John wolfed down the last bit of the fourth granola bar and carelessly tossed the trash to the floor. Normally, he would have at least put the wrapping into one of the trash cans but he was in a hurry and the slimes would get to it anyway. Between the conference and the hasted steps that carried him away from the Palace, he had only taken the time for a quick shower. Which had doubled as a chance for him to make sure Lydia was okay and get her up to speed. For once without any fun in the bathroom.

‘At least my clothes clean themselves,’ he thought, trying to stay optimistic, as he grabbed the golden doorknob of the Embassy and pushed. Once inside, he turned left and eventually arrived at a door. The back of his middle finger knocked against the wooden surface three times, then he waited. Not too soon thereafter, Marie opened the door.

She must have expected him as the dress she wore was more fitting for a court dance than a casual afternoon. Like every other he had seen her in, it was tight around her slender curves, of remarkably high quality but not all that decorated. What had changed since earlier in the day was her face. There was a stressed looked on it, not tired but exhausted, her eyes having that sunken appearance to them.

“John.” Her voice reflected this change, not having energy for any formalities. With a simple step sideways, she invited him inside.

There was a pop in his ears, like the balancing of pressure inside them. The atmosphere changed, as if he had stepped from a happy world straight into the site of a recent battlefield. Which was bizarre, given the world outside actually was the recent battlefield and the insides of Marie’s apartment in the Embassy had been left unharmed by any of this. Although Marie had done her best to create a royal looking and ordered place for herself, everything around was infested by the ill will of the wrathful god sharing the space.

At first, that seemed to be limited to that awful pressure. Then the door was closed behind John, and he noticed a wolf spider the width of two handspans sitting above the frame. Staring, waiting, the fangs moving as if chewing. Slowly, he looked down to the floor, only to find tiny insects gather and hide under his shoes. Instinctively disgusted, he tried to step away from them. He could almost hear them skitter away as they ran for the walls and vanished in the miniscule gap of the carpet.

The grandfather clock swung along. On it sat a crow.

John hadn’t noticed the bird until then, quiet as it was. He hadn’t noticed a lot of things in the room, slowly unfolding around him. Whenever he noticed one thing, another one appeared and something else seemed to vanish. The wolf growling under the table caught his attention. Then another skitter behind his head caused him to look for the spider again. It was gone. Under the ceiling, however, now hung a network of black ivy. From its poisonous looking leaves hung the dismembered, bled dry arms of rats and mice. He blinked, and the entire thing changed into an octopus, its tentacles spread and splitting to emulate the winding vines.

The grandfather clock swung along. Around it coiled a snake.

John lowered his gaze, breathing slowly to stay calm. Scratches came from inside the walls, along with squeaks. It seemed that worms drilled their way out of the solid stone, but when John turned to these movements at the edge of his vision, he just saw the spider again. It stared, then began to move. The slow, methodical steps of its eight legs were almost painful to follow.

The grandfather clock swung along. The spider reached it.

“Adventurer.” Cawed the crow. “Tool.” Hissed the snake. “…” Stared the spider.

John blinked again. All three vanished, melding into the afterimage of a distorted mass of limbs behind his eyelids. The most nightmarish dragon he had beheld in any imagination he ever had. When he looked again, the Horned Rat was sitting in the chair before the grandfather clock. He must have been there the entire time.

The pendulum swung. John was in the presence of an angry god.

As it was, the Horned Rat didn’t look much different than usual. As a matter of fact, he was less imposing than most of the times, having shrunken down to easily fit into the chair. If he were to stand right now, he would have likely been as tall as John, perhaps even a tad smaller. The skull didn’t look distorted in any way, the horns were as straight as usual. Nothing about this should have been any more imposing than the titan of a nightmare the god had been earlier. Yet, in the red fire of his two eyes was all the same dread John had felt then. It was a wonder Marie didn’t look like more of a mess in this atmosphere, she must have suffered it for the last twenty minutes at least.

He had wanted to ask where the Horned Rat was, but hadn’t expected to just find him immediately. Now that they were standing face to face again, John didn’t know what to say. Even he didn’t manage to crack however subtle a joke in this situation. Instead, there was something he wanted to say all of a sudden, something he realized.

“Months ago,” he therefore started, “I told Aclysia a story. Do you know that?”

Interested, the Horned Rat tilted his head. “No,” he spoke with absolute finality.

“It was more of a stream of consciousness than a real narrative. A smith who had never forged came to create a weapon on the advice of a crow,” John continued and the god leaned forwards with genuine interest. “The smith became an adventurer and the crow guided him through helping several people, few of which were thankful for what he did. Throughout that adventure, the blade the adventurer had made and carried became dull and bent. At the end of it all, the crow guided the adventurer to a sleeping dragon, who he was himself. The adventurer used the subservient weapon to defeat the dragon.”

John left the thing he had realized unsaid. That the smith and the adventurer had, at least in an archetypical way, been a metaphor for himself had been clear from the start the weapon had become a woman. A stream of his consciousness meant that, regardless of how little he thought about it, the story was constructed from his own view on the world. The adventurer had been himself, in some ways; the weapon had been Aclysia, in some ways; and the crow, so he now came to believe, was the Horned Rat.

“That dragon… it got killed by a dull and bent sword?” the Horned Rat asked.

“It tried to melt the sword, succeeded, but in the process incinerated itself, leaving the adventurer to find the treasure left behind,” John recounted truthfully. Like all stories, it sounded rather stupid if recounted like that.

“Heh…” The teeth of the god parted just a gap. “Haha…” The gap grew wider. Then, it opened wide, the fleshy insides becoming entirely visible. “AHAHAHAHAHAHA!” Roaring laughter echoed out, blew away spiders and zombified rodents, wolves and cockroaches, crows and snakes. They all vanished under the surfaces of the furniture and, once out of sight, ceased to exist.

All the while the laughter continued to grow louder, the Horned Rat shattering the wooden table with a gleeful slap of his hand. The entire building quaked, as the erratic sounds became multi-layered, booming with the magic that afflicted the god’s voice often. John stood still, but Marie soon stepped over and held onto his arm, a deeply terrified expression on her face. “He never laughs like that,” she whispered.

In his joyous cacophony, the Horned Rat accidentally squished the back of the chair with his tail and fell over backwards. He caught himself, it would have been amusing regardless, if his continued laughter and movements wouldn’t have smashed more furniture and, quite certainly, provided yet another reason to be unnerved to all the people currently on Liberty Island.

Eventually, the joy ebbed away and the god of calamity laid on the floor. Sprawled out limbs, surrounded by the splinters of his own making, the Horned Rat continued to be caught by occasional chuckles. “Whew,” he said, rolling over onto his stomach. “By Gaia, a delicious thing you said there.”

“Well, I am happy to be of entertainment, if nothing else,” John responded with a wry smile. Whether the Horned Rat understood his place in the metaphors of that story, and what he thought of it, the Gamer didn’t ask. He had an inkling that the answer was so obvious that it would be insulting to question things. “Sometimes I think it might be baby’s first prophecy.”

“You wouldn’t have to guess if it was one, if you spoke it,” the Horned Rat stated, clearing his throat. “Sounds more like you did some cold reading in story form. There is a reason why you can generalize most narratives.” Finally, the god managed to get back to his feet. The giggle he let out now was more along his usual, teasing tone. “Look who is getting closer, all according to my ever-growing schemes.”

Marie, noticing now how tightly she had held onto John’s arm, slowly let go. “Your plot may be what starts things between us, but it will still be our decisions, Horned One,” she retorted, seeming a lot braver now. Well, talking to the Horned Rat brashly was a lot easier than with other gods. Which had made that entire rage episode all the scarier.

“Yes, yes, you’re totally not dangling on my strings,” Richard said and made a couple of nimble movements with his raised fingers, as if he was pulling along some puppets. “Be a treasure and make tea for your guest.”

It was a less than courteous way to tell Marie to leave the room. Given the circumstances, that was extra insulting, and the black-haired woman did furrow her brows. Regardless, she followed the ‘recommendation’ and walked away. On the way, she fixed her barrette to sit properly.

“I guess you already know what I want,” John dared to suggest.

“You want to know where I put Marathyu and, if you can get it out of me, what I plan with him,” the Horned Rat turned around and sat down on the chair he had personally reduced to a stool. “Hm… and something extra, perhaps?”

“Let’s talk about that after you answer the part you correctly guessed,” John said, walking over to the intact chair on the other side of the broken table. They both looked with fascination when the splintered plate began to regenerate, the piles of wood on the floor growing smaller in response.

“Your powers never cease to be interesting,” Richard mused, then continued along the topic. “For the moment, the smith resides on my ship. He will return to France with me, where I will give him everything that he needs to work for me. Once I have what I wanted, I will return him to where I found him. As to what that is, you will be unsurprised if I stay quiet.”

“Maybe I’ll just ask him once he’s back,” John joked, to the Rat’s amusement. They both knew that, on the off-chance that Marathyu would even answer, what came out of his mouth would be mostly nonsense to the Gamer’s ears. “The other matter, because of what you did, I need someone to represent the Illuminati at the upcoming peace talks.”

“You need someone that condemns my actions, you mean?” the Horned Rat asked, not the slightest bit offended. “If only symbolically, someone that supports you in all statements that you did not know I would devour part of your opposition.”

“You’re a patron deity,” John answered in a matter of fact tone. “You know better than me that you can’t go around meddling in foreign affairs. I would much prefer not dealing with Krieg and his conclave of balance keepers.” Marie returned and placed a single porcelain cup on the broken table. “Not at this current juncture and not for something I actually didn’t have any hand in.”

“Hah, that will be a headache in the coming months,” the Hornet Rat agreed. While John blew steam off his tea.

“What will be a headache?” Marie wanted to know, evidently not in the loop.

“Oh, right, I was too busy brooding to tell you,” Richard giggled and made a vague gesture towards his teeth. “I ate someone from the Lake Alliance because they deeply offended me.”

Daughter of a member of the Illuminati’s highest governing level, Marie knew quite well what the repercussions of that could be. “Someone unimportant?”

“She tasted quite important,” the Horned Rat flippantly responded, now digging at his teeth with one of his claws.

For help, Marie looked to John, who was happy to oblige. “She was one of their six strongest members,” he gave the actual details.

Marie groaned, the wide-ranging effects this could have not escaping her. While the Lake Alliance wasn’t a threat for the Horned Rat alone, much less the Illuminati at large, it would garner them international attention of the variety nobody really wanted. “Horned One, you bring our guild great trouble. I will have to contact my mother immediately and make sure this whole affair iz taken care of properly.”

John took a sip of tea, found eye contact with the Horned Rat, whose skull creaked as it stretched into a grin. “You heard that, Gamer?” he asked out loud what the two of them just quietly agreed on. Turning to Marie, the god added. “We have just found who can do all the condemning you want.”