TIME August 15th, morning LOCATION The Section House, then Chuza
BACKGROUND:
An illithid was now sitting in on Section House briefings, DikDik had a body count from a brothel riot to explain, and Brin wanted the full story before anyone went back out on patrol.
WHAT HAPPENED
Brin needled DikDik over vanishing during the worst of the Open Arms riot. DikDik brushed it off without much shame.
It was Skarr, in the end, who broke the uncomfortable silence and laid out the full account:
A doomed engagement against Krell’s forces a thousand years ago, a portal torn open by Chuzan scholars reaching for knowledge they didn’t understand, two ships fleeing through it, and only one making it down safely.
Hidden and buried by the Indegee elves under a promise that the sleepers would help when the time eventually came.
Asquith filled in the Chuza side of it.
The Karnath prophecy, a folk memory of ‘visitors’ returning to lay waste to the world exactly a thousand years on, and the Cataclysm itself recast not as a natural disaster but as a demonstration.
A celestial body “plucked from the sky and hurled down” by Krell’s kind to show what defiance would cost.
What’s now the Bay of Chuza was the crater.
The Children of the Eye, Asquith explained, were creations of that same enemy – hybrid soldier-slaves on a fifty-year hibernation cycle, now running seventeen years early for reasons nobody in the room could explain.
Skarr took to the questioning with unsettling good humour for a species built, by its own account, to feed on thought.
Offered a pinch of coraman crystal on a dare, he accepted with visible curiosity and immediate regret, tentacles curling tight around a tiny scooped spoon before pronouncing it, at length, “crude.”
He was more serious on the subject of quintessence – extracted at the point of a sentient death, it could sustain life, power constructs that had none of their own, or simply be consumed.
Addictive, he admitted, and dangerously stimulating to his own kind.
The Children of the Eye earned a longer, stranger digression than anyone had actually asked for.
They didn’t breed in any sense Krusha recognised. No sex organs at all, Skarr explained, visibly delighted by the question in a way that made DikDik reconsider ever asking one of his own out loud (“REALLY, man? Deez tingz have no sex? Dread, man. Truly dread.”). Reproducing instead through something closer to insects: a rare Mother or Queen, capable of giving birth without need of a mate.
Loyalty ran to their creators first, Skarr added, though the bond to a Mother could override it.
Worth remembering, he said, and left it there.
Asquith’s own history came out sideways, prompted more by Brin’s needling than by any real willingness to share it.
A Tol Kerrate Knight pushing nine centuries old, sworn to an Order that had once ridden to war as battle-mages before turning, after the Cataclysm, to gentler vocations.
He was one of only three of his original brotherhood left standing after the Abandonment thirty-three years ago, all bound by an oath that left small spiders scuttling from any wound deep enough to draw blood.
DikDik was another.
The third, a name Asquith didn’t offer and nobody pressed him on, was Andros.
Brin had his own stake in it. Thirty-three years younger, he’d volunteered into those same tunnels himself, chasing a name for himself against things that ‘weren’t human’ and ‘just seemed to be feeding’ on the search party. He’d gotten off lightly with a lost leg – he still had the artificial one to show for it. A colleague, young Skinny Johnson, chased one of the beasts into the dark and was never seen again.
It didn’t stay civil for long.
Brin raised the Abandonment – the Order’s thirty-three-year-old tactic of using prisoners, including children, as bait to draw the Children of the Eye into a collapsible cavern.
Asquith, rather than deflect, threw the accusation straight back at him: it had been Brin and the Commissioner who’d asked for help ‘whatever it takes’ in the first place.
Brin didn’t dispute it – he’d lived with the weight of it every day since, he admitted, for all the good admitting it did anyone now.
Neither man backed down easily, though both eventually let it go rather than let old wounds derail the more urgent problem in front of them.
Boosay’s people, Brin added on his way out, were still quietly lifting the Section’s higher-value arrests for ‘official Dranathess business’ before processing could finish.
One more loose thread nobody had time to pull on yet.
Patrol resumed not long after – and didn’t stay routine.
A body arced out of a third-floor window onto Shell Street, dead before it hit the ground from blade wounds that had nothing to do with the fall.
Ash talked the gathering crowd down from murder to suicide before anyone got curious – too lazy to climb to the roof, she reasoned aloud, entirely for the onlookers’ benefit.
Buying the Agents room to work the scene without an audience.
A severed thumb, marked in blue dye, told its own story: the Blue Thumb gang had just declared open war on the Northside Crew, and the building above the body was already a slaughterhouse.
Krusha found survivors, a hidden boy hiding under his own father’s corpse, and, moments later, a hail of crossbow bolts from elven mercenaries still holding position in the dark.