. The body only really relaxes when the bass from below lets up, and it’s always half-waking expecting to be awakened.
This time, the half-dream of the wakeup happened. “Elizabeth?” A very gentle touch on her shoulder accompanied the near-whisper, just as loaded with regret as the voice.
Elizabeth Corwen opened her left eye, her Seeing eye, and took in her surroundings. The view flickered between a decrepit warehouse interior and a cozy alcove lined with blankets and tapestries, with one tapestry pulled aside to open the alcove to the outside. The outside was currently filled with her compatriots, her friends, the only beings in the whole of reality and its subsidiaries who knew anything about her…and she desperately lunged for the tapestry to put it back where it belonged.
Big Jack murmured “I apologize, but we have to get up. We have Problems.”
Big Jack always spoke like that. He had spoken like that before he became a lantern wraith, one of exceptional fighting and deduction skills chosen by The Maintainers to guard and protect the lower realms from all enemies, internal and external, but his pumpkin head resonated with every word, adding a pleasing buzz to his conversations. Big Jack had been awakened from a dead sleep, too: he only wore a long nightshirt instead of his traditional boots and armor, and Elizabeth could just see a touch of phosphorescent orange maybe-flesh between the nightshirt sleeve and his gloves. The day Big Jack took off his gloves was the day everyone worried.
Elizabeth sat up in the alcove and looked up with both eyes at Big Jack. Big Jack looked back, the glow behind his eyeholes flickering in what she recognized as warmth, respect, and apprehension. Warmth for their partnership, respect for her and her skills, and apprehension about what he had to say next. Elizabeth reached back to check her hair, recognized that she hadn’t been so tired before that she left it braided when she went to sleep, and reached toward her pillow to grab a small pot beside it. “What THIS time?”, she asked while she put back her braid, pulling small charms from the pot and including them in the braid weave.
“We have a Problem.” When he said it like that, it was always an understatement. “A resurrector. Maybe more than one.”
Elizabeth raised an eyebrow, and the Seeing glyph around her left eye sparkled slightly. “More than one?”
Although Big Jack’s pumpkin face didn’t move, she would have sworn it had. “There’s no easy way to tell. Worse, there’s no missing soul inventory in any of the Afterworlds. Every Afterworld is reporting a complete tally, and their locks and wards are complete, but bodies are emerging Up Top that match souls already in transit.”
Elizabeth finished her braid, and it slid carefully and of its own volition down the middle of her back, sparkling like her Seeing Eye. “Do the bodies have souls?”
“I don’t know. They seem complete. We’ve been called to find out for sure.”
Elizabeth hissed slightly. It was the season for Weird, both of the current meaning and the ancient meaning. From the main room, the dark spots under furnitue and beneath doors coalesced in a man-sized wicker basket into a vaguely cat-like form almost Elizabeth’s volume, and yellow eyes competed with a dark pink nose and ears for notice. Dinictis looked at the both of them and sneezed, then flowed to the edge of the alcove to sneeze on Elizabeth’s leg. No matter where their origin, cats were all alike.
“Okay, give me a chance to get dressed,” she said finally, and Big Jack and Dinictis walked to the other side of the room and left via the moon gate on the opposite wall. Elizabeth did some quick mental calculations, walked to a clothes dresser, and started picking out the best ensemble for the job. Dark turtleneck and pants, with fae spider silk at the seams to break up her pattern at a distance. A clamp for her braid. Her favorite boots, capable of skirting and bypassing gravity for as much as 10 seconds at a time, and a web belt kit for pouches and talismans. She then stood in front of a mirror and assessed her attire. Her Seeing eye glyph, awarded/sentenced to her upon joining the Trio, glowed adequately and with a suitable filigree, and she looked to the other side of the room to make sure it was working correctly. Yes, it was there. Ginger braid, with touches of silver after centuries of faithful and determined service. A few more freckles than the last time she checked, and her beauty mark had migrated to her lower lip. She had slept hard.
Assured that she had everything, she moved to the other side of the room, to a table of purest lunarwood. Atop was a single right glove and a short scabbard, with a bare silver tang and pommel the only things visible on the blade therein. Elizabeth carefully put on the glove, grabbed the scabbard with her left hand, and unsheathed the blade. Bright cool light, the light of a full moon at zenith, flared and settled, leaving the moonblade bright but not overpowering. Elizabeth swung the moonblade experimentally, noting heft and balance, before mumbling a rune and returning the blade to its scabbard. The moonblade could use more lunar light to keep its cohesion, but it definitely had enough in reserve for the task tonight. Clipping the scabbard onto her web belt, Elizabeth went out the moon gate, nearly running into Big Jack and tripping on Dinictis at the same time, both of them waiting patiently for her to finish.
Big Jack was definitely ready. In the earliest days of the Trio, he preferred a full suit of plate armor to both protect and impress, but he later learned the value of speed and agility over impregnability, and he now preferred ballistic cloth jackets and strapped-on guards on shoulders and forearms of ablative plate. His sole concession to his old costume, and he admitted that it was a costume, was a black resin chestplate, with defensive sigils painted in strontium/europium paint so they glowed for hours under even miniscule amounts of light. Through it all, through all of the time, he still had his favorite boots and his favorite gloves, and his head was buffed with oil so it looked freshly harvested.
Dinictis was Dinictis. It sat in front of Elizabeth, already bored with the wait.
Elizabeth approved of their being ready, even if they were always ready before she was. None had any complaints: she just had more to do. “Does anybody know anything else?”, she asked, less with a need for information and more to convince them to move just enough so she could enter the room.
“Not much, but apparently a Gem Witch was involved.”
“What stone?”
“Emerald.” Elizabeth nodded. All Gem Witches consolidated their essence around a particular precious, semiprecious, or fancy gemstone based on their inherent abilities, which allowed them to use that gem the way other thaumaturges used wands or staves. Diamond Witches were devastatingly powerful, and could handle tremendous pressures when given warning, but tended to shatter to powder, quite literally, when misdirected. Ruby Witches could focus energies of others to a single point, but they grew their abilities slowly and painfully. All had their strengths, but Emerald Witches held a special position in the hierarchy. Just like their stone, all Emerald Witches had a small pool of calm, known as a garden, right in their cores, and all of their abilities grew from there. They rarely caught the attention of the Trio because they were so averse to breaking that calm, but they were no slouches. “Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“This is the confusing part. There’s one trace of an authentic Emerald Witch, or at least a Witch’s gemstone, but there are traces of five or possibly six others, and they seem…”
“Artificial?”
“Synthetic. They might have something that mimics an emerald, or possibly a human-made emerald.”
At that, Dinictis perked up, grumbling slightly. It knew what would happen next.
“All right,” Elizabeth sighed, “Let’s find out.”
The room in which they resided had been dark and formless, but when Elizabeth unsheathed her moonblade, the interior glowed. Perfectly round and perfectly polished, a hundred meters in diameter, with no seams or breaks other than the moon gate. The three stood atop a platform at the bottom, and three other platforms of bluish-silver metal hovered at different heights within the room. Elizabeth performed a quick tapdance on the platform, and it rose up to mid-height before stabilizing as if it had been cast in concrete. Big Jack and Dinictis obligingly moved behind her as she wove a very specific pattern with her blade in the air, occasionally cutting flaps off conventional reality to show something underneath. While dancing, she sang to herself and to the blade, and the blade reciprocated by pulsing as it cut. Finally, Elizabeth got a good look beyond and stopped her dance, then tapped the platform with her foot for it to lower to the bottom of the sphere. She sheathed her blade as the platform touched down, and turned to her companions.
“Well, that was fun.” Her joviality hid her concern. “There’s an Emerald Witch involved, or there was one. She was quite good, but she died about 30 years ago. A granddaughter got her stone and knows just enough to activate it.”
Big Jack’s voice rose above a whisper: he was angry. “A Sorta Shannara?”
“Yep. The granddaughter thought she could bring her grandmother back, and got enough Blessed Wannabes around her to try. The problem is that she’s bringing back others.”
“And the lack of soul disparity?”
“They have knowledge, but no souls. Someone supplied memories, and is using synthetic emeralds to transfer them. The granddaughter is just a conduit, she’s not experienced or smart enough to be anything else, and she’s going to be the one blamed for playing for dead things.”
Dinictis grumbled again, and Elizabeth reached down to give it a good scritch on its ears. Dinictis already knew where this was going.
Big Jack broke the silence, back to a near-whisper. “So we have to stop the resurrector behind this, stop the Emerald Witch, deactivate the stone, and deactivate the synthetic emeralds before they take out their little bit of reality, and seize the night?”
Elizabeth nodded. “Carpe noctem.”
Big Jack looked thoughtful; Dinictis looked dyspeptic. “So we need to find the origin of the synthetic emeralds and how they would be connected. We’re going to St. Remedius?”
Elizabeth nodded back. “St. Remedius, and I hope nobody there was involved. Otherwise, things are going to get ugly.”
(Many thanks to David Lee Ingersoll for inspiring the Samhain Trio in the first place, and for allowing them to be part of the St. Remedius story.)
Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.
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