Nothing can really prepare you for meeting the Eldest for the first time. You expect overwhelming power, sure. There’s plenty of that. My hair stood on end, skin crawled, hell, even my teeth were tingling. The sensation passes after a few moments, once your body gets used to his aura, but it’s damned unsettling at first.

But aside from that? He’s about my height, so a bit on the tall side. He’s skinny as hell, like he hasn’t had time for a proper meal in ages, and pasty white. Like, Scandinavian goth kid white. His skin had that unique translucence that comes when the primary source of light in your life is a computer screen. Greasy black hair fell to his shoulders, as lifeless as the dead black eyes that peered out behind thick spectacles. His face was sharp, all angles and edges, with cheekbones so sharp, you could slice paper. I guess he’d look handsome if he didn’t look so malnourished, but damn. Someone get this guy a cheeseburger.

You don’t expect the most powerful being in existence to look like a nerdy anime character, the sort that always runs the student council behind the scenes.

Oh, and if you were holding out for a throne room or something majestic and god-like, don’t hold your breath. We met him in an office that could have belonged to any mid-level executive. The furniture was nice, sure, there was fashionable but reasonably inexpensive artwork on the walls, and every horizontal surface was crammed with reams of paperwork. The only unmolested spots on his desk were a hole where his computer sat, a decorative vase filled with long-dead flowers, and an overflowing ashtray.

“Be with you in a sec,” he said. His voice had a soft, lilting Southern drawl that I’m not even going to try to replicate in text.

“Look alive, Boss,” the Soldier said. “It’s that Hunter you wanted to see.”

The Soldier, in his Jimmy guise, sat across from the Eldest’s overburdened desk in a comfortable leather chair. Two more were set out, with a gap in the middle where I was supposed to go.

Unlike the caveman form he greeted me with on the rooftop, the Soldier’s prefered public face was that of James Buchanon, an unassuming bureaucrat who could be seen all over Haven’s governmental offices on any given day. His true identity was something of an open secret among Hunters, but I gathered that most of the politicritters he worked with had no idea.

The Eldest glanced up from his paperwork and gave us all a good, hard look. I tried not to shudder. Those eyes felt like they stripped your soul down to its constituent components, organized them alphabetically, and put it back together only after figuring out your worth to the nearest decimal.

“And so it is.”

“Do uh, do we bow or something?” I hissed out of the corner of my mouth.

Edgar shook his head slightly, which I took to mean no.

“You can do whatever the hell you want,” the Eldest said. “It’s a free country, after all.”

I swear I heard my ex-wife use that exact same tone whenever I asked if I could go out with my friends. She, however, wasn’t an omnipotent being capable of erasing me with an errant thought.

“No, bowing, got it.”

“Thank fuck. All that worship business gets old,” he muttered. And then, a little more brightly, “Thank you all for coming to see me today. I know tempus fugits, so I’ll be brief. Mycroft, I read your report.”

He turned to stare directly at me. I tried not to fidget uncomfortably. Thankfully, I was too exhausted to do much of anything but stare back.

“Does the name ‘Caliban’ mean anything to you? Any of you?”

I shook my head no, and Edgar did the same. Cora, on the other hand, looked thoughtful.

“I want to say I’ve heard it around town,” she said. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”

“But you’ve never heard of the Schism, or Caliban’s Rebellion,” he confirmed.

“Nope. Was I supposed to?”

Leave it to Cora to try to be flippant in the face of a god. I say try, because I could hear her knuckles pop as she clenched the push handle on my wheelchair.

“No, you weren’t. Outside of this room, only a select few living have, and none of you have come into contact with any of them. So, Mycroft, how did you come to the conclusion that we were attacked by a foreign power, when the Vale has no foreign powers?”

I had to swallow back bile as my stomach tried to crawl up my throat, presumably so it could run the hell away. The Eldest didn’t sound mad, but there was something in his expression that suggested I’d better choose my next words carefully. I glanced over at Jimmy. He was trying to stay all stone-faced, but he gave me just the slightest hint of a wink.

Okay, I can do this. If he wants to get all pissy about it and smite me down or whatever, then it’s his problem anyway.

“I didn’t say ‘foreign power,’ I said ‘hostile nation-state.’ May sound like I’m splitting hairs, but I’m really not. It’s entirely possible for a nation to host a smaller nation within its borders,” I explained. “Especially when you’re as big as Haven. You’ve got less than a thousand Hunters to police a billion people, and no centralized intelligence gathering whatsoever. North America has what, 23 countries and 600 million people, give or take? And about the same square mileage. That’s a lot of room to hide.”

I probably should have mentioned it before, but yeah, Haven is huge. The city proper hosts about 80% of the population, with the outskirts mostly going to agriculture and industry, but “city” is a bit of a misnomer. The greater metropolitan area is about the size of Alaska.

But wait, you cry. How the hell do you police that much land and that many people with only a thousand Hunters? Easy: magic. Also, literally infinite natural resources. Statistically, most crime is a function of desperation. If everyone has enough to eat and stable housing and employment, desperation is a function of stupidity rather than poverty. Throw in some extremely proactive social programs, a robust code duello, and civilian peacekeeping organizations raised up in at-risk districts, and you really don’t need much in the way of officially sanctioned law enforcement.

The Eldest let out a long string of curses in a long string of languages I don’t even begin to recognize. It took a good thirty seconds for him to wind down and switch back to English.

“I’m never sleeping again,” he muttered. “The possibility that there might be others wasn’t even on my radar.”

It was only when he screwed a fresh cigarette in his mouth and lit it off the cherry that I realized he’d been chain smoking the whole time. I guess ruling Haven was stressful, even for a god.

“Since you’re already here, I guess it doesn’t hurt to tell you,” Jimmy said, stepping in for his despondent boss. “We’ve been tracking your mysterious nation-state actors for quite some time. Since the beginning, really.”

Lots of little pieces slotted into place.

“Since the beginning of what, Haven?” asked Edgar. I could practically hear the gears turning in his head.

“No, all the way back, since the beginning of- wait, how’d you guess?” Jimmy asked. He looked a little hurt that we’d stolen his thunder.

“The official history is a little...tidy,” I supplied.

“Pretty much. I know things were rough and all,” Edgar said, “but you can’t take millions of people from across the globe, throw them all together, and expect everything to go off without a hitch.”

The two gods exchanged a nervous glance.

“You haven’t spoken to anyone about this, have you?” the Eldest asked, a hint of danger in his tone.

“What? No,” Edgar said. “I just figured it out myself. Mycroft?”

“Oh yeah, definitely. No clue until you said something,” I lied.

It didn’t feel like a good time to mention that the official “history” I’d been supplied with had more holes than a Dutch dam built from Swiss cheese. I’ll explain later.

Jimmy didn’t look convinced, but I guess he was willing to let it go. The Eldest just looked like he wanted to cry.

“Cora? Not you too,” he asked. Begged, really.

“Not me, Boss,” she said. “You don’t pay me to think, so I try not to.”

Fucking hell, the jokes just write themselves. It took everything I had to keep a straight face, and I damn near pulled it off. That didn’t stop her from kicking my chair hard enough to rattle my teeth.

“I don’t think I need to stress how much is at stake here,” the Eldest said. “Until we get a handle on how compromised Haven really is right now, everything I’m about to say is to be considered confidential on pain of death. Understood?”

I understood perfectly. For that matter, I still understand. The Eldest doesn’t half-ass anything. If he says he’ll kill me for running my trap, he’ll kill me, period. Ten days, ten years, hell, if someone finds a redacted journal entry a thousand years after my death, he’d probably bring me back to life just to end me rightly.

That’s gonna be a hard no from me, man. But don’t worry, I won’t leave you in the dark forever.