Okay. I need to stop revising and revising and revising and just post this. NaNoWriMo is going to be rougher than regular chapters. Will start posting these, and will clean it up once the month is over.

To Walk in Shadow
(Worm/Chronicles of Amber)
by P.H Wise

(Segment #1)

Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. Worm belongs to Wildbow. The Chronicles of Amber is by Roger Zelazny. I own neither. Please support the official release.

When I was done at the Parahuman Response Team's headquarters, I set about my next task: tracking down my magical tutor. I didn't know what he might have gotten up to since the last time I'd seen him, and that worried me. I tried calling him by name until he came to me, but he didn't respond. There wasn't any mention of him or anyone resembling him on PHO, at least, and I took that to be an encouraging sign. I had no idea where he was, but that didn't matter: I took hold of the stuff of Shadow, gave it the slightest twist, and called to my hand an orange-breasted bird of my Desire. It was a robin, and it trilled sweetly as it landed in my palm.

"Lead me to Jack of Shadows," I instructed.

The bird chirped once and took flight, and I followed.

The bird never left my sight, always waiting, allowing me to catch up when I fell behind. Police cars passed by me several times as I walked, and a PRT transport once. All around me was the press of humanity. People, so many people, and I just one face in that seemingly endless crowd. In time I left behind the skyscrapers of the city center. Now the buildings were smaller, and the smell of the ocean more noticable. Finally, almost an hour after I'd left the PRT headquarters, I walked up the hill two blocks away from Lord Street and found the robin I'd created out of Shadow waiting on the eaves of the Palanquin night club.

It was spring, and spring in Brockton Bay often had an ephemeral feel to it, an uncertainty that couldn't quite settle itself between our usually mild winters and the hot summers that followed. It seemed like less a season in itself and more just a time of transition between one season and another. Only very rarely did it smooth out into that eternal blooming of which poets sang, but those moments were preserved in memory like a fly in amber: the fluttering uncertain excitement of a first kiss; the first pale green buds of leaves on winter-bare trees; the gold morning of that first day after the snow melts and you can go outside, and you're alive, and the world seems limitless, and you run and splash in the puddles the snow left behind with the pure delight of a child who had been cooped up for too long. In that spring afternoon sunlight, the Palanquin looked almost ordinary.

It was muggy today, but only a little, and the neon signs and the colored lights that made the Palanquin so unlike anything else in the area were all but invisible in the afternoon sun. At night, the building looked like it had come from India by way of Las Vegas. By day, it was a wide three story brownstone building with a row of dogwood trees along the sidewalk out front. The trees were in bloom, each an alternating riot of white and pink flowers, each with lights set up at the base of the trunk to illuminate the leaves at night.

The club wasn't open yet, and sixteen was way too young to be allowed inside, but that didn't stop me. I decided that it was probable that the door was unlocked and exerted my will upon Shadow, and the door opened when I turned the handle and pulled, and my robin flew through the door as soon as it was open.

The main room was empty except for an unremarkable man mopping the dance floor and a slender red-haired woman cleaning the tables. The two workers exchanged looks when I came in, and the woman spoke up: "We're closed, miss. We open at five. How did you even…" she trailed off when she took in my appearance. "Can I help you?" she asked.

"I'm here to see Jack," I told her.

The woman frowned, taking the measure of me, considering my costume and mask. After a moment she muttered, "Where's the bloody doorman?"

There was a stairway to an upper level, and my robin was waiting on the railing at the top of the stairs. It tweeted noisily, drawing the eyes of the workers, at which point the red-haired woman turned and walked through a door marked 'staff only' likely to retrieve assistance in removing me from the club. The man just shook his head and went back to mopping the dance floor, occasionally returning the mop to his bucket and then wringing the water out of it.

I ascended the stairs and found him seated at a table near the far end of the upper level, near another door marked 'staff only', and he wasn't alone: sitting to his right was a… man? Woman? I wasn't sure. They were dressed in a peasant's shirt and long trousers, both covered with many coloured patches, and a harlequin's mask concealed their face. To Jack's left was a bald and obese man with pale, translucent skin that showed a shadow of his skeleton and internal organs as well as numerous small, hardened spiral growths all over his body. Across from him sat a orange-skinned boy with blue hair dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. I recognized the group. I'd researched the parahumans of Brockton Bay: these were Circus, Gregor the Snail, and Newter.

They were playing cards.

"Twenty," Gregor said, and the others each placed a pair of tokens in the middle of the table. Each of them had three face-up cards and one face-down card in front of them; the deck was sitting in front of Circus. Of the group, Gregor had the most poker chips in front of him, followed by Jack, Circus, and then Newter.

"Twenty?" Shadowjack asked. "That sounds like the bet of a man unsure of his hand. Here's your twenty and a hundred more." He placed a number of tokens in the center of the board. I had no context for the game: I'd never played poker and didn't know the rules, so whatever was going on was all Greek to me, but they seemed invested in it, so I waited.

"Fuck," Newter swore. "I can't afford to lose that much. I won't have anything for tonight."

Gregor regarded Jack impassively. "One hundred more," he said, and matched the bet.

"A hundred more," Circus echoed, and their voice didn't offer any help in discerning their gender. There was the sound of poker chips on poker chips.

"Don't let this braggart chase you out of the game," Gregor said. "He's bluffing."

"Easy for you to say," Newter said. "You can afford another loss. He cleaned me out last game. I fold."

Circus dealt another card to each of them who were still in the game. "Well," they said, "Jack could still be working that Flush. A deuce for the dealer. Queen of hearts for Gregor."

"Hello, Felicia," Shadowjack said, not looking up at me. My bird settled onto his shoulder, tweeted twice, and then flew away through an open window across the room.

"Jack," I said. "Making friends?"

The others at the table gave me considering looks.

"Poker's not a game you play to make friends," Circus said with a wink. "More… cordial enemies."

"Ah," I said. I took note of their body language, saw how they were leaning towards Jack, how they occasionally made what seemed like incidental physical contact with him but not with the others. "Making cordial enemies, then?" I asked.

"Several," Jack replied, and there was a flash of white within a momentary smile. "Felicia, this is Circus, Newter, and Gregor. Cordial enemies, this is Felicia: my student."

The expressions of the three parahumans went from 'considering' to 'wary'. Gregor nodded at me. Newter never made it past 'wary'. Circus smiled. "Charmed," they said.

"I didn't realize you were a teacher," Gregor said.

"I am a man of many talents," Jack replied. "But we're getting off track. We have a game to finish."

Each of them returned their attention to the cards. Silence for a trio of heartbeats. Circus put down two tokens. "Twenty," they said, and for a moment, I was sure they were a man. Doubt crept in soon after, and I told myself to stop wondering about it.

One hundred more," Gregor said, matching Jack's earlier tone exactly.

"One hundred more," Jack said.

"Too rich for me," Circus said. "Fold."

Gregor examined his face-down card, then looked up at Jack. "Let's see them," he said.

Jack revealed his hidden card. "Flush," he said.

Gregor smiled thinly, then revealed his hidden card. "Full house," he said.

Circus and Newter let out the breath they were each holding.

Jack grinned. "Well played," he said.

Gregor began to collect the pile of poker chips from the center of the table. "Can't win them all, Jack," he said with satisfaction.

"Best of five?" Jack proposed.

"Thank you, no."

And the game was over. Each collected what chips remained to them. The chips were exchanged for cash, and then Jack beckoned me over to a table in the corner away from the others.

"That trick with the bird," Jack said in a low voice. "It was clever. Can you do that with any bird, or did you make that one yourself?"

"I made it," I said. "Or called it? I wanted to find you. The bird was how my Desire-walk manifested."

"Ah," Jack said. "And now that you have?"

"I want to free all the people trapped by Bakuda's time bombs," I said.

"Then do it," Jack said. "I'm sure you know how."

"It took hours to unravel just one bubble," I said.
"There has to be a better way. Some way to free them all at once."

"There are other ways, not necessarily better ones."

"There has to be a better way. Some way to free them all at once."

I let out a frustrated breath. "If I have to free them all the way I did today, it will take forever."

"The project of a few weeks," he countered. "Perhaps a month."

"I can't take weeks to do this."

He met my gaze levelly. "Child of Amber.
Here in Shadow your blood has the power to reshape the universe. You can unmake your enemies, move the stars, render anything and anyone into something more to your liking, you can reorder time itself. Even without reordering time, you literally have all the time in the world to accomplish your goals. And your complaint is that the use of that power takes too long?"

I shook my head, my thoughts touching on what he was suggesting and then skittering away. "I don't know how to do those things yet," I insisted.

"If it's a matter of experience, find some Shadow where time flows like a lightning strike. Spend a few thousand years growing in power and mastery, then return a few minutes later and do what thou wilt."

I thought about it. This time, my thoughts landed on what he was suggesting and did not wriggle free. I saw myself with hundreds of years, thousands of years between one moment and the next. Tens of thousands. A woman was waiting there on the other side: she looked like me, but I didn't know her. I wanted to tell Jack, "Get behind me, Satan," but that was a ridiculous, mad notion: I knew the Morning Star, and he wasn't Jack of Shadows.

I stood upon the precipice, and all around me lay the abyss.

"I..." I turned to him, then, and I was seized with a sudden urgency as I said, "You could do it, couldn't you? You could rescue everyone from those time-stop zones."

"Why would I want to?" he asked. "They'll be freed on their own sooner or later."

I looked at him. "The one I freed Vista from wouldn't have broken down on its own for a thousand years," I said.

"Sooner or later," he repeated with a careless shrug.

"Everyone she'd ever known would have been dead, Jack."

"Won't the same thing be true in a little while now that you've freed her?" Jack asked.

I had no idea how to answer that. His perspective seemed inhuman. The abyss yawned before me, and I shied away from it. "But it isn't true now."

"You're still thinking like a mortal," Jack observed. "Time will cure that, sooner or later."

I shook my head. I wanted to deny his statement. I needed to deny it. But I couldn't find the words.

"This is what happens when you live with mortals," Jack said, and there was a strange timbre in his voice. "This is why your kind is never satisfied with Shadows in the long term. Shadows die. Amber endures."

Neither of us said anything for a long moment.

"I knew a girl, once, on the One-Half-World. Rosalie. I met her at the Sign of the Burning Pestle, on the coach road near the ocean in the Twilight lands. She was young and beautiful, and I wanted her." His gaze lingered on Circus across the way for a moment, then went back to me. "Her teeth were white, and they flashed when she smiled. Her hair was long, glossy, and dark as the empty places between the stars. Her eyes were like the dayside sky. Blue. So blue." His voice was a murmur now. Not a whisper, but a soft rumble in his chest. "I wanted her, so I had her, and she had me. I spoke words to capture her heart, and she loved me." He smiled in remembrance. "When I left, I promised I would come back for her one day and take her to dwell with me in Shadow Guard, my castle that no man has ever set eyes upon."

"What happened?" I asked.

"I went back for her after a little while, and she was gone," he said. "No one even remembered Rosalie. Everything was changed. All the people were different. I went away again." There was a heavy silence, and then he smiled, and his dark mood lifted. "It has been some time since your last magical lesson, hasn't it? Why don't you show me what you've learned since then. After, perhaps we will speak of better ways to steal little lives away from pockets of frozen time."

(end of Segment #1, start of Segment #2)