Page 1 of Prior Claim
Episode 1
Sevastyan
January 2nd
The air was cold. The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures museum stood in a stone building at the end of the main quad. Salt, keeping the cement path from becoming a lane of ice, ground under Sevastyan’s boots. Almost no one was walking about. They wouldn’t be, not mid-morning on the second of January. Classes for the University of Chicago were not in session, and the professors, staff, and students who could be were hidden inside, away from the storm. All the fewer to see him pass or remember his face.
He reached the doors of the Institute as they were unlocked, the sign in the front door just changed over to “Open”. The sleepy attendant waved him inside, and Sevastyan followed him up the short, enclosed stairway to the second set of front doors. Like many places in Chicago, the double entrance space was necessary for keeping the indoors warm during the winter. Sevastyan pulled off his coat and the attendant pointed him across the foyer to a small side room with space to hang outer garments built into the back wall. He left his large outer layer but kept the thick beanie covering his hair, taking time to brush the snow off it while standing on the gray mats.
The attendant yawned several times and blinked at him as he returned to the main space. “Donation only.” He waved to a box in front of the desk and a bit to the right. There was a QR code on the front for those who didn’t want to deposit cash through the slot in the top.
“Thanks,” Sevastyan said. He shoved cash into the box.
The first hall was accessed through a pair of heavy double doors. Wood and metal framed heavy glass that revealed what was coming. He pushed through, bypassing the rows of artifacts laid out in clear cases on either side. It was the massive figure at the end on which he was fixed.
The end of the hall was open space. From three sides, heavy stone reliefs looked down from above, figures half freed from slabs of stone the size of city walls. The greatest stared down the hall, facing any who entered—a perfect Assyrian lamassu. A massively winged divine protector. The body was that of a bull and the head of an ancient Mesopotamian king, his beard coiled in rows on his bare breast. Armor wrapped his shoulders and the massive tail of lion arched out behind. Every line of the face was defined and his headdress rose up to the ceiling. Attending the lamassu on the left were war horses and armed men, and to the right, princes and their retinue.
Sevastyan stared up at the lamassu’s implacable face. For all that Sevastyan was above average height and at the peak of physical fitness, the abs and arms on the figure eclipsed him completely. They were on the level of divinity, above what man had to offer, for all that man had chiseled them into being.
Was it art? Yes. And yet art had not been the aim. Figures such as these had stared down upon travelers as they entered the realm of kings, hewn to invoke power, to quell thoughts of rebellion, and to ignite fear in the heart of an embryonic challenger. A divine protector.
Sevastyan swallowed, keeping his back to the entrance. This was a risk. It was all a risk. But now that he was here—waiting—the danger was not what clawed at his throat and turned his skin slick with sweat.
He wouldn’t turn to watch.
He would wait.
It was up to the one he was waiting for whether this winged creature would be the last vision of his life. Lamassu were meant to be protective figures, but not even these ancient spirits would protect him now.
“Meet me at the gates of Assyria.”
Sevastyan’s breath stilled. The voice had not changed. The tone, if anything, had matured, but it was still the same timbre that had brought him to his knees more than ten years before.
He rotated slowly, hands laced together behind his back. “You came.”
“You called.”
Ellisandre had barely changed. The two of them stared at each other. He’d stalked them for years now, finding glimpses of them in the background of the tabloid and news coverage of Ellisandre’s employer. Ellisandre’s clothes were what he had come to expect: androgynous to the extreme, leaning towards avant-garde. Today they wore a brown suit with shoulder pads and oversized pants beneath a flat, maroon, wide-brimmed hat made of suede. Their jacket was buttoned in the center and a silk scarf of muted red, blue, and pink was tied around their throat. Their makeup was flawless, highlighting strong cheekbones and piercing gray eyes. Russet lips muted a mouth that should have looked too wide on such an angular face, but instead offset a sharp jaw and carved, alabaster neck. The rest of their form was lost beneath the bulk of the suit. Even their hands were gloved in leather the color of their lips.
The speech he’d planned to make flew out of his thoughts. Instead, he looked into those gray eyes and said, “You let me think a terrible thing.”
“I did.”
No denial. How like Ellisandre. Blunt and obvious. Absolutely opaque. The opposite of Rei. Sevastyan looked away.
Ellisandre moved to stand beside him, not shoulder to shoulder but close, so that they were absorbing the ancient guardian of the Assyrian gate as he had. Sevastyan turned back to stare at the stones with them.
“It is good you called,” Ellisandre said.
“Now or then?”
“Yes.”
Ellisandre
Ten Years Ago
The phone pressed against her collarbone shook with an incoming call. There was no one left alive. The long-abandoned and recently embattled stone farmhouse and barns were silent, the yard littered with cars and motorbikes. Bodies lay between them. Bodies clogged the kitchen door. Bodies draped across the fence. She flipped the phone open, not speaking.
