107

107
Thane's POV

“All the old mores,” Lord Valerian breathes, irretrievable centuries of cool finally as brittle as ice. Supernatural winds blow through our congregation, whipping his silver hair around his pale face. "That thing was once like us. Supernatural beings made the wrong choice of uniting together.”

“Not chose,” Astella says, nearer than before and with silver eyes that seethe with prescience and so seem almost luminous in the weird light about us. "They were forced. Someone or something had been making them into a oneness that flouted their essential natures, like the lashing-together of oil and water by pummeling.

The Devourer speaks its voice, and the sound is reality, tearing multiple tones layered over each other in harmonics. It is enough to make my werewolf hearing ache, and that should be a near-impossibility. “You repeat the mistakes of the Banishment Wars. You think unity can be achieved without sacrifice. Without loss. Without becoming less than what you were born to be.” “We’re not making anyone less,” I growl, stepping protectively in front of Astella. My broad shoulders tense. If necessary, I’ll shift, but I suspect my werewolf form would be useless against something like this. “We’re helping everyone become more than they ever imagined possible.”

“Lies!” The creature’s form shifts violently, and now it wears the face of what was once a proud Alpha. His features are twisted by eons of corruption, and feeding on supernatural discord. Recognition hits me like a physical blow, echo of leadership in that ruined visage. “I was an Alpha King once, just as you are now. I tried to unite the supernatural races under one banner. Look what it cost me!” The words hit me like a hammer in my skull, making me stagger back a step or two. This thing was once like me, a leader, trying to protect his people. Trying to bring peace to the world. What happened to you? How did you become this?

“The Architects happened,” the Devourer snarls, and even speaking this name seems to pain it physically. It's shape is warped and writhes as though the words themselves are venom for it's tainted being. "Creatures not of our dimension who offered perfect unity to us. They took us to the point where our races would blend absolutely, become something more than either.

"And you listened to them," Queen Titania says, her old voice and old understanding and old pity that makes her look human more than faerie for a brief instant. Her beautiful expression is full of true sorrow for the demise of the poor beast. “You allowed them to remold your very souls because you believed it would bring peace.

"We had no choice!" The beast’s voice is suddenly a chorus of the condemned, so many voices all at once in harmony- vampire and werewolf and witch and fae, all of them crying out together. "Our world was dying. The otherworldly were fighting an all-out war so fierce that it threatened to open up the fabric of reality themselves. Werewolf packs were drained by vampires for fun. Witches set fae forests on fire to power their spells. Vampires were hunted by werewolves in their own covens, like beasts. Somebody had to do something before there was nothing to save!"

I feel Astella's hand slipping into mine, her pale fingers lacing between my darker ones, and I feel the conviction that she is coming to the same understanding through the mate bond. It pulses with mutual radiation and increasing horror at what we are learning. “The Architects didn’t promise us unity,” she murmurs, her words clear despite their quietness. "They promised power. They offered to help you grow big and strong to enforce peace on your world.

Yes,” the Devourer concedes, its twisted shape weighing down as if from the burden of ancient sorrow. “And we were stupid enough to take it. They altered us, fused us into perfect killing machines, turned us into apex predators engineered to stalk and feed upon supernatural anarchy wherever it manifested. But something did not go according to their grand design.”

“Back then they were willing to become like you, and now you have become like them,” Lord Cassius realizes, his ancient mind sifting through the truth in the cold logic of one who has seen empires come and go. "Rather than eliminating the unnatural conflict, you have been feeding off of it."

The ring of power around us flickers brighter and I feel that our scar-offering is still growing, even with the creature's heavy presence and ominous warning. If anything, finding out the truth about how the Devourer was created is teaching us the consequences and the dangers, showing us what not to do. Our approach is fundamentally different — by consent not compulsion, by co-operation not domination.

“There are still enough Architects out there!” the Devourer shouts, sounding more desperate and panicky now. “There seems to be something, floating in the spaces between realities…watching mortal worlds like ours. They’ve been watching your realm for thousands of years, looking for a chance to manufacture their ideal supernatural warrior. Your unity ritual — and this is exactly what the alliance has been angling for, another opportunity to put their master plan into action.”

“Then they will be disappointed,” I tell them, making my Alpha King power linger in my words. The power runs through me on its own these days, fueled by not only our bond but my ever-deepening relationship with the other races. “Because this isn’t how they’re doing this. We’re not imposing anything on anybody. We're choosing to work together."

"It won't make a difference when they get here," it warns, but there is something different in its tone. Where once there was nothing but hunger, malice, I hear something else in its voice now. Hope? Longing? “They have ways of making you feel like you have no other choice, to make it seem the only logical route.

"What if we could free you?" "Your hearts sound… sad," Astella says abruptly, her liquid brown eyes meeting the Devourer’s with empathy rather than fear. Her face has that same look she wears when she’s tending her wounded pack mates. "What if the ritual just broke the pair of you down into the people you were all those years ago?"

The thing all but freezes, and just for a glance could the \[...\] Original Site: Source In the side of the eldritch thing, gobbets corrupt flesh and impossible eyes the size of shields slough.The abomination freezes, for an instant the corruption fades from its features and are visible the blebs of the noble men sacrificed to craft this abattoir. "Impossible. We are too far gone, too altered. It had been a merger intended to be forever, unalterable.”

“The twins don’t believe it,” she adds, directly on my swollen belly and still gripping my hand. “They are revealing to me patterns through our connection—ways to unweave what was woven wrong, how to heal what was broken through force, what was lost in desperation.

“It would need all our powers,” Morgana says, her witch-instincts lunging immediately for that possibility even as her sensible mind takes inventory of the dangers. "All these creatures would have to share their essence not only with each other but with those lost souls trapped in that thing.

“The risk is catastrophic,” Raven warns, her worn features looking as though she knows what happens when magical experiments go horribly awry. “If we screw up, we could become like them — tainted, starved, lost in other worlds, unable to return,” he went on.

"And if we succeed?" “Do tell.” I prompt even though I’m pretty sure that I have my answer from the building Wagnerian overture I’m getting via supernatural connections.

“If we succeed,” Queen Titania murmurs, and wonder trickles like sunlight in her ancient voice, “we do more than unify our present races. We redeem those who were seduced by the Architects, and we forge what they never intended—a metaphysical solidarity rooted in empathy, not subjugation.”

But no sooner are any of us able to act on this revelation than the sky directly overhead rends open as if torn by monstrous hands through fabric. What spews through the rift makes the Devourer look small by comparison, a gargantuan geometric structure that is physically painful to look at head on, its angles and surfaces existing in more dimensions than the human eye can comprehend. It pulses with a light that isn’t exactly, you know, getting into your eyes, it casts shadows that fall upward and compels reflection in surfaces that simply aren’t there.

“They arrive,” the Devourer murmurs, fear in its voice that dwarfs its previous hunger. "The Architects have found you. They ask you the same question they asked us: Is a man demanding and a woman tough the best America can do?".leadingAnchor: "They offer you the same thing they offered us: unity through power and force, or chaos through the breaking of our nation."

A voice sounds from the impossible structure hanging over us, a voice carrying harmonics that do not settle into our ears but rather resonate more directly in our minds, like tuning forks rattled against the body of our souls. "Greetings, supernatural children. We are the Builders of Perfect Order. Through the dimension barriers your unity ritual is bringing our attention to you. "We are giving you growth that you could never have imagined."

“We have nothing for you,” I snarl, my wolf instincts going haywire, even as my human brain tries to rationalise what we’re up against. “We don’t want your transcendence, or your perfect order.

“You bring defiance to us,” the Architect voice says, and there’s amusement in the alien cadences that makes my skin crawl. "How refreshing and predictably naive. It’s been ages since mortals displayed that much pluck before learning of our might. Very well. We’ll be watching your struggle at natural unity with great enthusiasm. When it does, eventually, fail, we'll be here with a plan B for you."

The tear in the sky snaps shut with a sound as though reality sets itself until I can feel the Architects outside the edges of our world, pressing in like the predators who wait just a little further into the dark than the light of the campfire reaches. They have not gone away — they are just lurking, waiting, poised to strike the moment our unity ritual should falter or fail.

"Now what?" Yvonne questions, in a calm young voice in spite of the cosmic horror we’ve just seen. Her training as a warrior helps her, but I can see how hard she is being pushed in the way she carries herself.

“Now we show them we are not,” Astella says, her silver eyes flashing with a defiance that seems to make them glow. We teach them that unity of the spirit is even more powerful than unity of the sword. We show that voluntary cooperation is stronger than obedience exacted by force.”

And yet as the supernatural noose tightens back around us again, I can't help but feel like the Architects landed at exactly the right time. They didn’t just happen upon our ritual — they were lying in wait for it, looking for this very moment. Which means we are either walking into a trap across multiple realities and dimensions, or there is something about our conception of unity that even godlike beings are afraid of and want to corrupt before it can reach its deserved zenith.