And With a Parting... Begins the Chronicle

Spores dispersed.

To the winds and to the skies.

Upon the waters and the crevasses of whittled old knot holes.

Within metallurgy and fires from home and boiler.

Of wild blazes and coming storms soothed back to sleep.

The ones who were lucky to escape.

From steel pure enough to be titanium with not even the slightest pore of humanity. No minute, miniscule flaw to indicate living/feeling creatures.

Well, clearly present company excluded.

Death had come upon the Fenton door.

Whether by sickness or...

But-- but that wouldn't happen.

That couldn't happen. Danny was fine, he would be fine.

Danny was breathing, there was no foaming spittle or blood or anything else. Just a drip of spittle but he wasn't choking.

He wasn't choking and he was breathing.

And Tucker-- Tucker had fled upstairs away from the grisly sight. To call an ambulance.

He was calling an ambulance despite-- despite his own apprehensions.

Because this was Danny. And since it was Danny, whom they had compelled to go in in the first place...

A figure fluttered into sight. A Lovecraftian vaguely human shape with a grizzled old face, flaming white hair, mismatched ram's horns, and baring tusks.

"OMG is he--"

"Stay away!" Sam snapped. "Whatever you are or whatever you want!"

For all his ugliness he hadn't done anything. But when it came to Danny, all bets were off.

"I'm sorry but look I think I can--"

A BOOM resounded shaking the small lab.

Beakers shattered and shelves skidded across the floor into several center points of ripping air.

And from them came yet more beasts and horrors straight out of her Occult texts.

Only for the imbalanced ram to ram into battle with a vengeance.

Green.

Green blood, green skin.

Flaming hair of all shades. A musician ghost, a hunter he knew well.

Sound became a secondary factor.

Draw.

Aim.

Dei pulled the trigger on the weapon, the shot piercing what would be a heart.

And within that came the fear.

The cessation of existence, Dei stained with the entrails and smear of rotted, burning flesh.

The coalescence of spirits shrieked, all united in their abject terror of their glowering monarch.

Dei took no time to let them nor himself recover before he shot again once, twice, three times.

Ghosts began to attack, with much more caution and cunning, but before raw, screaming power it made no difference.

Simple ghosts turned to splatters on now live electrical confines, the more complex left reeling or spectral bodies battered worse than the worst of abuses, and those who were out for blood... those he spared.

So that they could listen. From within his palm seared a sigil of a crimson snake entwined of twin heads under an eye like a chalice.

"Hear what I say," reverberated his seething, cruel voice, "I claim this homestead, this village under my domain. This is my haunt and I never want to see another ghost besiege it. Not for my sin today. Disobey... AND YOU'RE LIVES ARE FORFEIT!!! NOW RETURN! BY COMMAND OF YOUR KING!!!"

Growing and swelling in size the mark grew thorned metal mesh ensnaring all who were present, lashing venomously to the two young humans when he spared a glance.

But in protection he wanted to express.

The portal now shut, mechanical locks sparking red before resealing with a resounding click.

Form unstable Dei shuddered now feet firmly on the ground.

"That won't hold forever," he warned the glaring girl and the boy barely responsive.

He waited for some reply.

Something beside the silent encroachment of unlife but received none.

Simply for his girl to hold him.

"Eeengh. Sam," he moaned.

"I expect a week, before they decide I am not their King but a traitor. That means this doorway must come down."

He set down the gun.

Right in the human's encroaching hand.

"Did-- did we win?"

The boy looked at him now, straining but no less obstinate to make sense of, whatever he saw.

What did the dying see?

"Wh-- hughhh."

The boy retched and heaved. Turned to his side, shaking all over as the pulsing of green veins began to crack around his face and nape.

Before throwing up a putrid soup of boiling, bubbling green.

"NO! DANNY! DANNY!" the girl howled shaking a now unconscious teenager.

Dei could only watch. His bag dropped somewhere, somewhen.

Hardly mattered.

From the window above came the cry of sirens. Of hope for this boy.

And soon, with the glare of red and blue on the walls, the sobering silence of the adults doing their work, and interplay of paramedic, fire person, police, and any and all authorities, the inconsequential ghost was left forgotten.

Who he had learned was named Danny Fenton went wheeled out from his basement. Sam ushered out as well, and a flash of fiery hair demanding to be by his side.