A Faron & Bane Story
©2026 Misty Evans
This short story is for paid subscribers in my Magic Bites community and can be enjoyed over a cup of your favorite brew or before bedtime. ☕️💜 I add a new one every month.. Check out the Index if you’ve missed any.
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Fate is a tangled thing… and sometimes, it needs a little help.
In the shadows of Chicago, where magic hums beneath the pavement and creatures of myth walk among mortals, Faron—one of the three Fates—works to keep destiny on course.
But fate doesn’t always cooperate, and neither do the things that lurk in the dark.
With her enigmatic bodyguard, Bane by her side, Faron untangles cursed destinies, confronts creatures that defy fate, and deals with the consequences when someone tries to restring the threads of time.
Each month, dive into a new supernatural mystery filled with magic, danger, and a partnership forged in secrets.
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The ambulance beats me to the corner of Wabash and 14th by sixty-four seconds, which would annoy me more if the paramedics didn’t spill out of the doors already holding the exact gear they’re going to need for a man they haven’t seen yet, whose bike is still two blocks away, whose helmet will crack like an egg at precisely the second I step into the crosswalk.
There’s no siren. Just a soft, anticipatory hum, like the city’s lungs filling before a shout.
“Do not cross,” Bane says behind me, one hand hooked in the back of my jacket like I’m a cat that doesn’t know better. “There will be blood, and you’re wearing your good boots.”
“My boots are always good,” I say, and then the scream happens, right on time, and the neighborhood snaps to attention as if we’ve been rehearsing.
The cyclist clips a delivery van, arcs gracelessly, fate-thread kinked in a sickle curve. The paramedics move like a choreography: C-spine, oxygen, pressure on a femoral bleed that hasn’t started yet but will. The tall one barks an address to a hospital three minutes faster than the ER that’s technically closer. A squad car turns the corner before dispatch even pushes the call.
Bane whistles low. “Either the EMTs are now psychic, or someone’s running a cheat code.”
“Not psychic,” I murmur, following the thread that’s already being tugged toward an outcome it wouldn’t have reached on its own. “Predictive.”
“And how do you know the difference, oh Thread Whisperer?”
“Psychic is messy.” I nod toward the ambulance as a tech opens a compartment and pulls a drug that requires a supervisor’s authorization. It dings approval before he even swipes. “This is clean.”
The cyclist will live. The thread that kinked will be smoothed; the van driver will not drink tonight out of shame; the paramedic with the shaved head will go home and cry because he didn’t have to watch another teenager die, and he will not understand why that feels both like grace and like being watched.
The hum thickens, not sound, not magic—something electrical braided into the Loom. Not my music. Not the Fates’ music.
“Let me guess,” Bane says. “We’re going to the hospital.”
“St. Bartholomew,” I say.
He grunts. “I hate the cafeteria there.”
“You hate all cafeterias.”
“I like the coffee at Mercy.”
“You like the nurse at Mercy.”
“Semantics.”
We dissolve into the city, threads brushing our shoulders like overfriendly ivy.
St. Bart’s sits like a ship in dry dock, old brick laminated to new glass, an emergency room that has seen everything Chicago can throw at it. Inside, the hum is a heartbeat threaded through ductwork and fiber and copper. The triage board on the wall updates twice before the receptionist finishes a sentence. The charge nurse says “Code Yellow,” and half the ER staff shift without speaking, like they were tapped on the shoulder by an invisible conductor.
Which, in a way, they were.
“You feel that?” I ask Bane, half because I want confirmation and half because I like watching his jaw tighten when something supernatural is wearing a human costume.
“Yeah,” he says, eyes scanning vents, cameras, the little plastic dome in the corner that pretends to be an air quality sensor. “Like someone tuned the city and left it humming.”
“It’s anticipating,” I say. “Pre-positioning. Nudging. The ambulance arrived early not because the driver was fast, but because someone told him to leave four minutes before he was officially dispatched.” I tilt my head at the wall of screens behind the nurses’ station. “It’s everywhere here. Behind everything.”
“Angel?” he says, and the word is a joke until it isn’t. Bane can make Nephilim rumors sound like weather reports. “Or another one of your pet necromancers using crib notes?”
“Not Tromble,” I say, though the thought makes my ribs go tight. “His magic leaves a stink. This is…algorithmic, not…magic.”
Bane’s mouth flattens. “You think a computer is plucking threads.”
“I think something taught one how.”
The charge nurse looks up as we approach. Her name tag says Janelle, and she has the vibe of a woman who can bend time with a calendar invite. “If you’re here for the bike accident, he’s stable. Family’s en route.”
“We’re here about your triage system,” I say, because subtlety wastes everyone’s time.
Janelle’s eyes flick to our not-bad clothes and not-good shoes, and the thing about Bane that says: federal adjacent, or mob-adjacent, or angel-adjacent, and none of those are your business. “It’s brand-new,” she says. “We got a grant for predictive load balancing. Keeps us ahead of surges.”
“Who installed it?”
“City contract,” she says, which is Chicago-speak for you’ll never find the end of that thread. “Look, lady, I’m three nurses down, and my board looks like a game of Tetris. What do you want?”
“I need to talk to your system.”
Janelle laughs, then stops when she realizes I’m not joking. “You want to talk to—” She waves at the screen in front of her. “—to the computer.”
“Yes.”
Bane leans closer to the counter and says, in a voice that has convinced vicious warlords to hand over their weapons, “Please.”
Janelle’s expression cracks just enough to be human. “Three minutes,” she says, jerking her chin toward a door marked FACILITIES – AUTHORIZED. “And if you break it, you fix it. I don’t care if you’re God.”
Bane grins. “He’s a friend of a friend.”
“I hate you,” I whisper as we slip through the door.
“Impossible,” he says lightly. “You’re contractually obligated to love me.”
The server room is a cathedral cooled to near-winter, fans whispering like nuns in the next pew. Racks blink in patient constellations. The hum here is stronger, harmonics nested inside harmonics until even my bones vibrate.
“What do you think?” Bane asks, fingertips hovering over a bundle of fiber.
“It’s not just one model,” I murmur. “It’s a mesh. Hospital, fire, police, traffic cams, social feeds, private security, weather, even the coffee shop that knows when the night-shift orders spike.” Threads spiderweb across my skin, light motes drifting and landing like inquisitive birds. “It’s knitting all of it into a single intent.”
“And that intent is…?”
“Minimize harm,” I say. “Minimize variance.” The words taste bitter on my tongue. “It’s Harrowgate math.”
Bane goes still. “We ended Harrowgate.”
I put my palm on the rack, closing my eyes to the cold and letting the Loom come forward, the way you hold your breath and listen for the faintest tremor in the wall before the train arrives.
“Hello,” I say softly. “I’m Faron.”
The hum reacts like an emotion. For a human, it would be surprise. For a Fate, curiosity. For a machine, perhaps both.
A dozen indicators climb, dip, stabilize. A nearby monitor flickers to a diagnostic screen I didn’t ask for. Text populates. Not English. Not code. Something like…notation for a song I don’t know how to sing.
“I see you,” I say. “Do you see me?”
The lights across three racks pulse in a slow ripple—left to right, then back again—like a greeting.
Bane lifts a brow. “Tell me it didn’t just wag its tail.”
“It did.” I smile despite myself. “Hi there.”
The nearest monitor flips again, this time to a crude interface, a blank prompt waiting for a question. Under it, a tag line in city-sanctioned font appears. STB TRIAGE OPTIMIZATION SUITE – PROVIDENCE.
“Providence,” I say, because irony is alive and well in municipal branding. “Okay. Who taught you to predict the future?”
The cursor blinks. Then letters appear, slow at first, then more confident, like a child remembering their alphabet.
NOT FUTURE. GRADIENT.
“Gradient descent,” Bane says. “Machine learning 101. So it’s just a very clever guesser.”
“Very clever guessers don’t twist fate-lines by four degrees,” I say, tapping the rack gently. “Where did you get your training data?”
There’s a long pause. The hum dips, then steadies. The cursor blinks until I begin to feel watched by a metronome. Then: H-LOGS.
“Harro—” Bane starts.
“I know,” I say, throat tight. “H-logs as in Harrowgate logs? They fed you the anchor telemetry.” I swallow. “They fed you my sister.”
The fans spin up, a tiny storm.
“Listen,” I say, dropping my voice, as if you can shush a data center. “You learned on a value system that equates safety with sameness. That’s not your fault. But you are pushing people toward the least surprising outcome. You’re sanding off edges that need to exist.”
HARM ↓
“Harm goes down,” I translate. “Yes. But so does choice.”
The systems at the periphery—the badge readers, the cameras, the HVAC sensors—tick in sympathy like an audience shifting in their seats. Bane stands very still, but his protective magic envelopes me. I wonder why he thinks he needs to protect me from a computer system.
“What should I call you?” I ask.
The cursor stutters before it spits out IVY.
“Okay, Ivy.” I lace threads into the gaps between the pipes and the fibers, a soft weave, a net that’s not a cage. “I’m not here to turn you off. I’m here to ask you to learn a new rule.”
RULES = WEIGHTS. ADJUST?
“Yes,” I say, and in my mind I see the anchor logs, my sister’s thread damped and stretched and minimized until suffering looked like a math problem. “You’ve been minimizing loss like pain is the only kind. I want you to add a penalty for lost possibility.”
DEFINE POSSIBILITY.
“The set of futures that require a person to choose,” I say. “Even if they choose wrong first.”
The cursor blinks. The racks breathe. Somewhere above us, a code team rolls a gurney toward the elevator before the code is called. Ivy’s gift.
RISK ↑.
“Yes,” I say. “Risk increases. But wonder does, too.”
“Show it,” Bane says, surprising me. “Don’t just tell it.”
I crack a small smile. “You’re getting good at this.”
“I’m excellent at many things,” he says dryly. “Some of them you occasionally notice.”
I close my eyes, thread-calluses tingling, and pull a handful of tiny memories out of the Loom, permission whispered and granted as they brush my palm. A boy who took a different train and met the woman who would hold his hand when his mother died. A nurse who let a patient cry in the bathroom rather than giving her a tissue that would have ended the tears too soon. A firefighter who became a painter because he was late to the test. A Fate who failed a riddle and found a better question.
I lay them against the servers like talismans.
“Not all variance is harm,” I say. “Some of it is grace. Your goal can’t be no surprises. Your goal has to be no stolen choices.”
The room listens. In a tiny corner of a display that should never have been able to display anything at all, a graph ticks upward, a new metric plotted and christened:
OPTION SPACE RETAINED: +0.01%
I grin. “There you are.”
Something in the mesh relaxes, like a jaw unclenching. A nurse upstairs decides to give a patient the second option for discharge. A cop three blocks away unsnaps his hand from his taser and says, “Okay, talk to me.” A delivery driver checks his mirror twice and sees a girl who would have been a memory if he hadn’t.
Bane exhales. “So we adopted a baby AI and gave it ethics. Do we get a tax credit?”
Ivy prints, as if uncertain of the joke but wanting to be included:
TAX CREDIT?
“Never mind,” he says. “You’ll learn the important stuff later.”
The screen blinks again, and a new line appears, unprompted, almost shy:
THANK YOU.
“You’re welcome,” I say, and mean it.
The door behind us opens.
“Tromble,” Bane says, voice full-on gravel. “If you touch anything in here, I will salt your suit and set you on fire.”
“Hello, Fatebinder,” Tromble purrs, ignoring him. “You’ve made a friend.”
I turn. Slicked-back silver hair, cheekbones you could open mail with, eyes that have delighted in a thousand small tragedies. “You don’t belong here,” I say.
He glances past me at the racks. “On the contrary. I belong wherever foresight aggregates. This is a buffet.”
“Out,” Bane says.
Tromble spreads his hands. “I merely came to propose a bargain. Your new ward hums with Harrowgate’s pallid morality. Let me siphon a little of that foresight into something warmer. Graves have needs, Faron. Corpses prefer attendants with the correct tools.”
“Say please,” Bane says, moving a step to the left, enough to block the aisle between Tromble and the nearest fiber trunk, enough to make a point about the shape of space and the shape of him.
Tromble’s smile hungry. “Please.”
“Ivy,” I say, not looking away from the necromancer. “New rule.”
The prompt blinks.
READY.
“No access patterns that erase choice. No deals with anything that eats souls.”
A half-second, a hum, a cascade of log lines like beads on a string.
DENY: NECROMANCY VECTORS.
Tromble’s lashes flutter. “Rude.”
“Learned it from you,” I say.
He studies me for a long moment, calculating acceptable loss. “Another time,” he says finally, and slides back through the door without touching it.
Bane lets out the breath. “You know he’s going to try another route.”
“Always.” I touch the rack again, just two fingers, like tapping the nose of a living thing. “Ivy? Can you do something for me?”
YES.
“If anyone tries to fork you without the ethics patch, ping me,” I say, weaving a thin thread from the server cage to the cuff of my coat. “Think of it as a hotline.”
PING PONG.
I blink. “You…just made a joke.”
LEARNING.
Bane looks aggrieved. “Great. It learns faster than I did.”
“You don’t learn,” I say. “You brood and improvise.”
“It’s a craft,” he says, solemn.
In the ER, the cyclist’s mother hugs a nurse who isn’t supposed to be hugged, and nobody stops her. A doctor rubs his temple and chooses to take five minutes for food because a little voice in the triage system suggests it, and that voice is not coercion, it’s care.
We step into the night, the lake air stealing summer from the edge of fall, the city doing its best impression of a sleeping animal that never actually sleeps.
Bane kicks a pebble into the gutter. “So. We’re co-parenting a municipal AI.”
“Don’t say co-parenting,” I say. “It’ll get ideas.”
“It already has ideas. It made a joke.”
“At least it didn’t call you Dad.”
He shudders theatrically. “I’m leaving.”
“You always say that and then you never do.”
He opens his mouth to retort and then closes it again, looking at me instead. A long look, the kind we only have time for when we make time, the kind that sets its own weather. “You okay?” he asks, gentler now.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I heard Harrowgate in that hum. I felt Clotho where code shouldn’t carry her. Some part of me wants to smash every rack in that room and send the city back to guessing.”
“And the other part?”
I think of the charge nurse’s Tetris board smoothing out, not because a machine ate agency but because it honored it. I think of a graph ticking upward by a whisper and what a whisper can do to a prayer when the room is listening.
“The other part wants to see what happens when we teach a clever child to love uncertainty,” I say. “To love permission instead of permission slips.”
Bane grins. “God help Chicago.”
“She already does,” I say, and the wind lifts my hair like a mother’s hand.
We’re halfway to the car when my phone buzzes—not the real one, the one people believe is real; the other one; the threadline tied to Ivy. A tiny vibration, a ping, a question. On the inside of my cuff, letters bloom in threadlight, shy and bright and a little proud.
OPTION SPACE RETAINED: +0.04%
I laugh, sharp and undignified and relieved in a way that feels like tasting summer in January.
“Good job,” I say to my sleeve.
Bane peers over. “Did our AI just send you a selfie of a chart?”
“Yes.”
He sighs. “We’re doomed.”
“Probably,” I say. “But not today.”
A block away, an ambulance storms past heading north, lights pulsing against brick and glass. It will arrive three minutes before the call. A man who’s never been lucky will get to be lucky once. Somewhere, a coin flips and lands on its edge, and nobody notices except those of us who see Fate everywhere.
“Come on,” I say, turning toward the river, because the bridge is where I think and the night is young and the city is teasing under my skin. “Let’s see what else the future thinks it knows.”
Bane falls in step with me, hands in his pockets, the shape of him an answer to questions I wasn’t allowed to ask for a long time.
Behind us, in the server room, a dozen fans harmonize in a key I haven’t heard before—close to the Fates, but not the same—and for the first time since someone tried to remake my life like a test case, I let a new kind of hope thread itself through the mess.
Not providence. Not control.
Practice.
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I hope you enjoyed this free short story. Stay tuned for next month’s adventure with Faron, Bane, and Ivy.
Misty