Chapter 8: Regrets, They've Had A Few
The dimensional sled tore through the veil between places with a sound like tearing silk and shearing metal. Bruce wrestled the brass levers, his muscles corded, sweat tracing paths through the grime on his temples. Through the flickering viewport, the world outside lost definition, becoming a riot of streaking colors and jagged, half-seen shapes.
Then reality slammed back into place with a sickening lurch.
They hung in the air, the sled’s ornate runners skimming a foot above black, glass-smooth stone. To the left and right, impossible cliffs of the same obsidian soared vertically into a bruised, twilight sky where no sun or stars were visible, only a sourceless, gloom-thick illumination. This was the Gorge of Regret. The air didn’t move. It laid upon them, heavy and cold, smelling of old tears and burnt-out hopes.
In Katie’s van, rumbling along a spectral, parallel track barely visible on the stone floor, the atmosphere changed instantly. It was as if the walls of the gorge absorbed all sound and replaced it with a silent, insistent whisper—a whispering of what if and if only.
Vivian gasped.
It hit her like a physical blow to the gut, sharp and hollow. Her Hunger, that constant, subtle emptiness, was a void. The Gorge poured into it. Not sustenance, but the echo of starvation. It was the regret of every meal denied, every lonely night, every terrified glance in a mirror. She crumpled in the passenger seat, a hand flying to her mouth, her pale skin going ashen.
“Viv!” Dale’s voice was a bark of alarm from the driver’s seat. Katie, in the back amongst crates of volatile reagents, swore sharply.
On the sled, Jan’s head snapped around. Her compact, clutched in her hand, burned icy cold. She didn’t need it. She felt the wave of psychic desolation wash over her group like a tide of frigid oil. She saw Cameron’s shoulders tense, his knuckles white on the sled’s railing, his intense blue eyes fixed on some middle distance, seeing a decade of silent, respectful distance from the woman beside him. A wasted decade.
She saw Beth, further back, shrink into herself, her photographer's eye seeing only the perfect, magical symmetry of her sister Calista, the brilliant tech-savvy of Mandy, the destined importance of Rick—seeing herself as the blurry, unfocused afterthought.
In the van, Stacy ground her teeth, the memory of years spent alone in her penthouse, watching Rick grow up in snapshots and chaotic time-storms, a raw and festering ache. Next to her, Maryam stared at her own hands—plain, capable hands—then at the faint, magical glow always clinging to her twin Kim’s sword grip. A sick, hot twist of envy coiled in her chest.
Yukio leaned against the van’s cold interior wall, her face unreadable, but the rose tattoo on her shoulder seemed to throb. Freddie. The name was a quiet curse. A charming mistake with a title and a hereditary weakness for port. The regret wasn’t for the love lost, but for the years of explaining his absence to a daughter who deserved better myths.
Jan understood. The Gorge didn’t attack with claws or ice. It infected with hindsight. It would paralyze them with the weight of every path not taken.
“Oh, fuck that,” Jan muttered, her voice low against the crushing silence.
She closed her eyes. The Green Moon power within her wasn’t about lightning strikes or grand gestures. It was about resonance. Connection. Joy, especially the kind forged in the honest, sweating, fucking union of bodies and hearts. She reached down past her own clutter of minor regrets, found that warm, pulsing core, and pushed.
It unfurled from her like a sudden, soundless explosion of summer heat. A wave of verdant, defiant energy that radiated from the sled, washed over the van, and encapsulated both vehicles in a shimmering, intangible bubble. Inside, the cold lessened. The whispering didn’t stop, but it was countered by a stronger, more immediate truth: the drumbeat of blood, the scent of skin, the simple, glorious imperative of need.
Dale didn’t hesitate. He slammed the van into a shaky, magical park. He ripped open his flannel shirt, buttons pinging off the metal interior. The scars over his heart and pectorals—the ruined Consortium implant sites, ugly and raised—were a map of his past, of his regret. He grabbed Vivian’s shaking form, pulling her across the console.
“Feed, baby,” he gritted out, his voice raw. “Take it. It’s yours.”
Vivian’s Hunger shrieked, conflicted. The Gorge offered empty sorrow. Dale offered love, tinged with pain, but real. With a choked sob, she latched onto him, her mouth finding the worst of the scars. She didn’t kiss. She drank. Her succubus nature flared, not in seduction, but in desperate, grateful consumption. Life energy, warm and gold-streaked with decades of steadfast devotion, flowed from Dale into her. He shuddered, a groan ripped from his throat, part agony, part profound relief. His head fell back against the seat, his eyes closing, a sublime sacrifice written on his face. The hollow ache in Vivian’s soul began to fill, not with regret, but with him.
On the sled, Jan turned to Cameron. The green light from her pendant reflected in his eyes. She saw the years of silence there, the careful respect that had become a prison. She grabbed his face, her fingers pressing into his jaw. No magic in the touch, just sheer, demanding will.
“Tell me now or lose me forever,” she demanded, her voice barely a whisper but sharper than any blade.
He stared at her. The Ranger. The polite booty call. The man who had held every part of her except his own truth. The Gorge’s whisper of wasted time met the Green Moon’s crescendo of now.
His answer was not words.
A low, feral growl erupted from his chest. He spun her around, her back to his front. His hands went to the button of her jeans, popping it open, yanking the denim and her underwear down over the full curve of her hips in one rough, decisive motion. The cold air of the Gorge hit her bare skin, followed an instant later by the blistering heat of his body. He didn’t gentle her. He bent her forward, her palms slapping flat on the chilled brass of the sled’s main control panel.
“Mine,” he snarled, the word finally free. He shoved his own pants down just enough, and then, with no further preamble, he was pushing into her, thick and hard and claiming.
Jan cried out, a sharp, gasping sound lost in the shuddering hum of the sled’s engines. He was merciless, each thrust a punctuation to his declaration. His hands gripped her hips, holding her still for his deep, driving possession. The control panel rocked under her, dials trembling. Bruce, white-knuckled at the helm, shot a glance back, his grimace melting into a wild, approving grin. He steered, the chaotic poetry of the machinery in his blood syncing with the raw, rhythmic slap of Cameron’s body against Jan’s.
“Say it,” Cameron grunted, pounding into her, his breath hot on her neck. “Say it’s mine.”
“It’s yours, you bastard,” Jan moaned, pushing back against him, meeting every thrust. “It’s always been fucking yours.” The pleasure was acute, overwhelming, a green fire that burned away the chill of regret. With each deep stroke, she felt her power flare, reinforcing the bubble, feeding it with their intense, liberated joy.
In the van, Stacy moved. The years of waiting, the stupid, complex fragility of time—it crystallized into a single, furious need. She grabbed Rick by the front of his shirt and hauled him toward the back of the van, past crates labeled with explosive symbols. Katie, watching Vivian and Dale with clinical fascination, merely scooted her boots out of the way.
Stacy pushed Rick down onto a low, sturdy crate. Her eyes were chips of flint. “No more waiting,” she snarled, her voice trembling with a decades-deep hunger. She fumbled with his belt, then her own, desperation making her clumsy. In seconds, she was straddling him, guiding him inside her with a ragged sigh that was half-sob. She rode him hard, her movements not graceful but urgent, piston-like. Her nails dug into the shoulders of his jacket, piercing through to the skin beneath. “You’re here. You’re here.”
Rick, overwhelmed by the emotional bombardment and his own surge of need, could only hold on, his hands gripping her thighs, meeting her frantic pace. “Stacy,” he choked out, a vow and a surrender.
The joy-bubble thickened, humming with the energy of released tension. Yukio, leaning against the van wall, felt the thorny regret for Freddie loosen and fall away. She watched, and then she laughed. It was a short, bright sound that cut through the moans and gasps. It was the sound of liberation.
Her daughter, ever attuned to a new experience, saw Katie Manelli’s wide, intrigued eyes. Mai’s own regret—a fleeting worry that she was only spectacle, only beauty—dissolved in action. She closed the distance between her and Katie in the cramped space, her hands finding the goth woman’s belt.
“What’s the biggest boom?” Mai whispered, her lips a breath from Katie’s.
“Contained combustion,” Katie shot back, her smirk returning. She let Mai push her back against a crate, lifting her own black-skirted hips in invitation.
Mai didn’t wait. She buried her face between Katie’s thighs, her tongue lashing out against the soft, damp fabric of her underwear before pushing it aside. Katie’s head thumped back against the van wall, a long, low “Fuuuuck” drawing out as Mai’s tongue found her clit, circling, sucking, devouring with the same adventurous enthusiasm she applied to everything. Katie’s thighs, quaking, encircled Mai’s head, her hands tangling in the younger woman’s dark hair.
The sled and the van, encased in the shimmering, sex-fueled aurora of Jan’s power, sped down the Gorge of Regret. The oppressive whispers receded, unable to penetrate the cacophony of gasps, growls, and sobs of pleasure. It was a moving fortress of defiance, built on the tangible truth of bodies connecting, of loves declared, of hunger sated.
Bruce guided the sled, his jaw set, a verse of an old Scottish ballad about defiant love murmuring on his lips as the vehicle’s engines sang in harmony with the sounds around him.
Behind them, pacing silently just beyond the glow of the joy-bubble, the shadow-hound followed. Its obsidian eyes reflected the shimmering spectacle, its head tilted in what might have been confusion, or calculation. It did not howl. It simply ran, a patch of moving darkness in the permanent twilight, a promise that the Gorge was not done with them. But for now, held aloft by a bubble of raw, crafted joy, the expedition raced forward, untouchable.
But for now, held aloft by a bubble of raw, crafted joy, the expedition raced forward, untouchable.
Cameron’s release was a shuddering, silent thing that locked his body against Jan’s, his forehead pressed between her shoulder blades. The warmth flooding her core was matched by a final, verdant pulse from her pendant, the green light flaring once before settling into a steady, protective glow. The sled’s engines seemed to sigh, harmonizing. Bruce adjusted a crystalline knob, his hands steadier now. “The resonance is… stabilizing. We’re riding the wave.”
Jan, still bent over the controls, let out a long, shaky breath. She could feel him, still lodged inside her, softening. A profound, uncomplicated satisfaction settled in her bones. “Took you long enough, Ranger,” she muttered, a smile in her voice.
He withdrew slowly, his hands gentling on her hips. He helped her stand, pulling her jeans up with a rough tenderness. “Shouldn’t have,” he said, his voice gravel. He fastened his own pants, his eyes never leaving her. “Won’t again.”
In the van, the crescendos subsided into trembling aftershocks. Dale’s chest bore a faint, ethereal glow where Vivian had fed, the scars looking less like wounds and more like embers. She lay against him, color returned to her cheeks, her breathing deep and even. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, her fingers tracing the scars.
“Don’t,” he said, kissing her hair. “Just don’t.”
Stacy collapsed against Rick, her frantic energy spent. They stayed joined, sweat-slicked and clinging, her face buried in his neck. “Okay,” she breathed. “Okay now.”
Katie Manelli twitched, her thighs finally releasing their vise-grip on Mai’s head. “Holy shit,” she panted, a genuine grin spreading across her face. “That’s a new explosive compound. Gotta write that down.” Mai pulled back, licking her lips with a smug, utterly satiated expression.
Yukio pushed off the wall, her laughter faded to a quiet chuckle. She glanced out the van’s fogged window at the endless black cliffs. “The tear in the glamour should be up ahead. This little… festival may have just lubricated the approach.” She caught her daughter’s eye. “You good?”
“Never better,” Mai said, stretching like a cat. “Regret-free.”
The shadow-hound kept pace. Its obsidian eyes reflected the receding bubble of light and warmth. It did not tire. It did not falter. A low frequency began to emanate from the gorge walls themselves, a sub-audible thrum that vibrated in their teeth. The black stone beneath them was no longer smooth. It began to twist into shapes—frozen waves of anguish, spirals of trapped screams given mineral form.
“The Gorge is fighting back,” Bruce called, his voice tight. “It doesn’t like our soundtrack.”
The joy-bubble flickered. A tendril of pure, focused despair—the memory of a stillborn child, a lover’s betrayal found in a text message, a lifetime of being overlooked—snaked through the green light and brushed against Beth.
She gasped, her camera slipping from her fingers. It clattered on the sled’s deck. Her vision swam with the perfect, curated images of her sisters’ lives she kept on her phone, a gallery of her own irrelevance. The bubble dimmed.
“Beth!” Mandy yelled, grabbing her sister’s arm.
But Beth was retreating inside, folding in on herself. The Gorge had found a flaw in the armor, a latent insecurity it could pry open.
Calista moved. She didn’t use her fire. She stepped forward, her silver hair lifting in the staticky air, and grabbed Beth’s face. She forced her to look at her. Not as a subject, but as a sister. “You see me,” Calista said, her voice fierce, elf-glamour flaring not to enchant, but to reveal truth. “You always see me. The real me. The scared me. You caught it. You hold it. You are the lens, Beth. Not the glass.”
Beth’s eyes, wide and swimming, focused on Calista’s. She saw the fear there, the weight of destiny, the love. Her own artistry reflected back, vital and necessary.
The invasive tendril of regret hissed, dissolving in the face of that recognized truth. The bubble brightened, solidified. The sled jolted, hitting a patch of turbulent psychic air.
“There!” Yukio shouted, pointing ahead.
The left cliff wall wasn’t solid. It shimmered, a vertical river of malfunctioning reality where the black stone bled into the shimmering, muted greens and golds of the elf-lands. It was a ragged scar, pulsing like a raw nerve. The tear.
“Brace!” Bruce roared, yanking a massive copper lever.
The sled angled sharply, engines screaming in protest. Katie’s van, in tandem, swerved. They plunged toward the rippling curtain of broken glamour.
In the human world, the local branch of the Archimedes Society Archives smelled of dust, ozone, and very old paper. It was a deceptively normal-looking annex tucked behind a university library, its sterile fluorescent lights humming.
Brigid O’Connor smoothed her lab coat, facing the assembled group. “Alright. We’re looking for any foundational texts, specifically pre-Schism, that reference dimensional ice magic, sympathetic sealing rituals, or the ontological concept of a ‘living key.’ The indexing system is non-linear, so we’ll need to—”
“Brigid,” Fatima interrupted, her voice calm but edged. She stood with elegant authority, her short dark hair perfectly framing her serene face. “Jan and I devised the operational parameters. I have a clearer understanding of the contextual magic we’re dealing with. The search should be under my direction.”
Bethany Xander-MacDougal adjusted the cuff of her charcoal gray suit. “With respect,” she said, her tone cool enough to frost glass, “I hold the rank of Lady Percival within the Golden Wands. Coordinated retrieval of classified knowledge falls under my purview. I should lead.”
Mara Henderson, standing beside her husband Zack, crossed her arms. “I’ve coordinated discovery in over two hundred complex legal cases. Logistical command is essentially the same. I should be in charge.” She said it firmly, though a flicker in her eyes suggested she was arguing more out of professional reflex than true desire.
Hank, leaning against a bank of card catalogues that subtly rearranged themselves, nudged Liam MacDougal with his elbow. “This might be more entertaining than I thought,” he muttered.
Liam, his poet’s soul amused, whispered back. “How many orgies do you think Jan has started with the other group by now?”
Hank’s eyes widened in mock horror. “My daughters are in that group, you sick bastard.” He paused, considering. “At least three.”
Fatima, overhearing, shot a look across the room that could have vaporized lesser men. It was a complex look, mixing wifely exasperation with maternal alarm and a hint of deeply buried amusement.
Hank suddenly found the ancient linoleum tiles utterly fascinating, whistling a tuneless note.
At that moment, a side door opened. Franklin Sweeney stepped in, looking characteristically calm and mildly curious. “Hello. My parents thought I might be helpful? They said you needed clear heads and…” he trailed off, sensing the charged silence.
Mara’s head snapped toward him. She pointed. “Him. Put him in charge. End of fight.”
There was a beat of silence. Bethany studied Franklin, then gave a sharp, single nod. “Acceptable. He has no conflicting organizational allegiance.”
Brigid pushed her glasses up. “He’s unbiased. I agree.”
Fatima’s lips twitched. “Yes. A figurehead is perfect. Franklin, you’re in charge.”
Franklin’s eyes darted between the four formidable women. “I… what? What the fuck just happened?”
“You are now the nominal leader of this research team,” Fatima said, walking over to pat his shoulder. “Be a figurehead. Settle disputes as best you can. Smile. Nod. Meanwhile, the rest of us will try to find the lost Archimedes Society material about the Thaw before that sweet girl in the other world gets cemented as the new warden of a prison dimension.” She said it with serene practicality, as if discussing a grocery list.
Franklin blinked. “Right. Okay. Figurehead.” He took a deep breath. “So… should we maybe split into teams and start checking the… aura-coded stacks?” He ventured, recalling a term from his mother’s work.
Rebecca Winkle beamed. “Excellent starting point, Franklin! Charley, you take the west quadrant with Amanda and Jenny. Look for emotional resonances linked to ‘binding.’ Zack, Mara, with me—we’ll look for legalistic frameworks in the old covenants.” The group surged into motion, the leadership crisis bypassed.
Hank sidled up to Fatima as she headed toward a stack that glimmered with phantom light. “I have no idea why you looked at me like that,” he said, all innocence.
“Of course not,” Fatima said, not looking at him, a small, private smile playing on her lips. “Now make yourself useful. Lift that folio. It’s warded with gravity.”
The sled and van hit the tear in a concussion of opposing realities.
The world screamed. It was a sound of tearing minds, of geography divorcing itself from sense. The joy-bubble stretched, thin as a soap film, but it held, lubricated by spent passion and newfound declarations.
They burst through into sudden, shocking color and sound.
The sled crashed down onto a bed of thick, blue moss, skidding to a halt against the roots of a tree with silver bark. The van lurched to a stop beside it. The air here was warm, thick with the scent of blooming night-flowers and rich soil. Bioluminescent insects drifted in the lavender dusk. They were in a secluded, silent glen at the base of a soaring mountain, its peaks hidden by soft, glowing cloud.
The contrast with the Gorge was so violent it felt like a physical blow. Silence, deep and ringing, followed.
Then, Godfrey III let out a single, disgruntled ‘yip’ from Jan’s pack, shaking his little head as if to clear it.
Jan slumped against Cameron, breathing hard. The green light from her pendant faded to a dim ember. Everyone was still, disoriented, clothed in the heavy aftermath of adrenaline and sex.
Stacy slowly disentangled herself from Rick, wincing as she stood. “Everyone alive?”
A chorus of groans and affirmations answered.
Yukio was already at the van’s door, peering out. She traced the rose tattoo on her shoulder, then pointed up the mountain path. “The summer palace is up there. A half-hour climb, if the path is clear.” She looked back at the group, her gaze assessing. “We’re inside their perimeter. The hard part starts now.”
Calista stepped off the sled, her feet sinking into the soft moss. She looked up the path, her silver hair catching the faint light. A cool, determined fire flickered in her violet eyes. Somewhere up that mountain, the Thaw was waiting. And so was a king who might already be its puppet.
The shadow-hound did not follow them through the tear. It sat on the obsidian side, watching the glamour-mended scar. Then it turned, melting back into the darkness of the Gorge, its purpose perhaps fulfilled, its message delivered. They had been tracked. They were known. The element of surprise was gone. The only advantage left was the fragile, stubborn humanity they carried with them.