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Summer was getting on, now. All things came and went in their time.

For Hvergelmir, her vigils at North End Park had gone from chilly and mostly quiet to seasonably warm and somewhat more interesting. That was all well and good, but summer brought with it certain tidings that were less pleasant than the warmth and activity of the long season — to which end, she now sat comfortably on her bench once more, but this time flanked on the ground to either side of her with citronella candles, lit and filling the air with the powerful scent of bug repellant. It wasn’t classy or elegant, but Hvergelmir could hardly say she was looking at her classiest and most elegant of late, anyway; she still bore the marks of her run-in with Gehenna, and bandages covered her left hand where she’d recently had cause to carve a hasty, rudimentary star. She couldn’t imagine she was going to inspire much confidence in anyone, at this point.

Still, she’d missed too many days, lately. With Aquarius missing — with being pulled to Olympus without warning — with suddenly having to divert to her Wonder when Babylon had been falling apart at the seams — with everything that had happened with Gehenna — she’d been kept from about half of her days normally spent at North End Park. Now it was time to get back on schedule. She’d told people they could look for her there, and that meant she had to be there: even with a nasty shiner and an ugly series of cuts on her cheek. Even looking like the second-rate knight she was.

She’d just made it about halfway through a Merl Reagle crossword puzzle when she felt an aura moving into her vicinity. Setting her pen and puzzle book down in her lap, she folded her hands, waiting, trying to sense it as it moved closer.

Powerful, she noted. A general.

Bischofite, maybe, Hvergelmir considered with some hope. We’re supposed to meet. Then, with a little more trepidation, thinking of Babylon, Or it could be Avalon. She’s never come, though.

“Meursault?” she called out into the dark, past the interlocked penumbras of the street lamp and the two citronella candles. “Is that you?”

Bischofite.

There he was again: half demon, half shambling horror. It proved no less unsettling the second time.

Hvergelmir had been able to rationalize much of her discomfort away in the time since their last meeting. Absence, in this case, really did make the heart grow fonder -- if you could call it that. Without him there, Bischofite existed in her mind only as an idea, a concept in the abstract -- a General crippled by a Chaotic infection, looking to be free of it. No matter which way you turned that problem, the answer was the same, and in her mind, relatively unfettered: if he wanted purification (and this was certainly reason enough for her to believe that anyone would), there was no reason not to offer it to him. (She'd prepared her arguments on that score already, back when she'd expected to have to convince Camelot of it. Thankfully, there'd been no need.)

In the flesh, however, he was an uncomfortable combination of threatening from about three different directions. His appearance, first -- which, while no fault of his, was chilling, and which made her wish she was the kind of person possessed of natural poise and stoicism, who could mask their discomfort behind a cool demeanor. She felt guilty for reacting to it.

His aura, second -- and there was no banishing the weight of that as he approached, all that chthonic energy growing more air-stiflingly oppressive with his slow advance, finally closing in around her when he sat. That was a general's aura up close -- Chaos at its third level. It nearly made her skin crawl, it was such an uncomfortable thing to be near.

But there was something else radiantly vicious in him, something that came not from the youma grafted onto him or the Chaos threaded through his being, something that found its seat deeper, and was uncomfortably human. She remembered the heat of his breath on her ear from last time, trying to scare her. (Succeeding.) Schreibersite was sweet by nature, from what she'd seen; Titanlåvenite was gentle. Bischofite was neither of these things.

Neither was Gehenna when you met him, she reminded herself. Neither were half the knights at that first meeting, from how they spoke. You don't know. Foul thoughts, foul words, foul acts -- and he'd wanted to tell her about them, hadn't he? -- but for all that, he was still not some kind of living Angra Mainyu. He was still only a human being.

Focus on the human being. The rest is just shadows and cobwebs.

"I'm sorry I couldn't come sooner," she said. "Things've been . . . unexpected lately."

Hvergelmir looked down at her hand, the star on her palm scabbed over in meaty red. She was still recovering her energy from the too-early trip to her Wonder with Babylon. "The wood chipper in question was friendly fire -- a, uh, philosophical disagreement with a Mars knight. And this one's self-inflicted," she said, indicating she meant her hand.

"I have good news for you, though, I think. I found someone willing to make the attempt. If -- "

She broke off, looking away from the deep shadows of his masked face beneath the streetlamp, casting a wary glance backward to his chattering wings. "Is it safe to say all this out loud? Do you think they'd repeat it and put you at risk of being found out? I can write it down if that's better." It would be easy enough -- she had a pen and could easily find a blank spot on a page of her puzzle book to write on.

"'Too much order,'" Hvergelmir echoed, considering the information he'd offered. Well, the Negaverse army was a military organization, after all -- she'd known that. Little surprise to find they favored rules more keenly than a Catholic school. "Order, Chaos -- kind of a nomenclature issue there, don't you think? We call it Chaos, but everything on your side's structure. Everything you come from's . . . grafted from the same plant, if you catch my drift. Your soldiers are all created, all engineered from the same source. It's what we call Order that flourishes on its own -- we pop into being spontaneously, cut from different cloths and in mismatched shapes. The wording always struck me as weird."

Hvergelmir didn't always bother with semantics, talking to other people. Tara was usually the only other person interested, so she was used to screening it all out for the sake of avoiding longsuffering looks of parents and acquaintances. It was odd to find herself going on at any kind of length remotely approaching her scatterbrained thoughts -- she guessed she'd gotten the impression, in this case, that Bischofite was kind of the ruminating type himself. He hadn't lacked for conviction last time, that she could tell.

His questions to her were a little more interesting. Not many people really asked her, Laney, what are your thoughts on human evil? But here was the closest thing she supposed most people might ever meet to it, and it wanted her opinion. How deeply unlikely.

"That would be easier, wouldn't it? For everybody. If there was such a thing as bad people." Hvergelmir laced her fingers together, making a bridge out of them where she could rest her chin, looking out on the evening sky. The stars were lost in a dim soup of light pollution -- but they were out there even so, whether she could see them or not. "People that choose to think that way, that some people are bad, rather than doing bad . . . well, I guess I figure it's a convenient way to abdicate your own responsibility for what you choose to do or not to do. I can't change, because I'm a bad person. Or, I can eliminate him from our society, because he's a bad person, and bad people will always be bad. The only inherent predisposition toward antisocial behavior -- other than a Chaos infection, really -- is mental illness -- and modern society's at least not blind enough to pretend that's a moral failing, except in, like, criminal procedurals, I guess. You and I are both capable of free thought and free action -- neither of us has an intrinsic, incontrovertible nature that generates some kind of moral destiny that's magically out of our control. That's a cop-out. That's a fantasy that lets people excuse themselves for not trying harder, for giving up because changing seems like a lot of work. It's a lie that makes it easier to throw the switch on the electric chair.

"Ethics exist. Morals exist too -- everyone has their own. But if you're asking me if I believe in a universal human morality -- no, I guess I don't. The fact that we live on a planet with different groups all saying what the supposed 'universal' morality is is proof it doesn't exist. But it sure does make it easy to hate the guy on the other side of the fence."

She shrugged, wondering what he was driving at with his questions. "I didn't ask you to tell me what you'd done, last time. You wanted a way out, so I found you a door. It's up to you if you want to walk through it or not -- I don't know what it is you want to be on the other side. But if you stay this way, with Chaos in you -- all you'll ever become is what it makes you."

Bischofite's description of Ida and her viewpoints was disheartening, but she supposed she had to admit they were common sentiments. Plenty of people had espoused them at Olympus: Save the ones who'll fight for what we fight for. Save the good ones.

"Um. It's hard for me to judge. People, like your Sailor Ida," she started out, trying to spin together her thoughts into a compelling argument of some kind as she went, "are given powers other people don't have, and that creates a choice about how you're going to use them. Most people have -- moral structures, I guess, that dictate what values they ascribe to the choices they make -- and that means every choice they make is a responsibility to themselves about which of their values they'll choose to uphold. Deciding to fight, or not to fight, is difficult for most people. Some of them need a powerful reason to take that kind of an action, and they need to believe in something very clear and absolute to keep doing it. Some days it's too hard to let yourself face a grayer choice. Some days you lie to yourself because you're only hanging on to your convictions by your fingernails. If Ida told you you didn't deserve to be free of Chaos, didn't deserve anything happy or good in life, she was wrong -- or she lied to herself. Any human being benefits from the chance to think for themselves, to experience happiness."

She shifted in her seat, stretching her legs out straight and crossing them at the ankle.

"Please don't mistake me," Hvergelmir said, somewhat wearily. "Violent acts against humans are against my moral beliefs. I find value in my own life and my well-being, and you could say I extend that same value to other people. If you disagree, that's what your moral beliefs dictate, and that's not right or wrong -- but it's still an ethical problem, if you actually act on it."

Feeling restless, or maybe just not wanting to keep pantomiming the same chin-on-hands pose as Bischofite, Hvergelmir got up out of her seat. She walked around to the back of the bench -- alongside his monstrous wings, instead of his too-scrutinous eyes -- and leaned against the back of the bench, staring out in the opposite direction from where Bischofite had been looking.

"A nihilist and an absurdist are probably never going to have any answers to offer each other, so take me with a grain of salt -- but there aren't any truly free people in the world. The only people who honestly believe that's possible -- that freedom exists entirely in the mind, and can be absolute -- are ones who've never felt what it's like to have some other freedom taken away. We're a social species, and our society's a system of ethics that reflects popular morality -- just like you said. It's the social contract you sign when you go out to buy a hot dog from a vendor or drive a car. The minute you participate in human society you're not free -- unless you can become powerful enough to stop people from pushing you back into line you when you do something unethical, in which case, congrats on being the CEO of De Beers. If society's too restrictive, I guess you can always find some untouched patch of jungle and become a solitary animal, like a tiger -- but most of us decide that we like hot dogs and air conditioning and other people too much."

She turned back to study him, eyes on his raw, strange mask and his lank black hair like old motor oil. The things he says he believes -- is this really still a human being? she thought for a brief, uncertain, guilty moment -- but then, turning away again: Of course it is. He's here, after all. If he didn't want answers -- if they didn't mean something to him, whether he acknowledges that or not -- he wouldn't be here asking.

That meant she had to try, no matter how much Bischofite seemed to be reconsidering. She dug her nails into the wood at the back of the bench.

My philosophy's all Gutenberg Project and Wikipedia and sloppy improv. A college education, or even a high school diploma, would probably be better, but all I can do is guess. I wish I knew what to say.

Hvergelmir let out a long, slow sigh, trying again. " 'Kill them all, let God sort them out.' 'Only worthy knights, to sit at the Round Table.' Yeah -- I suppose they're both philosophies you'll find in abundance, for what they're worth. I can't claim to have a sect of nihilist knights hidden up my sleeve, or that our side's any more enlightened than yours, or than the general population. The fact is, though, if those philosophies are all we ever have on our side, we can't possibly survive this war. If the Negaverse army came against us in full strength, we'd lose. Our people are too few, and yours are too powerful. If we kill people who could've joined us, or turn them away as unworthy -- if we demand some kind of full goose-stepping accord instead of just a common affinity -- we're going to have a really, really small army. Whether they like it or not -- and it's true, most of them probably won't -- we need you. We need to learn to work with people like you. I can't promise the conversation will be any more intellectually fulfilling than, uh, than this, really. But if you want to suffer and toil -- well, I can promise you that much. It's all our side does."

Hvergelmir blinked at Bischofite a few times. She'd been worriedly anticipating a few different reactions -- ire, despondency, rejection, his flat walking away from the whole endeavor and giving up on purification as no longer to his taste, because she'd made a poor case for it -- but everything she'd pictured had sort of gone with the air of dramatic menace and grand hostility that she was associating with him. What she hadn't expected was his incredibly, mundanely human expressions of completely petulant annoyance. He was nothing more or less than exasperated -- which was probably the first response she'd really seen from him that she could remotely classify as endearing. (Not that it scored many points in that regard, weighed on the scale against I miss setting people on fire as it was.)

Aha, she thought to herself, There he is. There's the human being in you after all.

For just that brief moment, she forgot to be scared. She barked out a startled laugh, instead, for what it was he was complaining about, then put a hand to her face, chuckling hopelessly. "I'm sorry," she said. "It's just that, if you knew me, asking me to please shut up a little is far from a new sentiment. Sorry."

Hvergelmir picked herself up by her hands and hoisted her weight upwards until she was sitting on the back of the bench, using it as a perch. "Philosophy's not my usual remit. I'm doing my best to meet you at your level, but I'm really not cut out for much more than the 101 course." She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, studying Bischofite's face again now that she could see it without the mask in the way -- only the permanent shadow that hung over him from the dark paint striping his features. Her eyes searched him, wondering what in God's name was at this man's core. Sadness? Anger? Fear? Or was it just so much quicksand, there at the heart of him, on which all things settled just briefly, and then sank away? They were too unalike for her to tell, she supposed, what it was that made one man want to set another man on fire. He was too much of a strange, knotted mystery.

And, thankfully, not one she had to solve. He'd come here already wanting to buy what she had to sell, and had only the barest dismissal for her sales pitch. A transaction, in the end, and an easy one -- more stressful on the mind, but less heavy on the heart than talking to Schreibersite or Titanlåvenite.

"I have called for executioners; I want to perish chewing on their gun butts. I have called for plagues, to suffocate in sand and blood. Unhappiness has been my god. I have lain down in the mud, and dried myself off in the crime-infested air. I have played the fool to the point of madness.

"And springtime brought me the frightful laugh of an idiot.

"Princess Iris agreed to do what she can for you. Meet me back here, on July sixteenth. See if summertime has different news for you."