Dying, it turns out, is a habit that's hard to kick.

This time, at least, it was warm. There was suddenly no cold alley floor, no taste of blood in my mouth and no sirens sawing at the edges of my world.

Instead, there was the smell of strong coffee, lemon polish, and the dusty sweetness of a whole host of old books. Yeah, I think I know where I was. Again. There's no place like him, is there?

I was sitting at the kitchen table in Halfway Hold. The one with the knife-scarred pine surface and the kettle that always whistled three notes flat. Thick and buttery sunlight was pouring through the window, giving everything a warm vibe. Outside, birds I couldn't name were having a loud, cheerful argument.

Aunt Margaret was sitting opposite me, nursing a chipped mug. She wasn't the spectral memory-ghost I'd clung to in Bayteran, or the badass young woman from the Lugat's vision. She was just back to being plain Aunt M again. Her grey hair was an explosion of defiance, and she was wearing a paint-stained cardigan. The one that, now I thought about it, probably had a +5 to All Resistances.

She looked at me over the rim of her mug and her expression was not one of sympathy. It was the one she used to use when I'd tracked mud onto her clean floor. Or broken another window.

"Well," she said. "I did expect a little more subtlety, Elijah. Even from you."

I bristled a little at that. I thought I'd done pretty much exactly what she'd wanted "Subtlety? I followed the quest breadcrumbs and was ambushed by an overpowered, higher-level entity. I'm not sure what else you wanted from me there! That was some high-grade Wardening I nearly pulled off there."

"'Nearly' being the operative word, lad. And your first, second, and final response was to walk straight into the middle of a trap and try to punch it in the face." She took a sip. "You're a Warden, dear, not a wrecking ball. Though I see how you might confuse the two."

"You chose to turn me into an Iron Provocateur," I grumbled, feeling like I was twelve again. "You kind of made it into my job to be a punching bag. It's literally in the job description."

"It's your job to protect others," she corrected, setting the mug down with a sharp click. "To stand in the breach in the Veil. Not to be the breach yourself. You walked into that pub, a place you knew was hostile, and announced your presence like a foghorn. You've got all this new power, Elijah, and you're using it like a club. You're all anvil and no hammer. All shield and no redirection. I expected better."

She shook her head, a small, sad gesture that hit me much harder than any of the Kohë-therës's attack. "I guess I was hoping for a little more... finesse."

A surge of pure, childish frustration hit me. "I'm doing my best here, Aunt M! I'm all alone here."

"Well, that's not true at all, is it? If you're going to be all self-pitying, at least have the decency to be honest about it."

I paused for a moment, trying to think what she might mean. "Are you talking about the geriatric neighbourhood watch!"

I tried to stand, to pace, to do something other than sit there and be scolded by a ghost in her own kitchen but my body didn't respond. The vision—and this was very obviously a vision, or an afterlife loading screen—held me fast. The sunlight didn't flicker. The birds didn't stop their chirping.

"Sit down, Elijah. You're not going anywhere for the moment."

"I'm dying in an alleyway!" I hissed. "Mooney's probably looting my pockets right now! I need to wake up."

"No," she said, her voice softening just a fraction. "You're not. Not yet. You escaped this misstep, though barely. But you're broken, dear. Very broken. You're no good to anyone like this. Fortunately, time works a little differently here, in the heart of the Anchor, so we have the chance for a chat. Which I think you need right now."

I slumped. Defeated. "A chat. Great. Is this where you give me another 'Chosen One' speech? Or tell me how to find the magic sword?"

"You're being a little bit tiresome at the moment, dear. I really did hope that, returning to Earth, might make you a little more grown-up. No. This is no 'Chosen One' speech. This is where I tell you that you need to grow up. You're trying to fight the shadows like you're still a one-man show. You're fighting like Griff trained you—one-man army, burn your bridges, leave no witnesses. But that won't work anymore, Eli. It won't work against what's coming. Well, what's here already. You need allies."

"I had allies," I shot back, thinking of Scar and Lia. "In Bayteran. You're the one who told me I had to come back here."

"And you'll go back to them, I promise. But you have a duty here first. The Veil is thinning, Eli. And you can't just punch this fixed."

I leaned forward, the frustration giving way to a cold dread. This moment might well be safe, but the memory of that... thing... was still crawling on my skin. "Then tell me. Tell me what I'm fighting. What is the Kohë-therës? The Lugat showed me... you. In the war. But it was just a fragment of the true evil. What actually is it?"

Aunt M's face went still and the warmth in the kitchen seemed to dim by a few degrees. "I need to remember that you're not the Guardian yet, Elijah. I keep expecting things from you that you're not quite ready for." She took a deep breath. "You're a Warden. Looking directly at the present state of the Veil, at what the Kohë-therës truly is... it would scour your mind clean. You're not ready."

"Then make me ready! Stop wasting time! I got thrown into this without any preparation."

"I can't show you what is," she said, her voice patient. "But, like our mutual Lugat friend... I can show you what was. You're right. You need to understand what you're up against. What this thing actually is."

She reached across the table. Her hand, calloused from gardening and crackling with something far older, was strangely warm.

"Don't fight what you see next," she whispered. "I just want you to watch. This is something I was able to acces just before they came for me. It is a memory of the Kohë-therës. This is his... perspective. And, of course, he always seen himself as the hero."

The smell of coffee vanished. The sunlight snapped off. The world dissolved.

***

I was vast.

The concept of a body was a limitation, a quaint notion I had shed aeons ago. I was will. I was hunger. I was the cold, divine certainty of ambition.

Below me, realities flickered like faulty lamps. Worlds lived and died in the time it took me to form a thought. I drifted in the dark sea between them, a leviathan of purpose.

These... realms. They were a mess. Disconnected. Walled off from each other by a fragile, pointless membrane. This Veil. This Threshold. It was an inefficiency. A quarantine imposed by lesser, fearful beings who mistook separation for safety.

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I would fix it. I would shatter the barriers. I would unify all things under one will. Mine.

My gaze fell upon a small, vibrant, chaotic blue-green world. Earth. It was a nexus. A crossroads. Its Veil was thick, stubborn, but... damaged. It had been breached before, and the scars remained.

And it had a Guardian. A single, infuriating point of resistance. A Margaret.

She was the lock. She was the knot. She was the one who kept patching the holes I had spent millennia patiently tearing. She had banished me once, in a humiliating flare of domestic magic, casting me back into the dark.

But she would be gone soon. My minions would deal with her. The lock was broken. The door was ajar.

I moved from the void, descending not through space, but through possibility. I sought the fractures. The in-between places. The dark water under the world, the static in the air, the cold iron of abandoned rails.

I found the thin places. The wounds.

I perceived the world not as cities and people, but as a great, sprawling market of souls. Of ambitions. Of fears. Everything was for sale. Everything had a price. And I had the currency of gods.

I found a man. A creature of this realm, but one who vibrated with a pleasingly familiar frequency. He, too, saw the world as a resource. He, too, understood that strength was the only virtue. His name was a dull thud in the noise: Griff.

He wanted power. He wanted to be on the winning side. He wanted, as he called it, "friction." He believed the Veil made his world weak.

He was a perfect key.

I reached across the gap, not with a hand, but with a promise. I whispered of the old ways, of the return of strength, of a world remade, scoured clean of its weakness. I offered him a seat at the table.

He agreed. He would help me anchor. He would help me find the other... fragments. The pieces of myself that the Guardian had scattered and bound.

He would help me break the knots.

And as I touched his mind, I saw the prophecy that had burned in my own consciousness for an eternity. The words that gave my hunger purpose.

When the last knot unravels and the Guardian is gone,

The Threshold shall crack, and the Many be One.

The forgotten king shall return from the dark,

To reclaim the realms and leave his mark.

The Warden shall rise, a shield in the way,

But the Iron will buckle, and the Night win the Day.

The worlds would merge. The barriers would fall. All things would become one glorious, screaming whole. And I... I would be its master.

Better to reign in shadow than serve in the light. And soon, all realms would be my shadow.

My new tool, Griff, was already moving. He was purging his old network, the weak links who might resist. He was preparing the ground.

And he had a bonus. A complication.

A new Warden. The Guardian's "heir."

This... Elijah.

He was an insect. A gnat. But he was loud. He vibrated with the Threshold's power. He was an irritant. A piece of grit in the mechanism.

He would need to be crushed.

The vision blacked out.

***

I gasped, reeling, and found myself back in the kitchen. I was gripping the edge of the table so hard my knuckles were white. The wood was groaning.

"He's... he's using Griff," I managed to say, my throat tight. "Griff thinks he's a partner. The Kohë-therës is using him to find the other fragments... to re-assemble itself."

Aunt M was watching me, her face grim. "Yes. Now, listen up. You've seen how powerful he is, even in fragments. It is vital he is not able to fully return."

"How do I kill it? Give me the kill-switch, Aunt M. The silver bullet. The magic knot. Something."

She sighed and refilled her mug.

"There is no kill-switch, Eli. If it was that easy, I'd have done it myself thirty years ago and been home in time for tea. I bound it. I scattered it. But I couldn't destroy it. Its existence is tied to the Veil itself."

"So what do I do? How do I fight something like that?"

"You do what I did," she said, her eyes pinning me. "You stand in the breach. You protect. But you cann't do it alone. You need allies, Eli. Real ones. The Hunt. Even that slippery little magpie, Mooney. Even the Lugat. You can't just be the Iron Provocateur, the solo tank. You have to be the Warden. You have to be the one they rally to."

She leaned in, her voice dropping. "You're built to take the hits, dear. That's your strength. But that's not the point of you. The point of an anvil is to shape what's struck against it. You need to stop being a punching bag and start being the forge. But you need to accept that not everyone is going to make it out of the fire."

The dream was thinning. The edges of the kitchen were blurring, the sunlight turning watery. The sirens... I could hear the sirens again, faint and distant.

"Aunt M, I—"

"One last thing," she said, her voice suddenly urgent, cutting through the haze. "You're fading. You're waking up. Listen to me, Elijah."

The kitchen dissolved. I was back in the cold, wet dark of the alley.

"Your friend... Mooney... He really isn't strong enough to drag you, dear. You weigh an absolute ton."

Her voice faded, replaced by a much more nasal, panicked one.

"—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Undershaft, how do you weigh this much! It's like dragging a dead cow! A dead cow made of lead! Get up, you massive, armored, nightmarish lump! Get UP!"

My eyes snapped open.

Pain. White, immediate, and all-encompassing. My chest felt like a collapsed mine.

[HP: 2/185]

[Status: Critical. All systems failing.]

[Stubborn Constitution: Activating... FAILED (Insufficient Stamina)]

[Anvil Break: Cooldown Active]

[Unwelcome Mat: Cooldown Active]

I was, to use the technical term, completely battered.

Mooney was trying to haul me along, his face pale and sweaty in the flashing blue-and-red lights that were now flooding the end of the alley. The sirens were deafening.

"They're here!" he shrieked, dropping me. I hit the cobblestones with a wet thud. "The coppers! We are so, so dead. I'm an accessory! This is accessory! I'm going to prison, and they don't let you stream Arsenal in prison, do they? Do they, Undershaft?"

I tried to answer. What came out was a wet gurgle. Blood. Lovely.

The Kohë-therës was gone. Vanished. The sirens must have scared it off. Or, more likely, its work here was done. It had me-shaped bait, and now the hounds were here.

"Get up!" Mooney pleaded, kicking my boot. "I am not explaining this"—he gestured wildly at my armour, the shattered pavement, the general vibe of unholy destruction—"to Sergeant Plod. 'Evening, officer, my mate here had a disagreement with a Lovecraftian horror, any chance of a lift?'"

Police radios crackled. Shouts. "In the alley! I've got visual! Subject is down! And... armed? Looks like... a massive ball on chain? And armour? What the...?"

"Right," Mooney said, his voice going strangely calm. "New plan. We're not getting arrested. I hate prison decor. It's all beige."

He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out... a laminated card.

I stared. It was identical to the one Roderick had given me. A small, laminated prayer card, looking utterly mundane.

"You... you're with the Hunt?" I coughed.

"Me? God, no. I nicked this off a dead bloke in Hackney two years ago. Thought it looked lucky. Never really knew what it—"

He pressed his thumb to the centre of it, right where the badly-printed saint was looking mournful.

The card didn't glow. It didn't hum.

It just... worked.

The air in front of us tore.

It wasn't a gentle portal. It was a violent, jagged rip in the world. The sound of the sirens was sucked into it and vanished.

"What the—" Mooney started.

"Don't talk. Jump," I ordered, finding just enough strength to get to one knee.

A policeman, brave or stupid, rounded the corner. He saw us. He saw the rip in reality. He saw me, a seven-foot punching bag bleeding out next to a bin. His mouth opened, but no sound came out.

"You first," I grunted, shoving Mooney toward the portal.

"But—it could be anything! It could be Hell! Or worse, Hull!"

"It's the Hunt. Go!"

He yelped and tumbled through, vanishing like a stone dropped in a black pond.

The policeman was raising his Taser. "Freeze! Armed police! Drop the... medieval... thing!"

I didn't have the energy to explain. I put my last point of Stamina into a desperate, falling lunge.

The alley vanished. The sirens cut off.

I fell through cold, silent darkness, and landed hard on damp grass, the smell of weak tea and dog farts filling my lungs.

I'd made it.

I looked up. The entire Hunt—Roderick, Iris, Kenny, Cyril, and Max the dog—were standing over me in a semicircle.

Roderick took a slow sip.

"Well," he said, looking down at me, then at Mooney who was hyperventilating into a patch of clover. "You took your bloody time."

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