=:= Pierre =:=

Pierre finished his meal in the small chic cafe, then made his way back to the old building that housed his luxury apartment. He smiled at a few attractive women as he passed by. Le Marais had seen its ups and downs through its long history, but it was now a trendy and fashionable area again. He'd always liked it, it was his favourite part of Paris.

He chose to live here, and the Brotherhood's office in Paris was here. And since their headquarters in London had fallen last November, Pierre had become the de-facto leader of the remaining Brotherhood offices.

In addition to being the controller for France and the surrounding area, Pierre was also a wizard. Now he was the last surviving wizard. All the others fell along with their leadership. Of the men who survived, he alone knew what happened. Or at least, he suspected.

He'd been friends with a fellow wizard, a man named Anthony. His friend told him last October of the Awakening in Canada. Much to his chagrin, Anthony was being sent overseas with a small team, to execute the protocols and eliminate a group of cultists. Of course, Anthony never returned from that mission, and a month after his mission begun, the London office was smouldering rubble. Their leader Alexander had gone silent as well, as had Oracle. The various offices were all on their own.

Losing their leadership would have other impacts on men like Pierre. One of the privileges of attaining high rank within the Brotherhood, beyond the money and power, was the looks and the health. Despite being in his early seventies, he had the body of a man in his forties.

Pierre didn't know how Alexander did it, but he knew that was a gift that came from their leader, and without that ongoing gift, he would be aging again at a normal rate.

Since the Brotherhood had fallen, things had been fairly quiet for Pierre and the other men in the Paris office. Up until last month, that is.

In fact, it started in May. After the full moon on May twenty-third, there were scattered reports of people using magic, to transform themselves. Mostly it had been trans people changing their bodies to their desired gender. A few had been right here in Le Marais, home to one of Paris's LGBT districts.

Pierre hadn't actually paid the announcements any mind. Transformation magic was unheard of, and it certainly wasn't something lay people could just pick up and do.

Where there'd been just a handful of reports in May, the June full moon brought a small flood. The government had taken notice, as had Pierre and the Brotherhood. He'd quickly found a copy of the spell that was circulating online, and got to work attempting to reverse-engineer it.

That was four weeks ago, and he was still working on it now.

He hadn't spent all his time struggling to understand the spell though. He'd had some of his fellows locate and bind a handful of these 'changed' persons. He'd even personally examined and 'interrogated' four of them. And then dissected them. There was nothing remarkable about them or their lives. None had any natural talent for magic. They knew no other spells. All had merely found this one spell online, and had followed its simple instructions.

It was infuriating. Not only had someone come up with transformative magic, they'd wrapped it up in levels of obfuscation while simultaneously making it so simple to use that any fool off the street could use it, provided they could read and follow directions.

Now it was Saturday evening, and the next full moon would be just after midnight tonight. Across the country, more people would be playing with forces beyond their understanding, causing unnatural changes to their bodies.

Pierre sat at his dining table and got back to work on deciphering the spell. He'd already solved the smaller of the two. It was a clever little cantrip, designed to let the user charge up magical energy. It was very tightly controlled though.

The charged energy could only be used with the accompanying spell, and the charge would dissipate in thirty hours if it wasn't used or renewed. The average person would need to use the cantrip a dozen times to store enough energy to work the main spell. And the way the cantrip was created, after each use a person couldn't repeat it for about eighteen or twenty hours.

So the instructions to recite it every night before bed for two weeks ensured that the user would generate and store enough energy to work the actual transformation. The instructions stating the cantrip should be used beginning after the new moon seemed to be irrelevant. That was merely a convenient starting-point, it could be used any time of the month.

He was fairly sure though that the cantrip included a limiting function, so there was only so much power that could be built this way. It would serve no purpose for someone to be reciting it for three weeks, four weeks, or two months. Twelve to fourteen nights would suffice.

The second spell, the actual transformation, had been frustrating Pierre for weeks now. It was either a work of genius or of madness. There was layer upon layer of obfuscation, and so far he'd only managed to decipher the aspects which tied it to the full moon and to the charge of power created by the cantrip.

An experienced wizard like himself should be able to use this spell any time, with their own residual store of magical power. At least, that would be the case after he removed the parts of the spell which locked it to the cantrip and the phase of the moon. And it was of little use to him if he could only use it on himself. He needed to decipher and remove the aspects of the spell that limited its effect to the caster.

The primary goal of course was that he and the remaining Brotherhood would have this kind of magic for themselves.

Pierre's secondary goal was to find a simple way to reverse the effects. His contacts in the government were very interested in a method they could use to restore les gens changés to their original shapes. There would be a substantial monetary contribution should he deliver them a viable solution, which would help rebuild the Brotherhood's fortunes. They no longer received funds from London, and last month the accounts they still had access to were suddenly closed.

His eyes moved back and forth through the printed spell and the reams of notes he had spread out across his dining table. He had a sip of wine, then picked up his pencil and made a few more notes. He felt he was on the verge of another little breakthrough when he was interrupted by a knocking at his door.

Muttering some curses under his breath, Pierre got to his feet and moved to the door. He swung it open, scowling at whoever had disturbed him.

He found himself glaring down at a short, skinny blonde girl. She looked about fifteen or sixteen years old, and was dressed in leggings and an oversized top, with sneakers on her feet.

"Bonjour," she said, with a very foreign accent. "Parlez-vous Anglais?"

"Oui," Pierre scowled at her, "What is the meaning of this interruption? Who are you?"

The girl sighed in relief, "Oh thank goodness! Sorry but my French is... Well I just used about all the French I know, so this would be a lot harder if you didn't know English."

He was about to just slam the door in the girl's face, but she strolled past him into his home as if she owned the place. She was looking around his apartment as she wandered in.

He glared as she moved past him, shouting "Hey!" This girl was in for a very harsh lesson in manners. She'd interrupted his work, and for that he decided he would have a little fun with her before he disposed of her.

Pierre closed the door, then turned and cast the paralysis spell. To his shock there was no result, girl was still wandering around his home as though nothing had happened. He felt the magic, he knew the spell should have worked. Instead, it just drained away to nothing rather than immobilizing the blonde teen.

Instinctively he cast a spell to check her aura. The result was almost blinding. This girl's aura glowed with magical energy the way the sun glowed with light. He immediately used the death spell on her, but it too failed to find its mark. As before, he felt the magic just drain away as he worked the spell.

The teen was now standing by his dining table, looking at his notes. He kept his eyes on her as he walked around the perimeter of the room, to his desk in the corner. He was trying to keep the fear out of his expression. He had no idea who or what this girl was. She wasn't human, and she wasn't fae or demon. Then it hit him. She had to be a vessel, an embodied God.

She sighed, shaking her head. "Oh dear. Pierre... This is what I was afraid of. The Brotherhood's last wizzard is trying to reverse my spell and undo my good work."

He felt a twinge of shock. She knew of the Brotherhood. And she knew he was the only surviving wizard. Was she the one who destroyed the London office? It made sense, it would have taken an embodied God.

He tried to keep the anxiety out of his voice as he scoffed, "Your 'good' work? Your spell is perverting, subverting the human race. It's madness, to put that into the hands of the public." He recalled the spell had been attributed to someone named 'Cindy'. It was not the name of any Goddess he knew, but it may be the name of the vessel. "Your name is Cindy?"

"Yeah," she nodded. Then in an angry tone she said, "Pierre you're trying to figure out how to take my gift away from people! I won't let you to do that."

Pierre was next to his desk now, behind the girl. She was still standing next to the dining table, looking down at his notes. Moving quickly but silently, he slid open the top drawer of his desk and picked up the heavy old revolver he kept there. He hadn't needed it in decades, but this child was somehow immune to his magic. She was just turning around to face him as he raised it and fired.

The shot echoed loudly in his spacious apartment. He'd hit the girl at point blank range, in the middle of her chest. The impact knocked her backwards. She fell back across his dining table then rolled off, ending up face down on the floor.

Pierre stepped closer and fired twice more, once into her back and once into the back of her head. His heart was pounding and his ears were ringing, while the pungent odour of gunpowder hung in the air. He knew his neighbours would certainly be calling the police.

He felt a surge of emotions as he stood over the body. He'd just destroyed a vessel, he'd cut a Goddess off from the mortal realm. But he also had a dead teenage girl in his dining room, and he needed to remedy that before police arrived. He needed to call some of his Brothers. They had contacts with the police, and they would help him sort out this mess.

He set the revolver down on the desk and picked up his phone. As he was swiping through his contact list, he turned, and froze. The girl's body was gone. There wasn't even any blood on the floor where she'd been laying. His eyes widened as he realized all his notes were gone too, the dining table was bare.

Pierre spun around to grab the pistol again, and gasped in dismay. Not only was the gun missing, so was his desk. He turned again, and stared in shock. The entire apartment was now empty, all his furniture was gone. Even the pictures that had been decorating the walls were missing. The place was as empty and bare as it had been when he first moved in almost four decades ago.

His heart was racing as he looked down at the phone in his hands. He tapped one of his contacts in the Brotherhood. He had to warn the others. A moment after he hit the contact, the screen on his phone went black. His phone had died.

"That really sucked!" The teen girl's angry voice came from directly behind him.

Pierre spun around and stepped back. She was there, apparently completely unharmed, and she was scowling up at him with an outraged expression on her face. There was a faint red glow in her eyes.

She stated angrily "I thought you were a wizard! What's the deal with the gun?!"

He took another step back, and in desperation, he cast the death spell at her again. As before, it seemed to just fizzle out.

Cindy glared "Enough with the death spells! You guys really need to get more creative!"

The faint glow in her eyes flared a brighter red, and the world seemed to spin slightly as everything went white.

• • • • •

Pierre drifted awake with a groan. He could hear people moving around him, both locals and tourists wandering through the park enjoying another warm summer day.

He dragged his left arm up to shield his eyes from the noon sun, while his right hand tightened around the neck of his bottle. He gave it a little shake. From the sound and weight of the liquor sloshing around inside, he figured there was only one or two mouthfuls left.

He'd had that same dream again. The one where the angry little teenaged Goddess whisked him away to her log cabin in the heavens, and forced him to write down all the arcane magical knowledge he had.

"But why was she so angry with you?" people would ask him, whenever he recounted the story. He'd explain it was because he shot her with his enchanted antique gun.

"Ah, le pistolet magique!" They'd laugh, there'd be more questions, and eventually if he was lucky, they'd be entertained enough to part with a few euros. Then he'd get himself another bottle of the hard stuff to see him through another day.

Some of the tourists called him "Le Magicien" because of his tales of magic and wizardry. He was sure most of them meant well. They were entertained, they gave him money. They thought the title was part of his act, a character he played for their amusement and their money.

They might even be right. He wasn't sure himself anymore. Nor was he sure which truth was more horrific - that he was simply a delusional homeless old drunk, or that his stories might be true and he really was once a powerful wizard. He knew at one time, he was positive his stories were the truth.

Not long ago, he'd been convinced he'd been a high-ranking mage in a secret society. He had a luxurious apartment in Le Marais. Magic had even preserved his youth, or so he thought. He was once rich, powerful, handsome, healthy.

At one time he believed he'd had it all, and then he'd lost it. That angry teenaged Goddess had taken everything. His home, his money, his health, his youth, his knowledge, and his magic. She'd taken it all away, left him with nothing but his stories, then returned him to the streets of Paris.

Whether it had been real or was merely the result of an alcohol-fuelled nightmare, he still remembered the last thing she'd said to him, before she took it all away.

"Pierre," she said, "Shooting me was a mistake, but I can forgive that. What I cannot forgive though, was your efforts to reverse my gift. You wanted to take away the gift I've given people, you wanted to enable other people to take my gift away from people. And on top of that, you tormented and murdered four people, who's only 'crime' was accepting my gift."

He remembered her eyes glowing an angry red as she glared at him, "My gift is not yours to take away! That is unforgivable Pierre. Trying to take my gift from people who need it, that's the worst thing you could do! So I'm going to do to you the worst thing I can do. I'm taking away everything you've ever had. You have nothing, you are nothing. Now begone!"

Pierre suppressed a shudder at the memories. He brought the bottle to his lips and drank back the last its contents, a couple gulps of cheap triple sec. The liquid burned slightly on the way down, but brought a little extra warmth to his belly, and helped him forget the difficult memories.

With a few more groans, he slowly dragged himself upright and eventually got to his feet. He looked around, then shuffled off towards the path that ran alongside the river. There was a good spot there to sit and tell his stories, and hopefully earn himself a few euros for the day.

PurpleCatGirl

Sorry this wasn't a fun chapter but we knew there'd be push-back against Cindy's big plans. And we knew there were still some ex-Brotherhood guys around, who'd want to get involved.

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