FAMILIA ANTE OMNIA

Aurelia's first priority was the civilians that had made the Aftcastle Mall their shelter from the storm outside. Trembling masses that may have clued into the monsters over the last months but were unprepared to be faced with the horrors that had crawled their way out of the snow. The blizzard had picked up to an absurd degree, the darkness crept through in a way that made Aurelias watch useless. The hunters teeth were on edge, the weather isn't something she could fight. She couldn't put a bullet in a snowflake or put a stake in a second fucking moon.

Aurelia pulled her jacket tighter around her frame, the intermittent power outages meant the large space of the mall refused to heat up. The chill was so great that she could still see her breath even after the doors to the outside had all been shut. Even the layers of jackets couldn't stop the hair on the back of Aurelias neck from standing on edge. Her tattoos hummed with power that itched from all the excess magic flying around in the air. Something was wrong in the air, Aurelia could feel it but couldn't pin it down.

Aurelia huffed, digging through the department store trying to find something to warm up the civilians. A flash of moment caught her eye, the disappearing shape of a figure. "Wait stop!" Aurelia shouted out, moving quickly towards the women. "It's not safe-" Aurelia was cut off as something bit her shoulder. Acid dripped, cutting through the layers. "Mother fucker" Aurelia reached for her knife, stabbing into the three wick candle that had launched itself into her should, biting down. Aurelia watched as the shelves rattled, objects with tentacles and legs, sprouting and moving.

And then her bag shifts on her way to the exit, and like an electrical charge; magical, and potent. It had reminded her that she is not the only one with power beneath her fingertips. It distracts her like a shock to the chest when the mall becomes rife with panic. Maja glances up and down the length of the mall as things begin shifting from where she has just trekked; objects wrangling from their shapes. Chattering teeth of a costume store, chomping and chewing, hungry for something to gnaw at between its teeth.

Port Leiry is a hungry little haven, Grimhjarta has learned that, in her time visiting. A small, spidery-like, legged creatures drops from her bag, where something has oozed through the fabrics; a caustic substance that had offered an escape for whatever nasty had been hidden in her wares. It dripped to the linolieum, and Maja curled her lip at the offensive odour.

She glares at the tentacled, legged thing , but it has no eyes to stand off with. She merely bares her teeth, as if it might recognise a bigger threat. Run little creature. Because Grimhjarta's are hungry too. Chalk always lives in her pocket, and bitterly, she tosses her bag to the side to make a sacrifice of her own.

The former aged whiskey, bolts towards it, shredding through the cotton tote like it hides all her secrets. You like sound, little spider-thing? She could do something with that, as she reaches into her pocket for chalk. More scuttling echoes from behind her, and when her eyes nudge to the right, it's not just one odd beastly thing that wants to turn its attention towards her.

She reconsiders her stance, clasping the chalk, before running in the opposing direction; she could lead them into another net, if that's what they want.

A chuckle, where curiosity outweighs fear. What will they do, kill her? Devour her? She would come back and do far worse to them. Whatever the critters are. She would have to delve into the backroads of her mind, to wonder where they have emerged from; the weather has been shifting veils; she's noticed. She wonders if one has snapped completely, to allow these through.

Encouraging, she talks to them: "Come, edderkoppunge."

She can hear them in pursuit, and her periphery captures one scuttling along the wall of windows to her left, faster than she is. Rolling the chalk between her hands as she sprints, dust powders between her fingers in a cloud, until she can skid along the ground and leave a stripe that a whisper could set aflame. A squeal, as legs strike its paws or spikes, or whatever dirty little things they want to stab her with. Then another strike as she flips acrobatically to her feet. Thenl she finds a door to slip through. There's a mutter in Norweigen, as she slams the door closed. A hex, to tell her when things of magic step on her chalkdust on the other side; it had not like flames; most things do not like to be purged of their purpose.

Then, she wastes no time sketching on the door a hex that'd eat them alive, if they dared pass through.

Maja snaps her head backwards, when a voice from the other end of the room, by another entrance door is ajar. Faen. Another person. Maja darts across and slams herself against the door to shut it, bolt it. And when she does, a slam of sudden force cracks on the other side. Critters she will eat for dinner, she thinks.

More chalk on a door. More whispered hexes. And then she is looking at the stranger. A careful point between the runes she has drawn in fast scribbles, and the woman.

Rose noticed the way the woman's eyes flicker over her body. "Oh. We're not-- Ivar and I..." They weren't. They were friends. Even if her stomach twisted with nerves occasionally. "I was trying to learn how to perform. I didn't do all that well. Fell after a few seconds." She confessed with a small smile as her eyes flickered up towards the tightrope. She'd been caught on it and Ivar had come to ensure her safety.

"Rosie is fine." She said with a nod. Annabelle was often a mouthful, which was part of the reason as to why she'd gone by Rose after leaving home. The other reasons no longer mattered. Annabelle was back where she belonged -- where her family had pushed her into being: a hunter. The name Rose almost meant nothing to her anymore. It had just been a girl running away from a life that was inevitable.

Maja will show her what is like to jump into oblivion.

"I do not care if he spread you wide, or not." It will not help her. "I will show you more." Maja already knows her brother does not think of Rosie, whilst he is throwing dice with a group of others. And she understands, when her shirt lifts that there is an appeal; muscle that shows that she is not entirely without strength.

And then there is the mark. It provokes Grimhjarta to circle carefully to stare at it from another angle. A blackened stain tucked beneath her bicep. A hunter. A sacrifice that would be riddled with borrowed magic if she bled on Grimhjarta land. Maja had not felt the pulse of it, from the girl. Strange. Even if her eyes hover there, calculating the threat, she eventually moves her gaze back to the ladder than leads up to the trapeze. "Follow." Hunter. Maja would hex the platform, if the woman got funny ideas. "Today, you will defy gravity another way."

She tilts her head at the question, and its like she's been tee'd up for it, it's so easy to roll off her tongue.

She looks up, and once again can't help the smile the- what, praise? -brings her.

"Gothy, morbid, you remember suicide girls?" Nobody ever remembers suicide girls. "Like, I bet you own a human skull or a pet raven. Or both."

But she does have a human skull, a few, actually. No raven; they're messy, and she has never been one to like taxidermy. Dead things either stay dead, or they come back and live again. There's nothing worse than a stagnant, still thing, caught between half lives.

A smile is her answer, because she wonders what the ice skater thinks is truth, and what is not of her speculation. Maja has only delivered compliments to the pretty woman, and albeit, briefly mentioned a potential demise. But she stands, alive, and red in the cheeks. Half a rune in the snow, left unfinished, because Maja has had a change of heart.

The name hangs, and Maja imagines what it would be like to have it live on her tongue, for a night or two.

Whilst Aelita stands, eyes track the path she cuts. Instead of cutting the thread of what they're sowing, curiosity blossoms back in Grimhjarta's stomach. In the snow, are they the same breed of creature?

Maja keeps talking in her frustrating riddles though, and Holly follows to the edge of the van's hatch, half hanging out.

If Maja brought the devourer of worlds to their doorstep, would Hel intervene?

As a passing promise, Maja decides that another Grimhjarta — with knowledge older than hers, and lived longer lives may know something she does not. "You wish to see more, then you find us at the fairground." She should speak to Brynjar, and see if he has the patience for stories about towns being torn asunder. "You cannot walk on the other side, as you are." Holly would die, Maja is certain of it. And there is no coming back for her when she would be shredded by the layers of realms that lie dormant over the top of one another. Her faceless phantoms, born of devastation, are not her protectors. And Maja cannot be, either.

The revelation that it was an accident he's here is almost a gut punch, but he tries not to react too terribly to that news. Magic is weird, he guesses. It's not like - anyone would go out of their way? Vengeance, maybe.

Turning back to her, his eyes widen a bit. "That's - weirdly nice. If he's not dead yet, sure. I had - I'm sure they're still here - crazy friends. Angry friends." Autumn's face when it happened flashes through his mind and he tries not to visibly wince in front of this witch, who is already moving on to magic.

At first, his answer is just a shake of his head. "Normal guy. Didn't know magic existed." Glancing down to the paper, his lips twist into a frown. "I can learn?"

Maja did not know how far this extension of her magic went, or whether he would crumble to ash, if left unattended for too long. The rules of the talisman were not outlined clearly when she loses one of the bones, to revive a boy she has never met.

"Then we find them. Kill the hunter, if he lives. And I let you sacrifice them." A gift, to let him draw the blood, and see what power is in his marrow, if any. "You will grow strong from it." If done right; amplify power in ways the once-varulv has never known.

But he doesn't wanna judge too harshly, so he just shrugs in return. "Oh, uh - Jude Grigsby. I'm Jude - don't know what this guy's name is, though." At this, he gives a gesture down to the rest of his body as he finishes up his grooming.

Straightening up, he stares at her - frowning a little that he seems to tower a little more over people than he used to. To compensate, he hunches down some, not wanting her to feel weird about him being taller. "I was dead, yeah. You brought me back? On purpose? Er. I guess, uh, probably not."

Another pause here, and he rubs the back of his neck, wondering how much he should share. But if she's the one who did it, then.. he guesses it doesn't matter, because at least she's not a hunter. "I used to be a, uh, a werewolf. And some hunter guy did me in."

If she is sacrificing, and moving souls from their resting sites into bodies that have reforged in the earth. There is something she has broken in the cycle of runes, and the power of talismans. Something gravely wrong. At the thought, her eyes dip to the bones tied together on her person, assuming she has not entirely stripped the rights to the power by bending the laws. They have not crumbled, and she knows the power in her blood. She would liked to have known she had this capability, or that the vampyr's blood she borrowed, along with the ribs she had carved meticulous runes into for an hour, had been capable of this, too.

Maybe she'd have done it sooner, for someone useful. Does he have any real power?

"No." She folded her arms, staring at him. "You were accident. I sacrificed life." A trade-off that is more frustrating by the fact that she had been certain the ritual had been perfect. If it had been the soil they were on, that shattered the intention, that could not have been pre-meditated. Every ounce of dirt has the dead rotting within it; it'd make ever casting a spell like that, void in its entirety.

She had lost a phalange of the talisman, regardless. Trading what she had, to give to her brother no longer evens the score. It simply lessens hers.

"Varulv?" That is a strange, and unfortunate factor in the bones that make up her talisman. She's got all the linkages to whatever, and whoever this man is. And now, he's got the residue of Grimhjarta all over him, that the troupe would know he is something other the moment he wanders back out through their circus. Maybe he wants a job, here. Make use of him. "You were made dead by hunter. That is sad." More importantly, "Are they here, this town? We kill them." Maybe this is kindness for him, and maybe it is self-preservation all the same.

Maja fishes through a cupboard in the caravan, for paper, and a pen. "Before you were Varulv — wolf, did you have power?" Magic, she means. "Do you have magic of Gods, mine, from where I have brought you back from the soil?" a beat, as she slaps the pen and paper to a small fold out table, "I will teach you."

"I don't know if they'll hurt me - I just know I don't want to let them, and sometimes..."

Maja does not know exactly what this girl has done, or what she has wrought to tangle her soul in the power of Gods beyond her scope. She also does not think she cares to know, and risk the wrath of the one she worships. Would taking an audience with a thing beyond her realm, in the next life, ever dare share that with her, if she asked? A fool's errand, to even try.

"Echoes." She says it again. They do no harm. They're loud and repetitive. A voice in a tunnel that coils around and around. Like the mirror maze. But an echo is harmless. Just noise on repeat. "You keep them as that, yes? As long as you can."

Sometimes, is not her problem. A small pocket ripped out of existence — like the one this girl has shown her on a screen, is a power, and a magic that Maja cannot contend with, no matter her mastery.

Maja takes a step towards the door, as if the girl has sullied her own soul with her knowledge, and her Gods curse; like she has touched something filthy and now carries the stain on her palms, like a symbol of betrayal. "This. Or you dare to ask them to lead you to what they serve." Everything serves something. Mortals, men. Gods have their ambitions and their beliefs all the same. Physical, or not. Their purpose, as she seems to say, might become hers. If she delves into the veil that keeps her where she is, maybe she'll see what drives them. Curiosity is enough to keep Maja interested (and she has been, thus far — eager to know her secrets), but it's not enough for her to risk stripping the layers of the realms to see which one her ghosts lay between.

Her skates leave the ice, onto the security of terra firma, and she plugs along the snowy shore. "If the ice cracked, and I fell in, and you stood there and watched, and somebody else happened by, and pulled me out? Is that meddling in the great plan or is that just... the way? Maybe the caring is the way for some people."

Her features light up at the compliment, and a smile splits her features, tongue pinched for a moment between her teeth. "You always this philosophical?"

Maja would not have said philosophical, but maybe it is, to the skater.

"I care for your beauty," That's worth something. She licks her lips, cold and frostbitten. Shrugging, casual and free-spirited. "And maybe I believe in your skill to never let the ice crack at all."

Her eyes follow the skater, as she unlaces shoes, and trades out her bladed ones.

"The first bones. The first blood. And a vessel between kingdoms. First, sculpt the vessel in the absence of light, and cast a line into darkness."

Viktoria understands the first instruction, but not the second. She has no time to question before Maja is feeling around her waist for her ribs. With little to no reaction, she waits for the next task she needs to complete. Taking in a breath, she lifts an eyebrow in response.

She would ask for Máni's blessing, and for Sköll and Hati not to interfere. And she would cast on the next growing moon; it is always the most favoured time.

"The next growing moon." Waxing. Whatever ancients refer to it all. "I will come." And they will cast their ritual. Maja does not forget that she too, has paid a price of the Lomidze's compliance. If she takes too much, and does not give. Grimhjarta will devour more than the ancient's last slivers of stolen, half-given life.

Jude looked in the mirror again, rubbing longer finger than he's used to over growing stubble on his jawline. The razor provided to him is someone out of a movie - straight razor with just a blade. He's careful as he uses it, making short work of the itch that plagues him.

It's weird. There's a lot of geography to his features that he's not used to. Smaller eyes, bigger ears, fuller jaw and chin. Maybe one day he'll get used to it, but maybe not.

He hears someone enter into the shared space and looks up - he recognizes her from this new life, not the old one. "Shit's still a little weird, you know. It's.. I don't really know where to even start."

Impossible. She did not know others blessed by Hel.

He is something uncharted. Port Leiry has become an enigma of raw power, and new ages of magic that Maja has never known. Even in all the countries she has slipped through. None of them brought back a life untethered to her, yet so bound to one of her lives, it broke the laws of Hel entirely.

She'd known something had gone wrong that night. Blamed a dead thing, of course. Blamed a brother for his disinterest, and dismissal to take a thing seriously. Blamed the name on the grimoire, too.

Maja sees this boy with soil in his lungs, and a face that does not belong to her troupe.

She had stolen him, like she would thrift a grave and stuffed him in a caravan's bathroom. It's her sanctuary, and he is another life within it, poking at his face in the mirror like a newborn child. Revived from a life that no longer hangs on her talisman, just ashes of bonedust. She cannot ignore the signature of Grimhjarta power, the same way she could not ignore Norwegian if she passed it in the streets of Port Leiry.

"Weird." Yes. Very. "You saw the shores, and clawed through the soil." Did you speak to her? The ruler of Helheim? Did she grant him a talisman like her own, and see something worthy of him, in their band of death and decay? He was not supposed to come back from wherever he had been, she had meant the life to be traded to her brother's talisman; not spent on a stranger now imbued with Grimhjarta magic. "What is your name?" A descendent perhaps? Granted new life, for the first time since the shattering of a talisman. "I brought you back." As if that delivers her rights and power on its own. "You were dead, yes?"

Something about.. an office?

"For where?"

In recovered civility, Grimhjarta does a duty to point out what she knows. A finger lashes out by his shoulder, indicating to his rear. "Here. Entrance. Same as exit." Then a thumb to jut behind her. "Totes, smykker, meat in buns. That way." Either side of the crossroads of the markets they're in the midst of, "Food, also." And finally, she nods towards the left, "Business. Suits. Yes?"

All she knows, in her sly hands slipping between coats, open bags and overalls. She has already staked claim to the wolfen wallet, tucked in her jacket. It's time she leaves him to nurse his mind.

"I can show you."

* * *

It's cold as hell outside, and she misses the damp humidity of the laundromat almost instantly, but sitting in the back of her van with all its equipment and wires, she's spent five minutes with shivering fingers digging through memory cards full of digitized tape.

It's like she has a religious epiphany when the screen lights up with the right file, and she practically shoves it into Maja's hand. She hasn't show anyone this - she has no idea why she's so giddy to show this woman now.

The tape starts, and its a different Holly than the one sitting in the back of this van with Maja - more full bodies, more rested. There isn't this morose aura about her - it's a Holly who is still just living the next day of her eventful life. She delivers what seems to be the opening of a public access television show. She talks in enticing, sensational tones about convergences and rumors and celestial phenomenon, and then, as if out of nowhere, there's a shudder in the image, and a wave jostles everything in the picture, and Holly stands, staring at the horizon where a town goes from a twinkling oasis in the flat heartlands of the flyover country to a dark monument of nothing, and Holly, speech stopped, stairs into the sky, as if she's seen something immense and captivating. The camera seems to jump then, and Holly flashes from that standing position to one sprawled out in the grass. She slowly stands, moving for the camera, and the video ends.

Even if it is within the walls of an electrical tomb, with wiring dangling from above and sockets plugged into generators. It's a just a dimmer, crass depiction of their caravans at the circus. But this is not her home soil. It is tin she does not know, with a woman plagued with shadows of different origin. She's been thrusted a tape that she watches, with transfixed eyes.

She does not want to be sold on a woman and a microphone —

But then.

A civilisation torn out of its root.

What trickery is this? This cannot be magic like they know. This is the power of the Gods. Must be. Like what Hel possesses. Odin has struck down a town and punished them for something. If not him, then another. All of them. Maja stabs at the screen, reversing the line back and forth, as if she might see a signature of something other that tells her what she desires to know.

"You saw it." And now so has Maja. A witness to something not intended for eyes to know. A clever curse of sight, and sound. Of nothing, and no one. Maja turns to look at her own phantom, trapped in the gap of a closed van door, and then she searches for the ones this woman has; whatever entities hold onto her, and her ability of knowing. "This is the work of Gods." Not magic like Maja's, or the Circus. Real, divine. Celestials that can vaporise worlds. What has this woman done, to deserve this retribution? "But they do not hurt you, no? They watch." Like she watched. Maja drops the tape back to the woman's messy desk, before she is hexed by whatever origin power has tangled itself in it. "An echo of what you have seen, yes?"

If they stay their distance, then she is merely a syn seer, of sorts. She wonders if her uncle dared want to touch this magic, or know. Grimhjarta thinks that she is has adopted the residue of a power she stood too close to. Maybe it would fade, with time.

Maybe it would devour her, eventually, the same way it ate that city up.

"I have a healthy amount of respect," she says. Not quite true; most would characterize her respect as disregard, but she's never been one to take prescription from others. "Sorry, not to imply you don't."

This woman lights a certain kind of candle in her mind - she can't tell if it's intrigue or warning. She pushes herself forward, listessly drifting closer to the shore, until she stands there, opposite from Maja, arms folded over her chest.

Maja would like to understand that.

“Why?” If the woman dropped through the same mirrored crystal under her feet, Maja would likely watch it happen. She would not report it, or offer a hand in the water without reason — and whoever she is, would bloat and be discovered as an ugly corpse when the frost melted.

There’s always passing comment about staying safe, but she’s heard plenty in the course of wishing for a vanishing act. In every town, city or village. Whether in the circus, or in the street. The world did not care for lost causes. She recalls that one flatcapped man outside a florist, once said he’d like the President to vanish. Would that actually matter? Even a big name, with big people. In a big house.

They all bled the same.

She’d been right to assume that Grimhjarta’s respect does not offer free branches to all. No apology needed. “I think if you fell, and this ice cracked.” She could test the theory, if she wanted — with a snow-drawn rune. “It is simply the way. You were then meant to go under.” Maybe for something higher; a purpose greater than herself. More tragedies — even if this was hypothetical.

Her eyebrows raise the idea of the witch taking her ribs - and giving them back. Would they grow back? Potentially. In all her years as this undead thing, she had sustained many wounds and many broken bones. Regrowing or having them taken is a new experience. It excites her, she thinks. And if she gets to keep them afterwards, then they will reattach.

An offshoot of Garnett from over the sea? Interesting. That means life energy. Healing, death, the like. Makes sense, with the way she speaks of her own magic, with the markings she barely understands in the books. She's seen a fair few here and there, and seemingly every larger coven has its signature. Grimhjarta. She will research that name later.

She had the conduit. The blood, the ribs; the tie between life and death. Ancient, and old. The first of its kind, or near enough.

A willing cold one and the chance to equal the playing ground for herself and her brother. "Vampyr." She mutters, beckoning the woman closer. Maja is under no impression that her languages would best an ancient, so in case she dares let Janet trick her into an incomplete ritual, she asks the Lomidze. "Translate. Be precise."

prima ossa, primus sanguis et vas inter regna, Vas primum absente luce sculpe, et lineam in tenebras iacta.

She would not get this wrong, if it is to cost her an almost life, by the end of this. Maja turns around and presses on either side of the dead creature's ribs, feeling for the lowest of them; easiest to remove, she believes. It would take a while to slice away, and even longer to hack them from the cage. Lomidze may need to break them, herself.

Maja grins, because she is not sure friend is a word they would use. The creature is the other side of death; the duller sort, but helpful in the case of sacrifice.

"Yes. I take two." Decided. She thinks it is better, to draw the runes around and soak them in the blood; she would develop the version of the spell, with her talisman in mind. She needed to call Ivar, to get him to detach his, for them to stand a real chance of transference between lives.

Maja's not sure how long she would be able to keep the channel of hers open, before it would snap itself back, and cancel out all her intended preparations, otherwise.