{everything floats}

When the transformation occurs, she feels a brief flare of warmth, racing through her veins like an angry swarm of gnats. It shocks her, this spot of unexpected comfort, so thorough and sweet, lulling her into relaxation with a tender lie.

Sleep now, dear child, coaxes the fire. Sleep now and watch it all bleed away, watch it run down the drain and rot into nothing, all those old troubles unwound. The softness embraces her like a mother (or a lover), and she sinks gracefully into its hold.

She is in no way prepared for the next wave - heat lightning and frost, slashing across the surface of her skin and raining cold arrows right along her nerve endings. Her vocal cords stretch to their very limit and stay there, screaming, while the space around her shatters and dissolves. She sees Kyoko's mouth open in an 'o' of horror, clinging desperately to the leg of a bench, her red hair billowing behind her in a thick, crimson curtain. She thinks she can hear Madoka's voice as well, echoing in the back of her skull, urging her to stop, stop and come back Sayaka please don't go-

Her hands reach for her friend and find emptiness, her vision contracting into dull points of color while her world continues to dwindle, collapsing upon itself in a steady fall like a prodded house of cards. The last thing she thinks as a human is that she is sorry for leaving Madoka, and then her eyes close.

::

She awakes to a drearier existence. Her sky is a gaping mouth, yawning amongst the remains of the old universe; the buildings beneath are thin, stick-like structures that topple at the lightest touch. There is no sun, only tiny orbs of icy incandescence flitting around the lackluster clouds. She is all alone.

Her world is not depressing; it is disappointing.

::

Time passes slowly for her. A second becomes an hour. An hour becomes a day. A day becomes a week, and so on and so forth. In the span of a few human minutes, she has begun to construct her own labyrinth - she is a Witch now, after all, and survival bears highly on her list of precedents - from the bleak atoms of the landscape. Creation, she finds, is easier than she suspected, or even thought a Witch capable of. All the work comes naturally to her, guided by a melancholy she cannot explain. She thinks it might be the boy she lost, the jealousy at one of her friends for being close to him, the hatred she felt for the men on the train, the utter desolation of the planet. There are many things that led to her downfall; it would be difficult to decide which one of them was the straw that finally broke her back.

So, she builds relentlessly. She captures details that she had never thought her mind could see. Every seemingly insignificant memory returns blown up to gargantuan proportions, and the ones she had fussed over as a human - those become obsessions. She fixates over them day and night, watching as the sand trickles down the hourglass and her life continues undeterred. She draws her minions from her sorrows, watches them become flesh and blood and whatever it is they are made of (you, a part of her insists) and moves onto the next project. She is distracted over Debussy and Beethoven, Mozart and Vivaldi, all those concertos and symphonies the boy in her other life had loved. She does not know the boy here, but she knows she had loved him before, so she builds something to remember him by. From the dust of her realm springs an orchestra, designed only to play for her the melodies of her youth. She is old now, no longer a mahou shojo but a Witch; however, she is drawn back constantly to the boy and those other past recollections by sentiment, so she listens to Midnight Sonata, to Requiem and Four Seasons, and in her withered, blackened Witch heart, she weeps.

::

Her fellow Witches in the city appear in her mind's eye as dim areas of isolation, scars on an otherwise healthy Earth. She pulls towards them as any newborn must, trying to search for a soul to empathize with, to relate to. In this coven, she finds no friendship, for her Witches are as preoccupied by their own concerns as she is with hers. She is able to find some who will grieve with her, though, because they were born of the same despair that she was, and they understand better than most.

Perception as a Witch is limited. She no longer sees as a human would. All the sights she perceives are abstracted now, broken up into jumbles and colors and sounds that lack meaning. Most of her attention is devoted to her mourning, and so the clarity of her sight suffers, tainted by an omnipresent need to rove over the memories of her past and drink from them - what? Pain? Misery? Time for her has become less of a movie and more of a photo album; there is nothing else to do but to read through the sorrows she felt then, when she was but a girl, and to take the meager sustenance she can from these sessions. Every second she spends reviewing, the more her dominion grows. She is a tree fed by grief, watered by regret. The Witches know, and they cry out to her sometimes.

She cries back.

::

A pink-haired girl appears in her remembering occasionally. The girl is always smiling, radiating such happiness that she cannot help but want to reach out to her, to hold her and take some of that joy for her own. It is greedy, yes, but she is desperate.

In the centuries between, she puzzles over the girl, searches for a name. There is something that the girl was a part of, some role that she played. She searches for an answer. As always, there is none. Still, she wonders.

Who were you? she questions. Why have you remained?

Did I love you, once?

The girl simply laughs.

::

There are footsteps. Someone is coming, slashing through the barrier. She sees the red-haired girl, and surprisingly, the pink-haired one trailing beside her looking timid as a mouse.

Oh, she has time to think, before she pulls them in with a wish, before she bares her teeth and disconnects.

Sayaka Miki died millennia ago. There is only Oktavia von Seckendorff in the aftermath. The Witch roars, and the girls tremble.

Their fight begins with a song.