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Sebastien in January
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2026-08-05 03:31:33The New Year arrives in Edinburgh with the specific enthusiasm for Hogmanay that baffles anyone who hasn't been here for one and becomes immediately comprehensible to anyone who has. The city burns with it for twenty-four hours, then falls quietly, profoundly hungover for two days, and Sebastien spends those two days at the Greymantle house working through a month's accumulated Wolf Council business, attempting to present it to himself as ordinary and not as the administrative backdrop to the most significant three months in Folklore history since 1987.
The pack bond at New Year is always high-frequency. Thirty-one people with their own specific textures of celebration, family, the end-of-year feelings that humans have and wolves carry differently, which is to say loudly. By the second of January it's settled into its usual register, everyone at appropriate ambient distance Marcus with the sheep, Elspeth with her grandchildren, the twins with their respective hangovers.
He's been to the Canongate for Sunday dinner twice since Geneva. Both times with Variable on the table and Veira across from him and the quality of a thing that isn't yet what it's going to be but is already not nothing. He's learning the pace of it, a pace he's never previously been required to learn, because his previous relationships were conducted with people who had no substantive reason to be careful about him. Veira has substantive reasons and applies them, and he finds, to his surprise, that he prefers this. Knowing that what she gives him she's considered. Knowing that when she's in a room with him, she's chosen the room.
He's at his desk on the third of January when she calls.
"Joon-Ho found something in Iceland."
"What."
"He thinks the sixth frequency has a physical location in the north Atlantic. He was in the Westfjords over New Year. The signal's directional and stronger at close range."
He sits back. "You knew he was going."
"I told him to wait. He's Joon-Ho."
"What do you need."
"The Wolf Council's maritime jurisdiction in the north Atlantic. Who the Folklore's authority extends to in international waters. What the protocol is for first contact with an unknown bloodline, if that's what this is."
"There is no protocol."
"I know. We're going to have to write it."
"When."
"The team flies to Reykjavik on the fifteenth. Joon-Ho has a guesthouse booked. We drive up from there." A pause. "I'd like you to come."
"I'm coming."
"I'm asking, Sebastien. Not assuming."
"I know. And I'm answering. I'm coming."
A pause. Not long. The kind that contains something both people can feel and neither is going to name yet.
"Bring cold weather gear," she says.
"I'm Scottish."
"I know. Bring it anyway. Iceland is different."
She hangs up. He sits with his phone for a moment, thinking about the pack bond, thirty-one frequencies warm in the background of his awareness, thinking about what it would mean for the Folklore to discover a sixth bloodline not politically. What it would mean in the bone.
He calls Emre.
"She called you about Iceland," Emre says, on the second ring.
"She called everyone, I assume."
"Yes. She's coordinating the whole thing." A pause. "She coordinates things the way she does everything else. Without making the coordination visible."
"I know."
"It's impressive."
"Yes." A pause slightly less comfortable than the previous one, but less uncomfortable than it would have been six weeks ago. "You're coming."
"She asked."
"I know she asked. I'm saying you're coming."
Emre is quiet a moment. "Are we doing this now."
"Doing what."
"Deciding what we are."
"We know what we are. Two people in her life with complicated histories and complementary skills and a functional working relationship."
"That's accurate."
"It doesn't need to be more than that."
"Also accurate."
"Good."
"Good."
A pause. Then Sebastien says: "You're good at the neutral Folklore read. In Iceland, when we make contact, that's going to matter."
"I know."
"So."
"So we go to Iceland."
"We go to Iceland," Sebastien says, and ends the call, and starts making his own.
Latest chapter
BLOODLINE ZERO Quiet
"I don't think you do, actually, because you've been carrying the second half so hard you've forgotten I've been carrying the first." She pulls her coat round her. "I love you. Not the way you're asking. In the way where there are two of us in the world and there always will be, and if you ever needed me at three in the morning I'd be on a plane before you finished the sentence, and that isn't a consolation prize, Emre, it's the only relationship of its kind that has ever existed."He does not say anything for a while."That is considerably better than what I was braced for," he says."It's also true, which helps.""Is it Cole.""It's been Cole for about four years and I've been refusing to look at it because I was fairly sure I was dying." She picks up a stone and turns it over. "Which he knew, and never once raised, in four years."Emre laughs a real one, short and surprised."He's a better man than I am," he says."He's a better man than most people are. It's very irritating." She
BLOODLINE ZERO The Last One I Have
She tells Nell on the deck as they come back into the fjord, because the boat is loud and the wind takes half of it and it is easier to say difficult things when the weather is doing some of the work."It's happened before," she says. "Three times. Same conversation. Somebody at the end of a channel apologising for closing it.""And it came back.""Every time. Not soon they were very clear about not soon, and their not-soon is not our not-soon." Veira watches the black cliffs go past. "But it's not an ending. I've been carrying it as an ending for a year."Nell is quiet for a while."Can I say something you won't like," she says."You will anyway.""You've been treating this whole thing like you're the last one. Since Aberdeen." Nell has her hands in her pockets and is not looking at her. "Every time you talk about the channel closing you say it like the door's shutting behind you. And there's nine of us and there's a school and there's an empty chair in Geneva that Zofia's going to s
BLOODLINE ZERO The Fourth To Say This
It grieves her, which is different, and worse in a quieter way."Then I need to talk to them," she says. "Before it goes. Properly, not a report.""About what?""About what happens to a channel nobody can hold." She stands. "They've been in the Vein since before the compact. They waited seven hundred years for a conduit who could hear them. And in about a year there won't be one, and I'd like them to hear that from me rather than have it stop."Croft says, "You'll need a boat.""I'll need a boat," Veira agrees. "And I'd like Nell to come."Nell looks up sharply."You can't hear them," Veira says. "I know. But you're going to be doing this for sixty years after I stop and I'd rather you'd been in the room once."The Friðargeir is eleven years older and so is Brynja, who greets them at the Reykjavik dock with the expression of a woman who has been waiting five years to be asked again and would rather die than say so."You brought more people," she says."Six.""Last time it was seven."
BLOODLINE ZERO Four Minuites
The programme runs for four years.That is the sentence Veira will use afterwards, when people ask, and it is accurate and it conceals everything, because what four years actually consists of is Tuesdays.Nell takes a full share at seventeen and a second at nineteen and by twenty is carrying more than any of them, and it does not kill her, and by then Joon-Ho has eleven hundred days of monitoring data proving why: gradual, consensual, taught, and above all known the thing that killed the eleven in Utrecht was not the load but the fact that not one of them was ever told what they were holding.Aoife from Cork takes a share at twenty-two and immediately becomes insufferable about it.The girl from Kraków, whose name is Zofia and who did not speak for eleven days in her first month, takes hers at eighteen and then does something none of them anticipated, which is enrol in a medicine degree in Warsaw on the grounds that somebody is going to have to be able to treat this properly in thirty
BLOODLINE ZERO Chapter 97
The committee reports on the Friday and the Assembly convenes on the sixth of April, and Veira is not there.She watches it from the farmhouse on a link Sunnsdottir arranges through a procedural clause nobody has used since 1974, and Sebastien sits beside her for eleven hours and does not once say anything unless she asks him something.Croft opposes the conduit holding the seat. He does it in seven minutes and it is the best speech anybody makes all day and he loses the vote nine to four.Then Veira's written submission is read into the record by the convener, and Solvieg reads all of it, including the last paragraph, which several Elders have plainly not been shown in advance.I decline the seat. I ask the Assembly to create it and leave it vacant until a member of the restored bloodline is of age and willing to hold it. If that takes fifteen years, the vacancy is the accurate record of what was done, and I would ask the Assembly to look at it.There is a silence of about four secon
BLOODLINE ZERO Chapter 96-
The committee reports on the Friday and the Assembly convenes on the sixth of April, and Veira is not there.She watches it from the farmhouse on a link Sunnsdottir arranges through a procedural clause nobody has used since 1974, and Sebastien sits beside her for eleven hours and does not once say anything unless she asks him something.Croft opposes the conduit holding the seat. He does it in seven minutes and it is the best speech anybody makes all day and he loses the vote nine to four.Then Veira's written submission is read into the record by the convener, and Solvieg reads all of it, including the last paragraph, which several Elders have plainly not been shown in advance.I decline the seat. I ask the Assembly to create it and leave it vacant until a member of the restored bloodline is of age and willing to hold it. If that takes fifteen years, the vacancy is the accurate record of what was done, and I would ask the Assembly to look at it.There is a silence of about four secon
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