You return to Elton's flat a half-hour after sunset. You're both freezing, you because you managed to find every puddle of cold mud on the way out, despite using the lance as a walking stick, and Elton because he's barefoot and appears to be wearing only shadows. Once back up the narrow steps to the Shadow Lord's cluttered and dingy home, Elton does the nicest thing anyone has ever done for you.
After you finish your bath in the Shadow Lord's elaborate, if stained and chipped, clawfoot tub, you dry off while studying the posters for old trip hop shows in Bristol and London that line the walls. Hey, there's Jordan Dey. Wasn't there a Jordan Dey track in a movie you saw as a kid, like The Matrix or that American Godzilla?
"Is Jordan Dey your dad?" you ask as you dry yourself off.
"Yeah," Elton says. The silvery glint through the half-open bathroom door reveals that Elton is messing around with the lance. You find the world's oldest pair of pajamas waiting for you. They're more patch than original fabric, but they're clean, and so are the mismatched Turkish slippers, one green and one taupe.
"I took everything that survived to the laundromat," Elton says. He's seated in his leather armchair in a corner of the room previously covered by a faded burgundy tapestry. A fire roars in an elaborate Art Nouveau fireplace under an oil painting. Life-sized and in a realistic eighteenth-century style, it depicts an ethereally beautiful woman with dark eyes and a dress the color of storm-tossed seas. Curling golden ringlets frame a face with delicate features and an alarmingly high and broad forehead. A pale ring glints on one finger, lovingly rendered as her hand rests against a high-backed chair. She appears to be seated outside, since the Milky Way is visible behind her, forming strange patterns. Elton seems fixated on the image, the lance forgotten at his side.
"Who's the babe?"
"I'm sure I've seen this woman recently. Just not as impressive-looking." This has to be important.
"An ancestor?" Elton is Black, but sometimes on TV there are white people with British accents, too.
"Those are Garou glyphs in the stars, right? That's an impressive painting."
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"No, though Lucinda, the painter, did a wonderful job making the painting look centuries old," the theurge says. "Though I think the starfield comes from one of those Hubble space telescope images—the colors are too vibrant. No, Katherine was my wife. She died defending the caern, like so many others. Before she died, she was one of the greatest theurges of her generation, a true prodigy. The spirits are silent now that she's gone. Most of the world is just…dust."
He follows the starfield with his eyes, then looks down into the fire.
"Kate told me a story once about the Milky Way. Long ago, during a winter worse than any winter in history, the god of fire stole straw from a greedy king. As he fled, bits of straw escaped from his bag, and they scattered across the sky, forming the Milky Way. What we see, then, exists as it really is, and also exists as a remembrance of an act of mercy. The same thing, but two ways of understanding it."
"I'm not much for riddles, Elton."
"I think I prefer mercy to the justice I've seen from my fellow Garou."
"Did Katherine intend that as a moral lesson, or as a riddle?"
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