“Well, that sucks.”

I came to in a room...well, not really a room so much as a space. The floor was pure white, as were the walls and the ceiling. Only the walls at the ceiling were so far away, I couldn’t really tell how big the space was. All I could really tell was that it was white, blindingly so.

Sitting in front of me was a man. I say “man,” but I guess that’s not quite right, either.

Sitting in front of me was a god.

He was huge, for starters. Seven feet tall if he was an inch, and every bit as muscular as Edgar. Only, with Edgar, the muscle was decoration more than anything. He looked like a bodybuilder, had a bodybuilder’s proportions, because he wanted to. This guy, that’s just the way he was. His massive bulk was as natural to him as his chestnut skin and wide, green eyes.

His face looked like something out of a natural science exhibit, primal and primitive, built from genes that lacked the millennia of selection and refinement as the human race sorted out its archetypes. His brow was heavy and sloped, vanishing into a wild mane of wiry black hair that came down to his shoulders.

The look was somewhat spoiled by the fact that he was sitting in an overstuffed recliner and wearing a flannel bathrobe, but that did nothing to diminish the sense of raw, overwhelming power that poured off of him like heat from the sun.

“Am I… am I dead?” I asked, hesitant. I tried to look down at my body to check on my wounds, but I didn’t have one.

“Close,” he rumbled, with a voice like two mountains in a fistfight. “Close enough that we can talk, but no. I expect you’ll pull through.”

“Oh.”

He stared at me, waiting, as I just sort of floated there. Look, if you’ve never had a proper out of body experience, one where you literally don’t have a body, it’s hard to visualize just how damned awkward it is.

“Aren’t you going to ask who I am?”

I shrugged, or at least tried to.

“Pretty obvious, don’t you think?” I replied. “Who else but the Soldier is going to show up in my near death experience?”

“The Eldest, maybe,” the Soldier said. He shifted in his seat, trying to get comfortable as he stifled a yawn. “He likes to show up when he can, but his schedule is pretty packed these days. I try to help where I can.”

“I, uh, didn’t wake you, did I? It’s pretty late, I know.”

No one’s really briefed me on how you’re supposed to talk to gods yet, but I was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to drag them out of bed. At least he’d bothered to wear a robe. I shuddered to think what the Soldieriest Soldier who ever Soldiered wore for pyjamas.

“Nah, you’re good, Mycroft. It’s not like you got stabbed on purpose,” he said, grinning.

Which was followed up quickly by: That can’t be good.

“Of course I know your name,” the Soldier said, as though he’d read my mind. Hell, he probably had. “I know all of my little misbegotten children, especially the ones who are up to no good. And especially especially the ones who are up to no good, but are bad at it. Honestly, you really need to work on your situational awareness.”

“I had a prox sensor,” I said, trying not to whine. “I should have known she was there.”

In the real world, the idea of a portable proximity sensor is mostly videogame bullshit. You can set up acoustic microphones to detect footsteps, breathing, even heartbeats, but there’s no reliable way to filter out the user’s sound signature. They’re only really good if you set them up somewhere static, alone and unbothered, where anyone walking by would be suspicious. There were active devices, like lasers, but it was more or less the same story.

The grin turned to a frown.

“One of Edgar’s?” the Soldier asked.

“Yeah, why?”

Edgar’s proximity sensor, on the other hand, worked by registering the user’s magical aura and how it interacted with the ambient magical fields of the Vale. As he explained it, humans moved through the Vale’s magic a bit like a car moving through the air. The disruption you caused constituted the user’s aura. The more metaphysical mass you had, in other words, the stronger your magic, the bigger your aura. By registering mine with the device, in theory, the telltale variances caused by someone approaching should have triggered the alarm. Only, for some reason, it didn’t.

“Damn, I’d have bet on him, too. The man does good work,” he said.

My head would have spun, if I’d had one. Not only did the Soldier know me, he knew Edgar, too. I didn’t know what that meant, but it couldn’t be good.

“Look, we don’t have much time here, so I’ll be brief. You’ve been stabbed through the liver, and you’re going to bleed out in the next few minutes unless we stop it. I can help, but I can’t act on my own unless we strike a deal. I don’t like it, but rules are rules. The Eldest won’t let anyone bend them, not even me,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “What’s the deal?”

“Sometime in the future, I’m going to ask you to kill someone for me. I can’t tell you who, I can’t tell you when, and I can’t tell you why. All I can do is promise that it’ll be within your abilities to kill them, and that they’ll need to die. Can you do that for me?” he asked.

“Isn’t that what you pay me for in the first place?” I retorted.

“That’s the spirit. Now, I’m going to give you a crash course in using some of that Brute magic of yours. When you’re all healed up, I’ll give you proper lessons. But for now, let’s work on stopping the bleeding.”