NOW: OVERPALACE PRIME, BLIVE (BLEE PRIMEWORLD), 5 MONTHS AFTER THE ATTACK ON THE FESTIVE NIGHTBEAK

If you were a typical Blee, it would be easy for outsiders to confuse you with a mindless hive bug. The average sentient can’t see much beyond the mottled gray and brown chitin covering, the serrations on the limbs, the multifaceted eyes and the clicky mouth. No lips, no flesh. Other than small differences, most Blee look very similar. Sure, some of them wear decorative clasps, and jewelry, but not much of either. And yes, they ate the odd sentient, but nothing as repulsive as dead food, or disgusting birds, like the Cyph’d. Cyph’d used to be prey for birds and now they ate them, for revenge, it seems. Imagine. Eating a bird!

In reality, Blee communicated to each other in a rich, multi-layered way, combining mouth clicks and airborne chemical communication for nuance. The Blee had been more of a standard insectoid hive a thousand years ago, with local hives and local queens ruling them. Overqueen HiAail had the forethought that their species needed to be unified, to defend against threats beyond their own world. She initiated a specialized breeding program that encouraged individualization and independence. Now, Blee weren’t entirely separate, but they were no longer mindless drone extensions of their queen. They were individuals, but with limited inter-Blee communication that let them function as groups when needed and individuals when needed.

If you were born at the bottom, you were a Blee Pleeb, a manual worker, making foodstuffs mostly (smerg and bloon when it was in season). Blee castes above that got split into Warriors, Trades, Thinkers, Artisans, And Royals, with the Queens at the top of the Royal caste and the Overqueen at the top of the Queens. Overqueen HiAail-dAb was the 34th Overqueen in her line, and as befitted someone of her station, lived in the Overpalace Prime on Blive, the Blee homeworld.

It had been a rough week. Reports of the various Thirder skirmishes were trickling in, and her Warhorde Council wanted blood. The Blee in general were a fairly religious (and Mystic) lot, so stories of alien Sorceresses, Undead uprisings, and Eldritch abominations from beyond sounded entirely possible to the Blee, unlike the Cyph’d and the Mbth. dAb occasionally communed with the Ascended Blee: the Blee Goddess, self-formed as the emergent hyper-hive intelligence of all Blee. One of these days, she was going to have to ask her about this.

After a day of listening to reports all overlaid with panic and worry smells, she was glad to finally retire to her chambers, and her luxurious bloon pit, the walls draped in tasteful vines, filled full of harvested bloon by some of the most careful chefs. You could eat Bloon or sleep in it; Why not both? She even shut off her vid comms in the room for the night. The room was sealed, guards outside, auto-defenses inside.

She awoke in the middle-night, hearing a faint chittering voice. No , though. “dAAAAAb…dAAAAAAAbbb…”

dAb woke up fully, peering around the room softly lit by the glimmer of the bloon. “Guards?” she whispered.

From the gloom, stepping into the dim yellow bloon light, stepped an ethereal figure - a beautiful Blee female, royal class, wearing… well, dAb had no idea what she was wearing. It looked like some kind of sheer spider-silk, draped over her body with her head ridiculously poking through it, and on the head was a circle of silver, another completely un-Blee ornamentation. She also had feather wings like a storm-dove, which looked very odd on the back of a chitinous Blee body, and was covered in chains of some kind of iron. Stepping closer, she could barely make out the face.

“HiAail-dAa?” HiAail said. “Yes!” the apparition said. “dAb, I’ve been sent from the grave to warn you that your transgressions against the Thirders have not gone unnoticed. I’ve been sent by…oooOOOOOoooo,” she said, rattling the chains about, “...the greater powers beyond to make you learn from your mistakes!”

Mild terror mixed with incredulity filled dAb, as she sputtered “dAa! I don’t understand!”

“Tonight you will be visited by three spirits. A spirit of…wait.” dAa screwed her face up remembering. “Oh… it’s a Thirder holiday. Winter’s God’s Ceremony! Or something. Expect the first-”

“dAa… what the fuck are you going on about. What is that… insane outfit?”

Suddenly dAa flew at dAb, landing on the floor inches away. dAb let out a screech and sank into her bloon. Now that the old queen was closer, dAb could see that she was literally dead - her exoskeleton holding rotting flesh, eerily glowing.

“I’ve been… compelled... to exit the Overmind Beyond and come to you… by a fucking Thirder witch. I’ve been made to wear this… ridiculous outfit...” dAa said, grimacing, looking down, “...this…’dress’... and these wings… and I have to ‘Christmas Carol your ass’, was the way she put it. To get you to rethink your activities against the Thirders.”

dAa leaned in closer, and dAb could see the dead face up close - the inner workings aglow with worms. “I have to take you through every poor decision about the Thirders you made,” she said, ticking off on her digits to keep track as worms and goo dripped out of her open mouth, “are making now, and will make in the future.”

dAb’s chitin shook with fear as she tried to squirm away. Then dAa said, straightening up, “and then after all of that you… um… you repent or something. I’m trying to remember. Oh yes! Then you go and buy a big, fat bird… and roast it… and eat it all up with one of your employees.”

The guards had to break down the door when they heard the queen screaming. It took several doses of sedative before she was able to calm down enough to stop talking about the bird.

THEN: JULY 20TH, 2015, THE FIRST RESIDENCE

Dmitry carefully glided through the secondary office and into the hallway. His goal: the kitchen, then upstairs. His view was fuzzy and cut out now and then, and then he had to refocus. Back in Siberia, his body sat at a desk, his hands on paper, ready to write. He sat in the silver circle, Slavic runes cut into it. Sitting next to him were two additional psychics, hands on his shoulders, providing extra psychic resonance.

Ever since the alien attack on Earth, things couldn’t have been going better for Russia. The U.S. crippled; their economy in shambles. Until the new President shut down the Bird Labs from foreign observers, promising new technology had been squirreled out. Then, when the revelations of magic started to surface, they managed to sneak out a few QEM samples - at first, a few tunneling ring components which proved to be almost always fatal to anyone around them too long, and then a few of the hex fasteners, which recently was confirmed to also have QEM in microgram amounts.

Most countries had psychic departments in their governments - black labs, secret money, and 99% of the time just pet projects not amounting to much in the way of real-world results. Russian and the U.S. had some remote readers that every now and then showed promise and got glimpses of places, or prophetic flashes. Nothing to conquer the world with, but sometimes useful. But once you exposed some of these trained psychics to some QEM enough to wake up their third eye, and combined that with some runic symbology, their powers ramped up an order of magnitude.

Most major governments by now had a department feverishly working on the new revelations, and Russia was no exception. The first time one of their readers flew over to the First Residence, they knocked themselves into a coma when they slammed into the shields around the Madison house. More cautious investigation followed. A few things became immediately apparent to anyone with the ability to see:

President Ashe was a witch - and from the network of powers she’d set up, more advanced than everybody else. The house was protected, plugged into a ley line, but even that wasn’t as impressive as the other channels of power fueling the runes. There were lines of psychic energy pumping into them, but the sources weren’t clear.

In any event a full assault on the house was impossible. However, some more covert thinking spies came up with a backdoor - shipping a runic gateway in the form of a letter to the house. Made to look like a fancy document from some Eastern European country, it got past the drug and bomb sniffers, and was currently sitting in a pile of correspondence. Between that and a tiny chink in the wards that had been discovered in the front door, a powerful enough Psychic could get inside.

Dmitry had a plan of action: try to find any magic information primarily; non-magic intel secondarily; leave without setting off alarms if possible, but erase all traces if not and eliminate anybody who caught him, including Ashe, if it came to that. With his new abilities, he’d already assassinated two people - getting inside their minds and hammering them into pulp psychically. He was one of six psychics of this new level Russia had, with two of the six sitting with him. Command had decided it was worth risking half of the command Psychics in their arsenal.

Besides, it was one thing to study a little magic and be a witch; but Ashe wasn’t a killer. An ex-librarian and a language scholar in a skirt, no less. Laughable. OK, yes, they’ve been discovering what looks like some sort of “agree-with-me” rune here and there on people Ashe met, so she had talent, no question. But not a killer.

Knowing that it was 3am here in the U.S. and everyone would be asleep, he expected minimal contact. His psychic form carefully slid past a few Secret Service guards toward the kitchen, and through the kitchen door, where he came up short in front of President Ashe, who was standing with a coffee cup in one hand and a canister in the other, looking the kind of annoying you look like doing anything at 3 A.M.

“Fucking Splendaaaaaaiii!!!” she screamed when she saw him as he swore “blyad!” back at her when he realized she could see him.

Back in Siberia, one of the handlers (who could see through his vision) reported what Dmitry was seeing to the officer running the operation. The officer told them to abort. Dmitry angrily said he had this.

Dmitry flung his psychic body at her, hands outstretched, trying to hook into her brain. Wendy blocked with her left arm: in the process, a spot just above her wrist popped with flame as the primitive protection tattoo she had put there this morning immolated. She let out a strangled yelp, but Dmitry bounced off, spinning around like a top.

Wendy quickly realized her arm was on fire, and also that she was in trouble. She assumed she was more powerful than the assassin, but most of her spells weren’t quick release combat spells. Even a quick Authority wouldn’t work on a projection, and this guy was obviously trained to work fast. She was going to have to practice Aatlan macro-casting, assuming she lived through this. She made a mental note of this as she looked around frantically for an option or a weapon in the kitchen, realizing as she did how useless it was…

…until she realized that the paring knife she had cut the runes into her arm with was still in the sink.

She had brought it with her when she came down for a coffee. It had some dried blood on it of hers from when she’d scratched the runes on herself and inked them this morning. She’d had to enchant the blade to cut into a soul, in order to make it work for the tat (and also to cut through her no-harms) and probably that enchantment was still working.

As Dmitry finally got himself under control and pivoted to face her, Wendy snatched the knife out of the sink, rushed him, and slashed at his apparition’s face. His ghostly face cut along the cheek; no blood came out, but the cheek parted and Dmitry clapped at his face, howling with the unexpected pain.

In Siberia, Dmitry’s real face gained a sympathetic scar along the cheek. So did the two handler’s cheeks. Everyone froze from this new revelation, and the officer barked orders for medics and for a call to command to see how to handle this.

Suddenly, Dmitry slammed face first down on the table in front of him, whimpering, clutching at his back. Back in Philadelphia, Wendy had gotten around his ghost while it was frozen with pain, and drove the knife into his back, down into the kitchen table, pinning him there. His astral body bunched under the knife like stepping on a pile of crumpled-up gift wrapping.

Tommy Brey, the secret service agent on duty, burst in to find President Ashe panting, her left arm smoldering, and angrily surveying the kitchen table. The table had a paring knife stuck in it and above it there were some faint shimmerings of light. “Madam President!” he exclaimed, “You-” but Wendy waved him back.

“It’s here somewhere. Somewhere - ah, there you are, you little fucker. I see your cord. Yeah, not so much fun now, is it?” Then she broke into a short burst of Russian profanity (Tommy assumed.) Tommy watched as she seemed to dig around in the air over the table, like searching through a bag of imaginary laundry, then pantomimed finding something that she was holding in her finger, like a string. Tommy rushed to her side, trying to pat out the embers on her sleeve.

Wendy drew the silver cord out of the ghost where it attached to his Manpura Chakra (around the solar plexus) and started to hand-over-hand it, following it out into the hall, down the hall, and into the temporary office they were using as a mailroom with Tommy following. It led her over to the letter.

“Very sneaky. Motherfuckers. Fine. Fine!” She started waving her hands around as Tommy watched - it looked like the spellcasting she did sometimes, but also she was forming a shape in the air. As she worked, the imaginary string started to come into view, and Tommy’s eyes went wide. He scrabbled for his radio. “Pres-”

“Shut up, Tom. I’m trying to concentrate.” Wendy finished building the cat’s cradle out of the cord, weaving in some runes in the process. “Fuckers picked the wrong witch to fuck with. Mhorragan, burn geal, losgadh fada! Tommy, you better step to the left, please.”

Suddenly the cat’s cradle came into view as well, glowing bright. Tommy could see the cord, running past where he was standing, back to the kitchen and also out the front door. He looked back at President Ashe.

She began to speak in some kind of Gaelic, waving her cradle in front of her, and as Tommy watched, the cradle glowed brighter, bits of green in the silver light now. Wind started to whip around the room, blowing her red hair in a corona around her head. Tommy watched in amazement as she lifted off the floor, floating, the room shaking. Sounds of wailing in Gaelic could be heard off in the distance. The vines from the trellis plant hanging nearby grew out and the smell of oak and fire filled the room.

There was a shout from her, and the cradle appeared to burn and explode with a pop, sending a scorch out the front door and down the hall. Tommy heard a thin shriek in his head and then everything stopped abruptly. President Ashe lightly dropped the six inches to the floor with a thump.

“Well,” she said, looking down at her feet, stepping on one foot, then the other. “That was unexpected. Still. Nice to know that’s possible.”

She looked over at him, standing there, trying to get his composure back. “You OK, Tom? Sorry for all the drama. Hmpf.” She lightly made some passes in the air, going over what she had just done, then grimaced. “That was spectacularly inefficient,” she said. “Next time I do that, I promise I’ll have less spillover of cultural flavor. I hope. Tom?” she said, peering at him and arranging her hair, “you there?”

Tommy nodded, still in awe at what he saw. “Who was that?”

“The ghost?” she said, rubbing the scorch mark on her wrist. “Russians, I think. This just proves what we already assumed. Call the members of the Coven Cabinet. Christ. Tommy?”

Wendy looked at Tommy, who was standing there open-mouthed still, looking at her. Partially in shock. Yet very impressed, she saw. He had the look she saw when people gawked at celebrities, or at art… the open-mouthed expression of people at worship in a temple. Worship. Hmm.

She formed a seeing eye and carefully looked him over. He had a tiny Authority on him, really just something to make sure the geas she’d made him sign worked. But it was sending tiny pings of Kha, the sort of all-around descriptor of spiritual magic from the Enockian, from him to her. Now that she tuned her senses to it, and in the flush of her recent magical expenditure, she could see pings of Kha coming in from a few dozen sources.

Worship. People who worshiped her, like Andrew. Crap. This explained why she seemed to have more energy these days, even given the large amount of spellcasting she was doing and the general lack of sleep. Wendy wasn’t sure how she felt about this, but she had to put that aside, for the moment, so she could focus on the convention.

-

The Russian commander of the Siberian base was running to the room in the facility where they did the psychic experiments when he heard a foosh of fire. As he turned the corridor, he saw the officer on the mission run out of the room screaming, burning in multiple places. Inside the room was a complete conflagration: Two men flailing around completely bathed in green fire, which turned to red normal fire when something caught on fire, and eventually something became everything. The third man was pinned to a table, crushed flat on his chest, still alive and reaching his arms around as he burnt alive. At the same time, vines crawled along the floor, growing and burning.

Everyone on the opp now knew that President Ashe was a terrible and powerful witch; and knowing it made them fear and respect her, which in the long run really was the problem, more than anything.

-

At the Democratic National Convention a few days later, President Ashe accepted the final nomination, promising to give a good fight and to win her next term of office. She seemed lit up and triumphant, Xeniya thought, as she watched her on her laptop, sitting in the Sigma Labs office. Xeniya had wanted to be there - the rest of the Coven Cabinet was, she noted ruefully. But she was at a critical juncture in the work right now, and Wendy had made a strong case for her to stay on schedule.

Whenever Wendy argued something, Xeniya covertly checked to see if an Authority was clicking to her, like a balloon to staticky hair. Wendy promised she would never use that on her, but you never know. She had moments. Xeniya had engineered some protection gear and was having her team start to wear it, just in case. Not so much from Wendy, but from any wizard trying to compromise them… but, she inwardly admitted to herself, from Wendy, too.

And there she was, on the screen. Xeniya could see she was waving and occasionally twitching her hand, probably popping off a quick Authority here and there. That’s to be expected. She wasn’t that worried.

It’s not like she had ways of projecting Authority out across everybody in the convention.