#BattleTheBeast - The First Loop

The First Loop

Things had been going steadily worse since they had lost Surrendra. Fillory had always been Quentin's obsession, not hers, and for the third time in the few hours since she'd been made suddenly, shockingly aware of how little it took to kill a man, Julia found herself thinking of Quentin. Quentin had loved two things he could never have: Julia and Fillory. Julia had always imagined that finding Fillory was the more impossible of the dreams, but she had left Earth behind and she still didn't love him.

Her thoughts turned to blame: Josh, foremost, for discovering that button and Eliot for convincing him to test it. But Surrendra had only come because he'd been her friend, and Penny, poor Penny, had done an admirable job arguing against the trip. Penny, that dumb poser who yet seemed to understand her. Penny's hunger for magical knowledge had only ever been matched by Julia and Alice, but Alice had been segregated by her brilliance, and so here Penny was with Julia. They were the only two surviving from seven, they were halfway under a hill, and there were sharks swimming through the floor. They'd been told that if they managed to get to the center, down far enough, they'd find Umber. Or maybe it was Ember - she never could remember which of the ram gods was which. Quentin would have known.

They came into a dark room. Compared to the other stone-walled chambers, this one felt muffled and quiet, and when Penny had lit up the room with six words in Aramaic, Julia saw that it was because one wall was entirely covered with an intricately woven tapestry of five smiling children in front of a bright white castle. Julia worked to control her breathing as Penny pressed his fingertips into his temples.

"This isn't going to work, Penny. There's no way in hell the two of us survive this." Penny was silent, so Julia continued. "Still, Quentin would have loved this. To be on an adventure in Fillory? I'm sure he'd know what to do here – a secret invocation to summon help at a time of need, or some shit."

Penny was silent for a minute longer before speaking. "We might have one of those," he said cautiously. "We have the horn." Somehow, he was still carrying the satchel they'd been given when they arrived, over a week ago now. He reached into it and gingerly pulled out a hunting horn, silver and spiralling, intricately engraved with icons of rams. Julia had never known if she believed it had power, but had agreed with the others that it should only be used in a worst-case scenario. This felt like one of those. "What do you want to do, Jules?"

She held out her hand, and Penny passed it to her wordlessly. It wasn't quite the same as her old flute, but she assumed she'd be able to play it. When she tried, it sang a bright, clear note, but her gut suddenly felt ill at east and Julia knew that it had been the wrong decision. She broke off abruptly. She knew she had felt this presence once before and wished she didn't understand, or that she was wrong, but that day back in Brakebills, when the Beast appeared and Alice was eaten fell clearly into her mind. From his stricken face Julia could see that Penny wasn't surprised either when a small man in a neat grey suit stepped into their peripheral vision. They stared, unable or unwilling to be the first to speak.

"Oh, but where are my manners," the Beast said, and did something with those six-fingered hands such that when Julia was able to tear her attention away from his grotesque fingerwork, his face had become visible. His features entirely matched his voice: soft, and stereotypically British.

Not waiting for him to attack first, Julia released her last line of defense: a demon trapped in a tattoo on her back. That shook Penny to life, and he started working on something that seemed like it was going to be big, pulling particles of light and dark out of the air and spinning them around in his hands. Her cacodemon reached the Beast, and either it was much smaller than she remembered or the Beast was able to bend space because he distended his jaw and swallowed it whole. Then he was moving towards her. She fired off a spell that should have killed a man, and had in fact done so an hour previously, but as the arc of red light hit the Beast, it didn't even mark his suit. Was the suit warded, or was it a part of him?

Julia glanced at Penny, who was still working. At this point, their best chance was if she could distract the Beast until Penny could get whatever he was building to work, so she jumped back to life, charming the stone floor so it became stone hornets that jumped and stung. She was working on cooling a meter of the space between them to absolute zero when he shook off the hornets and strode through the frozen space like it was nothing more than a mist. He was just about all the way to her when Penny finished and attacked.

It seemed to be some sort of icosahedron of pulsing, fractal patterns and points of light. Had Julia been about a mile away from it, she could have marveled at its beauty for an hour. Instead, as it twisted and folded in and out of itself mocking the usual laws of three-dimensional geometry, it grew until it had overwhelmed Penny. Within another few seconds, it had spread to Julia, her face still frozen in a mask of awe, and torn her asunder.

The Beast casually strode into the storm, his jacket ruffling as if in a light breeze. When he reached the center, a blazing ultraviolet sphere the size of a marble, he licked his right index finger and pinched it like it was the smoking wick of a candle. There was calm again, the only light in the room now coming from the orbs Penny had cast earlier, and the Beast took a moment to brush down his jacket.

After a moment, his head snapped towards the tapestry as if it had, all of a sudden, caught his attention. He muttered a string of guttural fricatives in dwarvish, contorted his left hand into five precise gestures, and held his right hand up in a fist towards the woman embroidered in the middle. She blinked. The Beast flung his hand open. With the sound of ripping fabric, the tapestry was reduced to a cloud of threads and the blinking woman was standing, flesh and blood, in the middle of the wall.

"Jane," stated the Beast.

"Martin," replied Jane, and in the beat before Martin Chatwin brought his hands up Jane reached for the thick watch hanging on a braided silver chain around her neck. Before Martin could get through his third syllable, practiced fingers had grasped one of the crowns poking out of the side and twisted. The world around Jane shifted red as everything froze, even light slowing, the air turning gelatinous.

As she pulled her hair back into a tight, professional bun, Jane was pleased to discover she still had the capacity for surprise. Surprise that people had made it through from Earth and that they were American: she thought that the ram gods had closed the doors through which her family had come so many years ago. Surprise that they had fought her brother as a group: the dozen or so people who had challenged Martin in the past had been uniformly Fillorian, unaccompanied, and unsuccessful. Finally, surprise that they had done so well. Yes, they had lost, and lost badly, but they'd lasted longer than any of the others. She'd need to make sure any group that came through was bigger, or perhaps just better, but Jane could feel a plan forming as she walked out of the underground temple. Better trained, better informed, and in a better fighting mood. What had the girl said - that a friend of hers knew the Plover stories? Perhaps he'd be useful.

Jane had reached the outdoors, and far to her left the sun was setting, a dull red at the edge of the sky. She lifted the watch so she could see its face, and, intoning archaic dwarvish in her clear alto voice, started manipulating four of the various crowns independently until the sun rose backwards. Shortly after the eclipse marking noon, the Americans emerged whence she'd just come, walking backwards and in high spirits. Poor, doomed souls, Jane thought to herself as she followed them back. She would have to untangle this from the start, to see what made these people who they were, and to understand what had brought them across the worlds. She would have time.