"You're not serious."  The chiseled Nordic man squinted ice blue eyes at his companion.  Despite the remark, the young woman sitting at the cafe table with him did look rather serious.  Her mouth, seemingly designed by some brilliant Renaissance artist specifically for laughing or kissing, was turned down slightly.

"It's not forever, just a month.  It's an experiment.  Haven't you ever been curious?"  The man waved a hand dismissively.

"What's to be curious about?  We all had it before.  We couldn't know then what it'd be like to live without, and so many were too frightened to try."  His mouth twisted scornfully.  "But with the perspective of millennia...I'd say it was cloying, really.  Not to mention hypocritical, in the face of the Injustice."  The woman nodded, but her frown didn't budge.

"But it'd be different as a mortal.  Open to all the possibilities, but ignorant of all the...baggage."

"Gremory, you know better than most how desperate humans are for 'love', that so many will take the closest, quickest facsimile.  Delightful make-believe that we, too, can enjoy as we already are, I might add.   How many lonely mortals have you granted your blessing, hoping to kindle a flame with spoiled wood?  How many blushing maidens or eager bucks have you turned towards those who had not the heart to win them, but who did find the knowledge to Invoke you...and then seen it end in murder, betrayal, ash?  Surely tens of thousands by now?  Case in point...Circe's become quite unhinged by my 'rejection', you know.  It's delicious.  She'd prefer I killed her, as long as it was in some 'romantic' way, than for me to ignore her, which is of course why I'm favoring the latter."  He smiled, clearly trying to savor the cursed Sorceress' anguish, even if he couldn't really understand it.  Gremory sighed.

"The way it always goes wrong...it's not my fault.  He's turned his face from us.  If I just...knew what it was like, I'm certain I could get it right..."

"Idiot child," he scolded, despite the fact that they were precisely the same age.  "These powers of ours were a happy accident of Incarnation.  We were meant to drive and maintain the gears of Creation from within...our tools are not designed to work its face, yet you think a mortal perspective will suddenly make yours well-suited?  Even accepting for the moment that such a thing was possible, what makes you think you'd be able to find 'the real thing'," he rolled his eyes as he made quotes with his fingers, "in a pair of fortnights?"  After a moment, his expression grew suspicious.  "Have you Looked?"  Gremory shook her head, black curls bobbing.

"I've tried.  When I follow those lines, they...stop."  The man's eyebrows raised.

"And this strikes you as an encouraging sign?"

"I don't see myself die or anything...I just...can't see anything past that point.  Maybe it's too self-referential.  Or the power involved is blocking it somehow?"  Despite himself, the man looked curious.

"So you have at least foreseen the details leading up to it, then.  What's involved?"  The woman looked away for a moment, biting her lip.  But she didn't hesitate too long, lest her companion be tempted to Look for himself, and learn things she'd rather he didn't.

"I'd need your help, and that of a Revealed mortal.  The crux of the concept is that they would replace my name with a mystical True Name, the way mortals can do with 'Cloaks' nowadays."  The blond shook his head curtly.

"Impossible.  Our names came from Him."

"So maybe 'replace' is the wrong word.  Cloaks don't really do that anyway.  They just seem to suppress what's already there.  But since our names are more fundamental than that, they don't operate the same way theirs do anyway...I think if mine was not just pushed underneath a mortal one, but bound tightly inside it, filling the cracks, so to speak, it'd be...well, good enough to fool me, anyway.  Maybe even good enough to fool Him for a while, if the incantation was strong enough."  He laughed derisively.

"Their little bendings of Creation are even more flawed than our own.  How could a mortal expression of will possibly be that strong, you'd-"  The man stopped in mid-sentence and his amused expression tightened into a wary stare.  "You're insane."

"That's why I need your help, Taob," she said quietly.  "It's the only way it has any chance-"

"You want me to gift a mortal's tongue with Enochian?" he interrupted, voice raised.  Passers-by on the sidewalk glanced at them curiously until he noticed and muttered under his breath, irritated.  All the bystanders found themselves separately but simultaneously distracted by unrelated trivia, until they'd stopped paying attention.  He continued more quietly.  "They're getting successful enough at killing us off as things stand...what you're suggesting would be like giving them a...a...'tommy gun'!"  Despite, or perhaps because of his abilities, Taob had never paid very close attention to mortal progress.  Gremory decided it wasn't in her interests to update him on any of humanity's more current advances in horrific mass murder that might've made a more appropriate simile, both in era and in scope.  White phosphorous, for example, or even atomic weapons.

"We can ensure she wouldn't abuse it.  You can give her the pronunciation, but without comprehension, and I can write safeguards into the incantation...it will work.  We'd just need a suitably cooperative assistant.  I have one in mind, actually."

"Poor broken Viola?" he guessed, and snorted at the woman's nod.  "I had wondered why you went to the trouble of patching her psyche back together after I bade you smash it open...rather gracelessly, I might add."  Gremory grimaced.

"That wasn't the only reason," she noted.  Taob shrugged.

"At any rate, for once, you don't know it's going to work out, if you can't Look past this folly.  Maybe it just kills you in a way you can't See."

"I don't know," she admitted.  "But I...have faith."  Taob laughed curtly.

"Funny."

"It wasn't meant to be."  Gremory hesitated.  She hated this part.  But it was what it was.  "You of all people know how fragile she is, it's not as if you really have anything to fear," she continued, without a hint in her voice of the reluctance she felt.  "Even if she was more formidable, how many thousands of years has it been since you gained your current position?  How many would-be Hunters have you dispatched, personally?"

"True, true," he said, nodding approvingly.  He'd always been vulnerable to flattery.

"And if you're not curious about Love, aren't you curious about the endeavor itself?" she pressed, thoroughly disliking herself.  "What mayhem might result, despite my precautions?  A Revealed with the taste of the First Words on her tongue, thousands of years of weight behind them?  You always find your little amusements, but in the broad sweep of events, haven't things lately been a little...dull?"  Taob said nothing for a full minute, staring at the pedestrians as they passed.

"I'll consider it, and let you know." he said, finally.  Gremory nodded, and Taob rose and strode away, still lost in thought.  That was the last bit, the present had caught up with the future.  As long as she didn't lose her nerve and deliberately change something, and as long as he didn't Look himself, it was now guaranteed that he'd come around and help her.  When she found a line that led where she wanted...or if, since that part wasn't guaranteed...as long as she surrendered her own dearly-purchased Free Will and just acted out precisely what she'd Seen, the rest would come to pass.  To her, Time was, if not an open book per se, at least a dog-eared library card, or a worn and folded road map.  One that Taob could have used just as easily, but instead largely rejected, for his Free Will was more dear to him.

Gremory sipped her latte and mused.  She had been more fervent about the Injustice than most, before the Fall.  Even than Lucifer, who'd been more insulted than anything else.  For herself, it had been more a point of principle.  By her nature, she knew how thin a pretense Free Will actually was, and thus how petty it had appeared for Him to withhold it from those who were devoting so much to, and for, Creation.  She'd swayed a lot of the others on that argument.  At the time, of course, she hadn't been able to see past the Fall, she hadn't had that 'power' yet. 

Immediately after the Fall, however, after Incarnation had ham-handedly re-adjusted her relationship with Creation, she'd been able to Look ahead to what would come in the years and millennia, and she'd recoiled.  It was not at all what she'd expected, or hoped.  So much suffering caused both to and by her fellow rebels, for He'd allowed His rebellious subordinates even "Freer" Will, by denying them the constraints that usually came with Love.  Nearly everyone had fully embraced their new circumstances, acting as freely as possible, and when many of those acts just happened to shit all over Creation, their most common rejoinder was, well, He should've thought of that before He'd been such a putz and turned His face from them, shouldn't He have?

Gremory often wondered if He regretted that...despite being the literal source of Love, even He could indeed get angry, and contrary to mortal opinion, make mistakes.  Perhaps He'd known better, and there was a deeper plan at work...after all, when you took a step back and considered it, the way the relative proportions of rebels and loyalists had worked out so precisely when all was said and done was awfully suspicious.  But given what had happened to the loyalists, things hadn't really gone well for anyone.  Maybe even if He was Love, He was also other Things, less appealing in nature.

For her part, she'd adapted.  Even if she was barred from truly Loving them, she still liked mortals.  She wanted to help, and no matter how often it went wrong, she kept trying.  Most rebels decorated the horrific wounds of their loss with symbolic scar tissue and piercings, reveling in the martyrdom of it, embracing their twisted existences out of sheer spiteful perversity.  Gremory tried instead to fill her own wound with whatever was at hand, to pretend at what she ought to have been, if Creation had been more just.  The consequences of her failures, she tried to lay on His head, rather than her own...though when she was honest with herself, she knew there was blame aplenty to share.

It was what it was.  Since she did have Free Will, she'd use it as best she could, or what would the point have been?  And if her own power denied Free Will without cautious management...which it arguably did...well, with any luck in this endeavor, that particular temptation could be suppressed along with all the other aspects of herself she was so eager to take a vacation from.