This Magical Girl is Mine 6.8 This Magical Girl is Mine

When the deimovore bit in the woods, it felt worse than it looked. The world dimd and ice flooded my veins, but when it was torn from it left no mark and took no blood—the little clues that led to realize its weakness. It was a creature of terror that could do no harm.

Then I freed it from that particular clause.

Phoebe’s bite is ugly. Her teeth sink into flesh and rend it, shredding skin and spilling blood that drips down the side of Mord’s decorated leather jacket. Mordacity convulses as she’s bitten, fingers twitching helplessly, face caught in a frozen scream of anguish—a rictus expression, mouth open and eyes wide, muscles stretched. For the first ti since we were teens together, I see Mordacity afraid.

It’s over nearly as quickly as it ca. Striga rushes the barrier to take advantage of any lapse in concentration, but Maenad is closer and pulls Phoebe off with a mighty shove. The mont Mordacity is free, she raises her staff an inch off the ground and slams it back down. The shockwave unleashed sends Phoebe and Striga flying.

My beloved heroine manages a controlled stop and settles into a ready pose. The deimovore tumbles, smashes into the ground, and picks herself up in a more disheveled state. She snarls at Mordacity with a grin full of hate and says, “Made that one extra painful, for all the hell you put through.”

The wizard glares back, eyes burning, breath ragged. The wound in her neck is grueso, still bleeding, and sickly green at the edges. Her body still twitches in places and stays rigid in others, fighting off the deimovore’s venom. She exercises the muscles on her face until she can move her mouth cleanly, and only then does she reply.

“That,” she rasps, “was a mistake. Fall.”

Phoebe dies.

That single syllable strikes her down with absolute, unquestionable certainty, its truth searing into my mind as clearly as I know that it is a word of power—and one far greater than the words I’ve heard Striga and the Morrigan speak. If those were tricks of their mantles scrounged from the World of Glass, this is the true magic that they were imitating.

She tells the deimovore to fall and it does, swaying to one side and collapsing without resistance or hesitation. It falls and does not rise, its body lifeless and still. With one word, a person becos a corpse. The light of my magic flickers out.

I'm too stunned to react. Maenad whistles appreciatively. Striga takes a half step in front of .

Mordacity leans against her staff, gripping it tightly for support. She coughs—hacks up a gob of blood—and says, still rasping, “You'll see again at the sumr solstice. When you do, stay out of my way.”

And then she's gone.

Striga surveys the area for another few monts, on guard for a trick, but nothing cos. She eases up. “At least we learned sothing,” she mutters to herself, “but this wasn’t a victory.” She sounds resentful. Aggravated. Exhausted.

I can’t disagree. I’m not sure I can even say anything to comfort her. We stopped Venus, but there are more egregores out there. The Jovians got what they wanted. Mordacity got what she wanted.

Striga turns away and marches toward the magical girls and witches that Venus left behind. So of them have started to wake up. No doubt, she’s going to recruit them into the fight against Echidna. It’s their obligation.

It’s mine, too, but I don’t care. I wander over to the body of Phoebe and stare down at it. The last of my pacts, broken. Another would-be follower that I failed. So goddess.

I’m not sure what I feel. Emptiness? Maybe the sa exhaustion that Striga feels. I was supposed to do more. Do better.

My oldest friend betrayed and the one thing I found to get back at her—the one way I had to learn sothing about her—went away with a word. Whatever secrets Phoebe learned from that bite, they’re buried with her. She wasn't a magical girl, so there's no rule of three to give her extra chances, and no magical girl has the power to raise the truly dead. The closest thing is Phage, but only to those she kills, and only in twisted form. For an ordinary witch, true resurrection is impossible.

…But I'm not an ordinary witch, am I? Maybe I never was, but definitely not after tonight. The fla in my chest still burns with a tinge of gold.

I reach for Protheus, but it recoils. What I'm asking is beyond everything it knows how to do. It's a violation of its fundantal nature as a mantle. But mantles are just training wheels. Useful, but not absolute.

The ember I gave Phoebe is still there. It's dimming, but it hasn't died with its host. I can still feel it. I can grasp it. I can use it.

This is impossible. Why am I even trying this when hundreds are dying up above?

Behind , Striga is rallying the roused. Radiance, Sweet, Dawn. Others. I catch glimpses of confusion, terror, and rage. Most of the people left in this chamber were victims of Venus, even those who thought themselves her allies. Striga tells them of the horrors besetting Forks. She goads them. Inspires them. She makes it clear that the world will be watching.

Below, here in the dark of a chanical heart, no one watches as I roll Phoebe onto her back and press my hands to her chest.

I have no idea what I’m doing. What the hell am I doing?

The principle is simple: magic can do anything. The true nature of the source of all magic—the World of Glass—is roiling, unbound chaos. My mantle is just a set of patterns imposed on that chaos, custom-tailored to shape it into a particular kind of order. I’ve stretched my mantle’s capabilities before; this ti, I’m setting it aside almost entirely. The spark in Phoebe is the lifeline I’ll cling to. Everything else is up to .

I close my eyes, I breathe deep, and I rember what it felt like to be a god.

An egregore isn’t all that different from a mantle. Both are bound by patterns, finding it difficult to evolve beyond the ideas placed in them at their creation. But she was still closer to the source of all things—more attuned to the strange energies that define the other side of reality. Those energies perate this world, too, in ways I never realized before.

The battery has been emptied, but the power it radiated is still here in the chamber. Conceptual bleed from the battle. The hopes and dreams of the mahou. The dying cries of a god. All that energy, just waiting for a catalyst. Waiting to be called.

In my chest sleeps the key. My heart, my furnace, my fla. Tinged with gold, touched by divinity. I was Venus, for a mont. Now, Venus is broken, but that resonance hasn’t vanished. There’s a piece of it still inside , beating just out of pace with my heart, and it stirs and sings as I realize it’s there.

Co to . Answer . All this is mine to claim. I reach for the power, stretching my senses out, grasping blindly with a closed third eye. I wielded the worship in the air once before, I can do it again. I flare the fla in my chest and flood my limbs with strength and surety. I transform myself like Venus transford , taking on more of her guise, channeling her divinity. I grasp the energy in the air and the energy inside and I pull, bringing it all to my fingertips as I press against the cooling body of the deimovore that I bound.

It’s more than I can handle. The power strains against my will and burns . It feels like my hands are boiling, bubbling, close to bursting. The energy I’ve pulled in is too volatile, too violent. It’s chaos, raw and wild and unford. It needs a pattern to shape it, but I don’t know how to form one.

A biological understanding? I try to picture cellular regeneration, but I don't know what that looks like. On a macro level, there's nothing obviously wrong with Phoebe’s body to fix, other than signs of malnutrition. I don't have the ans to picture calories in my head. Jumpstarting the heart? Once still, now beating? Electrical impulses in the brain? She was a deimovore, she might have been moved by sothing else entirely. The power at my fingertips sputters and lashes out, rejecting my imprint.

The Prothean lens? Reforging, putting it back together, fixing a broken object? No response. I can't feed this problem to my inner kiln, can't rely on my mantle to interpret it for . The forge was never my domain, only borrowed.

A god should be able to resurrect one of her followers, but neither of us truly fit that bill. The idea doesn't stick. Doesn't hold. Isn't working. The power is slipping from my grasp.

How did she do it? How did Mordacity kill with a single word? She made it look so simple.

A last, desperate hope ignites in my mind. Simplicity itself. A strange, beautiful symtry. I cast aside all the complex patterns I was trying to shape and focus all my will and effort on a single, simple idea. A word to counter a word.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringent.

And I scream, “Rise!”

The energy I’d gathered leaves violently, ripping its way out of and leaving feeling drained and hollowed. I sag, vision spinning. For a mont, I can’t breathe, and then I gasp for air and blink rapidly to clear the stars.

I’m not the only one who gasps. The body of Phoebe stirs—seizes, shudders, shakes—and then settles. She breathes, deep and slow, eyes fluttering, like she’s fast asleep. Steady, unconscious, and alive.

I did it. I raised the dead.

“What the fuck!?” shrieks Dusk. The sisters are among those who survived their encounter and had gathered around Striga. Now, all of them are more interested in what I’m doing, or rather what I’ve just done. Dusk, Dawn, nto, Radiance, Sweet Tooth, and Green Thumb. The rest—Pearl Princess, Kira, Bombshell, and Riddlemaster—must have fallen during the last fray, before Venus could revive them again, and now they’ll be reforming in their places of sanctuary. Unless Striga tagged them thrice, which she very well might have. Frankly, I’m surprised so many of them are standing.

They’re all staring at . Understandable, given I’ve just broken what was assud to be a fundantal rule of magic. This wasn’t a mahou, and I didn’t make her a familiar. This was a true resurrection, undeniably, and that’s simply not possible for a witch.

But everyone in this room knows that gods are real, or things like them. And most of them heard my claim—back on the platform—for the seat of Venus.

Striga surges to my side. While everyone is staring at , she’s staring at the deimovore. I can practically see the calculations happening in her head. She doesn’t ask how I did it, or why. She just says, “Good work. We need to get this asset to soplace secure.”

She grabs a runestone out of nowhere and crushes it in her hand. Reality sunders in front of us—an inkblot becos a caged abyss—and a portal is ford. She’s told the Morrigan can only make so many of those toys, so she must have deed this truly worth the expenditure. So part of glows warmly at the thought that I’ve helped her. The rest of is dreading what she’s about to say next.

“You should go,” she says. She’s gentle, but it still hurts. “You can’t have much left in you after that. Get the deimovore to the Ossuary.”

“What about you?” My ugly, pleading voice is back. “What about Echidna?”

She smiles at . “I’ll deal with Echidna. Trust .” Then she turns back to the others that have gathered near us and scowls at them. “What are you waiting for? There’s a Catastrophe ravaging our city. All of you will join in dealing with it. Do you understand? If not for any virtuous reason, then because I will ruin you for cowardice. Co with and fight.”

I don’t register their responses. My focus is held solely by Strix Striga. Sophia Lane. My heroine, my savior. Am I leaving her to die? What if sothing goes wrong?

But… she’s fought these things before. She won’t die so easily. I have to believe that. I have to trust her. So I swallow my fear, I scoop up the sleeping deimovore, and I pass through the portal to the Ossuary.

It closes behind almost imdiately as I step into the peaceful garden maze of the Morrigan. The mont I feel grass beneath my feet, I crumple. Phoebe slips from my arms. Everything catches up to and I just let myself sink down to the mossy, cultivated ground, my head coming to rest beside tulips and roses. I breathe.

The sky above is a peaceful blue. Verdant green surrounds , and splashes of floral color. I hear birdsong, the croaking of frogs, and a gentle wind. I’m not in the throne clearing, so I could be anywhere in the maze. I’m not worried about it right now.

Out there in the world beyond this strange, epheral sanctuary, my beloved is going to war. She’ll be leading the charge against Echidna, rallying all the magical girls and witches she can find, and hopefully, putting an end to the nerve-winged angel that invited to be a sister.

I hate that I’m not with her. I can hardly argue the point when it feels so right to slump here in the grass. My body was taken for a ride by a wannabe goddess and I brought soone back from the dead tonight. I feel completely exhausted.

“It’s a perfectly natural reaction to violating a perfectly natural order,” an amused voice supplies.

I jolt upright. For a mont I panic that Mordacity’s sohow followed into the Ossuary, but it’s not her voice. It’s the other mysterious asshole bent on ruining my life.

The King in Yellow perches atop the hedge wall, robes fluttering in the breeze. Golden eyes shine behind a pallid, smiling mask. As ever, there's no hint of a real body beneath the folds of her golden cloak.

The Mumr in Mustard muses, “I suppose a truly perfect order would be one beyond such violation. Or is that the old omnipotence paradox again? I can never really tell.”

“What do you want?” I demand, hackles raised.

She laughs. “Oh, this and that. Well done, really, managing that spell. You almost got it wrong. Would you like to hear what you did right?”

What I’d like is to slug that bastard across the face for all the harm she's put through, and then thrice more for Sophia’s sake. But I get the feeling that won't do anything, so I just roll my eyes. “You're going to tell regardless. I understand your type.”

“It was choosing the parallel,” Hastur says, ignoring my response. “Like a groove worn into Creation, you took the path of least resistance and ford a sort of dyad with the other work of high magic that had just been perford. You borrowed a bit of legitimacy, in essence, in connecting those two concepts through mirrored ritual and mirrored words. All this to say… don't expect that trick to work a second ti, my dear. You'll need to find equally exceptional circumstances.”

“I kinda figured,” I mutter. “Nothing gets to be that easy. Look, are you just here to be annoying, or do you have a reason for showing up after all the action is over? I'm going to guess you think it's the latter, either way.”

“Too right, too right,” the King in Yellow trills. She strikes a flimsy bow, which mostly amounts to a shifting of silk and a dipping of that pale mask. She looks comical up there, bunched upon the hedge. “It is my solemn duty as custodian of this stage to maneuver us from climax to denouent. Congratulations, Rachel Emily, on surviving another act. Did you enjoy the show?”

A minute ago, I was so exhausted I could barely move. Rage grants a second wind. The gun appears in my hand, conjured by instinct, and I shoot at the god that’s mocking . It’s a futile act, a aningless symbol of rebellion. I don’t expect it to do anything.

The bullet punches right through Hastur’s mask and out the other side, tearing her cloak. Scraps of yellow fabric flutter through the air. There’s nothing underneath.

Sothing cold and clammy presses against the back of my neck, and the world goes dark. In the darkness, there is a room with four stone walls and a stone floor. There’s no ceiling. Above, the night sky is full of stars.

There’s no way out. I try to climb the walls, but they’re too smooth to get a grip and too high to jump. I try feeling for a weak point, but the box is uniform. I call out for soone to co rescue , but no one answers. Calling turns to crying turns to screaming, until my voice gives out. I pick one wall and scratch at it until my fingers are leaving trails of blood, until they’re worn to bone, until I’m just grinding my fingerbones against the unchanging stone and my hands beco mangled stumps that I’m grateful I can’t see clearly. I grow hungry, but I never starve. Tired, but I can’t sleep. Minutes stretch into hours into days, and then longer. I slump, the fight leaving , and stare up into a sky that never knows the sun. I wait there, huddled in the cold dark, and I watch the stars go out. Little lights, one by one, blinking out as they die. Until only darkness remains.

The darkness spits back out into the blue-and-green serenity of the Morrigan’s garden. I fall to my knees and shiver, teeth chattering, mind scoured by ti and deprivation.

The scraps of silk shift. The pieces of the pallid mask click as they reform. A tendril of yellow takes the gun from where it fell and envelops it. Erases it.

“Take this as a gentle lesson,” the King in Yellow says to , sounding personable and human and not the cruelty of ten thousand years spent in the endless dark. “There are things out there against whom bullets are just as useless that will take much, much more harshly to being shot at over anger issues. So, the next ti you want to lash out? Pick a weapon that’ll work or save it for therapy.”

Slowly, I stumble to my feet and nod. “ssage… received.” The cold lingers, fear washing away rage. For a mont, I’d managed to forget that the thing before is an alien god that makes Venus look like a child playing house.

The pallid mask smiles within its yellow cloak. Hastur waves a few tendrils of cloth. “Water under the bridge, then. I understand where you were coming from, of course; you’re still upset about what you learned from the angel, yes?”

I hesitate—no, more accurate to say that I flinch. “I…”

Hastur laughs again. “Not to worry, not to worry. You’re entitled to a dash of discontent. Allow to assure you, at least, that your greatest fears are unfounded; I have not sculpted every facet of your life to attain this outco. Rather, I selected you precisely because you would arrive at this outco with only a few nudges needed. It’s best when one’s entertainnt requires little maintenance, don’t you think?”

“Is that all I am to you?” I ask bleakly. “All my suffering, all that pining, all for the sake of your entertainnt?”

“Absolutely. You were magnificent, my dear.” More tendrils float through the air, almost encircling . “It’s about forbidden love! It’s about yearning! It’s about the yuri, my dearest Rachel. You, of all people, should understand. The tension before contact is the most exciting part; who wants to watch a play where the lovers get together before anything’s even at stake?”

“There’s more to love than that!” I cry out, fists balled. “It’s not just so ga that ends the mont two people kiss! If you think my feelings for Sophie are boring now just because they’re reciprocated, you don’t understand anything about love!”

“Show .” Hastur’s silken tendrils lash forward and wrap around my arms and legs, pulling tight. “Show , Rachel. I want to see it. Show the strength of a bond that’s waited seven years to consummate. Show what your love looks like now that it’s been won. Show that it can endure what is to co. Show that your love can survive contact with the hard reality of who you and Sophia really are. Prove to , Rachel, that your love is more than a candle’s last gasp, than a single flash of light swallowed by the dark.”

I grit my teeth, struggling against her grasp. “I will! Just you fucking watch! I love her, and she loves , and we’re going to be together forever! We love each other!”

Hastur releases , retracting in on herself with another laugh. “Good! Good. I’m rooting for you, truly. Nothing would make happier than to see the two of you succeed. It’ll be a wonderful ti! A grand drama! Or perhaps, in the end, a heartwrenching tragedy. But I promise, however it goes, I will do my utmost best to make it… interesting.”

I lean against the garden wall for support, feeling lightheaded and pained. “Why?” I ask bitterly. “Can’t I just enjoy my life with her? Can’t I have peace? Why can’t soone else be the focus of your ga? Let soone else save the world. Let soone else face the horrors.”

The cloaked figure of Hastur tilts its head curiously. “Is that what Sophia wants?”

And then she’s gone, leaving alone in the hedge maze with Phoebe and my thoughts.