Author's Notes: Holy man God wow is this full of references to self-harm, nihilism, despair, and body horror. Tread carefully. The yuri is a long way away. Additionally: this was written as part of the Diakko (Dianakko?) Week Challenge on Tumblr, though it rapidly grew out of control into a full-bore fic.
"We learn to live with this poison in our veins." - Parables of the Allspring
Daryl's familiar slithered under her dress. "Well, well. I was wondering who it could be at this hour. Is that you, Diana?" The powerful witch loomed into sight, casting her gaze onto her niece, who stood in the awning alone. "When I heard footsteps, I was afraid it might be a burglar."
"Sorry for startling you, Aunt Daryl. It's been a while." Diana cut quite the dapper profile in her long brown cloak. It had only been a few months, but somehow the little lady had grown to look even more like Bernadette.
Daryl's heart twitched. There was no going back now. She's here for the greater good, she thought, just like you. It'll all work out. You'll all be stronger for this. She'll forgive you.
"Aunt Daryl...?" Diana said.
"Ah... sorry. For a moment there..." She sighed. "My eyes aren't as good as they used to be. For a moment I'd thought my sister had just stepped in out of the gloom."
"It's just me," Diana said. "I'm here for family business. I hope you understand that I'll be here for an extended stay."
"I understand." Daryl descended the staircase. "What brings you here from the nice warm halls of Luna Nova?"
"They haven't been warm all the time," Diana said. "Did you not hear about the ludicrous fairy protests a few months back?"
"Ah, no," Daryl said. She reached the bottom floor, and glided across the tiles to Diana. Diana flinched as her aunt approached. "Do tell. It sounds amazing."
"I..." Diana narrowed her eyes. "Why are you...?"
"Diana, Diana, Diana." Daryl reached for her face. "Can't I get a closer look at you after so long?"
"It's just... it's not like you."
"Diana. These are dark days. I didn't even see you at Christmas, much less New Years. I miss you, child." Her hand hovered near Diana's cheek. "May I? Please?"
"If you insist," Diana whispered.
"I do." She touched Diana's cheek. Her hand was perpetually chill and clammy in the winter; her blood ran cold as her familiars' blood did. Diana was practically aflame to her touch. "Coils of Yig, Diana. You look just like her."
Diana's expression did not soften.
Both hands now, gently tilting Diana's head upward. "You're beautiful, child. Your mother would be so proud of you..."
Diana pursed her lip. She did not feel the presence of the worm until it sank its teeth into the back of her knee. "Hgk-" Her aunt seized her left hand, pointing it away from her leg. "You-Daryl, what have you-"
The strength left her leg; she crumpled to her knee, feeling now the presence of something soft, fat, and chitinous clenching her leg, long spines digging into her thigh as her leg fell into it. It yielded, but its armor stayed firm. She felt something cold flow up her leg and into her sides, spreading like an uncontrollable cramp. She fell to her side, Daryl holding her arm up.
"Diana," Daryl said, and she was almost crying. "This is going to hurt. But he promised me that you're going to be safe in his tutelage."
"What are you doing, auntie?" Diana gasped, finding it hard to open her eye. "What are you..."
"I made a promise. We'll all be stronger for this, Diana." Daryl let her go, stepping back and watching her collapse onto her side.
Diana clawed towards her. "Daryl... you traitor... you..."
The fat worm-thing slithered away. The candles and torches flickered and died, casting the room into darkness.
Something darker than the absence of light loomed over Diana's head. She struggled to breathe, forced every jot of energy she had into hefting her left hand, trying to level the prongs of her wand at the presence overhead. A lash of underblack buried in her chest, spreading like roots under her skin, through her muscles, and it pulled her inside-
Daryl snapped her fingers.
A single candle flickered to life. She was alone; the worm had slithered away, wherever it may. Her familiar crawled up her neck, coiling around her shoulders, a comforting presence.
She blew out the candle and faded into the dark. She had debriefed the oarsman: he had simply piloted out into the evening to enjoy the night air. Anna would not be long for sleep and she would not ask questions, being prone to her own late-night trawls through the grounds of the castle.
"Good luck, Diana," Daryl said. "I hope he'll be kind to you."
You are Diana Cavendish. Star pupil of Luna Nova Academy. Born to power, stripped of power, earned your power back. You stared disbelievers in the eye and made them blink.
You have been taken.
Lower your wand. There's nothing more to be done here. You can surrender the burden at last.
What aspiration led you to this place? What dream was supposed to be yours?
You've hardened your heart and rebuilt your soul, but both of them were eaten away years ago. Your life has been the process of losing everything worth living for. With no foundation, every mote of power you build is swallowed whole by the hunger of your hollow life. No matter how powerful you become, the emptiness will be stronger, and one day it will snuff you out.
Every dream you hold dear has turned on you. Every wish answered has made your life harder to live. You have never known the pleasure of love, only the pain of its loss. The emptiness's icy breath creeps up your calves as it digs its teeth into your tendons.
You need to cut its throat while you have it exposed and waiting.
There is a knife for you. It is shaped like [no hope]. Pick it up.
You will carve away the parts of you that hurt. The emptiness is an alpha predator, unstoppable, incontestable; you have the chance now to learn from it, steal from it, become it. You will strangle your dream in its crib. You will bleed love until your veins run dry. Stripped of meaning, pared of hope, you will be free in your newfound slavery.
Take up the knife. Become emptiness. Take your new shape.
Daryl was not a light sleeper, far from it. So when she woke to darkness, she knew at once the sensation of presence in the room was something to react to accordingly. She was up, wand in hand, her serpents coiling around the posts of her bed and the frame of her door. In silence she aimed her wand at the presence.
"Lights," she whispered.
Candles alit around her room in a spreading wave. At the furthest corner where she aimed was...
Her wand trembled. "Is that what he's done to you, Diana?"
Diana's hair hung limp over her face. Her clothes were stained with something that spread across her skin as well, tarry and starry and raw, like fresh-cut meat. Her familiars hissed and recoiled, fleeing from her presence into the safety of the darkness and through their many little hiding places.
Diana stepped forward. Her motions were smooth, practiced, and then they weren't, one step overlong, her head whipping in one direction, her right arm jerking, her right hand clenching. Her left hand bore her wand, the polished metal slick with a brackish filth that dripped from within her sleeve.
"Diana... did he hurt you?"
"Yes." Her voice was hoarse, thick, as if she had an awful cold. "I deserved it. As you deserve it."
Green energy flickered between the tines of Daryl's wand. "Diana, whatever happened, it was for the best. For all of us. He said he was going to return power to the Cavendish family name. He said we would be the first among witches, among all the witches of Earth."
"He didn't lie," Diana said, and she opened her cloak.
Daryl dropped her wand; it rolled down her thigh and into the folds of her covers.
"My babies," she stammered.
"They deserved their pain. In their weakness, they deserved death. Now they are nothing, as you soon will be nothing."
The strength left her and she let it fall way. Diana crawled onto her bed, climbed onto her, until they were face to face. Daryl stared at her through eyes blurred with tears. Diana glared not with her eyes, which were unfocused and dead, but with the light starting to burn between her eyebrows, the skin smoldering and flaking away in flecks of ash.
In silence, Diana unhinged her jaw and started with Daryl's eyes.
When she had eaten her fill, she knelt over her aunt's remains, contemplating their stillness, their incompleteness. As she did, her first grand mal seizure erupted across her body.
Every muscle flexed with supernatural force, yanking her arms, her legs, her head here and there; her back twisted far enough to crack the joint, tear the tendon. She held the impossible pose for a long moment as they knit together in their broken form; she wrenched herself back into something like a normal posture, re-breaking everything. At some point, she had bitten off the edge of her tongue.
Every spasm, every twist, every crack, was pure agony without even a taste of endorphins to dull the pain, no retreat into unconsciousness to stem the flow of pain. She wanted it to hurt. She choked on the vile ichor that had replaced her blood and she loved it.
The grand mal seizure faded; simple myclonic seizures took their place.
The change was progressing. She was hungry again.
Early the next afternoon, on a day so clear the sky seemed to stretch out forever, Akko knocked on the solid, stately front doors of the Cavendish mansion. "Hello!" she said. "Diana? Or people related to Diana? Anyone in there?"
"For the love of..." grumbled Paul Hanbridge. "This can't be happening."
"By reputation," Andrew said, "this isn't terribly like the Cavendishes."
"Well, I dunno, Diana was really upset. Maybe they ran off and left the castle unguarded and un-maid-ed and now she's gotta go and do all the maid stuff before she can answer the door."
"'Maid stuff,'" Paul said.
"Well, what else would a maid be doing on the job?" Andrew said.
Paul didn't dignify that with a response. "What do you say? One more minute before we contact them by phone?"
Before Andrew could do more than start to speak, the door opened. An older woman in dowdy sleepwear forced her way through the narrowest slit she could open the door and closed it behind her, slowly and silently.
"Did you come by car?" the woman whispered. "We have to run. Please, hurry."
"Pardon...?" Paul said.
"Wait, what's happening?" Akko said.
"I don't have time to explain why I don't have time to explain," the maid said, storming off between the lot of them, hiking up her skirt and running for the limousine.
"That's not helpful!" Akko said.
She was already banging on the side door, trying to pull the door open. "Christ, would you look at her-" Paul said.
"Given how terrified she is, don't you think we should heed that advice?" Andrew said. "Unless this is some sort of elaborate prank-"
"Hey!" Akko said. "Why should we be running?!"
Paul walked down the path to the driveway. "Perhaps the lady of the house has finally lost her last wit and is intent on sacrificing everyone in arm's reach to Satan."
"Don't even joke about that!" Akko said, taking Andrew by the hand and yanking him behind her.
"Woah, now!" he said.
"M'am," Paul Hanbridge said, putting his arm on the woman's shoulder and eliciting a shriek. "Please. Tell us what's happening. We can't help if you aren't upfront."
"There's been..." The maid fumbled for words. "There's been a curse of some kind. Young Mistress Diana... something has seized her. She's not human anymore. She's some flesh-eating thing spewing black magic. Everyone else in there is dead and we will be too if we don't run."
"...Come again?" Akko said, her voice small and tremulous.
"I said I didn't have time, goddamn you all," the maid said. "Now are we leaving or are you leaving us all to die?"
"If you insist," Hanbridge said, adjusting his glasses.
"Father, would it be..."
"Son, if you take a witch's side again I will strongly consider disowning you. Now let's leave and save what time we can."
"I..." Akko let go of Andrew's wrist. "I dunno."
The doors unlocked and the maid climbed into the limousine's front seat. "What was that?" Andrew said.
"If she's in trouble, I should help. There's a sorcerer's stone and I have the Shiny Rod!" She hefted the magic item above her head. "I can take it."
"If you insist," Andrew said. "But, here." He fetched a small phone from his pocket and pressed it into Akko's palm. "If anything goes wrong, even a little bit, call and I'll do my best to get you help."
"Thank you, Andrew," Akko said, giving him a hug. "I really appreciate it, okay? And, uh, don't drive off too far, alright?"
"I'll try," he said. He entered the car and conversed with his father; he closed the door behind him before she could catch more than a few stern words from his father. Not very encouraging words, they were. The limousine rumbled down the driveway and into the distance.
Akko bore the Shiny Rod in hand and headed for the front door.
Akko whistled. "Diana?"
The sounds echoed through the grand foyer. "Di-a-na?" she said. "It's me, Akko! I couldn't just let you run off, you know!" She wondered what the point was in framing a scorched canvas-especially one that was nearly seven feet tall-but she presumed it was some kind of highfaultin modern art deal.
She tapped the Shiny Rod on the ground as she walked. "Still here, like I was a minute ago... looking around for a kitchen, if I'm gonna be honest..."
She snooped around for a map, or a brochure, or even a sign reading YOU ARE HERE. Which really would be attached to a map, wouldn't it...? She wished she'd brought snacks, or more snacks. Or some of those little hand-warming packets. They did not pay for heating around here.
By the good grace of whatever god looks out for witches, she found the kitchen, or maybe just a kitchen, and at least the pantry. She found a jar full of peanut butter cookies, reasonably fresh, and had a few, before moving on to raid the fridge for something to, say, make a sandwich of. She assembled herself a turkey sandwich with plenty of life-giving mayo and bacon (cold but still good, if less crunchy than ideal-she didn't see a microwave around here). She wished there were chips anywhere in sight.
She carried a bottle of fancy apple cider with her as she searched for Diana. "Hey, Diana! I'm really still in the mansion! Just had a snack 'cause I was really hungry..." She looked up the staircase. No, no shadowy Diana lurking at the top. "Goin' upstairs. If you're not upstairs, yell where you are and I'll follow. Or just yell 'Marco!' Or should I be yelling 'Marco?'"
After some fumbling around, she caught a whiff of something truly rank. "Oh, dear God," she said, pinching her nose shut. Her belly quivered in fear. Don't you start now, Akko thought. She peered down the hall and saw a door partway open. If she had to guess, the smell had to be coming from there, seeing how there wasn't anything big and dead in the hallway. She gulped down a breath, held it, and stepped into the room.
It was a bedroom, spacious, real heavy on the snake theme. A headless corpse lay sprawled halfway out of bed, the body ravaged by teeth and claws, the open wounds swarmed by an abundance of fat black flies. Her bedding was a swamp of dried blood.
Akko closed the door, stumbled to the railing overlooking the grand foyer, and hurled her lunch onto the tiled floor below.
With much hesitation she swished the cider around in her mouth and spat it out. Then she fumbled for the phone. Juggling one too many objects in hand she wound up dropping it, dropping the cider (again, to the bottom floor,) batting the cell phone into the air to buy herself precious moments, and at last seized it in her left hand, perched on the railing with one leg and balancing with the other.
"Ha!" she said. She tilted just a little bit to the left and landed on her ass. She flipped through the phone, saw there were only two pre-registered numbers, and called Andrew.
"Hello?" Andrew said. He could feel his father roll his eyes.
"Andrew?"
"It's me. What's wrong, Akko?"
"I just found the deadest body I've ever seen and I think Crazy Maid Lady was right. I mean I haven't seen Diana but if that wasn't a dead body it's gotta be made from a dead body. Get some people over here right now, cops or the army or-can you call Luna Nova? You have their number, right?"
"I... surely father would have."
"Don't involve me in this," Paul said.
"Atsuko found a murder victim at the house," Andrew said, covering the phone's mic. "If we're silent we're as complicit in this as-"
Paul took the phone from Andrew's hands and spoke into it. "Young miss, if there is a crime, leave it to your people. I trust you have your own police." He pressed the end-call button, popped the casing off, separated phone and battery, and slipped the components into separate pockets. "Son, we've lowered ourselves enough by taxiing that lost creature away from her owners. Let the Caligulas enjoy their own company."
"Father, there's been-"
"I'll have you silent or I'll have you walk home. Don't test my last nerve, boy."
Andrew clamped his mouth shut and fumed in the stagnant silence, broken only by the nervous nightmare-twitches of the maid.
"I actually don't know if we have magic police," Akko said. "I mean, I think we should, but I haven't had to call them yet." She waited for a response. "Hello? You're there, right?" She checked the phone and saw she'd been hung up on. "Oh, come on! You friggin' jerk!" She tossed the phone down the hall and realized too late that was the worst thing she could've done. She scrambled after it on all fours. "Please don't be dead please don't be dead please don't be-"
The phone's screen alit under her palm, the speakers emitting a low, atonal series of beeps.
She hadn't realized that the lights had gone dark further up the hall, away from the windows. All but one, a pale white-blue.
Akko peered into the darkness.
The light wasn't so much a light as it was... maybe it was a picture, sitting in the middle of the hall? It had a quality like light, but like a painting of light, or like light in an old cartoon; it changed the value of the darkness around it, but it cast no shadows, no light on the walls and floor. It felt like it should be a blue-tinged white... but it was neither of those things. Those were the names her head conjured for what it was. Trying to fix a more accurate name to them felt like letting a worm wriggle in her brain.
The un-light was moving.
It was brightest-or the most different color-at its extremities. Moving legs, hidden by a darker coat, fading to a mantle of black deeper than the dark it emerged from. Akko had no idea how she missed the other un-light-the circle of white hovering in the midst of the darkness.
"Hello...?" Akko said, standing up. She felt the absence of the Shiny Rod, several steps behind her. But her wand was at hand. Why was she wanting her wand...?
"Atsuko Kagari..." the thing in the dark said.
"...D... Diana...?"
In the thin light, she saw Diana. It was Diana... it was Diana. Her long coat was starlight around her shoulders; her legs, her arms, un-shone with light-like quality. From the waist up, the elbows up, her clothes, her hair, her body was oily black. Moldering and flickering in the center of her head, between where her eyes and nose should be, shone something so bright Akko couldn't believe she was staring straight into it.
"What happened to you?" Akko said.
"I am Taken."
"...what?" Akko stumbled backwards.
Diana's wand flicked into her hand. "Don't move."
Akko froze in place, not from magic but from fear. "Diana, did you... did you do that?" The smell of the dead body was rich in her nostrils.
"I did. Maril Cavendish, the eldest of my twin cousins. When she awoke, it was to my teeth cracking her spine. She was awake and present for her death."
Akko fumbled, as though her knees were hinged the wrong way. She grabbed for the railing to steady herself. "No... you couldn't..."
With rehearsed steadiness, Diana parted her cloak, revealing three mementos.
Akko tasted bile on her tongue. Her head was light; she struggled to retain her consciousness.
"I have, as I must." She let her cape drop and held out her hand. "Atsuko, you are of interest to the Taken King. This world's time is at an end. Will you join me?"
The word "no" died in Akko's throat. "Why?" broke free instead.
"The Sword Logic." Diana's stillness was disrupted by violent tremors. She shrugged her head into her left shoulder, her elbow bending the wrong way until it broke. Her hand, remained still, and when her tremors stopped her hand was still locked in place.
"What the hell are you even saying?"
"At the end of time, there shall be only one perfect thing left. For this to come to pass, all that is imperfect must die. Death refines reality. To kill is beautiful; to die is just. You will kill with me, Atsuko, or you will die to make me more perfect."
Akko freed her wand from its clasp.
Diana pronounced a Word whose noise hurt Akko's ears and bleeding indigo flame spewed from Diana's wand. Akko turned, dove for the Shiny Rod, the flame licking her hair as she passed; she grabbed the haft and stumbled to her feet, running one way, the other, as Diana sprayed occult death at her.
Akko ran for the stairs, heart pounding in her chest. She skidded as she rounded the carpet, nearly tripping, fumbling down the stairs three steps at a time, nearly tripping again as she reached the first flight-
Diana appeared in a burst of darkness, wand at the ready.
Akko squealed in fear and clenched the Shiny Rod in hand. "Diana, please! I don't want to hurt you!"
"Then die in pain." She fired her attack spell.
Akko swung the Shiny Rod. Time slowed. "Phaidorari Afairynghor!" The rod transformed mid-swing into its axe shape, colliding with the noxious spell mid-air, dispelling its energies. She took the axe in both hands, awkwardly as she clamped her hand around her wand.
Something like a tiny star burst into being in Diana's free hand. She pitched it at Akko like a baseball; Akko hopped over the railing, landing with a thump that forced the breath out of her as the spell burst behind her with a noise like shredding paper.
Akko stumbled forward, the axe's tip dragging along the ground, and Diana leaped at her, wand in hand; in the light Akko saw the glint of a blade on the pommel, something new. She held up the Shiny Axe and caught the blade on it haft. Diana landed, Akko readied a swing, and Diana seized Akko's knee.
Screaming, Akko swung the blade at Diana's elbow; it bounced off in a spray of orange sparks, but it gave Diana pause as she pulled her hand away, and Akko swung again, two-handed, full-force, powering the blade through whatever defended Diana from its first strike and cleaving through her left shoulder, the blade embedding in the floor.
Diana's arm fell to the ground in a spray of what looked like tar and smelled like rat. Diana faltered, stumbling onto her back, feeling for her severed limb.
Akko turned and ran. As fast as she could, as far as she could, with no set direction, into the depths of the mansion, through corridors, through doors she slammed shut and latched behind her, until she could run no more and the Rod had long since returned to its original form.
She fell to her knees someplace cold and dark, lit only by far, strange lights. She dropped the Rod, she dropped her wand.
Her heart caught up to her head.
The noises she made were choked and harsh, til the dam burst at last and she bawled endlessly into her hands, lost and alone.
Diana held her arm to its socket and waited for her form to resume its shape.
Was this her body? This body, on Earth, in her ancestral mansion, moved as she moved in a dream. At the same time she felt suspended as if in lukewarm oil, unmoving, save for the seizures, or the separation of her arm. That she could feel acutely, along with its healing, severed muscles mating with their other halves, nerves singing like guitar strings broken in reverse.
She felt the words she had spoken, and she felt the presence of the Taken King, and she felt something older and farther still.
She addressed her master:
"Oryx, I am hurt."
Far away, on his osmium throne, the Taken King responded.
"Little thing, new Taken. It delights me to tell you that this is the first and least pain you will know."
"It's not the pain. It's my ability to carry on the mission."
"Little thing, this body is mine, not yours. If it falls, I will call it again, if it pleases me that I do. Your death is hidden well in me."
The shield repaired itself, stitching into a haze of orange before her eyes and vanishing from sight.
"You know what you must do. Gather your energies, if you must. Avoid the walking reminder of your first failure, if you must. Your power only grows. Their time only frays. You have time to distinguish yourself yet, little thing. Perhaps you will be a brilliant thing that presents the throat of your world to me. If not, it avails you to be the spark which ignites this place. Give me this planet or make it ready for taking."
"This world will be yours... tonight. When the Cavendish family's power belongs to me."
"See that it is, or be forgotten."
The Taken King spoke no more, and there was nothing left to heal.
Diana thought of the library, and vanished.
Croix flinched as a stray noodle slapped her goggles. She swore at herself for being scared by her own food, and swore at herself again when she realized it happened at least once a week. What are you, six?
It was almost a relief to be shaken out of her self-loathing reverie by her consoles screaming at her. Nested in her monitoring equipment in the New Moon Tower, nothing else could've swayed her, save perhaps Chariot coming to knock. But Chariot was busy today, brooding over Diana and Akko and whatever life-building exercise they were enjoying, and nobody else dared interrupt her studies.
Speaking of. She zoomed in on the map of emotional energy output. Wedinburgh, eh? That would be the Cavendish estate. Home to one of the most productive sorcerer's stones in the United Kingdom, and one of the most wasteful for how dead the place was nowadays. In the township near the Cavendish Manor, anger and anxiety spiked-over the football game, she presumed-but there was a pillar of energy coming off of Cavendish Manor, downright dead center. It wasn't the usual mana boiling off into the ether. It registered on the Triple S, but the color pattern was...
"Infra-Violet." Croix glared at her computer. "I don't remember programming you not to be funny. Come on, let's see what..."
Her fuel spirits in the area had all died. There was a lingering camera feed from a handful of them; patching the images together showed vague, impressionistic smears of black and white in suggestions of shrieking and agonized contortion.
After a moment, she dialed the headmistress.
"M'am," she said, "are you aware that the Cavendish estate is presently emitting huge amounts of magical radiation of a hitherto undiscovered type?"
Diana stared at the vine-robed pillar at the heart of the library. Around her, discarded in low pits, were one thousand and five hundred years of magic theory and practice, journals of medicine, anatomies of body and soul, invocations to every god who listened, beckons for every god that remained silent, diaries, notes, scrolls, confessions, hagiographies, memoirs, tomes whose names were only ever whispered, tomes whose names no witch dared pronounce aloud.
This place was redolent with magic. Wisdom had its own energy; the passions and discoveries in these pages were heavy with power.
Diana breathed into her palm; a lick of flame caught on her skin, which blackened and boiled at its touch. She knelt into one of the pits and pressed her hand against Wojciech's Manual of Harm Reduction. The last of its kind in all the world, centuries ahead of its time, and it burned beautifully.
In the smoke of dying wisdom, Diana dreamed of teeth and nothing else.
Around her, from the smoke, loomed forth a starving tide.
Author's Note: Can you find the Destiny quotes, LWA fans?
