Sovereign

Addendum.

In the weeks following the conclusion of the investigation, Agent Zoe Fischa (nee Sanders) received an offer for transfer to the Esoteric Division. However, due to the adverse implications of her prolonged absence  to her husband's health, such a transfer could not be fully instated. She currently remains the only official liaison between the Esoteric and Paranormal Divisions. About a month after the case was officially closed, she provided me with this voice recording made by Magdalene Price, which I have transcribed below:

There is debris everywhere.

I asked Moses and Raphael to send everyone home. Very few of them know what really happened with the Pine Street incident and how badly things got fucked up. How badly we fucked things up. They only saw Crystal, transformed into the thing she became under Promeno’s control. Heard Henry’s screams as all of that energy broke his body. His screams still haunt me, like the memory of a shiver rattling my teeth. Kojiro took him away, saying he could fix him. Crystal went with him, wide eyed and fearful, the condemning voices the least of her concerns. They spoke in whispers out of fear of what she might do, and discussed the things they heard, things that they won’t be able to understand without a back story.

As far as they know, I shouldn’t even understand any of that.

But I am not just Magdalene Price. I may have taken that name to blend in with this new generation, might have shed my powers and taken this dowdy aspect to allay everyone into thinking that I am only slightly dangerous. But I am, and I will always be Tsagaglalal.

She who watches.

It’s my curse, that as a receptacle of knowledge, the things I have seen and the lives I have lived will always remain in startling clarity, compartmentalized and processed, so they are never horrible enough to drive me insane.

Magreb, on the other hand, took her curse magnanimously. With a bit of whimsy if you like.

I clean up alone, seeking out the nex connections that still bind the chunks of concrete, still hold the phantom shape they held when they were first cast. When I started two days ago, it only took a thought to send the crumbs scuttling across the damaged floors to fill the gouges and fill out, reverse time lapse. Now each pull sends white bursts of pain lancing through the dark in my skull. I worked my way from the inside out, starting with the room where we held Henry. The place where ‘All The Evil’ came to rest; if Stieg Larsson is your kind of poison.

I’m finally in the lobby, and I cannot remember exactly where on the ceiling the receptionist’s desk used to be. I have spent so much quietly tending to other people’s memories that I have forgotten to pay attention to my own. I close my eyes and concentrate, bringing up the colour and texture of the mahogany wood and send a chit into my head. It’s a handy trick for parsing memories as complex as mine for a distinct detail. If people build mental palaces then I build mental constellations. And I am a meticulous hoarder.

I’d thought Mosadiel was exaggerating all those years ago when he told me about what Henry was and what he was made for. Mosadiel never exaggerates. But I thought Promeno was smarter than meddling with the human world and successfully siring an heir. I didn’t meet Crystal. But Henry, he was my baby. He still is. I’ve carefully tended his memories all these years.  I let him believe I was his elder sister for most of his adolescence, so the excruciating sessions of mental invasions to maintain the barriers that kept those thoughts buried deep in his subconscious felt less like intrusions and more like tough love; a feeling I sensed never changed even when he was given the truth, or a version of it. Then he met up with Crystal and he turned to her and away from me.