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clear. The only real way to find out was to ask the Old Man directly, and that task had fallen to me.
    Our best guess was that he would, eventually, come to Seattle. All I had to do was stay put and wait him out. But, the Old Man had outfoxed us. He hadn't come to talk; he had come to die. At my hand, and in doing so, his problems became my problems. His wisdom became mine.
    And what did that leave for the Protector to protect? came the whisper in my head.
    Suddenly, I had a creeping suspicion who had tipped Henri off.
    Antoine stared at me, trying to read what I was thinking. "Endgame," he Whispered via magi-speak so that Marielle couldn't hear. "The revolution is upon us."
    I cleared my throat. Sooner than you think, I thought. "We need to go," I said aloud. "Henri and the others are coming. We can have this out, but let's not do it here." Marielle's face was taut with fury and sorrow, and I flinched at the sight of the hurt I had inflicted on her. Not my intention, I wanted to tell her. It's not what I wanted.
    "I'm sorry," I said. The words couldn't heal the pain. Nor would they change what had been done, or absolve me of having done it. They were meaningless sounds, empty tokens that did nothing to wipe away my sin, but they were all I had to ease her despair.
    She started to speak, and then shook her head. A tear tracked down her cheek and she slowly unclenched her fists. For a second, I thought my apology was actually going to be enough, but then her face hardened again. This time, I didn't even bother trying to block the punch.
    I had earned it. What is done is done, what is gone is gone. I had earned her wrath. In so many ways. My knees buckled and I fell back against the car. Then everything went black.
     
    In the weeks following the Ascension Event in Portland, I fell into a temporal loop when I closed my eyes. During the winter, a splinter group of magi had unleashed an experiment on the Rose City. Using a theurgic harvester, they had attempted to collect the living energy of every soul within reach. The device hadn't been properly prepared, and it didn't devour the entire city—just all of downtown. Everything between the bluffs and the river. More than fifty thousand souls.
    When I tried to sleep, I snapped back to that night in a bad cosmological loop. Standing at the top of the tower built by Bernard du Guyon's hubris, and watching the dazzling un-light of the harvester. Even though the sphere of mirrors had been destroyed, I could still remember its hypnotic facets. I could still remember the device's hunger for all those souls. I could still remember the emptiness. The Qliphotic void.
    The Chorus, as I had lived with them for a decade while I had chased my own ill-remembered history, had died that night. Detonated so I could escape the soul-dead of Portland, expelled from my broken shell to complete the purge of their poisonous taint. Spiritually naked, I had ascended to the top of the spire; there, given another chance to climb the mystic tree I had first seen at my initiation into magick, I had clawed my way to the top branches and touched the crown. Kether, the first Sphere of the Tree of the Sephiroth.
    So far from mud-footed Malkuth . So far from that time of crawling on my belly among the roots of the trees. So far from who I was: a child, blind to the magick of the world; a pure soul, untouched by the corruption of the Weave.
    Somewhere in the explosion of self and soul that followed, I found a new Chorus, a new collection of voices and personalities who were tasked with filling the cracks of my shell, who were meant to make me whole. A little bit of Bernard du Guyon was in there, a black coal sulking in the fiery pit of my heart. As were his Anointed, the psychoanimistic inner circle of the Hollow Men, the Seattle-based coven who had helped him build Thoth's Key. John Nicols, the Seattle detective who had fallen during the battle with Bernard's magus, was in my head too. Unlike the old collection of