He was scheduled to spend six grueling hours signing merch, posing for photos, and shaking hands. It would be a blur of platitudes, of thanks for his music, and of grinning faces. He had chosen two armchairs with a sidetable between them, so the photos would look like he was casually hanging out with his fans. He took a deep breath, sipped a miserably light roast that tasted like grass clippings, and signalled to his security team.

Most of Quentin’s fans were women, but the split for meet-and-greets tended to be more even. And of course, if you play a real instrument, you’ll inevitably attract other players who appreciate your style, so Quentin had been signing a lot of guitars on this tour. He’d also been really working on his guitar poses, for moments like this one. He posed like he was shredding, he posed like two people were playing one guitar, and he posed like a rock god, playing borrowed instruments while fans laid prostrate before him. But whenever the inevitable fan tried to throw the horns up for a photo, Quentin always carefully lowered their hand, without saying a word.

Gifts were slowly beginning to grow in a heap on a table off to the side. The hand-knit sweaters were Quentin’s favorite, a known part of his off-stage persona, a private joke about his old-man style, just between him and his superfans. But there were also art pieces, novelties, home-cooked food, handmade jams, baked goods… anything you could imagine being made in a kitchen or a living room, with the occasional professionally-fabricated piece thrown in as well. Quentin was taken aback when a fan gave him a half-size replica of a platinum record, machined in his shop, for a song that Quentin had personally loved, but hadn’t really been embraced by his fanbase.

“It’s my favorite song too,” he had said. “And I’ll get it to platinum even if I’m the only one listening to it!” Quentin had laughed hoarsely and made a mental note to tag the fan’s business when his team posted the picture.

All good. All love. But not what he was really here for.

Four hours in, it happened. A young woman, still a few years older than Quentin. She had nothing in her hands, nothing to give, nothing to get signed. She demurred when they offered to take her photo, and she took Quentin’s hands with something like reverence.

“Your music saved my life,” she said quietly.

Quentin had to clench something inside of himself in order not to roll his eyes. He was tired of being a prop in the self-directed movie of these peoples’ lives, an unwilling and unknowing actor in their parasocial fantasies. He didn’t doubt the girl’s sincerity, but he had been present for so, so many hushed confessions by now, and the experience had worn thin so, so quickly. All the same, he bit his tongue and nodded solemnly, eyebrows set in an expression of carefully practiced concern.

I’m always performing.

As she unfurled her story, he played the part of the sympathetic confessee, making all the appropriate interjections, prodding her to go on when she paused dramatically, and squeezing her hands when she dropped the “bombshell” moments. It was an unpleasant story, but hardly a horrible one. If anything, this was a normal but emotional young woman, mythologizing her average-but-awkward adolescence into an entire tragic backstory. Quentin had to stifle a groan when she revealed that the climax of her story was experimenting with party drugs. The only repercussions had been a couple of bad hangovers, nothing sinister or permanent, but even now, years later, her self-image still couldn’t recover from the guilt and shame of acting out of character.

The type was common among superfans, people immersed in the melodrama of art day-in and day-out. They were often obsessed over some moral hiccup in their past, and spent inordinate amounts of time desperately trying to think of ways to exorcise their minor sins, real and imagined. They rarely followed through, hence the confessions. As if Quentin’s songs were the sermons that showed them the light, and now only he held the power to absolve them of their transgressions.

In short, she was exactly the kind of person to say something as dramatic as “your music saved my life”. None of the recovering addicts, the hardcore drug users who’d gotten clean and thanked him for his music, none of them ever said “your music saved my life”.

Quentin knew, cerebrally, that he played an important function in the human ecosystem for these people, and they could be moulded into some of his most fanatical followers if he cultivated their relationships well. But he had grown too big to handle all those relationships personally, and with his energy as low as it was, he mentally prepared to pass her name along to his social media team and scrub her face from his memory, until… until something flickered in her downcast eyes and Quentin’s ears pricked up.

It had emerged so gradually that Quentin hadn’t noticed at first. It was at the very edge of his perception, in no particular place in the room. He didn’t see it, didn’t feel it like he could see and feel the girl, a human being, solid matter in front of him. Instead, it was a subtle Something that prickled against his brain-flesh whenever he threatened to wrap his mind around it. It was reacting defensively, refusing to be directly sensed, threatening retaliation against even being perceived. It was only allowing him to be aware of it, and Quentin approached it with what he hoped was the mental body-language (mind-language? psychic?) equivalent of his hands up, fingers spread, like it was a wild animal.

Then it allowed him to see it. Just an outline, a hazy silhouette of a Thing not-quite human-shaped. Not animal shaped, not abstract, none of these. It was Something Else, and the only static piece he could make out were its great, luminous eyes. Quentin swallowed through his bruised throat as cold sweat frothed out of his skin. For the first time, he felt unprepared by his training. He felt like there was supposed to be a script, a ritual, some magic words he should say to It. But Something Else simply tilted its head, as if listening to the girl who Quentin had almost forgotten about. As if on cue, she clutched his hands a little tighter and leaned just a tiny bit closer.

Quentin took the hint. He forced himself to push Something Else to the side of his mind and focused all of his attention on the girl, on her words, on the passe story he’d been half-ignoring a moment before. He could feel her hands pressed tight against his, and between the solid hardness of their bones, something hot and vital, pulsing with life. Gradually he realized that it wasn’t her heartbeat, he could see that beating off-time with this other Something. But the more he focused on it, the fainter it became, and the more he focused on her words, the stronger the pressure in the peripheral of his mind, swelling hot inside his brainflesh, threatening to sear the backs of his eyeballs. They hadn’t trained him for this. They hadn’t told him it would hurt.

A new pulse rippled out from Something Else like a great sigh, rearranging Quentin’s thoughts. It organized them, aligning things in his vision, making connections obvious.

Her every inhale charged the words in her chest. Her every exhale billowed between them like glittering smoke. Ice raced up Quentin’s spine as he caught an impression of it – in the smoke, in the space between the words. Something more abstract, something less tangible, something more… Else. There was energy laced into her words. There was heat steaming out of her mouth into the air around them. Waste. Her emotions, her pain, her joy – they were vehicles for the energy, but they were going nowhere. Finally, his mind managed to wrap around something and understand it. He felt his grip tighten, felt the heat build in her palms as their connection solidified.

Take it.

He could take it. It was right there. He could see her pulse beating in her throat, the cables of red that ran up her neck swelling and pressing against her skin, translucent and paper-thin. Did she know? Was she doing it on purpose?

Take it.

He shuddered under the pressure of temptation, the quiet insistence of Something Else. He watched the rise and fall of her breath, the slow expansion and contraction of her breathing. The inhale that charged her words, the exhale that bled them out. Wasting it on purpose. Sending a hint, begging him to take it.

Feed.

He felt something like irritation from Something Else. A sharp, many-cornered feeling in the aether around them. Impatience. Urgency. He watched the red in her throat darken, curdling in the artery, rotting on the vine.

This is how it’s supposed to be.

The flutter of her eyelashes. The flush on her cheeks. Her doe eyes, clear and guileless and honest. His grasping talons. His carnivorous purpose. His fangs, longing to bite down. Nature, exposed in the details of their bodies. Brushstrokes that revealed the artist’s intent.

This is what she was made for.

He leaned forward, felt his teeth sink into the side of her neck, felt blood pouring out around his fangs, hot on his gums. She moaned as her paper skin tore open, a torrent of hot lifeblood boiling straight out into Quentin’s stomach, searing every inch of soft skin it touched on the way down, but he couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to.

This is what you were made for.

She sagged against him as her blood pressure dropped, but Quentin’s hands lashed out, his talons locking them together. One hand grabbed her ribs under her arm and held her upright, one grabbed her face and pressed it closer to him.

“Ca… ca…” She was trying to speak but could only gurgle through the red foam bubbling over her lips.

“Cal… Coll…” The sound dissolved into liquid. Quentin’s brain was overheating. He screwed his eyes shut, every muscle in his body straining, steam billowing out from around his gums –

“Call me,” She was holding out a card. Quentin took it and held it up to the light. Dawn Tellis, New Beginnings Rehab and Counselling.

“I will,” Quentin slipped the card into his back pocket and shook her hand. “I’d be honored to help. Actually, here…” he reached over to his jacket draped on one of the armchairs. He hesitated for a moment, two different cases of business cards in his hands. He closed his eyes, pausing to really feel the emotion bubbling in his chest.

Tellis. Dawn Tellis. New Beginnings.

Quentin took a deep breath and made his choice.

There are no coincidences.

“If you don’t hear from one of my people in the next couple of weeks, call me directly.” Dawn’s eyes widened as she looked at the card. Matte black, gold around the edges, with a sigil stamped on the back. The front simply said Quentin and had the QR code which would open a line directly to him. One-time use, a standard security measure for celebrities and industry leaders who needed to keep their numbers and addresses private.

“I will,” she smiled at him, and over her shoulder Quentin saw Something Else close It’s eyes and vanish, as calm and quiet as falling asleep.

Elysia found herself in a room that could charitably be called intimate. There were simple, comfortable chairs arranged in a grid five across and ten deep, but the room stretched back far enough for twice that many. There was a raised dais at the front of the class, and the wall behind it was made of textured slate. The dais was bare, save for an ornate lectern made of dark wood, the front caned like an old cabinet. Making her way across to a window seat in the middle of the pack, Elysia set down her violin case and waited. There were only a handful of other Initiates in the room when she arrived, and she was greeted by a few familiar faces as they filed in after her, mostly barefoot, mostly dressed in their colourful chitonai. Her guess about the dress code had been a good one.

Then came black-clad adepts with their bright sashes and curious marks of achievement. Lustrous metal jewelry chimed as they moved, and Elysia had only just begun to piece together the significance and symbolism of these trophies. A gold viper ring, silver bell earrings that really rang, a brass torq that couldn’t be taken off, and the occasional, sinister steel rings that swung from leather wrist-cuffs. As she studied these elites of the CVLT in their black chitonai, she realized they were all beautiful. Hard jawlines and thick brows framed jewel-toned eyes that blinked dreamily back and forth. They spoke to each other differently than they did to Initiates, purring in flinty, low-pitched voices, their tongues scraping along unfamiliar words in a foreign language. Curtains of glossy hair and crisp braids shook and shone in the slanted morning light. A severe, pale young woman leaned down to adjust the strap on her violin case, and just before her raven hair cascaded down to block her from view, Elysia caught the glitter of a thick silver rope around her neck, carefully tucked between heavy breasts. As she straightened, a row of silver bells ringing off her ear, the young woman caught Elysia’s eye and winked. The rope had disappeared under the collar of her chiton, and was invisible as she turned back to her conversation.

Face hot, Elysia’s mind was flooded with burgeoning questions. She felt as thought she’d trespassed somehow, seen something she shouldn’t have under the shapeless, figure-obscuring uniform. But she understood very little, and that was a feature of CVLT’s unique curriculum. The feeble and incurious had been eliminated at the first hurdle, and everyone who made it within the Temple walls was razor-sharp. She took a deep breath and touched the clay tablet around her neck.

Everyone I used to know. Everything I used to have.

For a reason she couldn’t articulate, she tucked it into her chiton.

Nothing could have prepared Elysia for the entrance of their teacher. The door swung open silently, but the hush that descended was instant. The figure paused only momentarily on the doorstep before gliding into the room. Veiled head-to-toe in black, it approached the dais with confidence. Initiates immediately fell into seats, but the Adepts took a moment to place their hands over their hearts, first. Gloved hands emerged from the folds of the veil as the figure stood beside the lectern, and as the morning light reverently touched the edges of the outfit, Elysia could make out lace details, painstaking depictions of flowers and birds, almost invisible in black-on-black until the sun marked the edges in midmorning gold.

“Some of you are new,” the figure’s voice was flanged, stuttering, sonically mangled and re-formed before coming out through a speaker hidden somewhere in the lectern. Elysia’s eyes narrowed and her mind lurched into motion to work on the puzzle. Female, average height, middle-aged.

“I will explain,” the figure continued. “I teach as my tithe, to repay the Temple for my education and training. I have become significant in the Outside World, and my identity must be kept secret to avoid unpleasant repercussions. This is the meaning of the black veils, and the strange noises that pass for my voice,” The room was silent for a moment as the black veil swept slowly across the musicians gathered within.

“Rest assured, I am a champion of the CVLT, and I climbed my way up just as you all seek to do now. I stood in the throne room as rose petals rained down on my cohort. The Circle washed me in glory, and God willing, all of you will follow in my footsteps, even if you never learn my name.”

The Adepts in the room hummed a note in unison, and the veil dipped, a curt nod in response. Elysia mentally tagged the figure as the Black Veil, because it was less cumbersome than “the figure”. New questions burst into her mind like fireworks but she didn’t dare speak up now.

“Enough introduction. Weapons ready.” Elysia followed along as violins were drawn from cases and poised on shoulders. She had tuned in her room beforehand, but she quickly tapped her strings to make sure they hadn’t drifted. The noise of nearly twenty violins briefly squalled against each other in the air until they all sang the same note. One more tap, just to double check that she was in tune with the rest.

“You tune by harmonics instead of matching the others with your bow. Why?” The Black Veil was standing by Elysia’s chair, hands folded in front of her. Her approach had been silent, and her voice still came, disorientingly, from the lectern on the dais. She is the room, Elysia realized.

“I tuned before I came. It’s faster and less obtrusive to check by tapping.” Elysia kept her violin poised on her shoulder as she spoke, but turned her head to make what passed for eye contact.

“But less accurate. You’re in tune with your peers?” Elysia nodded affirmatively.

“I’m very close. If I wasn’t, I would have tuned up normally.” The Black Veil nodded and paced back towards the front of the room before approaching an Adept whose shoulder pointed downwards and whose violin was not held upright.

“Your posture.” It was a statement, not a question.

“An old injury, Honored One,” the Adept did not make eye contact, but he wore a small, playful smile on his lips. “During my Trials I contributed significantly to the Schola Ergonomic. My playing position has no disadvantages.”

“Admirable,” The Black Veil nodded again. “But there is one disadvantage.”

“Yes, Honored One?” The smile retreated a fraction but his eyes stayed fixed straight ahead.

“It’s distracting. At ease, Adept.” The Black Veil swept away as the Adept’s smirk returned.

“Yes, Honored One.”

It took only a couple of tense minutes for the Black Veil to cross up and down the columns, her hands making small adjustments. She lifted elbows, straightened wrists, and asked questions about modifications made to the instruments. Seemingly satisfied, she returned to the dais.

The class spent upwards of thirty minutes running scales and arpeggios together, new positions and keys being called out whenever the Black Veil wished. They only paused over errors a handful of times. Switching so often was unusual, and practice like this was never done in groups, but the exercises themselves were mundane. Elysia barely had to think about what her hands did, and it took great effort to keep her mind from wandering. At last, the Black Veil raised a hand and the class stopped in unison.

“As expected of our Friend and Master, there is a fine display of ability here. CVLT is made of strong hands and fine minds. Each and every one of you deserves your seat in this room,” Elysia’s eyes narrowed. Was that all?

I’ve been running scales since I was a child.

Then they began individual performances. One by one, the violins sang their songs. Sweet, sorrowful, anxious, prideful, and furious in their turns, they all poured out wordless stories of their players’ souls. The Black Veil paced up and down their columns the whole time, listening intently as her feet sloshed though emotion that had pooled ankle-deep, the hem of her veil drifting around her. Elysia heard them run the gamut of their skill, each one cutting a little deeper and soaring a little higher than the one before them. She scowled, realizing that the Adepts had positioned themselves in the room so that they performed first, and had set the bar low so as not to show up the Initiates.

They’re hiding what they’re capable of. Putting the pressure on us to keep escalating.

She had no doubt that any one of them would pass in a professional orchestra, practicing and performing a rotating repertoire of complex classical music. But that was not what Elysia really wanted to know. That was not the life she wanted.

A name, a face, a crown of glory.

She was last to perform, positioned as she was by the window. The Black Veil turned to her and nodded. Vibrating with tension, Elysia let out a drawn breath and let her bow fall onto her strings like a stylus fitting in the groove of a vinyl record. She had one objective in this moment: dominate. Mark herself above the rest.

As soon as her first note rang out, the air in the room shifted. She felt forty eyes pierce through her like arrows, pinning her to the window, but she kept playing. Her violin didn’t pour like theirs had, it spat and frothed. Frost squealed off her strings in glittering clouds as her violin screamed to life, her hands leaping into instant motion, fingers racing up and down as frigid stormwind seared the exposed faces of her peers. She moved deftly through a piece that showed her many strengths, and when the time came, she abandoned her bow altogether, plucking the strings with her nails in rapid staccato, slowly easing into a drizzle that sent ripples through the shin-deep water.

The only sound in the room was the groaning of her summoned thunder, and the gentle dripping of residual rain. The silence that surrounded her peers was cold and endless. Eventually, the speaker crackled with what might have been a sudden intake of breath.

“Strong hands,” The Black Veil’s tone did not waver. “And fine minds. I have taken your measure, and will plan our time together accordingly. We will keep lectures to a minimum, and focus on your technical abilities. You are mine for the week, and in that time I will hone you into razors. Dismissed.”

Elysia sat still, violin in her lap, as her peers packed up and left in silence. Only she and the Black Veil remained, ice drifting in the water around them.

“Initiate,” the mechanical voice flickered. “Is something the matter?” Elysia took a deep breath and shook her head, vision clearing.

“I’m all right, uh-” she put her violin in its case. “Uhm, Honored One. It’s my first class, that’s all.” She rose to leave, but the mechanical voice stopped her:

“That’s not all,” Elysia turned to look at the Black Veil. “And you’re much more than all right.”

She couldn’t see her face through the veil, but she knew, somehow she knew that she was smiling. Elysia smiled back and nodded before she turned to leave, bare feet treading quietly across the clean, dry floor, the black marble of the classroom flushed warm by the midmorning sun.

The Temple was a geometric void, thrust arrogantly skyward from the earth. A testament to the tremendous ego of the Demigod, it also represented the order and civility of his design; dramatic, intentional, but opaque. The opulent architecture gleamed darkly at all hours, and mysteriously, even as the veil of dusk fell and hundreds of dorm rooms were lit by candlelight, the windows and gallery openings kept their silence, obscuring their occupants so that only the silhouette of the Temple was visible, faintly outlined in the pale profusion of starlight.

Despite the remote location, it was safe to wander through the immense, sprawling gardens and cultivated groves of the Temple grounds, greet the various strange animals that made their homes in the ruins of disused CVLT buildings, and practice around firepits, or under candlelit canopies of night-blooming flowers. The sounds of mysterious creatures punctuated the darkness and their otherworldly vocalizations joined in the music, but the students were assured that great pacts had been forged, and their safety was assured so long as they stayed out of the great forest after nightfall. Those who left CVLT often reminisced that these nocturnal jam sessions and study groups were the part they missed the most, blessed as they were in their student companies by the goddess of stars and shadows.

The sun rose over the temple grounds and the Apollonians began their work, swarming like bees out of their great black hive. Conscientious and ruled by the path of the sun, those that wore red-and-gold tended to be the earlier risers, but there were always fringe cases, ever-present veins of purple in the ebb and flow of the crimson tide. By midmorning, most of the cult was active, pursuing the many ends of the Demigod like the heads of the hydra.

In a secluded part of the gardens, two Initiates had met to work on a song. Chloe was slight, with a bob of wavy brown hair and a casual demeanor. She dressed in loose, fashionably torn pants and sleeveless shirts. She wore simple leather strings instead of the more ostentatious metal jewelry that higher-ranking cultists gravitated towards, and in her earth-tones, green eyes shining with effort, she could almost be mistaken for some fey creature of the garden. Adrian was taller, more fashionable, and more refined. He wore a satin letterman jacket — merch from his favorite band — and faded blue jeans. If it wasn’t for his nonsense fashion pendant hanging on a steel ball-chain around his neck, he could be mistaken for some alternate-history greaser out of Old American pop culture. Always cool and collected, he was much more social and popular than Chloe, but the two of them had met in this corner of the gardens, both trying to find a quiet spot to practice, and become fast friends through their shared passion for songwriting. Since then, they met often in the disused, overgrown corner of the gardens to workshop their newest creations together.

At this moment, Adrian felt a twinge of regret over that first meeting, and did his best to hide his grimace. He kept his eyes locked on the sheaf of scorepaper in his hand as Chloe’s fingers stuttered across the strings of her little parlor guitar. Eventually her voice cracked and Adrian flinched in the silence. Chloe took a deep breath and let out a shout of frustration that belied her soft, breathy singing voice.

“Oh it’s garbage! It sucks! It’s hot ass,” she fumbled the strap of her guitar over her head and sat heavily on the marble bench next to Adrian, who had pointedly kept the papers up so she couldn’t see his snarl of disgust.

“What? No, you were doing good!” His voice, high and nervous, revealed the lie immediately.

“When? Which part was good, Adrian?” she hissed, glaring at him through slit eyes. He cleared his throat.

“You know, the uh, first part. The instrumental bit at the beginning,”

“There is no instrumental bit at the beginning, there’s just a couple bars before I start singing,” she growled. He snapped his fingers.

“That part, yeah. The part where you weren’t singing was much better. It’s just your voice that screwed it up,” Chloe knocked him in the ribs with the back of her guitar.

“Asshole,” she grunted.

“Yeah, well, I’m your asshole,” he smiled. “You come to me for hard truths, delivered with humour and tact,” Chloe snorted.

“Funny, I don’t think I’ve ever laughed at you. Oh, sorry, not at anything you’ve said, anyway,”

Adrian let his face go slack for a long moment before throwing Chloe’s notes into the air in a storm of scorepaper. Their eyes remained locked together as Chloe’s unfortunate song fluttered down around them, an entire flock of off-white folio pages tumbling onto the grass. Chloe cracked first, laughing dryly as she sank her face into her hands. Adrian smiled as he put his hand on her shoulder. The song was important to her for reasons he didn’t fully understand, and they’d workshopped it a dozen times in the past two months, but he couldn’t figure out how to help her. His heart ached for his friend, whose pain he was intimately familiar with. There was not a single artist in CVLT who had not tasted the bitter fruit of a creative block. The congestion, the frustration, the struggle to put feelings into words and match those words to chords. The devastation that came with failing at the task you felt that you had been made for, despite your best efforts. The dark face of artistic failure. The revolting underside of the sublime.

“Who the hell am I supposed to go to? Who can I ask for help?” the edge was back in Chloe’s voice. “Who is in charge of songwriting now?”

“You got me,” Adrian grumbled. “Sophia’s promotion deleted the entire songwriting chain of command. I don’t even know who my nearest Adept is.”

“You lost yours?” Chloe looked up, shocked. Adrian shook his head.

“Never had one. My apprenticeship was delayed because the cohort ahead of me was bigger than normal, and then Sophia became… what are they calling her now?”

“Mistress of Narratives,” Chloe snarled the words. “Whatever that means.”

“Right, that. So I’m in limbo until something changes. No better than a sophomore like you.”

This time he was ready for Chloe’s guitar, his hidden hand holding the butt of the instrument in place as she tried to knock him in the ribs again.

“Well that does me no good,” she sighed. “You’re not exactly who I would pick to be trapped with on my songwriting desert island.”

“That’s… abstract,” he raised his eyebrow, shrugging off the implied insult. “Who would you pick, if you could pick anyone?” Chloe leaned back, her scowl deep. Adrian was occasionally struck by how expressive her face was, and how often she defaulted to harsh expressions. She was pretty in that plain, well-featured way that didn’t leave anything but a vague good impression. Not his type at all, but it still creased his heart to see his friend’s beautiful face contorted by pain and struggle.

“Tough one,” she spoke at last, slowly. “There are lots of legends to choose from but I just don’t think we’d mesh well. Most of my songwriting heroes would probably hate me.” Adrian laughed.

“You’d make them cry? Crush their egos? Drive their verses before you, hear the lamentations of Dido?”

“We’re just different people, I think,” Chloe muttered, still deep in thought. “Too different to interact in non-musical ways. Maybe in musical ways, too,” she chewed her lip for a moment. “Maybe I’d pick… Sophia?” Adrian’s ears pricked up.

Sophia was an enigma. She came from nowhere, and appeared everywhere. It seemed like all chains of command led to her, eventually. She held the keys to every door, but it was as if she walked through the Temple’s marble walls, going wherever she was needed, doing whatever needed to be done. If Lucien was the personification of the Demigod’s tact and charisma, Sophia was his determination, his grinding will. Lucien’s very breath was laughter, but with every rise of Sophia’s shoulders was the possibility that she would spit out a sizzling curse. If Lucien’s sleaze and flattery were the Demigod’s hand, outstretched in friendship, Sophia’s laconic speech and balefire eyes were an unspoken demand to kneel and kiss the ring.

“You’ve met her?” He asked, his voice hushed.

“No, I sat in on one of her feedback sessions once, but we’ve never had a conversation. I like how she spoke. Short, sharp, direct. No time for flowery words.”

“Yeah, that tracks,” Adrian scoffed. “But as long as you’re shooting that high, why not pick the Demigod himself?” Chloe’s eyes lit up.

“Oh, right! Right! Oh my God, can you imagine?”

“Not even a little,” Adrian sighed, smiling slightly at Chloe’s improved mood. “One of my upperclassmen is in tight with Lucien, but even he has only caught the big man once or twice, in passing. He’s not accessible at all, unless you’re in the Circle.”

“Do you feel like you know him already?” Chloe’s voice was pensive. “You’re a fan too, right? Do you feel like you know him through his work? His music, his videos, his other art?”

“Chloe, that’s all marketing,” he spoke carefully, not wanting to bring her energy back down. “Parasocial, like you’re supposed to be building with your audience.”

“No, I think it’s different,” she murmured. “All our training here is so focused on authenticity, on true expression in our art. Maybe the parasocial thing is a deflection? No, no, it’s all affectation. All marketing. It’s not really me. But in reality, it is. Do you think he could be hiding behind the pageantry? Behind the spectacle? Plausibly denying what he is, what he feels? It must be mortifying, to be so… exposed.”

“I… honestly couldn’t say,” Adrian spoke slowly. “But I’ve wondered something similar, I suppose. There’s something about the balance between cynical business and authentic art-making that I still don’t really understand. I hope it becomes clearer.”

“I wish we could pick his brain,” Chloe sighed, her face resting on the bout of her guitar. “But I’m not sure I would know what to do with the answers he’d give.”

“That’s an oddly wise sentiment, coming from you,” Adrian smirked, feeling his way blindly back from this philosophical musing to normal conversation.

“I’ve been reading the Parables. Really trying to internalize the lessons. They help in moments like this, when I’m stuck. The lesson is something like… like, even if you had the answers written down in front of you, in plain English, you don’t have the experience to implement that information yet, and it’s important to just do the work, even if it’s frustrating that it takes a couple years.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Adrian picked up a stray folio page and turned it over in his hands. “In two years, you’ll be two years older, whether or not you did the work. Time is the price of everything, and there’s no way to earn any more of it. So… we keep practicing. Until it works.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself,” she closed her eyes, letting the midmorning sun play with her hair and kiss her eyelids. They enjoyed the moment of calm, listening to the little birds of the garden as they flit about on their errands. On serious CVLT business, they often joked.

“Maybe this just isn’t meant to be,” Chloe sighed at last. “It feels like I’m forcing it now.”

“I get what you mean,” Adrian nodded. “Sometimes it’s just not time yet. You can always come back to the idea later. Rewrite it, or-”

“No, I think it’s done,” Chloe grumbled. “There’s a bad taste in my mouth about it now.”

“Are you sure? I don’t think it’s a bad concept…”

“I… I don’t know,” she seemed deflated. “I’m just stuck. I can’t keep wasting time on it. If I don’t have something good by the end of the moon, I’ll look like an ass. Maybe lose my slot.”

“They wouldn’t drop you for one bad moon,” Adrian put his hand on her shoulder.

“I can’t get dropped,” Chloe murmured. “It’s not an option. I won’t break this early. I won’t be able to respect myself after. Lots of people crumple during the Trials, that’s the point of them, but to not even make it that far? That’s… pathetic.” Her lip curled into a snarl and she pounded her fist on the marble bench before standing up and pacing away.

“Chloe wait–” Adrian started up after her but she whirled to face him, face flushed, teeth bared, with the bottomless madness of the Apollonians dancing in her eyes.

“I was made for more than that!” she hissed.

“You certainly were.” Both students whirled as a new voice pried its way into their conversation. Smooth, heavy, and loaded with intention, it set them both on edge, hair standing up on the backs of their necks as their eyes darted around the garden. A hand punctured the shrubbery barely twenty feet from the bench they had been sitting on, and their hearts skipped a beat in tandem.

The foliage was brushed aside, and suddenly the Demigod was there, a terrible manifestation of their wishes for aid. Seeing him for the first time, up-close and in-person, was stunning. There was a weight that seemed to hang in the air around him, helped no doubt by his unusual and ostentatious clothing. This morning he appeared in a loose silk wrap, an unidentifiable style that did not suggest any particular place or culture of origin. With his hair tied back loosely and his sleeves high on his tan forearms, he was the very image of a wandering holy man, manifested to preach an unknown faith from somewhere else. His skin glowed in the warm light, but his eyes might as well have been chips of black ice. He was barefoot, and one of the little birds of the garden was perched on his finger, a burst of midnight blue against the green backdrop.

“My apologies, dear friends, I’ll be back with you shortly,” he gestured apologetically behind him, to where his students could see a table set up in the ruin of some old CVLT building. It was a small, clean area with ivy climbing the walls and an intact dome overhead, not unlike the transept of a small church. In the shade of this area sat three women, two veiled in black, and one wrapped in shocking red, with a black cat on her lap. The black-clad women were not unusual— many visitors to CVLT kept their identities secret, for fear that the association with the Demigod would affect their reputations in the outside world. It was a brutal necessity, but one which the Lord of the Cult allowed. No, despite the terrifying potential that one of the black veils hid a hero of the Craft, someone with the power to either manifest or obliterate their nascent careers, the figure in red was far, far more chilling to behold. The Mistress of Narratives herself, the star malevolent, the seeress ascendent, the bloody left hand of the Demigod, interrupted while sipping her midmorning tea. Sophia. Her left hand was wrapped around the throat of the purring cat, massaging the beast gently. She raised her other hand in acknowledgement of the Demigod’s apology, but her ice-blue eyes did not even flicker in the students’ direction before the Demigod let go of the foliage and she disappeared behind a wall of green.

“The situation with Sophia has caused… difficulties,” he spoke slowly, smoothly, surely. “No one appreciates that more than I. But I can’t allow you to drop the song. Not this one.”

“Why not?” Adrian had instinctively stepped between the Demigod and Chloe, and spoke as if defending her. The Demigod’s eyes flashed at him.

“You… you have failed thus far in coaxing the song out because you are unwilling to be completely honest. You do your ‘friend’ a disservice by treating her so delicately,” his face was severe. “Disrespectful. If she shatters under the weight of your criticism, she was never strong enough to make it in the first place. Do you doubt her strength?”

“I… no!” Adrian floundered.

“Good,” the Demigod’s eyes glittered like fire-ash as he brushed his sleeves back and let the bird settle in his cupped hand. “We’ll fix the song now, then,” he turned his smoldering gaze onto Chloe. “Do not spoil his faith in you.” She nodded, transfixed by his glare. Her shaking hands picked up her guitar and she grit her teeth together. Mercifully, the Demigod closed his eyes as she began to play.

“Stop,” she froze, barely four bars in. “The rhythm of the introduction changes once you begin the verse. Why?”

“I uh, I’m not sure,” she mumbled. “I think it’s the rhythm I originally wrote, before I had lyrics, and I’ve just never updated the intro. Old habits?” The Demigod nodded.

“You’ve worked on the song too long, and part of it has worn a rut in your brain. When learning a new song, we tend to wear that rut deeper at the beginning, stopping in the middle many times before we can push all the way through to the end. And writing a new song is learning a new song. It will take significant effort to fix, so start now.” Chloe swallowed dry, and began to play again.

I got your letter in the mail today
Seems you had something you just had to say
And-

“Stop,” Chloe was sweating in the mild midmorning sun. She’d played six bars, this time.

“You break into falsetto almost immediately. For what purpose?” His closed-eye scowl was disconcerting. She felt that even if she wasn’t being seen, she was being perceived in a very invasive way.

“Emotional intensity,” Chloe answered confidently, but quietly. “I wanted to start on a high note, literally and-” The Demigod interrupted her with a wave of his hand, as if pulling the breath from her mouth.

“Intensity means nothing if you do not have contrast,” he shook his head. “You must earn your moments of falsetto, not the least because it represents the spirit realm. It is the voice of the disembodied, those beyond biological limitations. Falsetto is neither male nor female, neither child nor adult. It is distinctly Other, and should be treated as such. Do you understand?” Chloe took a deep breath.

“I… think so.”

“Hold the falsetto for the most tender moment, or the most triumphant. Begin again.”
She did.

I got your letter in the mail today
Seems you had something you just had to say
And after all the fights and embarrassment,
I want to just be candid, so I
Sent…You… A… Song… Bac-

“Stop,” air hissed in through her teeth. She couldn’t believe how tense she was. She’d finished 8 bars this time. “That word irks me,” his eyes remained closed, his face creased with concentration. He was petting the little bird in his hands as he listened.

“Which w-”

“You know which one. Why do you insist on forcing it in, against the wishes of rhythm and prosody?”

“I’m… I like it. I think it’s the best word,” the Demigod opened one eye. “For the situation!” she hastily added. “There’s no best word, of course, but it’s very powerful, very evocative, has a lot of meaning...”

“And I look fantastic naked.” He did not elaborate. The moment stretched awkwardly long, and Chloe met Adrian’s equally baffled eyes. He shrugged in disbelief.

“Just giving you a moment to imagine it,” the Demigod smirked, eyes still shut. “I could be wearing anything. I have suits, robes, casual clothes, even armour. Many of them are fine, some are bespoke. Heirlooms, in fact. But most of them are inappropriate for midmorning tea.

“Context is crucial. Great jewels left on the ground look like children’s marbles. A golden crown worn at a party instantly seems plastic. A word,” he raised his cupped hands and kissed the top of the bird’s tiny head, eliciting a whistle of delight. “Forced in where it doesn’t belong becomes a splinter of glass, lodged in the folds of my brain. Grating, disproportionately annoying, and a terrible feeling to force upon an audience who is graciously furnishing you with his attention. Do not betray your audience by failing to entertain them, especially not out of some misplaced egoic need to use a big word.”

Chloe was silent for a long moment, her eyes cast down.

“Why don’t you want to change the word, Chloe?” The Demigod’s eyes were still closed. The silence stretched on, punctuated only by the happy noises of the little bird.

“Why doesn’t she want to change the word, Adrian?” Adrian nearly jumped at the sound of his name.

“I suggested it, before,” he scrambled to pick up some of the scattered bits of scorepaper. “I thought it was a little long, sounded off somehow, so we-” the Demigod held up his hand to silence Adrian.

“Why,” his voice was louder now. “Don’t you want to change the word, Chloe?” She was chewing her lip again, eyes fixed on the grass, knuckles white around the neck of her guitar.

“Why have you wasted your friend’s time by not telling him, Chloe?” The air in her mouth became coarse with the Demigod’s impatience.

“Whose word is it, Chloe?” She gasped, eyes snapping up to meet his balefire gaze. Stunned, her mouth moved wordlessly.

“Who did she lose, Adrian? Who is the song lamenting?”

“Uh, an ex-boyfriend, I guess. Most of us lost someone when we were initiated, it-”

“No. It’s not a breakup song,” The Demigod eased the distance between them closer with the sleek menace of a panther. “It’s a memorial.” Adrian turned to Chloe, but she was absolutely focused on the Lord of the CVLT, her face drawn half in shock, half in fury.

“Two problems,” the Demigod counted them off on his fingers. “First, that this is a memorial disguised as a breakup song. Different flavours of heartache, though the underlying loss is very similar. And clearly,” he gestured towards Adrian. “Your audience is tasting the wrong flavour. That lack of control precludes it being a clever subversion of audience expectations, and anyway, it’s very off-color to bait-and-switch romance with familial love. But you don’t reveal it, and now you find yourself two steps into the Styx.

“Second, a failure to communicate is already mortal for an artist, but a failure to communicate with a fellow artist is a betrayal. You have stolen his time by refusing to tell him the truth. It absolves Adrian of his cowardice, but only on a technicality.” He was standing in front of her now, dark and fearsome, and Chloe felt forced to break his gaze by the sheer intensity of his attention.

“If you can not be honest with someone who shares the struggle, how do you expect to be honest with a real audience? And how can you possibly,” he placed the bird carefully on the headstock of her guitar, and put his hands gently on her shoulders. “Possibly hope to honour a memory that way?” He grasped her chin and raised her eyes back to his. It was still overwhelming to be so close to him, but there was softness in his predator’s gaze now. Kindness, a kind of warm glow that overtook the icy gleam.

“Your mother?” he asked. Chloe nodded.

“How did you know?”

The Demigod gave a half shrug.

“There’s a maudlin streak in the lyrics that made me think so. We tend to mourn mothers more keenly,” he held her cheek for a moment, gave her a slight nod, and mercifully swept his eyes away. He held out his finger and the little bird leapt back onto it.

“If the word is indispensable to the memory, then this is a private song. Permissible. I have many, myself. But if you can sacrifice the specificity of your situation, you have the potential to connect with the grief of your audience. That is the soul of an artist, the core of our purpose. Are you brave enough to open your chest, bare your heart to the world and let your tears flow freely in front of your adoring audience? Are you willing to trust that they will forgive you for crying, because you are crying for them? Sacrificing your privacy for the sake of their catharsis?”

Chloe chewed her lip for a long moment, with only the sounds of the little bird piercing the warm midmorning air. Adrian didn’t dare speak up. He wasn’t sure what he was witnessing, but he felt the import of the moment, and kept his mouth shut. Eventually, Chloe spoke.

“I surrender the details of my story,” she enunciated slowly, deliberately. “And it becomes more relatable because it’s… more generic?”

The Demigod tutted.

“You strip the story back so that everyone can fill in their own details. You create a shared memory, your song becomes the structure that every listener hangs their own emotions on. You allow them to decorate your work, and in doing so, your song takes flight.”

“But how can it honour my mother’s memory if it isn’t explicitly about her, anymore?” Chloe countered confidently, her mind spinning faster. “If my listeners don’t hear her story, is the song still for her?”

“Not just for her,” The Demigod’s voice was the only sound that rustled the leaves around them. “For every mother, every death, every loss. You are the one who honours her, not the audience. You take their energy, and send it heavenward. You give them space to project their emotion, and as an Artist, it feeds you. What you do with that energy is entirely up to you,” His eyes flashed between the two Initiates, his voice dropped into a growl. “Choose wisely. All magic has a price.”

Chloe swallowed. She took a deep breath, and began to play again.

I got your letter in the mail today,
Seems you had something you just had to say,
After all the fights I’m empty-handed,
And I want to just be candid, so I sent
You… A… Song… Back.

It’s been so long since I’ve seen you,
What time is it where you are?
After all that you put me through
I can only talk through this guitar,

“Enough,” The Demigod raised his hand. “You’ve chosen well, Initiate. Remember this moment, there will be many like it on your journey.”

“Thank you,” Chloe bowed her head, strangely out of breath. “I will. I will remember this.”

“Do not give in to despair so easily. Masterpieces take time. Your three months of work is a drop in the ocean of your life. You will agonize over bigger and better songs, sometimes for years before they begin to work. And you are never alone. Now then, I should really let this one be on his way.”

He raised his hands and the little bird took flight, disappearing over the hedges. The Demigod kept his eyes on Chloe until she met his gaze, and he flashed her a half smile.
“He has important CVLT business to attend to.”

And just as suddenly as he had appeared, the Demigod vanished back into the foliage of the garden.

Elysia was staring at the high ceiling of her dorm room, waiting for the shadows to run down the columns like melting wax in the creeping pink glow of the pre-dawn. Not even 48 hours since her audition, and she was in a completely different world.

The trek through the woods, the sunset, the passage between the rocks and under the archway. The cave. The long walk in the dark tunnel, lit only by occasional torchlight. The emergence at the edge of the great clearing, the gasp that escaped her lips the first time she saw the Temple. The night was bright, but the building was a vicious black void against the star-strewn sky.

The quiet walk through the gardens as odd noises stalked the shadows around them. The marble entranceway, the way the veins of gold in the walls and floor seemed to smoulder like coal and light the dark passageways. The stunning array of sparkling gems in the ceiling that stretched to dizzying heights, an admirable imitation of the real cosmos that stretched away into infinity above the great roof.

She had sat stiffly in a dark room while grim-faced academics in curious, colour-coded costumes from an ancient time quizzed her, asking rapid-fire questions about music theory, history, and instrument design. She sight-read, played her scales and arpeggios, and even improvised for them. She received very little feedback after each test, and as they concluded, she asked if it was supposed to be that easy. They laughed as they presented her with a folded uniform of shocking scarlet. She did not understand the joke.

The uniforms were from a different time and place, but as she looked at herself in her dorm’s full-length mirror, Elysia felt an odd tug under her ribs. Something felt familiar about the long scarlet tunic, but try as she might, she couldn’t dredge up any memories that matched. She’d never been one for dresses, and had made her mother stop buying them as soon as she was old enough to articulate her need for pants. A sense of relief washed over her as she put her plain jeans back on, but the feeling of the textured linen tunic on her skin was stuck like a splinter of glass in the corner of her mind.

Her dorm room was sparse but well-appointed. It was white marble, complete with a pair of columns that soared to a ceiling easily fourteen feet above her. She had a sizeable bed, a heavy armchair, and a huge, gaping hole in the wall. It wasn’t damage to the Temple’s structure, no, it looked very intentional, set like a window just above a low couch, but as she climbed up into it, she saw that it was level with the grass outside. There were cryptic cyrillic words inlaid in gold on a black stripe of marble that limned the mouth of that portal out into the darkness, where she could see the moonlight frosting the tops of the trees at the edge of the clearing. Her room seemed to be elevated somewhat from the gardens, so nobody could simply walk by the hole, but it still made her uneasy. She couldn’t stop thinking of it as a hole, rather than a feature. A weakness, a portal which could admit anyone or any thing to enter her space.

She sat heavily in the armchair and reached for the pile of books that sat on a small table beside it. A welcome package of sorts, there was some information here about the organization of CVLT, the schedules, the classes, and how to navigate the Temple. There were “schools”, “disciplines”, and “cults” within the organization, but they seemed administrative. Her red tunic was in the style of a chiton, an ancient Greco-Roman piece of clothing, and the brilliant scarlet meant she belonged to the cult of Apollo. There were ranks, signified by coloured chitonai and other accessories. Do people really wear these every day?

Satisfied that she understood the structure of her education, she picked up another book – a guide to the Temple grounds. The hole was safe, it assured her, and represented the freedom for both her and Inspiration (capitalized like a name) to come and go as they pleased. The guide said that higher level dorms would not have this privilege, at which Elysia raised an incredulous eyebrow, but she kept reading. The gardens were safe at night, but the forest was not safe, ever. This sent a chill down her spine. She was free to come and go, but the forest wasn’t safe? Who would she have to ask if she wanted to leave?

Elysia shut the book sharply and took a deep breath. She caught herself panicking and reminded herself what she had said to the Gatekeeper. The promise she’d made to herself. Everyone I used to know, everything I used to have. She’d come this far because she had nothing worth going back to, nobody who understood her dream, nobody to confide in. If this was the place for her, the place where she belonged, it was worth becoming a little weird in order to fit in.

She must have gotten over her apprehension of the hole because she woke up when the sunrise kissed her eyelids, sprawled out on her bed. She noted that she didn’t get cold despite the spring chill she felt the day before, but didn’t dwell on it. The book had said that nobody could see into her room but she still felt strange changing in broad daylight. In her scarlet chiton, belted at the waist, she felt awkward and out-of-place. She picked up her violin case, took a deep breath, and left her room.

Her awkwardness disappeared as she began to mingle with the crowd of other students, variously dressed in chitonai, street clothes, formal attire, and odd, foreign mixes of the three. She followed them to the mess hall, ate normal breakfast food, and was often greeted and welcomed into the cult by friendly, smiling faces. There were a lot of people here, but not an overwhelming number. She guessed maybe 150 milling about the mess hall in the time she spent eating eggs and toast. She nudged the boy sitting next to her, who had previously greeted her with a winning smile and a firm handshake, standing out somewhat with his bright green chiton, red silk sash, and waves of blonde hair.

“Where do I go now?” She whispered.

“You just got in last night?” He laughed. “You really don’t get much guidance from the night shift, huh? Don’t worry, it’ll all make sense very soon.” He shoveled the rest of his breakfast unceremoniously into his mouth and led her to a grand hall with a raised dais. There were dozens of musicians milling about, carrying instruments and sheaves of scorepaper as they made their way… somewhere. Many were walking on the dais, making their way in and out of various other rooms, but they all gave a wide berth to the three figures standing in the middle.

A bizarre group, Elysia’s eyes were assaulted by how different they were. Two women and a man, all casually speaking across each other as they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, eyes scanning the crowd from above. On the right was a tan woman whose background Elysia couldn’t place, wearing a shimmering blue dress that felt far too formal in the early hours of the morning. She was tall and perfectly put-together, her straight black hair shining in the sun’s early glow. On the left was a man in black slacks, dress boots, and a purple silk shirt, unbuttoned halfway down his chest, with the posture of a gunslinger from an Old American western. He was imposingly tall, covered in silver jewelry, and his sleeves were rolled up to reveal leather cuffs on his forearms. He wore sunglasses indoors, which was odd, but Elysia supposed that there was less of a distinction between in and out here, what with the holes in the walls.

But the one in the middle was different. Everything about her was red, from her mane of wavy hair to her snarling lips and unplaceable dress, something almost medieval in design. Her eyes were white-blue, too large for her face, and kept flickering upwards towards something Elysia could not see.

“Lucien!” Her guide called out and pulled her up the dais directly towards the trio. “Hey, Lucien!”

“Alex, can I do something for you?” The man’s smile dripped charisma, and Elysia found it difficult to tear her eyes off of him. He was handsome, in the late years of middle-age, but showed few signs of it on his pale face. As he peered over his sunglasses, she saw that his eyes were sharp and bright green, and they licked Elysia up and down for a moment too long before returning to Alex’s face.

“This is Elysia, she just got in last night. Night shift handed her a robe and sent her straight to her dorm.”

“God damn it,” Lucien shook his head. “What do I have to do to get them to play by the rules? Whip them?”

“Would you enjoy that, Lucien?” The tan woman in the fine dress practically purred the words.

“No, not really,” Lucien’s face split into a slick grin. “I’d let Sophia handle it, I’m sure it’s up her alley.”

“Appalling.” The woman in red had a high, flinty voice and spoke in a disconcerting monotone. Her eyes never stopped moving, but she never turned them towards her companions, or towards Alex. Elysia shivered harder the longer she looked at her, and forcefully tore her eyes back onto Lucien.

“Where are my manners? A pleasure to meet you, Elysia,” Lucien bowed slightly to shake her hand, and Elysia felt like the air around him was thicker, warmer than normal, and harder to breathe. The tan woman seemed to glide around behind Lucien, appearing on his other side, and also shook Elysia’s hand.

“Vivienne, my darling. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.” Her words felt genuine, but her smile set Elysia’s teeth on edge. Both Lucien and Vivienne turned to look at the woman in red, who had not acknowledged the introductions. She kept her unsettling eyes on the crowd, looking as if for something only she could see.

“Alex, you’re not busy until tonight,” Lucien’s smile was slightly stiff now. “Could you take her papers and get her enrolled? Give her a quick tour, too.” Lucien and Alex clasped hands and thumped each other on the back.

“I’ll see you in Studio 2. Show up on time!” Alex called up to Lucien as he took Elysia back down the dais.

“I don’t take orders from you, Adept!” Lucien laughed as he shouted back, and returned to sweeping the crowd.

As they disappeared back into the crowd of bodies, Elysia suddenly knew, inexplicably, that there were icy blue eyes boring into the back of her head. She suppressed a shudder as she followed Alex back towards her dorm.

“Who are they?” Elysia asked as soon as they were in a quiet hallway.

“They’re the Circle,” Alex said, casually. “The highest-ranking ones in the entire cult. There are other members, but they’re the ones that live here full-time.”

“You’re the only one who walked up to them. You know them well?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Alex laughed. “I’ve been here a long time, I know everyone now.” Elysia stole a closer look at Alex’s face out of the corner of her eye. He couldn’t have been older than 25. How young was he when he joined? Did he have to make it out into the forest too? As a child?

Right before they turned down the last hallway, Elysia froze.

“How do you know where my dorm is?” Her heart was beating fast.

Alex stopped in his tracks, now a few paces ahead. He turned towards her, surprise written across his face. He gestured towards her violin case.

“You’re a violinist, right? This is the string section.” Something in his eyes made Elysia nauseous. They were too clear, too sincere, too innocent.

“Oh,” Elysia felt a moment of embarrassment. “I didn’t realize they were… organized.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Alex laughed easily, cutting the tension. “Everything will be very strange for a few days. It’s normal to feel a little threatened. It’ll take a couple weeks before you find your clique and stop feeling like you’re undercover.”

“Sure, sure,” Elysia mumbled. He has an answer for everything.

She hurried into her room and brought out the handful of papers she’d been given with her chiton the night before.

“Oh wow, you really impressed them,” Alex was looking over the documents. “You’re that good?”

How the hell am I supposed to answer that?

“Yeah, I’m pretty good,” She answered, lamely.

“Awesome,” He was grinning earnestly. “Let’s get you enrolled in your classes.”

And so here she was, lying on her bed, waiting for dawn to kiss the tops of the columns so they would blush pink in the morning light. Gradually, the static in her head grew louder and louder, until she couldn’t take it anymore. She stood up, dressed in her chiton, and began to explore the Temple.

Elysia found herself breathless over and over again as she made her way through the empty galleries in the hush of the early morning. In the daylight, the Temple had seemed like a monumental tribute to the awe of nature, with filigreed columns soaring to richly decorated ceilings, bringing to mind the titanic bulk of redwood trees aimed at an unreachable sky. The architecture rarely felt like it was truly inside, with grand galleries and vast open spaces blurring the lines between adjoining rooms. The boundaries between sections were marked more by decorations, platforms, and porticoes than by anything else, giving a distinct feeling of crossing lines rather than truly dividing the space into rooms.

Elysia wandered for well over an hour, running her hands along the smouldering veins in the marble walls, sitting at the top of stairs, listening to the way her footsteps sounded beneath her feet, marveling at the way the Temple refused to echo the noise of her explorations back at her. It keeps secrets, she thought to herself.

She found herself walking through the upper level of a cafe, modelled after a European ideal of open, social space, with the foliage of nearby trees reachable from the exposed balcony. Morning light was just beginning to redden the treetops, and she breathed deep as the breeze carried the smells of the forest to her. The strangeness of this massive complex, hidden so far from civilization, was starting to fade away, but her acceptance did nothing to diminish how fantastical the experience was. This is my life now..?

A wet plop sounded through the hush of dawn. Below her, in the courtyard of the cafe, there was a large circular table, slightly concave, so that the water gathered on its surface formed a smooth, shallow pool. The water was silver in the faint light, rippling out from a spot in the center. There was a man standing at the edge of the pool, his back to her, his hands resting on the rim of the table. As she looked at his reflection to see his features, his bright gold eyes found hers, and her heart quickened. Still looking at her in the reflection, he beckoned her to come.

He didn’t turn around as she approached through the lower level, instead manipulating something in his hands, as if lost in thought. She stood at the edge of the table, leaving some distance between them. After a moment, he spoke.

“Awake at this hour, Initiate?” He spoke slowly, with a voice as deep and rich as honey. Now that she could see him better, she realized he was dressed in something like a silk robe, though nothing signified a culture of origin to her eyes. His skin was tan, his long, dark hair tied back loosely, which did nothing to diminish the impression of a lion’s wild mane. His short beard was perfectly trimmed, and he had the sharp features of a wild predator. Gold glimmered at his neck and wrists, and chimed softly as he moved his hands.

“I couldn’t sleep,” She answered somewhat sheepishly. “It’s been a strange journey.”

“Most journeys are,” He chuckled softly. “You’ve only just arrived?”

“Yes, late last night. I’m still getting my bearings,” Why did she feel the need to justify herself to him? He tossed something into the pool, making another wet plop. A small ceramic tablet rose to the surface, a cyrillic letter scratched on the visible face. The man tutted.

“No man ever steps into the same river twice for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man,” He said it as if it was a quote.

“I’m… sorry?” She wasn’t sure what to make of it.

“Journeys create change, both within us and without. As soon as you have your bearings, you will not be the same as you were when you arrived. Every class will change you, moulding you slowly into something else. In our lucid moments, we marvel at how strange it is to change, but most of the time we don’t even notice.” Elysia found herself nodding as he spoke. He tossed another tablet into the pool, this one showing a blank face to the sky. He let out a small grunt of disgust.

“What are you doing?” She asked.

“Oh, just thinking,” He demurred. “We’ve called chance the will of the gods for as long as we’ve had gods to worship. Even now, we search for meaning in randomness, to guide us in making decisions.”

“A coin toss?” She ventured.

“Just so,” He smiled and finally turned his lurid, golden eyes on her. “But you don’t have to wait and see what the coin says. The moment it’s in the air, often you know which answer you’re hoping for. I’m doing something similar, albeit in an ancient style. The Greeks would throw tablets like these into an urn full of water, and the first one to pour out was the answer. The Romans would open Virgil’s books to a random page, and point at a random line, and meditate on what it meant for their destinies. Vikings also threw tablets, early Europeans drew tarot cards, some cultures even read the gore of sacrificed animals. Every culture invents a way to consult the universe. Sometimes doing little things like this helps to… orient me.”

“You’re trying to make a big decision?” Elysia’s curiosity was piqued. The man took a deep breath.

“Yes, there are many decisions weighing on my mind at the moment. Some heavier than others,”

“Is it magic?” Elysia asked, quietly.

“Everything is magic,” he answered assuredly.

“The pool? The tablets? Do you say magic words when you… cast them in?”

“The scrying pool is quite ordinary,” he laughed. “The tablets are baked clay. And I say nothing as I cast them, I just think about my question, my desires, the paths ahead of me..” He produced a long brass stylus from his robe and scratched another letter onto a tablet.

“Omega, the final letter. I am considering whether one of my projects is complete, or whether there is more that I should do.” He cast the tablet into the pool and it plopped beneath the silvery surface into darkness. After a moment, it reappeared, the omega face-up as it floated on water as still and smooth as glass.

“The pool affirms an ending,” he nodded. “But I disagree. I can always do more. I often spend too much time and effort to achieve my artistic vision. A character flaw, perhaps.”

“Why cast the tablet if you’re going to disagree with the answer?” Elysia stepped closer to peer into the shallow depth of the scrying pool. It was strangely dark, just below the surface. Something to do with the dark stone?

“Because my desire became clear to me the moment the tablet left my hand. The pool gives clarity, not prophecy. I choose to be in control of my… destiny. That is the magic of it.” Elysia thought about this for a long moment.

“May I?”

The man silently slid a tablet around the rim of the pool to her. She picked it up, taking a moment to feel the cold, rough ceramic in her hand.

“I don’t know Greek,” she said lamely.

“Neither does the pool,” he shrugged and offered her the stylus. “Write what-ever you want.” The double-meaning of what-ever was not lost on Elysia. She turned the tablet over in her hand, a rectangle the size of a small domino, off-white in colour. What do I want? What is my question?

After a moment of consideration, she scratched a crown with the stylus. She held the rough tablet to her lips, whispering her desire for power, for fame, for mastery, not just over her art, but over hearts and minds. She kissed the ceramic and let the tablet fly.

Plop!

A crown slowly rose to the surface of the pool. Elysia let out a breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding. She covered her face with her hands, rubbing gently.

“Excellence,” she breathed. “In everything. Mastery. That’s what I want.” She turned to the man, but his face was dark, his eyes burning into the tablet that floated slowly towards them in the pool. His lips were set in a grimace of disgust, and Elysia shivered.

“Is everything all right?” She asked hesitantly. His face cleared immediately and he smiled at her.

“Yes, everything is fine. Just remembering something I’d forgotten about.”

As if on cue, new voice caused Elysia to start violently:
“My Lord,” the woman in red was standing on the man’s other side. “We have business to attend to.” She was just as unsettling as she had been the day before, eyes alight but never meeting Elysia’s. She kept them fixed on the man’s face, her expression softer than it had been when she scanned the crowd.

“Yes, of course,” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath as the sun finally broke over the top of the trees. In the golden light of dawn, Elysia was suddenly struck by the way the sun danced across the man’s skin, shone in his hair, and caused his jewelry to glow.

“Who are you?” She managed to ask. He opened eyes that flashed with the same light as the rising sun and smiled at Elysia.

“Oh, please,” The woman in red scoffed. She had finally turned her gaze onto Elysia, who shivered under her icy glare, recognizing unrestrained hatred in her too-wide eyes.

“You’re important, aren’t you?” Elysia was still addressing the man.

“Well, it is my CVLT,” he chuckled. A real chill ran down Elysia’s spine, and she was suddenly aware of the gravity of this meeting.

“It’s you,” she whispered. "You’re the Demigod.” He placed a hand on his heart and gave her a shallow bow.

“Guilty as charged,” he was still smiling. “I hope to hear great things from you, Initiate. Follow your heart, and immerse yourself in our culture. Everything you see here,” he gestured around them. “Was handmade, to one end. It all exists for the sake of making you powerful.” Elysia took a moment to look at the gorgeous patio she was standing on, the exquisite block of marble the pool had been carved from, the grand balcony looming above them, and the tentative fingers of foliage reaching over the line that separated the Temple from the wilderness beyond.

“My Lord!” Elysia caught a shout of surprise in her throat as yet another voice startled her. Suddenly, there was a woman standing with them, veiled in white like the Gatekeeper had been, but somehow Elysia knew this was not the same woman. There was an edge of panic in her voice as she addressed the Demigod.

“You are late! I couldn’t find you anywhere! You must not disappear on such an auspicious occasion!”

He sighed and rolled his shoulders.

“Heavy is the head that wears the laurel crown. You want excellence, Initiate? Know that as you reach your hands for power, many hands will reach for you, as well.” The woman in white had grasped his forearm with both hands and was pulling him away from Elysia and the pool.

“Oh, one more piece of advice,” he spoke over his shoulder even as his body was turned away. “Take those off. It’s harder to be surprised when you’re barefoot.”

Elysia looked down as three pairs of naked feet padded near-silently away on the marble. She realized, somewhat sheepishly, that she was still wearing her hiking boots and wool socks, which clashed horribly with the scarlet chiton. She tugged them off and felt the cold marble beneath her. The vibrations of their movements reached her, travelling across the marble and into her feet, so much smaller than sound, so subtle that she had been unable to feel them through the thick rubber sole of her boots. Interesting. She closed her eyes.

Elysia stood quietly by the edge of the pool for a few minutes, feeling the sun warm her face, hearing the noise of other cultists beginning their day, and enjoying the rush of tiny sensations that raced to her along the stone floor. Finally, she leaned over the pool and fished out the tablet she’d thrown in. Her fingertips recoiled from the water at first, finding it icy cold, but she steeled herself and grabbed the tablet, feeling the crunch of slush in her fist. Water had seeped into the ceramic and the crown was now a dark sigil on a white background. She held it tightly to her chest, feeling her heart hammer against her fist.

Everyone I used to know, Everything I used to have.
A name, a face, a crown of glory.

The smell of sweat and alcohol. The crush of bodies, the humidity of livestock packed in pens. The flash of stage lights and the roar of guitar. The club was packed well over the legal capacity, but the promoters were known to make exceptions. At least, they did for Quentin.

In his spotless leather sneakers, blue jeans and white t-shirt, Quentin was in his full good-boy costume, singing his heart out at the final show of his tour. His throat was dry, his eyes stung in the light, and his shoulders ached from endless nights of playing guitar. He felt the sting of exhaustion as he ripped through his solo, and in a moment where his hand was free, he desperately signalled to his drummer to stall. His band was professional and disciplined, and even through his own hazy vision, the drummer started a breakdown.

Panting with exertion, dripping sweat under the stage lights, Quentin shook damp blonde curls out of his eyes. He had bought ten seconds to prepare for the final chorus, and didn’t intend to waste a single one of them. He gulped water from a sport bottle and sprayed the leftovers on his face. He imagined steam rising from his skin as he toweled his face and neck dry, throwing the sweaty towel into the screaming crowd. One second left. One last drum fill.

Quentin launched into the final chorus with the last shreds of his voice.

I’ve got a new girl now,
And we do all the things that couples do
I’ve got a new girl now,
And she’ll do anything I want her to

The crowd was screaming themselves hoarse alongside him. Quentin planted his feet and felt the bones click in his wrist as he stopped strumming and launched into a second, improvised solo to play them out. The connection between him and his fans was electric, but Quentin was burning out. He rode the last spasms of that supernatural energy as he finished the song:

I’ve got a new girl now,
I think I might make her my wife real soon,
I’ve got a new girl now,
But she looks just like
You.

Quentin fell to his knees as the crowd rained glory down upon him. He lost his vision in the ebb and flow of their screams, drifting on the tide of their adoration. He was only semi-lucid when his bassist lifted him to his feet and raised his fist in the air, triumphant, but entirely spent.

There was no chance of an encore. Quentin was half-asleep by the time his team had helped him back onto the bus, and the next morning he could barely remember the walk between the stage and his bed. But he wasn’t done. A hiccup in his scheduling meant he had an interview and a meet-and-greet to do before he could officially be through with this chapter. He couldn’t cancel them, no matter how much he wanted to. This show had been postponed from earlier in the tour, and he had contractual obligations to meet. He sat in silence with his band in the tour bus, lights off, sunglasses on, wincing as he swallowed hot tea with a throat that felt bruised from overuse.

They were worn ragged off of this tour, but when Quentin’s manager boarded the bus to start passing out the first round of cheques, the vibe shifted. This had been Quentin’s biggest success yet, and after years of lineup experiments, drug problems, and even a couple legal battles, Quentin was happy with his current team. He made sure they were cut fat cheques out of the tour profit, commensurate with their work, from the band all the way down to the techs and roadies. He didn’t say a word as his manager shook his hand to leave, though the matching snake rings on their fingers nearly kissed.

“I’ll be seeing you soon,” his manager nodded and fixed him with a meaningful stare over his orange-tinted sunglasses. Quentin lowered his own so they could meet eye-to-eye, and nodded back.

He was exhausted, kept upright by caffeine and force of will as the studio crew did his makeup for the morning talk show. Just smile, laugh, and answer their stupid questions. His voice was blown out, but it was a good look at the end of a tour – now everyone would hear how hard he’d worked, and it would complement the rave reviews from the night before. The hosts were there, sitting beside him. A short, ambiguously dark man who laughed too much, and a tall blonde woman who had no defining features whatsoever. A typical talkshow duo. Everything should be on-script.

He squinted into the harsh studio lights, wearing his shy earth-tones and chunky knit sweater. He was in mom-friendly self-promo mode, a much lower gear than the sexy but family-friendly teen heartthrob gear he used on-stage. Deep breaths. He needed to put on twenty minutes of the bashful shy-boy act before he was done. He could be more natural at the meet-and-greet after. He imagined a meter floating in the corner of his eye, his precious reserve of patience that he would have to spend very carefully.

Action.

The moment the hosts started gushing about his album, Quentin was reminded about how much he hated journalists. The energy was always manic, their praise flew too high, and the God-awful music puns made his stomach churn.

“- but what do you plan to do now that you’re free? What does an eligible young bachelor like you do in your off-time?” Her smile was too wide, her teeth were too white, and her tan was far too fresh in the middle of the big Midwestern empty.
“I’m going to spend some time with my family,” he croaked out calculated PR lies. “Catch up on some reading at the beach, and stay in bed all day, watching the shows I missed out on with my… puppy.”

“Awww!” She put a hand over her heart and pulled a big pouty face for the camera. Quentin felt his gorge rise but he bit his tongue and hid his snarl with another sip of tea.

“And what do you read? What’s on your reading list?” she was constant teeth, her lips never seemed to touch.

“Oh, I was planning to read something classic, maybe the Iliad? It’s been on my-” he was interrupted by the cohost.

“The Iliad? I’m sorry, no offense, but that’s a serious book for a kid like you!” he gestured wildly with his coffee mug, but Quentin didn’t flinch. He knew the only real drink in the room was in his hands.

“Kids used to read the classics in school,” Quentin tried to deflect, he’d gotten too close to telling the truth.

“Kids? Classics? When, way back in ancient Greece?” They were laughing. This was part of the script for young celebrity interviews; make fun of them no matter what. Quentin had dropped out of school to start his first tour after a meteoric rise to fame on social media, but the mainstream media humiliation ritual still had to play out if he wanted to keep climbing higher.

“You’ve still got a long way to go, kiddo. Maybe you should read something more age-appropriate? We were just interviewing this local author the other day-” Quentin’s eyes unfocused. He heard the pounding of taiko drums, the stamping of bare feet on packed earth. He felt the presence of something massive and hungry slinking through the shadows outside of the crowd, just beyond his vision. He felt blood roll out of his nose and over his lips, but his hands stayed clenched at his sides. He bared his teeth as someone stood between him and the Thing in the crowd. Lathos. He surged forward, felt fragile arm bones splinter in his grip as he bent them back, smiling scarlet as the drums beat faster. He could see his own face, eyes as black and pitiless as the void, pupils pinpricks of light as cold and distant as the stars above–

“–Quentin? Quentin? Oh, he’s so tired! It’s been such a long tour!” He was in the studio again. The blonde woman was touching him, her arm was across his shoulders and she rocked him like a child while making big, animated faces at the cameras. Quentin pushed a fake smile out between his teeth and laughed along, his voice as thin as his patience.

“Sorry, I guess I’m still too young to be working this hard,”

I’m nothing like you.

“Oh don’t worry, I’m going to go take a nap after this, myself! Hahaha!”

We have nothing in common.

“But we love having you here, thank you so much for taking the time to hang out with us!”

I’m not a child,

“Totally, it’s always great to catch up,”

I’m a prodigy.

Surreal. Like something out of her childhood stories.

The woman seated before the Violinist was immaculate, totally obscured in her white veil and trailing gown, absurdly, incongruously seated on a stone, hours of hiking from civilization. Somehow, the Violinist knew that she was a woman, even though there were no hints visible through the veil, not even the curve of a cheek under the gold circlet that rested on an invisible brow. Images of a cruel and beautiful face pressed their way into the Violinist’s mind, of piercing blue eyes and thick, golden braids that wove seamlessly into heavy, gold ropes draped around her shoulders. She imagined that she could almost hear a name, whispering at the corner of her mind. The Violinist had never believed in magic, not any more than any other modern did, but as a musician, she was always open to the possibility that there were portals. If she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have come so far to see if the rumours were true.

She had left home early that morning, bringing only her violin and a backpack with supplies, in case her trip took more than a day. The journey was a blur, a series of snapshots blended together by long, idle waiting. The sidewalk, the bus stop, the crying child on the bus. The station, the subway, the blare of unintelligible noise over the speaker. The delay. The sun caressing her face as she came topside again, walking the last few blocks to the train station. The ticket office, the platform. Walking past the luggage rack and hugging her violin case tight to her chest in her seat. The miserable gray of the industrial blocks fading to suburbs, to fields, and eventually to thick forest. The noonday light banishing the morning chill, the scrape of her jacket being shrugged off and the fresh attention of the sun on her skin. The endless crunch of leaves and pine needles underfoot, the spring chill, the smell of loam and the sound of animals rushing about, always just outside of her peripheral vision. Hours of walking, not really knowing where she was going. The crinkle of foil and the taste of granola and chocolate. GPS finally failing, using the position of the sun to keep going straight, or so she hoped.

The clearing. The stone. The woman in white.

She didn’t say a word, but the Violinist knew, somehow she couldn’t explain, that there were blue eyes boring into her. She felt compelled to speak.
“Are you the gatekeeper?” Her voice did not support the confidence of her words, wavering in the warm, spring air. The woman in white did not move, hands remaining folded on her lap.

“I came a long way,” The Violinist continued, clearing her throat. “I want to join. I came to join.”

Her only answer was the sounds of birds in the trees and squirrels in the brush. The absurdity of the encounter began to creep into her mind.

“Do you… sit here all day? Waiting? Do you eat? Are you hungry?” A doubt flickered across her thoughts, like the shadow of a passing bird.
“Are you real? Am I talking to a statue? Is this a prank? Am I being filmed?”

Finally, the woman in white moved, raising a hand as if to command the Violinist to halt. She held her breath, fresh wonder and fear sweeping away her misgivings. The woman in white gestured, as if to say go on. The Violinist swallowed, dropped her backpack, and began to take out her violin.

Somehow, a clearing in the woods felt stranger, more out-of-place than busking on the subway or practicing on the rooftop of her best friend’s apartment. Her mind flashed to the trees around them, alive and listening, and to the wood of her violin, which had once been just such a tree. Was it like listening to a corpse speak? Or like seeing an old friend, transformed? Odd, poetic thoughts were not new to the Violinist, but she crushed them down. This was an audition. Tuned and in position, taut as a wire, she paused. The woman in white nodded slowly. The Violinist felt a chill run down her spine in the warm spring air. She began to play.

Her pieces were originals, all of them. She didn’t dare to spend her time warming up, so she started with a slower, easier piece. She focused on the dynamics, letting the violin sing, swelling louder in triumph and dropping to a tender whisper of confession. As she finished the first piece, cold sweat stung her eyes. The woman in white nodded, slowly.

The Violinist took a deep breath, and started her second piece. Faster, more technical, but truthfully not much more than an embellished exercise, she sawed at her strings with fervor. Rage and pride inflected the notes, and she finished the piece with a flourish of her bow upwards, holding it aloft like a warrior, triumphant. The woman in white nodded again, this time with a tilt of her head that made the Violinist flush. A good sign? She imagined a half-grimace of respect on lips split by a scar. She shook the thoughts out of her head, and pulled out all of the stops.

She played a piece to make Vivaldi blush, a piece she intended as a spiteful jab at the faces of the old masters. Arrogant, brash, and nearsighted, she knew that it was only possible to write something so bold because she had learned from the same masters who she now sought to outdo. She stood on the shoulders of giants, claiming she was taller than all those that had come before. It was tongue-in-cheek, two-faced in the way that all art is, humble to her peers and boastful to her audience. Her shirt was soaked in sweat, and the tension in her chest felt like it would crack her ribs, but she kept playing. She finished the piece with a rapid-fire pizzicato assault on the strings, her nails plucking them directly so her arpeggios fell like rain. She let the last notes bleed out into silence, panting, limp hair hanging in her face. The silence stretched on forever, and she screwed her eyes shut against the sting of sweat-salt.

She heard clapping, slow and deliberate. The woman in white was still seated, but her head was high now.

“Well done,” she spoke with a voice high and rich. “You have impressed the Gatekeeper of the cult. You have… potential.” The Violinist sagged. Just potential? She’d played her heart out. But if the rumours were true, potential was high praise.

“So it’s real,” she panted. “The cult is real?”

“CVLT is real,” in the Gatekeeper’s mouth, the word sounded somehow different. “But it is not for the faint of heart, or the foolish, or the vainglorious. What are you willing to sacrifice for the sake of your art?”

Despite her doubts, the Violinist had not trekked out this far into the wilderness without conviction in her heart. Some part of her, the part where poetry was stitched together in the ruins of her heart, had decided long ago what she would do for her art.
“Everything,” Still out of breath, she pushed the word out through a barricade of clenched teeth. “Everyone I knew, everything I used to have.” The Gatekeeper thrust her chin out, glaring invisibly down at the kneeling Violinist.

“Your name?” The Gatekeeper still hadn’t shifted in her seat.
The Violinist answered through a mouth as dry as ash:
“Elysia.”

“Is everything all right?” They had been at this same track for days now, working on revisions and re-mixing. It was a large, collaborative piece to be played as an Exultation as the next group of Adepts earned their titles; a sacred moment when Initiates chose the Mission of CVLT over their own earthly desires for wealth and fame. Such a moment deserved a crown of glory — a dedication of allegiance from their peers. It had to be perfect.

But of course, the perfect is the mortal enemy of the good, and even the great. Lucien was now contending with the crashing tide of his juniors’ revisions and rewrites. Loathe to stop them from pursuing the Craft, reluctant to deny anyone their chance at introspection, Lucien quietly bore this labour of love, as he had dozens of times before.

“Yes and no,” he answered Quentin with a grim smile. “Dionysus gave me many gifts, but I gave myself patience. It does not come naturally.”

“I’ve noticed,” Quentin scoffed aloud.

There was always some tension between Lucien and Quentin. The elder musician was a legend who cut his teeth during the rock revival of the 2020’s. The quintessential rockstar, he exuded easy charisma and friendly charm. He was usually decked in jewelry, gaudy ostentatious rings and heavy pendants being his favorites. He wore slick snakeskin boots, tight black slacks, and a loose silk shirt in the vivid purple of the Dionysian school. Everything about his dress oozed sleazy sex appeal, and it wasn’t hard to visualize Lucien as part of a glam-rock band from the 1980’s.

Quentin, on the other hand, was a modern. Even though he dressed frumpily, in the androgynous streetwear and oversized hoodies that had plagued fashion for most of the 21st century, his youth and beauty were violently apparent. A young man still bearing the softness of boyhood in his face, his cherubic features served to hold eyes like crown jewels, as bright and green as emeralds. Between his tangle of boyish curls, his shining smile, and a voice that practically made love to any microphone that it touched, he had easily gathered an audience of young women with his crooning love songs.

But Quentin was no normal teenage heartthrob. His feigned bashfulness hid a true student of the Craft, and in his pursuit of musical enlightenment, he had callously separated his product from his ego. He had decimated his Trials with the uncommon skill of an elite, if not a virtuoso. Hot-blooded and flushed with triumph, he had chosen the premier guitarist of the Circle to apprentice under, rather than a prominent Apollonian who shared his philosophy.

In the months since, he’d regretted that decision several times.

Lucien was lax, casual, and went with the flow. He woke up late and casually wandered from room to room and lecture to lecture. He visited his friends in their studio sessions, and he spent lots of time jamming with Initiates who were preparing for their own Trials. He was an easy figurehead to follow, and one of the faces of CVLT. The quintessential Dionysian.

Quentin hated it. Punctual, determined, and more than a little obsessive, Quentin was always prepared in advance. CVLT taught Adepts to keep 6 weeks of music and content in their backlogs, but Quentin always had 12. He rose with the sun, had a meticulous skincare routine, and kept his dorm room militantly clean. If it wasn’t for Lucien’s incredible, unconscious ability on the guitar, Quentin would have asked to be reassigned months ago. But he persisted, determined to crack into Lucien’s skull and articulate his secrets.

“These drum tracks are a mess,” Lucien grumbled, sliding his headphones off. “Just listen to them.” He slid the master fader up, and Quentin winced as off-tempo blast beats assaulted his ears. He could hear three booming taiko drums, and three distinctly different sets of hands beating their enormous skins.
“Were they drunk?” He grunted, setting down his scorepad and pressing a recessed button on the coffee table in front of him. A perfect copy of Lucien’s session flickered to life, projected in the air between the two artists. The waveforms were mangled, clipped hard, and somehow all three tracks managed to be offset.

Lucien dragged them around the timeline a bit, halfheartedly trying to get them to line up, before highlighting and deleting all three.
“Pathetic,” he grunted. “I’m not warping three fucking tracks. They’re going to get it right, or they’re going to be replaced.”

“Who else would we get to play taiko? It’s a niche instrument.” Conscientious as always, Quentin was scrolling through a roster of percussionists as he spoke, eyes flicking back and forth.
Lucien rubbed his temples and reached for his drink.

“The Goons,” he scoffed. “I wish. I miss those guys a lot. I hope they’re all doing well.”

Quentin’s teenage-dream face screwed into a snarl.

“The… who?” His search of the CVLT network returned only references to album credits.

“The Goons? They were the Demigod’s band, sort of. In the early days. They played all the tribal instruments during his analog raves. Taiko, conch horns, all the chanting, too. I remember reviving some of the lost instruments with them in our first studio, modeling the bullroarers for the first Underworld Rave. They shook the damn windows, shouting and swinging all night, stimmed out of their minds. They got us into a lot of scrapes with the law, a lot more than just noise complaints,” Lucien sipped his now-warm whiskey and sighed. “I miss those days.”

Quentin had already opened an early recording of the Forest Rave and was listening to the chants and claps, marvelling at how smoothly the polyrhythms shifted across the measures.
“I love this version, the energy is so raw. This was all done by hand? I assumed it was sampled and processed,” He chewed on the side of his thumbnail, a nervous habit he’d picked up during long hours spent waiting for Lucien to develop a sense of punctuality.

“I didn’t think it was your style. You must have been to one in person by now,” Lucien’s voice didn’t rise, but it was definitely phrased as a question.

“Impressive music is my style, and this percussion is… very impressive. Yeah, I’ve been more than once. I’ve always had to go in a mask, just in case paparazzi or journalists manage to sneak in.”

“More than once? Meaning you went before you joined CVLT? Underage? The Forest Rave is…” Lucien chose his words carefully. “… not for the faint of heart.”

“Damn right,” Quentin laughed. “But who turns down that invitation?”

“Nobody,” Lucien grinned through sharp teeth. “Most people try to get in uninvited. You just didn’t strike me as the type. It seems… off-brand.”

“I’ll give your regards to my marketing team,” Quentin’s eyes turned back to the personnel list he’d been scanning. “All the Forest Raves I’ve been to had CVLT members playing the instruments. I’ve never heard the names of these… Goons. What else have they done?”
“Oh, last I heard they were isolationists. The Goon Tribes, if you will, spend most of their time in the deep woods, lying low in national parks, living off-grid. Some of them are scattered across Europe, too. I’m not sure if Ze-” Lucien cleared his throat. “-if the Demigod is still in contact with those ones. But the North-American tribes visit the Temple from time to time, and they still scout out locations for our various projects while they’re out there living off the land.”

“Wait, they visit the Temple? Are we talking about the guys in camo and camp gear, who wear all the… bones?”

“Just so,” Lucien nodded.

Quentin had seen them once, shortly before passing his Trials. He remembered some of the largest, most terrifying men he’d ever seen standing in the pristine Temple, incongruous in their filthy military gear. They were armed like guerilla fighters, draped in pelts and bedecked with animal skulls, their bodies swollen with the muscle of wild beasts. It was an intense juxtaposition, to see them standing cordially in the marble hall with the Demigod and his lean-limbed, silk-brocaded coterie. At the time, he’d been very uneasy to see so many weapons in the Temple, but the Demigod looked perfectly at ease as his hand was swallowed in the grip of a giant wearing an antlered helmet.

Quentin’s mind reeled as he put together this new piece of the puzzle.
“They’re… tribes? Isolationist tribes? So they’re like a… political group, now?”
“Oh, they were always political, in some sense. The Demigod was never a Goon, but they spent a lot of time together, with shared interests. The first Forest Rave was held in their honour, for allowing him to spend time among them and learn from their culture. He wrote the… climax,” Lucien shot Quentin a knowing glance. “...of the rave first, as a gift to their Chieftain.”

“I didn’t see the climax, my first time,” Quentin admitted. “I was too young, I got to see the first half of the show from a distance. But the next year, they decided I was old enough. They gave me a mask, they allowed me to go into the crowd…” Quentin’s eyes unfocused as a jumble of images and sensations roared up his spine and gushed into the folds of his brain.

The Demigod raised his arms in exultation, face shrouded and invisible beneath the hood of the leopardskin draped around his shoulders. His eyes were blazing in the void beneath that hood, hotter than the massive bonfire that prickled at his skin, hotter than the pitiful, wan stars that blinked above. Quentin’s eyes sparkled as he stood at the edge of the stage and watched as the Demigod threw glittering dust into the bonfire, where it caught alight and blazed in a thousand unnamable colors.

He was in the crowd, hands raised, jumping to the pounding of taiko drums. He was shouting with a voice that had been blown out from hours of chanting, hot breath scraping along his vocal cords. He was pushing his way out of the mosh pit, his shirt torn and bloody. He felt the bones in his hand crack, pain boiling up his arm and whistling out through his clenched teeth. He was bent low, hunched like an animal, stalking some other hunched thing through the crowd in a wicked game of cat and mouse.

He was standing at the edge of the crowd, looking into the darkness, feeling the cool night air on his skin. He tackled his quarry from behind, hands catching fistfuls of thick fur, his fist pistoning over and over again into a bony animal’s face, a skull darkened with soot and paint. Hands stretched across their fight and enclosed them in a dark dome as clawed fingers reached up and wrapped around his throat. He and his prey both screamed voicelessly at each other through bloody mouths until they found new voices, baying like bloodhounds under the baleful stars. Someone sank their teeth into the soft flesh above his elbow and he snarled like a lion as he sank his thumb into his attacker’s eye. He felt himself lifted atop the seething crowd as the last shreds of his damp clothes were torn from his body. He felt a thousand hands trace grime and soot through the sheen of sweat on his naked skin as some enormous beast began to roar under a red moon…

“You really have been to the Forest Rave,” It wasn’t a question, but Lucien’s voice snapped Quentin back to reality. Lucien had spun in his chair and was watching him through the floating projection, his green eyes practically glowing in the dark room, piercing through the track credits for the climax of the rave.
“What did you do there, Quentin?”

“All we did was dance,” Quentin was strangely out of breath, sweat beading on his forehead. He answered slowly, voice lilting as if he knew the answer by rote. “All we did was sing along.”

Lucien smiled knowingly. He spun his chair back around, and Quentin pressed play. It was less than a pale imitation of the real thing, it was impossible to capture the sheer sonic power of the Forest Rave, but nevertheless Quentin held his breath and shut his eyes as the taikos played Human Sacrifice under a blood moon.

Sunlight poured in through gaps in the canopy, painting the Ludus in dawn’s gold. Today, a hard floor was placed atop the usual sand of the fighting pit, and two titans of CVLT traded blows, their feet scraping errant grains of sand across the hardwood.

Lucien was taller, leaner, and older, but was built out of whipcord muscle, his leather wristbands soaked in sweat above his boxing gloves. His hair had been tied back, but wavy salt-and-pepper strands had escaped, and now hung over his white shoulders, hunched for combat, and shining with sweat.

Facing him was the Demigod. Shorter, darker, and more powerfully built, the Demigod’s body showed none of the ravages of age. His skin was the smooth bronze of a much younger man, and his bare torso was the picture of Classical perfection.

They preferred to spar allegretto, slower than one would expect of two such well-practiced specimens, bringing other, older martial arts to the mind of the Ludus attendants. On this morning, a silent agreement passed between them, and the rhythm of shuffling feet and landing punches began to speed up. As their effort increased, so did the noises of combat echoing in the empty Ludus. Speed brought violence with it, and soon there were real punches being thrown, real grunts of pain, and real panting as breath ran short.

Lucien saw an opening, a break in the Demigod’s rhythm, a hitch every time he stepped out of striking range. A predictable rest in the measure of the fight. He squinted through eyes stinging from sweat-salt and made his move. Light, lithe, and fast, he pressed his advantage and swung, a middling strike that the Demigod deflected. Lucien’s eyes tracked the reaction. The habitual triangle-step, to re-establish his stance. Lucien rushed into the gap and feinted low. The Demigod stayed low and covered his core, but Lucien knew this was not enough. Long familiarity had acquainted him with his friend and mentor’s reflexes. Lucien threw a second feint at his face, and the Demigod raised his hands again, just barely in time. Now Lucien struck, with speed he’d kept in reserve, coming around for a brutal right hook, over the Demigod’s shoulder, crashing into his heavy skull.

But the blow never landed.

The Demigod’s eyes flashed like lightning and he twisted, low, impossibly flexible, and catlike. Lucien’s fist only touched air as his friend became a bronze blur that eyes could not track. The right hand that had covered the Demigod’s face a split second before suddenly pistoned upwards in a vicious strike to Lucien’s chest, lifting him ever-so-slightly off his feet. Adrenaline coursed through Lucien as the strike connected, so his stumble backward seemed to stretch in time. He saw the Demigod’s face split in two emotions, a snarl of triumph on his bared fangs, but a sudden horror flashing in his eyes.

Lucien collapsed to a knee, hands clutching his chest as pain traveled in knots around his body. His friend was suddenly there with him, hand on his shoulder, his aspect silently screaming an emotion so rare that Lucien couldn’t help but find it sublime, through the haze of his pain.

There was fear on the face of the Demigod.

Initiates often get lost in the twisting halls of the CVLT temple, stumbling into the many great chambers as they search for their classes. The special purposes of these rooms are myriad and subtle, and even accomplished musicians who are Initiated find themselves with brows furrowed and eyes flickering, wondering at the hidden logic that built these spaces.

The effect is heightened by the architecture: soaring ceilings and massive columns dominate, with incredible domes standing watch over diligently studying musicians, light pouring in through glaring oculi. There are grand galleries that open onto amphitheatres and practice pits, and massive porticoes, lovingly painted with shining frescoes that leave mouths gaping. Night-black marble stretches to the edge of vision, and golden filigree twists along walls and floors like wild ivy. Between the lavish artworks and the rare materials, the opulence of the CVLT temple beggars belief.

One such obscure space is the Piano Room. At first glance, an interloper is reminded of the sunken office spaces in the background of news broadcasts, where entire teams collect, collate, and edit stories. But this hall, enormous and rectangular, is not filled with desks. Instead, a legion of upright pianos stand in shimmering, emerald-green cubicles, ready and waiting for practiced hands to lift their ebony lids and press their ivory keys. When empty, the Piano Room gives an impression of pregnant silence, of potential, and of patience.

A grand walkway splits the room in half, and Adepts frequently walk through in tight groups, their clicking heels echoing lightly at chest-level to the pianists sunk in their cubicles. Flanking the two grand entrances are miniature organs on balconies raised above the walkway, their brass pipes polished and their multi-tiered keyboards waiting. One might expect this room to sound like cacophony from these alone, but there is a curious quality to the space, and the noise of practice does not carry beyond the confines of the cubicles. The inhabitants joke that this is the room’s “magic”, but some of them are beginning to believe it.

Today, the piano room is bustling. It’s a warm summer day outside, but to the pianists of CVLT, it might as well be midnight. If you were to wind your way through one of the pits, you would hear not just piano, but other, more obscure keyboard instruments being played in the further reaches of the room. Historical practitioners of harpsichord, virginal, and clavier mingle with modern concert pianists, and sets of tuning equipment hang on cubicle walls in leather rolls. Fistfuls of crumpled scorepaper are passed between cubicles by long-fingered, ink-stained hands. The history of the keyboard provides much for Initiates to learn, and much to experiment with.

Nacreous cubicle walls are pushed aside and circles of sunken-eyed Adepts stand, jaws clenched and arms folded, taking turns to attempt finger-crushing compositions in the fondly savage fashion of Cutting Competitions from Old America. It is normal to feel uneasy as an outsider witnessing these gatherings, which are part tribal custom, part scientific experiment, and performed with the somber severity of religious ritual. These Adepts are taut as harp-strings, their old hierarchies balanced on the knife-edge of progress as champions from the various Schools of CVLT struggle to prove the dominance of some theory or pedagogy. They are grave as death, these gatherings often bearing witness to fated moments when the will of Apollo or Dionysios becomes manifest and the twisting vines of the Craft grow new blooms.

You can be forgiven for thinking that there is an energy of bestial violence about these meetings, and assuming that artistic progress is better made in bohemian apartments in Paris, or smoky recording studios in LA. Progress is the bastard child of Experience, and these whip-sharp men and women are her disciples: they are Adepts of the CVLT, hardened by the Trials, and the philosophy of predator excellence has leached into their bones and drawn their muscles taut. Avoid disturbing them, and do not meet their glittering eyes. The Piano God is obsessive, uncreative, prone to violent passions.

And his followers have strong hands.

In this grand hall, there is an Initiate named Eva, slumped on her piano with her back to the walkway. Her face in her hands, her elbows playing a disrespectfully dissonant chord, she closes her eyes and tries to focus. She is in the midst of her Trials, and her cubicle is in a state of devastation, her hands splattered with ink, her face smudged, and a veritable storm of scorepaper surrounds her like a massacre. She is no amateur, and has distinguished herself among the Initiates. She has grown her flock of followers to a respectable size, and made a name for herself in the World Outside. Her name trends whenever she releases a new song, and bootleg videos of her rare, intimate live shows are fawned over for months. She even took a page from the Demigod’s playbook and circulated fake leaks on hard media, which her followers eagerly traded like bootleg tapes from the Analog Age.

She had dominated her social Trials, and pursued her professional ones with the cold certainty of a crocodile, silently swimming close enough for a kill. The numbers didn’t lie - her engagement (and her bank account) had both swelled. By any historical metric, she was horrifically rich and famous - for a musician. Many Initiates chose this moment to break with CVLT. The money, the fame, the dream of recognition was the limit of their ambition. They left, never to have their names engraved in the Triumph Hall, never to earn a Laurel crown. Eva was not one of these. The music spoke through her, and she desired nothing so ardently as to understand what purpose she served, one small white hand transcribing her piece of the Grand Creation in the midst of the boundless darkness.

But here she was, hero and inspiration to thousands, slumped in the Piano Room, struggling mightily to pass her technical Trials, defeated by the ghost of a man whose handprints she feared she could never fill. A titan. A monster. A virtuoso par excellence. Rachmaninoff. She’d done her research and listened to his pieces. She’d interviewed incredible pianists. She’d felt the fire in her guts ignite. She set her teeth and started to train. She used all her connections to get personal feedback from Vivienne, one of the Circle’s own. She spent hours at the bench, and hours more in the gym, stretching and strengthening muscles that were failing her in long sessions. Her slim forearms grew harder as she strained the muscles within. Her fingernails began to click on the keys, so she cut them short. More than once, she had been lost in her exercises and had come back to herself, only to realize there was a crowd growing at the entrance to her cubicle. Once she’d seen an Initiate at the back throw an entire sheaf of scorepapers and storm off. Her heart swelled, and her eyes burned.

She felt ready to kill.

No plan survives contact with the enemy, and Rachmaninoff is a ruthless one. Eva’s fingers twisted into knots, her wrists stiffened and seized, and her shoulders ached from supporting her craned neck and stooped head. Days turned into weeks and measures stretched into passages, but she had yet to conquer even a quarter of the score. Eva was determined. She was an Apollonian. She did not shrink from the challenge, and reverted to type. Obsessive, nonverbal, and vicious, she embodied all the worst traits of the Sun god who patronized her sect. Her reverence for Rachmaninoff soured into spite, her lovingly annotated scores were criss-crossed with curses that sizzled on the page, and she threw copy after copy to the ground. Menials delivered water and coffee, and she ate disgracefully in the Mess before rushing back to her cubicle. Passers-by who had casually stopped in to chat just days before now saw the bottomless madness in her eyes and wisely chose to keep walking.

Eva was torn out of her spiral of misery when she heard the great doors to the Piano Room open. This was significant, Adepts usually made their way into the pits through galleries along the walls, down staircases and amongst the Initiates. If the door was opening, then someone significant was passing through. Eva’s head snapped up and she stood on tiptoe to peer over the wall of her cubicle.

There was a tight cluster of figures, decked in black and gold, approaching along the central walkway. The masterful acoustics of the room made their speech unintelligible, but Eva didn’t need to hear them. Light seemed to bend around the figure who paced calmly at the lead, and though she had only ever seen him from a distance before, perhaps twice, she recognized him. How could she not? She recognized him, and her heart stopped.

Eva leapt into action, suddenly aware that she looked like a wounded beast, having retreated into her burrow to die. She gathered the scorepapers off the floor in an untidy pile and placed them on top of her piano. She wiped her hands on her shirt, but this made no difference. She tried to smooth her hair back but it was a poor camouflage. Nevertheless, she couldn’t let him glance into her cubicle and see the disgrace she had become. She could at least appear civilized.

The footsteps were growing closer, and Eva tried to clear her mind. She placed trembling hands on the keys, and began to play through the piece again, at half-speed. She was distracted, and knew she couldn’t play at her best. Her inner monologue was breathlessly narrating her thoughts as loudly as the piano groaned in her ears. It’s okay, the mistakes don’t matter. This room is magical. They can’t hear what you’re doing. The score blurred in her vision, and the keyboard heaved under her hands. She couldn’t hear the footsteps over her clumsy recitation, but she was sure they had passed. Keep playing, just until they’re on the other side. Just look busy. Look productive. You can do this. Her hand hung suspended in front of her. Her mind blanked. She couldn’t remember the next note.

Someone Else’s hand reached in and played the next measure, at half-speed. Eva was frozen. Her head turned, fear stretching the seconds into agonizing moments. His skin was tan, his long hair hung down past his shoulders. He had a close-cropped beard under cheekbones as sheer as cliffs. His brow was heavy, and his golden eyes seemed to smoulder into her own. Eva couldn’t find the words to speak, or even the voice to scream, as her private nightmare became reality.

The Demigod was here, in her miserable den, surrounded by her failures.

“Rachmaninoff,” He spoke, his voice smooth and low. “How… ambitious of you, young Initiate.” He straightened and his fingers began flipping through the discarded stack of scorepaper heaped atop her piano.

Panic bubbled up, and with it came Eva’s voice.

“I-I-I wanted to impress during my trials, and he’s… well, he’s… Rachmaninoff…” She trailed off, eyes wide as she watched the Demigod’s eyes flickering across her scores. He paused to hold up a particularly profanity-laden page that made Eva wince to recall.

“Hmm. A legend, to be sure. One so virtuosic that it can be hard to imagine how his hands worked,” he feigned a squint at her scrawled vitriol. “I bet the Russian prick hit this one with his Russian—” Eva let out an involuntary squeak of distress. The Demigod placed the score back on top of the pile.

“You wanted to find a way to play Rachmaninoff. Many do. There’s… glory in the concept. ‘Conquering Rachmaninoff’ is an incredible dream.” He leaned closer. “Why isn’t it working?” Eva felt her lip quiver. Fear had loosed her stuck tongue, and she began to pour out her repressed emotions.

“The man was not normal! Not human! The stretches are insane, and it doesn’t match any framework I can find! He’s in a class of his own, there’s nothing else quite like it!” She vented, raged, and choked on her own bile, and the Demigod listened silently, his eyes never wavering. “I need… speed. But to go that fast, I can’t be precise anymore! I’m changing hand over hand over hand, I can’t even keep track! And I’m not bad, I’m not bad! I’ve played Mozart and Beethoven, I’ve played Chopin’s Andante Spinato, I’ve… I’ve… I’ve-” The Demigod caught her flailing hand easily in his own. Eva blinked away tears she hadn’t realized she’d made. His eyes flickered up and down her body.

“You’re… five-two?” she nodded. “So you’re the same size as Beethoven, and a little smaller than Mozart. Your hands are small, even for your size. Theirs were proportional. How tall was Rachmaninoff?” Eva was taken aback. Tall, everyone knew Rachmaninoff was very tall, but how tall? And what did it matter?

The Demigod beckoned to someone outside of the cubicle as he turned Eva to face the keyboard. He pressed her fingers to the keys, and her small hand stretched to its limit to reach an octave.

“Beethoven,” he said matter-of-factly. As he pressed his own hand to the keyboard, Eva noticed that his hands were large, and his fingers were long. He played the octave easily, and stretched beyond with some effort. “Liszt, almost,” he said with a small smile. “Bigger than Mozart, not that that’s saying much.”

The hand that touched the keyboard next was massive. Eva started and looked up as the tallest man she’d ever seen stretched his hand across the keys. His fingers unfurled and reached like an enormous spider. Her mouth opened. Almost two octaves! The Demigod leaned close over her shoulder, and in a mock whisper said “Rachmaninoff was bigger.”

Eva was herself again.
“How… how? How big was Rachmaninoff?”

“Well, my anonymous compatriot here is six-four. A true giant among mortals, but his hands are proportional. Rachmaninoff was six-six, and his hands were a foot across.” Eva felt lightheaded imagining a hand that could palm two octaves. Some of the monster chords she’d grappled with were beginning to make sense.

“So… so how am I supposed to play this? With hands that big… arms that long… he was…” The Demigod pulled a sheet from the top of her pile and pointed to a measure which had the word FREAK angrily scrawled across it.

“A freak. A titan. A cruel jest of nature, stretching the shape of a man beyond what it was supposed to be. His heart struggled to pump blood against gravity, all that way up to his brain. His joints ground together under the sheer weight of his bones. It’s a miracle he lived to see old age, riddled with afflictions as he was.” Eva sighed, a chill creeping into her bones.

“I don’t understand. Nothing about him makes sense. I’ve worked so hard and I can’t make any headway. Every technique I develop is only good for a short section, and I can’t just switch. I have to train between them,” She turned bloodshot, desperate eyes up at the Demigod. “Is there a way? Can you show me? Is it… possible?” His face was as cold as the void, and his eyes were the flicker of distant starlight.

“No.” he whispered down to her.

The word cracked Eva’s heart like a hammerblow.

“We heap praise upon them, but we rarely speak of how virtuosos become so incredible. Truthfully, they’re usually freaks. Some quirk of anatomy, combined with some irreverence for tradition, and an unusual mind to command the two. They’re unique and terrible and… gorgeous.” Eva registered an odd shift in his tone. He had turned his eyes up to the shrouded ceiling, far above.

“They’re embodiments of Apollo. Shards of his genius. Sometimes they’re Demigods themselves. Mozart certainly was.”

He caught her eye.

“I cannot play Rachmaninoff, either.”

Eva was on her feet, crying out involuntarily.
“You just did! You reached over me and finished the measure!” The Demigod snorted.

“I sight-read one chord.”

“No! I studied your tapes, I’ve listened to every piano piece you’ve ever written! I used to follow your performance tapes frame-by-frame, I know you can do… this!” She grabbed crumpled handfuls of score and waved them frantically, like a troubled little bird. The Demigod was immovable.

“I have a CVLT to run, a Mission to pursue, and dozens of members of my Circle to attend to. I have my own pursuits, my own studies, and my own desires. Learning Rachmaninoff is not one of them, despite whatever technical ability I may have. I am no gifted keyboardist, and I have no desire to struggle my way through pieces written by and for a man nearly twice my size. I have no desire to play guitar like Segovia, or sing like Pavarotti, either.

“You have an incredibly rare issue. To be as good as you want to become, to master this technical hurdle, you will have to dedicate your entire life to it. Nonstop practice, just to approximate what Rachmaninoff did naturally, with all of his… questionable gifts” He gestured to their shameful surroundings. “Do you want to live like this forever, if it means you can conquer Rachmaninoff? To cease to be Eva, and become Rachmaninoff? Is it the end of your want, the extinction of all your desires?”

Eva sank back onto the bench, her eyes unfocused. In her stupor, as her ideals came tumbling down around her in a shower of broken glass, the Demigod waited with the patience of a glacier. Dimly, the thought registered in her mind, He uses silence in his speech the same way he does in his music. Forcefully.

“I want to kill my heroes.” she whispered.

The Demigod kept silent.

“I want to be their legacy. I want people to look at me and think of them. To be the… evolution of their art, their technique, their entire style. The new version. Better. Like… whatever spoke through them also speaks through me, now,” Her fingers twisted together, the savaged scores falling to the floor with a rustle like autumn leaves. The Demigod nodded, his eyes unblinking.

“Rachmaninoff is not one of my heroes,” She admitted, slowly. “But… I wanted to beat him. To conquer him, yes, I do. But I don’t think I can. He’s just… better than me. I still want to kill him, but… not the same. Different from the others,”

“There is no love in this kill, Eva,” the Demigod’s voice was a low rumble. “You love your heroes dearly, and have that… impossible, complicated feeling of love that can’t be described, so it comes out as violence. You want to be closer to them in an abstract way. To…”

“Crack their skulls between my teeth,” Eva murmured. “ I love them the way a wolf loves a fawn.”

The Demigod smirked audibly, “Are you quoting… me? To myself? My own lyrics?”

“I wore that vinyl out,” she confessed. “You can’t even hear the music anymore, but your voice is still clear. Mostly clear.”

“I’m flattered. It’s why my security keeps an eye on you.” Eva’s eyes snapped up to meet his.

“You plan to kill me too, don’t you Eva?”

“No! No, not… not like that!” Eva was horrified, but the Demigod shook with low, steady laughter.

“A joke, Eva. Only a joke,” his face became serious again. “You can’t understand Rachmaninoff because you don’t love him. You don’t love his work. You don’t want to further his legacy, you want to destroy it. A powerful motivation, but not one that’s conducive to… this.” He gestured to the pile of ruined scores.

“You can’t understand him, embody him, and grow from his work if you don’t love him. This kind of frustration, this species of anger, they are poor food for an artist’s soul, and you don’t have enough love to endure the struggle of getting to know Rachmaninoff.”

There was a long stretch of silence between them.

“You said it wasn’t possible,” she began, slowly. “But you also said I could dedicate my entire life to it. So… it is… possible?”

“Like all vain follies, the price is your soul,” he said, plainly. “To live this life of torment and die unfulfilled, because Rachmaninoff’s work was not what you loved. Some Adepts thrive on this challenge, and spend all of their time scrutinizing Rach, or Liszt, or… Sorabji.” Eva shuddered at the recollection of Sorabji’s twisting, nightmarish scores.

“For some, there is nothing but technique. Biomechanic. Ergonomic. They crave form. Between you and I, they rarely create any art worth the effort, and they have to be guided like a flock of blind sheep. But their contributions to the Craft are… invaluable. They design technology and dream of improvements, they study anatomy and catalogue exceptional techniques, they codify new curricula and inform pedagogy. But they rarely write good music.

“You are not one of them, Eva. You have success, a small army of adoring fans, and a style all your own. You are not a slave to technique. You are an artist. And your fans love you, not Rachmaninoff. Hell, you don’t even play classical music for them,” Eva let out a noise that was half-laugh, half-sob. “You are trying to become Rachmaninoff in order to impress other piano players, in hopes that it will bring you closer to… enlightenment? Mastery of the instrument? Just who made Rach the be-all and end-all of piano, exactly?”

Eva was laughing in earnest now, tears streaming down her face.

“It sounds so stupid, when you say it like that,” she wiped her face on her sleeve unceremoniously. “God, I wasted all this time…”

“Hardly,” The Demigod muttered, holding a stack of her stained scorepapers. “You think this was a failure because you couldn’t become Rachmaninoff, but I think this work could be useful. There are thousands of small, discouraged hands stretching themselves to become pianists. You’ve laid the groundwork for something that could help them.”

“You think I should… teach?” Eva’s nose wrinkled in momentary disgust.

“Don’t be absurd. That would be a waste of your sadly limited life. You have great works of art awaiting you yet, Starling. I’ve heard them whispering from Somewhere Else.” Eva’s eyes were wide, her mouth moved noiselessly. The Demigod motioned, and one of his aides appeared in the doorway of the cubicle.

“This isn’t what you imagined would pass your technical Trial, but it’s more than enough. I’ll have an Adept reach out and see what you two can put together once he’s edited down this… colourful rough draft.” Eva felt her face becoming more colourful, too. She didn’t relish the idea of some stranger reading through transcripts of her darkest thoughts, but she trusted the Demigod, and didn’t dare contradict him. As his attendant gathered up all the extraneous scores into his arms, the Demigod spoke again, softly.

“Eva?” she turned to see him framed by the doorway, ready to be on his way again. He reached into his jacket and held up a cassette tape. Ancient technology that was nearly a century obsolete, but Eva recognized it. An exclusive EP, mixes that weren’t released anywhere else. It was one of hers.

“I loved Swan Songs at Sunset. A limited release of hard media, copy-protected, lovingly recorded for your most loyal fans. Fantastic idea.” His idea. The play she’d taken from his book. I’ve been watching him for so long, Eva marvelled. How long has he been watching me? The Demigod’s face was soft, his smile easy and warm, but his eyes were like chips of ice.

“I’ll be waiting for the day you come to kill me.”

Welcome to the Temple

CVLT is a secretive society led by some of the world’s preeminent musicians. They unite in secret, despite their intractable differences, around the enigmatic Demigod who directs their efforts.

CVLT can not be applied to. There are no admission boards. Initiates must first seek out the Temple, and perform for one of its gatekeepers.

Initiates to CVLT train tirelessly so that inspiration can be channelled effortlessly, and art can flow freely from Somewhere Else into the air around them.

On the path to passing the Trials and choosing their destiny, each aspiring artist will come face-to-face with their deepest fears and most ardent desires.

Most will fail.
Some will ascend.

A precious few will awaken Something Else within themselves, and attain the most coveted power of all: The Secret of Infinite Inspiration.