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Chapter Text

Dana Scully was, foremost, a believer. 

Her faith in the Authority and the power of the Magisterium had always been absolute. Despite the fact that she was a woman, she was the youngest person in the country of New Denmark to ascend to the position of Detective Inspector, and she and her dæmon Hendrick, his feline shoulder blades rolling under tufted fur, strolled through the Security Forces bullpen with their heads held higher than most. She had conviction on her side. She had faith. And it wasn’t until she was assigned a partner, a man sent from the lauded halls of the Magisterium in Oxford, that she began to question the Authority’s faith in her. 

She assumed he was a spy, a man sent to test her capability and resolve, and when he walked up to her desk - his fossa dæmon Cassiana walking primly at his heels - she did not have the revelation of her life. That would come later. What she did have all those years ago was an inkling that Fox Mulder was perhaps not what he appeared, and she would find that that was the last time a conviction she had would prove to be absolutely true.

XxXxXxXxXxX 

It happened the first time on a stakeout, after having been partners for several months. Mulder had saved her life at least once by this point, and he had worked his way under her shell, irritating and challenging her until she had nurtured a deep seated respect for and trust in him; something beautiful, rare, and completely unexpected. In her head she likened it to an oyster producing a pearl, but she would never tell Mulder that. 

They had been assigned to observe and monitor a group of Gyptians that had settled on a tributary of the Mississippi just south of Chicago. As the partners settled into the observation room that had been set up in the upper room of a warehouse across the river from where the Gyptians were docked, Mulder had removed his coat, bundling it up behind his head as he stretched out on the floor, and informed Scully that he was going to take a nap. When pressed, he informed her that he wasn’t about to engage in hassling (whether they were aware of it or not) a group of oft-maligned and misunderstood people just because the Magisterium -- and society at large -- thought them different enough to engender misplaced suspicion. Five minutes later he was snoring. 

Having whatever duty-bound motivation and stick withitness immediately deflated by her partner’s righteous scorn, Scully sat in one of the room’s two chairs, looking occasionally through the spyglass without any real interest or intent. Finally sliding back in the chair and examining her cuticles, she only saw it for a split second, and only then out of the corner of her eye. 

Cass, curled into a feline-like ball on Mulder’s left side, had, for what amounted to only a moment, completely changed color, from her usual reddish-brown to stark white and then back again, her coat rippling in her sleep as though a wave had passed from her head to the tip of her tail. Mulder mumbled something and twitched and then they were still again, and if Hendrick had not been looking directly at them at the time, Scully would have called it a trick of her mind and wouldn’t have given it another thought. 

“Dana,” Hendrick said sharply, sitting up fast on his haunches, the hair at the rough of his neck puffed up in either aggression or fear.

She hardly wanted to admit she had seen it, but Hendrick was off-put as hell.

“Did Cass just…” she asked her dæmon.

“Yes,” he said, sniffing the air in the direction of Mulder and Cass, the black parentheses-like lines running from his tear ducts to his jaw twitching as he inhaled. 

As if sensing the attention being paid him, Mulder sniffed to awareness, blinking his eyes tiredly. Cass uncurled herself next to him and reared back on her hind legs to stretch. Mulder sat up and caught the look on Scully’s face. 

“Did something happen?” he asked. “Are the Gyptians-”

“You changed,” Hendrick said to Cassiana, who tensed under the unblinking yellow stare of the cheetah. “We saw you.”

Mulder and Cass shared a look. 

“Mulder, what’s going on?” Scully asked. 

Mulder pointed to the window -- the glare of the sun was knifing through it, painting the brick wall in the back of the room a warm red.

“I’m sure it was just a trick of the sun,” Mulder said nonchalantly, getting to his feet. “It does weird things at this hour of the day.”

“Mulder, she changed. Hendrick and I both saw it. Her coat went white and then back to brown.”

One of Cass’s ears twitched, and Mulder looked down at his dæmon, who looked back at him. “We were asleep,” Cass said to him irritably, and then looked away, her voice getting quieter, “...it’s possible.” 

“What’s possible?” Scully asked. “Mulder what is going on?”

Mulder pulled his lips into his mouth and took a deep breath, clearly considering what his next words would be. Finally he tipped his head to the side, as if trying to crack his neck, and blew out the breath he’d been holding. 

“Scully, do you trust us?” he asked. 

“Mulder, this isn’t-”

“No. I need to know. Do. You. Trust us?”

Scully looked to Hendrick, who returned her gaze, unblinking. Finally she turned back to her partner. 

“Yes,” she said, something in her gut — in the way Hendrick lifted up his head — telling her to follow her instincts. Yes, she trusted him. He’d earned it. “Yes, we trust you.”

“Good,” he said, nodding. “That’s good.” He lowered himself into the other chair that was set up on the other side of the brass spyglass, and folded his hands together, lowering his head as if in prayer. When he finally looked up, he glanced at his dæmon, who looked back at him nervously. “Cass never settled, Scully,” he said simply. “Not really. Not like other dæmons. She’s usually a fossa, I think that’s her most natural form,” at this, Cass nodded her head, “but… when I feel a particularly strong emotion or… sometimes she changes.”

“But you’re-” Scully floundered. “But you’re, what? Thirty-two years old?”

“Yes.”

Scully felt as though the world itself had spun, and everything she’d ever thought to be true and right had inverted. 

“But… Can she change at will? Like when we were kids?”

Mulder nodded slowly. “Under the right circumstances,” he said quietly.   

“Mulder, that’s-” she stopped herself. “Who knows? Who knows about this?” 

“A few close friends,” he said. “My father.”

“Does Captain Skinner know?”

“No,” Mulder looked up sharply, “no one at the Magisterium.”

“Except your father-” she began to say.

“Okay,” he sighed, “no one at the Magisterium but him.” Scully was shocked. Bill Mulder was one of the highest ranking members at the Magisterium Headquarters itself.

She was silent for several lengthy moments. Beside her, Hendrick twitched his long tail. If she hadn’t seen Cass change, she never would have believed it. And what of the Magisterium? The very institution for which they worked? If she reported something of this nature to their superiors, it would send the institution into a tailspin. There would be hearings, likely prosecutions. Experiments. Mulder would be locked up. Mulder could be killed. If the Magisterium found out…

“Mulder, that could be considered heresy,” she whispered. 

“I know,” he confessed. “I didn’t join the Magisterium to try to… I’m not working against it. I wanted to make a difference. I still do.”

She sat down heavily in the other chair. 

“Scully,” he said, his voice pleading. Cass sat up on her haunches and put a comforting paw on his knee. 

Finally, Hendrick looked at Scully, who nodded at him, and then he walked over to Cass and gave her a gentle cat-like head butt. “We’ll keep your secret,” Hendrick said. 

XxX

That had been three years ago. And she and Hendrick, having been through a maelstrom of experiences that had made her question the life she led and cemented Mulder’s place by her side and in the secret places of her heart, kept their secret. 

She had only seen Cass turn twice in all that time. Once, when Mulder had been in a coma, both he and his dæmon laid out on a bed in the far north after having been attacked by a band of Québécois — Cass, lying unconscious at her human’s side, had turned into a butterfly and then back again, so quickly Scully wouldn’t have even seen it if she hadn’t been looking for it. The other time, Scully had been kidnapped by a man experiencing a psychotic break, and while the man and his baboon dæmon dragged Scully and Hendrick into the back of an anbaric truck, Cass, moving far further away from Mulder (who was giving chase more than a quarter of a mile behind them) than should have ever been possible, turned into a black bear while chasing the man’s dæmon and delivered a blow so vicious to the baboon’s head that Scully felt the man holding her flung backwards. By the time Mulder caught up to them Cass was a fossa again, and was wending her way between Hendrick’s front legs with quiet cat-like mews. 

Mulder had embraced Scully then, and she felt something come alive inside of her.

Chapter Text

They had been called into their superior’s office -- a not uncommon experience -- though Scully always got an initial roiling in her gut when Captain Skinner’s secretary reached out. She worried every second of every day that Mulder would be found out and taken away from her. She’d fallen in love with him — was fairly certain he’d fallen in love with her too — and though neither of them acknowledged it, much less talked about it out loud —  she knew that he knew.

“Relax,” Mulder would say to her, and Cass would give her head a shake and they would take the lift to Skinner’s floor, the lower ranked detectives watching them as they walked through the bullpen, their dull eyes and those of their dæmons -- Alsatians almost to a one -- following them jealously. Then Mulder would make small talk with Skinner’s secretary while they waited to be called in. 

They sat thusly now. 

“And how did you find the zeppelin ride?” Mulder asked Kimberly, having found out she had just returned from a trip to the Continent.

“Very well,” she answered, smiling, “the food was excellent.” The songbird dæmon at her shoulder gave a ruffle of her feathers in agreement.

“Next time try African Aeroways,” Mulder suggested helpfully. “The food is just as good, but I find the flight to be more comfortable.”

Scully, who had been raised the daughter of a relatively poor sailor, hadn’t even seen a zeppelin until she started working for the Magisterium, and even now she found being reminded of Mulder’s privileged upbringing sometimes rankled.  

Skinner popped his head out of his office door. 

“Detectives,” he said, inviting them in. 

Scully walked in first, glancing briefly at Skinner’s gorilla dæmon Lucy, who sat stoically in the corner of the office running a finger through the glossy hair of her arm. 

“Have a seat,” Skinner said, gesturing to the two chairs which sat in front of his large mahogany desk. Once they settled in, he perched himself on the desk’s edge in front of them. “I need you to go to Beringland.”

At this, Cass blew a quiet breath out, fluffing up her whiskers. Mulder squirmed a bit in his chair. Lucy looked up from the shadowed corner where she sat, and Skinner looked at Mulder, his face registering no emotion at all. 

“Will that be a problem?” the Captain asked. 

“No sir,” Mulder answered. 

Scully sat up more in her seat. 

“What’s in Beringland, sir?” she asked. “Won’t the Bering government bristle at two agents of the New Danish Magisterium being sent into their territory?”

Skinner stood and moved to lower himself into the chair behind his desk. 

“It was the Bering government itself which has asked for the Magisterium’s help.”

At this both Mulder and Scully’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. 

“Help with what?” Mulder finally spoke. 

“They believe that they are experiencing a… witch problem,” Skinner said. Scully saw Mulder’s brows go up impossibly higher. 

“But witches only live in the plains of Northern Siberia,” Scully said. “They’re permitted nowhere else. This has always been so.”

“Yes,” Skinner said matter of factly. 

“Witches can live in any northern clime,” Mulder said, throwing a glance to his partner. “It’s only Magisterium rules that keep them in the Far East. Rules that they themselves view with no small amount of derision. I don’t see why they might not have decided to stake a claim in North America.”

Scully snickered, which drew a look from her partner. 

“What about the Witches of Juneau?” he asked her. 

Skinner held up a hand. “We should leave the debate of repatriation to the halls of Geneva,” he said. “I need you two to head up to Nome. You’ll meet an agent of the Bering by the name of Frohike at the airfield there. He’ll give you more information. Your job is to assist the Bering in their investigation into the claims of supposed witch settlements. Nothing more. I don’t want any international incidents, do you understand me?” 

“Understood, sir,” Scully said, standing. 

Mulder remained in his seat, and flashed a look at Cass, who’d been staring at Lucy. “Why us, sir?” he asked, turning to look at their boss. “Why Detective Inspector Scully and myself?”

Skinner looked at Mulder steadily, his countenance unruffled. 

“I find you to be uniquely qualified,” he said after giving his subordinate a long look. 

Cass chuffed again and Mulder stood as well, nodding at Skinner, and then lead Scully out of the office and back to the lift, his warm hand at the small of her back. 

XxX

Back in their office (they had been moved from the bullpen to a basement office two years back when Mulder had gotten the promotion to Detective Inspector, though the grumblings from the rest of the lower level Detectives seemed to think it was pure nepotism), Mulder pulled out several files while Scully sat at her desk watching him. 

"I'm not entirely certain the witches of Juneau aren't a myth," she said, crossing her arms in front of her. At her feet, Hendrick sat back, wrapping his thick tail haughtily around his feet. Cass huffed a breath through her whiskers -- her version of an eye roll. 

"Scully,” Mulder said. It was a statement. A complaint. A plea. "You can't be serious."

"Witches’ very existence are heretical," Scully said, knowing full well she was being evasive.

"So is mine," Mulder said, and both Cass and Scully looked at him sharply. 

"Fox," Cass said sharply. 

"She's right," Scully said, looking over her shoulder. "You need to be careful what you say."

Mulder shrugged. "You're changing the subject."

Scully looked at him sternly and then sighed. "I've never met a witch. Have you?"

"Thought I saw one flying over Lac Supérieur once," Mulder said offhandedly. "But it could have been an aeronaut." He tossed a few files on her desktop and turned to her. “You’re not saying you doubt the existence of witches full-stop, are you?”

She looked at him a minute. “No,” she finally said, “just the notion that there are pockets of witches -- like those rumored to be in Juneau for instance -- that don’t adhere to Magisterium law.” She realized she was making it sound like the very thought of breaking the law was something out of the realm of possibility when her job was to track down those who did so every day of the week. Mulder wrinkled his nose at her and she felt suddenly defensive. 

“The Magisterium has very little authority in the Bering Territory,” he pointed out. 

“But the Bering don’t want the witches, either.”

“And apparently that’s why we’re being sent to Beringland,” he sighed. 

“What kind of help do you suppose they want?” Scully asked him.

“Helping ‘to assist the Bering in their investigation into the claims of supposed witch settlements. Nothing more.’” Mulder quoted Skinner, imitating their superior’s voice. 

Scully sighed. She had no idea what to expect. “There’s not much infrastructure up there,” she said. “And it’s cold year-round.”

Mulder smiled and leaned into her as he walked by. “Bring your mittens,” he said.

Chapter Text

The first thing that hit her when she stepped off the Zeppelin in Nome was the marshy smell of the Snake River that purled past the airfield. The second thing was the cold. Though it was summer, there was a chill underlying everything; the kind of cold that waited for you just round a bend, the kind that hid in every shadow. The cold made the air seem brighter somehow, the sunshine as high and clear as a rung bell. 

Scully could see her breath. Hendrick ruffled the fur around his neck, making a feline chuff of displeasure.

“Ah,” Mulder said, with an irritating air of serenity, “the north.” As though he had just walked through the door of a pub where everyone knew his name. Cass gave him a look askance and proceeded to trot down the short metal plank to the ground, her nails clicking with each brisk step. 

At the base of the plank waited a short, grizzled man dressed in a sheep fleece-lined vest and a pork pie hat, fingerless gloves on hands that were laced together in front of him, patiently expectant. His dæmon sat up on her haunches next to him, a portly raccoon with her paws held in just the same way. 

“Mr. Mulder,” he said, “Ms. Scully. Welcome to Beringland.”

Mulder and Scully took the last few steps down the plank and reached out to shake hands with the little man, who held onto Scully's hand a fraction too long, his eyes softening in the light of the cold summer sun.

“Frohike?” Mulder asked, to which the man nodded, and then pointed down to his dæmon.

“Annie,” he said, introducing them. Hendrick and Cass politely touched noses with the raccoon. “Come,” Frohike went on, turning on his heel and leading them to the area where their luggage awaited them. They obediently followed, Scully looking this way and that at the high, snow-capped mountains that stood as a purple and white backdrop like a ring around the valley in which they stood. 

Once they collected their things and were a ways away from the porters and the other passengers, Frohike looked at them over his shoulder.

“Apologies, Detectives, but it would be best not to advertise your employment by the Magisterium while here amongst the Bering.”

“Your accent,” Mulder said, nodding, “you don’t sound Bering yourself.”

“I am New Danish by birth,” he explained, turning them onto a wet gravel path that led from the airfield down a gentle slope toward the port. “I grew up in the north, just outside of Pontchartrain on the border with New France.” His dæmon kept glancing back at them as if to assure herself that they still followed, her fat striped tail swishing over the prickly, frost-covered grass at their feet. “I have hired a boat to take us up the Snake,” Frohike went on, “the captain and crew know our business, but you will want to be on guard while on shore. This land is not entirely lawless,” he said, “but not entirely… not.”

With that they approached the town center which fanned out from the center of the port, and Frohike swung a right toward the northernmost pier, a long stretch of wet and slippery docks with a heavy anbaric crane on one side and a row of small steam coasters on the other, all bobbing gently in the surf. Each boat was painted a different bright color, which had been worn by the sun and wind and was flecked by paint chips and gull guano. Frohike pulled up to a stop at the steamer tied to the furthest-most berth on the end, a faded red Gulpie that reminded Scully of her father’s own barge, and she felt a small smile push into her cheeks.

“Your chariot, my lady,” Frohike said, giving her a wide smile. A man with stringy blond hair jumped up onto the deck and held out a hand to help her aboard, his arctic fox dæmon peering at them curiously. Scully ignored the man’s hand and tossed him her canvas rucksack instead, jumping easily down onto the bobbing deck with the confident expertise of a sailor’s daughter. Mulder, looking at her with impressed surprise, did so far less gracefully, and the blond man had to grab his arm to steady him when he almost fell in. 

Frohike jumped down onto the deck with slightly more grace and hooked a thumb at the blond sailor. 

“Langly,” he introduced him simply. 

Frohike led them along the deck and into the small interior bridge. At the helm stood a man of average height, looking the part of a sailor with an oatmeal colored cable knit sweater, a long, warm looking navy peacoat and a woolen cap upon his head. He had a trim cinnamon colored beard and wide eyes, and his dæmon, a red squirrel, was perched on his shoulder. 

“Captain Byers,” Frohike said, and the man turned to them, “this is Detective Inspector Scully and Detective Inspector Mulder.” 

The captain reached out to shake their hands and his dæmon, whose name they would soon find out was Mia, nodded to Hendrick and Cass. 

“Welcome aboard,” he said. “Would you mind showing them to their berth?” This he said to Frohike, who nodded and led them down the steps of a companionway next to the helm that led into the interior of the small ship. 

To the stern, Frohike pointed out the small mess and engine room beyond it, from which a thin redheaded man was stepping through the hatch, wiping greasy hands on an already greasy rag. He had long hair and a red puffy down vest that had been patched with various colors of fabric. He startled a bit when he saw them but nodded at them with a smile when Frohike introduced them, his calico cat dæmon Ulle partially hiding behind his legs. 

“Fenig,” Frohike said. 

“Call me Max,” the man said, nodding one extra time and then quickly ducking back into the engine room. 

Their guide turned to them then. 

“Now,” Frohike began, putting his hands on his hips and looking at them with an odd air of unsure sternness, “this ship is small, but agile, and we’ll be needing that the further north we go when we get into the northern tributaries of the Snake River. But it only has two sleeping berths, one for the captain and one for the crew. Captain Byers has generously offered you the use of his berth,” to this he looked at Scully, “but I’m afraid there is only room for four hammocks with the crew.” 

“You mean there’s nowhere for me to sleep?” Mulder asked jovially. 

Scully glanced at Mulder and then in at the mess, wondering if there was perhaps a place she or Mulder could sleep, but it was it was a small, tight area with no room at all to lay prone much less prone with an also sleeping large-ish daemon, which they both had. 

“The Captain’s cabin does have a bed big enough to share, if you’re comfortable with that, but it’s a small one,” Frohike went on dubiously. “We can maybe try to string up a hammock in the engine room – Fenig has offered – but it’s monstrously loud in there, and we’ll want a well-rested crew for the trip we have ahead of us. It’ll be an arduous one.”

Mulder looked to Scully with raised eyebrows. He was making this her call. 

“My partner and I can share the Captain’s cabin,” she said, her stomach threatening butterflies, “it’s not a problem.”

Frohike nodded and showed them to the tiny room, the bunk barely big enough for two, with a small lower shelf where their daemons would be relatively comfortable, though they too would have to share the space. 

“Cozy,” Mulder said, and Cassiana’s small round ears twitched. 

“Is there anything you’ll be needing from the port before we shove off?” Frohike asked from the doorway. 

“I guess we’d be able to answer that question better once we know what exactly you’ll be needing from us?” Mulder said, and Scully peered curiously at Frohike, eager to hear his answer. 

The little man took a big breath. 

“We think there’s a hidden witches’ settlement far to the north,” Frohike went on, “hidden by a spell of some kind, on an area of government land that they plan to mine. The Bering government has sent out three groups of their own inspectors, none of which have returned.”

“And they want us to…?”

“Investigate only,” Frohike said, “find out whatever you can. Which group, the name of their queen, which spells are being used upon the land. Your reputation for investigating odd and unusual things precedes you. The Bering will take the information you gather and implement a removal strategy, by which time you will be well on your way back to New Denmark.”

Scully looked to her partner, who shrugged. 

“In that case,” he said, “we likely won’t need much other than our wits.”

Frohike nodded. “I’ll leave you to get settled in. We’ll be off with the tide.”

Chapter Text

Scully barely slept a wink. She spent the entire night hyper aware of where her body was in relation to Mulder’s. If he moved on the narrow bunk, her body would tense until he settled, and at the accidental brushing of a foot or elbow, she would startle awake if she wasn’t already. Several times, she would glance over to find Hendrick staring at her with an exasperated expression. Finally, when she saw the first pinkish light creeping through the porthole in their berth, she rolled to the side of the bed and turned to look at a still sleeping Mulder, who was fully reclined on the bunk, his face slack in sleep. 

Underneath her feet the floor vibrated with the soft rumble of the ship’s engines and Hendrick rose from beside Cass without a word, giving himself a long, decadent feline stretch. 

She stood, slipping on shoes, and pulled on a thick woolen sweater that her mother had knitted for her, making her way to the mess, where she found a hot kettle of weak tea. She poured herself a mug and climbed the ladder to the deck where she found Frohike peering up into the sky. For a split second she thought she saw the white wing of a bird disappear into the clouds. 

“Not an albatross, I hope,” she said good naturedly, and Frohike turned to her and smiled. 

“The sun came up upon the left, Out of the Sea came he: and he shone bright, and on the right, Went down into the Sea,” he said, quoting the old Rime. “How did you sleep?”

Scully looked out at the vista beyond the purl of the river. The purple mountains were laced with snow, their peaks craggy and sharp — these were not the rolling hills of the Eastern Seaboard. At the base of the mountains began a line of rich green conifers which grew, thick and impenetrable, all the way to the edge of the river. 

“Very well, thank you,” she lied. “I’ve never seen country like this,” she said, unable to take her eyes off the snow capped peaks. “It’s incredible.”

Frohike turned to look as well, shuffling in next to Hendrick. “It is indeed,” he said. “As rugged a place as I’ve ever been. Which is why we’ll be traveling as far as we can by boat.”

“How long do you suppose we’ll be traveling?” 

Frohike leaned back and stole a glance at his daemon, who sat at his feet, preening her thick tail. “As long as possible,” he said. 

Scully nodded and took a sip of her tea, already cooling in the frigid morning air. She shivered. 

“Come on below,” Frohike said, turning on his heel. “Let’s get a hot breakfast into you. It’s your lucky day — I pulled KP.”

Scully followed him back below deck and swung herself into the small galley table, its surface low and nicked, the varnish rubbed thin by years of spills and elbows. Frohike threw a dish towel over his shoulder and moved about the galley confidently, asking her questions about herself – where she grew up, how long she’d been a detective, if she had any siblings – and she found herself midway through the telling of a story about how she and her sister had shoved their older brother off their father’s boat while in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. She and Melissa wouldn’t let him back on board until he apologized for a perceived slight. She was happily describing the sopping wet look of rage her brother wore when Frohike lowered a steaming plate of eggs and hash in front of her. 

“You should have seen his badger daemon Freja,” Scully said, laughing and accepting the fork that Frohike held out to her. “Soaked to the skin and startled out of her wits. She had just settled and I don’t think she was quite ready.”

“Thought she’d settle as a dolphin, that one,” said Hendrick. 

Frohike chuckled and leaned back against the small stovetop, contentedly watching her eat. 

“This is delicious,” Scully said, half surprised, and tucked in hungrily. 

Mulder shuffled in sleepily a moment later, rubbing his eyes and yawning. 

“Something smells good,” he said, and Frohike directed him to the table where he swung in to sit across from Scully. Cass parked herself next to Hendrick and shook her coat. Before Mulder had time to lean back on the narrow bench, Frohike had plonked a thick mug of tea and a steaming plate in front of him. 

“Eat,” Frohike said, pushy as a Finnish grandmother. “I’m going to take a plate up to the captain.” 

With that, he was gone. Mulder blinked at Scully. 

“He’s a bit of a whirling dervish,” he said. 

“Who makes really good eggs,” Scully replied, her mouth full. 

The next few minutes were filled with silence but for the clink of flatware on crockery and the occasional clang of metal meeting metal from the engine room. 

“So,” Mulder said when he had finished eating, leaning back and emitting a quiet, satisfied burp. “Looks like we’re all dressed up with nowhere to go.”

“How do you mean?” Scully asked, picking up her recently refilled tea and giving it a slurp. 

“We’re going to be on this boat for a while until we get up north. Nothing to do but read engine manuals and polish our…” he gave Scully a quick look and cleared his throat, “ahem, sextants.” 

“I don’t know if Captain Byers is using quite such outdated modes of navigation, but I’m sure you can find plenty of things to polish,” she said. “Let me know if you need Hendrick and I to make ourselves scarce.” She felt a blush creep up her neck, but nevertheless thrilled a little at the look of incredulous surprise that bloomed across his features. 

“Detective Scully, as I live and breathe,” he started, but at that moment Max came out of the engine room behind the galley and, nodding at them even as he looked away, helped himself to a plate of food which he took back into the compartment from which he’d come. 

Scully took the moment to compose herself, taking another sip of tea. 

“As aimless as we might be on board,” she said, setting the mug down with a satisfying clunk. “Any idea what we’ll do when we finally get where we’re going?”

Mulder ran a hand over his chin, thoughtful. “No idea, really,” he said, “it’s a weird assignment.”

“Do you really think it’s a clan of witches up there?” Scully asked. “And not some roving band of colonistic Nordic rednecks staking a claim?”

“I’ve seen Bering investigators in action, Scully,” Mulder said, though he didn’t elaborate how or when, “they don’t just disappear. There very well may be witchcraft involved.”

Scully sighed. “And how does one uncover witchcraft, Mulder? I assume we don’t just go up to the supposed settlement, throw a stick through the… I don’t know, magical forcefield, and when we can’t find our stick say ‘yeah, it’s definitely witches.’”

Mulder had narrowed his eyes at her and had an interesting smile that played about his lips. “There goes my stick idea,” he said. 

“I assume you have others,” she said. “You usually do.”

“How much do you know about witches, Scully?”

Scully held up a finger. “They’re all women,” she said, then held up a second finger. “They can fly.” A third and fourth finger. “They age more slowly than we do and have bird daemons.” That was the sum total of her knowledge. She didn’t point out that she was still extremely skeptical of the second point and uncomfortable with the rest. Scully had always been a curious person, but something about witches had instilled in her a willful ignorance – she had educated herself in many things, but their heretical existence was where she had always drawn the line.  

“Those statements are accurate,” he said after considering her for a moment. “But not remotely the entire picture.” 

Scully sat back and shared a look with Hendrick before gesturing to Mulder. 

“Do tell,” she said, leaning forward on her elbows with her hands wrapped around the warm mug of her tea. 

“Witches look like us, but are biologically and culturally distinct from humans. They have daemons, like we do, which, yes, always settle in the form of birds. As you mentioned, they age far more slowly than humans and are known to live for a thousand years or more.” Scully nodded to him to go on. “You are correct in saying that only female witches exist, though they bear the children of human men – who are witches if female and humans if male.” Mulder settled back on his bench, looking pleased with himself. “Witches are able to feel cold, but it doesn’t cause them harm, which is why they tend to settle in the far north where they are able to avoid the harassment of us mere mortals. They’re capable of flight, but must use the branches of a cloud-pine to fly. They possess the ability to enter a fiercely-held state of mind that, while not rendering them completely invisible, does allow them to go about unnoticed. Which is maybe why you’ve never seen one.” Scully felt a prickle of annoyance, but Mulder continued to talk. “They also are capable of performing healing magic and have been known to be able to control the weather, to a degree. Culturally, witches do not have possessions, and their only means of exchange is mutual aid, much to the chagrin of the Magisterium and various other governments around the world, who cannot buy their loyalty. They divide themselves into communities known as clans which form alliances and enmities with each other, and each clan has its own territory with definite but irregular borders which vary from season to season based on the growth of plants and the migration of animals.” He looked smug, and took a long drink of his own tea. 

Hendrick made a feline sound in the back of his throat and Scully sat back, impressed. “How do you know all this?” 

Mulder shrugged. “I know a lot of things about a lot of things. Witches interest me.”

Cass stood and turned around once before settling back down, like a dog trying to get comfortable. 

“I’m beginning to see why Skinner sent us ,” she said, more to herself than to him. 

“Never underestimate the severity of the heartburn he experiences when I turn in a report,” Mulder said, piling Scully’s empty plate on top of his own before sliding off of the bench and making his way to the small sink area. “He probably just needed a few weeks so his ulcer could recover.” 

XxX

By the fifth night, she was simply too tired to think about Mulder and his proximity, and she fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. When she woke the next morning, it was to the abject humiliation of having her chin half soaked in drool and Mulder staring at her prettily from a seated position between her and the wall of their berth.

“Scully, have you not been sleeping well?” he asked after she attempted to wipe her chin, and, blinking to awareness, whispered an apology. 

“What?” she asked, coming to herself. Beside the bed on the low pallet where their dæmons slept, Hendrick was rousing himself from a similar stupor. 

“It’s just that you seemed to be dead to the world all night and were making these snuffly noises I hadn’t heard before.” He caught her look of abject mortification and hastened to add, “They were very cute noises.”

His assurances did nothing to help.

“How long have you been awake?” she asked, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. Hopefully not long enough to witness anything truly humiliating. 

“About an hour,” he said, and she wondered how much worse it could get. “You were kind of sleeping half on me and I was afraid I would wake you if I moved.” 

Worse. Much worse. 

“Scully, seriously. Have you not been sleeping well? Is it something I’m doing? I can try to sleep on the deck or-“

“Mulder, you’d freeze to death on the deck, don’t… It’s fine. I’m fine.”

He gave her a skeptical look, but scooted over next to her, and rubbed her back once before standing. 

“We’ll head up,” he said, “let you get changed.” And he and Cass shuffled out, closing the hatch behind them.

Hendrick was looking at her as she stepped out of the fleecy pants she’d slept in. 

“What?” she asked him huffily.

“You should have just told him when he asked.”

“Told him what?”

“That we’re not sleeping because we’re agitated.”

“You’re agitating me.”

“Stop deflecting. You’re angry because I’m right. We’re in love, Dana. When are you going to do something about it?”

Rather than engage, Scully decided to ignore Hendrick, and he turned his back to her and made an irritated sound while she donned the rest of her clothes. She was just lacing up her boots when the engine noise whined to a stop. 

“Are we docking somewhere, do you think?” Hendrick asked her, turning around when they could feel the boat under them fishtail slowly out into the current. 

“Let’s go see,” Scully said. 

When they got up on the deck, they found that the boat was indeed docking at a small wooden pier adjacent to a little village. The trees had thinned on this area of the river and the village was set upon a rocky outcropping. Several young children had come running to the shore to watch them, one whose daemon had changed into a seagull, and was swooping down close to the boat, pestering Langly’s daemon Ondima with rapid-fire questions. Langly was more than busy trying to catch a stern rope onto the small dock’s clete and Ondima nipped at the gull in annoyance. The gull and her boy took off into the village, spooked.

“Refueling?” Scully asked as she sidled up to Mulder who was standing out of the way. 

“Captain Byers said it would take about an hour,” Mulder said, watching the small crew try to wrangle the little barge up to the shore. “I’m thinking of maybe going ashore and talking to a few locals. See if they’ve heard anything about a witch settlement.”

“If you do,” said a voice from behind them, “be discreet.” Frohike approached them, Annie padding along behind him. “The Bering may have requested your assistance, but they don’t want that fact advertised. The people in these little villages do not care for the Magisterium. Half the reason some of them live here is to be out from under its thumb.”

Scully traded a look with Mulder, who then turned confidently to Frohike. 

“Discretion is my middle name,” he said. 

Chapter Text

The path that lay beyond the small dock was muddy, a thick sucking mass that pulled on boots and paws. Hendrick lifted his long legs distastefully and shot a look at Cassiana, who seemed to practically hover above the mess. 

The village was only about a block long and two wide, a cluster of beige buildings that had probably once been stained a rich brown but had lost the battle of luster to the relentless northern elements. Planks had been set up that ran the length of the streets to keep the villagers off of the mud, and they stepped onto them gratefully, leaving clumps of glop in their wake.

Mulder looked down at Scully walking next to him, their two dæmons walking side by side a pace or two behind them, their long tails brushing against each other every few steps. Scully’s cheeks were ruddy from the cold, giving her a freshly tumbled look that he very much tried not to think about. It had been torture sleeping next to her, her petite body seemingly made to fit with his like two spoons in a drawer, and when she’d turned on her side in the compact little bunk, the soft, rounded flare of her hip made his head spin. When he’d woken up that morning with her sprawled onto his chest, he’d allowed himself the briefest indulgence and held her close while she slept. 

“Where do you want to start?” she asked him, and he gave the village a scan. 

There were a few people walking about, each of them giving the two detectives curious looks. The village must not get many visitors. 

“A cafe maybe? A general store?”

There was a promising looking building midway up the street they were closest to with rustic signs in the window advertising tea and choclatl. They ducked inside, the anbaric lights dull and buzzing in the small space. There were a few tables at which sat several older men, their clothes and hats thick and as leached of color as the buildings they sat in. 

Near the back of the cafe, there was a small till and a breakfast counter with three empty stools and a pastry case that was bare but for one crumbling biscuit. Mulder led Scully to the stools with his hand on the small of her back and they settled down, looking expectantly around for a proprietor. Hendrick and Cass were sitting side by side near the end of the counter facing the door, gazing at the other dæmons who were perched near their humans – a marten, a chickadee and a dung beetle that scuttled up her human’s arm to perch on his shoulder. 

From the back of the small restaurant an older woman came, her face stoic and weather beaten. She sidled up to the counter in front of them and leaned forward, looking at them expectantly, but didn’t say a word. Her dæmon, a beaver with a broad flat tail, laid himself down behind the counter with a tired sigh. 

“Good morning,” Mulder said cheerfully, which elicited nothing more from her than a flick of her eyes to his unusual dæmon. “A cup of choclatl, please.”

“We’re out,” the woman said, her thick Bering accent making it sound like ver-oot . 

“Tea then?” Mulder queried, and the woman nodded gruffly. Scully ordered the same. When the woman set the drinks in front of them a minute later, Mulder tried upping the charm just a touch. 

“It’s very good,” he said to the proprietress, nodding at his mug. “It’s nice to have a hot drink on dry land.”

The woman grunted again. 

“We’re headed north,” Mulder went on, undeterred. “Do you get many travelers through here?”

“A few,” the woman answered, and began wiping down the countertop with a rag of dubious cleanliness. He saw Scully set down her tea and bring her hands to her lap, a small moue of distaste crossing her face. 

Mulder took an enthusiastic slurpy sip. 

“Do they all travel by boat?”

The proprietor grunted another affirmative. 

“None by air?” he asked innocently, and the woman gave him a look. 

“Not many aeronauts this far north,” she said, her S’s sounding like Z’s. 

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of aeronauts,” Mulder said, which drew him a sharp look. 

He was about to open his mouth to mention cloud-pine, when the door to the cafe opened sharply, smacking into the wall with a clatter. Mulder and Scully both whirled around, Hendrick and Cass already on their feet, to find a burly dark haired man standing in the doorway, breathing heavily with a riotous look on his face. Behind him was his dæmon, a hunched black vulture, and the same little boy whose dæmon had been pestering Ondima while they were trying to dock their boat. 

“Which of you attacked my son?” he thundered in a thick accent, ducking under the lintel and taking several large steps into the space. His dæmon hopped along beside him, the bare, leathered skin of her head wrinkling as she eyed Hendrick and Cassiana suspiciously. The customer with the dung beetle daemon quickly ducked out behind him, but the other two customers sat watching the drama unfold with interest. 

“Pyotr!” barked the woman behind the counter, and Mulder got the distinct impression that it wasn’t the first time that Pyotr had been a nuisance in her establishment. 

“Sir,” said Scully, stepping forward with an air to mediation, “I assure you that your son wasn’t attacked, it was-”

The man threw a meaty hand in the direction of the door, pointing at his son who was still standing on the steps outside the cafe, looking equal parts nervous and embarrassed. His dæmon had assumed the shape of a mouse and was hiding meekly behind the boy’s left foot. 

“His dæmon was attacked, he says. Which of you did it?” At this he swung his eyes to Hendrick and Cass, the latter of whom he eyed suspiciously. His vulture dæmon took two hops forward, tilting her head to look at Cassiana before snapping her beak once. Mulder could feel a ripple of fear and apprehension from Cass. Outside, the boy’s mouse dæmon scampered up his leg and tried to burrow her way into the collar of his cowl-neck sweater. 

It wasn’t the first time people had looked at Cassiana – and by extension Mulder – with suspicion. He had never seen or heard of a fossa before his dæmon – well, ‘settled’ wasn’t the right word, as she’d never actually settled, but it was the form she was most comfortable in – and people tended to suspect that which they didn’t fully understand.  

Hendrick took a step forward and issued forth a low growl. 

“Sir,” Scully said again, this time with the authority of her station in her tone, which seemed to only further irritate the angry father before them. 

“I’ll have you and your unnatural dæmon in the stocks!” he hissed, taking another step forward. 

On instinct, Mulder reached back for his sidearm but found his belt empty – they had opted to leave their weapons onboard the ship on the advice of Frohike, a move Mulder was quickly regretting as the face of the man before them purpled with rage. 

“Pyotr, please!” the woman behind the counter shouted, but no amount of talking would calm him, Mulder knew. He could see the man pull back his arm as if to throw a punch and Mulder leaned forward to block Scully when there was a commotion from their feet. 

Hendrick, quick as lightning, had pounced upon the black vulture dæmon and had her pinned to the ground with one large paw, his jaw around the bird’s neck. 

The vulture squawked, confirming what Mulder already knew – that Hendrick was merely holding the creature down and not actually hurting her – the bird tried to flap her wings to no effect, and the big man staggered back.

“Let,” he gasped, “let go of us!” 

The two remaining customers and the proprietress looked on in horror, their own dæmon’s’ mouths open in shock.

“Scully!” Mulder hissed. 

“Hen?” Scully said, her voice wavering. 

Hendrick gave one disgusted chuff and let go of the vulture, who rose to her feet and stumbled toward her human with rather more dramatics that Mulder thought was entirely necessary. They all stood in silence for a momentary detente until the woman who ran the cafe gave Mulder and Scully a withering glare and said, her voice low and dangerous:

“Get out.”

They needed no further encouragement, and he threw a bank note on the cafe counter and hustled Scully and their dæmons out of the cafe and past several new onlookers, eschewing the dry planks in the center of the road for a more direct route to the dock, squelching their way toward the ship with all the haste they could muster. 

When they jumped aboard, Frohike was on the deck and he eyed the dozen or so villagers who had followed them and were standing on the shore warily. 

“We need to go,” Mulder said to their guide and Frohike nodded.

“It would appear so,” he said calmly, before he ducked into the small bridge. 

The refueling had luckily already been finished, and the engine roared to life beneath their feet, Langly appearing out of nowhere to untie the ship from the dock’s cleat, throwing the rope to a waiting Ondima, who caught it snappily in her mouth while her human pushed the boat off and hopped back aboard. 

There was a rumble from the crowd as Byers shifted the engine into gear and they eased their way into the center of the river, finally growling forward toward easier, calmer points north. 

XxX

“Skinner wasn’t kidding when he said you have a knack for attracting the wrong kind of attention,” Frohike said as they were all crowded around the small galley table later that evening. Max was the only one not at the table with everyone else, as he chose to eat with his plate on his lap, sitting in the hatch between the galley and the small engine room. “I believe I cautioned you to act with discretion.” 

His tone was a little harsh, but Mulder felt no real malice from him. 

“The other kid started it,” Mulder said. Scully gave him a look askance.

“We’re well away by now,” said Captain Byers, reaching for another helping of the evening’s meal. Mia was sitting primly on his shoulder, her tail twitching cheerfully. “All’s well that ends well.”

“Did you find out anything about the witches’ settlement?” asked Langly, his voice nasally and clipped.

“I had just brought up the subject when the, ah, incident occured.”

They had told the crew about their encounter with the angry father, but had left out the part about Hendrick setting himself upon the man’s dæmon – even spoken about after, the act of anyone touching another person’s dæmon was taboo, and while dæmon-to-dæmon contact wasn’t culturally horrific, it was not a part of the story that needed to be shared. 

Langly shared a look with Frohike that Mulder couldn’t interpret. 

“In the future,” the little man said, “perhaps you and Detective Scully should stay aboard the ship when we dock for resupply.”

After he had helped clean up the meal, Mulder went up onto the deck to find Scully in an intense, quiet conversation with Hendrick. He cleared his throat and Scully looked at him and moved to the side of the ship to look out at where the sun’s last rays were sweeping over the tops of the trees. 

“I never thanked Hendrick for stepping in today to help,” he said to her, moving to stand next to her. The clouds above them were a rich, deep purple, but those near the horizon were an unruly pink and orange and red that reminded Mulder of Scully’s hair. 

“Cass did,” Scully said quietly. 

Mulder looked toward his dæmon, who had settled next to Hendrick, their heads bent, talking to each other in low, quiet voices. 

“Hen thinks I should tell you that I am having trouble sleeping here,” Scully went on, her eyes glued to the horizon. 

“I’m snoring, aren’t I?” Mulder said, lighthearted. 

“It’s definitely not that,” she replied, finally turning to look at him. There was an earnest hope in her eyes, something nameless that made his stomach lurch with breathless anticipation.

“Mulder, I…” she started, but after a moment she seemed to lose her nerve and reached forward to grab onto the ship’s railing. 

The smoke from the Gulpie’s engine sunk to the surface of the river, wafting downstream with the current. From below them a sundown chill crept up the sides of the boat and slipped into their boots. Scully shifted on her feet and he caught her profile against the water, diaphanous in the golden hour light, spectral, on the earth but not of it. It hurt just to look at her.

The engine churned beneath them, the bow pointed north, and Mulder thought about where they’d been… where they were going. Scully shivered and before either one of them registered what was happening he pulled her into his side. 

“How do you always stay so warm?” she asked, leaning into him after a hesitant moment.

“It was colder where I grew up. You get hardened to it.”

“Tell me about Oxford,” she said, and he didn’t correct her. He hadn’t gone to live with his father until he was eight. 

“It’s beautiful. Ancient in a way that New Denmark never will be. My favorite place there was the botanic garden at the university. It holds wonders.”

He told her about the lily pond, about the exotic specimens brought in from various expeditions from all points of the world, about the arboretum and how he’d climbed a tree there once and taken a beating from a university guard for his trouble, Cass flitting about the guard’s head in the form of a screeching woodpecker.

“It sounds idyllic,” she said, thunking her head back to rest on his shoulder. He tightened his grip on her and leaned down to take a quick whiff of her hair, feeling serenely complicit, playing a dangerous game.

“It had its moments. Dad’s dæmon Vissa kept a sharp eye on us. Especially after adolescence.”

“I understand why.” Scully put a light hand on his arm. “You know, you don’t talk about your father much.”

“When everyone thinks you got where you are because of nepotism, you tend to keep the family talk to a minimum.”

“How did he end up at the Magisterium?”

“Vissa is a praying mantis, he likes to joke that it was fate.”

“Is he a Bishop?” Scully asked.

“He’s not in the clergy,” Mulder said, not explaining any further. 

There was a thump from behind them, and Langly came slouching out onto the deck from below, Ondima trotting at his heels, her white bushy tail a stark contrast to the grunge of the boat. The sun was fully down now and the sky was a purple mass, stars winking on from every part of the sky. Scully leaned away from Mulder as Langly crossed behind them. 

“Going to moor for the night,” he explained, heading for the bow. 

“Need any help?” Mulder offered.

“Sure,” Langly said, and directed him about. When they’d finished, Mulder turned back to where Scully had been standing, but she’d already gone below.

Chapter Text

At Frohike’s insistence, they stayed aboard the ship for the next several weeks until the motor made a horrible clattering sound and ground to a halt, one day north of the town of Kyovat. Max came up onto the deck, wiping his hands on a soiled cloth and informed them that they’d need parts and a week in port for repairs. With impressive precision, Byers steered the little ship back down river with only the current for propulsion and docked next to another little Gulpie, painted a chipped and faded blue. 

The nights were getting easier, though illicitly so. Slowly, over the course of the previous weeks and without discussion, they’d begun drifting toward each other, first in sleep, and then more recently, when awake. It had started with a foot on a shin, a forehead resting lightly on an arm, and gradually they’d begun sleeping fully entwined, until they had reached the point of the last several nights, where Mulder simply got in bed, raised the covers in invitation and Scully got in, neither of them able to sleep unless she was fully enveloped in his arms. 

While awake, Scully was able to talk herself into the argument that it was the change in latitude, that the nights were becoming downright frigid, and in the interest of thermodynamics and staying on top of their game, sleeping that way was necessary for functionality. She didn’t allow herself to look into the other bunkroom, where the four members of the crew slumbered away comfortably enough all singly enclosed in thin material of a ship’s hammock. 

When she awoke that morning, an hour or so before the engine of the Gulpie failed, she glanced over at Hendrick and Cass who were curled around each other like serpents entwined, whispering, their noses practically touching. Scully could feel Hendrick’s contentment and warmth radiating over the whole of her body. 

“I’m getting off,” Mulder said, the second the boat had been secured to the dock. 

Scully couldn’t really argue with the impulse, as sick as she was of being stuck on the ship with a bunch of working, flatulent men, however kind and accommodating they were. 

“I’m coming too,” she said impulsively, and followed Mulder close on his heels as he made his way to the small locker and pulled out his sidearm, and then Scully’s, handing it to her. 

“I’m going armed this time,” he said without preamble, and Scully took her weapon from him and secured it into a holster on her hip. She pulled closed the jacket she was wearing to conceal it, though she would have to be careful – if she sat down, the coat would ride up. 

The government of Beringland had outlawed firearms but for their own peacekeeping forces, and though the two detectives were working as agents of the government, the legal logistics were dicey and they were trying to stay under the radar. Gas pistols were an option – they were legal and quietly fired, but also not as powerful as the Magisterium-issued weapons the detectives normally carried. Scully knew that Mulder felt better with his pistol at his side, and she couldn’t say she disagreed with him. 

Scully gave a glance at their shared bed as she exited, and the two detectives made their way up the companionway and onto the deck, their dæmons following like shadows. The crew had gathered near the bridge and Mulder and Scully joined them. 

“It will take a couple of days to get the parts,” Max was telling Captain Byers, “the repair yard is expecting a supply ship two days from now.”

“So,” said Frohike, Annie sitting beside him with her human-like hands laced daintily together. “Looks like we’re stuck in Kyovat.”

“Scully and I are going ashore,” Mulder said, speaking for her. 

“Planning more subtle investigating?” Frohike asked, turning to him. 

Mia chittered a squirrely laugh from Byers’ shoulder. 

“I think we’ll just get a bite to eat,” Mulder said.

“I could use a bite,” said Langly, and Ondima licked her narrow white chops. 

“We could all use a bite,” Frohike said, settling his thumbs into the belt loops of his pants. “Maybe strength in numbers will keep you two out of trouble.” 

And that was how the ragtag crew found themselves sitting at a booth in a small restaurant in Kyovat, scraping plates of hearty beef stew with the crusts of a dark bread favored by the Bering. 

Frohike had just leaned back and emitted forth a soft, satisfied belch when a man came up to them. He was aged with long silver hair and had a craggy, weather-beaten face that looked native, with a red tailed hawk dæmon perched on his shoulder. 

"You two are carrying pistols," he said, pointing at Mulder and Scully. He said it as a statement of fact rather than an accusation. The other members of their party exchanged glances.  

"We are," Scully said, a hint of suspicion in her voice. 

"I did not mean to interrupt your meal,” he said. “But I could use your help." He seemed kindly and steady enough.

Mulder gestured to the empty chair at the end of the booth next to Frohike. "Have a seat," he said, pulling his coat more tightly around himself to cover the leather holster on his side.

The man nodded his thanks and settled into the chair, sighing as he sat back. 

"Your accents," the man said. "You’re from New Denmark."

Mulder nodded and gestured to the server for another cup of chocolatl for their guest. 

"And you're a Skræling?“ Mulder asked. 

“Yes.”

“Inuit?”

"Navajo," the man corrected.

"You're a long way from home," Mulder said. 

"And you are not," said the man, who looked levelly at Mulder. Scully peered at him in curiosity. She could hear Cass puff out her whiskers from where she, Hendrick and Ondima were sitting next to the booth. Mia was on Byers’ shoulder, Annie was curled up under Frohike’s chair, and Ulle was in Max’s lap, her sleek cat’s tail twitching. 

"What's your name?" Mulder asked after a moment. 

"Hosteen," the man said. "Albert Hosteen."

"What can two New Danes with pistols do for you, Mr. Hosteen?" Mulder asked, unwilling to advertise their connection to the Magisterium.

“My village,” Albert explained. “My late wife’s village, actually, but I have lived there many years.”  Scully nodded at him encouragingly. “It is dying.”

“How so, Mr. Hosteen?” Mulder asked. The hawk dæmon on the man’s shoulder extended her wings and then tucked them back into her body. Albert looked at them as though to gauge whether or not to trust them before he finally spoke again. 

“Creatures,” he said. “Horrible little creatures.”

Mulder leaned forward with interest and Albert Hosteen sighed and told them a tale that Scully only half-believed. 

Little armor-clad rodents with teeth like needles had begun to slowly overrun the village. No one knew what they were or where they came from, but they could not be felled by an arrow, trapped or poisoned. The few quiet-firing gas pistols Hosteen’s village had — fine for felling a rabbit or scaring off a problem wolf or grizzly, did nothing to the gleaming hide of the tundra rats, as the villagers had taken to calling them, but dent it slightly and really piss them off. The gas pistols were only good at close range, and these were fearless creatures you didn’t want to get near — they were literal ankle-biters, severing Achilles’ tendons with one thrash of their teeth, and their saliva seemed to possess an anticoagulant property which would cause the victim to bleed out rapidly. Many villagers had died. The village had written to the Bering government begging for help, but either no one believed them or no one cared, because the village was on the brink of annihilation. The people were afraid to leave their homes, their crops were being eaten and decimated, and the tundra rats could seemingly breed like rabbits — there were more spotted every day and they were spreading to neighboring villages and neighboring plains. Hosteen had ventured out to find help, and seeing the rare high powered pistols on the belts of two outsiders on the very afternoon he arrived at the outpost… Well, it seemed to Albert that his village’s prayers had been answered. 

“I’ve heard of such things,” Max said quietly, setting down his cup with a dainty sounding clink. “Odd creatures, not of this earth.”

“My people have stories,” Hosteen said, “that tell of otherworldly beings being a portent. A sign of things written in the stars, of people and changes coming to upend the world.”

Scully watched as Frohike looked at Mulder, who was obviously intrigued, a half-delighted look on his face. 

“Teeth like needles?” Byers asked, swallowing thickly. 

Hosteen nodded. “I have seen a lot of things. Never anything like this,” he said. 

“You say these tundra rats are armored,” Scully asked. “Do you mean these creatures wear armor like the panserbjørne?”

“They are as far from the armored bears as they could be, ma’am,” Hosteen said. “Their very hides are armored. As though their skin were made of metal.”

“And how do you think we can help you, sir?” Mulder asked. 

Cass stood up and stretched, wrapping her long tail around her feet. She was watching Hosteen closely, who glanced at her in curiosity.

Hosteen looked at them beseechingly and finally turned to Mulder. “Your dæmon. I have seen her in my dreams.” Goosebumps broke out over Scully’s skin. “This is a sign that I have come to the right place. Come to my village,” the man went on, “bring your weapons. Maybe you can kill them. Maybe you can save us.”

Mulder and Scully exchanged a look and Frohike leaned forward. 

“We do have several days before repairs on the boat are complete,” he said. “It’s up to you.” 

Scully could practically feel the enthusiasm vibrating off of her partner. She turned to Albert Hosteen. 

“Let us pull a few things together,” she said. “We’ll help you.”

XxX

They had to rent a few horses from the livery in Kyovat for the half-day’s journey to Albert Hosteen’s village. Byers had stayed behind with Max to oversee repairs on the Gulpie in case they ended up having to stay in the village for longer than they were waiting on parts, and the four others shifted uncomfortably in their saddles. Next to Hosteen’s spirited and beautiful pinto, the dull chestnut horses seemed like plodding nags and Hendrick, Cassiana and Ondima had taken to having to nip at the beast’s ankles every now and then to get them to trot. 

“Pestilential creatures,” Scully overheard Annie say to Frohike from where she was perched on the back of Frohike’s saddle. “We’ll be lucky if we get there by nightfall.” 

Scully couldn’t help but agree. The sun was just beginning to set when Mulder’s horse gave a low whinny and shied away sideways on the path behind Hosteen, who turned in his saddle and looked out over the landscape. Langly’s horse jerked its head up, tugging the reins out of his hands. 

“The horses know the tundra rats are near,” Hosteen called back. “We’re almost to the village.”

They crossed over the next rise and Scully inhaled in surprise. The village lay ahead in a large valley of low rippling hills, the houses laid out in a wheel around the small town center. Surrounding the houses, each dotted with their own barns and outbuildings, were fields and fields of various crops planted in the rich brown loam, all of them, but for one, nibbled down stumps. Hosteen pointed to the single field that was still green with crops. 

“The tundra rats don’t seem to like the kale,” he said. “We have a very short growing season this far north. We’ll barely be able to feed our families with what’s left this winter.”

From the edge of the field of kale, Scully saw a small creature about the size of a cat scuttle from the edge of the cover of greenery into a low growth of brush nearby, its back glinting in the last rays of the day’s sun. 

“Was that-” she started to say, when Hosteen answered her. 

“Yes,” he said. Below her, Scully’s horse made an unhappy sound. 

Hosteen turned his horse off of the path as they got close to the village. “Come,” he said, and they followed him, “we will need to stable the horses inside the barn for the night. The rats go after livestock after sundown.”

He hopped down off of his mount and approached the big barn door, and Scully could see that the barn itself, as well as the house and all the outbuildings were covered from the foundation until about four feet up all around the circumference with corrugated metal. The sheets, some new and shining, some old and rusted, had been nailed to the buildings in a patchwork of spare pieces, large and small. She was about to ask about it when Hosteen explained. 

“The metal keeps them from burrowing into the houses. We lost several children. Once they ate through our crops, they started coming after us. Bring the horses in, we will rub them down inside.”

Scully dismounted and rubbed her aching backside, looking around at the buildings of neighboring farms, which were all similarly skirted in a mosaic of thick metal. Hendrick looked up at her, his paws and shins covered in road dust. 

“These creatures go after children?” he said, shaking his head.

“They go after everything,” said a voice they hadn’t heard before. Scully turned to see Albert Hosteen’s dæmon perched on top of the open barn door, her clever eyes peering closely at them.

“I don’t like this place, Dana,” Hendrick went on. “It’s too quiet.”

Scully knew what he meant, looking around as the sun finally dipped behind the mountains to the west. The whole place had an uneasy air about it, a feeling like a breath held too long. 

Once the horses were taken care of for the night, they all followed Hosteen into the two story farmhouse. He showed each of them to their own rooms, which were tidy but a little dusty, each decorated with a light feminine touch, the narrow beds covered in floral print quilts. Scully stowed her small pack inside her room and glanced at Mulder who was doing the same in his, directly across the hall. 

Cass said something to him that she couldn’t hear, and he turned and found her looking at him. 

“Enjoy all that extra space tonight,” he said, and she blushed a bit and ducked back down the hallway and down the stairs to where Hosteen was putting on a kettle. 

Frohike, Langly and Mulder wandered in a minute later. 

“I’m curious,” Mulder said, as Hosteen began pouring hot water into five earthenware mugs. “Have you been able to kill any of these creatures at all?”

“A few,” the Skræling man said, passing around the mugs. “My nephew found one drowned in his irrigation cistern. It’s how we discovered that they couldn’t chew through metal. And Cisco,” he nodded in the direction of the barn, where his pinto colt was stabled with the other horses. “Killed one last week. Stomped on it in the field.” 

“Was a necropsy done?” Scully asked. “Do you still have the body?” Hosteen nodded. 

“Come,” he said, and led them down into his cellar. The area got colder and colder as they descended the steps, and Scully saw that it had been carved all of the way down into the permafrost in such a way that they were able to keep food and other stores freely sitting in the space, which explained why the house didn’t have an anbaric powered refrigerator in the kitchen. 

Hosteen walked into a corner and pulled out a box, which he brought to a workbench on a raised and warmer dais near the stairs. He took the lid off the box and turned on the light overhead. 

Scully stepped forward, and Hendrick, as curious as she’d ever seen him, raised himself up on his hind legs and rested his paws on the workbench, trying to get a look inside the box. Hosteen put on a pair of leather work gloves and reached inside, placing what remained of the tundra rat on the table. 

“Look at that,” Mulder said with wonder, stepping forward to peer curiously from the other side of the workbench at the creature, which lay on its side, its legs frozen stiff and extended. 

As Hosteen had told them in Kyovet, to Scully’s extreme skepticism at the time, the creature was covered in a hide made of pure gleaming metal. It appeared to be almost pleated in large, serpent-like scales which were lubricated with a thin coating of a biological oily substance, the purpose of which Scully was unsure about. Mulder reached out to touch it. 

“Don’t!” she said quickly, and Mulder snatched back his hand and looked at her. 

“I’m not sure what this substance is, here,” she said, pointing at the oily sheen. “You said the saliva had anticoagulant properties?” This she asked of Hosteen, who nodded at her silently. “This coating may be toxic. Mulder, I’ve never seen anything like this.” 

There were several tools hanging on the wall near the workbench and Scully walked over and grabbed a pair of pliers and a small screwdriver and took them back to the table. 

“Can I get a little more light?” she asked Hosteen, who turned on an anbaric torch and focused its light on the creature. She attempted to palpate the rat’s body, to no avail. The hide was impenetrable, and had no give whatsoever, except for an area near its back where she could see the imprint of Cisco’s sharp hoof, which had snapped the creature’s spine. 

Finally she took the tools to the animal’s mouth, using the screwdriver to pry its jaw open. Inside its mouth were two rows of metal teeth so sharp and sinister looking that it looked like nails had been driven up into the animal’s jaw. Mulder gave a low whistle. 

“How many of these creatures are there?” Frohike asked, his voice just above a whisper. 

“Countless,” said Hosteen quietly. “There are more today than there were yesterday. Tomorrow there will be more still.”

Frohike shifted on his feet, his dæmon’s eyes appearing wide and frightened from the black mask on her face. 

Chapter Text

“Fox, if you don’t get some sleep, we’ll be of no use to anyone tomorrow,” Cass said from where she was curled above his head.

Mulder rolled over in the bed, the old springs squeaking underneath him. Though it was narrow, the bed felt sprawling and cold. He punched the pillow, which jostled his dæmon.

“I can’t,” he said. 

Cass sighed, irritated. “You two are ridiculous.”

He thought briefly of arguing that not everything — including his sudden inability to sleep on his own — was about Scully, but abandoned the impulse. Cassiana felt everything he did and he was past the point of lying to himself.

“Has Hendrick said something to you?”

“What Hendrick and I talk about is our business.”

It was Mulder’s turn to sigh. What he felt for Scully was almost dæmon-like in its complexity and depth. And the thought of losing that connection, of actually binding himself to someone who could walk away was a thought untenable. Something he would pretend to ignore rather than voice and risk losing it forever. 

“It’s complicated,” he finally said.

“It’s not. She clearly has feelings for you, too. You’ve been pressed together intimately for the last how many nights? I don’t recall you doing that with your last partner.”

“Reggie’s dæmon was a skunk, I kept my distance for your benefit.”

Cass uttered a low animal sound at his evasion. The mantel clock that sat on an antique dresser in the corner clicked to midnight. In the hallway he heard the creak of an old board. A moment later his door eked open a little way and he heard the soft purr of a feline. 

“Scully?” he said quietly, and the door opened the rest of the way with a soft chirp. In the doorway, illuminated by the faint light of the moon through Mulder’s window stood Scully, dressed in fleece pajamas, Hendrick standing at her side.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked, and she shook her head and moved into the room even as he scooted over and threw the blankets back. He was vaguely aware of Cass thudding to the floor where she and Hendrick curled up next to each other. 

Scully settled in next to him and heaved a contented sigh as he pulled her in close, pulling the blankets up tight to her chin. 

“Neither could I,” he whispered into the shell of her ear. 

“Mulder?” she said sleepily, and he hummed at her in question. “Tomorrow we should talk,” she finished, lacing her fingers through his. 

From the corner of his eye, he saw Cass’s coat ripple, and for a moment she had the spots of a cheetah. 

XxX

They rose with the sun to the smell of spiced chocolatl wafting up the stairs. Frohike was coming out of the hallway lavatory as they both walked out of Mulder’s room, but he said nothing but good morning and followed them down the narrow farmhouse stairway, Annie cheerfully greeting Hendrick and Cass. 

They found Albert Hosteen seated at the kitchen table talking with Langly who appeared to have been awake a while. Ondima sat at his feet, talking quietly with Haseya, Hosteen’s red hawk dæmon, who was perched on the back of his chair. 

“Good morning,” Hosteen said as they shuffled in, “I trust you slept well.”

Annie peered conspicuously at Hendrick and Cass, but Scully just said, “Yes, thank you,” and went to the counter to pour herself a hot drink. She poured some for Mulder and Frohike as well and as she handed them over, Mulder said, “Mr. Hosteen, tell me about when the village started seeing tundra rats.”

Hosteen sat back in his chair and wrapped his hands around the mug in front of him, steam rising from it like a mist. 

“It was three months ago, around the same time as the first thaw. One of the fields flooded, though we couldn’t figure out why – we’d had no rain and the snowpack was the same as it has always been. But the field where my nephew grows maize flooded and after that, the tundra rats came.”

“A lot of them?” Scully asked.

“No,” the man said. “At first it was only one. A sighting here. A rumor there. We lost some livestock. More sightings. And then Agatha Ptyorat was bitten in her own field when a tundra rat went after her dæmon. It severed the tendon in her ankle and she bled to death. Her daughter saw it all. After that there were more and more. They attacked workers planting fields. They slaughtered livestock. When they decimated our crops, that’s when they started coming into houses and attacking children.”

“The field that flooded,” Mulder said, “the sightings were in that area as well?”

“Yes,” Hosteen said simply. 

“Can you take us there?” 

Hosteen agreed to do so as soon as he had fed them all breakfast and attended to his livestock. 

An hour later, they were trudging through barren fields toward the farm of Hosteen’s nephew, who met them as they entered his property. The tundra rats seemed to not care about the empty fields of weed grasses, instead preferring the planted crops of the village, so while the crops had been gnawed down to stubs, the grassland surrounding the fields was untouched and full of low, scrubby growth. An easy place for any animal to hide or go to ground. Hosteen had to warn them to stay alert, and had cautioned Mulder and Scully to have their weapons at the ready. 

“Welcome,” Hosteen’s nephew said, as he introduced himself in a thick Bering accent. “I am Tonnels. You are the gun wielders my uncle spoke of?” Mulder nodded. “You are hunters?”

“Of a kind,” Mulder said, not getting into specifics. “Your uncle tells me your field flooded and after that the tundra rats came?”

“My uncle is conflating correlation with causation,” Tonnels said. “But more of them have been seen on my land than anywhere else.”

“The flood brought evil here,” Hosteen said. 

“With that, I can’t disagree.”

“Will you show us the flooded field?” Mulder asked. 

The day was cloudy, but one of the calmest they had experienced since arriving in Beringland, with not a bit of wind. Once Tonnels brought them to the field, which was three or four acres in extremis, Mulder wanted to walk the perimeter to get a sense for the area. Something about the land here was prickling the inner recesses of his mind and he had learned to trust his instincts. Scully had questions for Tonnels about what he’d seen and experienced, and the two of them took the lead, Tonnels’ rabbit daemon hopping at the head of the pack. Frohike and Langly followed, with Mulder and Hosteen bringing up the rear. Eventually the three groups were just out of earshot of each other. 

Haseya leapt off of Hosteen’s shoulder and rose up above the group, having to wheel in circles above her human as there were no wind currents to ride. When she was high above them, almost to the limits of their connection, Hosteen finally spoke. 

“The night of the flood is when I first dreamed of your dæmon,” he said calmly, and Mulder and Cass, who was walking beside him, shared a look. “I had never seen a creature such as this, and in my dream, I followed her.”

Mulder kept quiet, letting the man tell him what he would. 

“Over mountains and through valleys we walked, and for a while, I thought she was leading me back to my homeland, to the sandstone and the buttes of my youth, but she continued on past the place of my ancestors until she reached vast grasslands, full of sagebrush and goldenrod. There she laid down and I sat beside her and I thought ‘This is a good place.’” Up ahead, Mulder watched as Scully leaned down to examine something in the dirt and the sun shone off her hair like a spark. Hosteen watched her too, and went on. “Until she laid down in the sagelands, I had thought I was following only an animal, but when I sat beside her, she spoke to me and I realized that I was sitting with another man’s dæmon.”

“What did she say to you?” Mulder asked. 

“She told me of things I would not live to see. But I am an old man, and the future does not trouble me as it once did. To sit and talk in solitude with the soul of another was a rare gift, and I want to thank you both for that.” Mulder nodded, not sure if he should say anything. “I have dreamt of your dæmon since, Mr. Mulder. I have seen the things she can do.” A shiver of disquiet passed through Cassiana and on into Mulder. Hosteen stopped walking and Mulder stopped as well, turning to him, wondering what he was about to say. “Can she only do those things in my dreams?” the old man asked. 

Mulder considered him for a moment, glancing at the rest of the party and turned back to Hosteen, shaking his head. “It’s not just in your dreams,” he said.

Hosteen nodded as though this was the answer he expected. “Once we reach maturity, our dæmons settle and are like fire: radiant and immutable. This has always been so.” At their feet, Cassiana rubbed against Mulder’s legs and looked up at him with soulful eyes. “And it will be for you,” the old man went on. “Many years after the rest of us, your dæmon will settle, as she has in my dreams. But you must follow her, Mr. Mulder. When everything in you is telling you not to, you must follow your daemon, like I did. If you do that, everything that should come to pass, will.”

Albert Hosteen’s words would have sat like lead in Mulder’s stomach if not for the gunshot. 

He and Hosteen whipped around to find Tonnels on the ground with an arm out, and Scully in a shooter’s stance a few feet away, smoke from her pistol still leaking out of the barrel. Hosteen and Mulder ran to where they stood, arriving only a few seconds behind Frohike and Langly. Next to Tonnels, lay a tundra rat, dead, with a bullet hole blown between its misty red eyes. 

“What happened?” Mulder asked, breathless. Scully had still not fully lowered the weapon. Once she seemed certain that the rat was in fact incapacitated, she slowly relaxed, reaching out a hand to help Tonnels to stand.

“It came out of the brush, just there,” the man said, pointing to a dense thicket of tundra sawgrass and wiping dust off of his pants. He seemed to be unhurt. “It went right for me. If she had not… Thank you,” he said, looking down at Scully, who waved off his gratitude. 

Mulder drew his own weapon and kneeled down to peer into the brush where the creature had come from. Something about it was odd. Cass took a step forward and sniffed at it with her superior nose. 

“... Fox,” she said, and he realized what he was seeing. Though there wasn’t a whiff of wind, the sawgrass was moving as though in a breeze. 

“Scully, look,” he said, and she saw it a moment later. 

“How is it…?” she asked. 

“I don’t know.”

“What are you seeing?” Frohike asked. 

Langly got down on one knee beside Mulder. “Wind,” he said, and Mulder nodded. He looked back up at Hosteen and Tonnels and explained. 

“Look at the sawgrass,” Mulder said, pointing, “it’s moving in the wind.” 

“There is no wind,” said Tonnels. 

“Exactly.”

Everyone dropped down onto their knees, Scully helping Hosteen, and peered at the grass. The dæmons stepped forward as well, Haseya coming down to land on Hosteen’s shoulder, each creature sniffing the air. 

“Do you smell that?” Cass asked Hendrick, who nodded. 

Ondima and Annie muttered a few words to each other and then Annie looked up to Frohike. 

“The air is warm,” she said, and all the humans, save Tonnels and his rabbit daemon, who had taken a few steps back in fear, put their hands out to feel it. The breeze coming from the sawgrass was warm, by at least fifteen to twenty degrees. 

“I need everyone to take a few steps back,” Scully said, reholstering her weapon and pulling out a pair of leather mittens from inside her coat. Beside her, Hendrick tensed, lowering his body slightly to the ground as though ready to pounce. “Mulder, I need you to cover me.” 

Mulder trained his gun on the sharp sawgrass, Cass next to him unsheathing her claws. He connected eyes with Scully and nodded. She stepped forward and grabbed onto the grass with both hands, parting it and peering into the thick brush. 

Mulder saw the rough fur on Hendrick’s neck and shoulders puff up in fear or aggression. 

“Mulder?” Scully said, her voice shaky. 

“What is it?” he asked, a nervous sweat beading on his upper lip. 

“You need to see this,” she said. 

Mulder turned to Frohike. “Can you fire a pistol?” 

The little man nodded, and Mulder handed over his weapon, getting on his knees next to Scully. 

“Look,” she said, pulling the grass apart again. “Just a few inches above the ground, a little to the right.” 

Mulder peered into where Scully had indicated and noticed it right away. In what appeared to be a small slit in the very fabric of the earth – about six inches by three –  shone a bit of sunlight, which looked odd and otherworldly in the grey overcast day. Along with the sunlight, a breeze was blowing through the slit, the air warm and stale. All he could see through the opening was a bit of bare dirt. 

“Did you see anything?” Mulder asked quietly. 

“Not from this angle. I need to get down lower.” 

Mulder nodded and shrugged off his jacket, laying it over the top of the sawgrass so that it wouldn’t cut at them. Scully had a better position, so she lowered herself onto his jacket so that she was laying almost flat to the earth, and leaned forward, peering in toward the sunlight. After a moment she pulled back and the look she gave Mulder frightened him right down to his toes. 

“Mulder,” she said. “It’s a whole other world.”

Chapter Text

Scully immediately got up so that Mulder could have a look for himself. He laid down on top of the jacket he had laid out and peered through the opening. He could see a dirt covered rocky ground with the rise of mountains in the distance and blue sky above that. But that was the extent of it. Just a narrow frame, like looking at a photogram or a painting. A window into another world. 

The implications of what he was seeing were astounding. He’d read of the multiverse theory in obscure scientific journals, but the idea that one could actually pass from one universe to another was astonishing. Without a doubt in his mind he had found where the metallic tundra rats had come from. 

Mulder reached forward to touch the place where his world met the next. He heard Scully’s intake of breath when she realized what he was doing, but she said nothing. He didn’t know what he expected to feel, surely some kind of resistance, but as his fingers touched the space where his world became another, he felt nothing but the warmer air of a different clime. He leaned forward and smelled the faint breeze passing through the tear. It smelled vaguely of soggy earth with a hint of decay. 

“I smell death,” Hendrick said, stepping forward so that he was standing right at Scully’s side. She reached down and ran a hand absently along the fur of his head. 

“I smell it, too,” said Cass from Mulder’s other shoulder. 

Feeling a profound sense of Cass’s unease, he nevertheless ran his hand up to the edge of the tear, curious beyond reason to know what the fabric between worlds felt like. When he touched it, his mind had trouble processing what he was feeling. It was both liquid and solid at the same time, as thick as the distance between the farthest reaches of space and as thin as the sharpened point of a pin. Invisible. Both pliant and unyielding. Silvery was the only word that came to mind. 

He pulled his hand back, but his wrist caught on a bit of sawgrass and it sliced through the exposed skin. He gave a hiss of pain and heard Cass make a similar sound. He pulled his wrist to his chest and rolled off the jacket and onto his knees. 

“What happened?” Scully asked, her voice high and anxious. 

“Cut myself on the sawgrass,” he said, lowering his hand to take a look at the injury. It was a thin gash about two inches long. Cass leaned over his shoulder and gently licked the blood away, soothing the angry red skin. He looked into her eyes with thanks. 

Finally he got to his feet. 

“This is it,” he said with certainty. “There’s a… There’s a window between worlds. My guess is the tundra rats are coming through it.” 

Frohike, Langly and Hosteen leaned forward with interest, looking at the slip of sun shining in from a different world, but Tonnels’ face had turned white and his eyes were wide and terrified. He turned on his heel and took off across the field, his rabbit daemon leaping beside and in front of him. 

Hosteen turned to watch him go. “His mind is small,” he said. “He is afraid of what he doesn’t understand. This is beyond his ken.” He pointed at the sawgrass. “It is beyond mine too.”

“I’ve read of the Other Worlds theory,” Frohike said. “Experimental theologians have theorized the existence of parallel worlds, but I… by the Authority, I never thought I would live to see it so plainly.”

“You think the tundra rats are from this other world, then?” Langly asked. “That they’re passing through here? Is that all that lives there? What else can come through?”

Mulder thought of other creatures with mouths full of those nail-like teeth. Bigger creatures. He swallowed thickly and looked at his injured arm. The bleeding had stopped, but it was tender.

“I think,” Mulder said, wincing, “that the sawgrass most likely keeps other creatures out or in, or whatever you want to call it. The rats, I think,” he said, “with their metallic skin and the size of this… this window, are some of the few creatures that can pass through.” 

“So how do we close it? Seal it off?” Scully asked. 

Mulder saw the reason in this, but his sense of awe and curiosity was only just awakening. “Close it?” he asked, incredulity creeping into his tone. “Scully, this is a wonder!”

“If it is the source of the tundra rats, Mulder,” she said testily, “it’s killing this village.” 

Mulder didn’t, couldn’t argue with that. 

Frohike had lowered himself to his knees and was peering through the sawgrass at the bit of sunlight that showed through behind it. “Remarkable,” he said. “Though I think Scully is right. We need to definitively find out if this is the source of the vermin.”

“How?” said Langly, standing with his arms crossed in front of him. “Set up a camp and wait for one to come through?” 

“That would be dangerous,” Hosteen said, “even with pistols. You do not want to be out here at night.”

“We could go through,” Mulder said. “Armed, of course. Go in and look around. See if we can find other rats. Evidence of their presence.”

“Through that hole?” Scully said. “How? Do you have the ability to elongate your bones and squeeze through narrow places?”

“What if we send a dæmon? Ondima could probably squeeze through.” 

The arctic fox in question eased her way behind Langly’s leg, lowering herself to the ground in fear. 

“I could go,” said Haseya. “It would be my honor to see a world beyond our own.”

“I think that’s a nonstarter,” said Frohike to the hawk. “How far would you be able to go with Mr. Hosteen on this side of the window?”

Scully gave Mulder a significant look and subtly shook her head. She’d thought of it before he had. Cassiana could change into something small and go through the window. And the dæmon could move as far away from Mulder as necessary. Though this certainly wasn’t the time to bring it up. 

“Well,” he said. “We’ll need to think of a solution. In the meantime, I think the more pressing matter is what to do about the tundra rats that are already here.”

Everyone agreed with this and they all reluctantly backed away from the wonder of the dense thicket. Mulder gazed at it with longing, and finally turned, the last to do so, to head back to Hosteen’s farm. 

XxX

Hosteen had seen them back to his farmhouse and then left to talk to Tonnels. Mulder, Scully, Frohike and Langly sat around his kitchen table sipping at strong tea and trading ideas. 

“I wonder,” said Scully, who had been quiet for some time, “if the hide of the tundra rats are conductive.”

Langly leaned forward. “It would stand to reason that they are,” he said, “if they’re actually made of metal.”

“Should be easy enough to test,” said Frohike, and galvanized, the four of them put on coats and trudged down the steps with their daemons into Hosteen’s basement, bringing up the dead frozen rat onto the workbench. 

“So,” said Mulder, “how do we do this?” 

Langly looked around Hosteen’s work area, pulling open drawers and cabinets. “I’ve got it,” he said. “Will someone pull the exterior fixture off that light, please?” He pointed at the anbaric light above the bench. 

Frohike pushed the table a bit to the side and stood under the light as Annie scampered up him and onto his shoulder, reaching up to deftly remove the casing from the light with her small, human-like hands. Langly worked for a few minutes and then strung up several wires and hooked them into the rudimentary circuitry at the base of the bulb. 

“Ready,” he said. 

“Hold one wire to the nose and one to the tail,” instructed Scully. “See if it will complete the circuit.”

Langly did so, and the light above them dimmed and then got brighter. They could see a faint anbaric static crackle along the hide of the beast. 

“That answers that,” Mulder said. 

“I wonder if the animal’s circulatory system is similar to ours,” Scully pondered out loud. “If its heart functions with the same anbaric pulses as our own. If so, maybe we could shock them.”

“Every farm in the village could rig something up, if so,” Frohike said, excitedly. 

“Langly,” Scully said, narrowing her eyes for a moment. “Can you touch both wires to the rat? At the same time in the same location? I’m curious what would happen.” 

Langly nodded and twisted the two wires together, touching them to the tundra rat’s back. What happened next was not anything Mulder had been expecting. There was the sound of a crackling surge of power, and the body of the rat went flying a foot off the table with a momentary flash of purple sparks encasing the body. The lights in the basement grew three times as bright as one of the bulbs in the far corner exploded, and then the creature fell back to the table, its hide shrunk to half its previous size, and its limbs, frozen stiff though they had been, were pulled up into its abdomen so that it appeared to be nothing more than a desiccated metallic ball. 

“Well now,” said Frohike. “That was something.” 

Scully leaned forward onto the table, peering at what was left of the creature with interest, looking surprised despite herself.

“I think we figured out a way to kill ‘em,” Mulder said happily. 

XxX

Hosteen’s house, though old, was well insulated and built well for the area in which it sat. When Scully walked into his room that evening, she was wearing far less than she had any other night since they arrived in Beringland — a camisole and a night skirt — having practically overheated the night before. 

Mulder sat up in the bed, just the sight of her bare shoulder setting his pulse to racing. He remembered her words as she drifted off to sleep the previous evening, how she wanted to talk. About them. 

She shut the door softly and Hendrick made a beeline for Cassiana, settling in next to her without delay. Scully took more time and care entering the room, looking at Mulder with a small moue of apprehension. She sat on the bed near his hip, but didn’t lay down next to him. 

He reached out a hand and ran it down her arm. “You wanted to talk,” he said quietly, and she turned to him. 

“Yes,” she said. 

“About us,” he had to resist the urge to lean forward and press a kiss to the skin of her shoulder. He saw her smile and look down, her hair falling to block his view of her face.

“Yes,” she said again. “But…”

“But?” A low feeling of disquiet settled in his stomach.

“First I want to…” She took a breath and appeared to steel herself. “Mulder, I know what you’re thinking. You want to send Cass through the window. You want her to change so she can go through.”

Mulder looked over at his dæmon who was sitting next to Hendrick on the floor, both of them sitting like sphinxes. 

“Yes,” he said simply, echoing her from the moment before. 

“Mulder, please don’t. Anyone might see, and besides, we don’t know what’s on the other side of that window. There could be anything. If something happened to her… if you died…” 

He could see tears forming in her eyes and he sat forward, wrapping an arm around her. 

“We’ll be careful,” he said. “We won’t do it when anyone else is around. She can be a bird, high up in the air, above any danger.”

Scully sniffed once. “Suppose they have cliff ghasts in that world too,” she said. “Or something worse.” 

“Scully,” he said, his voice one of confident wonder. “It’s another world. Another world. If Cass can experience that for us… And we have to be sure about the rats. We promised Albert Hosteen our help and protection.” He reached out and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “You and I never do anything half-assed.”

“Mulder, if something happened… I can’t lose you.”

“Why not?” His voice was a rasp, emotion pulling his throat tight. 

The tears that were in her eyes pooled even bigger under the bright blue of her irises, but refused to fall. “Because I love you,” she said, and an emotion surged up from inside of him so big that it propelled him forward and before he knew quite what he was doing, his lips were on hers in a searing kiss. She kissed him back, desperately, her arms suddenly around him, pulling him to her tightly. 

He kissed her like he’d always wanted to, passionately, greedily, with an ancient fire in the belly, and he only pulled back when he felt a wetness on his cheeks, the sweetness of her briny tears sweeping across his lips and into his mouth. 

He took a breath, calmed himself, and used his thumbs to wipe the tear tracks from beneath her eyes. 

“Mulder, there’s got to be another way,” she whispered, pleading. 

He leaned forward and touched a chaste kiss to the end of her nose, holding her cheeks in both hands. 

“It’ll be fine,” he whispered back, pressing his lips one last time to hers. “It’ll be fine.”

XxX

Everyone once again awoke with the dawn, eager to put their plan into action. Hosteen had called a meeting with the other villagers, who gathered in the town hall later that morning to hear the plan to eradicate the tundra rats from the village. 

The creatures, who had been seen by more than one villager drinking from livestock troughs, seemed to be drawn to the water there, and so that was how they planned to get them. With the help of Frohike and Langly, the villagers would rig anbaric cabling to the troughs at every farm, turning on the power every night once livestock was safely enclosed in their stables. The closest natural water source was miles and miles away, and with any luck, they would shock and kill every tundra rat before the month was out. The villagers accepted the plan with enthusiasm.

They had a lot of work to do to put the plan into action, and hoped to be able to see if it worked that very night. 

A couple of villagers had brought up the fact that they still didn’t know where the tundra rats came from, and voiced their fear that until that happened they would never feel safe. Hosteen had cautioned against announcing what they’d found after Tonnels’ reaction, and all parties involved had agreed. Once the meeting had drawn to an end, Mulder pulled Scully aside. 

“We need to go in,” he said. 

She sighed unhappily. 

“You heard those people, Scully. We need to be sure. And once we’re through, maybe we can find a way to close the tear so that the village never has to worry again.”

“How?” she asked. “When? It’s not safe to do it in the dead of night, you heard Hosteen. And during the day – what if you’re seen?” 

Mulder looked around. “We’ll go now,” he said. “Everyone will be busy preparing their farms for the anbaric defense.”

Scully sighed again, but said nothing, following him out of the village center and down the road toward Tonnels’ field. He was right in that the villagers had gathered around Hosteen, Frohike and Langly and were listening carefully to the instructions they gave on what supplies they needed to gather and what they needed to prepare to protect their homes. Mulder and Scully turned on the road that led out of the village and were utterly alone, the hum of energized voices gradually fading to silence behind them. 

Mulder could hear Hendrick and Cass talking in low voices a few paces back. He hesitated for a moment and then reached out to take Scully’s hand.

“Last night,” he said, “we got a little sidetracked.”

Other than Scully’s confession, they had spent most of the time discussing the perils of what they were now on their way to do and then had turned in for the night without talking about what lay so obviously between them, emotionally and physically spent. 

“I just,” he went on, “I want you to know that your feelings aren’t one-sided.”

Scully squeezed his hand and then let it go. 

“Let’s do this first,” she said, her voice clipped with worry and fear. 

“Okay,” he said, centering himself. “Okay.”

They both looked warily around as they approached the thicket where the window lay, but saw no one. With Cass by his side, Mulder walked around the thicket itself, studying it in space. When they went around the back of the window, it vanished. You could only see it from one side. 

“How do you want to do this?” Mulder finally said, turning to his daemon. 

“I think what you said before is probably the best way,” Cass said. She was nervous but was putting on a brave face. “Once I’m through, I’ll go up in the air. See if I can confirm the presence of the rats. Maybe look around a bit, for the sake of exploring.” 

Mulder smiled at her. “I wish I could go with you.” 

“I know,” she said, and rubbed her face into his hand. 

With that, Cassiana turned to Hendrick. 

“Cassiana,” the cheetah said, his low baritone betraying the trace of a nervous purr. Hendrick stepped forward and closed his eyes, giving the fossa a tender head butt before licking the fur on her head with a rough tongue. “Be careful.”

Cass, a little overwhelmed with emotion, simply nodded in a human-like way and turned back to Mulder. 

“Is the coast clear?” she asked. 

Mulder and Scully scanned all parts of the horizon before giving her the go ahead, and, looking around once herself, Cass changed into a moth, flitting over lightly to the sawgrass and then disappearing behind it. 

Mulder could feel her excitement and fear as she slipped through the slit of space.

Chapter Text

They waited several minutes, just staring at the patch of sawgrass, and Scully felt like she was going to jump out of her skin. Finally she turned to Mulder. 

“How can you stand it?” she asked. 

He shrugged. He had explained to her that since he was about eight years old, they’d been able to separate without severing their connection. He had mentioned that he didn’t remember how or why they’d figured it out, and Scully had always thought it impolite to press. 

“Can you still feel her, even when she’s far away from you?” she went on, curious despite her nerves. 

“Yes,” Mulder said, concentrating. Most likely on the feelings of his dæmon, thought Scully – their only way of monitoring what was going on in the other world. 

“What do you feel?” 

“Nervous,” Mulder said, then looked up at her and gave her a small smile. “Exhilarated.” 

Scully felt the sudden need to touch her own dæmon, and her hand fell to her side where Hendrick stood, who leaned into her touch, needing the same reassurance.

It was torture, just standing and waiting. Scully couldn’t imagine being in Mulder’s position. Twenty more minutes passed, all of it agonizing, when she began to hear a very faint, very high pitched whine. They had trouble placing its source until Hendrick tensed by Scully’s side and he took a step toward the sawgrass patch. 

“It’s coming from in there,” he said, tense. 

Scully exchanged a look with Mulder. “What’s going on with Cass?” she asked. 

Mulder shook his head. “Confusion,” was all he said, though she noticed that his pupils were dilated and his breathing had begun to quicken.    

It was then that she began to hear another sound from behind them. Faint whispering sounds, like the brush of weeds on a pant leg and then every few seconds a muted skittering. A creep of gooseflesh along her spine, and she and Hendrick whirled around at the same time, Scully drawing her pistol as she turned. 

Right behind her, there was a tundra rat sitting up on its hind legs, silver nose sniffing the air. 

“Dana!” Hendrick said sharply, and she finally saw what had alarmed him – flashing in the sunshine all around them were more and more tundra rats, skittering across the empty field of maize, from in between clumps of weedgrass in the fields on either side. Dozens of the creatures were coming their way. 

“Mulder!” Scully said, as the one closest to them dropped down onto all fours and took a couple of short leaps in their direction. From the corner of her eye Scully saw Mulder turn and draw his own weapon, and when the rat got within ten feet of them, Scully fired a round into its head, sending the creature hurtling backwards several feet through the air where it fell to the earth, dead. 

Another rat was approaching from the field to their right and Mulder fired off a shot, missed, then fired again, felling it. 

More of them were coming, and getting closer, and soon the two detectives were firing off a round every ten or so seconds, the rats coming more quickly and closely. 

Scully had to stop to reload her pistol and then had to cover Mulder while he did the same. 

“Mulder, I don’t have that many rounds left!” she called to her partner, and when he didn’t answer, she turned to him. He was looking at the sawgrass thicket. Scully then noticed that the sound that had been coming in from the other world had stopped, and she turned back to check the rats, firing off one more round at the closest creature, and with that one shot, the tundra rats that had been flooding their direction as though called by a pied piper, suddenly scattered and darted away, disappearing as quickly as they had come. Scully stood once more in an empty field next to her dæmon and Mulder, smoke still leaking out of the barrel of her Magisterium-issued pistol. 

Two seconds later, they heard a high bird-like scream and then Cassiana, in a blur, came flying through the patch of sawgrass and hurtling into Mulder. 

“Cass!” he shouted, and caught her and held her close for a moment before holding out his arm so that she could perch on it – she was in the shape of a sharp-shinned hawk, her yellow legs bright against the dark material of Mulder’s coat. 

She was breathing hard, and took several moments to catch her breath. 

“There was a flood,” Cass finally said, swallowing hard. “The area through there looks just like this one geographically. I saw the same mountains and the same topography, but… it was ravaged by a flood. Recently, too. The land is just decimated. There are other metal creatures, like the tundra rats, bigger creatures, but they’re dead. Drowned. It’s a different world through there. A hellscape.”

“What happened?” Mulder said, his forehead creased in concern. “I felt terror, and then…”

“I’m not sure what it was,” Cass said. “I thought I’d seen a tundra rat and flew down for a closer look, and I think I disturbed a nest or-” 

At that moment Cass stopped talking and craned her neck to look past Mulder. Scully heard what caught her attention and turned to see several villagers, along with Frohike and Langly and Tonnels running toward them from across the field, carrying scythes and shovels and whatever they had grabbed for arms. 

Mulder looked at Cass. “Fly behind the thicket and turn back. Go!”

Cass needed no more instruction and turned immediately back into a moth, fluttering behind the sawgrass thicket where Scully knew she would instantly turn back into a fossa. 

The approaching mob pulled up a moment later. 

“Shots!” Frohike said, leaning on his knees, out of breath. “We heard shots!” 

“Tundra rats,” Scully said, finally holstering her weapon. She pointed to several of the dead rats lying scattered around them. 

“Where did they come from?” Tonnels asked, looking fearfully at the sawgrass thicket, the scythe he was carrying glinting in the sunlight. 

“All over,” Mulder said, pointing to the fields surrounding them. “They came from every direction.” The other villagers that had come running to help started mumbling to each other in concern. 

Tonnels narrowed his eyes at Mulder. “Where is your dæmon?” he demanded. 

“Here,” said a female voice, and Cass came slinking from around the back side of the thicket in fossa form. “I saw a few go darting that way, Fox,” she said to Mulder, pointing her nose toward the direction of the field behind them. 

“I saw a hawk,” Tonnels said, and Scully saw his knuckles holding the scythe whiten. 

“You saw me, nephew,” said another female voice from above them, and Haseya gracefully alighted on the waiting outstretched arm of Albert Hosteen, who stepped forward from the crowd. Tonnels opened his mouth to say something more, but Haseya went on. “What called them?” she asked, her question directed at Cass. 

“We don’t know,” said Hendrick, stepping forward. “We saw nothing.”

“Then we should delay no longer in setting our trap. Come everyone,” Hosteen said, turning back toward the village. “Sunset will come sooner than we would like it to.” 

With a long look at Mulder, Tonnels turned on his heel and followed his uncle and the other villagers back the way they’d come. 

Scully, feeling unsettled, glanced at her partner herself and trailed them, a pall of apprehension following her like a shadow. 

XxX

That night, after the evening meal had been cleared away, Frohike and Langly excused themselves, exhausted from helping the various farms around the village set up their anbaric rat traps. Mulder, Scully and Hosteen sat around the bare table, all of them a bit too keyed up to sleep. 

When the sounds from the floor above them settled, Hosteen finally turned to them. “What did you find,” he asked, “through the seam to the other world?”

Scully watched as Mulder looked at him a moment and then answered honestly. “A wasteland. With creatures similar to those terrorizing your village.” 

“A flood ravaged the other world,” Scully said, “which would explain the water that appeared in your nephew’s field before the rats came. If it’s any consolation, I don’t think they’re breeding — just more and more coming through the window between worlds. The creatures must be starving. They came through seeking food. Survival.”

Hosteen nodded as though he were not surprised. “And I am sorry for them and I am sorry for their world. But it needs to be sealed, this window,” Hosteen said. “I can only concern myself with my world and the lives that were born to it.”

“I agree,” said Mulder, “but how?” 

Scully felt a profound relief hearing Mulder say the words. 

“I don’t suppose we could use a needle and thread, could we?” she asked. 

Mulder looked at her ruefully. “I don’t suppose we could,” he said. 

“Then we need to seal it off,” she said, “in such a way that no one would be able to access it from either side.” 

“Some kind of fencing?” Mulder suggested. 

“The rats would eat right through it,” said Hosteen. 

“If the fencing were made of metal?” Mulder went on. “We could bury deep posts on either side and secure metal plates to them.”

Scully leaned forward. “You need something more permanent. Something that will last generations. And something inconspicuous. A fence will lead to questions. You need something that looks like it’s supposed to be there.” 

The men sat back, nodding and contemplative. They knew she was right. She thought of the glacier scraped landscape she observed when they rode in from Kyovat. 

“Mr. Hosteen,” she finally said. “Does your village have access to an anbaric tractor? Ideally a very powerful one?” 

The old man nodded. “I have one myself. In the barn.”

“Good,” said Scully. “I have an idea.” 

XxX

They were awakened just after dawn with a shout from downstairs. 

They tumbled out of bed, throwing on jackets and boots and spilled out of the farmhouse to find Langly and Frohike not far from the house, near the farm’s trough. 

“What is it?” Scully called out. “What happened?”

Frohike trotted up to them with a wide smile. 

“It worked,” he said, looking at each of them in turn, delighted. “The trap worked. There are four dead rats in there. Four!”

Albert came shuffling out of the house moments later and they relayed the good news. More animated than they had ever seen him, the old man clapped his hands together and excused himself to call on other villagers to see how their traps had fared. When he returned an hour later, he had nothing but good news. All the traps in the village had caught or killed at least one tundra rat in the night. If they could seal the hole, there was a chance the village might be able to eradicate their otherworldly vermin problem in time to perhaps even plant one or two of the more fast-growing crops before autumn came. It looked like the village might not only survive, but perhaps thrive once more. 

There was a feeling of jubilation throughout the whole of the town, and when Hosteen told Tonnels of Scully’s plan to seal the window in the sawgrass thicket on the edge of his maize field, he agreed to it with enthusiasm. 

The plan itself had been fairly simple. The geography in which the village sat had been carved eons ago by glaciation, the glaciers that were not too far north having left behind mammoth boulders that dotted the land. Throughout the rolling drumlins of the valley, these massive rocks were not hard to find and, using several powerful anbaric-powered tractors, Hosteen, Tonnels and a few other villagers were able to retrieve and maneuver one so that it sat right up against the window that the tundra rats had come through, sealing it tightly and permanently. 

When the villagers with tractors had asked why they were being asked to move a monstrously large boulder to the edge of Tonnels’ maize field, Scully explained that she  and Mulder had found the rat’s nest and that they wanted to seal it to ensure no more rats would be unleashed on their community. The bodies of the rats Mulder and Scully had shot was proof enough. 

Later that day, when the other villagers were informed of what the outsiders had done for them, they were so elated that a plan was hatched to throw a fete to celebrate, and Mulder, Scully, Frohike and Langly were to be honored by a hastily thrown-together feast and celebration in the community building later that night. 

XxX

“I have nothing to wear,” said Scully, turning to look at herself in the mirror in Mulder’s room. It was full length, but antique, the patina on the glass lending her an ethereal quality. “I packed for a case, not a ball.”

“If anything,” said Mulder, approaching her from behind, “a ‘ball’ is probably too generous a term. I think at most we could consider it a country dance.”

“Even worse,” she said.

“Hey,” he said, rubbing his hands up and down her arms once. “We helped save a town. Or rather you did. I don’t think I was much more than moral support. Isn’t that why we got into this job in the first place? To help people?”

Scully couldn’t argue with that, and when they walked through the doors of the overheated little community building, they were so warmly received that she soon forgot all her nagging concerns and started having a good time, despite herself. 

Midway through the evening, Albert Hosteen pulled her aside. 

“I want to thank you,” he said, “for coming to the assistance of an old man you do not know.”

There was a warmth in his eyes, and Scully felt an instant kinship, something that didn’t always come easily to her. She reached out and grabbed his hand. 

“We were happy to do it, Mr. Hosteen.”

“Your partner,” Hosteen said, nodding toward Mulder, who was telling the story of the afternoon’s excitement to Frohike and some of the men of the village, throwing out his hands with enthusiastic, bold gestures. “You are right to worry about him. But he is true, as is his dæmon. However changeable, they are steady. You do well to trust in him.”

Despite what he knew about Mulder, however he knew it, he was kind and trusting. After worrying about Mulder so long, Scully found she was touched beyond measure by Hosteen’s acceptance.

“For you," Hosteen said, holding out something toward her. After a moment's hesitation, she reached out and the man gently set something small and heavy into the palm of her hand. When he drew back, she saw that it was a ring; dense, silver, with large turquoise stones, one of which was chipped in the corner. 

The metal was warm, and Scully felt as though she had just been given a precious gift. 

“You don’t have to-“ she started, but he reached out and closed her hand around the offering.

“Take it,” he said. “With my thanks.”

"I will, Mr. Hosteen," she said. "Thank you."

A moment later, Mulder approached. He was warm, his face covered in a thin sheen of sweat, and he smelled yeasty, like the homemade ale the revelers had tapped into earlier in the evening. He put an affectionate arm around her without a thought or care, and Scully couldn’t help but wonder if he was maybe a little bit drunk. That said, it was a nice feeling, and the warm, happy mood of the evening was infectious. She leaned into his side. 

“Did Scully tell you,” said Mulder, beaming at Hosteen, “that not only did she figure out the tundra rats’ weakness, but that she single-handedly took out fifteen of them today on her own?”

Hosteen smiled at Mulder warmly. “You’re lucky she’s a good shot,” the old man said. 

Instead of his usual quip back, Mulder merely smiled at Hosteen and then leaned down to bring his mouth close to Scully’s ear. 

“Dance with me,” he said, his low rumbly voice awakening something in her belly. 

“You’re drunk,” she said, leaning back to get a look at him, though she was smiling. 

“I’m happy,” he corrected her. “Dance with me.”

There wasn’t quite a band, but a couple of the villagers had brought fiddles and one had a large, ancient looking guitar. They were playing a lively tune, and Scully dragged her feet, but let Mulder pull her out onto the floor, to the rousing cheers of the assembled villagers. Scully caught Frohike’s eye, who raised a pewter glass in her direction and toasted the two of them. 

Mulder had just gotten Scully into position when the musicians stopped playing suddenly, and after exchanging conspiratorial glances, broke into a slow, romantic tune. 

Mortified, Scully still let Mulder pull her into his embrace as he rolled with the villagers’ agenda with humor and grace. 

“Mulder, everyone is watching,” Scully whispered, and she saw Hendrick sit himself down next to Cass on the edge of the improvised dance floor. 

Mulder’s eyes never left hers as he swayed with her. “Let them,” he said. She tucked her face into his chest and let herself breathe in the warmth of him and his homey, cedary smell. 

After several minutes, more people joined them and soon there was the dim sound of conversation and Scully finally felt like all the attention in the room was no longer on the two of them.

She felt Mulder pull back a bit and she lifted her head to look up at him. 

“Scully,” he said, his voice gravely with emotion, “I know this isn’t really the time or place, but I need to say it just the same.” A dump of adrenaline hit her bloodstream, but she swallowed thickly and gave him the tiniest of nods. “When I was assigned to work with you… I had heard you were a good detective. But I also heard that you were by the book. Guided by faith in the rules. Faith in the Authority. Faith in the Magisterium itself. You had no reason to trust me. You had no reason to… to not turn me in for what I am. I never wanted you to… I never expected…” He was floundering a bit, and Scully reached up and put a hand on his warm sandpapery cheek. He leaned into her touch, closed his eyes for a moment and then looked at her deeply. “Scully, somewhere in the middle of it all I fell in love with you, too. And I don’t think I can do this anymore and not be with you. Really be with you. I don’t want to just be your partner anymore. I want more. And I don’t think I can wait another minute.”

With tears burning the corners of her eyes, she slid her hand from his cheek to the back of his head and pulled him down for a kiss. And for a long, underwater moment, she was aware of nothing but the feel of him against her and the slide of his hot tongue in her mouth and then she heard the whoops and the hollers from the gathered revelers.  She pulled back, cheeks aflame with both embarrassment and lust. 

Mulder merely smiled down at her, ignoring the melee. “You want to get out of here?” he husked. 

She worried for a moment what everyone would think, but found she didn’t care. She nodded to him and he bit his bottom lip and grabbed her hand, pulling her off the dance floor as a small flock of children ran by, giggling. They said their goodbyes, and left Mulder’s pistol with Frohike so that he could safely see the villagers home. 

They strolled through the dark streets of the village, wary of rats, but silent, giddy, unable to let go of one another’s hands. Finally making it back to Albert Hosteen’s house, they stepped through the door of Mulder’s bedroom, and after Cassiana and Hendrick had slipped in behind them, Mulder pushed the door closed and then pressed Scully against it, his knee in between her legs, pinning her to the solid oak. 

“I have been wanting to do this since…” he started. 

“Just kiss me,” she said, and he did so with enthusiasm, the kiss growing heated until Scully felt as though she might combust. She ran her hands over his shoulders, cleaving off his jacket so that it fell to the floor behind him. That wasn’t enough, so she pulled the sweater he was wearing up and over his head, pulling the insulated shirt he was wearing underneath up and off with it. 

She ran her hands greedily over the plane of his chest and abdomen, memorizing the feel of the taut muscles and his sleek warm skin. Mulder dragged his lips from hers and down the skin of her neck, only pulling back to shuck off her jacket and pull off her own sweater and shirt, and then moved his mouth back to the sensitive skin of her decolletage without delay. When his hands skimmed over the soft fabric of her brasserie, Scully hissed in a breath and grabbed at his fly. 

“Bed,” she panted out, and they kicked off their boots and stumbled over discarded clothing, falling onto the old mattress with a creak. 

Beside them, Cassiana and Hendrick turned away with simple dignity, affording them a bit of privacy. Scully saw Cass curl into Hendrick’s side and lick his neck before Mulder drew her attention back to the matter at hand, tugging on the waist of her pants. 

“Is this okay?” he asked breathily, and she nodded quickly, laughing when he had trouble with the buttons that held closed the fells of her trousers. Scully unhooked her brassiere as he shucked off his own pants hurriedly, but he stopped in his tracks when he finally looked up at her, and she felt a glowing warmth rise up inside her from the way he was roving his eyes over her body so reverently. 

It was an odd sort of shock to see him in all his naked glory, and she took a moment to take in the sight of him too. 

Smiling, he finally lowered himself back to the narrow bed, his hot skin pressed along the length of her. He ran his fingers along her hairline and maneuvered himself in between her legs, which fell open practically of their own accord, the dewy petals of her mons opening to him like a crocus. 

“There’s no going back after this,” he whispered, his lips hovering above hers, and she felt a heat crawl up the back of her neck, felt her blood sing beneath her skin. 

“No going back,” she breathed, and he reached down and within seconds had slid up and into the waiting cradle of her hips. They both hissed at the sensation, the feeling of completion. She had to force her eyes open and found him looking at her, pupils blown, his mossy irises the color of a drop of water on a leaf. 

They moved slowly at first, a gentle rocking, getting a feel for how it was to be together like this. Scully roved her hands wherever she wanted, the places she’d always longed to touch him – her nails through his scalp, the pads of her fingers skimming his back as his muscles shifted beneath his skin, and finally up and over the perfect globes of his backside. And when she squeezed, he surged into her with a newfound intensity and lights blazed behind the lids of her eyes like aurora in the night. 

“I wanted,” he said, snapping his hips into her sharply. “To go slow.” Another snap. “To make love.” She shifted her hips slightly and his next thrust hit her core like an arrow sinking into a tree. She hissed with pleasure. “Can’t,” he went on, snapping his hips again. “I can’t.” 

“Don’t,” she said, inhaling sharply, and then she groaned when he lifted her up by the hips and slammed into her relentlessly, until she was practically keening into the dusty air of the old room. 

Her climax overcame her like a wave running up onto shore and when the gentle pulses of pleasure receded, Mulder groaned himself, lowered her to the mattress and pulled out, spurting hotly onto the skin of her bare stomach, anointing her. She felt almost holy. 

Before she could even mumble a post-coital endearment, he rolled off the bed and was back a moment later with a soft shirt from his baggage, cleaning her up tenderly and issuing a soft apology. 

Scully could only hum and pull him back down beside her. She drifted off to sleep to the soft thump of his heart under her cheek, and the feeling of something inside of her clicking into place. 

XxX

The first thing she felt when she awoke was a soft kiss on the sensitive skin behind her ear, and Mulder’s roving hands over the taut skin of her belly. She inhaled, sniffing to awareness and felt a smile stretch the skin of her cheeks as she rolled over in the bed to let her eyes drink their fill of her lover. 

The sun was high, bright and shining in through the window of Mulder’s room, dust beams falling onto the silky hides of their daemons. Mulder’s skin was dark against the pale pink flowers of the quilt, the shadow of his beard growth giving him a rakish air. 

“Good morning,” he rumbled and she took a deep pull of him. He smelled of sunshine and dust and the quiet musk of the earth. 

“Mm,” she said. “Good morning.” Hendrick uncurled himself from around Cass and gave himself a luxurious feline stretch.

Scully reached out to bring Mulder’s face to hers for a kiss when there was a hurried, loud knocking on the bedroom door. 

Hendrick sat up to instant alertness, and Mulder quickly looked at her and then rolled out of the bed, hastily stepping into pants. He opened the door a crack and Scully heard Albert Hosteen’s voice. 

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” the old man said. Scully sat up in the bed, pulling the covers high up to cover herself. “I have just come from Tonnels house. There are government men there. They are looking for you.”

“Ah,” said Mulder, and she could see his posture relaxing. “We have been brought in by the Bering to attend to a matter in the far north. No need to be alarmed, Mr. Hosteen.”

“You do not understand, Mr. Mulder,” Hosteen went on. “These are heresy inspectors called in by my nephew. They are not coming to escort or meet or help you and Miss Scully. They are here to take you into custody.” 

Scully’s guts went liquid. 

There was a shuffling outside the door and it opened wider to reveal Frohike, who was hiking a pack up onto his shoulder, Annie at his heels nervously wringing her paws. “Langly has the horses,” the little man said. “Gather your things quickly. We need to leave. Now.” 

“I will take you,” Hosteen said. “We will avoid the roads.” 

With that Mulder shut the door and turned to Scully. His face was pale, his nostrils flared. 

“You cannot panic, Fox,” said Cass, stepping forward and placing a paw on Mulder’s bare foot. “We don’t have the luxury of time.” 

Taking a page from Cass’s book, Hendrick walked to the side of the bed and looked at Scully. “I hope the nags you rented are faster than they look, Mulder,” he said jovially. “I have been longing to run!”

XxX

Spurred on by Hendrick nipping at their heels, the rented horses in fact did prove their mettle, keeping up with Hosteen and his clever mount Cisco. Haseya swooped down as they slowed to a canter just outside of Kyovat. 

“The way looks clear,” she said, swooping low and talking to Mulder and Scully directly. “Ride straight to the docks. We will take care of the horses.” 

“That’s assuming Fenig has the boat fixed,” Frohike said from Scully’s other side. 

In the interest of making haste, Hendrick and Haseya were the only dæmons not mounted with their humans, and Mulder looked determined and spurred his mount on with Cass sitting awkwardly in front of him in the saddle.They took side streets toward the river so as not to draw any further attention, and as they finally pulled up to the dock and dismounted, Scully felt a relief so profound that her knees almost buckled when she slid off her horse. The animal was covered with sweat and flecked with foam from the journey, and she cooed a thank you to the beast and ran her hand along its side before sliding her pack from the saddle and turning towards the little red Gulpie. 

Captain Byers came up from below decks wearing an apron smeared with grease and waved at them cheerfully from the deck. Mia bounded up beside him, flicking her tail in a squirrelly greeting. 

“Hello!” he called out to them with a friendly wave. “I trust your endeavors were successful?”

“Something like that,” Frohike muttered as he slid off his own mount and helped Annie down before handing the reins over to Hosteen. 

Langly and Ondima were already jumping lightly on board the boat and Langly turned to catch their luggage which Mulder was throwing to him, one piece at a time. 

“Eager to continue our journey?” Byers called out with a smile, and Frohike turned to him, all serious. 

“Are the repairs complete?” the little man asked.

“Nearly,” Byers said, his smile fading. “We were about to test the engine.”

“We need to be off, and quickly.”

Mulder jumped onto the boat after all their luggage was aboard and turned to help Scully. She had one foot on the deck when she heard it: the sound of an incoming airship. They all looked to the southern sky to see a zeppelin quickly approaching the town, flying low. 

“You two get below,” Frohike ordered. “Now.” 

Scully turned to say goodbye to Albert Hosteen, who sat tall and proud on the back of his pinto and raised one hand up in farewell. From the sky, Scully heard the call of a hawk, and she fingered the heavy turquoise ring he had given her through the fabric of her pocket. Then Mulder grabbed her hand and ushered her quickly down the companionway. 

From below the sound of the approaching zeppelin grew louder, as though the dirigible was docking nearby. They ducked into their quarters and both moved to the small, dingy porthole to watch what was going on outside, both their dæmons crowding in next to them to try to get a peek. Scully’s hand inadvertently brushed the back of Cass’s coat and she heard Mulder’s sharp intake of breath. They looked at each other intensely and then a shout from behind them drew their attention.

Max was calling up something to Byers from the engine room and then Byers shouted something back. She felt the motor of the ship rumble to life and then sputter out. More shouting. 

Out on the street, which they could only just make out, Hosteen and the horses had disappeared, but a group of men with Alsatian dæmons approached the dock, stopping just off shore. Once they got close, Scully recognized the dark uniforms of the security forces. 

She turned to Mulder. “Magisterium security forces in Beringland? I thought they were only sending us.”

Mulder shook his head. 

There was a grinding noise from the engine room and a startled shout from Max. 

Up on the deck, Scully could make out the muffled sound of Frohike, who had stepped up to the edge of the ship and was talking to the security force men. She couldn’t hear what they were saying. The conversation went on for a moment and then a man stepped forward from behind the group. He was not in uniform, but wore a dark leather jacket that Scully could see shine dully in the sun. His hair was slicked back and he had what she thought to be a rat dæmon sitting on his shoulder.

Mulder cursed under his breath and ducked out of sight of the porthole for a moment.

“What?” Scully asked. “What is it?”

Mulder rose back up, but looked carefully out the porthole, wary of being seen.

“I know that man,” he said. Scully could still hear a muffled exchange between Frohike and the man in question.

“Who is he?” she asked. 

“His name is Krycek. He works out of the Magisterium Headquarters in Oxford.”

“Do you think Skinner sent him?” she asked curiously, craning her neck to try to get a better look.

“No. He works for the Magisterium's Secret Service.”

“The same division as your father?”

“Not exactly,” Mulder said, ducking down once more from the window so as not to be seen. When he looked up at Scully, his face had gone pale. “He’s a heretic hunter.”

Chapter Text

“My God, Mulder,” said Scully. 

Mulder paled and swallowed thickly. He didn’t respond, but kept one eye on the proceedings outside. 

Beneath them, the engine rumbled to life, sputtered once, and then hummed evenly along. Scully watched as Byers joined Frohike on the deck. He spoke in a low calm voice and gestured toward the ship. The man Krycek looked at Byers a moment and then shook his head, turning to one of the security men next to him, who turned away, taking several men with him. With that, Byers disappeared from view and a few moments later the Gulpie pulled away from the dock, drifted with the current for a moment before the engine shifted gears and once again ground its way up the river. 

Out the porthole, Krycek stood on the dock watching their progress, and Scully didn’t take her eyes off the man until their ship had rounded a bend and he was out of sight. 

Mulder dropped heavily onto their bunk. Scully could do nothing, glued to the spot where she stood, watching as the town of Kyovat turned to trees through the porthole. A moment later there was a knock on the door to their quarters. Scully opened to reveal Frohike. 

“What happened?” she asked before the little man could even open his mouth. 

“We’ve got trouble,” he said. 

They followed him to the galley where Langly was waiting, arms crossed over his chest, Ondima sitting at his feet with her fat white tail curled around her legs. Max hovered in the hatchway of the engine room and he gave them a sympathetic smile. Captain Byers remained on the bridge. 

“Tell us,” Mulder said, swinging into the small bench around the galley’s little table.

“He’s one of yours. From the Magisterium,” Frohike said. 

“Does he know who he’s chasing?” 

“He intercepted Bering communications, came directly to Kyovat. He only knows there’s a heretic about, and he’s determined to find them first.”

“And he suspected this heretic of being on board?” Scully asked. 

“He was checking all boats. Saved ours for last as we’ve been in port for days with repairs.”

“What did you tell him? I’m surprised he didn’t want to board and ransack the ship,” Mulder said.  

“He did,” Frohike said plainly, and Scully reeled, knowing how close they’d come to being found out. “I hinted that I was a local witch’s counsel, and that I was on my way north without delay. The Magisterium would not want to anger a witch clan.”

Mulder breathed out a relieved sigh and slumped back in the small booth, where he looked over at Scully who said nothing, swallowing thickly. 

Frohike missed nothing. “You know him,” he said. 

Mulder sighed and nodded. “Man by the name of Krycek. He’s with the Secret Service.”

Frohike gave Mulder a long hard look. “He’s a heretic hunter.”

Oh god , thought Scully. This was it. They knew. She watched her partner as he tensed, but the other men in the cabin merely blinked at them, their daemons showing no sign of fear or aggression. 

“How long have you known?” said Mulder, looking at Frohike warily. 

“Since the thing in the field,” Frohike said. 

“Are you going to turn me in?”

“Our job is to take you to the witches' settlement in the Icy Cape. And we’re going to do that. You’ve proven yourselves to be worthy investigators and decent people. That’s all I need to know. They’ll tell you the same.” He threw a thumb back at Langly and Max, who both nodded at them. 

Scully felt a profound relief, but fear was creeping back in.

“And why would we go on?” she said, turning to her partner. “My God, Mulder. We should go back to New Denmark. Explain to Skinner that the assignment went sideways.”

“And how would we do that? Tell our superior at the Magisterium that I’m being hunted by our own heretic police? No. We need to finish the assignment. Go back when it’s complete. They don’t know exactly who they’re chasing. We need to carry on as if we’re just doing our jobs, completely above suspicion. If we run, we’ll be running forever.” Mulder leaned back once again, running a hand over his face. “That said, it’s probably best if we avoid them if at all possible.” 

“I agree,” said Frohike. “If we’re going to continue going north, we’ll need to go on foot. That man back at the dock, Krycek, he’ll be following this ship’s progress closely.”

“How long will that take?” Scully asked. “Going north on foot?”

“We were only ever going to be able to follow the Snake River a certain distance anyway,” Frohike said. “If we go ashore now, it’ll add a week or so to our journey. Perhaps more.”

Scully hadn’t been looking forward to this portion of the assignment, though they had journeyed here prepared for it. However, they hadn’t planned on doing it while the shadow of Mulder’s doom followed along behind them. 

“So it’s decided, then. We carry on.” Her words came out with a hint of vitriol.

“I don’t see that we have any other choice, Scully,” Mulder said, pleading a little. 

Scully’s non-response relayed her capitulation. 

Frohike pushed off the wall he had been leaning against. “We’ll need to begin preparing to disembark,” he said, and Scully took the opportunity to turn away from the men. She wanted to go up and get fresh air, but fear of being seen kept her below deck, and so she turned back into their quarters, leaving the door open for Mulder who would inevitably be behind her. She leaned against the tiny desktop built into the wall and took several deep breaths. Hendrick sat by her side. 

“They’re right,” he said. “The only way out is forward.” 

“I know,” she whispered, sniffing once. “But I’m scared for him. And I’m scared for us.” 

What she didn’t voice was that what she was most afraid of was losing him. There was a maelstrom of emotion roiling through her in want of release. 

There was a clicking of nails on wood and Cass appeared in the doorway a split second before Mulder himself. 

“Are you okay?” Mulder asked, closing the door behind him. 

No, she wanted to cry, she wasn’t okay.

“Why did you have to go through the window?” She said instead, fear turning to anger. “If you hadn’t sent Cass through that window, none of this would be happening.” She was simplifying it, and an unconscious part of her wanted to assign blame. She had just gotten him, they had just — she had just gotten almost everything she ever wanted and it was turning to ash in her hand. 

She thought of waking up that morning, the sixty seconds of bliss she was able to enjoy before Hosteen knocked on their door, of Mulder’s lips on her neck, of the quiet room with dust rising up through a sunbeam. That was how long she’d been able to savor their longed-for joining. And in that time she daydreamed what it would be like to live with him by her side, of his rumpled suits close to the hamper but not quite in it, of his mismatched tea mugs next to hers on a shelf. She had seen all the possibilities that lay before them, and now she only saw the end.

“Scully-“

“Don’t,” she said, when he took a step toward her. 

The feminine desire to comfort him was warring with the desire to wring his neck, and the former impulse only made her really want to attempt the latter. 

“Don’t,” she repeated, and he pulled up short. “Do you know what they’ll do to you, Mulder?”

“Yes,” he said, a tinge of irritation coloring his voice. “And it’s my risk to take.”

Rage came over her like the rotor wash from a gyrocopter and she stepped forward and shoved him in the chest so hard that he stumbled back. At her side Hendrick was showing his fangs in a silent feline snarl and Cass, only a foot away from the cat, unsheathed her claws and dug them into the wood of the small room’s floors. 

And then the two humans came together like two storms colliding, all lips and tongues and teeth. He had her on her back on the thin mattress before she could put together a coherent thought, and she tore at his sweater and shirt, ripping her nails down his back so hard that he hissed, reared back, and yanked down the waist of her pants and undergarments together, rough. The clothes caught on her boots at the ankle and he left them there, trailing like a serpent shedding its skin. He palmed her knees apart and licked the fingers of his right hand, smearing his spit into the skin at her center. From beside them, Scully heard a low, cat-like rumble and turned her head to see Cass change into a leopard, she and Hendrick sizing each other up like two beasts fighting over a kill.

And then Mulder was there, surging up into her and she had no more room for thought, no more room for emotion, nothing but base instinct and hunger. He grabbed her shoulder with one hand, pulling her into him with a lustful grimace on his face. 

Already he felt familiar, as if they’d been doing this— every iteration of this—for years. In no time at all she could feel herself unspooling under him, everything inside her tensing and loosening all at once. 

He was sweating, hips snapping angrily, his knees slamming into the wood of the bed’s frame. She opened herself as far as she could, her pants pulling tight across his thighs like a strung bow. He gave a long, low moan.

“Scully, I’m gonna- I need to-” he panted, close to his own climax.

“No,” she said fiercely. 

She wanted to be cleansed by him, purified. Scrubbed down to nothing and begun anew. She wanted everything she used to believe in — order, fact, faith — she wanted it all back. She wanted it all gone. She wanted to feel like herself again. She wanted to feel like somebody else. 

She grabbed Mulder’s hips and held him to her fiercely, clenching her inner muscles until he groaned again and bucked up into her, succumbing to her, and she followed him to the apogee with a short but intense pulsing release. The anger leached out of her, as did the fear, leaving a calm, clear feeling in its wake.

His head fell heavily to her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he panted into her skin, his voice muffled. She ran her fingers lightly through his hair and then gently down his back, soothing the angry scratch marks she had left there. 

“I’m sorry too,” she whispered. “But you’re risking more than yourself now. I’m here, Mulder. I’m here too.”

He pulled back and slipped out of her, helping her to redress, and then settled down beside her, reaching out, letting his fingers skitter along her hairline, as gentle and tender now as he’d been rough moments before. 

“You’re right,” he said. Scully heard Hendrick mumble something to Cass from where they’d settled next to each other on the small pallet on the floor. 

“Scully, my father brought me into the Magisterium out of university in order to keep me above suspicion,” he said. “Before moving to New Denmark, I investigated heresy myself,” Scully turned to peer at him closely as he went on. “That’s when I met Alex Krycek. At the time, he worked for a small division that investigated prophecy. He’s known for bringing in subjects the church has trouble catching. Something about meeting him… I quickly lost my appetite for the work, knowing that I was going after people just like myself. Knowing what he would do when he caught them.”

He reached over and took Scully’s hand. 

“You should go back. Tell Skinner you fell ill. I’ll take this case to its conclusion, whatever that may be. I don’t want to lose you. But maybe you should get as far away from me as you can.”

She inhaled deeply, considering his words. She noticed the way the cabin smelled, the old wood, the must of hidden mildew, the underwater dank of what just smelled ineffably like boat . It made her think of her father’s ship and the man himself, his stalwart righteousness, his stubborn refusal to let his family down. The love he’d always shown her mother, which she returned with a fierce grace.

Scully squeezed his hand.

“If I quit now,” she said, straightening her back. “They win.”

Chapter Text

Deciduous turned to conifer and conifer to scrub. Mulder’s body was increasingly sore every day as the ground they slept on gradually became permafrost, the tundra spreading out before them like the blanket on a rumpled bed. 

How odd to find oneself in the first flush of realized love and be in the ceaseless, inescapable company of four near-strangers. Mulder would feel the overwhelming urge to taste Scully’s lips and find the only thing he was comfortable doing was reaching out to help her make her way over a slippery patch in a rocky stream. Twilight was the only time they felt they could take comfort with one another, pressed to each other’s side for warmth, furtive touches stolen in the darkest part of the night. 

The mountains past which they would find the Icy Cape seemed no closer than they had been when they began their journey, with Captain Byers saying goodbye to his beloved Gulpie at a gentle turn in the Snake River, the boat secured and moored beneath the full boughs of a giant hemlock at the edge of a flood plain. Byers had insisted on joining their odd company of travelers, pulling a cache of air pistols out from under a hidden compartment in the Gulpie’s deck, saying that should they need the extra pair of hands, they could use as many gunmen as they could get. And so all six of them with their assortment of daemons had set out, trudging ever on over the frozen ground of the hilly Bering far north, and they did not see anything but roving bands of reindeer and the packs of wolves that hunted them. 

The day was cloudy, making the cold the gray sort that creeped into your collar and sunk its icy nails into your neck, and Mulder knew that he wouldn’t be warm again until he was by the fire that night, with Scully pressed up against him. From beside him, he heard her intake of breath. 

When he turned to her, she was squinting up into the sky. “Look,” she said and he followed her line of sight. 

High above them, he could see the shape of a white bird wheeling high in the sky and then disappearing into a cloud bank. 

“You know,” said Scully, bemused. “I swear I’ve seen that same bird once before, right at the beginning of our journey?”

“Have you?” Mulder asked, making sure to keep his voice light. He kept his eyes on the cloud bank, but saw nothing else. 

An hour later, they crested the rise of the next slope, and it was Langly who saw it first: an odd shape on the horizon, to the west of the direction they were headed, and it was strange and intriguing enough that they opted to veer off course by several miles–wasting precious energy and time– in order to investigate it.

As they approached, it took Mulder a moment to recognize what he was seeing. 

“Is that what I think it is?” Cass said, padding along silently beside him. 

Spread out along the ground for at least fifty feet was a bunched up mass of fabric laced with the criss-cross of ropes, the material brownish yellow, but patched in a few places with brighter fabric, all of it stiff with frost. At one end above a large heavy iron ring was a massive basket tipped on its side, which had been what stuck up along the horizon and grabbed their attention. 

“A balloon?” Scully said, a hint of wonder in her voice.

“Where’s the aëronaut?” Hendrick asked, stepping forward to sniff at the edge of the basket, a dubious look on his feline face. 

“There,” said Frohike, pointing to a small brown lump about forty feet from where the great balloon went down. They approached the body without fear – it too was covered in a thin layer of frost and looked as weather-beaten as the balloon – the pilot, hunched up on its side so that his shoulder stuck up prominently at an odd angle – was long dead. 

Scully leaned down and attempted to roll the remains over, but they were frozen to the earth. 

“Not much left of him,” she said, peering into what remained of the man’s face. The skin was brown and leathered, the eye sockets as empty as an old well. 

“Think the fall killed him?” Mulder asked, kneeling down next to her. 

“No,” she said, bending down to get a closer look at the body. Though he was covered with a light layer of frost, something colorful and odd caught her eye. She reached a hand to the fallen man’s torso and pulled out what remained of an arrow that was fletched with bright green feathers. 

She handed it to Mulder. “Witches, do you think?” 

He rolled the smooth wooden shaft over in his fingers. “No,” he said after a moment, dropping the arrow to lay next to its victim. “Québécois.”

“How can you tell?” she asked, rising as well, her knees popping loudly as she stood. 

“Witches wouldn’t use maple for the shaft of their arrows,” he said absently, looking assessingly at the balloon. “The wood has too much give and they consider it a sacred tree.”

“Do you think the Québécois are still nearby?” Byers asked, peering around with a worried look. 

“I think they’re long gone,” said Mulder, not the least bit concerned. 

He was less interested in how the aëronaut died and more interested in his mode of transportation. There was movement from inside the basket and a moment later Ulle nosed her way out of the recesses of the murk within it.  

“It appears to be in good working order,” the Bengal cat said quietly to Max. It was the first time Mulder could recall hearing her speak. “The equipment is all intact. It appears to have gone down gently.” 

“You think it’s flyable?” Mulder asked. 

Before anyone could respond, Scully stepped forward. “By whom, exactly?” she asked. 

Max’s face twitched, and he sniffed, taking a step forward. “I could fly it,” he said. “Assuming the balloon itself hasn’t been damaged by the elements and that the drill is in working order.” 

“The drill?” Scully asked. 

“To access the gas necessary to fly,” he explained, smiling at her. “The north is riddled with ground-gas vents that leak hydrogen, though they’re most readily available near mines. Barring a naturally occurring vent, there are pockets close to the surface held in by the permafrost. If the drill is in working order, it should be easy enough to fill the balloon.”

Mulder thought just how much more quickly they could move in the balloon. How much distance he could put between himself and Alex Krycek. 

“Check that the sandbags are filled evenly, if you would,” Max said to Frohike. “We’ll need the ballast to ascend. Would you two mind helping me to inspect the balloon itself? There’s a lot of material here.”

Mulder and Scully nodded. 

“It’s frozen,” Langly pointed out. 

“We’ll have to warm it,” Max said. 

“I’ll build a fire,” Byers offered. 

And with jobs assigned, all six of them put themselves readily to work, eager to see if they could use the conveyance and save themselves miles of frigid trekking. Scully discovered a cache of furs that would be necessary to keep them warm up in the frigid atmosphere of the Bering northland and Frohike and Langly worked at warming the balloon so that it could be checked for functionality.

By the time night fell, half of the balloon had been thawed out and checked and all of the rigging and instrumentation – built to withstand the freezing temperatures of the upper atmosphere – had proven to be in working order. The six humans and their daemons sat with their backs to the large basket of the balloon to block the wind, a roaring and cheerful fire in front of them. They were practically giddy with excitement over their find, and from his pocket, Frohike pulled out a flask of vodka. They passed it around to the coughing sputters of their blended collective, but each and every one of them was thankful for the warmth it provided. The mood around the fire that night was as close to jubilant as it had been since they started their journey in Nome. 

Scully leaned against Mulder’s shoulder, smelling of sweet liquor. “I wish we were able to bury the aëronaut,” she said, looking at the dark shape of the man beyond the light of the fire. The dæmons did not like to go near him, knowing that his own dæmon had vanished into the ether upon his death, and were all crowded on the other sides of their people, keeping a human wall between themselves and the specter of their own future. 

“There’s nothing to be done,” Frohike assured her. “Not this far north. Naught but to say a prayer for him.”

Mulder watched as everyone was silent, none of them but perhaps Scully, particularly religious. Scully yawned from beside him, exhausted from the day’s activity. She took another nip from Frohike’s flask and leaned over to hand it to Langly.

“Are you ready to sleep?” Mulder asked her quietly. 

“Not quite yet,” she said, her eyes a little soft and muzzy. Mulder couldn’t remember if he’d ever seen her tipsy, much less drunk. 

From across the fire, the four men who escorted them had begun arguing about some finer point of controversial Beringland law, and he felt Scully slip from his side and disappear beyond the reach of the firelight. Mulder thought that perhaps she’d merely gotten up to relieve herself, when Hendrick, who had been walking silently beside her, slipped back a few feet and said something in a low voice to Cass. Mulder could feel the thrill that ran up Cass’s spine and she turned to look at him significantly. He rose without another word and followed her as she trotted off with the cheetah. 

Thirty yards past the edge of the firelight, he was about to call her name when Scully grabbed him by the sleeve, her mittened hand sliding down his jacket. Before he could turn to her, she had launched herself into his arms and was kissing him hungrily. He felt his body respond, and pulled her to him tightly. High above them the stars blazed and a streak of purple aurora shot across the sky.

He could hear a low feline sound from nearby and Scully pulled back from him sloppily, her lips glistening in the starlight. 

“I miss you,” she said. 

“Me too,” he mumbled, “but we’re going to freeze out here if we don’t get back to the fire.”

“I don’t care,” she said, grinning at him impishly and running her hand over the front of him. He could barely feel her hand for the layers he was wearing, but his body responded to her nonetheless. 

“You might start caring if certain parts of my anatomy are frostbitten and rendered unusable.” Her smile widened and she reached for him again. “Dana Scully, I believe you might be drunk,” he went on, returning her grin, not really minding that she was getting handsy. 

“I believe you might be right,” she said. “But I also feel, for the first time,” with this she began plucking at the cords that held the waist of his cold weather gear in place, “that we might just get out of this.”

“The balloon was a real find, I admit,” he said, knowing he should argue against what she seemed to have planned, but the blood was leaving his brain and rushing south and he found he had neither the words nor the willpower to continue to try to dissuade her. 

“Yes,” she said, her tongue pressed to the back of her front teeth. He could feel several garments loosen. “A real find.”

There was a bark of laughter from around the fire in the distance and then Scully was there and everything else faded away.

XxXxXxXxXxX

“Hold it steady!” Max called out. “Right there!” Scully watched him as he rubbed his hands together, giddy. 

“It’s a good vent,” he said to her, smiling. 

They had everything loaded and stowed in the basket to Max’s exacting standards, keeping in mind balance and stability, and the great balloon was being quickly filled by a perfectly drilled vent – their first attempt. Scully was standing next to Max within the basket itself while Mulder, Frohike and Langly held the balloon tight. Byers was loosening the tops of several sandbags from which Max would release the contents as ballast when the balloon was filled and they were ready to fly. And from the looks of things, it wouldn't take long. The balloon itself was billowing out and up, the hydrogen it held pushing against the rope cords that crisscrossed the fabric as if they weighed nothing at all. 

Max checked and rechecked the gauges in front of him and Scully glanced over as Mulder and the other men struggled to hold the balloon steady. Ulle looked on with cat-like stoicism and judgment, her tail flicking every so often. 

A moment later, Hendrick raised himself up onto his hind legs, his front paws resting on the edge of the basket, peering out at the landscape. 

“What is it?” Scully asked him. 

“I thought I heard something,” her dæmon said. After a moment he lowered himself and walked over to Mia, saying something to her in low tones. The squirrel flicked her tail once and then ran easily up the ropes holding the still-inflating balloon and climbed the criss-crossed netting like she was born to do it. She made a full circuit of the circumference of the balloon and then came running back down. 

“I hear it, too,” Scully heard her say to Hendrick. “Engine noise of some sort. But I see nothing. If there is something there, we’ll be in the air long before it gets here.”

Scully nevertheless felt a quick shot of nerves. From what Mulder had told her, Alex Krycek was relentless, and she imagined that by now he knew who he was hunting. The man would not rest until he’d caught Mulder. 

There was a shout from the vent, and the men struggled with the ropes holding the balloon down. 

“That’s it!” Max shouted. “Get in the basket, she’s ready to fly!”

Mulder, Frohike and Langly let go and the balloon shot straight up, lifting the basket two feet off the ground before setting it back down to earth, the ropes attached to it straining. The three men leapt over the side of the basket and tumbled to its floor and then Max released ballast and the balloon took off like a shot, sideways into the sky. Max gave a shout of delight though Byers and Langly looked a bit green around the gills. 

“The winds are with us!” Max said, delighted. 

He released more ballast and the balloon rocketed up and out toward the mountains in the distance, gravity pushing at the occupants and making Scully feel heavy and slow. Once they finally evened out, Scully chanced a look over the side at the ground below. It looked pale and washed out, small and big at the same time. She thought she saw the flash of sunlight reflecting off of something on the horizon before the balloon went through the clouds and she lost sight of it. 

XxX

The luster had quickly come off the appeal of air travel. For one thing, it was duecedly boring — at least when traveling by foot you had a task, even though it was only putting one foot in front of the other. For another, it was cold. Far colder than it had been on the ground. They all huddled under the furs they had found with the balloon and even then Scully could feel the cold down to her bones. It struck her with a lethargy that didn’t seem to extend to the men. Nevertheless, Mulder, Frohike, Byers and Langly were all dozing, their dæmons tucked tightly up against them for warmth. 

Scully rose with a tired ache, and thought perhaps movement might work some of it off. Max was fiddling with something on the far side of the basket, and she stretched and did a few squats and lunges just to give herself something to do. 

They had been aloft for over a day and were in the midst of a cloud bank, the air surrounding them a swirling mass of frigid vapor. It was unnerving, perched in the basket high above the earth, but unable to tell where you were, and Scully had to fight off panic several times. She finally went to the bank of instruments and had a look over them, though she didn’t know what information any of them relayed. Hendrick kept making chuffing, cat-like noises. 

“You’re making it worse,” she finally muttered to him. In response, he gave her a look of dignified scorn and leaned down to groom his paw.

“It’s all right,” came a nasally voice from beside her. Ulle jumped silently up onto the instrument panel and gave her a feline blink. Scully turned to Max, who was approaching from the other side. “It’s unnerving, I realize,” Max went on. “Not being able to see. But everything is in order.”

She smiled at him politely and they both turned to look out at the mass of grey.

“Where did you learn to fly?” Scully asked him. She glanced over at Mulder where he was huddled down next to Frohike under a pile of furs. Cass had turned herself into a mink and had curled herself around Mulder’s neck. 

“Oh, it’s just something I picked up,” Max said with a smile. 

Scully shivered and tried moving her arms and legs. There was just no getting warm up here. 

“Get yourself back under the furs, Detective Scully,” Max said kindly. “It will be a long journey, but will feel longer still if you get a chill.”

From the other side of the basket, Scully noticed the white shape of Ondima’s head lift off the fur she and Langly had been dozing on, and a moment later she heard what had caught the small fox’s attention. There was the faintest rumble of an engine in the distance. Hendrick rose up immediately on his hind legs, front paws on the edge of the basket, and stared out alertly over the railing, his ears flicking this way and that. 

“Max,” said Ulle, her tone a low warning. 

The heightened animal senses of the basket’s various dæmons had alerted their humans, and all six people had roused themselves to awareness and were pushing themselves to their feet, each one spreading out around the basket in various directions, trying to pinpoint the location of the sound, which was growing steadily louder. Scully threw a look to Mulder and watched as mink Cassiana whispered something in Mulder’s ear and then changed into a white snowy owl, launching herself off his shoulder to disappear into the foggy opaqueness surrounding them. 

“Could it be a-“ Byers began to say, but was brought to silence by a harsh shushing from Frohike. Mia flicked her puffy tail in fear and agitation from Byers’ shoulder. 

A cold douse of liquid fear pooled in Scully’s belly as the engine noise grew louder, and she recognized it as a—

“Zeppelin!” came Cassiana’s sharp shout from behind them. “Fox! It’s a—“ 

Her next words were cut off by the sudden reverb of a gunshot, and Mulder grunted from beside Scully, who whirled around and watched in horror as the white shape of Cassiana suddenly stopped short in the sky and began falling toward the earth. 

“Mulder!” Scully shouted, lunging for him. 

He hissed as she reached his side, and he held onto the outside of his shoulder. 

“We’re okay,” he said through gritted teeth, and a moment later Cass fluttered back up and over the side of the basket, changing into a tabby house cat so that she could lick at the wound to her shoulder — a bullet had grazed her and there was a small red gash on her fur which she bent her head to lick.

The engine noise was powerful now, and they could make out the dark, hulking mass of the zeppelin through the murk to the south. 

Another gunshot rang out.

“Hold on!” shouted Max, and he released sand from one of the bags that acted as ballast and the balloon went lurching sideways higher up into the sky, all occupants of the great balloon’s basket stumbling for purchase. 

They shot above the cloud bank and into the blazing sunshine high above the clouds, and if Scully didn’t think it could get any colder, she was wrong. Her exhalations a high thin vapor, she realized she was breathing more quickly and strenuously — the air here was thin and she felt as though she couldn’t catch her breath. 

“Max!” Mulder shouted. The thin man was staring at the instruments in front of him. 

“We need,” the man wheezed, pausing to take in a breath, “we need to catch the prevailing winds,” he said, “or we’ll never outrun them.”

Below them, the cloud cover spread out like a rumpled carpet as white as bleached bone. Scully could still hear the sound of the zeppelin’s engine above the winds and then its dark nose broke through the clouds as a whale breaks through the surface of the sea. 

Fumbling a bit in the thin air, Byers was by her side, pulling out one of the air pistols that he’d brought from his ship. He squinted one eye and fired the quiet pistol several times at the rounded nose of the zeppelin, his arm wavering in the thin air. 

The lack of oxygen must have been affecting her more than she thought – it hadn’t even occurred to her to fire her own weapon. She struggled to get at it under the bulk of her cold weather gear and fired off several rounds. She didn’t want to ignite the hydrogen in the great dirigible – the chances of it setting their own balloon ablaze were too great – but if they could blow a big enough hole in the side of it, the zeppelin would lose altitude nonetheless. 

She could hear Frohike and Langly popping off shots of their own from the far end of the basket. The lumbering beast of a machine was turning in the air, pulling up level with them and she finally got a look at the great seal of the Magisterium painted across the immense drum of material pulled across the dirigible’s frame. She grabbed Byers’ arm and he turned to her, a look of surprise on his face. Scully pressed her weapon into the sea captain’s hand. 

“Protect Mulder at all costs!” she hissed and turned to find her partner, who was bending down, trying to attend to his daemon. 

Scully fell to her knees next to him. 

“How bad is it?” she asked. 

Mulder winced and grabbed at his own shoulder. 

“Not bad, I don’t think,” he said, “but she won’t let me look at it.” 

Cass, still in house cat form, hissed at the both of them to punctuate Mulder’s statement. 

Scully looked over at Hendrick who nodded at her, and eased his way down to Cass’s level, speaking to her in low tones. Scully turned back to Mulder, who had pulled out his own weapon and was checking the rounds in the cylinder. 

“You need to stay down,” she said, putting a staying hand on his arm.

“Scully,” he said, rising up onto his knee, “I’m not gonna-”

“Mulder,” she interrupted him, holding out a hand for his weapon. “You can’t let them see you. Stay. Down.”

He looked at her for a long moment, pulling his lips into his mouth before reluctantly handing over his pistol and nodding. 

Satisfied that her partner would do as she asked, Scully rose and saw that the zeppelin had pulled up evenly with the balloon, keeping pace with it as the winds of the atmosphere blew it along. The air pistols that the gunmen were firing seemed to have little to no impact on the inflatable, and all of them had to dive down when gunfire strafed across the basket from the Magisterium’s ship. 

“Everyone all right?” Scully called out when the shots had ended.

Scully caught the terrified eyes of each man as they nodded at her, but her gaze was pulled back to Max, who was leaning back against the basket at an awkward angle, his hand low to his abdomen. Ulle limply crawled into his lap. 

“Max?” Scully said, and then army-crawled to the pilot to find that his lap was covered in a wash of blood. “Max!” 

“It’s all right,” Max croaked, trying to smile at her, his blue eyes crinkling fondly behind small round spectacles. 

“Mulder!” she shouted for help. “Frohike!” 

She reached for the closest thing to hand to stem the bleeding, which was a small roll of fur one of them had been using as a scarf. She pressed it to his side. 

Mulder scrambled to her and Frohike was there a moment later, but there was nothing to be done – Max’s breath was coming in short, gasping pants, he reached out a hand to Scully, who took it, holding it close. A moment later, his hand went limp in hers, and Scully watched, heartbroken, as Ulle dissipated into a cloud of smoke-like dust. 

She whipped her head to Mulder, tears burning the corners of her eyes. “How will we fly?” she asked him desperately. When she turned to Frohike, hoping he might have an answer, she saw him holding a small white object in his thumbs and he closed his eyes, whispering into the thin air. 

Before Scully could wonder just what exactly he was doing, there were several loud thumps and Scully felt the basket jerk slightly under them. When she rose to see what was happening, she saw four grappling hooks had been thrown over and secured to the great balloon’s basket, the ropes from them strung tight and leading to the zeppelin. Langly and Byers were shooting desperately with the air pistols, Scully’s own gun lying on the floor of the basket at Byers’ feet, clearly out of ammunition. After a moment, Scully finally saw what they were shooting at. 

Crawling along the lines were black and brown-clad figures who had odd contraptions covering their faces and eyes, which must have been thin-air protection. Scully herself felt weaker every moment from the lack of oxygen. The little air pistol bullets seemed to ricochet off whatever thick leather body armor the Magisterium air troopers were wearing, and they kept crawling, growing ever closer to the balloon, their daemons perched on their backs, or crawling sure-footedly in front of them on the ropes, or in one case, with a hawk, swooping up and onto the side of the basket and keening out a high pitched cry. Byers stumbled backwards from the bird, Mia diving to hide behind him. 

Scully whipped up Mulder’s gun and took careful aim, firing a blazing metal round into the body of the daemon, which exploded in a burst of feathers and bright fire and then, like Ulle, vanished in a sweep of dust. She watched as one of the men went limp on his rope and then fell, disappearing into the clouds below them. 

Mulder gave a shout and Scully turned to see him pointing as a trooper and his ferret daemon reached the grappling hook and leapt over and into the basket. The ferret immediately dove at Ondima who gave a frightened yelp. Scully turned her weapon on the man, but the bullet she fired only knocked him momentarily back. The basket lurched beneath them and another man jumped aboard, his rat daemon perched on his shoulder. Krycek , she thought with dread. 

From the corner of her eye she saw Cass, now wisely in the shape of a fossa, dive into the mix and land a powerful swipe to the ferret, knocking her away from Ondima. Scully raised her pistol and fired at Krycek, but missed when the man lurched sideways – Byers had hit him with a long wooden tool that Max had used to adjust parts of the balloon that were out of reach. 

“The ropes!” she shouted at Byers, who looked dazed from the thin air and from felling the Magisterium man. “Cut the ropes from the grappling hooks!” 

Byers nodded at her and Scully raised her weapon toward Krycek once again, but the basket swayed under her when another trooper leapt onto the basket’s edge and she lost her footing. The first air trooper – the one with the ferret daemon – was making a lunge for Mulder and Scully dove at him instead, her pistol knocked out of her hand when she collided into him with a grunt. 

She kicked up with her foot and the trooper’s head went flying back, making a sickening sound – the best thing she’d heard all day – even as her vision blurred from lack of oxygen. 

The air trooper who had been perched on the basket’s edge watching the proceedings jumped down and made a move for Mulder but was brought up short with a harsh word from Krycek. 

“Take the woman,” Krycek shouted at the trooper, his rat dæmon clinging to his shoulder, whispering something in his ear. Krycek pointed at Mulder. “He no longer matters.”

“Scully!” Mulder shouted, and she was grabbed by the throat from behind. The balloon lurched once and began to descend as though it were losing air. 

She could hear Langly and Frohike struggling with men on the other side of the basket while Byers was furiously cutting at the ropes of the grappling hooks. From beside her Hendrick was snarling, taking fully-clawed swats at the dæmons of the other two troopers, and then the arms around her neck went suddenly slack. 

She whirled around to see the air trooper who had been holding her stumble backwards and fall over the side of the basket, a dark arrow with deep purple fletching sunk deep into his neck. Scully coughed, trying to take in precious air when everything around her went to chaos. 

There were birds – raptors of every kind – swooping into and around the basket of the balloon, attacking the faces of the air troopers and ripping at their oxygen masks. From beside her, she heard a grunt and turned to watch Mulder go limp and fall to the floor of the basket after something struck him in the temple. She was just reaching for him when a great eagle with a stark white head went flying in between them to collide with a fresh trooper who had just jumped into the basket, the lines from the grappling hooks now taut and pointing straight upward to where the zeppelin hovered high above them.  

Scully fell to her knees, unable to track what all was happening around her, her vision tunneling for a moment. Chaos, shouts, Hendrick desperately trying to claw his way across the bottom of the basket to get to Cass’s side. 

She could barely think for the cold. She sank to the floor of the basket and watched as a wild wind blew into the zeppelin, turning it almost onto its side.

And then the basket shook and shook again. Suddenly, all the ropes connecting the balloon to the zeppelin snapped, one after the other. She could hear Frohike mutter something in quick succession, as though speaking to someone and then, startling her almost fully to rousing consciousness, a woman’s head and naked shoulders rose up over the side of the basket near her, the woman’s light hair and violet eyes as wild as a furious storm. A witch, Scully thought, too overwhelmed to marvel at the discovery.

“Hold fast,” the woman said to her, and the balloon stopped its wild descent and began skimming more evenly. Scully glanced to the skies around them and saw at least eight other women, all as fierce and wild as the one before her, each riding on a piece of cloud-pine, and each one holding a long rope attached to the balloon’s massive webbing. Against the gales and headwinds that had blown the zeppelin away from them, the witches tamed the great balloon into their control as though calming a wild stallion, and began pulling it steadily north. 

Scully sunk down slowly to the floor of the basket, exhaustion and cold pulling at her as if she were a stone sinking into a river. She eased her way into Mulder’s still-prone side and pulled a great fur blanket up and over the both of them.

Chapter Text

When Scully roused to consciousness, she was impossibly warm, and laying on something impossibly soft. She didn’t open her eyes, wanting to luxuriate in the comfort for a moment longer in case she woke from this dream and found herself shivering once again on the floor of the great aëronautic balloon’s basket. When she finally chanced a peek, she discovered that she was not dreaming and was laying in a large bed in a small room with a roaring fire cheerfully burning in a corner fireplace. 

She sat up and looked around and discovered that Mulder was in the bed next to her, lying on his back, deeply asleep, with a small bandage secured to his temple. The gray wooden room itself was bare, with no decoration and no other furniture but for a small table upon which sat the clothes she and Mulder had been wearing on the balloon. They appeared to have been laundered and neatly folded. Their pistols sat in their holsters next to their clothes. 

Scully peeked under the covers to see that she was wearing a light muslin nightgown. She appeared to have been bathed as well (which she hadn’t been able to do properly in weeks), and when she reached up to touch her hair, found that it too was clean and had been brushed to a high shine. She was debating whether she felt violated or more relieved just to be clean when the door to the room opened and in walked the wildest woman Scully had ever seen. 

“Good morning, Dana,” the woman said formally, stopping at the foot of the bed. She had dark windswept hair and the same color violet eyes as the witch who’d told her to hold fast . It occurred to her that there was something incandescently untamed about the witches, something exciting, frightening. A feeling that made you want to both throw yourself at their feet and flee at the same time. 

“Good morning,” Scully said, a little lost. She shifted herself to sitting up.

“Would you care for something to eat?” the woman asked. 

“Would I-” Scully began to repeat, but then stopped herself, curiosity getting the better of her. “I’m sorry, where am I? How did we get here? Who are you?”

“My apologies,” the woman said, and for the first time Scully detected a slight accent to the woman’s speech that she couldn’t quite place. “My name is Monica Reyes. I am a member of the Lake Skilak clan.”

“And you’re a…”

“Witch,” Monica finished for her, looking at Scully calmly and expectantly. 

“And that’s where we are? Lake Skilak?”

“Yes,” Monica said. “North of the Icy Cape. I believe you were sent here to find us?” The woman sounded more bemused than anything. 

“Something like that,” Scully mumbled. She looked down at Mulder, who hadn’t roused or moved an inch. “Is he okay?”

“You were both suffering from cold sickness when you arrived. Fox had also been rendered unconscious. We treated you both, bathed you, and gave you a sleeping draught. His recovery appears to be taking a bit longer than yours.”

Scully reached down and ran her fingers through the hair on his forehead. “But he’ll be alright?” she asked without looking up.

“He will be just fine,” Monica said kindly. 

It occured to Scully quite suddenly that while she could feel him, she couldn’t see Hendrick, or Cass. 

“Your dæmons are just there,” Monica answered before Scully could ask, pointing toward a pallet of red and white infused wood a few feet from Mulder’s side of the bed. “Cedarwood has a soporific effect on dæmons, as you know. They were quite agitated on the flight here and needed rest themselves.”

“You brought us here in the balloon? Am I remembering that correctly?” 

Monica nodded. 

“The men that attacked us, what happened to them?”

“Several were killed. Two made it back to their ship. We would have pursued them, but the great balloon you rode upon required all our hands.”

“The man with the rat dæmon?”

“Was not amongst the dead.”

Scully sighed. “I’m sorry for asking so many questions.”

“No apologies are necessary,” Monica said kindly.

Scully gave the woman a thankful smile.

“Our companions,” Scully went on. “Are they all-”

“Alive, yes. And awake. Though I’m afraid there was nothing to be done for your pilot Max. I’m sorry to say that there’s no magic strong enough to pull back the hand of death once it has closed its fist. We have arranged a funeral pyre for him. Yambe-Akka will come for him once you’ve all had a chance to say goodbye.”

Scully nodded at this, and wondered if the man had any family.

“He does not,” Monica answered as though she had read Scully’s mind. Oddly, Scully didn’t feel put off by this, and next wondered out loud:

“Who’s Yambe-Akka?”

“The witches’ goddess of the dead,” rumbled a voice from beside her. 

She looked to find Mulder blinking and sitting up and when she turned to offer her thanks to Monica Reyes for everything they’d done, the witch was gone. 

XxX

Hendrick and Cassiana were both still soundly sleeping on a bed of cedarwood, and Scully found the sensation of being awake while her dæmon slept to be oddly disconcerting. In fact everything about Lake Skilak was oddly disconcerting, from the lack of any kind of decor, to the witches, who all walked around the frigid corridors of the palace wearing only the lightest flowing empire-waisted gowns, their shoulders bare and exposed to the freezing northern air. 

Scully had just finished dressing when Monica came back with a tray of steaming food which she left on the table without a word, shutting the door behind her with a definitive snick. 

Mulder swung his legs over the side of the bed and lifted his hand to the bandage on his head. Scully moved to his side. 

“How are you feeling?” she asked. 

“I’m all right,” he said, wincing a bit as he pulled at the bandage. “Can you help me?” 

He leaned his head back as Scully delicately peeled back the white bandage which had been attached to his skin with some kind of light coniferous resin. When the bandage peeled away, a small bit of plant came with it, which, upon inspection, appeared to be a tiny spray of thorns. She gave it a quick sniff. 

“Thimbleberry thorns,” Mulder explained, though how he knew was lost on her. “Those my clothes over there?” he asked her. 

She nodded. “Can I get you something to eat?”

Scully brought the tray of food over to the bed, and they both tucked in hungrily, slurping a rich chocolatl which left them feeling more awake and human than they had in weeks. Once they finished the food, Mulder moved to get dressed and Scully leaned down and ran her hand along Hendrick’s knobbly head, enjoying the feeling of his downy, soft coat under her fingers. He lifted his head up groggily after a moment and yawned. 

“Where-?” he asked, blinking several times and raising himself slowly to his feet. 

“We’re with the witches,” she explained to him, and led him away from the cedarwood pallet. After a moment he inhaled expansively and shook out his coat, coming to full wakefulness. 

“I remember now,” he said, his deep voice quiet in the soft, silent room. He looked over at Cassiana, who was still deeply asleep. 

Mulder was pulling on the oatmeal colored henley he wore as an undershirt and looked over at both of them. 

“Will you wake her for me, Hendrick?” Mulder asked him, and Scully felt a tight pull inside herself, the intimacy of Mulder speaking directly to her dæmon choking her up. 

Hendrick allowed himself a lavish stretch before he walked over to Cass and began tenderly licking the top of her head. A moment later, Scully felt Mulder at her side and leaned into him, a psychic warmth radiating all the way down to her toes. She stuck her nose into his side and breathed in the warm, familiar scent of him. 

Maryland felt like a universe away – the tidal pull of the Chesapeake, the gentle rolling of her father’s boat – like they existed on another plane. Mulder was the only thing here that still made sense, and she wanted to cling to him like a child to its mother, like a barnacle on a pier. 

When Cass was fully awake and had begun to sniff her way curiously around the room, Mulder sank down to the bed and Scully sat next to him. 

“I guess your report to Skinner will be fairly short and concise,” Mulder said. 

“One sentence,” she said. “ The presence of witches in Beringland has been verified . May we have our next assignment please?”

“You’ll be back at your desk before Kimberly has retaken her seat,” Mulder said, watching his dæmon as she drifted around the room. 

“You keep saying ‘you,’” Scully pointed out, reaching out to take his hand. “We’ll figure this out, Mulder. We’ll find a way to clear you. We’ll-” 

“I’m not-” Mulder started. “That’s not-” he sighed, struggling to find the right words. “Scully, there’s something I need to tell you.”

Before she could respond, there was a light knock on the door and a moment later Frohike stuck his head through, smiling when he saw them. 

“Mind if I come in?” he asked, and they gestured for him to proceed. He stepped into the room and Scully noticed how clean and put together the little man seemed, his hair brushed neatly back and his face cleanly shaven. He was wearing more formal attire than she’d seen him in and even his posture seemed more upright and august. Annie looked to be well groomed as well and was holding herself rather importantly. She stepped forward after a moment and touched noses politely with Hendrick and Cass. 

“You seem to have fared well,” Mulder said. “I’m happy to see it.”

Frohike nodded at him, close lipped. “The clan’s queen has asked to see you,” he said. “If you’ll follow me, I’d be happy to escort you to her chambers.”

Mulder narrowed his eyes at the man, but rose to his feet and offered Scully his arm. She took it, but said to him in a low tone, “you wanted to tell me something?”

Mulder sighed, but gave her a short smile. “I suspect the queen will have answers for us both.”

They followed Frohike and Annie through labyrinthine corridors, passing several clusters of witches who watched them curiously and spoke to each other in low tones. Dæmons, all raptors or songbirds, followed them with unblinking eyes, many of them perched far from their humans. 

The whole of the palace seemed to be constructed with the same dark gray wood as their bedchamber had been, and the soft soles of their fur boots made no noise at all as they walked along the cold halls. 

Finally, Frohike turned before an ornately carved door and gave them a small smile before pushing his way through. The queen’s chamber was as empty of adornment as the rest of the palace was, but for a throne that sat upon a raised dais near the back. The room was dark but for a bright fire that burned in the fireplace to the right of the door, which Scully suspected had been lit solely for their comfort. 

“Your majesty,” Frohike said, bowing his head deferentially toward a figure Scully had not seen until the little man spoke. A shiver went down her spine and Hendrick stepped closer to her, butting his head against her hand in support. 

The woman stepped forward from the shadows, the whiteness of her hair giving off an ethereal glow. Scully knew that witches lived for hundreds of years and barely aged, so this woman must be one of the rare ancient witches, a daughter of Eve, like the rest of mankind descended from Adam. She had eyes that were the blue of arctic ice and was wearing a gown that matched them.

"So, Fox," the woman said, settling her steely gaze on Scully's partner. "You've come home."

Scully's head swung around so fast to look at Mulder that her hair got into her eyes and she almost missed seeing Mulder's mouth move when he said:

"Hello, Mother."

Chapter Text

"Thank you for delivering them to me, Mr. Frohike," the witch said, turning to their guide, who lowered his head deferentially. 

"I'll be just outside," the little man said to Scully, who was fighting a kind of panic that had frozen her in place, her heart hammering in her chest. She was at the precipice of something here, and when she launched off of it, the world as she'd known it would crumble below her. Hendrick sat at her feet, his tail flicking this way and that, a low nervous purr rumbling from his throat. 

Frohike went through the large door through which they'd come and shut it quietly behind him. 

The witch stepped forward. 

"Be calm, child," she said to Scully, placing a hand on her shoulder. "My name is Teena. You have nothing to fear from me."

“Mother, what have you done?” Mulder asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

Teena turned to him, her hand still resting on Scully’s shoulder.

“Peace, Fox.”

Mulder looked at her for a long minute and then took a slow turn, looking around the room. Scully could tell he was assembling some kind of puzzle in his mind. Finally, he spoke again.

"It was you,” he said, his words an accusation. “You orchestrated this, didn’t you? This entire endeavor. Our assignment from Skinner, the guides – Frohike is one of yours, isn’t he?” Scully could start to hear the barely controlled rage in his voice. 

“He is this clan’s counsel and a very good one at that. I’ll have you treat him with more respect.” The woman’s voice remained calm, but there was a biting coldness to it. It scared Scully, but Mulder seemed immune. 

“Why the cloak and dagger to bring us here, mother? Why not just ask us to come? You know I would have."

"You would have," Teena said, finally removing her hand from Scully's shoulder and turning in full to her son. "But she wouldn't. And she’s just as important as you are. More so. In any event, all of the things that happened to you on your journey were pre-ordained. They happened the way they needed to happen. This way I was at least able to offer you the protection of our clan. And you’ll be needing it.”

Scully was still reeling from the discovery that Mulder was the son of a witch. So much that she almost didn’t register what the woman had said. She was further startled by the revelation. She could see why the witch might have wanted to see her son, but why her? The daughter of a sailor, a Magisterium Detective, a once-devout woman. 

Just then Scully saw movement from above the dais where Teena had been standing. A stark white raven took two hops along the rafter it had been sitting on and turned his head so that one sharp pink eye was peering at her. 

Something about the dæmon struck her as familiar, and she remembered white wings disappearing into the clouds. Mulder put the pieces together just before she did.

"You sent Jasper to watch us," Mulder said, nodding toward the raven. 

"I sent Jasper to watch over you," Teena said. "There's a difference."

"Why are we here?" Scully found her voice. "Why did you need us to come here? Why did you need me ?"

Teena turned to her slowly and gave her a good hard stare.

"Because of the prophecy," the witch finally said. Her albino dæmon raven jumped off of his perch and swooped down to gracefully alight onto her shoulder. 

"What prophecy?" Mulder said, his voice low and dangerous. He took a step forward, as did Cass, her lips curled back in a silent snarl. 

"Up until the day I sent you to live with your father in Brytain, I had told you that you were destined for great things, did I not?" Teena said, stepping back up on the dais to sit on the chair there, her movement slow and regal. She turned her cool gaze to her son.

Mulder scoffed. "You hardly let me forget it."

"And for such an intelligent, inquisitive child, you can imagine how disappointed I was that you never asked me why you were destined for great things." Scully could see Mulder's Adam's apple bob in his throat. "There is a prophecy," she went on, "long told. About a child that -- when he's grown into a man -- will help to save the lives of all beings."

"And that child is me?" Mulder asked. 

"No," Teena said, gesturing to Scully. "The child is your son, who even now is quickening in the belly of this woman." 

XxX

Scully felt as though she might pass out. Her hand had found its way unconsciously to her abdomen, just as her knees wobbled under her. Mulder was by her side in an instant, his strong arm clasped around her waist. Cassiana had trotted over to Hendrick and was looking up at him in concern.

“Hey,” Mulder said, his focus entirely on her, “are you okay?”

“I-“ she started, and Teena was suddenly beside her, grasping Scully’s elbow on her other side.

“See her to my throne, Fox,” the witch said, “let her sit.”

Scully didn’t have the wherewithal to argue and let herself be led to the wooden cathedra where she sat heavily, feeling lightheaded and dazed. Hendrick rested his chin on the arm of the chair and looked up at Scully with solemn yellow eyes.

“Is it true?” Scully asked him. “About the baby?”

Hendrick blinked at her solemnly. “I suspect it might be,” her dæmon answered her, “I have felt… accompanied.”

When she turned from Hendrick, Mulder was kneeling before her like a supplicant, Cass at his knee, both of them peering at her with a loving reverence. 

“God, Scully,” he said, and reached for her, cupping her cheek in his palm. She had so many questions for him, but for now could only lean into his warm hand, borrowing some of his strength. Hendrick stepped forward and rubbed his head against the gloss of Cassiana’s cheek. 

When Mulder seemed satisfied that she wasn’t going to pass out, he whirled on his mother. 

“You should have told me!”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why?!”

“If you’d known, it might not have come to pass. I did what I could. I prepared you as best I could.”

“Prepared me? By setting expectations that I could never live up to?”

“You have lived up to them.” Mulder looked momentarily humbled, and Teena went on. “But you have a long way yet to go.”

Mulder’s face fell. “This is what I’m talking about. Your expectations and your cryptic double talk. This is why I went to live with Father.”

“You went to live with your father because I sent you there. You never would have ended up at the Magisterium otherwise. You never would have met this woman.”

Scully watched Mulder’s face, his jaw clenched tightly beneath his skin. 

“You’re saying you orchestrated everything in my life?”

“I’m saying you have a destiny. And I did what I had to do to ensure that you’ll fulfill it.”

“With manipulation and deceit.”

The witch Teena looked at him coldly. 

“You deny it?” he asked.

“Fox, I have lived for over a thousand years. I hear the immortal whispers of those who pass between worlds. You are my child, and I love you, but I am responsible for more than the happiness of my progeny. I ensured your survival and made sure you had the gifts you needed to bring this child into the world so that he may help to save it. Some things are bigger than ourselves.”

Mulder froze. “What gifts?” he asked, his voice cracking.

“The gifts that mark you as prophetic. The gifts the Magisterium would call heretical.”

Scully felt her stomach do a flip.

“Cassiana,” she said, her voice the shadow of a whisper. She cleared her throat and tried to find her voice. “You’re the reason they can separate. You’re the reason she never settled.” 

Teena nodded once. “I took him to Tungusk when he was seven. He and Cassiana went through the ritual of separation.”

Mulder’s face looked blank, but pale. “We have no memory of that,” he said, and Cass moved between his legs, leaning into them. 

“Only a witch would remember.”

Scully was horrified. She didn’t really yet consider herself a mother, but she couldn’t imagine putting her child through some of the things that Mulder had apparently been through. He had explained to her the ancient ritual that separated witches from their dæmons — it sounded treacherous and painful — and he’d had no idea he had been through it himself.

“And her ability to change?” Scully said, finding strength in her anger. 

“A spell,” Teena said. “An ancient one that will die with me.”

Mulder looked gobsmacked. Cass rubbed herself against Mulder’s leg as though to soothe him. She looked up at him, and when he simply stood there in shock and distress, she then changed into a massive bear, opening up her mouth and unleashing a furious, deafening roar directly into the face of his mother, who had the decency to lower her eyes and calmly receive the dæmon’s wrath. 

When the ear-splitting sound had faded, Jasper fluttered down to the floor in front of Cass and opened his white wings, bowing to her in a dignified, bird-like way. Cass changed back into a fossa, her fur rippling with vexation, and leaned back against Mulder’s legs, breathing heavily. 

Scully rose to her feet and moved to Mulder’s side. She heard Hendrick mutter something to Cass, who chuffed her whiskers. Mulder seemed to come back to himself. He straightened his spine and reached down to grab Scully’s hand. 

“Madam, I believe we’ve had enough of your company for one day,” he said, and turned on his heel without waiting for a response, pulling Scully along behind him. She heard Hendrick give a rude, catty chuff as they breezed through the door. 

She let Mulder lead them, trusting his sense of direction, and as they walked, Scully’s mind reeled with the information and implications of all the ancient witch had told them. By the time they got back to their chambers, both her guts and mind were twisted into knots. 

Once he shut them into the room, securing the lock on the rough hewn wooden door, Mulder immediately reached for her, but she took a step back. His face fell.

“Scully?”

“You should have told me,” she said, feeling overwhelmed with emotion but succumbing to the small part of her that felt betrayed.

Mulder sighed. “Scully, up until we arrived in Nome, you didn’t even really believe that witches existed. Did you.” It wasn’t a question. 

She had to give him that. “But you knew what we’d find.”

“I suspected. But I didn’t know it would be my mother’s clan.”

“You didn’t grow up here?” 

“Witches consider wherever the clan is to be home. They must have moved here after I left.”

“You didn’t stay in touch?”

Mulder gave her a rueful grin. “She’s not the type who writes.”

Scully sighed, the fight leaving her. She drifted into Mulder’s side, and he pulled her tightly to him. “I’m sorry,” she said, her words muffled with her face pressed into his chest. “I know you were just as blindsided by all this as I was.”

“I’m the one who should be sorry. If I had known any of this would have happened, I never would have…” his words tapered off. What he’d just said backed up a lot of what Teena had told them. That if either of them had known anything of the prophecy, the events that took place to bring about its fulfillment never would have come to pass. 

“Do you believe what she said?” Scully asked him, her voice sounding small. She looked up at him, her eyes searching his. “About the prophecy? About the… the baby?”

Scully wasn’t sure what to believe. There was a sense of unreality about everything that had happened to them since they stepped off the zeppelin in Nome. 

Mulder cupped her face in his hands, rubbing his thumbs gently along her cheekbones. “If the witches say there will be a baby,” he said, “there will be a baby. They are never wrong about that.” Scully felt the urge to run her hand over her abdomen. Pregnancy would certainly explain why the journey seemed to fatigue her more than the men she traveled with. And what Hendrick had said to her in Teena’s chambers, about feeling ‘accompanied,’ well… 

“As for a prophecy about our child… My mother believes it. And in my experience, as hard as it is for me to admit, my mother is rarely wrong.”

Scully pulled back and stepped away from him. She felt floored by the enormity of events that had transpired and by those they had yet to live. She moved to the bed they had woken up in that morning and lowered herself slowly to sit down. Hendrick came to her, the thick pads of his paws thumping ever so slightly on the wooden floor as he walked. He lowered his chin until it was resting on her knee and she ran her hands over his head, losing her fingers in the long fur at the back of his neck.

“Mulder,” she finally said, looking up at her partner. “All my life I believed in two things: My faith in the authority, and the authority’s faith in me. My faith was a wall, something to put my back up against. But since I met you, that wall has slowly crumbled.” Mulder took a step toward her, but she held up a hand, staying him. “I don’t blame you for that. Knowing you and working with you has opened my eyes to things I was blind to before. Wonderful things. Terrible things.” Mulder opened his mouth and Scully knew an apology was on his tongue; one she didn’t want or need. “No,” she went on, not unkindly. “My eyes are open now, and my life is richer for it. My life is richer because you’re in it.” Mulder moved toward her and she let him. He sat gingerly down next to her, turning his body to face her. “But I have to wonder, Mulder,” she continued, “why are you in my life? By chance? By the winsome hands of fate? Or has it all been some orchestrated plan? Were we manipulated into loving each other? Are our choices even our own? Have they ever been?”

Mulder sighed and silence stretched out between them until it became something she could almost reach out and touch. 

“All I know,” he finally said. “Is that until I met you, everything about me and around me felt off. Off-kilter, off-balance… different in a way that would have frightened people. Different in a way that frightened myself. But meeting you… Scully, you were like the coin you add to the scales to make it all even out.” At this, he reached out and took her hand. “You brought me level. You made me whole.” He squeezed her hand and she gripped it back. “Is that fate’s design?” He went on. “Is it the authority’s design? Despite the throne and the flying and the spells, I assure you that my love for you is rather outside the scope of my mother’s.” At this Scully couldn’t help but release a small breath of both relief and amusement. “All I know is that I love you. Without regret. Without agenda. And prophecy or no, I will continue to love you for the rest of my days.”

Hendrick sighed peacefully from where his head was still perched on her knee, his soft breath warming the skin of her arm. Scully knew right then the same was true of her. 

She looked up and into her partner’s eyes and he looked back at her with reverence. 

“Oh, Mulder,” she said, feeling so much hope and fear and love that she didn’t know how to contain it all. “What the hell are we going to do?” 

Chapter Text

“I think the first thing we should do,” Mulder said, adjusting himself on the bed so that he was lying back, “is just sit back and try to process all of this.”

Scully looked at him gratefully. 

“And I don’t know about you, but I would really like to hold you while we do it,” he went on, opening up his arms, looking at her with hesitant expectancy. Scully shifted and eased herself into his embrace, feeling herself relax into his warmth. 

She closed her eyes for a moment and felt the foot of the mattress dip. Hendrick and Cass had both jumped up and curled themselves into each other. Mulder sighed into her hair and she felt his fingers begin tracing patterns onto her back. She drifted off and when she roused to consciousness again, the door to their room was just closing. 

She inhaled deeply and turned to look up at Mulder, who hadn’t moved. She was warm and pliant and ever so slightly dazed. “Everything okay?” she asked. 

Mulder grunted an affirmative and took up running his hand over the plane of her back once again. “They brought up some food if you’re interested,” he said. Scully realized she was famished. She sat up and Mulder’s hand fell to her hip. 

“How long was I out?” she asked. 

“An hour or two,” he said, rolling up onto his elbow so that he could plant a kiss on her shoulder. 

She smiled at him and ambled over to the table, looking over the tray briefly before just grabbing the whole thing and bringing it back to the bed. There was a small bowl of seeds and nuts and another of berries. On one plate was a selection of hard cheeses, which sat next to two ripe, round oranges that gave off a pleasant citrusy perfume. At the top of the tray sat a small bundle of greenery that was tied tightly with twine. Mulder reached forward and grabbed it, bringing it to his nose thoughtfully. 

“What is it?” Scully asked. 

“A bundle of chamomile, nettle and blessed thistle,” he said, setting it gently back on the tray. Scully ran her hands over the nubbly rind of one of the oranges, debating what to try first. He caught her eye. “They’re uh,” he went on, “a traditional pregnancy blessing.” 

Scully felt her cheeks color and dug her thumbnail into the orange to cover for it. As she peeled, she eventually looked up at him once again. 

“Are you happy, Mulder?” 

He reached out and cupped her cheek. “I can’t believe you have to ask that,” he said earnestly. 

“I don’t,” she insisted. “I don’t. It’s just-”

“All starting to seem real?” 

She nodded at him, and popped a section of orange in her mouth, the juice bursting with sweetness. She wanted to tell her mother. Her sister. 

As if reading her thoughts, Mulder let his hand drop. “We’ll get a message to your family,” he said. “Once we figure out our next step, one of the clan will send their dæmon.”

Scully nodded at him, chewing thoughtfully, then thought to ask a question she’d been wondering. 

“Are all these women related to you?” she asked. 

Mulder chuffed a laugh. “No,” he said. “‘Clan’ means something different to witches. Although…”

Scully turned herself more on the bed to better look at him. “Although?” she led, handing him the other half of the orange. 

“I have a sister,” he said, popping a section in his mouth and continuing to talk as he chewed. “Much older than me. Young for a witch, but in line to take the throne when my mother… She was always kind to me, my sister. I haven’t seen her since I left to live in Brytain with my father.”

“What’s her name?”

“Samantha.”

“Do you think she’s here?”

“I don’t see why she wouldn’t be.”

“You’ve never mentioned having a sister,” Scully said, looking at him over another sumptuous bite. 

“Yeah, well,” he said. “It’s not like I could ask for time off at work so I could attend her two hundredth.”

She gave him a small smile, and finally marveled out loud: “How is this produce so good this far into the arctic? It’s staggering.”

Mulder’s smile went all the way to his eyes. “Magic,” he said smugly. 

XxXxXxXxXxX

The funeral pyre for Max Fenig had been set up in a large courtyard in the center of the palace, the sky above them the mottled gray of a dappled pony. Mulder’s mother had delivered a prayer and an ancient benediction and Mulder himself, as well as Byers and Frohike, had each said a few words as Max’s body was set upon the wooden structure by several clanswomen, the mood of the gathering as somber as the sky. 

A funeral ceremony was a complicated affair, and Mulder had done his level best to walk Scully through most of the process before they attended, but there was still a lot of ritual that could be confusing without explanation. 

“Afrikan dream root,” Mulder muttered into Scully’s ear. It was a relief to be fully open with her, with their Gunmen escorts. A part of him had unclenched when she met his mother, and he felt more like himself than he had in years. It was oddly soothing and freeing to share this part of his life with her. And for her part, Scully seemed interested in the proceedings, or at the very least respectful of them. 

“It’s said to open the door between this world and the next, so that Yambe-Akka can escort you,” he went on, watching as a witch he had never met before was placing a bundle of plants at the four corners of the pyre. The body of Max rested peacefully atop a raised wooden platform, the witches of the Lake Skilak clan standing to one side of it and Scully, Mulder, Frohike, Langly and Byers standing on the other. 

The witches’ dæmons were the only ones who seemed perfectly comfortable, the humans’ dæmons standing as far back from the pyre platform as their connections would allow. Cassiana stood back further still, joined by Jasper, who spoke to her as quietly as Mulder was speaking to Scully. 

The witch attending the pyre moved to the next corner. 

“Henbane,” Mulder muttered in Scully’s ear. “To envelop his spirit. Careful if the henbane smoke drifts towards you,” he went on, “it can cause delirium that’s said to last for days.” Scully shot him a look of alarm. 

The witch moved to the next corner, a light breeze lifting tendrils of her hair. 

“White sage,” Mulder explained. “To purify.”

Mulder watched Scully’s eyes follow the witch to the final corner. 

“Blue lily,” he said, grabbing gently onto Scully’s elbow to pull her back several feet. They would light the fire in a moment. “For repair of the soul.”

Teena stepped forward then and muttered an incantation welcoming Yambe-Akka. Mulder muttered ritualistic words along with the gathered witches and bowed his head. A moment later he heard the whoosh of the pyre being lit, and Teena turned and walked into the palace, the assembled retinue following her wordlessly.

“We don’t stay?” Scully asked in a whisper as she took Mulder’s arm and followed the retreating mourners. 

“He doesn’t need us anymore,” Mulder explained. “Now we feast in his memory.”

He had not attended many funerals in his time growing up with the witches of his mother’s clan – it was rare for a witch to die of old age or natural causes – but they had feuded and fought with another clan once when he was seven, just before the trip to Tungusk, and he remembered the funeral proceedings for the two witches his clan had lost vividly. 

Teena turned into the palace’s great room, which had been lit with candles and set with more food than Mulder had seen in years. In deference to their human guests, fires had been lit in the two fireplaces on either end of the hall and the temperature in the room was comfortable enough that Mulder shed his jacket and helped Scully off with hers. They were seen to a long table nearest one of the fireplaces, and Frohike, Langly and Byers were sat across from them. 

Mulder took a deep breath as Scully settled in next to him and reached for the wine goblet in front of him, taking a sip before he finally looked up and connected eyes with Frohike. Frohike reached for his own goblet and took a sip himself, each of them murmuring the clan’s wine blessing before setting their cups down and taking each other in. 

“So,” Mulder said, finally breaking the silence. “I suppose I should ask what you consider your level of duplicity before I assign you one in my head.”

Frohike nodded at him. “You would be within your rights,” the little man said calmly, before looking over at Langly and Byers. “But I ask you to spare my compatriots. Byers had no knowledge of the details of my mission. He’s an old and true friend, who stuck with us out of a sense of duty and heart. Langly knew of my position with the Lake Skilak clan, but not of my assignment from its queen.”

Mulder digested this for a moment and then nodded at the two men. “And you?”

“I knew what I was doing,” Frohike said. “And I would do it again.”

“Is your allegiance to my mother so strong?”

“My allegiance is to mankind,” Frohike went on, his face taking on a fierceness Mulder hadn’t before witnessed. “And my life was and is dedicated toward its continued existence. That means that I will protect you, and her,” at this, he pointed at Scully, “and the life you’ve created until my dying breath.” 

Mulder was a little taken aback by the little man’s fervor. Frohike took a calming breath. “I apologize that I wasn’t able to be completely honest with you. I promise that I will be going forward. You have my word.” 

At this, he muttered a witches’ vow and held Mulder’s eyes. Mulder nodded once and leaned back. 

“Going forward?” he said. “What will that look like?” Mulder was curious what everyone thought was going to happen.

“That,” said a voice behind him. “Is up to you and your woman.” A shiver ran up his spine and he turned around.

“Samantha,” he said, feeling a smile spread widely across his face. His sister’s crowned eagle daemon Thorcan flapped his large wings as he landed near Cass and touched his beak to her nose affectionately.

“Hello, Fox.” She looked no different than when he’d seen her last nearly thirty years before. A mass of dark curls that flowed over her shoulder and the same narrowish hazel eyes he saw when he looked into a mirror. He rose and threw his arms around her, her skin cool, but her smell the same warm cinnamony scent that plucked at chords of memory. There was always a sense of harmony around his sister, who could be as fierce as panserbjørn , but had invariably shown him kindness, no matter the situation. 

“Samantha,” he said again, pulling back. “I want to introduce you to-” 

Scully turned and made to get up from the long bench but Samantha raised a hand. “Please keep your seat,” she said kindly. “It’s an honor to meet you, Dana.” She reached down and formally shook Scully’s hand, then turned back to Mulder. 

“May I speak with you?” 

Mulder nodded and they moved away from the table and to the side of the roaring fireplace, away from the witches that were still milling about the great room, not having yet taken their seats. Cass stayed where she was by the fire, talking with Thorcan who was nearly the same size as the fossa.

“What is it?” he asked without preamble. His sister was never one to beat around the bush. 

“The heretic hunter. The prophecy pursuer. He is after your woman now.”

Mulder’s blood turned to ice. “What does Krycek want with her?”

“The child,” Samantha said. 

Mulder swore, drawing the attention of a few nearby witches. He took a deep breath and lowered his voice. 

“How does he know?” Mulder asked her. “How does he know about the child when even we didn’t?”

“The Magisterium,” Samantha explained, “in Geneva. They have a tool called an alethiometer that can tell you any truth, if you know what to ask it. Alex Krycek has a talent for asking the right questions.”

“So what do we do?”

“You’ll stay here,” said a darker voice. Teena was standing only a few feet away. She approached her two children. “You’ll raise your child here, where we can protect it.”

“Have you been inhaling henbane?” Mulder said viciously. He saw Scully turn her head curiously towards them, and once again lowered his voice. “Mother, there’s no way-“

Teena looked at him coldly. “Fox, you know the power of the Magisterium. You once wielded it yourself.” Mulder felt like he’d been punched in the gut. “The safest place would be here. With your people.”

“Absolutely not-”

Teena held up a hand. “This is not the time or the place. Yambe-Akka is in our courtyard. We will have this discussion another day.”

With that, she stalked off and sat at the head of the longest table. 

Mulder inhaled deeply, trying to calm himself and turned back to his sister. 

“Samantha, I can’t ask Scully to do that. To live out our days here. I can’t ask my own child to grow up the same way I did. It’s cold. And it’s miserable to be raised with expectations on your shoulders. Even if you don’t know what they are.”

“Oh, your son can’t know what’s expected of him. And he won’t.” Samantha smiled at him. “No, he will be raised far south of here. Under warm, limitless skies.”

“What do you mean?”

“Fox, Mother sees much, but not all. Never forget that I have powers of my own.”

Mulder peered at his sister closely, and she cocked her head to the side, looking at him fondly. “She is right about the occasion, however. We can all discuss it in a few days time. You’ll have to change your names. Your identities. We have only to get you there, and then the spells of our clan will protect you all.”

“Where?” he asked. But she didn’t answer, only reached out and handed something to him, which he took into the palm of his hand. It was the silver and turquoise ring that Albert Hosteen had given Scully. It was warm to the touch, though his sister’s skin was as cool as the air. 

“How did you get this?” he asked, but his sister only smiled. 

“Return it to your woman,” she said, closing his hand around it. “And keep it safe.”

XxXxXxXxXxX 

Scully slid the ring onto her middle finger, sliding under the covers of the large bed in their appointed room. 

“I thought I lost this,” she said, marveling. “It came off when we were attacked.”

“My sister has a talent,” Mulder said, climbing in beside her. The fire in the room was crackling cheerfully and Mulder came to bed wearing only his underwear, the skin of his long body honeyed in the firelight. It took her a moment to look away. 

“A talent for what?” she finally asked. 

“The unexpected,” Mulder answered. 

“What did she want to talk to you about?” 

Mulder shifted onto his side, propping his head up with his elbow.  “My mother wants us to stay here,” he said, sighing. “Raise the baby here in the clan.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad,” Scully hedged. “We’d be safe-“

“It would be. It would be so bad. Trust me. I’ve done it.” Mulder flopped onto his back. “And I couldn’t do that to you. To take you away from your life. Your friends, your family.”

Scully sighed. It was sweet of him to think that she had a whole life she would be leaving, but if she took out work and Mulder, there was surprisingly little left. In the years since she began working with him she’d lost touch with friends, neglected hobbies. Yet she lived her life without regret. She rolled toward him and tucked herself under his arm, throwing a leg over his warm hips. 

“I would miss my family,” she admitted. “Desperately.”

He sighed unhappily, and she splayed her fingers into the wiry hairs of his chest, her hand like a pink starfish over his heart. 

“I take it your sister has an unexpected solution?” she asked. 

“She seems to,” he said, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. 

It still felt otherworldly to be held by him, to take comfort in his warmth and know that she could have as much of him as she wanted. She traced a lazy pattern on his skin, feeling complicit, like an accomplice in some vast conspiracy. 

She turned her head and pressed a long, wet kiss into the skin of his neck, feeling him stir to life under the leg she had thrown over him. 

She tried to pinpoint the moment when her life had changed, when she swung wildly from the path she’d been on since birth to whatever this was: filled with magic and prophecy and a love so blinding she hadn’t recognized her misstep, if you could call it that. Was it when she stepped off the zeppelin in Nome? Or before that, long before, when she left the halls of academia for the bullpen of the police force? Or had it been that wild moment when she looked up from her desk to see a dæmon in the shape of an obscure golden mammal and a handsome man holding out his hand in introduction, telling her that he was looking forward to working with her? 

Or had it all been written in the stars, eons before?

“Where are we?” she breathed into his skin, darting out her tongue to taste him. “Where are we really?” She meant the question in every way; physically, spiritually, in every way that counted. 

“We’re miles from home,” he whispered in her ear, moving over her.

She rose up like their massive balloon, ascending to a place beyond thought, beyond reason. 

XxXxXxXxXxX

He thought of the clan he’d been brought up in. Of his mother, of the other witches. They might know magic, but they didn’t know this. It was deeper and more secret than any spell, more effervescent than any potion, older than cloud pine and truer than steel.

Where their other couplings were furious with need, this was slow, luxurious, the slit beneath her red thatch of curls gripping him like a steamy hand. He moved within her like the tide, easing and moony.

Already she felt different, her concupiscence taking on a rounded, fecund quality that drove him nearly breathless, even if it was only in his head. Oh, but he would enjoy this. 

He pumped his hips lazily while she stared up at him with half-lidded eyes, the scent of chamomile wafting over them like a sleepy fog; someone had put a brooding bundle under their pillows. 

He rested his forehead against hers, closed his eyes and knuckled her clit until she was purring. Mulder sometimes wondered why her dæmon had settled as the tall stately feline it did, but in moments like this when she was pliant and affectionate, graceful and warm — her truest self — that’s when he understood. 

“Like that,” she whispered, running her fingers up his sides to strum along his ribs, and he almost felt like he was shipwrecked on some tropical shore, rum-drunk and happy. And then the little port-wench beneath him turned her face into his and breathed a hot pant in his ear and the glowing embers within him ignited into a flame that threatened to engulf him whole. He grabbed her hip with one hand, the other still rubbing the hot felt of her at their joining, and he surged up with renewed lust. That seemed all she needed, for a moment later she was coming apart at the seams, pulsing around him like a supernova, powerful and luminous. 

She called out to the heavens and he followed her there.

XxXxXxXxXxX 

Teena was having none of it, and Scully could tell that her partner was taking a perverse kind of pleasure in his mother’s dissent. 

“I forbid it,” the witch snapped, obviously unused to her will being crossed. 

The night before, Scully had sat down with Mulder and his sister and had listened to what Samantha had to say. She was not a witch who could foresee the things that were to come, she had said, but she was a dreamwalker, rare among her kind, and she was told in the dreamscape what their party must do:

“You must travel south,” she’d said. “Farther south than even New Denmark. The journey will not be easy or quick. On a prairie in this distant land, there is a house called Bowie’s Revenge. It is on an old cattle ranch and the property is large. A good place to give birth. A good place for a growing boy. The house belonged to a lover of mine, who willed it to me when he died. He had hoped we would raise a family there, but it was not meant to be. I bequeath it to you. There is a magic about the place. A good, kind magic. You have only to get there, and you and all who live with and visit you will be safe.” 

When Samantha assured her that this included her family, Scully agreed to the plan without caveat. Mulder said he would support whatever Scully decided. 

And so they found themselves sitting before the queen of the Lake Skilak clan, with all of the witches in attendance as well as their five human guests, watching the witch who would become queen go up against her predecessor. 

At Teena’s outburst, Scully could feel Mulder beside her, poised like a coiled spring. She could see the fury building inside of him, could almost feel it. 

“Mother–” he all but growled. 

“Fox,” the queen said, her voice wavering. For a moment, Scully saw the raw desperation of a mother who thought she was doing what was best for her child. She put her hand on Mulder’s arm, and he calmed instantly. 

Samantha watched the gesture and raised her voice. 

“You’re not the only one who speaks with the beings who pass between worlds, mother,” Samantha said, and with those words, some of the fight seemed to leave the queen. 

“How do you propose they travel, then?” Teena asked. “The Magisterium’s most lethal hunter pursues them. And you’re proposing a journey of thousands upon thousands of miles.” 

“A cadre of witches will escort them,” Samantha said.

“As will we!” shouted Frohike from where he, Langly and Byers stood at the edge of the room. The other two gunmen nodded at his pronouncement.

“And you think this fellowship will be enough?” Teena questioned her daughter. Something seemed to pass between them, and when Samantha answered, she was a bit more somber. 

“I’m certain of it,” she said. 

Teena sighed and leaned back on her throne. “Which among you will escort my son and his woman through the southern heat?” she called out. 

“I will,” called out Samantha, followed almost immediately by Monica, who stepped forward. 

“And me!” she said, with a kind look to Scully. 

Several other witches came forward, pledging their wits and their bows. 

“That makes six,” Samantha said, looking around at the other witches in the room. “My dreams tell me that we’ll need a full coven of seven.”

There was muttering amongst the various groups, when Teena rose from her seat. 

“I will be the seventh,” she said, and at her pronouncement, there was a bevy of shocked discussion. Scully got the impression that the queen did not often leave her palace. 

Mulder stepped forward. 

“We will not survive another trek on foot through the arctic,” he pointed out. “And I cannot in good conscience foist a journey like this on a pregnant woman. Certainly not when winter is coming.” 

Samantha turned to him. 

“We won’t be leaving right away,” Samantha said. “Journeys like this require preparation. But you need not worry. We’ll not be traveling on foot.”

Mulder looked at his sister. “How do you suppose you’ll get us there?” he asked. 

“Simple,” Samantha said, smiling at him indulgently, but kindly. “We’ll get you there the same way we got you here. We’ll pull your great balloon.”

Chapter Text

The air felt downright warm. The breezes wafting above and below and behind them smelled of lodgepole pine and wild bergamot. They were finally past the cold barrenness of central New France and were well into New Denmark, heading south through sparsely populated Skraeling territory. They had been traveling for weeks, making good time, the winds of the northern plains always with the witches that escorted them, riding upon their cloud-pine and pulling the balloon’s long ropes. The witches never seemed to tire, though Scully found that she was exhausted at the end of each day, even if she’d done nothing more than wander along within the confines of the great balloon’s basket, talking and playing cards with Mulder and their three Gunmen. 

All four men were dozing, and Scully – still energized by the return of Bruno, Monica’s falcon dæmon, pushed aside the fur covering she had in her lap and rose to her feet. She stretched, and shrugged off her fur and leather jacket, the toggles of which were already stretched to capacity. Her belly had rounded and filled out in the weeks since they left Lake Skilak, and she would be needing new clothes soon – already she was in a pair of pants borrowed from Frohike, rolled at the waist and ankles. 

She walked to the side of the basket and looked down over the landscape below them. They were not flying so high that she couldn’t make out the features of the land. It was forested, though had tall gray rocky outcrops reaching up high over the canopy in thin stacks that looked remarkably like the drip castles she and Melissa used to make on the wet sandy beaches of the Chesapeake. 

Scully raised her eyes to look for their witch escorts, who rode smooth and steady around them. In calm weather, only four of them were required on the ropes that pulled the balloon, the other three riding around and below the balloon on their cloud-pine branches, eyes always scanning, an arrow always nocked on their bow. Today, Teena, Samantha, Monica and a quiet witch named Silva were pulling the ropes, Abigail, Liana and Weera flying slowly among them, ever watchful. 

The breeze fanning her wild dark hair, Monica caught Scully’s eye and flew in closer to her, the rope she was pulling going a bit slack. The wind itself was providing enough push that their speed wasn’t at all affected. 

“Hello,” Monica said, smiling at Scully as she approached, stopping short of the basket and flying along beside it at the same speed as the balloon itself. 

“Hello, Monica,” Scully smiled back. “I want to thank you again – you and Bruno – for getting in touch with my family.” The dæmon had gone to Scully’s family to tell them what had happened to their Detective daughter and to bring Scully tidings of their good health and fortunes.

“It was our pleasure,” Monica said, and Bruno himself whipped in between Scully and Monica to punctuate their amity. 

Hendrick moved to Scully’s side and sat, leaning his head into her hip. She reached down to rub between his ears, losing her fingers in his thick fur. 

“Where are we now?” Scully asked, nodding to the odd rock formations. 

“I believe they’re called the Black Hills,” Monica said. “Though I know Teena is eager to be past them. We may go further today than normal, to put some distance behind us.” On Scully’s questioning look, Monica leaned toward Scully, her arm almost brushing the outside of the basket. She lowered her voice, as though what she were about to say might set some jinx upon them. “Are you familiar with ley lines?”

“I’ve heard Mulder mention them,” Scully said, lowering her own voice. “He claims they’re lines that run along the earth that are imbued with anbarmagnetic energy. He once tried to convince me that there was no way a suspect could have crossed over Sedona with a stolen papal artifact because the power of the ley lines beneath it would have repelled the relic.”

“And I was right, too,” said a voice from beside her. She turned just in time for Mulder to press a kiss to her hairline. 

Monica smiled at them approvingly. “Many energy portals are positioned at the center of a ley line. Stonehenge, for instance, or Huayna Picchu. This place…” Monica looked down at the passing landscape. “Many ley lines converge here.”

“Then why cross it?” Scully asked.

“No people,” Monica said kindly. “Less risk of reports to the Magisterium.”

Scully nodded. They had been avoiding cities and villages. 

Mulder was looking out over the vista, and Scully watched as he briefly connected eyes with Samantha and nodded. After a moment, he turned, as though looking for something he expected to be there and suddenly said:

“Where’s Liana?” 

Scully and Monica both turned, scanning the horizon in all directions. Cassiana jumped up onto the side of the basket and turned into a snowy owl, looking at Mulder once before leaping off into the air to confer with the other flying dæmons. Scully watched as the witches’ confusion turned to alarm. 

Teena barked something Scully couldn’t quite hear, and a moment later, the balloon dropped several feet, as though it hit a pocket of dead air, and the jerk of the basket startled the Gunmen into consciousness. Frohike shot up to standing, instantly alert, and pulled the air pistol from his waist. 

“Arm yourselves,” he hissed to Langly and Byers, who had gotten to their feet, but wore looks of perplexed surprise. “What’s going on?” He went on, turning to Mulder and Scully. Annie was looking alertly around, but Ondima was crouched low to the floor of the basket, Mia beside her, fat tail flicking irritably. 

“Liana is gone,” Scully said, glancing up at Mulder, who was still scanning the skies, keeping an eye on his dæmon. Cass had dove down to skim over the tops of the narrow peaks below them. After a few minutes, she came wheeling back up through the air and landed on the side of the basket next to Mulder. 

She opened her beak, but only an owly chirp came out. Cass shook her head, hopped down to the floor of the basket and changed back into a fossa. She opened her mouth once again, but only the donkey-like squeak of a fossa came forth. 

“Cass?” Mulder said, when a shout of alarm pulled all of their attention. 

Scully turned to watch in horror as the cloud-pine under Abigail dropped as though it had been yanked to earth by an invisible tether, taking the witch with it. Her dæmon, a white cockatoo, his yellow crest fully extended in panic, screeched and dove down after her. Her body tumbled end over end, her hands still clutching desperately to the cloud-pine branch, until she disappeared into the canopy of trees below them. 

The balloon once again lurched, this time falling a dozen feet or more. Scully screamed as they came to a stop. The remaining witches were now shouting things back and forth to each other, and she watched as Jasper glided by the basket and then dropped, tumbling through the air until he managed to right himself. He quickly flapped up to Teena and cawed something at her. Teena gave him a long look and then shouted at Weera — the only remaining witch who was not actively pulling the balloon— to get into the balloon’s basket immediately. 

Weera, a slight witch with hair the same bright copper as Scully’s own, complied immediately, and was just getting to the basket when the cloud-pine under her failed and fell to earth. With a shriek, the witch flailed and just caught the edge of the basket with one hand. Byers dove at her and managed to grab her other wrist, pulling her into the basket with Langly and Mulder’s help. Her dæmon, a small gray parrot whose name Scully couldn’t remember, flapped to her shoulder.

“What the hell is it?” Frohike shouted, weaving his gun through the air, looking for something to shoot. 

Scully could only shake her head and grip the side of the basket with one hand and her swollen belly with the other, just waiting for the balloon to once again pitch through the air. Beside her, Hendrick had his claws fully unsheathed and dug into the hard wicker beneath them. He growled at her, and suddenly Scully could feel fear and confusion coursing through him. He growled again, the feeling increasing in intensity. 

“Hen?” she said, a thought beginning to form in her mind. 

Before it could be fully realized, the great balloon lurched again, but this time sideways, as Teena, Monica, Samantha and Silva pulled hard on the balloon’s ropes. Scully could hear them muttering an incantation and the wind suddenly buffeted in from the north, sweeping them along more hastily.

“What about the witches who fell?” Scully said desperately, but Mulder only looked at Weera and then turned back to Scully, shaking his head.  

Ondima barked once, sharply. A feeling like cold water poured down Scully’s spine. 

“Mulder,” she said, and he looked at her, realization dawning on him at the same time. 

“The dæmons can’t talk,” he said, and all the humans in the basket looked at each other in alarm.

And then there was another scream from outside the balloon. Scully didn’t even want to look, but forced herself to. Samantha, who now clung desperately to the rope she had been pulling the balloon with, gave one more shout as the cloud-pine branch beneath her fell away. Thorcan, her dæmon, the great crowned eagle, flew to her side and grabbed onto the flailing end of the rope. He flew it up and over the side of the balloon’s webbing, using his beak and talons to tie it securely, leaving Samantha a sturdy loop that she was able to put her foot through. Jasper and Bruno quickly did the same for their humans just in case their cloud-pine failed, and Thorcan flew over to help Silva, whose chickadee dæmon was not powerful enough to manipulate the balloon’s thick cords. 

Mulder put a fierce arm around Scully and was breathing hard. The winds died out behind them and the balloon began to slow, no matter how hard the remaining three witches pulled on it. 

A desperate chitter filled the air. Mia, who was perched on the side of the balloon’s webbing looking down at the ground, was trying to say something and then the balloon simply fell from the sky, taking everything and everyone with it. 

XxXxXxXxXxX

Mulder pulled Scully into his side, dropping them to the floor of the basket and curling himself around her. As the balloon fell, he could feel the hydrogen pushing for split second increments against whatever force was pulling them down, but it was all for naught. He could hear the desperate cries of the witches’ bird dæmons in the air outside of the balloon and for a moment had a clear and distinct moment when he felt a singular sorrow that he, Scully, and their unborn child would not live to enjoy the comfort of the loved and safe life that he had so longed for. 

And then a wave of fierce determination came over him. Not from his own heart, but from his dæmon’s. 

He connected eyes with the fossa, who had settled beside Hendrick, her claws dug equally fast into the wicker basket under them, and she nodded at him once and then leapt to the side of the basket. 

“Cassiana!” Mulder shouted, but she was already gone, leaping into the air that was ripping past the balloon as it fell through the sky. 

He heard her before he saw her. A booming screech like glass breaking split through the air, and then the balloon above them, as round and full as the sky itself, was wrenched to a long thin line. They were jerked back by the slowing momentum, and Mulder saw nothing above them now but Cassiana’s great claws dug into the shredded remains of the balloon and its webbing, pulled taut as the dæmon — in the shape of a monstrous purple dragon — flapped her great leathered wings and worked to slow their tumultuous descent. His stomach arced in a fizzle of joyous relief, and then down again they were pulled, Cass’s Herculean efforts no match for the dead air around them. 

They hit the canopy of trees first, which is probably what saved most of them, the four witches who held the ropes slipping past the basket and into the leafy tops of the trees. The basket hit with a shuddering thud, first one large branch and then another. Cass gave one more ear-splitting screech and the webbing and tattered fabric remains of the balloon caught on a large branch and they were pulled up short. There was a quiet moment when everyone came to their senses and Mulder rolled away from Scully and brought a hand gently to her shoulder. 

“Are you okay?” he asked. 

She nodded, her face wearing a shocked and bewildered expression. 

He looked up. Cass had changed into a swallow and fluttered down to land lightly in Mulder’s cupped hand. He put his other hand on top of her, as though catching a firefly, and he could feel her little puff of a chest heaving. 

“Cass?” he said. She gave him a weak chirp, but pecked his palm lightly and he rubbed her tiny head once before placing her gently on his shoulder. “Thank you,” he said, leaning his cheek towards her. She briefly pressed her feathered head against him and he felt the strength of their connection.

Mulder stood slowly, feeling bumps and bruises and did a quick self assessment, determining that nothing was too damaged. He helped Scully to stand and she gave him a quick look and nodded once before leaning down and running her hand over Hendrick’s head. The cheetah rose and shook himself before looking at Scully and making a high chirping sound. 

On the other side of the balloon, the Gunmen were standing, checking in with each other and their dæmons. Byers reached out and helped Weera to her feet, and then lifted the bottom of his shirt and pulled it up to wipe away a rivulet of blood that was trickling down from a gash in the witch’s forehead. She looked at him gratefully.

Mulder and Scully both moved to the side of the basket and looked out and down. The basket was hanging only about five feet from the ground, in a small cluster of trees at the edge of an outcropping of the rocky sanddrip castle-like structures. Below them, Samantha was leaning over Monica, who was lying prone on the rocky ground, her leg at an odd angle. 

Samantha looked up and caught her brother’s eye. 

“She has a broken leg,” Samantha said, holding onto Monica’s hand. The other witch was pale, a sheen of sweat on her forehead. Bruno stood close to her, moving his head side to side, looking at her with one sharp eye and then the other. 

“Where’s Mother?” Mulder called down. He felt rather than saw Frohike move to stand at his other side.

Samantha gestured to the area past the basket. “Bruised, but alive. Attending to Silva.”

“Is Silva all right?” Scully asked, her voice regaining some of its strength. 

Samantha’s look was solemn. “Silva is dead.”

Mulder saw Frohike grip the side of the basket beside him, his knuckles going white. 

“We need to get down,” the little man said quietly. 

It was easier said than done. Mulder was able to leap off the side of the basket with little trouble other than a sharp landing on an already bruised frame, and Langly and Byers were able to do the same with slightly less grace, their dæmons perched in their arms. Weera had no trouble, but Frohike was adamant that he couldn’t and wouldn’t jump, even with the promise of the three other men to catch him. Eventually, Cass, back in fossa form, grunted and leapt to the side of the basket where she changed into a gorilla, looking remarkably like Walter Skinner’s Lucy. Cass held onto the basket with both dark feet and one hand and extended the other one to Frohike, who looked at it in alarm. A lifetime of living with the taboo of touching another person’s dæmon was tough to overcome. 

Annie gave her human a long look and then jumped into Cass’s hand, who swung her easily over the side of the basket and, holding on with only her feet, lowered the raccoon gently to the ground. Cass swung back up and offered her hand once more to the witches’ counsel, who merely looked at it. 

“Just do it,” Mulder finally called up, steadying himself for the awful feeling he knew would come when another person touched his dæmon. “There’s nothing to be done.”

Finally, Frohike tentatively reached out and he and Cass locked hands around each other’s wrists. 

Mulder felt the feeling of revulsion instantly, and staggered back a step, but Cass worked quickly and swung the little man up and over the side of the basket and to the ground, and the horrible feeling passed as soon as she released her grip. Then the dæmon was back up on the side of the basket. 

Scully looked down at Mulder and he gave her a small encouraging smile. She reached forward and he braced himself once again, but the feeling that came over him when Cass pulled Scully gently to her side and hoisted them carefully up and over the basket was not one of revulsion, but a shiver of pleasure so potent that Mulder’s breath caught in his throat. Then Cass and Scully were on the ground and stepping away from each other and the frisson of feeling ran up and out of him. 

Cass changed into a fossa and darted to his side and he knelt down, running his hands over her compact little head and whispering comforting words. After a few moments he stood and moved to Samantha, where she was still kneeling next to Monica. 

Teena approached then, limping her way over. When Mulder moved to help her, she held up her hand. 

“Let us attend to Monica,” she said. “Please give us a moment.”

With that, she leaned down over Monica’s other side and muttered something to Samantha, who muttered something back. After a moment, Teena pulled a few bits of herbs from a satchel hanging from her waist and handed them to Monica, who put them in her mouth. Teena reached out and took Samantha’s hand. 

A warm breeze buffeted through the stalagmite-like peaks beyond the stand of trees whose leaves shivered with movement. Everything around them had an odd, echoish feeling, and Mulder thought that if he had a third eye, it was the feeling as though a blindfold had been lowered to cover it. Everything was just off . 

A light touch to his shoulder and Mulder turned to find Byers standing next to him. 

“Mulder,” the man said. Mia was standing upright on his shoulder, her tiny hands wringing themselves nervously. “Mia saw something,” he went on when Mulder turned to him fully. “From the air.” 

Mulder glanced over at his mother and sister and then nodded at Byers, moving their conversation away from them, his boots scratching in the sandy grit at their feet.

“Is it nearby?” Mulder asked, turning to him again. 

Byers looked at his dæmon. “I believe so,” he said. 

“Will you lead the way?” Mulder said directly to Mia, who nodded quickly and then leapt off Byers’ shoulder and to the ground, turning back to see who would follow her. 

Scully stepped forward, but Mulder put a hand on her shoulder. “I want you to stay here with my mother,” he said, and for a moment it looked like she might argue, but instead she nodded and pulled her revolver from its holster, handing it to Frohike. 

“Just in case,” she said. 

Weera stepped forward and unslung her bow from around her shoulders. “I will go with you,” she said. 

“As will I,” said Frohike, who took a step toward the boat captain. 

Langly pushed his glasses up further onto his face. “I’ll stay with Scully,” he said, and Mulder gave him a thankful nod. He turned for one last glance at Scully as they shuffled off.

Mia led them around the small growth of trees in which their balloon crashed and around the back of the nearest rocky spire. From here the rocks seemed to grow out of the earth as though from seedlings, and they picked their way through them, finding something like a path. 

After about three hundred yards, they came to a fork in which the path diverted into two directions. Mia sat back on her haunches, sniffing the air, and jumped up onto one of the rock growths and scampered easily up it, stopping when she was several feet from its rounded point, scanning the horizon. Her tail gave one quick flick and then she came scrambling back down, the sound of her sharp claws on the gritty rock running a shiver up Mulder’s spine. 

Mia jumped down to the ground and began heading down the path to the right. Byers led the way, with Weera behind him, followed by Mulder and then Frohike, their dæmons walking at their sides, Weera’s parrot dæmon on her shoulder. 

When Weera passed by the path that went left, she paused for a moment, her gray daemon flapping his wing agitatedly, and then nocked an arrow to her bow, turning to give Mulder a look before carrying on down the path after Byers. When Mulder passed the same area, his palms went sweaty, and Cass, walking next to him, gave a low growlish chuff. He carried on, glancing once over his shoulder at the seemingly innocuous path. 

Mia rounded a curve and before them, the rocky towers seemed to peter out, getting smaller and lower until they ended in an undulating valley of stone. Laying over the last few low spires like an enormous dark gray blanket were the remains of a zeppelin, the rib-like frame that its fabric had been pulled over cracked in half and reaching up into the sky like skeletal hands pleading to the heavens for mercy. Some of the fabric that had caught on it snapped in the wind. 

Byers sucked in a breath and Frohike swore in a low tone. 

Mulder pulled out his pistol. “Mia, did you see any people?” he asked the little daemon, who shook her head no. 

“How long do you think it’s been here?” Frohike asked, putting his other hand on the grip of Scully’s pistol as though readying for a fight. 

“Not very,” Mulder said, moving forward cautiously. “It’s not at all weathered. And,” he pointed out, “it’s the newest model.” He pointed to the sleek art deco script that could still be seen on the back of the zeppelin’s rigid passenger cabin, which was tilted on its side, partially crushed by the rock beneath it. He wouldn’t have been surprised if smoke had still been coming from the wreckage. “Come on.”

They moved forward carefully, ears tuned to any slight noise as they crossed the half acre that sat between them and the wrecked airship. Once they got near it, Mulder turned to Byers. 

“Weera and I can check the cabin for survivors. Think you can crawl up to get a vantage of the side or back? See if you can make out its registry?” 

Byers nodded and Frohike followed him. Mulder and Weera came up to one of the cabin’s broken windows and peered into the murk. There wasn’t much to see from where they stood. Mulder kicked the remains of broken glass from the window’s frame and jumped down into the cabin, Weera following him a moment later. 

He took several steps in, glass crunching under his feet, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. He expected there to be the plush velvet seats one normally saw in a commercial passenger zeppelin, but there was none of that. It seemed to just be a large table in the center of the large cabin which had cracked in half, and around the outside, lining the walls were a row of spartan metallic seats. Something about that pinged something in his head when Weera said:

“No bodies.”

Mulder grunted an agreement. “No survivors, either,” he said. 

There was a shout from outside and they made their way carefully back out, jumping down into the bright sunshine. They trotted to the back of the cabin and Mulder caught Byers’ large round eyes before he saw what the man was pointing at. On the back of the zeppelin’s cabin was a familiar large script M. 

“It’s a Magisterium ship,” Mulder said, realization dawning. “A security forces ship. That would explain the militaristic interior.” 

“No, Mulder,” said Frohike, stepping closer. “ Look .”

Mulder took a step closer. On the metal sheeting of the rear of the cabin were several bullet holes and many small dents where it had been hit with the tiny munitions fired from air pistols. Weera stepped forward and knelt down toward where the cabin met the rock. She reached forward and pulled out the broken shaft of an arrow, flecked with bright purple feathers. 

“This isn’t just a Magisterium ship, Mulder,” said Frohike, his face pale under the patchy growth of a few days’ worth of beard. “It’s Krycek’s ship. It’s the one we fought.”

“But that was halfway across the arctic,” Weera said. “Where did it come from? How did it get here?”

Mulder stepped forward, a deep feeling of disquiet settling over him. “What the hell is this place?” he said.

Chapter Text

“This is a dark place,” Teena said, looking around. “Of old magic.” She rose from where she’d been kneeling next to Monica and wiped the dust off of her hands. 

Scully wasn’t sure whose question the witch queen was answering, but it had been on the forefront of her own mind. Though the sun shone and the air smelled clean and bright, there was something ominously off about the area where their balloon had been pulled down, the shadows a little darker than they ought to be. 

The scouting party had not yet returned from their sojourn to investigate what Mia had seen from the air, though Scully remembered Byers saying it had been close. It had been almost an hour since they’d left. Scully ran a hand over her stomach as if trying to soothe a restless child – though in reality she was the one who needed soothing. 

Langly sat on the dusty ground next to her, absently petting the soft white fur of Ondima. 

“Our dæmons,” he said thoughtfully, looking up at Teena. “Will they get their voices back?” It was the first time he’d spoken since his compatriots had left with Mulder and Weera, and the first time he’d ever spoken directly to the witch queen. 

“Once you leave this place,” Teena said, turning on her heel and limping slightly as she made her way to where her son had left not long before. “All will be as it was.” She seemed distracted, and Scully was concerned about her limp. 

“Are you injured?” Scully called out. 

“Yes,” the woman called back over her shoulder. “But it does not matter.” Scully found it an odd answer, but Teena turned back toward them and sighed. 

“They should be back,” said Samantha from Scully’s other side. She was still on her knees next to Monica, who was now able to sit up – her leg freshly healed by her queen and the witch princess.

“Yes,” Teena said, sighing as though about to do a chore she found distasteful. “They should. We shall have to go after them.”

Jasper, who had been hopping along at Teena’s feet, flapped his wings, trying to take flight. He managed to get a few feet off the ground but was forced to flutter back down. He cawed once at his witch. 

“Dead air,” Teena said, peering around as though she half-expected to see something or someone. “It’s what brought down the balloon.Though it doesn’t account for the cloud-pine failing. You won’t be able to fly.” The last bit was directed at her dæmon, who snapped his pink beak in irritation. 

She turned to Monica. “Can you walk?”

Samantha helped Monica to her feet. Monica winced as she put weight on her leg, but nodded to her queen. “I can walk,” she said. Scully rather admired her mettle. 

Teena pulled her bow from her shoulder. Its wood was gray and it was larger than the bows of the other witches and had odd runes carved into its side. She strung it with the ease of a Gibsonton strongman, and looked around a moment, nocking an arrow to the string. She pulled back and released. The arrow sunk deeply into the tree holding the balloon in its snarled grip.

“Arm yourselves,” she said, turning to what remained of their collective. “The air isn’t so dead we cannot fight. And we may need to.” 

Scully began to regret handing her weapon over to Frohike. As if reading her thoughts, Langly scrambled to his feet and handed her his air pistol. 

“I defer to your marksmanship,” the man said, pushing his spectacles further up onto his nose. 

Scully checked the gun’s firing mechanism, and from the corner of her eye saw Hendrick lean down and give Ondima a quick appreciative headbutt. 

Without another word, Teena turned on her heel and made her way quickly, even with a limp, down the path that led through the tall stone spires. Scully could make out the footprints of the other four people in the dirt at their feet as they walked, and eventually Teena paused where the path forked. Scully could clearly still see the footprints of the others heading down the path to the right, but Teena turned and stared down the path to the left for a long minute. When neither Samantha nor Monica questioned her, Scully decided to hold her tongue. Eventually, the queen nodded to herself and continued on down the route her son had taken. 

When Scully herself passed by the fork, she thought she heard a scatter of pebbles on dirt down the left-hand path and paused, but hustled on when she didn’t hear anything else. Eventually the trail widened out further and they came to the wreckage of a massive silver zeppelin. 

Scully sucked in a breath. All five people and their dæmons paused on the small rise to take in the sight. 

“This is the heretic hunter’s ship,” Samantha said, turning to her mother and letting little emotion into her voice. 

Scully’s stomach did a flip. 

“No doubt it’s what the squirrel saw from the air,” Teena said, limping forward a few steps. 

“But…” Langly began to say before his voice tapered off. He shot Scully a pleading look.

Scully’s mind flashed to the terrifying moment when the grappling hooks sunk into the side of their balloon and Krycek and his men began climbing on board. She could see the zeppelin behind them in her mind’s eye. She found her voice again. “How?” she asked. “How did it get here, the same place we are?”

Beside her, Samantha, who had been on high alert, lowered her bow as a thought occurred to her. Her face went dark.

“The alethiometer,” Samantha said. “He must be traveling with it. And with someone who can read it.”

“He may be able to read it himself,” Teena said matter-of-factly, turning to her daughter. “He shall have to be killed. As will anyone with him.”

“Perhaps that nasty work has been done for us,” said Monica, nodding toward the wreckage. 

Teena nodded at her without a word.

“I’ll go,” said Samantha, and she scrambled down the slight incline to where the wreckage of the zeppelin lay. She hopped down into the murk of the cabin and emerged a few minutes later, coming back to rejoin the group. 

“Nothing,” she said as she approached. “But there are footprints. Fox’s and the others.”

“But where did they go?” asked Langly. 

No one seemed to have any answers. Scully couldn’t stand the useless feeling that had been building up inside her and stepped forward, shouting as loud as she could:

“MULDERRRRR!” 

There was no response but the flapping of the torn zeppelin fabric in the wind. 

XxXxXxXxXxX

Mulder turned on his heel, wondering if he’d actually heard something or if it was more of an echo in the bone. No one else in the group turned to look, so he figured it must have been in his head. 

They were heading back to where they’d left Scully and the others, bearing news of the discovery of Krycek’s ship. The thought that the man was somewhere around made Mulder more than a little anxious, even though he trusted his sister and mother to look out for Scully. He transferred his pistol to his other hand, rubbing his damp palms against his pants to dry them. Why weren’t they back yet? It seemed like they had been walking far longer than it took them to get to the zeppelin. 

Frohike, who was leading the group, seemed to have the same thought at the same time. He pulled up quickly, causing everyone behind him to pull up short, scattering the dirt at their feet. 

“This is taking a lot longer than it should,” the little man said. 

Byers and Weera, who had been walking together, quietly talking, looked over at him. 

“You must have taken a wrong turn,” said Byers.

“A wrong turn where?” Frohike said, defensive. “There is only one path back until we get to where the paths fork, and we haven’t gotten to the fork yet.”

“He’s right,” Mulder piped up from where he was bringing up the rear. “But,” he said, looking around. “This doesn’t look the same.”

And it didn’t. The path they’d walked to get to the zeppelin had been fairly wide, the spires leaving enough room for the party to walk three abreast – with dæmons – if they so chose. Here it was beginning to narrow, the rocky pillars towering above them so that it felt like they were leaning in, like the skyscrapers in New Amsterdam. 

“Should we go back?” Weera asked, directing her question to Mulder. 

“Let’s keep going,” Mulder said after a moment, debating the merits of turning back around. “I want to get back to Scully. But maybe Cass and Mia could go take a look?”

Everyone saw the sense in this and Mia jumped off of Byers’ shoulder. Cass changed herself into a buff-haired gibbon and easily climbed the rock above them, ascending to the top of the closest spire and then fluidly brachiating through the towers as though she were born to do it. After several minutes, both dæmons came down and returned to their people. Cass raised her arms in a human-like gesture of confusion and she shook her head. Mia simply chittered in Byers’ ear, who turned to everyone else. 

“We’re agitated and puzzled,” he said, reaching out to run a hand over Mia’s small head. 

“Join the club,” said Frohike. Beside him, Annie wrung her paws nervously. 

“Let’s just go,” said Mulder, the feeling that he needed to get back to Scully growing more and more persistent. An odd sense like Déjà vu was pinging around in his head, and when Cass – still in gibbon form – jumped onto his back to cling to him nervously, he physically startled. 

Not five minutes later, they rounded a small curve and found themselves staring at the mouth of a cave, a dark gaping maw in the surface of otherwise dense red stone. Frohike gave a small hollo of alarm and took a step back. The hair on the back of Mulder’s neck stood on end. 

“Go,” said Frohike, turning around and not waiting for the others to do the same. “Go back.”

“Yeah,” said Mulder, turning around himself. But when he rounded the small curve to go back the way they’d come, the path wasn’t there. What was there was the same gaping mouth of the same dark cave.

XxXxXxXxXxX

With one last look at the zeppelin, Teena turned and faced the others and their dæmons. 

“I’ve had quite enough being the prey, sisters,” she said, pulling back the string on her bow with a sharp twang and pulling her shoulders back to stand at her full height. “It’s time we become the hunters.”

A change seemed to come over the two other witches at Teena’s pronouncement, a flash of wily erudition flashing through their eyes. 

“What do you mean?” Scully asked. 

Teena turned to her and for the first time her eyes softened. She reached and ran a lock of Scully’s hair through her fingers, tucking it behind her ear in a matronly way. 

“You’ve the hair of a vixen,” the old woman said. “My son was right to choose you.” Scully cocked her head to the side, a question still on her face. “We’re running the hounds to ground, little fox,” Teena went on. “Courage.”

“Dana,” Samantha said, turning to Scully. “Stay by my side. Richard, Ondima. We shall need your eyes and ears. Nephew,” she said, addressing Hendrick, who looked surprised to be addressed thus by the witch. “Stay close to her. And keep your wits about you.” At this, Thorcan, who stood nearby and whose head reached nearly to his human’s thigh, gave a high pitched call that seemed out of place from such a large creature. 

Jasper flapped his wings once and Teena leaned down and brought the dæmon to her shoulder. She turned on her heel without another word, limping her way back down the path over which they’d come. When they arrived at the fork that Scully remembered passing, Teena stopped. She looked at the two younger witches. 

“Prepare yourselves,” she said. “This is a place of old magic, unfamiliar with and to you. Do not rely on your powers. They may not work here." 

"Will yours?" Samantha asked. 

"I will call my powers forth. Whether they respond to me is another matter entirely." With this, she followed the path to the left and Scully felt a dump of adrenaline hit her bloodstream, the baby in her belly gently fluttering in response. 

As they walked, she noticed that everything felt a little different, from the air going in and out of her lungs to the light sounds of their footfalls, which seemed to echo from the wrong directions. Hendrick issued forth a low, constant growl. 

Where the other path had opened up and gotten wider, eventually leading to the low open area in which they’d found the ruined zeppelin, this one seemed to get more and more narrow, the rocky spires growing taller, the walls pressing in until they were all walking, people and dæmons, single-file, their elbows occasionally brushing the rocky surface. 

With Samantha in front of her, Scully glanced back behind her once to make sure Langly was still there and was surprised to find him at least twenty feet behind her, though his footfalls sounded as though he were about to trod on her heels. When she turned again, puzzled, Langly was only a step behind her. She stopped short. 

“What’s wrong?” Langly asked, pulling up himself, his voice nervous. 

Scully shook her head, second guessing her instincts. “Nothing,” she said, and continued walking. 

Several minutes of eerie shuffling later, there was a cool puff of wind that hit Scully’s face, as if the earth had exhaled, and there was something familiar about the scent of the air, something she couldn’t quite place. From her side, Hendrick looked up at her with bright, eager eyes. And then they rounded a small curve and were met with the end of the line; the grim mouth of a cave sat before them, its opening as round and dark as a plum. 

Teena went in without a word, and everyone else followed. 

The cave was dank, with a faint hint of sulfur, and the air itself cool – there was the distant sound of steady dripping which only stood to remind Scully that she hadn’t had anything to drink or eat in hours. She’d been used to Mulder practically pushing food and water on her, a new trait she found both sweet and vaguely irritating. The thought of her partner brought her up short.

The light from outside didn’t penetrate far into the dark space, and after a moment, Scully heard Teena mutter a quiet incantation and then a low blue glow came to life in the witch’s hand, not as bright as anbaric light, but with a steady underwater pulse. Not moments later, a second and third light winked to life further up into the cave, to the left and to the right. Scully heard Monica make an appreciative sound in her throat. 

“‘Tis a fine spell, Mother,” Samantha said quietly, stepping forward and looking around at what they could now see of the cave. “How many lights can you cast?” 

Teena took a moment, her fingers working in the air around the ball of light in her hand. “I cast only one,” she eventually said. "It's not acting as it should."

"Well," said Langly, "at least we can see."

Monica subtly nocked an arrow to the string of her bow, and they all took several steps forward. 

The dripping sound was growing louder as they moved into the cave and Teena swung the arm holding the light to the side, trying to get a look at its source. The other lights, still further into the cave and on either side of them, moved as well. 

Scully was the first one to see it. She gasped, the sound echoing off the walls of the chamber. There was a stalagmite very near Teena’s hand, and Scully watched as water ran along its surface, not flowing down, but up, so that when it reached the tip of the rocky protrusion, the droplet of water rose up to the ceiling where it plunked into a large pool, concentric circles widening out from where it landed. Fear flooded through her in a vasoconstrictive rush that made her almost giddy. 

"Are we on the floor?" Langly asked, his voice wavering. "Or is that pool of water on the ceiling?"

The urge to flee was overwhelming and the only thing that kept her from turning tail and loping out of the cave as fast as her legs would carry her, was the low distant sound of her name being called out from far away. 

Scully ! 

It wasn’t a whisper, nor a shout, but a call, and it echoed quietly off the walls of the chamber in the dry baritone of Mulder’s voice. 

“Fox,” said Samantha as though informing herself, and Scully watched as Teena nodded, muttering something so that the light she held moved to float in front of her. She pulled her bow from her shoulder and tested the string. 

“Further up and further in,” she said, and moved forward silently, deeper into the cave. Scully looked to the quiet, unnatural water on the ceiling, and put all her psychic focus on Mulder. Finding Mulder, getting to Mulder. She was stiff with panic, her breath coming in quick little gasps. Mulder, she thought, trying to focus, and Hendrick pressed his lanky bulk into her leg, shoring her up from the outside. 

They moved forward as a unit, the pulsing blue glow of light growing eerier the further into the cave they went. Above them, the water seemed to move in a slow stream, going the same direction they were, wending its way around stalactites ( or were they stalagmites? she thought) to a point deeper in the cave. 

The area they were in seemed to go in a gradual slope up, and when they finally crested the rise, Scully saw the faintest hint of sunlight ahead. The desire to surge forward toward it was immense, but Samantha, who had stayed close, put a silent hand on her arm. She very subtly pointed up. There on the ceiling of the cave, standing in front of the pool like an upside-down Narcissus, was a dæmon in the shape of a rat. 

The animal looked at their reflection in the water and skittered off into the dark.

Chapter Text

Scully was here. Something in him knew it instinctually. Mulder called out her name, hoping to tell her to go, to warn her off, but it was likely she had been funneled into the cave by who knew what, the same as he and his band had been – he only hoped she still had the protection of his mother and the other witches. 

They’d had no choice but to enter the cave, the very center of where all the ley lines converged, he was certain. The power had brought them down, had brought them here, and they soon discovered they weren’t the only ones. 

It was the ferret dæmon he’d seen first, scrambling up the wall until it disappeared into a crevice. Cass had seen it too, and they shared a look. They didn’t need to speak to each other to know what was needed. She quickly changed into a ferret herself and scrambled up the wall after it– easily, as though gravity were being perpetually shunted out – then caught Mulder’s eyes once before disappearing into the same fissure. She’d returned several minutes later, hurriedly, trying to communicate something to him when he saw Scully, his mother, sister, Monica and Langly crest the small rise opposite where he was standing, led by a trio of glowing blue orbs. Between their two groups stood an arch of rock, and on either side of the arch, to the left and right, were two dark openings that must have led to chambers branching out into other parts of the cave system. Sunlight crept in from several cracks in the ceiling of the cave, casting odd shadows into the large cavern. 

“Scully!” he shouted again.

“Mulder!” she called back, and Mulder took off running toward her, Frohike and the others behind him. For their part, Scully and the members of her party started making their way toward Mulder as well, the three blue orbs of light preceding Teena and their group.

“God,” Mulder said, smiling as they approached each other under the rocky arch. “I was afraid I might not see you again.” 

Scully and Hendrick were approaching quickly, but Mulder was in the lead, and when he and Cassiana passed under the arch, Scully suddenly disappeared from in front of him and his view changed, as if someone had switched out the slide in the projection he was looking at. Mulder pulled up short. 

“Mulder?!” Scully shouted, but her voice was coming from a different direction. 

He turned his head slightly and there she was, fifty feet away again, just approaching the arch he’d passed under, but now he himself was standing off to her left, in the mouth of one of the caverns that were on either side of the arch itself. 

“Here!” he called out, and everyone – Scully and his mother, as well as Frohike, Weera and Byers, who were approaching the arch from the other side – turned to the sound of his voice. 

“How did you-?!” Scully called to him, but Frohike held up a hand and stepped forward. He was standing only ten feet from Scully, Teena, Samantha, Langly and Monica. 

“Let me see if…” Frohike said, and he and Annie looked at one another and then stepped forward under the arch. They disappeared, but were instantaneously behind Mulder, stumbling forward, almost tripping into him. 

Mulder locked eyes with the little man. “I’m starting to see how this-”

“Yeah,” said Frohike. 

“Byers, Weera!” Mulder called out. “Step through and see if you come out over here!” 

Byers and Weera, dæmons on their shoulders, clasped hands and walked through the arch, coming out at the same time only a few steps behind Frohike and Mulder. 

Still standing where they’d stopped, Samantha stepped forward. 

“Fox!” his sister called out, and he held up a hand and nodded at her, knowing her plan. She was going to step through the arch from her side to see where she ended up. With a nod at their mother, Samantha stepped through and disappeared. 

Mulder turned, half expecting to see her show up behind them where the others had appeared, but there was nothing. 

“Samantha?” he called out once, but there was no response. “Samantha!” 

Panic clutched at him. From his side, he felt the light touch of claws through the leg of his pants and looked down. Cass was once again a fossa and was on her hind legs, trying to get his attention. She opened her mouth but all that came out were high pitched chirps. 

“Mulder!” Scully called out from where she stood by the arch. Mulder looked up and watched as Teena sent through the three blue orbs of light. They, like Samantha before them, disappeared completely. 

And then a gunshot rang out, and the rock at Mulder’s feet burst into a spray of shrapnel. 

It was all chaos. Mulder dove backwards into the mouth of the cavern he stood before despite not knowing where the shot had come from. He looked immediately to Scully and watched as his mother and Monica wrapped her in a protective embrace and ushered her quickly towards the cavern opening opposite Mulder’s, their two bird dæmons hopping along behind them awkwardly, Langly running ahead as if clearing a path. 

Frohike dove near Mulder, and Byers and Weera were on the opposite side of the cavern’s mouth, huddled closely together. 

There was another shot, but Mulder didn’t see its impact, and the acoustics of the cave made it impossible to trace the sound. And then there was a shout. 

“Give her up, Mulder!” Kyrcek’s voice pinged off every surface of rock. “Give her to me and I won’t tell the Magisterium what you are! Give her up and the rest of you can go!”

Mulder’s eyes darted to Frohike, who shook his head at him with a fierce determination. When he glanced back toward where Scully and the others had gone, they’d entered the darkness of the other cavern. 

“Not going to happen, Krycek!” he shouted back, scanning the rest of the cave, desperately trying to pinpoint where the man was hiding. 

“Then you’re all dead!” There was a scrambling rustling and Mulder could hear several other voices but it was no good tracking them. 

From beside him, Cass darted over to where Annie sat pressing into Frohike’s side. She made a come with me gesture with her paw and then darted up the wall they were nearest to as easily as if it were the floor. She paused and turned around to see if Annie was following her, and when the raccoon stayed put, Cass ran back down. She approached Annie again, changed herself into a raccoon and then once again ran quickly up the wall, stopping once again to look at Annie. 

Annie, seeing how easy it was for Cass, even in the shape of a raccoon, tentatively approached the wall and took several steps. When she found no resistance, she took one look at her human and then darted off after Cass, who ran the rest of the way up the wall and then dashed across the ceiling, Annie hot on her heels, both of them splashing through a shallow pool of water before disappearing amongst the jumble of stalactites with purpose. Frohike had brought a hand to his chest, alarmed, and Mulder realized that Annie had ventured far from her human’s side. Farther than any dæmon should be able to go. 

“Are you all right?” he asked Frohike, who nodded, his face a little shell-shocked. “Does it hurt?”  

Again, Frohike shook his head. “We feel… stretched tight,” he explained. “But it doesn’t hurt. What is this place?” 

Mulder looked around them, sweat beading on his upper lip. “It’s a hell of a place for a standoff,” he said. The little man agreed, darting a tongue out to wet dry lips. 

After they each attempted to try to walk up the wall as Cass and Annie had done but found it impossible (apparently it was something only dæmons could do here), Mulder turned his attention to the area where he’d last seen Scully and his mother, but there was nothing. He raised himself to a crouch and pulled out his pistol, turning to Frohike. 

“I’m going to go out there and draw their fire,” he said. “See if you can figure out where they’re firing from.”

“No,” Frohike said, putting a hand on Mulder’s shoulder. “I won’t let you take that risk. Scully needs you far more than she needs me. My duty is to protect you both.” And before Mulder could issue any kind of argument, Frohike darted off into the open space of the cave, heading for a thin shaft of sunlight that shone more or less in the center. Several shots were fired, nicking up bits of rock where they hit to the left and behind where Frohike was running, giving Mulder a better idea of where the shots were coming from, and he laid down several rounds, covering Frohike until he made it under the patch of sunlight, at which point he disappeared from view. 

XxXxXxXxXxX

Scully couldn’t see anything as she was rushed to the cavern opening opposite where Mulder and the others were, locked between Teena and Monica. She fought for only a second and then gave in as other gunshots rang out. 

Once they were in the dark embrace of the cavern, Teena and Monica slowed up and let her go. 

She whipped around. “Mulder!” she hissed, but Monica grabbed her arm.

“He’s okay,” the witch said to her. “We will get to him. But we have to be smart.”

“What about Samantha?” Scully said, concerned for the other witch. 

“She will find us,” Teena said, her words certain. 

Krycek’s voice rang through the cavern then. Give her up, Mulder! Give her to me and I won’t tell the Magisterium what you are! Give her up and the rest of you can go!

Scully’s stomach sank to her toes. They would never be rid of this man. Mulder shouted back, effectively telling Krycek to go to hell, and Krycek answering that he’d kill them all. On this, from the dim light shining into the cavern, Teena and Monica pulled themselves to their full height and nocked arrows, their bows at the ready.

“Come along,” said Teena, her voice stone cold. 

“But-” Scully started. 

“There is nothing to be gained by staying put. We’re the hunters now, and it’s time these animals knew it.”

Somewhat galvanized but still terribly worried for her partner, Scully reluctantly followed the witches into the dark. 

Teena once again muttered the incantation that called forth the glowing blue light, but this time only one appeared, and she cast it out in front of herself, lighting their way forward. 

While they walked, slowly and silently, Scully reflected on the strangeness of the cave itself. It couldn’t be tears through worlds like what they encountered in Hosteen’s village, as there were no visible rips and when you walked through one, you came out in the same cave, just in a different location. It was mind-bending and mystical and something that Mulder would have delighted in if they weren’t fighting for their lives. 

A few minutes later, the sounds of more gunshots rang out, both in front and behind them, and Teena held up a hand, pausing their movement. Ahead, there was the distant glow of dim sunlight. Ondima stepped forward, her keen nose sniffing the air. She made a quiet chuff of noise and slunk forward. Hendrick took an intent step forward too, but stayed by Scully’s side. 

The gunshots died down after a moment and soon after, Ondima came trotting back, rising up on her hind legs to put her front paws on Langly’s knees. He kneeled down and ran a hand along her back before looking up at Scully and the two witches. 

“I think we found them,” he said. 

Scully watched a grim satisfaction cross Teena’s features. She walked on, carefully and silently. As they approached the dim glow of daylight that was ahead, Teena’s hand closed around the blue orb of light and it disappeared. They were at yet another mouth of a cavern, behind a boulder that stood leaning against the opening. Beyond the boulder was the main body of the cave, the arch at the center, but now they were a quarter of a turn away from the side from which they’d come. If the cave were a clock face, Scully surmised, with the arch at dead center, Mulder was at the 3 o’clock position, she and the others had run into the 9 o’clock position, but had come out at 6 o’clock. 

Ahead, Scully could hear the sound of furtive whispers, and then the dark gray figure of a man crossed in front of them not twenty yards ahead, a gun drawn in his hand and a fierce looking Alasatian dæmon trotting faithfully at his heel. 

Beside her, Monica pulled back the string of her bow, but Teena put a hand out and lowered it, her eyes locked on the man. There would surely be more of them, and the witch queen didn’t want to alert them to their presence quite yet. 

There was a quiet scrabble from above, and Scully’s eyes flew up, expecting to see Krycek’s rat dæmon staring at them and about to give them up, but instead she was surprised to see Annie and another raccoon walking along the ceiling and hiding behind a stalactite, watching the men below, two of whom finally came into view. She recognized one of them as Krycek, whose dark rat sat on his shoulder and the other as the man with the ferret dæmon who’d boarded their balloon in Beringland. 

Hendrick tensed beside her, then she felt a quick sense of elation from him, and she realized the other raccoon must be Cassiana. She felt a profound sense of relief. If Cass was okay, so was Mulder. 

Several more soldiers stepped into view and Krycek stepped around them, looking around a bend and thumbing open the chamber on his gun to spill empty bullet casings to the floor. 

“We need to find the witches,” he told his men, reloading his weapon with bright brass ammunition, one bullet at a time. “The woman is with them. I don’t care about the others; if you see them, kill them.” The men nodded, and Krycek then added, “Except Mulder. I want him for study, if possible. But the woman – she is paramount. Focus on her dæmon. The cheetah. If we can capture the cheetah, she’s ours.”

Hendrick pressed himself into her leg. There was the metallic sound of weaponry being checked and armed and several of the men moved off around the curve of rock and disappeared from view. Above them, Scully watched Annie and Cass scurry off the way they’d come, which caught both Hendrick and Ondima’s attention. The dæmons looked up, intrigued. 

In front of them, Krycek and the soldier with the ferret dæmon were joined by another man, lanky and dark, whose dæmon was a carmine-haired orangutan who looked around the space with a cunning that scared Scully. 

“Cronin,” Krycek said to the lanky man, “with me. Follet,” he directed at the other soldier, “you know what to do.” At this, Krycek and Cronin slunk off around the curve as well, armed to the teeth, and Follet, the only man still before them, sent his ferret dæmon up the wall and to the ceiling. 

Scully didn’t realize what was happening next until Langly stepped forward, his gaze pointed up. Ondima was on the ceiling of the cave, crouched down behind a low pillar, watching as the ferret came bounding along toward her. It happened almost faster than Scully’s eyes could process it; Ondima, a white streak against the red rock of the cave was upon the ferret dæmon like a flash, catching the dæmon in her mouth. Scully could hear the crunch of bone from where she stood and she watched as the soldier Follet fell to his knees. A second later, there was a purple-fletched arrow sticking directly out of his throat, and Teena stepped forward, lowering her bow. The man fell to the rock floor of the cave without a sound and the body of the ferret in Onidma’s mouth disappeared in a puff of dusty haze. 

Ondima shook her head with a foxy sneeze and was slinking along the ceiling back towards the group when suddenly she was hoisted off her feet. No one had seen the orangutan; she blended in with the color of the rocky cave too well. The large primate wrapped its arms around the unsuspecting fox, and with a vicious twist, snapped Ondima’s neck. Beside Scully, Langly fell to the ground with a strangled cry, convulsed once and was still. When she looked back up at the ceiling, the orangutan was gone, and all that was left of Ondima was a dissipating waft of sparkling smoke. 

XxXxXxXxXxX

When he was a child, no more than six years old, before he and Cass had been separated on the plains of Tungusk, Mulder’s sister had taken him south at the height of summer to a small cottage that sat on the shores of a mossy green lake. He had laid in the hot sun flat on his back when they arrived, reveling in the warmth. Cass would lounge beside him, stretched out on the scratchy, damp grass as a silky black cat, both of them enjoying the feeling of being out of doors, unencumbered by the layers of fur and wool that were always necessary in the frigid wind of Lake Skilak. 

Samantha, patient, kind and encouraging, had suggested several times that he might like to swim in the green lake, to enjoy the break from the cold white north and its endless crust of frozen white. Mulder would eye the choppy water with an air of mistrust and decline her suggestion, but would eventually wander out onto the cottage’s little dock. He would sit on the end of the weathered gray wood, running his toes over the surface of the water, watching the V shaped skein of wake his foot would create. Cassiana would sometimes flit above and around his head as a dragonfly – an animal she’d been delighted to discover when they arrived – and sometimes as that same black cat, raptly watching the schools of minnows retreat and advance from the attack of Mulder’s bubbly toes. 

“Why don’t you want to go in?” Cass had asked him on the third day, her tail swishing back and forth over the dock’s prickly boards. 

“I’m frightened,” he’d answered sullenly. It was no use hiding anything from his dæmon. He’d never had the opportunity to swim before, and was afraid of sinking to the bottom of the choppy expanse before him. It wasn’t only a fear of the unknown, however. Mulder was not a child who liked to do or try things he wouldn’t be immediately good at. 

“ I’m not afraid,” his dæmon had said with all the hauteur of the cat she embodied, though Mulder knew that wasn’t entirely true. He could feel her fear, though it was more an intrigued, excited fear than the nervous unease he experienced whenever he thought of shucking off his shirt and diving in. 

“Liar,” Mulder said to her. Being afraid made him morose and argumentative. 

“Shows what you know,” Cass said, rising to her feet and backing up a few steps. And before Mulder could say another word, she’d darted forward and dove into the air, changing form as she hit the surface of the water into something large, gray and slick. 

Mulder jumped to his feet and called her name. He’d planned to give her an earful as soon as she surfaced, which she inevitably had to do, but she didn’t come up. And he began to feel something he’d never felt before, a bone-clutching terror – a sense of loss so profound, he found he couldn’t breathe. 

When he was reaching a level of desperation so acute that he was about to jump in to look for his dæmon, she came flying up out of the water and crashed into the surface with an almighty splash, most of the force of which Mulder took right in the face. He stumbled back, sputtering. When he’d wiped his face dry, he glared at her. 

“What are you supposed to be?” 

“A dolphin,” she said happily, her bulbous head sticking out of the water. “We saw one in a book, don’t you remember?”

“No,” he said viciously. The feeling she’d evoked in him — the fright, the terror, the sense of loss — bubbled to the surface and instantly vectored to anger. 

“The water’s nice!” Cass called out. “It’s shallow! We won’t sink!”

But Mulder was having none of it. He turned on his heel and stormed off down the dock back toward the shore. Even as he was doing so, he could feel the painful pull in his chest as he moved away from his dæmon, but he knew she was feeling it too, and he was angry and scared and wanted to punish her. A self-flagellation he wouldn’t understand until he was older. 

“Fox!” she called out to him from the water, her voice high and thin, distressed. 

He marched off even faster, the invisible cord of their connection pulled tight. Up and onto the grass he walked until he was gasping for breath and stumbling, desperate for reunion but still so angry . 

And then a splash and the sounds of keratin nails on wood and he turned around just as Cass, now a shaggy terrier, launched herself into the air and he caught her and they both wept with relief and completion, burrowing into each other and vowing never, never again. 

As he crouched on the rocky floor of the mystical Black Hills cave, he realized that that same feeling — the one of relief and completion — was what he felt whenever Scully was in his arms. And the feeling he had now — a wretched loneliness, a terrifying sense of loss — was what he’d felt on the dock that day with Cass. Now the anger was coming back, the rage, the need to punish . 

Krycek and his men would pay . 

Cass came trotting down the wall next to him, her face as set and resolute as his own. 

“Is Annie okay?” Mulder asked her, looking around for the raccoon. Cass, once again a fossa, nodded once. “Good,” Mulder said, and stood from where he was crouched, turning toward the dark back of the cavern. He was certain that this part of the cave was like the others, and would lead him somewhere unexpected. He gripped his pistol in his hand. 

“With me,” he said to Byers and Weera as he passed them, and they fell into step behind him without a word. 

XxXxXxXxXxX

They had moved Langly’s body back behind the boulder that sat in front of the entrance of the cavern they were in, sitting his body up against the rock. As Teena kneeled at his side muttering an invitation to Yambe-Akka, Scully entertained a flitting thought that it looked as if the man were sleeping.  

The surprise had worn off and she felt a kind of hollow despair settle onto her. Hendrick bumped his head up into her hand, and she ran her hand along the fur of his head, caressing the flexible cup of his ear with the V of her thumb. 

“Oh, Hen,” she whispered, and she heard a quiet, catty groan in response. 

Teena rose from Langly’s side. 

“The orangutan will find his people if he hasn’t already. Come.” With this she began limping off in the direction the Magisterium men had gone. Monica put a hand briefly on Langly’s blond head and then followed her queen. Scully, Hendrick at her side, followed along behind. 

Past the red rock wall in front of them and around a long curving path, they entered a tunnel,  walking with bows at the ready, but they encountered no one. The tunnel was dark, with only a faint light far ahead. They walked cautiously forward, pausing several times to listen for the sound of the men they’d followed, but there was only the sound of their own breathing. 

As they approached the light, Scully could see that the end of the tunnel was not the naturally shaped opening one expected in a cave system, but rather looked like a doorway, even and straight on the sides, rising up into a rounded lintel. They advanced toward it, pausing while they were still enveloped by the darkness. Not a sound came from in front of them, and after several long moments, Teena eased forward, stepping through under the rock transom and into the light. 

The room, if you could call it that, was fairly large, nearly the same size as the great hall in the Lake Skilak palace where they’d shared a meal in Max Fenig’s memory. It was the same warm red rock of the rest of the cave with natural sunlight diffusing in through cracks in the roof, but was shaped like a septagon, with seven even sides, and in the center of each side sat a doorway exactly like the one they had just stepped through. There was no one about. 

Scully followed the two witches into the light. She turned, looking around, getting a closer look at the doorway they’d just walked through. Above it, carved into the rock, was the shape of a feline. Curious, she looked above each of the other six doorways, having to get closer to each to see what was carved there. She found, in turn: the shape of a canine, a butterfly, a snake, an ape, and a bird. She turned to Teena. 

“What do you think they are?” she asked. 

“If we were to venture down each one,” the queen said, “my guess is we would find ourselves in different parts of this cave system. Perhaps,” she went on, “different parts of other places like it in the world.” She held her hand out, palm facing down, as if the ground were speaking to her. “It is unpredictable, I think. And unsafe.”

At her feet, Jasper jumped up, flapping his wings and she leaned down to pick up and put the white raven on her shoulder. Noises began coming from one of the other portals. The three women skipped back into the darkness of the doorway they had entered through and a few moments later, under the lintel with the butterfly above it, Mulder, Byers and Weera came trotting through the opening. 

“Mulder!” Scully couldn’t help but shout, and ran forward, Hendrick several paces behind her, making for Mulder, whose head whipped toward her, a smile cracking through the grim set of his face. 

“Scully!” he called out. 

They were about thirty feet from each other when a gunshot rang out and Byers, who was right on Mulder’s heels, went flying backwards. Four Magisterium men came barreling out of the snake tunnel to her right and three more, Kryek and Cronin among them, came out of the ape tunnel to her left. 

She felt an arm tugging her back and then once again: chaos. 

XxXxXxXxXxX

Mulder only had time to turn his head to where the gunshot had erupted, a bright blaze coming from the muzzle of a large pistol in the doorway of the dark tunnel to his right before he dropped to one knee and began firing back. Behind him, he heard the sickening thud of Byers’ body falling to the Earth, and then the sharp twang of several arrows being loosed from Weera’s bow. Two of the men, including the gunman who had fired, fell, both with purple fletched arrows sticking out of their eye sockets. Mulder barely had time to recognize the shape of a coyote and wolverine dæmon before they disappeared into the ether. 

He heard the sounds of struggle behind him, but couldn’t look, for the third man was upon him, barreling into him with a shoulder into the ribs. He flew back, fossa Cass scrambling forward, snarling, throwing herself at the neck of the man’s jackal dæmon, her long tail whipping through the air as they grappled. Mulder landed several punches to the man’s ribs before he caught an elbow to the chin and he went flying back, his ears ringing.

He scrambled to his feet, but the soldier was just as quick as he was, with fists that felt like hammers. When the man landed a blow to his temple, Mulder crumpled, not unconscious, but dazed. The man then flipped him onto his stomach and pressed a sharp knee into his back. His face was pressed to the hard rock below him, but his eyes flicked around, searching for Scully. He saw Bruno struggling with a thick snake dæmon, the ropey body of the reptile thrashing as Bruno lashed out with talons and beak. 

Mulder turned his face, scraping his chin against the rocky ground, and watched as Monica and Weera pulled a barely conscious Byers back under the doorway with the bird above it, and that’s when the pressure on his back let up. Cass had gotten the drop on the jackal, and Mulder flipped over and kicked out the soldier’s knee as he was distracted with his dæmon’s pain, and kicked the man in the face, hard. There was a sickening crunch, and the jackal, caught up in the snarling jaws of Cassiana, turned to smoke. 

Mulder whipped around, and saw his mother, her bow raised high, Scully behind her. 

Hendrick was several paces in front of both of them, clearly torn between staying near Scully as Samantha had instructed him to do, and entering the fray. His lips were curled back in a vicious snarl. 

“The cheetah!” Krycek shouted, and Mulder saw his rat dæmon leap onto the floor and skitter up the wall of the chamber. “Get her dæmon!” Krycek was pointing at Hendrick. 

A large dog dæmon bounded forward, growling, and then a streak of yellow shot past Mulder and barreled into the Alsatian, and Hendrick waited no more, flying forward and joining the fray. And as he watched the animals grappling in a blur of frenzied snarling, Mulder realized that Cass had turned into a cheetah in an effort to confuse their enemy, and he felt a surge of fierce love fizzle through him. 

Powered by the savage emotion, he launched himself at Krycek and landed a punch to the man’s nose, which made a satisfying crunch before he was pulled back by another soldier. As he was hauled several feet away, Mulder watched as the snake dæmon, who had managed to escape Bruno’s clutches, was slithering forward toward Hendrick and Cass, who were standing shoulder to shoulder, hair bristled on the napes of their necks. In front of them was the large dog and an orangutan that was shifting his weight back and forth looking at the cheetahs with malicious intent. 

One of the arms of the man who’d been pulling him back slipped, affording Mulder the opportunity to throw back an elbow, which connected with the man’s stomach. Mulder whipped around and began fighting the soldier, going at it hammer and tongs, their momentum carrying them back towards the doorways on the opposite end of the chamber. He landed one hard blow and the man stumbled back. 

Mulder heard the whisper of an arrow ripping through the air and the soldier he’d been fighting fell, the arrow sticking out of his chest snapping when he hit the rocky ground. 

Mulder whirled around, and watched in horror as the orangutan picked up one cheetah and hurled it through the doorway behind her. And then a gunshot rang out and his mother crumpled. 

Monica screamed and Mulder lurched forward, but Krycek was too fast, and he had his arms around Scully’s neck before Teena hit the ground.

“Mother!” Mulder screamed out, and Krycek smiled viciously, blood still leaking from his nose, his face a grotesque mask, Mulder’s mother laying at his feet. 

Mulder could see her chest rising and falling with shallow breaths, Jasper a small lump of white at her head. The remaining two Magisterium men moved in slowly to flank Krycek, weapons trained on Teena. The two men’s dæmons, the orangutan and Alsatian, were at their feet, baring fangs at Hendrick, who was crouched low, snarling. 

Mulder felt the burn of fury streak through him, flames of rage licking up inside the walls of his chest. “I’m going to kill you!” he hissed, drawing another wicked smile from the heretic hunter. 

“I only want the child,” Krycek said. “You can have her back when he’s born.”

Mulder growled, sounding more like a dæmon than an actual man. He could see Monica on the other side of the open area, her bow pulled back, arrow ready to fly. But Mulder knew that she couldn’t, wouldn’t dare loose the arrow – the chance of hitting Scully was too great. 

His fingers flexed. They weren’t that far away. He could bum rush them. But the risk of hurting Scully stopped him as well. Krycek started to ease his way backward toward one of the portals. It was only a matter of seconds before they disappeared. Probably for good. 

Then, a gentle warm tap to his hand. He looked down and was staring into the eyes of Cass, who had appeared silently at his side. She looked up at him beseechingly and then turned, walking into the portal nearest where they stood. Cass wanted him to follow, he could feel it. But Scully was up ahead of him, as was his mother. And Krycek was gradually moving away from him. 

Cass gave a high chirp, but Mulder ignored her, unable to take his eyes off of Scully. 

The dæmon chirped again, and this time, the high, bird-like sound drummed up a memory: of Albert Hosteen and his red-tailed hawk dæmon. Words from the Navajo man came back to him from what felt like a lifetime ago. 

You must follow her, Mr. Mulder. When everything is telling you not to, you must follow your dæmon, like I did. If you do that, everything that should come to pass, will.

With no other choice and a feeling that wrenched him from the inside out, Mulder turned away from Scully and followed his dæmon into the dark.

XxXxXxXxXxX

Scully could barely breathe. Krycek’s grip around her throat was tight and he was pulling her backwards. There was no telling where the portal behind them would lead, and the strangeness of the cave made her situation even more precarious and unpredictable, as one more step back was not only another step away from Mulder, but a step toward the unknown. She could see her partner at the mouth of one of the other doorways, his face a desperate mask of panic.  

She could hear Hendrick snarling beside her, facing off with the two dæmons of Krycek’s men who were flanking them. The orangutan was powerful, and paired with the snapping jaws of the dog dæmon next to her, she knew Hendrick was outmatched. As they backed away from Teena, Scully could see that the pool of blood under the woman was growing bigger. In desperation, Scully looked up once again to find Mulder’s eyes, to tell him how sorry she was for everything that had and would happen. But Mulder was gone. 

In concert with the bizarre machinations of all she had encountered in the Black Hills, everything that happened next seemed to go in slow motion. 

A single arrow went flying above her head from Monica’s bow, whistling through the air as quietly as a mother shushing a child. A moment later, Alex Krycek’s rat dæmon fell to the ground in front of her with the arrow sticking out and through the creature’s shoulder. Krycek himself hissed and stumbled, loosening his grip. Scully lifted her leg and ground it into the top of his foot and then he was wrenched backward and Scully herself fell forward to her knees. As she turned, she saw two streaks of yellow come flying at the orangutan and Alsatian, as Hendrick and Cass – still in the shape of a cheetah – hurled themselves at the two dæmons with ferocious intent. And behind her, wrenching Kyrcek backward and then throwing him to the ground was Mulder, who had appeared out of the portal door behind them. 

Scully crawled forward to Teena’s side, pressing her hands into the wound in her torso, and the old woman’s ice blue eyes found hers. 

“I’ve got you,” Scully said, knowing and despairing at the fading look on Teena’s face. 

And then there was the piercing shriek of an eagle. Scully looked up and before her came Thorcan, flying through the air upside-down until he twisted above her and then dove down, sinking his talons into the thrashing body of Krycek’s dæmon, who gave an unholy squeal. 

Walking towards them all was Samantha, who came through the last unexplored portal in the chamber, looking as wild and fierce as a February blizzard. Frohike was behind her, Scully’s pistol drawn in his hand. 

Frohike fired once and the soldier to Scully’s right fell with a grunt, his Alsatian dæmon bursting to a bright haze in Hendrick’s snarling mouth. Another shot and the soldier to her left fell to his knees and then slumped. Cass had sunk her fangs into his orangutan dæmon’s neck, and she too burst into ethereal smoke.  

As Samantha approached closer, Scully saw that she was wielding the three blue orbs that Teena had sent through the arch, the flashes of light turning in her hand as though dancing around a maypole. 

“Fox,” the witch said, her voice low and powerful. “Away.” 

Scully turned to look over her shoulder, watching as Mulder, who was sitting on top of Krycek, his fist high in the air to deliver yet another blow, looked up at his sister and then slid off the heretic hunter and to the ground next to him. 

Samantha mumbled something that Scully couldn’t understand and the blue orbs in her hand – all three — shot out and went flying into Krycek’s mouth. The man lurched up into the air, his entire head seemingly glowing, bright blue light radiating out of his nose and mouth and ears, and eerily, out of his eyes so that they glowed like the fairies of the deep. Another muttered word and then Krycek went completely stiff, the light shot out of him and vaporized, and the man slumped back to the earth, dead. 

Mulder had been watching, transfixed, but after a moment he shook himself and scrambled to Scully’s side. He reached out a hand and grabbed her shoulder. 

“Scully?” he said desperately. “Are you-”

“I’m fine, Mulder,” she said shakily, and gave him a weary, empathetic look, turning to Teena, whose breaths were coming quick and shallow. 

“Mom?” he said, his voice sounding young and far away. 

Samantha approached and sank to her knees on Teena’s other side. The old woman looked up, a weak smile lighting up her face. 

“Yambe-Akka is with me,” the queen said weakly to her daughter. “And so,” she said, turning to her son and coughing once as she raised a hand to touch Mulder’s cheek, “are you.” 

With that, her hand slipped down and the light went out of her face. Beside her, the ancient white crow crumbled into silvery ash and Samantha became queen of the Lake Skilak clan. 

Chapter Text

“I must go back,” Samantha said, as they walked out of the Black Hills into a low rich valley with grazing bison dotting the vast expanse of green in the distance. “I must get back to Lake Skilak to ascend to the throne and tell our sisters what happened here.” Mulder looked stricken, but he nodded his acceptance. Samantha turned to Monica and Weera, who were helping Byers make his way gingerly down the path. “It is your choice whether to come with me or accompany my brother and his woman the rest of the way on their journey.”

“Will we be safe?” Scully asked. “On our own?”

“My mother’s spell, the one I sent into Alex Krycek, was ancient and powerful. No one will remember he even existed, nor those he hunted and why. No one will pursue you. Do you still have the Navajo ring?” She looked at Scully, who held up her hand, showing it. Samantha nodded. “Then you will have the protection of our clan. Help will find you if you need it.”

Monica stepped forward. “I will see them safely to Bowie’s Revenge,” she said. “And I’ll see their child brought into the world.”

Samantha gave her a warm smile.

“And I,” said Weera, standing tall next to Byers. “Will be staying with John.”

“I wish you both happiness,” Samantha said, and Byers, his arm in a white sling, looked at Weera moonily.

Thorcan had flown north ahead of Samantha, taking wing as soon as what remained of the group had stumbled out of the area where their balloon had gone down. Despite their injuries, they had all been eager to be away from the mystic hills and marched on through what remained of that day and into the night, settling before a fire only when the dæmons had once again found their voices.

Now Samantha stepped toward where Hendrick and Cassiana were sitting, side by side and shoulder to shoulder, a matching pair of spotted felines, Cass’s ability to change at will having left her in the form of what she was when Teena’s ancient spell died with her. She was now and would always remain a cheetah. Samantha crouched down before them and the three spoke in hushed tones.

Mulder lightly gripped Scully’s elbow, leading her down the path a bit more and away, affording them some privacy. They were a half day’s walk from the nearest village according to Bruno, who was riding the breezes in the air above them. Annie and Frohike ambled ahead in the lead of the group, Weera’s parrot dæmon Kinnick and Mia bringing up the rear, jumping from branch to branch in the treetops. Wishing to remain anonymous and away from other people until they settled at Bowie’s Revenge, when they reached the village, they would buy horses and whatever other conveyance was needed for the rest of the long journey south.

When Mulder glanced back over his shoulder a few minutes later, his sister was gone. Cass and Hendrick trotted towards them to catch up, and when she’d pulled level with her human, Cass looked up.

“She promised to take care of the dead,” the dæmon said, “to give them a proper send off in Lake Skilak.” Mulder nodded and turned to help Scully over a tree that had fallen across the path.

XxXxXxXxXxX

They traveled for weeks, months, always headed south, with new identities and papers that Frohike had acquired for them out of an abundance of caution; through the rest of New Denmark and further south, Scully lumbering and growing more heavily gravid with the weight of their child. They traveled until the mountains became plains, until the undulating hills were prickled with mesquite. On and on to a home where they would be safe.

“Texas,” Frohike said, when they passed over an unmarked border, and Scully felt something inside of her release. Still they pressed on.

When it felt like the interminable journey might never end, they crested a rise and finally saw it: Bowie’s Revenge, the ranch house as large and proud as its namesake.

The ground here was dusty and firm, the grass yellowish-green, abundant, stretching off into the horizon, only mottled with the scrub of sagebrush, which gave the air an earthy sun-baked smell, fragrant as a spring morning and dry as a moth’s wing.

The house sat on the prairie, a sturdy, proud building, timber framed and as brown as the mountains in the distance. Scully felt a kind of settling in her bones, a warmth that came from the earth.

From beneath them, the horses snickered and stamped their feet — they could sense the end of the road.

Mulder made a calming sound in the back of his throat and reached forward to pat the beast’s neck. Cass trotted on ahead of them with Annie. She could of course range far further than the others, and Frohike had to spur his horse forward to keep up with his dæmon.

“Look at this place!” Cass called out to Mulder, looking eagerly toward the house. “There’s no one here but us!”

Hendrick was walking slowly, as bone-tired as Scully, the feline shoulder bones of his frame trodding each tiring step. He slowed as Scully reined her horse and sniffed the air, scenting the currents.

“The boy will do well here,” Hendrick said to her, a contented look in his eye. “There is nothing but space and warmth.”

Scully sat up straighter in the saddle, her eyes casting over the horizon. It was a good place. Wild, free. Somewhere their son could grow without a care in the world. A place so far removed from the Magisterium, only the sky would be his limit.

She rubbed Albert Hosteen’s ring, her thumb catching on the chipped corner.

“I think so too, Hen,” she said.

XxXxXxXxXxX

The pains came on a Saturday, when Mulder and Byers were out in the south pasture, repairing a fence. Weera appeared at Mulder’s shoulder and put a gentle hand on his arm.

“It’s time,” she said kindly, giving him an encouraging smile.

He had stripped to his waist in the heat, and as her words registered, he grabbed his shirt from a fence post and tore across the field, Cass flying out in front of him like the very wind carried her. He was utterly winded and gasping for breath by the time he stumbled through the door to the house and into the large foyer at its entrance.

Frohike was making his way in through the kitchen to his left, carrying two pails of water he’d brought in from the pump and he proceeded to pour them into a large kettle that was steaming over the kitchen’s fire.

“Easy, son,” the older man said to him, giving him a bemused smile. “Catch your breath. Wash the dirt from your hands and face. Perhaps put on a shirt. The babe is not yet here, and you’ve hours to go helping your wife get through the birth.”

Mulder leaned over and put his hands on his knees to catch his breath. He saw the sense in the man’s words and washed himself quickly over the sink in the kitchen before pulling back on the light linen shirt. Cass stood next to him, practically dancing with impatience.

Frohike handed Mulder a towel to dry his face and hands, and said kindly: “They’re in the back bedroom.”

When Mulder and his dæmon walked into the room, Scully rolled her head on her pillow and smiled at him, reaching out a hand, which he took. Monica was sitting at the foot of the bed, just pulling down the hem of the old nightgown Scully wore.

“We’re getting there,” the witch said, giving Mulder a warm smile. “But she’s going to need you.”

“I’ll be here for every minute,” Mulder said, leaning down to press a kiss to Scully’s damp forehead.

And need him, she did.

It was a long labor, and he walked Scully on circuits through the house, pausing to dig his thumbs into her back, the weight of her low and pendulous, the strength of her apparent in every wracking contraction.

Finally, with the two cheetahs watching from the corner of the room, Scully settled back into the bed and Monica carefully checked her. The witch turned to Mulder.

“I need you to either hold her knee or her hand, wherever Dana would like you best.”

“Hand,” said Scully weakly, reaching out to Mulder. Hendrick drifted over to stand at her other side, Cass standing back respectfully.

His son was born after the sun set on a late spring day, with a cool breeze gently fanning out the gauzy curtains that covered the window. He praised Scully and marveled over their child, shook Frohike’s hand entirely too hard and twirled Weera around the foyer until her feet lifted off the ground.

He ran outside and shouted the news to the empty prairie and Kinnick flew off joyfully with tidings of the birth, headed first to Scully’s family in Maryland and then on to Lake Skilak.

When Mulder finally came back into the room, the baby was wrapped in a bright white blanket in the crook of Scully’s arms and she gave him a dreamy smile. Monica wiped her hands on a cloth and backed out of the room with a silent, happy expression, closing the door behind her.

From outside came the lonely yipe of a coyote.

Mulder pulled up a chair and sighed blissfully, running his fingers through the hair at Scully's temple.

"How about we name him William?" he finally said, feeling like he couldn’t possibly be happier.

"No," said Scully, nuzzling the baby’s soft head. "I want to name him Lee."

Hendrick and Cassiana stood on the other side of the bed, looking at the child and his tiny dæmon, who was curled on her side in a tuck of blanket, covered in fuzz and barely recognizable as that of an infant hare.

“And she,” said Hendrick, bending his head toward the little creature and glancing once at Cass, who nodded at him, “will be called Hester.”

THE END

“Out of the little grove, away from the baffled Spectres, out of the valley, past the mighty form of his old companion the armour-clad bear, the last little scrap of the consciousness that had been the aëronaut Lee Scoresby floated upwards, just as his great balloon had done so many times. Untroubled by the flares and the bursting shells, deaf to the explosions and the shouts and cries of anger and warning and pain, conscious only of his movement upwards, the last of Lee Scoresby passed through the heavy clouds and came out under the brilliant stars, where the atoms of his beloved dæmon Hester were waiting for him.”
― Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials