ajastor

[ajastor]

AJ ASTOR @ THE CONCLAVE GALA

He almost didn't make an appearance.

A week in the dumps of a Penthouse turned One-Man-Bar had him drowning in cure-alls for a recovery that came too slowly to a man as impatient as him. For someone with everything on tap, the delay in his magic following his interaction with Caitlin and her shadow-self had AJ a shell of an Astor.

Upon Caitlin's return from Nebraska, her visit to AJ had provoked conversations and encouragements that convince him to attend.

He attends with Caitlin Siltshore, as a different kind of shadow. This one, on her arm. She's a newly-made friend, and collaborator that he's quietly growing fond of. They're late because he refuses to arrive to any red carpet event in an Uber. And he's yet to get a replacement driver since Autumn Howell's crashing retirement.

But they pull it off, feet hitting the red carpet thirty minutes later.

Fashionably late, he'd call it.

@ofgarnett / @autumnshowell

[ajastor]

You're still alive, Garnett. Maybe I'm a little impressed by the tenacity. But you better piss off talking code. Big thing you did.

AJ's phone is somewhere on the kitchen island. Discarded like a lead weight following the messages between himself and the Garnett head. A flashing, vibrating thing that's merely a slew of missed calls and emails he won't answer. Levinon. Astorgold. Executive duties, ignored. Both alchemy and alcohol feature en masse instead.

AJ's slouched against a kitchen side, a half-empty Tom Collins' in his hand, and a glazed pair of dark eyes that stare fruitlessly at the array of magic that he cannot channel as he is meant to. A sputtering, coughing stream of metallurgy, and no matter what language he uses. It laughs.

He lifts a hand, holds it out in front of him, watches his fingers flex in triple vision. A broken channel of magic, visibly beneath the surface of his skin; a weakness he denies — despite the difficult act of reaching for the warmth that usually nestles in his chest. Astor has to laugh, because it's better than a week ago, but not nearly as potent as his day-to-day. Caitlin worked a number on him — No. The entity within her, did. He knows that hadn't been Cait's magic. Something far more abyssal had struck him, and left its mark.

AJ doesn't hear the door open, nor close.

Just a voice that resembles the one in his mind when he closes his eyes.

"Two man party now you're here." Maybe she's one of the hallucinations of a little too much gin, and not enough sleep. He'd talk to the ghosts, even if they don't usually talk back. What else is there to do?. He raises his glass half-heartedly, and lowers the hand that he'd been feeling for his power with, offers her a half-assed: "Cheers, love."

Somehow, this phantom duo had spoken so callously about mass murder a week ago. If Astor hadn't been so trollied, he might have recognised the slither of power echoing off Caitlin like a shadow, crawling along his floor, and wrapping around the mess of his place. He could crack the power, he's convinced. But he needs his own back, first.

"Genocide takes a bit of time, doesn't it, babe?" AJ shoves himself off the counter, and necks the last of his drink. Searches for the ice — almost melted in a bucket by the sink — and refills the glass, like it's a potion he's crafting in his sleep. It's all he's got to fill the void. Astor hates that she reads his energy the same way they pick up a book. Eyes flicker up to meet hers, as he pours another drink. Doesn't bother to offer her one, because she's as boring as they come when fun is involved. Witchcraft? Fine. A bit of old fashioned intoxication? Better luck with a tin can. "Empty, me? No. I've got plenty juice."

If they're talking gin that is.

who: @ajastor

when: pre-gala, post-ascension

Caitlin Siltshore is a storm caught mid-laugh. Since the Strawberry Moon bled itself pale and the old tyrant slipped its hooks from her marrow, every breath tastes like stolen dawn. She paces her bedroom barefoot, trailing sparks—static or sorcery, she can’t decide—and studies her hands the way devout astronomers study eclipses: hungry, reverent, incredulous that something so ordinary could suddenly govern constellations.

One finger at a time, she flexes—thumb, fore, middle, ring, pinky—naming silent constellations of bone and tendon. Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. Each knuckle cracks like a lock springing open. Power gathers in her palm, a shimmer just shy of vision: hot mercury rolling behind the skin, obedient, waiting for her whim. She thinks of all the hours those fingers spent as borrowed tools, all the pages they filled at someone else’s command. Now they twitch with impatient melodies only she can hear.

She catches her reflection in the gilt edge of the wardrobe mirror: freckle-bright cheeks, hair untamed from too many triumphant nights, grin wide enough to bruise the glass. She looks... like the happiest she's ever been. Her body, finally her own. Warlock, the word thrums through her throat like a basso note struck on cathedral bells. Not witch, not host, not haunted reliquary. War-lock, key-breaker, door-smasher. She loves the taste of each syllable. 

Impulse becomes ritual. She thumbs open her phone and fires a proof-of-life missile at the architect of this miracle:

Atlas Jay. Proof of life. Vital signs stable. Innovation sings. You hear it too?

Full name, always. There’s an intimacy now to how much she knows it bothers him. Send. She traces the screen with the pad of her thumb as though sealing a ward. 

A few hours later, one short, cryptic exchange later - she’s on his doorstep, ready to revel in the beauty of innovation. But the penthouse door yawns open on a wreckage of brilliance and bad decisions. Glassware litters every flat surface - pipettes abandoned beside lime rinds, beakers repurposed as highball glasses. Bottles of gin sweat on the counter, tonic gone flat in half-drained mixers, and front-and-center stands Atlas Jay Astor, cradling a Tom Collins as if it’s the only lawful constant left in his universe. The air glitters with alchemical dust and citrus peel, and his aura—usually a precise lattice—flickers thin as spun sugar, threatening collapse. He looks less like the architect of perfect sigils and more like a fifteen-year-old who just discovered fireworks and pocket change. Cait's eyes narrow.

What the fuck.

“Looks like the lab’s moonlighting as a cocktail lounge. Hosting a one-man soirée?"

Last week’s memory slithers up her spine: Dorian—still woven through her nerves then—pressing spectral fingers to Atlas, drawing out arc after arc of argent energy. She remembers Atlas trembling, eyes white with equations only he could see, power siphoned until each breath rattled like a coin dropped down a well.

She told herself he’d recover—people bounce, don’t they? - but his aura is banner flapping in invisible wind. It’s… brittle. His aura feels brittle, as if any sudden gust could splinter it. Cait breathes, taking in the gin-strewn laboratory and the Tom Collins sweating in his hand. “I disappear for a week and come back to tonic water propping up your aura—ring me before you hit the duct-tape phase, yeah?” What the fuck happened? hovers on her tongue, goes instead for: “Have you been running on empty since our meeting?”

[ajastor]

FIN.

Astor drags quicksilver from his own blood, bead by tremulous bead, while Dorian watches with the clinical interest of a scholar observing a laboratory rat. Mercury ought to obey gravity; instead, the alchemist coaxes it against the pull, a prayer answered by physics tipped on its side. To Dorian the feat is impressive, yes—yet ultimately small. Survival is a pastime for mortals. Ascension, he believes, is the only art worth rehearsing.

Inside the shared flesh they currently occupy, Cait’s unease flickers like candlelight: brief impulses to steady Astor’s shoulders, to murmur reassurance. Dorian flicks those urges away with a metaphysical shrug. Let the alchemist feel every bruise; let him remember how fragile flesh becomes when power misbehaves. The suffering is a line item in Dorian’s grand ledger, nothing more, and his ledgers balance to the dram.

The penthouse reeks of copper and scorched ozone. Astor slumps, vacant-eyed, one knee down on the glossy floorboards as though devotion has forced him into prayer. Dorian, inhabiting Cait’s frame, sinks into a chair opposite the drafting table with the manuscript in hand.

“Coastal?” he echoes, amused by Astor’s earlier suggestion of a seaside locus. “Wave-washed cliffs, gulls shrieking over altars—poetic, but redundant. The salt we need already courses through fifteen thousand inland bodies. Why drag a stage to the sea when each resident is a walking brine reservoir?”

The silence serves as permission. Dorian begins flipping through the rite one last time for the evening. 

First: sever the town. An iron-salt cordon at the county line, bone-scissor sigils under every door, the name of the town burned from every record, and the bell tower tolling a counterfeit midnight. Fifteen-thousand pulses will hang one shiver short of stillness. “You pen cattle before the slaughter,” he reminds the alchemist.

Second: manufacture fuel. Thirty blood-storm jars will shatter in a tightening spiral while onne scores a mercury line through the corn. Stibnite and sulfur—as shown today by Astor—raise lattice integrity by seventeen percent. The jars will top up the spell beyond what the bodies alone provide.

Third: raise the shell. Bone chalk and obsidian spread across black soil in fractal geometry; reflective spruce stakes catch moonlight. At the hub, a Roy heirloom ring fuses to wax and iron, sealed by Caitlin’s palmprint. Frames before occupancy— Dorian will step into something worthy, better than a human body.

Fourth: bind the pulses. Sub-hertz speakers in the grain silos hammer every heart into Cait’s steady seventy-two; blood-knot on her sternum, silver-braided founder hair linking all to one. When the fuse ignites, the orchestra dies on a single downbeat.

Fifth: anchor between planes of existence. A Sagittarian rune—phosphorus on the grain elevator, rotated three degrees to match ley flow—faces its void-ink twin in the Elseway. On the seventh hammer-blow the earth-side tether snaps, leaving Dorian free to walk between planes of existence. 

Last: seal or swallow backlash. The contingency. Seven counter-sunwise coils, black salt, marigold seed. If the rite rebels, the spiral drinks the blast; if it obeys, soil vitrifies to glass, a shimmering tomb no archaeologist will read.

Six steps. An unholy rite.

Dorian closes the manuscript and offers a thin smile.

Fifteen thousand people and Dorian becomes gains more than a body, he becomes something new. 

Yet even this metamorphosis is only the penultimate act. At fifteen thousand souls, Dorian steps across the final, invisible rung of the ladder and slips the title of mere spirit. He ascends—no longer a parasite in mortal flesh but something in the oldest, most terrifying sense: a cosmic signature that writes itself across covenants and blood oaths, available to any witch bold enough to pronounce it. This ascension remakes him into mythology; altars bloom overnight, inked sigils bloom on desperate skin, and the question on every practitioner’s lips is no longer whether to barter, but what the appropriate tribute should be.

Power, now, is a current that begins and ends in him. And anyone who drinks from that river must first taste the iron ghost of fifteen thousand beating hearts—each one the price of his divinity.

At fifteen thousand souls, Dorian ascends and becomes a Patron. Simple as that.

END.

[ajastor]

AJ would like to see these legendary parts in all their grandiose. He imagines that possession has rules; it's still arcane in its origin and he's making it a secondary to try guessing all the play-by-plays. Atlas Jay. There it is again — almost like Cait's doing it to differentiate between which of the entities is speaking; Garnett, or the other. Is she doing him a favour? Peeking out between the cracks of whatever ancient-speaking culmination; a heavenly body crossing the meridian of an altitude AJ cannot reach.

"To make the measurement I had to look at the myth," Dismissive, callous. He'd needed a starting point. That is not foolhardy, as much as it's an alchemical fact. Strabo isn't perfect, but nobody who comes before the last, ever is. "It hasn't been done before." Astor works in sevens, it's always been that way; seven elements; seven godly bodies; seven organs that made up the power. Multiply, subtract. It's all an equation; mathematics that have its own etiquette. And when it doesn't fit the bylaws, he has to go a little off-book.

Maybe Caitlin needs to stick to her runes. Unless she's harbouring Thoth in there, she may as well be the shadow to a know-it-all. That's usually his role. Siltshore even has an echo of that pride, swimming in the back of Astor's memory.

AJ's eyes slip back to the dramatics of city picking, and the requirements. "Somewhere coastal then — purifying," Salt. "— won't even notice the chip in the land map, eh?" A light joke, on a foul topic. "Be like it's always been there."

And then the pressure of the room bites at him, like it had suddenly grown teeth. It has him rearing back from the table. He doesn't have to know magic like gloves over his fingers to know that this power is not Caity's. Its shape is not that one of jagged lines and the whispers of skeletons like neatly laid graves in the curve of her ribs. These ones are blackened, charred from a place that does not exist in the same realm of the dead but somewhere archaic. The bitter taste of copper, and graphite crawls down his throat. AJ cannot make out the shape in the fog. It curls dark around him, a serpent that he's allowed to get close; a confidence in believing he could pinch at the base of its head, tame it like Uboros, and watch it writhe harmlessly in a God's grip.

There's nothing tangible except Caitlin to target in retribution. This is the sulfuric gas they had built an entire ritual around to avoid, coming in revenge to alchemy's neglect.

In response, Astor's power bolts to the surface, but all the spells die on his tongue. He doesn't know what he's purging; he cannot explain, nor understand the invisible walls closing in, tightening his limbs in a way he imagines a casualty of his efficacy. If he starts shooting, he'll take out their finale. But what does it matter, if AJ becomes the encore?

Every counter-spell he can think to muster, comes a fraction too late because AJ feels his magic rush cold. No heat of gold on a blaze able to liquify or transform. There's a shutter on the channels of his power, vices that clamp, clamp, clamp down on every bone, tendon —

He looks to the dried substances on the table, like he can crack the reins of Caitlin's bloody fucking — mess. Astor's nerves light up with pins, scratching lines down the most sensitive parts and his eyes grow wide, blown like saucers as he bites down on a scream. He's not even sure if he could, because his bones grind against a chisel that's slowly dragging shards free from their homes. Marrow bleeds out. Even if he wants to yell now, he can no longer breath. The last house of his power; the ribs, scarred with that familiar gold divots and carvings. AJ reaches with a tendril, misses, slams power from every crevasse that has a leak. No machination is perfect, there is always wasted power. Heat, of burning reactant; a source abused. Noise, of potassium poorly handled. AJ needs to find the spare energy in amongst the agony. He has to find the break that does not follow the path of intent. Where?

Astor hits the ground, knees cracking on the penthouse floor. He's gasping now, hands braced on the ground, muscles slackening — withering as though something has crawled inside him and is tearing all his innards, his soul from his very core. Stop it. Stop it now. Bloodshot, oxygen deprived eyes find Caitlin in the blur of his vision. His magic too difficult to reach, retreating from something that has no obvious leak; no crack that can be made wide, when his essence is being torn from his body.

A mouth moves to form words, or maybe elicit a cry — he can no longer be sure.

When it all suddenly jerks to a stop, right as AJ's eyes dare to close. He collapses entirely under the release of tension, slamming onto his front, with the dull thud of a body released. Fuck. His first freed thought is to tear the room asunder. But his fingers dig at the floor, vying not to be a fool because it feels like in the aftermath, its burned through every spell he's ever learned, and then some. All voiced aloud in a day. An exhaustion like no other. A Turkish curse uttered incomprehensibly off a tongue that doesn't know its intent; a foolish, childish ditch of rebellion that falls to the wayside.

He can't stay down. Not here. Caitlin can blow him.

A hand reaches up aimlessly and pulls harshly on the edge of the table, a strength he barely possesses that gets him to a sitting position. Fingers flex, absent their heat; he's cold. He's never cold. He burns in the arctic, but not here, not now. Caitlin, no — the other has battered the walls of his realm with something uncharted.

AJ's already said he likes a challenge; he'll find the heel to bury the knife, even if its not tonight. Is she fucking for real though, all that, over a bloody nickname? Astor's laugh is not God-like, but it's there, in the cough-rasp of what's left. He is but a shell of a deity in this moment. Blood pumps weakly around whilst his core trembles with unease; the thread of a loss almost as damaging as the River waters of Pactolus.

He only catches the silver stream in his periphery when he tips his head back, watching in the slump at the next agonising stage of Caitlin and company's little show. It winds him as it presses through his chest, sucks the last husk of his breath from damaged lungs and the next few moments is Astor laugh-choking as he redirects the stunted magic within to corkscrew around the invasion.

This, he can do something about. He can touch this. Feel the substance as liquid as gold, never hardening without a bonding composite. An outlier in the game, Astor lifts a hand slowly, his fingers aren't steady. Not like he's used to, his power isn't smooth. A stop start of bones, and tendons peeled at their first layers, making his every channel feel like he's siphoning capability through tiny capillaries not made for magic. AJ's never bled the substance out of him so slowly, osmosing it from pores until it collects at the wrist of his hands, pooling into his palms.

A single second of forward-thinking stops him from making a war. Whilst he can manipulate the elements and their properties, controlled by the mind over matter — he doesn't know if the other inside Caitlin would save her from its poison. He'd seen them draw it into oneself, but AJ doesn't know enough about this.

Does Caitlin know his hesitation is consideration for her?

AJ squeezes his fists tight, shuttering the element away until he can force his legs to stand. God, he could fall at any moment. The mercury returns to a pestle, gleaming in the rock. Astor might be a ghost of confidence, burdened by a rage that stems from a bloodline unforgiving. But he has to view a bigger picture and his smile is not friendly, but strained — a reflection of something Astor hates seeing in the mirror.

"You can draw life, Siltshore. But the chemical elements are mine."

The discarded toxin shows as much; you cannot poison this alchemist, Garnett.

That's all he says, in the sunken quake of a God on the edge of death. They are not in the habit of trading explanations. Secrets aired that die on their tongues all the same.

Caity straightens, as though she's quite satisfied with her punishing result. AJ's tongue slicks drying lips and attempts to balance a counterweight of his bodily functions, to the magical. Astor's not sure how he can cast anything else tonight, without draining himself entirely. He has to brace himself on the table, just to remain on his feet.

He's stopped listening to the town talk, after all that. Allows Cait to rattle on about the choices. Astor doesn't think she's asking him, so presumably it's to herself — or the other careening her body around as a puppet.

But she decides, a finger hovers over a location. Astor logs it to memory.

They might miss brekkie now.

Caitlin supposes she’s thankful for Atlas Jay. Thankful in the same way one’s grateful the building didn’t collapse while you were still inside it. He adapts. Rolls with the kind of information that would’ve sent most mages into a spiral of ethics or ego. The good parts, he says.

She wants to laugh. Barks it inside. But Dorian has the mouth. She manages instead, dry and clipped: “The legendary parts. I don’t deem possession rooftop conversation, Atlas Jay.”

But Dorian’s already moving, already circling. His stride is fluid and predatory—an older gait than Cait’s bones should carry, refined by centuries. He stalks toward the table like something returning to a familiar altar. His eyes trace the map and, with a glint of nostalgia she doesn’t share. “Strabo,” he says. “Fine work. If one favors myth over measurement.” Still, he recognizes the fine lines from a life Cait’s never lived. A memory nested somewhere along the Thracian coast, maybe. One of his scholars, once. Or perhaps one of the men who slit a scholar’s throat to take the ink. Hard to say.

When Atlas Jay confirms the cost, Caitlin breathes in, deep. There’s no sugar left to rim this cup. She’d hoped—naively, she realizes—that her deals with Yuisa, with Avi, with Mara’s delicate, decaying gifts might be enough. A finger here, a rib there. But Estela’s siphoning magic had already shown her: necrotic matter held no echo. For the convergence to hold, the source had to pulse. Had to be living. 

And Atlas Jay, damn him, confirms the size.

Dorian exhales through her. Cool as untouched water. “The minimum viable population,” he begins, and his fingers trail the rim of the parchment as though testing its temperature. “Ritual patterning needs redundancy. Anything less than five thousand and you court collapse at the apex of infusion. Ten thousand, and you have stability. Fifteen, and you begin to pull clean. I want clean.” He taps one long finger above a state. “We’ll need salt for the bleed control.”

His lip curls as he flicks his gaze to Astor.

“And ‘CS’?” The words are a purr sharpened into something worse. “Sobriquet after sobriquet, Astor.”

Dorian’s gaze doesn’t so much rest on Astor as enfold him, like a snake slipping between the folds of a dream. He tilts Cait’s head just slightly to the side, almost as if she’s listening for something distant. Something buried in the timbre of Astor’s voice.

“Ah,” he sighs. “The illusion of familiarity.” His mouth curls, not in a smile, but in some imitation of one. As though mimicking how humans express amusement. “You name the mask, not the monster. That’s your first mistake.”

Cait winces. Dorian—

“These sobriquets,” he continues, voice flattening to a winter hush, “are unnecessary.”

The room tightens. Astor doesn’t flinch—but he should. Already, the air is thickening, calcifying into something ancient. Old magic gathers the way fog gathers on the ribs of the dead. The sigils along the table rattle faintly, disturbed by no breeze.

Dorian is already moving.

He lifts a hand. He doesn’t touch. He doesn’t need to. Cait’s breath stutters. What slips from her wrist is not blood, not light, but something darker—older. A filament of shadow, a thread of ruin. It winds out of her like smoke unraveling beneath a closed door. Not from her. Through her. From him. From the thing living behind her eyes, wearing her bones like a borrowed cathedral.

Dorian, the channeller, siphons not with violence but with terrifying precision—the kind born of centuries folded over themselves in arcane practice. He’s stolen the breath of saints in plague-cities. Drained warlords in their dreams. Whispered the final syllables of rites no living coven dares speak aloud.

He is refined hunger.

The first thing to leave Cait is heat. Then resistance. Then breath. It looks like nothing. It feels like a crowbar to the spine. The channel opens. AJ’s shoulders stiffen—not from fear, but instinct. Like an animal realizing a god has stepped into the clearing. Too late. Dorian threads the connection cleanly, reverently, like threading a needle through the eye of a soul. He pulls. Not enough to kill. But enough to wound.

Cait shudders—then thrashes, inwardly and utterly, panic rippling through every nerve. She lunges for the reins of her own body, not gently but with brute instinct, the way a drowning woman claws for the surface. But Dorian holds fast—like a god with his heel on her throat.

She pushes again, harder this time—Dorian, stop, Dorian let go—but the words barely form inside her own mind, warped by the cold bloom spreading through her spine. Her limbs don’t answer. Her breath comes shallow. Her heartbeat stutters beneath a rhythm that isn't hers.

Her vision fractures at the edges, curling in with the nausea of altitude sickness. The world tips sideways. She tries to scream—not aloud, not even with her voice, just something primal— and then drives her fingernails into her palm, deep enough to draw blood, willing pain to wake her body up from the possession. She's snarling — But Dorian is already threading the spell. Already far, far ahead of her. And she is being ridden like a chariot lashed to a storm.

Then Dorian—reverses. He gives.

He channels the mercury through himself, through her. Liquid quicksilver turned sacred venom. The essence of Mercury—unholy messenger, twin-souled liar, king and queen of thresholds—boils through his borrowed blood like a hymn in a dead tongue. It sings.It burns. It knows.

And then he channels it—straight into Astor. The transfer is silent. Not a spell. A consequence. Mercury doesn’t obey physical laws. Neither solid nor gas. Neither life nor death. It’s the only thing that ever Dorian me.

It pierces AJ like a whispered prayer stabbed through the architecture of his soul. Not a substance, but an idea. A mutable god, writhing into the lattice of his spellcraft. Every sigil he’s ever drawn lights up behind his eyes, perfect and terrible. Equations twist. Symbols realign. Logic glitches—then reforms into something hungrier.

Cait nearly collapses. Her hand hits the table with a thud. She clings to it, dragging air into her lungs like it owes her something. “Stop—”

But it’s too late. The spell has passed. Dorian reels the thread back into himself like a fisherman who already knows the sea is empty. He smooths her breath with clinical disinterest. And then he speaks, quiet as a tomb.

“You reached,” he says, “as though we were familiar.” His voice curves around the word like a noose. “And now you’ve learned how wrong you were.”

He straightens Cait’s spine with all the ease of a puppeteer drawing taut a string. And Cait—still shaking—says nothing at all. Dorian smooths Cait’s breath like he’s brushing the wrinkles from a sleeve. She sucks air down in ragged, furious gulps. Dorian ignores her rage. Steps back to the map as though nothing happened. As though he didn’t just use a living alchemist as both conduit and capacitor.

“So.” He claps once, soft. Businesslike. “The town.”

Cait’s mouth is bloodless.

“Preferably a town with weak national oversight. One no one will miss. One that will not be named in tomorrow’s paper. Something expendable. But not insignificant.”

Internally his attention to Caitlin.

There is a difference, between collateral and offering. Let’s not confuse the two, he says.

Cait, recovering, finally manages: You could’ve told me you were going to do that.

And ruin the lesson? He needed to feel what he’s playing with. Before he picks a city.

Caitlin swallows, hard—like she’s trying to keep something inside from crawling up her throat. There’s a flicker—regret, sharp and sudden, for ever pulling Atlas Jay into this. For letting his clever hands and careless charm wander too close to the core of the ritual. He hadn’t known. Not really. Not until now.

But it’s too late. She’s too close. There’s no clean retreat from this edge. No gentle undoing of what’s already been bound in blood and vow. Her ribs ache with the weight of proximity—like the world itself is pressing against her sternum, whispering: finish it.

This is the horror of it. Not the spell. Not Dorian, even. Not entirely. The horror is her.

Caitlin Siltshore—who once believed she’d stop before the end. Who told herself she’d find another way. Who now watches her hands, her traitorous hands, move toward the map with practiced ease.

She doesn’t look to Dorian. Doesn’t look at Atlas Jay. She looks at the parchment—crisp, ancient, humming with terrible potential—and starts tracing the coastlines. A slow, looping motion. Searching for a place to disappear a city. Searching for a place the world won’t mourn.

Her finger pauses over the interior. Not coast. Not even close. And she lingers there. Just long enough.

[ajastor]

Her hands find his. She dares to taunt and take things that she does not realise would close around her throat as swiftly as rope pulled taut. Skin that would turn from ruby, to violet. Shades of uncut sapphire drawn to the edge when he may see how long she can pray at his altar. On her knees, beneath the water.

The flowers will not save you, Allie.

And neither will I.

AJ's smile is split by teeth that scrape a lower lip. His hands are merciless entities that exist in tandem to his hungers. There can be unforgiving acts that are disguised as the softest of taffeta. Silk-like, hiding the most deadly of things beneath the ripples; a mask of gilded objects that hide the teeth that are ready to rip through sinew and marrow. Allie had done everything he'd asked; shown her threads of her magic but in doing so, she'd traipsed too close to a God's patience. Snapped the thread to make a weave over his heart. He does not make the same mistake twice. Even the most beautiful flowers can bloom the most toxic of artifices. Hemlock, Foxglove, Belladonna, Monkshood — he has crushed, and made powders of every substance available to him, made it something anew.

Allie is no different.

She gasps beneath his touch, eliciting a low chuckle. She trusts that he won't stain her flesh with his mark; that he won't transform her skin in patterns that elicit another kind of noise from pursed lips. When she clasped his wrist still, the one in her nape drags her head south.

"Go down, Allie, love."

She is to go beneath the water, delve under the surface where she is no longer able to see the darkness that wants to eat away the gold-flecks in his gaze. Does she see that he could bury her here, beneath this hot tub? A statuette that stands as a decorative piece for all to gaze upon; the attention she so craves.

Enjoy it then.

His grasp tightens at the base of her head.

         the warmth of the water does a wonderful job of melting her. where it touches, she flushes a soft rose, she can only hope the glitter doesn’t wash away with it, if the water would be kind enough to let her keep that gentle shimmer of gold. allie trusts everything in all the world, but this is where she grows unsure. as long as she can touch the ground, as long as there’s something here for delicate hands to hold onto, she’ll be just fine. besides, aj’s here, and she trusts him not to drag her down, to not let her go too far. 

         allie turns back to look at him, half through her eyelashes, as he enters the pool. he really is beautiful, befitting of that word, god, stamped on the invitation. the one he’d promised her, a night with a god. even if she doesn’t understand it, like the fullscope of it hides just beyond her fingertips, his world- khaos surrounds them. and her nerves have fluttered far, far away. slipping, easily. aj brings with him a high of his own, almost like a trance. he reaches for her, pulling her in, but she would’ve gone without it. big blue eyes fall down to his hands, he’d taken his gloves off. she sweeps a thumb over the palm of his hand. the water makes it smooth, like velvet, like the leather that isn’t hiding them from her, anymore. she giggles, hushed, her eyes meeting his, allie stands between the gap of his knees.

         you enjoy this. she nods, with that same sweet, enchanted smile. of course she does.  “ the flowers are my favorite. ”  her gaze moves past him, for a moment, and the hand that wasn’t holding his might’ve reached for the flora that surrounds the pool, if there wasn’t still something pulling her closer to him.  “ but, mostly, i enjoy you. ”

         and she continues to enjoy him, a wave of heat rising with his touch. up, up, up- her waist, then her chest, just enough that it draws sensation to her skin like a feather. until he elicits a soft little gasp from her, sensitive under his thumb, more melting. she feels the other hand in her hair, dampening what wasn’t already fallen down her back, ends soaked by the tub. her mouth opens for him, soft and warm, inviting, almost like a reflex that’s triggered just by his hand being near. she takes his wrist in her hands, and allie doesn’t pull him away but she just wants to hold him, keep him there. her touch doesn’t do anything but beg. how dedicated are you? the dream doesn’t shatter, but it hazes, like dew covering a meadow. doe-eyed, a pinch of confusion finding the space between her brow as her head tilts.  “ what do you mean? ”

[ajastor]

"Yeah, babe, hot." Her blood is as icy as a glavier, her organs are almost frozen stiff. Long after he's cursed the golden veins away, hissing and bleeding between bare fingers, he feels the pull of it desires to ruin. He'd laugh if giving her an ounce of leeway could mean she'd be choking on golddust for eternity, at best. He can't lose. He doesn't lose. But Noialles is going to crumble to dust, before she ever gets to see herself as a figurine at the penthouse doorway if she doesn't meet him in the fucking middle. "Your tits are fine."

For once, not the priority. Frankenfurt has redirected the neurons in Astor's brain to something more pressing. It's impressive. Moreso than the magic AJ is casting from within the ribcage of the vampire. She'd not understand, nor appreciate the casting even if he began to explain. The ribs are a centre. Instructions go over her head.

I don't feel good. She provokes that volatile feeling of fear inside his chest; the kind that comes out when Astor elders desire to inflict crucifying consequences. She is not a God, in any right. She does not get to make an Astor sweat without some god-given return. He knows she has the strength to push him off, so she desires, but her nails raking his arms aren't a fully formed assault.

AJ is sifting the magic, not quite a siphon, but drawing fingers in a motion along her heart, to the spokes of her ribs until he can coerce the magic to give up this entity. When it does, AJ has to use all his strength to tear away from the speed of Noialles healing abilities, ripping everything wide open. Less damaging than the potions she desires to play with; she cannot heal from those but she can melt her lungs back together; a falsity, if ever knew one. She doesn't need them, anyway.

"Shut up for a bloody minute," His hands retract from her chest, slick with blood. It sloshes at their feet, and AJ breathes a sigh of relief as he catches her still-whole-form before she falls. No dust, no ash. No sparks of river-God magic left in the carcass of her. God, I'm fucking good.

There's suddenly a sound from the living area. A scrape of glass that pierces through the panting of his bold success to save a vampire from golden desiccation-death, whatever. AJ's head snaps sideways, a violence that comes in the aftermath of being pissed by Frank's stupidity.

He remembers how close he'd been to severing the head of the dead woman in the living room before Frankie had got too curious with the experiments. Remembrance is killer. And he eases his grip from Frankie, when the wound on her chest knits over.

"Frank, you turned that shit lay," it's only going to take minutes for her to wreak havoc in his place and AJ's reaching for a rag to try and wipe the thick essence of Frankie from his hands. "Why? You didn't even enjoy her." a beat, "So which of us is killing her, because there's not much to hunt in here, love, and I'll tell you now, as hot as this little game was, I'm in no mood."

This was a scene from a horror movie. Usually, it was her mouth and hands drenched in delicious red, a body lumped at her feet. But occasionally — once, maybe twice she’d been the one spread out on the floor of some dungeon, riddled with bullets or sliced open like a decadent fruit platter. Some whateverhood hunter thinking he’d won because he had the big bad wolf in a cage. They all met the same fate, teeth in their throats, flesh torn to ribbons. AJ's gilded hands digging somewhere between her ribs and her breakfast was new. He could've at least lit up a few candles. Maybe put on some sexy playlist on. "Spread a bit?" she squealed, voice reaching very dramatic heights, "What is this, a date?"

Because, obviously, that’s how her dates usually went. "I swear to God, JayJay, if you rearrange my organs, I better come out with tits two cups sizes bigger."

Oh, her breath glittered all pretty and shiny. Morbid curiosity took over, and she lifted her head slightly just to look at the sorcerer elbows deep in her while her ribcage was stubbornly trying to zip itself shut. A fucked up Build-A-Babe.

Holy fuck—

Black eyes turned to chocolate glazed donuts, all big and glossy. "Babes, this is totally not sexy, and I don't feel good— I really don’t feel good—" Her fingers fluttered uselessly, somewhere between fanning herself and trying to scratch him off like a bad rash. Maybe if she clawed hard enough, she could finally rid herself of his cursed golden hands.

"Wait— what do you mean you’re not done?" Panic bloomed wide in those big brown eyes. "What do you mean, babes?! How— how long are we doing this for? No, no— it’s okay now. See? See! I feel so much better—"

She gestured frantically, manicured hands pawing at him like they were two toddlers fighting over the same toy. The toy being her violently open ribcage.

"I could literally do a cartwheel right now, AJ. Like, full aerial, no hands, check my form— just get off, get off, get OFF!"

[ajastor]

In all the quiet of the revelation, AJ is recalculating his own equations. Over and over, as though despite the stakes being hellish in their expectation — they've suddenly tacked on a caveat Astor hadn't put into his projections. It goes beyond the heights of the heavenly and divine; he's weighing the denominators on a statera in his mind.

The only thing that has changed is the convergence material centre to the ritual. And he knows his spell is faultless. No matter a drop, to an avalanche, it'll hold like Hadrian's wall — will not crumble, or slough because of dried dust pools or because hydrargyrum desires to bend the rules. The alchemist merely eyes Caity with new amusement, curious but tamed. There's quiet, when there had been so much noise of assertion moments prior. AJ has to brush off the lingering scald of where he'd felt his blood nearly freeze beneath the flesh of his palm as he drags fingers along the skin, a scab that he almost believes he might never rid.

When Garnett Gal had been talking Gods. She'd left out this detail.

Of it all, the most grinding thing in this room — not the geode dust, or the ancient extinct ores, it's her knack to call him by his name.

But it's how he knows: There she bloody is.

And then there is whatever shares her body.

"That's poetic," Rewriting his arithmetic in bone, Astor points playfully at her and whether it's easily read in his eyes, he calculates (as cleverly as the rest of the spell had been) that perhaps her joke of who is inside who, should be left on the backburner. Instead, something lighter breaks the surface, dismissive of the new information in favour of the history that Astor desires to make: "You know I do love a good equation." He does. An alchemist with a hunger fed in calcinatio, solutio and coniunctio. "Just can't believe you left out the good parts, love."

A flash of a grin, because AJ's boundaries are as lackadaisical as they come. A phrase about Europeans and their habits comes to mind, but Astor doesn't see its relevance now. Instead lifts dangerous hands up, in a faux act of surrender; it's lazy, almost sarcastic, but he doesn't chase for the gold, or to upset his partner in spellcrafting.

Bigger things are due to die, than them tonight. Maybe Caitlin, if she scratches her runifications wrong. Where he doesn't specialise in the ancient language of runes — not more than the languages he needs. An occasional charcoal sketch, or a copyrighted piece from a grimoire. He does not practice the art of birthing new markings. But if he did, he imagines there's more give with them. Has a vision of whether Cait draws it small, or large, it'll still do some degree of it's intention. There's less give with his measurements; it's either perfect, or it's catastrophic.

AJ's never bitten his tongue so hard.

The spell.

AJ nods, just once. A mirror of Caity's earlier subtle gesture.

Eyes slide down to the parchment. "This draft is executable." The alchemist can picture the play in his mind; crystalline scaffolding, to intact natron, the tendon threads bind around the nexus of the spirit — in this case, Caity's little bodysnatching friend. Nigredo, albedo, citrinitas. Illuminations of gold. Ash settles in the wake of what they've created; what they've shredded in order to accomplish the rite. A channel that surpasses all previous iterations.

The cost. The first law of alchemy has always been that something cannot come from nothing; to gain, requires a loss or transference of something of equal value. Astor expects the price of this to be beyond anything he has ever crafted. He does not know spirits, or possessions of grandeur. Not until Caity G's supplied reading. It speaks of volumes of power, older than Cartagena, and the Albigensian crusades. They want to tear souls, and bone; Astor's about to stretch the limitations of known alchemy. He's about to throw dirt on Paracelsus' name. The principles of sulfur, mercury and salt as their representative elements — pushing the comprehensible known as the spirit, mind and the body. No metaphor. Just magic.

AJ takes a step back from Siltshore and a few steps further he stands glancing out the window to the city below, sparked away by lights in the dark. An abyss easily sucked into the void of both successful and detrimental power. Sometimes, they are one and the same. An aether that needs an anchorage; if it is to tear apart under the rule of Astor's power, then it would like to tear a piece of the world of the living in retribution — in payment.

He almost feels like he doesn't need to air the words. But Cait's voice is cutting, in a way that now he knows, is a tone that is unbelonging; unsuited to her.

"Do you want the arithmetic, Garnett?" His eyes slide across the landscape before he pivots back to survey the scene; there's nothing he would not pay, he realises. Look how close we are. Exhilaration, formed of something more settled than his earlier thrill. When he steps back to the opposing side of the table, beneath the alchemical pigments, he plucks out a map; torn carefully from Strabo's rumoured documents. Geographer's were always more creative, than accurate in Astor's opinion. "Or merely the estimate; it's not a difficult price," a beat, a problematically sharp drag of how he'd take a country if it needed that. "Personally, if it were up to me, I'd like to fuck off France and stick up their arse. But, we're a bit far out for that." Astor's tone lowers as he slides it across, because the gravitas of his morality is not thrown into question as he realises that he doesn't know if Caitlin Siltshore is prepared. This map, is closer to her home. Not his. He taps it twice, playful. "Pick a city, CS. That's your cost."

Dorian recoils at the presumptive touch and Cait has to fire a sharp Don’t across their shared synapse before the hex leaps, fully forged, to his tongue. We still need him, she reminds, packing three centuries of exasperation into a single mental syllable. And this was bound to happen. She can already hear Dorian’s silent rebuttal—every complaint shaped like a dirk.

For a heartbeat they stand motionless—at least, that is what Atlas Jay Astor must see: Caitlin Siltshore, spine ruler-straight, boots in a soldier’s line, eyes shuttered behind a calm so austere it borders on boredom. He cannot see the quarrel lightning back and forth behind her irises, cannot feel the hot-and-cold fronts of will that buffet the skin he dared to touch. Inside that carefully curated stillness, woman and possession wrangle over precisely how many of Astor’s bones should pay tuition for his curiosity.

All of them, Dorian decides, silk-sweet, the judgment delivered like a dessert course. We could stitch them back together once the lesson’s learned, he adds, helpful as a butcher offering free twine. In Dorian’s imagination the penthouse floor tiles are very obliging—white enough to show blood spatter, smooth enough to hose clean.

How about none of them, Cait counters, voice in their mind as dry as archival paper. There’s a timetable and you know it. She tightens her grip on the inner reins, the gesture mental yet viscerally felt: a set of fingers digging into phantom leather. She pivots the argument. He’s already felt you; that bell can’t be unrung. If we stay ghosts in the walls, the next touch detonates everything. Show him the wiring now, and he’ll keep his hands to himself. Dorian bristles—secrecy is his favorite knife. Their quarrel is silent thunder—flash, boom, flash—and Dorian’s first instinct is cloaking, always cloaking. He snarls inside the mind-space that exposure forfeits advantage and Cait counters with a tactician’s cool: If he keeps prodding in the dark he’ll trip the tripwire we can’t reset; better we light the hallway ourselves. She shows him the potential fallout—mercury igniting, sigils shearing, a penthouse full of body parts none of them can reassemble in time. Dorian hesitates, pride a fist around principle, until she twists the knife of logic one last quarter-turn: Your empire of fear is worth nothing if the laboratory becomes your tomb. Reluctant, he yields a single, curt nod. The outward shift that follows is a mere millimeter of posture, a hairline slide in breath rhythm, yet it rings through the warded air like a struck goblet—a resonance any witch would feel though no mundane eye could name.

“It’s me in here, and not just me. You’re speaking to both halves of this equation, Atlas Jay.” says Caitlin, speaking for the first time that evening, her consonants sharpened on a whetstone of irritation. "Two integers share the sum of this flesh, alchemist—test either, and I rewrite your arithmetic in bone.” adds Dorian, dovetailing on the same breath, his vowels viscous and old-country smooth.

Their voices braid seamlessly in air, but inside the skull-house the exchange is a flick of claws, a clack of shield. It is not their first time co-piloting—casting often demands that sleight-of-hand—but it is rare they hold debate mid-skin, rarer still in front of an audience who thinks the car has only one driver.

Cait rolls her wrist, letting the gold lightning sink beneath the cuff as though sealing a vault door. The lattice obeys, glowing down to banked embers. She studies the reddened imprint of Astor’s fingers on her skin, catalogues the lingering static, then looks up - but it's Dorian that speaks. “It’s a miracle you’re so wholly intact, with how quick you are to touch what isn’t yours," says Dorian. The words leave Caitlin's lips cool, neatly hem-stitched, nothing to snag a conscience on—yet Dorian salts each syllable with menace, and the temperature drops a discernible degree.

Introducing the possession was reckless, borderline absurd, but, in Caitlin's mind, there is no erasing what he just felt. Certainty tastes like copper; once it coats the tongue it never quite leaves. She stalks a slow circuit around the workbench—not to menace, merely to buy seconds—boots tapping Morse code into the marble veining. Racks of alembics rattle faintly at her passage.

“Don’t bother drafting questions about what the fuck is going on here, Atlas Jay; the FAQ on this is permanently redacted.” Caitlin snarks, sliding a single finger toward the parchment grid of their manuscript, “So let's talk about this spell—anything else we need to look for?” She keeps her gaze on the glyphs, not on the alchemist; better to parse sigils than measure the exact ratio of awe and annoyance on his face.

She senses, rather than sees, Astor’s mouth open—ready to fill the space with lecture or brag. Dorian’s voice slices in first, steel-polite, surgical in its precision. “The cost,” he repeats with stiff certainty. “Confirm the cost.” His tone is all courthouse marble and winter wind—no heat, only consequence.

Cait nods, as though the ghost is merely her own echo. She flicks an invisible speck of dust from the corner of a rune, then glances up through her lashes. “I’d do that,” she adds, tone deceptively light, a lace curtain hiding iron bars, “he doesn’t really ask twice.” 

Twice is generous, Dorian says internally. Third ask is bones.

I’m aware, thinks Cait.

Just checking your timetable, Dorian replies.

[ajastor]

"Gotta have a little fun with it, haven't I?" Astor tosses it at her like they're playing a leisurely game of tennis. The competitiveness yet to be violent, the vicious volley for match point not yet set. Dramatic is not a word AJ would use as much as he would voice it's intellect blown wide. A hunger fed by the clockwork pieces of aspiration. Alchemy is a scaffold to Caity's resurrection, what good is something raised in physical form, if it's missing all its good parts? They're not trying out a bond made with paper mâché, they're embarking on an unprecedented trial of the Gods.

The kind only Gods themselves can survive.

Caitlin spills her blood as easy as she had done across the dinner table and AJ steps back from his workings, allows ample room for the rapidity of his fixtures to operate their timepiece.

Fifteen seconds is right. There's pride swelling in AJ's chest, as though a part of him had momentarily doubted his calculations. Proven null, as Astor's intent meets expectation. It's an alchemical perfection. His mouth draws up into a grin that's not satisfied, but hungrier than ever. Eager and foul to know what other puzzles he might solve, when deities are teased into existence at the edge of his fingertips. Brought both to and from perdition by the power of his mind.

Caity's almost deadpan in reciting back the steps, where AJ's noting the inked corrections, following the Astor planning. Siltshore though? Odd. Even in the flourish of the way she moves. AJ can't pin it down. Even by her standard of stick up her arse and constipated disapproval of his ignorance, she's missing the spark of what he liked about her. She's not once crossed a boundary, or laid a derogatory but almost flirtatious wit from a whipcrack tongue.

Astor notices, for more than the second time that the spell has no tangible target; to pluck apart and rebuild a ritual. AJ knows what the elements attain to. And they're missing more than just a catalyst of a droplet of blood.

An emergency egress is fine, but AJ refrains from commenting that it is a needless contingency. It won't fracture, not unless he wants it to.

The alchemist narrows his gaze on Caity, assessing every sharp syllable dropped out of her mouth. Maybe he hadn't noticed the assertion so early on, mistaken in allowing his ego to know how right he is about his fixtures on the ritual. But there's something in the eyes, when she traces the sigils of her original work, glazed over runes, dabbled onto a page in carefully drawn ink. There's plenty AJ could note, all the specifics that require not inches, but millimetres of specifics; no rooms for a drop off. No casual bloodletting across a table when forging the chemical bonds, of both science and magic. It's more delicate than that. He thinks Siltshore's capable of it, but as he looks at her in her turtleneck and slacks, he can't help but wonder if she is either afraid of this — in fact, he'd love to ask her that — or if she's leaving a detail out.

Whilst he thinks, AJ's pulling at the fingers of leather gloves, loosening them from his hands. There's a moment of chivalry where he considers asking her permission, but, just as she bruised his shin under the table once before. He'll cross those boundaries without so much as a second thought.

AJ tosses the gloves to the top of the desk, disturbs the remnants of bonedust from a previous spell.

"Yeah, actually," He steps forward, no haste in the movements, more casual as he lifts Caitlin's wrist, and tugs the sleeve of her arm upwards. He's not just looking for the gleam of gold that burrows beneath the layers of her flesh, humming the beat of Astor's magic. He wants to know what she's got pushing to the surface of it all. A hand curls around the gold lightning and squeezes, a pulse of magic that shocks his palm like nitrogen. Not warm. Icy. But it burns, and Astor pulls his hand back so suddenly, eyes flying to Caitlin's like the pain in his palm is hilarious. There's something dark, and unsettling that didn't like to be touched swimming under the surface of Astor's mark, and his fingers curl into his palm. He can almost taste the bitter tang of something ametrine; a citrine abyss, dried out at the base of a cavern. A place that should be dank, and wet with old knowledge instead carved out as if a desert has made a home in the rock.

He'd thought they were missing some constitutes. "That's bloody new."

Brash and foolish from a Siltshore to delve that deep into uncharted waters. But then, how can he not be impressed? She'd fooled him, at least until now. It doesn't come to him quickly, but it's the first time he's considered the cost if Caitlin messes this up. It's no longer a silent third party paying the price. It'd be Siltshore's burnt flesh stinking out his penthouse.

It's easily deciphered in his features, magic buzzing beneath his skin. Unfurled in anticipation of the ritual, or the fresh knowledge that Caitlin's power is pooled into something else; something Astor does not know. It doesn't provoke him to change anything, merely shake his head — disbelief breeds amusement, rubedo has never looked so dark. CS, anyone ever told you that you make a guy want to drink?

Dorian listens with the stillness of a coiled spring, head tilted just enough to suggest courtesy while his eyes track every sweep of Atlas Jay’s hand. Each correction lands like a pebble on deep water: ripples spread, but the surface soon calms to glass. Astor's pupils contract and flare like shutters fighting the sun, each micro-movement betraying calculations he will never voice. The alchemist’s mouth shapes another silky explanation, but Dorian is no longer listening to the words; he is listening to the voltage behind them, mapping every flicker across the man’s irises to the lattice of motives he carries in his skull.

< Caitlin, is there something between the two of you that you have failed to tell me? > The question unfurls along their shared nerves, cool silk over steel.

No. That’s just him. Her answer lands flat, unembellished. Dorian parses the cadence, hunting for the faint quaver that would betray longing or spite. He hears only steady exhaustion, yet skepticism needles the edges of his certainty. Astor is a kaleidoscope—dazzling, yes, but predictable only until the next turn of the wheel. He tucks his doubt away like a blade beneath a sleeve: unvoiced, provisional, and ready to be drawn if future evidence demands its edge. Inwardly then, he lets calculations spark—he files every barb, gauging whether the alchemist’s critique reveals insight or merely vanity. Pride pricks at the edges of his composure; centuries of mastery refuse to bow to a lecture delivered in sing-song bravado. Yet beneath the irritation pulses a sharper interest: Atlas’s observations align with fault lines Dorian has sensed but not yet named. The acknowledgment clarifies. His thumb strokes the pommel of the athame—an unconscious promise of precision, not violence. When Atlas punctuates a point with a flourish, Dorian’s lips twitch. “Such dramatics,” Dorian says, a scalpel of contempt thin enough to shave silence from the air. Astor’s showmanship reminds him of Mehrzād’s pageants: so much glitter draped over hollow hunger. Ambition should burn white-hot and invisible, not parade itself like carnival fire. Without him and Caitlin there is no crucible worthy of polishing Astor’s ego.

Nevertheless, this is an indulgent tableau—a alchemist arranging glinting shards, Caitlin balanced on boot-tips of discipline, and himself, the unquiet ghost in her marrow, measuring ambition against metallurgy. Astor indeed solves the brittleness, soldering antimony to bismuth in a lattice that chews volatility into orderly channels. Still, cleverness is hypothesis until blood confirms it. Spectacle belongs to lesser appetites; Dorian needs proof.

Dorian rotates the athame and Cait offers her hand without a word. Trust, he thinks, still dazzles him after a millennium of borrowing bodies. A flick of steel, a bead of red—alive, hot, claiming lineage. He lets a single drop fall.

The circle drinks it like parched earth. Mercury snaps from liquid to mirror; antimonide plates fuse, their lamellae knitting with a muted chime pitched to an immaculate F-sharp. No sulfuric spit, no glassy fracture, only a resonance that rings up Cait’s bones and through his borrowed nerves. The alloy holds.

“Correct,” he acknowledges to the silence, and the mercury’s surface stills, reflecting his shared face in perfect, merciless detail. One proof down.

He withdraws, wipes the blade on his sleeve, and turns toward the long workbench where the spell manuscript sits—time to canonize what the alloy has revealed. Laying the athame across the page like a ruler, Dorian begins to annotate, speaking each correction aloud so the room—and Astor—cannot mistake his intent.

“Volatility Channel,” he says, scoring a single line through gradual pour. “We decant with velocity—quicksilver obeys momentum, not caution.” The stroke is decisive, the ink still wet when he moves on.

“Fixation and Re-architecture,” he continues, slashing out sulfuric catalysis. “Stibnite removed, sulfur excised. Lattice integrity rises seventeen percent.” A faint, bitter smile ghosts his lips—memory of a plague doctor’s lungs turned to ash by brimstone.

“Lineage Control,” he announces, deepening Caitlin’s blood-knot sigil until it bites the parchment. “Pulse-anchored braid. Heartbeat held at seventy-two, give or take four.” He doesn’t name the violin prodigy whose arrhythmia once shattered a cathedral of elixirs, but the lesson hangs in the air like spent incense.

“Cosmic Anchoring,” he says, rotating the rune three degrees clockwise. “Align to the ley-line gradient—neutralize phase skew, prevent harmonic drift.” Another host whispers across his memory: an astronomer devoured by an eclipse of his own summoning.

“Phase Tracking,” he finishes, sketching a nested spiral—seven counter-clockwise turns. “Emergency egress. If the alloy backlashes, the charge vents here, nowhere else.”

The fountain pen lifts. “And that is that.” He caps the ink, the finality in his voice as clean and unadorned as the strokes now drying on the page. Dorian slips the athame into its sheath and lifts the manuscript, weighing it in his palm. A spell is never finished, his first master once told him—centuries before he killed that same master to escape a throttling tutelage—but tonight this version feels perilously close, an edge honed fine enough to split futures.

He sets the book beneath a lead weight, sealing ink and intention together, and lets his attention drift once more across the workshop. The mercury, mirror-still, reflects not one face but two—Cait’s and the flicker of every host echoed behind her eyes: kings, beggars, scholars, butchers. He feels them watching the alloy with mingled envy and pride. They will never stand here again, yet their lessons sing in every correction he has inked. “Proof complete,” he announces, voice stripped of flourish.

If Astor is angling for praise, he will leave empty-handed. Dorian has never dispensed gold stars and is not about to cultivate the habit before dawn. The only commendation available is that Astor still occupies the room—that Dorian has not dismissed him and his florid turns of phrase into the street’s predawn chill.

Inside the borrowed cockpit of her own body, Cait skulks behind her ribs like a back-seat driver with no brake pedal. She tastes metal on her tongue, counting heartbeats the way gamblers count cards—hold, hold, hold—while Dorian threads theory into copper-bright reality. If Atlas Jay's clever lattice so much as twitches wrong, the whole circle will eat their shins and her pride in one molten gulp. But then the alloy locks on that knife-sharp F-sharp, mercury stills to mirror, and she exhales the breath she’d white-knuckled, a low, ghosted whistle of reluctant awe. The resonance rings down her spine, a tuning fork struck in a cathedral of bone, and she’s left deciding whether it’s brilliant or terrifying that it feels exactly right.

It strikes her how grateful she is not to be the one speaking—how impossible it would be, right now, to assemble praise into something that wouldn’t taste like surrender. If she had command of her own tongue, she might blurt the obvious—you did it—and shatter the moment’s austere equilibrium. Better, then, that Dorian drives. Better that the acknowledgment stays unspoken, coiled like quicksilver respect in the hollows of her throat where no one, least of all Astor, can hear it. He doesn't need that going to his head. Or elsewhere.

Dorian leafs once more through the amended spell, eyes flicking across sigils and correction marks. “Anything else worth noting?” he asks, tone flat as a ledger. “And the cost—confirm it.” Dorian harbors no qualms about the volume of blood, breath, or bone required, but arithmetic must close cleanly before the first drop is spent.

[ajastor]

An eyeroll, for someone has sucked the ever living life out of Riv. His load of crap laugh and the serious pull to his brows is nothing short of mood killing. His boredom used to be as deadly as AJ's had been. Something sharpened into a reckoning.

"Make time, you little illusionary," He could fabricate the procrastination tasks to completion and enjoy the moment. Riv's gotten stiff, and it's not in the good way. "What are you so busy with in Port Shitly?" It's not Riv's Columbus, and AJ supposes he cannot keep doting it a shithole, forever. He's just opened a luxury club of magic and depravity in a town not prevalent for its gilded streets. He's got to like some parts of it; the people more than the architecture.

But the damage of Riv's needling has already bled Astor, and it beads through his soul and to the edges of his disposition. Eyes shift to the hand on his shoulder, before sliding back to the illusionist with a glimmer of distain. Trust Riv to kill the vibe on a such a momentous opening night and bring up the family.

"You give Titan too much credit."

And Riv's exaggerating. He's not been in many of the Astor wars, or the smear campaigns, hell, he's barely been witness to half the shit Astor has cooked. That's what happens when Reverie comes back and realises their tragic mistake, scooping up a prodigal son after throwing him away. To walk among Gods, to then walk among ghosts, and fantasies. For nothing to ever supply substance, merely energy that deceives.

"Talking to him isn't the problem, Riv. He doesn't bloody listen —" AJ stops abruptly, neck twitches when he captures a shadow behind Riven. Steals his attention away so easily, like it were made to distract. A warmth that has his mind feeling subdued. Astor's brows furrow, steps around Riv to see the shadow, it manifests into something more with a face, eyes that gleam darkness — it's not —

AJ knows Riv's magic, he knows a creature that is in Astor's mind, appearing so real yet so distorted that it's agonisingly dredging up all the buried parts.

The walls close in. It's not as obvious as a poisoned chalice, but AJ glances once down to the whisper of where Victors touched his shoulder. Bastard. No time for games? Funny that. He's staring down the barrel of one. Dark. Looming. AJ's senses blackening as he loses sight of everything around him. His magic burns under his flesh, like it knows the threat before it comes. KHÀOS disappears in the abyss, and leaves a ghost of Riven in front of him, and the shadow of a dead friend, back towards him; never able to capture them for more than a moment, bowed and quiet.

There's no shaking the illusion off. AJ knows the strength of his mind, turns, to see darkness. When he smiles in amusement. It smiles back.

'You should sort him out, mate. He's being a bit of a prick.' It's not AJ's voice. But it washes over him, almost like his old friend speaks his mind. 'Don't get sappy on me, Astor. Break him. You broke m—"

Astor's magic quakes as he steps forward into the abyss, blows out air laced with gold dust, whispers in a Turkish tongue, utterings that infect the walls of the illusion, and melt the dark that clouds the walls of the club. Painting it metallic. It makes Riv a tangible notion again and has a shadow fading into the disappearance of rainclouds. Swearing under humidity that tempts to drown him.

He issues a fair warning, tone colder — jokes aside: "Riv, you might want to watch it."

Love was a strong word. Riven tolerated the man. And even he, someone with an almost unnatural supply of patience, had considered giving up on AJ once or twice. Those thoughts were never just his, however. They were seeded in him by careful hands, like the gilded ones of Astor parents, and the ever hovering Reveries. Women who had thrown him at the Astors like an offering and came back years later to collect, once their boy was older and his mother’s magic ran more volatile through his veins. They wanted nothing to do with the English dynasty, no matter how powerful. His face was cold, where a smile cracked slightly at edge of his mouth, like the fraction in a stone: "Ha - ha." a dry, hollow breath disguised as laughter. "Like that?"

A puppeteer. He knew the meaning of that, vaguely — mostly through his mother. The taste of magic powerful enough to slip inside a mind and make the shadows there dance, he'd only ever known through crumbs. What AJ didn’t know was that Victors had an appetite now. That he’d been given more than he should have and now, he was hungry.

There was a momentary dip of his head to his chest, like he could fold the expression away, hide the smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. "I do all that out of boredom, Astor." his voice soft, "I’ve been pretty busy lately. I don’t have time for games anymore."

Then, as if to offer some scrap of reassurance and comfort, after that verbal punch to the gut, the sorcerer let a hand settle on AJ's shoulder; warm and steady, threaded with magic he tried to keep carefully reined in. Didn't want it to spread, and stain his friend with what lived in him now. But it struck him quietly, and without warning—that his hand had become a rose with thorns, pricking skin before either of them realized. "I'm not out here to harm you, AJ. Neither is your brother." missmatched hues lifting to meet the pair of dark ones, "You two have dragged me through every headline-worthy disaster you could cook up." And still he hasn't walked away. "Talk to your brother, Astor." a beat, "You owe me so much already, I'll start charging interest."

[ajastor]

Caity and her moniker corrections, he knows she loves it. It's part of their banter. A negligence to consider that Astor only becomes worse when the irritations are laid bare; open, irksome spots to poke at. This magic does not rely on using one specific name as a reference to a peer, so there's little effort he'll make in adjusting it. And maybe, it's because he's never quite gotten over the fact that she reads him his name the way it's written on a fucking Wiki page.

Garnett Gal can get over it, because he's about to school her in alchemy.

AJ puffs out a laugh as she surveys his work, he wonders if she's as confident as he is tonight. Daring to pick up the elements with bare hands, tempting poison into her veins because they're prepared to pay costs that they've yet to ever honour.

"What isn't working, is that you've never had me." Matter of fact, because whilst he had sweat over the original ritual, working through kinks in the system, and plucking out the incorrect chemistry. Pulling apart previous attempts like it were a giant puzzle, made a mess of by a student who has no business playing alchemist. He's realised how invested he is in Siltshore, and this project. In Gods and deities. Nobody is as good as I am, Caity. That's all she should take from this.

And then — as ever — mercury gets to keep its reputation for being one of ancients more wild elements, toxic, neurologically destructive; some minds aren't meant to ever play games with channelling its volatility. Always a problem child. AJ likes balling with hydrargyrum because silver-water is everything he hates. He likes watching the colour change, most of all.

Yet Caity's talking his language; a knack, he realises, she's becoming quite good at. He knows now she cannot spot the mistakes in technique, or the absent factors that have been weighing her down this long. The smile carries, perusing her as she stalks the room, assessing, recounting previous instances where they'd fucked the bloody thing up. She doesn't even make it sound fun, all business, no play.

He didn't know she'd been so serious, even when she'd been all teeth and crazed enthusiasm at the dinner table. She provoked a man who is unimpressed by most presentations. Her attitude had been a seller, and tonight, she's a husk of it.

What AJ is really waiting for, is the answer about the medium that they're doing all this for. It's just him, Cait, and their two minds present.

"Look at you, love, keep talking like that, you'll get us both excited," A ridiculous tease, because she pins a stare at him by the end of it all. Demanding explanation. He knows woman and their looks. Pride is a sin that AJ's convinced he and Caitlin share. But he indulges her, because he thrives on the win — on imagining her face when she bitterly realises that he's figured out what she could not. Priceless.

"You're not making it spicy enough —" he starts with, crossing the room, as though this requires the substances to hear him too: "Binary alloys — bismuth, antimony, you missed the hottest step. Foreplay, love. Caress it a little. You went in too cold, allowed it to fleck, and crack. Stibnite likes it hot, but don't breathe too much on the bloody thing, you exude that dioxide all over it, it'll spit at you. Let it suffocate a little and it'll split your sulfide." No gas that messes with the whole thing. "—if its in the right crucible, when the heat spikes, because it's bonded with our delightful bismuth." Child's play. "It'll stop that brittle shit later. Everyone just wants a little chance at being a deadly, insoluble powder that'll choke and torment the everliving out of you, eh?" She gets front row as to why Astor's don't like AJ's toying with alchemy; it's never in the books. "You don't fuck with sulfur, aight? It messes the alchemy up. So we remove it from the equation entirely and you've got yourself a ritual fit for Gods."

A moment of pause, to clarify the results: "No wolf howls. You get your F-sharp. You get the charge across the anisotropic channels and you get to keep all that pretty flesh on your bones."

Whoever Caitlin's last alchemist had been, if there were any, had evidently been too untrained, uneducated. Bismuth antimonide is a perfect scaffold for all the steps Cait wants for the ritual. A structure already flashed, quenched and sitting in amongst the circle. "You've done it all too slow. A pour? What, so you can feed our virulent little friend more oxy than it needs? No. Faster. Quick — Quicksilver, baby. It's in the name. Lock it in tight. You do that, with surgical precision, the lamallae won't caviate. It'll hold."

Does she want the rest? The spark in his gaze is challenging, like he wants her to keep probing; keep hearing how he's fixed all those holes she left open, for all the substances to pool through, burn and shatter, erupting messily like something prematurely ejecting: "Shall I keep going, Caity G, or shall we get this done before brekkie?"

He perches himself against the bench with all his notes and leftover scraps. Careful mapping laid out that they'll follow. It sits besides his own Astor grimoire, stuffed with charcoal scrawlings and in scratchy handwriting; all his notations, and fixes. AJ's buzzing with anticipation; a malignant high of knowing the results in his theorem, against what he knows he'll see in real time when Garnett gets her knickers untwisted.

“Garnett?” Dorian corrects him without looking up. “Caitlin, or Siltshore.”

The moment Cait’s boots cross the threshold, Dorian's eye parses the workbench the way a field surgeon reads a pulse. The spell breaks into six functional sections: Destruction & Separation, Volatility Channel, Fixation & Re-architecture, Lineage Control, Cosmic Anchoring, and Phase Tracking. Every ingredient laid out in Astor's workshop carries both practical utility and mythic charge—Astor clearly has done the reading.

Hydrargyrum—mercury. The perpetual messenger: neither solid nor gas, gendered king and queen, the soul of transformation. It bridges fixed salt and fiery sulfur. Salt as body, Sulfur as spirit. Mercury is the hinge of the whole rite, the conduit through which Cait’s living current and Dorian’s possession circulate without catastrophe. Those free pools on the slab announce Astor’s confidence in managing volatility.

He sees the bismuth. Bismuth. Order coaxed from chaos. When it crystallises in rainbow-stepped pyramids its pastel iridescence embodies citrinitas—the dawning-yellow phase between whitening and reddening in the magnum opus.

Then there's stibnite, or antimony. The outlaw metal: volatile, poisonous, resistant to flame yet eager to alloy. Years ago in Poland Dorian learned it stands for “the wolf that devours the king,” the brutal dissolution that must precede any higher union.

Astor says something—brekkie? Dorian ignores it. Means breakfast, Cait mutters inside him; he still ignores it, waving a hand as he stalks toward the metals.

“It’s clear you’ve read the ritual more than once.” He sets the spell pages on the bench, then faces the array again. “From what you’ve read, what isn’t working?”

He points at the hydrargyrum—mercury, all that madness a fingertip away.

“In every past attempt, failure starts here. On a clean run the mercury should pour in one steady, mirror-bright thread into the antimony channel, hold its surface tension, and carry the spirit current. Antimony stays passive, bismuth plates out in neat stair-steps, the return charge follows the salt beds, and the bismuth lattice damps any spike. We reach stable citrinitas: the room warms by three degrees, the sigils lock onto an F-sharp, and the candles snuff themselves. Done.

“That’s never what happens. First I hear a hiss—the same pitch you get when wet iron hits a forge. The mercury edge goes matte, then blackens as sulfur contaminates it; rotten egg and ozone every time. The trench surface fractures like a windshield, droplets crawl across the marble, and the candles tilt, pick up a green fringe, then right themselves. Next the floor crackles, chalk lines flicker, natron scabs yellow and pops, and a metallic howl circles the room. A forked spark jumps— branding the skin sulfur-black. Finally every flame implodes, the room plunges to pitch-black, and a green-white plasma coil vents across the circle. The air reeks of carrion and burnt copper, and any blood inside the boundary tries to boil out through the pores—all within fifteen seconds."

He looks at Astor, as if expecting an explanation. A silent, tell me what's wrong.

[ajastor]

Silty’s list had been bloody extensive, but not exhaustive. Astor knows the malleable guidelines of power as well as he does the shape of his magic; plays off his concentration in place of reinvention. But he knows when to reconfigure a crease that might pool out of its box, dares to see what it manifests as, and when to never break a pattern. Meticulousness that is tunnelling in the marrow of Astor: it provokes violence, dare a ghost disturb a single seed. AJ expects the dead to rot in their own lanes tonight, without the promise of hands across veils. Every sigil counts — not an inch off, not a millimetre unmeasured. Astor might play, but he does not play with the prospect of godly ascension.

And even when he does, he only plays to win.

Because he knows it’s easy to own the world, when it is laid like the timepiece inside a pocket watch, stretched across the lab, bleeding alchemical formulae. He allows it to settle, sinking and staining the open plan like the anticipation of an eruption. A quake in the air that threatens to shatter the windows of the penthouse if he breathes gold too heavy tonight. Everything else, displaced — Astor’s workings scratched out with charcoal, and paper, discarded teeth, and dried tendons — stibnium, bismuth, hydragyrum laid free as though they are not the deadliest metalloids in the room. More minerals and pigments, salts and stones; ancient rocks cracked wide to grind down the oldest of ores.

What is alchemy if not the chemistry that science is afraid of? Theres no mixture here that welcomes fear — not from its casters because AJ knows from all those lessons he loathed; spoken out of pensioners mouths, that intention is a key that unlocks all manner of what most call impossibilities.

He has attained what he intended upon the first hour, hands sheathed in gloves for just a little longer. When a knock comes. He knows Caity Silt has come to birth her ambitions.

“‘Ello Garnett,” A flash of white ivories meets her in the threshold of the doorway; a wry smile — because she’s goading from the getoff and he’s biting — all ego, and precision: “You know, love, I’d even have time to order us brekkie,” Because he’s followed every instruction, to the letter, to the ink. Bloodstains, rotted hearts and calculated variables that cross into insanity. If he is asked to check the fucking thing one more time — he’ll recite the definition of it to her and she can watch the gold-flecks in his eyes sink beneath the black. Astor doesn’t tell Caity he sweated a little when presented algorithms that didn’t naturally swarm to the front of his mind. AJ’s only study, is for this work. To be better, to make every substance nothing more than an extension of himself; if he knows it all, there is nothing more than could hinder him.

She’d been right in the restaurant — another confession that suffers apoptosis upon creation — those grand promises got him eager, and hungry. Stole a lazy God’s attention to pay attention to the revel. It’d been a thrill. Even the platter of food could not satiate a desire so virulently entwined within him.

who: @ajastor

where: Atlas Jay's Alchemy Penthouse, 7:00pm

They arrive on the cusp of transfiguration, dusk bleeding into the penultimate hour of Dorian’s long-promised becoming. Restlessness flickers through Cait’s marrow like static; each heartbeat is a knuckle rapped against the cage of her ribs, reminding her the passenger is awake and pacing.

Inside the shared hush of their skull, she recites the ledger: the deal signed with Astor, the blood spilt. Dorian listens, a serpent coiled around her spine, and in rare unanimity they agree—yes, this is the only proper sequence. Order amid the havoc they intend to loose.

The last time Cait faced Atlas Jay Astor she stood alone in her own skin; tonight she is a two-voiced chorus wrapped in a single body. She has not volunteered that fact—even Jameson didn’t discover Dorian until the spirit was laced around his lungs like winter frost. Still, secrecy has a half-life, and Astor is an observant witch. The moment he asks for proof of possession with a 'Well where’s the possession, Garnett Girl?’ she'll have to confess: 'It’s in my body right now.’ 

She balances the draft spell in her palms—a palimpsest of marginalia: her meticulous revisions, Jameson’s counter-glyphs, a millennium of Dorian’s occult calculus. Hypotheses refined, variables punished, theorems carved into bone and smoke. All of it distills to this single sheaf of vellum, trembling only because she refuses to.

Astor’s penthouse door looms. He’d sworn the workspace met exigent standards; if it doesn’t, Cait fully intends to flay his pride with her tongue. But she is ready—has always been ready. A lifetime spent coaxing this bloom from poisoned soil.

Tonight, Dorian takes the wheel. He has rediscovered the utility of an alchemist, having once worn that mantle through at least three gilded epochs: Bohemia, Kraków, and finally, Kyoto. Those centuries weigh nothing as he lifts Cait's fist and raps. The latch clicks; the door sighs open on a hush of conditioned air.

“Astor,” Dorian says through her lips as a greeting. He holds up the manuscript - for him. All business. “Your reputation suggests we can close the circle and be finished before dawn.”

[ajastor]

if something bad happens, who will your muse call first?

Levels of bad.

Balenciaga fucked his custom order up — he’s calling a guy called Owen, who cleans up his messes.

If he’s just having a bad day, he calls up one of the names in his phone with the tag ‘BC’ at the end of it.

In a life or death emergency — he’s probably calling mum, who might actually stand a chance of fixing whatever mess he’s involved in. And he will sooner die if it’s dad who needs to be called.

(It used to be Cal as the emergency contact, but RIP)

In no circumstances is it TJ.

If it’s semi-life or death, he may call Riven, or Frankie.

[ajastor]

will your muse eat at fast food restaurants? if they're on a time crunch, what type of food will they grab?

For sure. AJ would smash a Greggs if that counts. Most recently chuffed with the new opening of the corner one on Leicester Sq. Pissed however that they never have the drinks cooler on, so every can is warm. He is predictably in the bracket of saying the vegan sausage rolls are better than the ordinary. But would eat either.

He might draw the line at a Spoons. Yet —

Mcdicks. Yeah, he’ll go to order a Big Mac, fries. Vanilla shake. Probably whatever their special burger is of the season, like the Steakhouse Stack or whatever.

He’s got mixed opinions about Wendy’s as it feels like a shittier Mcdicks. And would go to Five Guys over it, for their milkshakes.

If it delivers. If there’s no queue. He’ll probably eat it. AJ’s not that pretentious about fast food. (Just sometimes.)

Tips like a King. 👑

Edited For the fans —

He would eat at a Wafflehouse, even if it isn’t a English Brekkie but he gets that it isn’t in the name. He’d get the Texas Sausage Melt & a black coffee. Then try a different Biccy every time he goes to one.

Also, Denny’s, specifically to ride out a hangover probably. Red Berries Pancake Slam — 🫡

[ajastor]

🌙 : a weird habit or tic my muse has. ????? now im curious tho

Not necessarily a tic, but a habit. AJ arranges his cutlery on his plate specifically as a traditional means of communication. Even if the rest of his dining habits are unorthodox. He no longer notices he has a formal table etiquette and will place his knife and fork neatly in whatever arrangement necessary to indicate when he’s finished a meal (parallel through the centre of his plate, side by side), whether he dislikes it (linked together), or is waiting for the next dish (crossed).

Unless he’s in cultured company, nobody takes too much notice. But he never simply leaves them on the tablecloth (or bare table). They always sit somewhere on his plate.

Potentially some unchecked compulsive disorder with certain nuances. Most of them associated with his gloves. He’ll also get them cleaned, daily.

[ajastor]

Not only has she hijacked his dinner, but she's stolen his finishing move. There's less than a dozen people worldwide that AJ hasn't overruled, or tossed a slick, gilded card at, for some reason or another. Primarily, because they've somehow beaten him to the punch. Imagine. A time AJ does not flick a card at a waiter the moment upon entry and open up a tab. It's a trivial loss, and a staggering blow to his hard-on, but it's not about the act; it's the representation of power that Astor's handed over to Caity like he's fallen into the habit of submission.

Nicely played, Garnett. He's never letting her know that his mind ticks like a clock, stuttering on this knowledge. This revelation.

AJ momentarily allows himself to wonder if she's this assertive behind closed doors. The way she speaks to the staff is velveteen, silk that is ghosted beside ears, garnering the most delectable of attentions. He contemplates if she kneels the same way she makes those servers tremble. A tongue peeks from between his lips in thought, a fantasy too basic for such a complex partnership. An imagination that he cannot allow to run rampant. She believes in Gods, and speaks of them like there is nothing else in this world worth her hunger.

He stands when she does, necking the last drabs of a vodka and smiling sweetly at the waiters desperately trying to ram the ensemble into cheap containers. His next words might be the only compliment he's ever delivered so casually. He watches the servers first, dismissive of CS. She can't look like that, all sequin skirts and presentation, without being one of two things.

"You're either very bloody good, love," a quirk as he pulls on the lip of his gloves, tightening them around his hands and then dark eyes flicker over to her, "Or you're really daring to know the cost of magic as steep as you're talking." He wonders if she'll look like that, when this is done. If there's to be any flesh left on her. AJ's seen them bleed; his blood and hers, in flashes of potency, in contracts. If that's the gravitas of her spellcasting, Astor's bursting at the seams, like something caged, to know what she can truly do.

As she holds her cartons and walks, tossing him a glance back. His ego feels rejuvenated. I'm not going anywhere, Garnett. AJ stares at the waiter, offering him boxes, lowers his eyes to the idea that he's being handed them, instead of tailed.

"Yeah, no, mate." He flicks the man's forehead; feels the magic threaten to rip through the glove. "You have that delivered, or you go get your steps in and start dishing it out to those sleeping in shopfronts." He squeezes the man's jaw once, smiles and taps his cheek playfully. "Get yourself a TikTok, and be a real pubby shitstain on society, eh?"

Bin it, for all AJ really cares.

On cue, he backs up, because there's something loud coming from the kitchen in the back. A poor bird's about to get a little chargrilled; AJ's leftover hex is teaching them how to cook something a little better than mediocre.

Gods leave a footprint everywhere they go, in everything they touch. AJ and CS have left theirs, to go carve a crater the size of their ambition, worthy of a deity. They'll fill it with the blood of their intentions, or swim in the wreckage of what is left.

It already tastes more filling, more addicting than anything served here.

END.

Cait lifts her hand, catches the waiter’s eye, and reels him in with a tilt of her wrist. The black-amethyst AmEx appears between her fingers like a conjured blade. “We’ll take the rest to go—every last bite,” she says, syllables clean and clipped, then slides a glance across the table, letting the gold on her skin glitter. “Dessert can wait until the work’s done.” Back to the waiter: “And the check, if you don’t mind.” The command lands soft as velvet, absolute as iron. His nod wobbles, but he gathers himself, hands already fumbling for cartons and the leather billfold. Plastic over power tonight; small change for the ledger to come. “Exit cue,” she adds, smoothing her skirt as the waiter retreats. Sequins sure came through, huh? Might be good luck. “Easy enough.”

He wants the grand design, but he also wants the finer grains of it: the star-forged rivets, the bone dust mortar, the way lightning tastes when you bite down. That sharp, acquisitive curiosity sings to her own.

They are, she realizes, twins of a sort—mirrors tilted at dangerous angles. Neither of them flinches from cost. In fact, cost is the point. Any half-wit can pull a rabbit from a hat; it takes conviction to pull a God out of the void and keep it breathing. Tonight he proved willing to pay—first with that scorch-kiss brand, then with the unfazed nod when she confessed the spell’s appetite. A whole town’s worth of heartbeats? He weighed the math, found it merely interesting.

A ripple of dark pride curls through her. Jameson would hate this partnership—too risky to pull in someone new, he’d warn, too many friction sparks. But Dorian understood necessity: a thousand years of possession speaks fluently in the dialect of sacrifice. Cait speaks it too. After all, she forged her life from compulsory loss—family shredded by centuries-old vendetta, body shared with a ghost who thinks in apocalyptic terms. If she lets sentiment buckle her knees now, everything she’s survived becomes pointless elegy.

She studies Atlas Jay's hands, long and sure, resting on the vodka bucket. Those hands will lift her calculations off parchment and hammer them into permanence. They’re already painted with potential—calluses hidden beneath a gentleman’s manicure, polished edges blade-sharp. She wonders if he notices how the candlelight shivers when he flexes his fingers; probably, yes. He’s vain enough to take note of every tremor he induces.

Good. Vanity is a lever. Curiosity is a fulcrum. She’ll use both until the world tilts exactly her way.

A sudden hush falls over the rooftop as the waiter returns, arms full of takeout cartons. Cait’s eyes track the path of steam curling from the boxes; even mundane leftovers hum with residual significance now that they’re earmarked for ritual. Salt, protein, a dash of domestic normalcy—exactly the seasoning an apocalypse needs to feel inevitable.

But they’re not at the apocalypse yet, only the prologue. She reminds herself to breathe, to catalog the moment’s ordinary details: the faint chlorine of the ice water, the wilted parsley clinging to a plate rim, the distant rattle of the kitchen door. Ordinary details root magic; forget them and you drift into abstraction, easy prey for your own spellwork.

As she gathers the cartons—two in one hand, three in the other—she throws a parting glance over her shoulder, pinning Atlas Jay beneath it. No words pass her lips, but the meaning threads bright and unbreakable: Don’t lag behind. This is the first step, not the summit.

[ajastor]

'There's a demon? [ ... ] What?'

'I don't know if I want to know who just meowed? but okay, yeah, love. Get a driver. Sort your shit out and get back to me on it. You better not be a stranger. I know where you live.' 'Text me if you need shit for the building, aight?'

[...] 'No it's just... this... demon.' [*muffled sound, then a tiny little mew* *distant; yeah could you just. okay. okay yea, yes, attack that. Aria, can- *muffled* mm, see you later, yeah] 'i'm so sorry, it's chaos right now, we lost some pieces of the building and it's a little chaotic getting stuff in order but... i will find you a driver, someone you can trust, or at least not... throw off a building? or whatever you were getting at earlier.' 'and i will make it up to you, AJ, I mean it. i... thank you, so much. really. and yeah, we can... i don't know, get drinks or hit up your club or something. i won't be a stranger, and like, you don't have to be either'

[ajastor]

'are you calling me and getting laid? what is happening? who the fuck is thoreau, autumn? did you hit your bloody head, thought you liked emo so much you were quitting on me?' '[ ... ] have you got a pet, is that what this is? i'm second to an animal.' 'i've never been second. i don't even come second... [ ... ] oh piss off, you don't care that i know you love it in the back. i call my financial advisor and even he knows what you and emo are up to, that's how often i have to explain a Porsche, a bookstore, and whatever paper that uni gave you on the annual statement. fuck no, love, i'm not mad. i hate that bastard. i enjoy knowing that cunt doesn't want to be on the phone.' 'i'm just collecting my hubris about being blown off by you, that's all. and it's not sexy. i'm chuffed you're not dead in the hurricane and that you, emo and thoreau are getting busy in whatever new kink you've got. not sure why you have me on the line. you should be finding me a new driver.'

'[...] but... i'm happy for you, love.'

'i... aj, i don't want to tell you to ... i'm jus -' [... *muffled grumble*] 'it's... ' 'it's not... i.' 'okay.' [... *muffled, distantly;* get off of me, thoreau!*] 'sorry, oka-' 'okay so if-' 'jesus, can we not talk about loving it in the b- [...] can we tr-' [...*muffled* aria, can.. can you please get this little sh*inaudible*] 'i'm confused, are you angry at me or happy for me?'