She knew when she started that she would never defeat Martin Chatwin. Not as he was, twisted into something that was not human, but that she could not put enough mental power into to name demon. There was...a softness to him, she'd seen it the moment the branch had come away. But it was something hard to reach, something he protected with the twisted magic he'd spent countless years learning. Even at her level – which she knew was higher than many other people's – she wasn't sure how she could crack through that terrifying shell. Still, she knew when Martin charged Quentin, that she was going to try. And if she didn't succeed, she would die here, they would all die here. They probably deserved it, considering how every single one of them had been acting since they took off on this ridiculous mission. It was a sad state of affairs when Eliot was the one acting like anything that resembled a rational human being. Well, Eliot and Josh, but Josh never changed.
She was running mostly on reflex, pulling spells, transformations. She'd told Quentin she would take a chance, and here it was – she was taking all of the chances at once, played on fast-forward, and played for keeps. As she worked the spells, she felt a sort of elation, or maybe a sort of bloodlust. None of the fighting up to now had mattered the way this did, and it felt good to take a stand. Here, then, was Quentin's grand adventure, only he got to play damsel in distress instead of shining white knight. In a way, that suited him better. If she'd had time, she might have hoped that it would be a reality check for him. But in the end, she'd probably know better, too. As it was, the world slowed down. There was only Martin Chatwin and his temper tantrum; that's all it really was, in the end, just one big temper tantrum, carried out by a little boy who'd been allowed to run wild for far too long.
Quentin, understandably, wasn't any help in the fight at large. She could hear the murmur of the others, frantically casting spells, trying to keep up with her. As it was, only Penny would have stood a chance (or, yes, all right, Quentin, if he ever pulled his head out of his ass long enough to figure things out). The others were a welcome help, but she didn't think they'd make a difference. They were all running on empty, and they were losing. She held her own well enough, but it wasn't something to brag about. The things you did in life or death situations were never worth bragging about, it seemed. Anyway, she probably wouldn't remember, later. None of them would remember the play-by-play sequence of events, if they made it out. That was how these things worked. They'd all be shell-shocked and ruined and traumatized, but they'd be alive.
That was the plan, anyway. It was the only plan she had.
But Penny and Quentin were bleeding out on the floor, and Alice herself was running out of ideas, out of memorized spells. She spouted off to Martin, full of bravado she hadn't known she'd had. If she hadn't been so secretly terrified, it probably would have felt wonderful. It did, even now, just a bit, but the stakes were too high to focus on any real enjoyment.
Quentin, through his haze of pain, managed to unleash his demon. It looked almost...nerdy, from what she saw of it, with its little glasses. The absurdity of it might have made her laugh, if she'd had any laughter in her just then. As it was, she just stared, breathing hard, feeling the adrenaline start to run itself out. That wouldn't do. She'd never make it, and they'd all die here. She refused to accept that, after she'd been doing so well. Even having known she couldn't do it, that didn't mean she was going to lay down and admit defeat. She had to at least try again. She'd come here to take care of Quentin, and that's what she would do, no matter the cost. She didn't even care if he was pissed at her, if he never forgave her. She didn't need his forgiveness.
When Martin began to devour the cacodemon just as he'd devoured that girl, years ago, and Penny's hand, minutes ago, it dawned on Alice what she had to do. She couldn't have said how it occurred to her; it came in a moment of hopeless, stark clarity, like your life flashing before your eyes when you die. Only she didn't really plan to die, she planned to do something better.
The spells came to her tongue mostly unbidden. Once she'd made the decision, it was easy, from there. There was absolutely nothing left to do, to think, to decide. The only words were the words that would form the spells, that would overload her system and destroy her, and they were the easiest words she'd ever spoken.
The fire started in her hands, burning hotter than anything she'd ever felt. It wasn't painful, exactly, because it was too many other things to be painful. There was no pain, there was only...magic. That's what it was, it was pure magic. Magic the way it was originally, raw and grand and untempered, magic too great for the human mind or body to contain.
She watched, the world moving in slow motion, as the fire spread up her arms, towards her body. It did burn, furiously.
"I'm on fire," she said, filled with the wonder of it. She was detached, though. The voice that rose to fill the room was not her own. She had no more need of a voice, no more than she needed her burning hands. Still, she couldn't help staring at them. The process itself seemed so slow that it was impossible to focus on anything else. She had started this, and she needed to see it done, so she watched as it worked, consuming her.
Martin had said that humanity was the first thing to go, and maybe for him, that had been true. But as Alice watched her flesh turn to fire, she felt that the Beast had taken the wrong path entirely. This...this wasn't giving up her humanity. She'd never felt more human, really. She felt almost as if she was being turned inside out, the physical being turned into pure spirit – the human soul, unencumbered, unrestrained by the normal fleshy prison. If you believed in that sort of thing.
Her head fell back as the strange, burning, shimmering flames reached her face, and the last of her that was human the way Quentin and the others were human became something more.
As she rose, it hit her all at once. She was plugged in, tapped in to the world in a way that she'd never been able to do before, not in her human skin and not in any animal skin she'd ever worn. They'd been here before. Penny on the floor, bleeding from losing a head, not his hands. Quentin losing his hands instead, bleeding out into madness and death. All of them broken into pieces that even her magical new mind couldn't fathom. Josh and Eliot and Janet and other people, other faces she knew and did not know, contorted in pain or disappearing into Martin Chatwin's hideous maw of a mouth, over and over...
She did not know she was laughing, but she was.
She had beaten the timeline. They would not end here, in pieces. Penny and Quentin, they would live. Josh and Eliot and Janet and even that French girl, they would all live. They might not be all right, and she knew Quentin would probably never forgive her, or himself, but they would live. And Martin Chatwin...would not.
There was nothing left to fear, for her, or for any of them, not how she saw it. She looked at all of them, and she felt too much to express it. She loved them, the Physical Kids, and she loved Quentin. She had done this, she had become this, for Quentin. And if they had to do it again, in some other fucked up timeline, she would do it again and again. They would never lose to Martin Chatwin ever again.
Pulling the Beast's head off was as easy as it would have been to pull a Barbie's head off when she was a child, if she'd been into that sort of thing. It took only a little force, and there it was, separating, tearing. That was the softness she'd known existed in him, oozing out all over the sandy floor of the cave.
There would be more trials, for them, before they got out. But Alice knew with the certainty of her connection to the world – Fillory, Earth, a million others, everything and nothing – that they would manage it. Quentin had lost consciousness around the time Elliot had thrown the crown, but none of that mattered now. She still did not require his forgiveness; perhaps now, she required it even less.
The fire that had become Alice – or had Alice become the fire? - began to glow brighter, white hot, too much to look at. The others had their own ordeals to face, and they shielded their eyes from her brilliance. She began to dissipate. To the mortals – and Ember – below her, it would be in the blink of an eye. But to her, it was another long, slow, process. Everything she was spread out, slowly, touching all of them, though they could not perceive it, spreading out into the world beyond. She was made of magic, she was magic, and anyone from now until forever who used magic would be using her too, as she had used the force of anyone who had come before her, tapped into whatever the source of it all was. Had she been using her brother all these years, too? Surely that was the case. She hoped it was.
She lingered, last of all, on Quentin. Emotion seemed pointless and far away from her now, but she loved him, in all his self-hatred and imperfection. She couldn't hang on to that feeling, or she might have been sad. But they weren't really being separated, not entirely. No one was ever really separated, or so it seemed to her.
As the last of her blue light faded out, growing – or diminishing, she couldn't have really said – she hoped that he would see that, one day. And maybe then, he would forgive the one person who needed his forgiveness: himself.