Disclaimer: I own absolutely nothing. Tin Man is SciFi's, et al; the Dies Irae is church liturgy.
Setting/Spoilers: Generally spoils all three installments; set for the most part pre-main action of the story.
Notes: Despite the first line around which this is based, no, I'm quite aware there is canonically no prophecy. However, the tone of the verses convince me otherwise, so I took a few liberties. Sibyl, for the confused, is the prophetess of Greco-Roman mythology. I have officially been reading too much poetry.
Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla, teste David cum Sibylla.
(Day of wrath, that day, when the world dissolves into ash, as David and the Sibyl have foretold.)
There had been a prophecy.
My life is a fairytale, DG had moaned only a week ago, twenty years old and alive, alive, much later in the story itself.
She hadn't been able to resist the smile then, having long accustomed herself to that particular truth. That her daughter was finally coming to terms with the fact seemed, in comparison, slightly absurd. Azkadellia had looked on with dark, vaguely amused eyes, though no hint of a smile on her face. Ahamo had stood ready to calm his overacting daughter, not seeming to realize or remember that this was the way she had always been.
Ah, memories. How she would always treasure them.
The prophecy itself had come at a very inopportune time – she recalled it clearly – during which she was at the cusp of her courtship of Ahamo. Royalty is not passive, her mother had told her at the time, dissatisfied but relenting in the face of her daughter's determination. Therefore you shall do the courting. An unimportant matter of perspective, perhaps, but one she was willing to abide by. Such stuffiness, how she had loathed it, only to conform to it in part as a matter of survival.
oOo
It had in fact been the year before her engagement, she still a blushing and defiant girl of nineteen.
(How very like her DG had turned out, she thought much later, with the ever present touch of aching nostalgia.)
The majestic queen of the OZ, the beggar woman had begun in the courtyard of the summer palace, and thus had spun history. At the time, she hadn't known what to believe, as she herself was her mother's only daughter and child.
The witch was accordingly banished in her guise of a gypsy woman. Her mother instructed her to place it out of her mind – a task that, even with her strength in magic, seemed impossible. The memory of the day lurked on the fringes of her mind, rustling themselves like sheaves of paper in the dead of night when she dwelled on the subject and slept little, haunted by a ragged mountain woman's eyes that if only for a moment in time, had met hers.
oOo
She had thrown caution to the winds and married Ahamo despite heavy protestations. The princess marry a Slipper? Preposterous!
And Dorothy Gale herself a Slipper. How very preposterous that was indeed.
Two years after her marriage she bore a daughter whom she named Azkadellia, the very name itself imbued with ancient power. Five years later had followed another child, a daughter she named Dorothy Gale and nicknamed DG. The name spoke for itself.
In those years, the upheaval had gradually been quieted by the anticipation. Her mother's death and her own coronation came and went peacefully, much like a dream to she who experienced it all.
One to light, and one to dark, the woman had whispered, though as the years passed it seemed impossible. Azkadellia, if possible, had taken to her sister faster than she, her own mother, could have; DG always in her still-small arms or at her side, having taken her first step clinging to her sister's hands. They neither wanted nor needed other friends, and she had never felt any guilt or regret for not setting them in other playgroups.
No, not when the days in Finaqua were so sweet, the colors so brilliant, the joys so simple and pure; not when she could spend hours watching her daughters smile at nothing but each other and the day, a heart-shaped rock, a spinning doll. Azkadellia stooped to take her sister's hand, and scampered off with her. DG came, grinning mischievously, and presented her with flowers from the woods neither of them were supposed to enter.
How could she have done anything but smile?
Until one day, when her darling had come running clumsily through wood and briar and buried herself in her arms, sobbing on her breast as she used to, saying that Az fell, that she had run away and let go. By that time she had quite disabused herself of any notion of a prophecy, and had merely held her darling all the more tightly, making the quiet calming noises that were so familiar to her by then. Azkadellia had followed not far behind, and her fears were alleviated for There was Az right there and obviously well enough. Whatever game the two had been playing in the forests (she made a mental note to talk to them firmly about the dangers of the forests behind Finaqua later that evening; not knowing then that DG would idly mention an encounter with a bear, to her horror, nearly fifteen years later) must have gotten a little out of hand. That was all.
Later, she thought the way DG tensed every time her sister came near her should have been warning enough.
Two months later, they had moved to the winter palace; and not long after, she had watched her elder daughter quietly leave her sister's room after nightfall. Such a thing was not uncommon between her daughters – but the saunter, the swagger, the sway that sat wrongly on her twelve-year-old daughter's hips; the suggestion of overt femininity, allure, danger -
Inside her room, she found her youngest daughter dead.
oOo
Action was necessary, and moreso in that it be quiet and secret. She sat on the verge of barely contained hysteria a moment later in Ambrose's spacious quarters, claustrophobia overcoming her despite it all.
Royalty is not passive, echoed her mother's voice in her head, and absurdly, that was all she could think of.
"My lady," Ambrose said, formal to the end, loose as he ever allowed himself around her, brow concerned and pace hurried. His eyes roamed over her now-grey head, questioning, but silent.
"Azkadellia took her sister's life not ten minutes ago," she explained with no hesitation. In her arms, her daughter twitched.
Ambrose, to his credit, hardly flinched. "You have your suspicions?" he questioned softly.
"I do," she replied, quietly. "A moment, nearly half a year past…" but she was rambling, and composed herself, unable to decide if she was more soothed or unsettled by DG's soft, warm breaths against her neck. "Ahamo is explaining to Azkadellia that DG unexpectedly died in the course of the night even as we speak."
He nodded slowly. "And you?"
"I have taken upon myself a journey of both spiritual and physical importance, and with my daughter's body, have begun to make my way back to Finaqua."
Ambrose sighed. "What are your plans? If there is any way in which I may assist you, aid you…"
She smiled, sadly. "I knew this day would come. Just not in this way." DG shifted against her shoulder, fighting against the sleep her mind had induced. It was for the best. Ambrose stared at her, gently. She shook herself.
"Milltown," she said, and sealed her daughter's fate.
oOo
Halfway between the Winter Palace and Central City, DG awoke.
"Az!" she cried, for the last time.
Though it broke her heart to do so, she commanded a wave of forgetfulness to descend like a shroud upon her daughter's small mind, so impressionable, so tortured; a vise that, like a shroud, might be removed with her barely tapped magic.
Remember, she whispered into her daughter's ear, a promise and a hope distilled for the future. Snatches of the most traumatic memories of her daughter's young life passed before her own eyes, as DG screamed the guilt and terror and grief of it all to the wild forest.
Then, it was over, and the eyes so full of the innocence and mischief she loved gazed up at her, still half closed from the force of her earlier tears. Her heart sank further to see that the love they had always held had fled with the descent of forgetfulness.
"Who are you?"
Always so curious, so audacious. She smiled sadly, for the last time, as deep within her she felt the last embers of her own magic smolder and die. "It doesn't matter. There is an adventure that lies before us."
oOo
The majestic queen of the OZ
Had two lovely daughters, she
One to darkness, she be drawn
One to light, she be shown
So her fate had been drawn in her twentieth annual. She refused now to lay idle, words and songs whirling and combining in her mind, verses forming and stories beginning. Parts were missing, but that was to be expected in such a story as this: begun, but unfinished, with only hope to stimulate the future's outcome. She continued to plan in her mind, her meter set by the irregularity of the jostling of the cart they rode in, while DG, not knowing her mother for who she was, snuggled nevertheless trustingly against her side.
Daughter of light came across
A glistening white
Mountain
Four, two, and one; the consecutive division of iambs by two. Stress, unstress. Frozen in time in a sea of ice; four, and so it should continue, the repetition a testament to perseverance. Whose, she could not yet say. She stroked back her daughter's hair in broken reverence.
Words were her only solace, and soon provided a tangible hope. She toyed with them, turning them over and over in her mind, glowing and sparkling through the undercurrents that by necessity had to permeate everything like a dark cloud on a bright day.
The majestic queen, indeed. What a picture she should make in the months and years to come.
"Oh, my darling," she whispered softly in the silence. "You hardly know your fate, now, at this moment."
It seemed to make the moment all the more fleeting. DG slept on against her, brown curls tangled as her mother had never allowed them before, dreams blissfully, for the moment, devoid of terrors and death, of once-loving sisters, of deserting mothers.
Everything's better in Milltown, read the sign before her. Sleepy eyed and unerringly trusting, her daughter took her hand and followed her from the cart.
oOo
Such storms as needed to take DG to the other side were called freak for the very reason that they were violent and, above all, unpredictable. It was a dichotomy of choice and error, her magic gone, her daughter's strong but untrained, the very memory of it held in suspension by a thread.
With no other choice, she bent to her daughter's level, cheek to cheek, one gentle hand on her shoulder and the other clasped around her smaller one: a pose in all respects very reminiscent of the same she'd seen Azkadellia emulate with her sister during DG's lessons; Tutor, bless him, standing patiently to the side.
She prayed that the subconscious might remember something of it all, impressions that were too deeply ingrained to have disappeared yet so quickly and without complete erasure. Her hand did not glow and tingle in the old familiar way, and neither did DG's. Her daughter looked up at her curiously as she struggled not to cry in frustration.
"What's supposed to be happening?" she whispered.
No time, no time, her mind was screaming at her, three precious days already lost, time that otherwise would have already been ample enough to have arrived and settled at Finaqua had that been her true objectivebut there was no other choice.
"Something we're going to need help doing," she replied, and straightened from the unfamiliar pose.
oOo
The queen sat
Gazing hopefully out upon her frozen realm
Longing for her daughter to return
Two, six, and three; and any semblance of scansion fled in the face of the haste that drove her mind and quickened her heart, jarred by the rumblings of wheel traversing rock.
Henry and Emily, as she had dubbed them, sat entertaining DG in the back of the wagon with the verses she had carefully taught them, and though she restrained herself from joining them, it was more difficult than she had feared, despite the way DG looked at her so blankly. Better now that she learn to accommodate herself to her new parents, fashioned to love and care for her. The names were suitable enough, hearkening to the glorified past as her daughter's hearkened to her destiny.
The Mystic Man's show was one she had not seen since before she had met Ahamo, and had changed little in form. It was however, the man, rather than the show, that she had come to see. She had met him, once, the first time she had travelled to Central City by herself (excluding her company, always an unspoken prerequisite for any member of the royal family, and something she had long accustomed herself to.) She remembered the moment of realization that alerted her that these, while cheap parlor tricks, were the product of real magical talent.
I see this is why you are so charismatic, she had said to him at the time, all of seventeen annuals and precocious as a child. She created a ball of energy drawn from her surroundings, and cradled it in the palm of her hand. There is in fact something to the man behind the curtain.
She threw the ball without warning; he caught it with a grin, which she reciprocated, and made it disperse back into the air.
And you, your majesty, he had returned.
Luckily or unluckily for her, depending on the situation, her eyes had always been striking, especially in combination with her raven-dark hair; and with a lowered hood and a meeting of eyes that lasted perhaps a split second, she had gained the recognition of the man on stage.
He was waiting for her backstage after the show.
"Your majesty," he began, bowing low. "I am most aggrieved to hear of the death of your daughter."
She smiled bittersweetly. "There is no need for such formality, nor for such sorrow, I assure you. My daughter is alive and well and, in fact, in your presence."
He stilled in something between shock and confusion. "Highness, then - "
"I have need of your help," she implored him.
"However could I help you?" he asked, genuinely bewildered, giving DG a trinket off his bureau to play with. "Your magic far exceeds mine, and I'm sure I have nothing else of value to offer for your service."
"My magic is gone," she softly interrupted him, "and is no more, and that is why I have come, if I have your trust, of course?"
"Of course, of course," he replied quickly, still with that baffled look on his face. "I take it then, that I am one of few privy to the knowledge that your daughter is alive?"
"And that my other daughter shall soon turn this nation upon itself," she replied, "yes. And while that shall of itself soon become public knowledge, DG's life depends on you, and the others who know her secret, to keep it such."
"What must I do?" he asked, and she sighed her relief.
On the outskirts of the city, just past the slums and immediately before the never-ending expanse of field and prairie, a storm rose from the heavens, and descended to unleash its fury on the earth it touched. She watched as it swallowed her fearless daughter along with Henry and Emily.
"How do you know?" the Mystic Man asked her once it was over, and the seeming non sequitur resounded in the newly hollowed space within her.
"There was a prophecy," was her only reply, soft and distant. "One I couldn't quite disabuse myself of."
Reports came later that night as she journeyed alone to Finaqua that there had been no casualties among the storm.
oOo
Ahamo greeted her two days later with Azkadellia in tow. She took a moment to remind herself that, if her suspicions were correct, it was no longer her daughter that talked and lived and breathed, and that she must keep up the pretense of her sister's death for this reason.
She found this was not harder than expected. The burial of an empty coffin held nearly as much significance as if her daughter's body truly was being laid to rest. Az's once warm, expressive eyes now glittered from their sockets, and though look as she might, she could find no trace of the girl she loved within.
She prayed that she was wrong. Only years later was she proven so, having held onto that hope through seven years of a beautiful prison, a mockery of Finaqua in its pastels and driftwood, all things dead or dying, confined to a hundred feet of space.
(Later, Az would look at her, unable to hold her gaze or bear her touch for weeks. DG was by then a constant by her side, a reminder that it now was she, in fact, who talked, lived, and breathed, that it was her own heart that beat for her alone. Watching them, her heart ached with the memory of two carefree girls, lost now to tortured women, clinging to each other for dear life.)
After conspiring together quietly for several days after the funeral, she sent her husband away, the guardian of the last gasping remnants of her hasty plan; told everyone he had abandoned her in the face of his daughter's death, and officially banished him to the Realm of the Unwanted.
A Slipper! the people cried again, unaware of the movements that would soon shake the core of the O.Z., of a force that would soon make such differentiations seem trivial. What good can one expect from a Slipper!
Ah, mused the queen later, alone in her self-enforced confinement within the winter palace, staring out across the frozen expanse. We shall soon see.
oOo
The days passed slowly, and she left them up to fate, the concept of free will now fading into a romantic ideal embodied by the scholarly and the young.
Azkadellia's hair darkened from its former ordinary brown to a shade nearing what her own had once been. She wondered if DG's would do the same, how tall she was, if she had retained her wide eyed innocence, her capacity to love. Such thoughts were never far from her mind.
In one day, Ambrose was taken and her dynasty fell: one terrible, fell swoop. She met her prison and against her will, began to languish, her orchestrated losses always in her thoughts; she, the grand master within the space allotted her, subservient to whatever force governed the universe.
Once, she had thought she had seen a telltale flicker in Azkadellia's eyes, and ventured for the first time in years to call her Az, to croon a hint of an old lullaby to her, to come close enough to tenderly stroke a lock of dark hair from ivory cheek, before she was slapped brutally away.
She added it to the few things she had left to hold on to; strengthened only years later when a flowering branch from the fields of the Papay was pressed coldly into her hand. The heady knowledge of what it must have meant put her stagnant mind into overdrive.
DG, her mind repeated frenetically, and hopes that had atrophied with her mind revived in that instant. The eclipse was coming, Azkadellia told her.
Double eclipse, it is foreseen
Light meets dark, and the stillness between
The thought paralyzed her, and she leaned against the twisted tree for support for she didn't know how long, eyes of long ago full of madness and dreadful amusement catching at memories over twenty annuals old. The force of the clash resided in the strength of the word meet. It was a terrifying thought.
The next seven days promised to be the longest of her life.
oOo
At the end of them, DG stood beaming on the other side of her husband, Azkadellia on the other side of her, bathed in the light of both suns. It promised to be a fortuitous omen. If they would have allowed it, she would have gathered them both in her arms and shook with the dry terror she'd suppressed the last fifteen annuals until their combined warmth warded it away and proved their reality. There was a wariness, a weariness, to belief, that hurt with every beat of her heart, resonant in the realization of her daughters, fully grown, before her.
It surprised and pleased her no end that DG had reunited with Ambrose, however unknowingly, though he now went by Glitch. She wrapped him in a relieved hug he returned uncertainly. Azkadellia retreated into a corner in palpable desperation, diffused into the air despite her intentions; in the long breaths she finally felt free to take, it tasted sharp and sour on her tongue. In her peripheral vision, she saw DG follow more tentatively than she had previously thought she might have.
(Boundless energy, mischievous smile, adult bearing, her hands finally, finally, again between hers, pressed against her lips; her face, her expression, her likeness available to drink in as she had so often longed to do.)
"I don't know how deserving I am of your favor, your majesty," he said, stuttering over it, very unlike the Ambrose she had known. Heart sinking in spite of the happy day, she began to accept the difference between Glitch and Ambrose, and the likelihood one would never again be reconciled to the other.
"You brought my daughter home," she told him. "Even if you weren't already a trusted friend, that would have earned my undying respect. Thank you."
"No, you don't understand!" he continued, fretting. "I nearly got her killed, a few times - "
The man DG had introduced as Cain stepped discreetly on Ambrose's toes. She smothered a smile.
"Thank you," she repeated earnestly, and turned to the other two men. "All of you."
Later that night, they had all gathered by tacit agreement in a little used room in the fortress, strangers with blood and history between them, and little in common, warmed collectively by the fire and each other's company, however uncertain such company was. It was assured, and for the moment, it was all that mattered.
"How did this all start again?" DG asked aimlessly in the restless silence to no one in particular, staring into the flames in the hearth.
Ahamo glanced her way, as if to lay the question on her. Even Azkadellia's dark eyes looked up in interest.
She smiled ruefully, always having been forced to find a terrible dark humor in it – those eyes that had housed insanity, how often the memory of them had threatened to drive her mad – and said, "There was a prophecy."
DG groaned.
When the only other option was to weep, how could she have done anything but laugh aloud?