Scene 17 - March 27th

Interior Mansion, Continuous

Dominic Könberg

It was probably around the time to pull Morgan out of her wing anyway, I reflected as I walked. She had been in there for close to a month now - while her initial experiments with Excalibur hadn’t kept her from the rest of the family, because she had failed too often to get really excited about it, she had recently figured out a method to use it relatively safely and hadn’t emerged since, spending a great deal of time scrying in order to fill out the information we had stolen from the MLED servers.

“Morgan!” I called when I reached the entrance to her wing, knocking. “Devon is here with a new spell to try on dad!”

She didn’t respond, and I frowned. Normally Morgan could be reached from anywhere in the house - she had monitoring spells set to alert her if anyone was calling for her. Even if those had been taken down for some reason, her wing of the mansion was small enough that she should have heard me in person. “...Morgan?”

Nothing, and I was starting to get worried now. I opened the door and entered, and saw that most of the lights were off - not unusual, she preferred to have as few distractions as possible when she was working complex magic - and a faint glow was coming from under one of the doors. “...mom?” I whispered.

Still nothing. I tentatively approached the door and opened it, to see...

Morgan, her eyes wide, sightless, and watering slightly. She held an ornate dagger that could only be Excalibur in one hand, a bright tracery of glowing sigils in the shape of a gauntlet wrapping around her arm up to the shoulder. Her other hand was clenching repeatedly at her leg, nearly drawing blood. Sitting on a table in front of her was a mirror, its surface filled with colorless light and smoking rising from where it touched the wooden frame.

I swallowed. Morgan was scrying, which explained what she hadn’t heard me - her senses were entirely absent. But... she had never looked quite like this while scrying before. It looked like she was crying. What on earth was she seeing?

I couldn’t let her put herself through this and, thankfully, I knew how to stop it. If she was using Excalibur, then she was scrying through wards that she wouldn’t be able to see through on her own, and taking it from her should result in her being cut off.

I glanced around, looking for something to protect myself from the damn thing, and found nothing, so instead I just pulled off the flannel shirt I was wearing. I wrapped it around my hand before taking Excalibur by its blade and pulling it from Morgan’s white-knuckled grip, thankful that my football coach was so insistent on grip training. I dropped the dagger on the table, then draped the shirt over the mirror for good measure.

Morgan came back to herself slowly, blinking a few times as her senses returned to her, and she began crying in earnest as she saw me. She lunged for me, and I hugged her as she began sobbing desperately.

“What is it?” I asked, my mind racing as I thought of all the horrible scenarios she could have seen. “What did you see?”

“...three months,” she whispered.

“What?”

“We only have three months before they go after her,” Morgan said, horrified. “Just to get to us.”

“Go after who?” I asked. “Morgan, what-”

She pulled back, sniffing, and murmured something that made a tissue fly to her hand so she could wipe her face. I waited while she cleaned up, and finally explained, “I was scrying on the Ambrosia Company. They... they can’t find us through the Kovals’ wards, but... their daughter isn’t under those wards.”

“The Kovals’ daughter,” I said, frowning as I tried to remember. Viv and I had used to play with her, when we were kids, but I didn’t think I had seen her in ten years. “...Holly? Was that her name?”

Morgan nodded. “Yes. And they know exactly where to find her.” She took a breath. “Apparently, Holly Koval is Loki,” she told me. “And if we don’t show up in the next three months, Ambrosia will go after her.”

I swallowed, flashing back to the artistic girl I remembered playing with and connecting her to the young hero who had nearly stymied us at the MLED Compound. “Threaten her to make the Kovals take down our wards...”

“Exactly. And then they’ll take Arthur’s armor, and Excalibur, and... and then it’s all over.”

“...three months, you said?”

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “Whatever our next move is, we only have three months to make it.”

“Well then,” I decided, “we’d better start planning.”