Page 67 of Tidal Creatures

Unlike Kelpie, he sees nothing of the newness or wonder of this world. Newness and wonder were worn away for him a long time ago, before this modern world was even born. All he sees now are disrepair and decay, all the places where this reality falls short of the shining perfection that waits within the City.

Tristan Rapp is many things. Man. Monster. Mutilator. Murderer. Destroyer of innocent lives and dreams.

But at the end, he is also a cautionary tale.

When he was a child in the faraway streets of London, his older sister, whom he loved beyond all reason, was called to the seasonal coronation. Summer sang in her soul, and over the course of her bid for the crown, he watched it blossom, until flowers sprouted where she stepped and fruit grew ripe and rounded at her touch, even when it had been rotted to the seed. He followed her through the trials and terrors of the coronation, until he had seen her walk into the maze that wavered on the edge between reality and unreality, fading into the pale liminal space reserved for creatures out of story.

All that, and she hadn’t claimed the crown. She had come out broken and weeping, her hands cracked and black with frost, and she had died a week later in her own bed, wasting away to nothing in the absence of her season. But that hadn’t been the worst of it.

Oh, no. For he had been a boy, young and quick and curious, in the way of young things everywhere, and when she had gone into the maze, he had followed. But for him, there was no clash of seasons, no Winter meeting Summer on equal ground and discussing the world that was yet to come, there were no tests or trials. There had been only blackness, the emptiness of the void outside all things, and then, in the dark, the endless rainbow flashing of instants passing to their deaths, of entropy made manifest. He had entered the everything, although he had no such name for it, and he had come to understand in an instant why so many human cultures saw the rainbow as a bridge between the heavens and the earth. The everything was no bridge, no Bifröst to lead him to Asgard, and yet it was something so far outside his experience that his mind had rejected it, refusing to accept what was happening around him.

Young Tristan had screamed into the abyss, and run deeper, unwittingly moving away from the exit that would have seen him restored to the world of men before he could damage himself permanently. Instead, he had traveled unhindered through the everything, until he had come to a window hanging in the air, perfectly suspended on nothing at all, and yet something concrete and comprehensible, something for his wounded mind to seize upon.

The window had been closed when he reached it, and he lacked the strength to pry it open, so he had been unable to climb through in his quest for solid ground. Instead, he had pressed his face against the glass and looked out upon a great and glorious city such as he had never seen before in his life.

It was as if his familiar, well-loved London had been somehow purified and transformed into the very ideal of what a city could be. The streets gleamed iridescent, as if they had been cut from the delicate whorls of a snail’s shell. The storefronts were a riot of colorful delights, the produce stands boasted treasures such as even his sister’s strange and growing powers could not dare to dream, and the buildings were flawless. It was the Platonic ideal of a city, and it struck him both silent and sightless in a matter of seconds, unable to perceive anything save for his memory of that city.

How he escaped the everything was a mystery to him then and remains a mystery to him now. He stumbled out of the maze where the potential kings and queens of summer and winter battled for their place, tears streaming from his unseeing eyes and his own breath a keening wail in his ears.

As his sister dwindled, severed from the Summer, his sight had gradually returned, and his voice had come back with it. Still, he did not weep when they gave her to the ground, she who he had once loved best in all the world, for whom he had stepped outside the bounds of the reality man was meant to know and trod the Bifröst as an unwanted intruder. He watched them pile earth atop her body, and could see no real change in her state, for everyone around him was decaying by the second, their bodies and bones slipping further and further from the ideals of that shining, impossible city he had seen.

Any alchemist or sorcerer could have warned his parents of what was going to happen next, but they were ordinary people who had intersected with the elemental world purely by chance, thanks to the nature of their much-mourned daughter. They had no one to warn them. No one to tell them why the City, so dazzling, so perfect, was forbidden to mortal eyes. Tristan started killing a month after his sister’s burial.

He was clever and resourceful, even then, and carried out his first such acts with surprising skill, finding beauty in the arch of arteries and treasuring the last beating of each heart, the soft collapse of each lung. He sought the City in the broken bodies of those who moved too slowly to evade him, and he had nearly a year to hunt unhindered before he had come to the attention of the local alchemists. His latest victim had been a promising apprentice of theirs. With her death, he had passed from environmental hazard into figure of quiet interest, and shortly after that, he had been acquired.

Tristan’s training with the British Alchemical Congress had taken several decades, as was the norm, but as his new masters had managed to capture a manifestation of Iðunn and keep her alive long enough to compel the planting of a healthy orchard, they had no need to focus on the purification of alkahest or the creation of a philosopher’s stone. Their focus was, instead, on the search for a reliable passage into the City.

Then Baker’s curious creation had begun gaining traction in the hearts and minds of children, causing them to map North America to her Up-and-Under, and when Baum had followed with his own imaginary world, reversing the elements, he left the concept of the City where she had placed it, right at the center of all things. It had become quickly apparent that if the City were to become manifest in this time, it would do so in North America. The alchemical heart of the world had been shifted by manipulation of children’s dreams. Tristan hadn’t even been able to resent that theft of power from the European Congresses. It had been done too elegantly, and too quickly to evade.

He had killed his masters on the same night the European Congress collectively admitted defeat, and he had left their bodies cooling in their own labs as he made for the shipyards and hence to the New World. With him he had carried his small store of personal possessions, the grimoires of the three men who had taken charge of the bulk of his education, and a small leather bag of apple seeds.

Iðunn herself had been long gone by then, and he might have been pleased to know that over a century later, a goddess of the moon would feel a pang of guilt over how long it had been since she’d last wondered after her peer in immortality.

It wasn’t difficult for a man like him, even with such narrow and focused alchemical interests, to find the North American Congress. It had proven even less difficult for him to integrate himself within their ranks.

He had never joined Reed’s wild attempt to harness aspects of the universe beyond those which incarnated naturally. Baker had been a genius, the sort that comes along once a generation at the absolute most, but that wasn’t enough to have rendered her infallible. A candle is a controlled fire. Even a campfire can be used as a tool and a weapon, beneficial if somewhat riskier.

But forest fire is no one’s tool. Perhaps it burns what you wanted to burn and perhaps not; the fire is burning either way. The fire doesn’t care.

Tristan knows, perhaps better than most, that humanity owes everything they have today to the acquisition and “taming” of the flame, even though he also knows, deep in his soul, that no fire has ever been truly tamed. It is his unfashionable belief, which would limit his advancement through the Congressional ranks if he had any interest in advancing, that the manifestations of various universal constants are just another form of flame. Grasp a Winter or a Summer, you have a controlled fire. Net a minor god, a Lunar or a Harvest, and you have a tool or a weapon. Reach for something more than that …

Forest fire. The Doctrine of Ethos was always going to turn against the people who forced it into a single incarnation, because it blazes too big to be held. It doesn’t warm. It devours. So when he heard of Reed’s plans, inherited from Baker with her blood still wet on his hands, Tristan had turned away and busied himself serving other goals, other masters. He does that still.

He may be the oldest alchemist alive in North America, and he hasn’t enjoyed a single full day of his existence since he saw the City. He subsists on the apples of Iðunn, which he has never shared—let the other alchemists think him more skilled than he actually is if they like, this strange, cadaverous man with his seemingly endless supply of the elixir of life. He lives on apples and the bitter, hateful knowledge that he may never see the City again. He will never walk those streets, he will never smell those flowers or taste those fruits.

He was not the one to propose the use of Lunars to gain access to the City, but he supports it. Slaughter them all. Not a one of them has earned what they have. Not a one of them deserves to cross that sky, to shine on those streets and spires, to have what he’s denied. He’ll see them all dead if given half the chance.

The dowsing rod in his hands shudders, guiding him onward. He’ll have more than half a chance. He has the apples of immortality and all the time in the world to accomplish his goals.

Margaret had been clever enough, in her way. He’s still not sure he supports the inclusion of women in the ranks of the Congress. There were always women who could serve as reasonably talented apprentices, who enjoyed the feeling of mercury running over their palms or viscera yielding before their blades, but they were the exception, not the rule. He’s found women to be too sentimental in the main, too inclined to become attached to their subjects, to humanize what should never be humanized. To care.

Oh, men care also, but the men drawn to alchemy are usually the sort he’s known all his life, the ones who can control themselves and retain their focus even in the face of temptation. Margaret’s assistant had been very forthcoming once she realized she was never going to walk away from the lab. She told him everything about their concealed successes, about the conspiracy to hide cuckoos and resources from the eyes of the Congress.

None of those successes matter now, of course. The project has been canceled. Like all canceled projects, it will be stripped for parts, the pieces that work distributed among all the other, more deserving projects, while the pieces that don’t will be recycled into anything that can still be of use. The “Rabbit” she and her team managed to incarnate had been in the botanical section when Tristan made his appearance, the creature wearing lab coat and goggles and behaving for all the world as if he had a right to be there. As if he were human.

Human or not, he’d died as easily as the rest of them. One more unnecessary incarnate, no longer walking around to complicate the alchemical transformation of the natural world. If only Tristan had been a little less willing to believe that Margaret was too smart to lie to him, if only he hadn’t chalked her anxiousness up to a desperate need to save her own skin, this could all be over already. He could have killed her little runaway Hind and be on his way back to Maine to check in with his handlers.

Ah, well. It’s too late now, and some things can’t be helped. The dowsing rod is good; it will see him to his target, and he’ll finish the matter tonight, wherever it is the girl has gone to ground.