You hit me once (I hit myself back)
So. It starts explosively. Things do have a tendency to go disastrously wrong around the Physical Kids and anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with them can attest to.
(Sorry Josh. I'm sure that you'll get the blood stains out of your clothes eventually. And eh Penny. Maybe you got off easy with the whole enslaved to the library and slowly dying thing, at least you don't have to witness this shitshow)
You see. The thing is magic is no more right? The plumber of the gods turned off the source of magic etc etc because the old gods are hilariously bad and/or negligent parents who don't seem to care when their kids are running riot so long as they don't get themselves killed.
(So you dropped the ball there huh old gods. Whoops-a-daisy, hope you like sautéed goat)
Eliot and Margo are stuck in Fillory, forced to deal with the fallout of a truly tragic party (without even getting into the whole god killing bit, honestly Tick Fillorian parties are the worst), Quentin and Alice are off memorising even more pointless Circumstances, Kady and Penny are living out their epically tragic love story somewhere, Josh is probably digging into his stash of the Really Good Stuff.
And really? How is it that they keep getting stuck with the whole getting rid of bodies schtick? First the Beast, now Ember and Umber… If they are being typecast, Margo would prefer that it be something more glamorous and less likely to leave a funny smell than gravediggers number one and two.
But yes back to the point. The point being that magic is gone. No more convenient hairdressing spells (Margo can feel her hair getting less shiny), no more magical swords (or magical swords, not that anyone in the throne room needs one if you get my drift), no more cleaning up rotting corpses without lot of hard work and potentially several (hundred) servants quitting.
(The rate of attrition is truly ridiculous. Look, Margo knows that in the Middle Ages the monarchy had people who literally wiped the shit off the Royal Posterior and were glad for such a cushy post: the imbeciles chosen as Royal Scenery have it easy in comparison and should stop whining already about how constantly flexing their muscles is giving them cramp. Wimps)
Catastrophic failure of essential divine power, check. Left along with rotting corpses again, check (and no, Margo is still not over that). Champagne-substitute that El still hasn't got to taste less shit going flat already, check.
So when hundreds of fucking invisible fairies storm the castle, Margo figures that it must be a Monday. Yeah, she dropped the ball making a fairy deal but what was she meant to do, let El get killed. Not going to happen: the world has so little fabulous in it that it would be a crime to rid it of anymore. Take El out of the group and it immediately becomes 50% less fashion savvy, and Margo's not a fucking saint, she can't sustain an entire group's worth of sartorial elegance on her own for long.
(That's a lie, she definitely can but where's the fun in being better dressed than everyone else if there's no one around to appreciate it?)
Margo's pretty certain that the fairies weren't expecting to have a roof literally drop of them though. She certainly wasn't expecting anything like that to happen, and she's riding so high on adrenaline, two bottles of tragic almost-champagne, and a couple of Xanax that she swiped from El after he stocked up on Earth that a literal unicorn could come riding by while shitting literal rainbows and she wouldn't miss a beat.
(So she had a little celebration after the goats were killed. She deserves it)
Hey what does she know though. Maybe Fillorian architects were just stupidly dependant on magic just like Fillorian farmers and the roof had been help up with nothing but a couple of spells and a prayer for a few hundred years. When the fairies moving through the throng of screaming people (incidentally trampling a few of them, not that Margo hasn't been tempted to do some of her own trampling recently) are abruptly knocked off their feet and pinned to the (already pretty unstable) walls by an invisible force though…
"Holy fuckballs," Margo says, turning toward Eliot, "You've still got your telekinesis."
Eliot looks back at her, strain on his face. Both arms are flung to the sides, and Margo isn't actually sure he needs to do that for his telekinesis to work or whether he's just being a dramatic twat.
"No shit Sherlock," he deadpans.
"How the hell are you going full Jean Grey without magic?" she demands.
Eliot gives a Gallic shrug.
"Your guess is as good as mine, Bambi," he replies languidly, "Sheer talent perhaps."
One of the fairies explodes like a water balloon, splattering blood everywhere. The rest of them still pretty quickly. As soon as all of this is over, they are building a new fucking castle because there is no way that they're getting the blood out of the marble without magic.
"Oops?" says Eliot.
"Oops?" Margo replies. "El, oops is wearing a paisley vest with a striped shirt. We moved past oops a while ago."
Eliot remains studiously indifferent (how many of those Xanax did he take?)
"Well," he says, "I might, over the years, have supplemented my already not inconsiderable skill at repression with a variety of borderline illegal spells to stop my telekinesis from wreaking havoc."
Margo is silent.
"Are you telling me," she hisses, "That you fucking bound your telekinesis with shitty dark magic instead of womaning up and learning how to control it like an adult? And now that magic has deserted us you're going full Dark Phoenix on me?"
Eliot frowns.
"Famke Janssenn or Sophie Turner?" he asks.
"Oh my god El, Janssen evidentially, but so not the time!"
"It seemed like a good idea at the time?" he replies sheepishly, "I got really high in first year, snuck found a few books in Cottage, performed a few spells… It was win win really, I stop having to concentrate so hard on control all the time and devote more of my life to decadence, we save a fortune on broken wineglasses… The only price is a teensy-weensy bit of spellcasting that I just set to autopilot to maintain control. How was I supposed to know that magic would give out and fuck us all over?"
Margo stares.
"Because that was momentously stupid? Because the Universe enjoys deep-dicking us all over? Because you were probably going to literally explode when all that pent-up magic finally reached its limit?"
Another couple of fairies burst into red showers. Margo ignores them: she has more important things to worry about.
"Ahem."
The fairy queen gives a polite cough from where she's suspended near where the ceiling used to be.
"I can see that you have a lot of Royal Business to get on with," she says, "If you wouldn't mind letting me and my people down, we'll let you get on with it."
"Yeah right," says Margo. "You and me? We need to have a little chat. I think it's time to negotiate a new deal. Then we'll let you down."
Five more fairies explode.
"Did you do that on purpose?" Margo mutters at Eliot. He gives a slow, solemn nod.
"I got you back bitch," he says.
Margo smiles. It's vaguely terrifying. It's her Todd smile: she practices it in front of the mirror.
"Now," she says sweetly, "Let's talk your highness."
(Later, sitting on the couch at the Cottage and stroking Eliot's hair she basks in a job well done. Penny's free of the Library which means that Kady can stop sulking. After uncovering a slavery ring and stopping some creep called Irene McAllister, she and the fairy queen are content to exist in mutually beneficial hatred. Tick has a broken leg after being 'accidentally' hit by a falling fairy after negotiations were done. El is free to fuck whoever he wants, and Fen has an entire kingdom to baby while Margo has a nice relaxing holiday. And Q has a shiny new Quest to bring magic back, thereby sorting out her frizzy hair situation. All in all a good day's work.)