“Go, bid the huntsmen
wake them with their horns.”

There’s this really funny remake of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” done by S. P. Somtow called, “Ill Met By Moonlight” which I wandered into a number of years ago when it was playing a couple special shows in Denver, part of one of the science fiction conventions. In the movie (which takes its liberties) they say that line and then there are actual car horns ringing out through the valley.

That was what I thought of as the cavalry came through – all the car horns.

One of the girls opened the door, cautiously, holding her broomstick as a baton the whole time. I could see it from my stance in the common room, and I moved around the blissfully sleeping (or maybe unconscious) Sylvie, as the Shadow King froze in an inhuman pause. Whatever hold he had on the residents was not one that completely took away their decision-making capabilities, apparently. Good to know.

They had to have at least a dozen cars shining headlights towards the front of the house, and all the ruckus of the horns, as if they’d let a couple of kindergartners in front and encouraged them to beeping. They brought light – chemical lights, spotlights, flashlights, laser lights from those pointers everyone just uses as cat toys, and I might have smelled some flash paper on the wind. Yeah, I’ve got friends who would do that, don’t you?

I almost started to laugh, but it might have come through as a hysterical giggle, and the man known as the Portal Doctor would not giggle. He would laugh a hearty guffaw, perhaps.

“She is coming,” the Shadow King said.

I whipped around from where I had been taking steps towards the door. “Who?” I was about to ask, but the word literally died on my lips with a faint exhalation of air. I could almost see it growing little wings, cartoon-style, and ascending towards the heavens.

The messenger stood at the door, somehow taller, with what I recognized as superheroine proportions. I mean that whole size thing that comic book artists do, where they make the heroes a head or two taller perspective-wise than normal people. It was like she expanded in all dimensions.

Oh.

Um, yeah, literally. She was bigger than the doorway, but she was a few steps away from the threshhold. That strange, crinkling, plastic-wrap kind of envelope had been probably blasted away, as her stance showed her in her glowing aura of gold glory, too much to take in, too much to exist except simultaneously in this reality and outside of it. I could hear in my teeth rather than my ears the buzzing static bass of a door opened.

She was nude, not naked. Naked implies a lack of power – she was armed and not just with two lovely lengths bounded by shoulders and wrists. With nothing in her hand, she still held enough presence to kill should She (and the capital came so easily) decide to direct it. I looked up at Her face. She looked like Doloise. Like Binah. Like Magdalene. Like all the girls I knew, and some I didn’t, and all of them were angry, and giggly, and horny, and maudlin, and my emotion swelled in that little thing that happens in your chest and throat that’s like a dry silent squeak. I was overwhelmed enough to fall to my knees, woozy. I could barely see and I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or cry or scream in ecstasy or fear.

I kept silent because I could. It took a lot out of me. In the edge of my blurring vision, I saw movement. I wiped the moisture away with the back of my hand. The others in the house came out, curious. They looked at Her as if She were an interesting statue, a piece of art they thought should have more impact. Not jaded, I remembered. Merely immune without the need for Will.

I took a deep breath, drawing the meager amount of Will I could call to me as a person in the Know, but the Shadow King reacted faster.

He shed something of me like dropping a shadow, and for a moment he was as he was in the fey realm. A tall barrow wight, made of shadows where She was made of gold. Around Her, the creatures that had painted the house in uncomfortable couples (pun intended) flew into the night, losing form and cohesion as the sound and light gathered more strength.

The Shadow King brought what was of darkness and cold with him. The quiet patience of the grave. The forever home – where She made one desire the surcease of pain, he brought it in eternal quantities. If they were saying anything, it was nothing I could stand to hear, but the din of light and sound beyond seemed to fade against some kind of communication the Powers had together.

Light and darkness squared off for a moment, and then they touched as if coming to some kind of agreement. There was a swelling of something, some kind of moment of reality twisting, bending, like all the air had been sucked out, not of my lungs, but from my diaphragm, and then in the seeming silence of the moment, I heard a voice.

“E?”

Sylvie! My trance was broken, as was the wavering line of those holding lights or behind horns, and there was a roar of people surging forward. I stood up, my feet unsteady underneath me.

In a burst of sound like an explosion, shockwave included, She and the Shadow King disappeared. I was caught by the wave and nearly tripped on top of where Sylvie sat, nursing a sore neck with the rub of her right hand. “What’s happening? Why are you here?”

We were knocked sideways as there was a popping, crunching sound, and reality asserted itself in an unsubtle fashion, the house returning to where it should be. I managed to miss a chair, but a lamp on the table cracked in the fall.

“It’s a long story,” I started. “I’m afraid we’ll have to cancel our dinner date.”