"Okay," Peach said, straightening her back. "Why don't you show me where we stand, and we can go ahead and get started."
When Bowser put his hand on her shoulder, she'd felt a strange urge to rest her cheek against it. She had spent her entire life learning to be quiet, and she couldn't help but resent how loud and obnoxious he was. He only attempted to control himself when they were alone together, and occasionally he would even demonstrate something resembling tenderness. If only he could be like this all the time – but he wasn't.
Peach shrugged Bowser's hand away as she walked to a large table in the middle of the room. The floor was covered with sand and gravel, but the table was clean, its surface free of the ash coating everything else in the castle. Unlike Bowser's desk, which was constructed of stone slabs he had probably dragged into place himself, the table was made of dark wood that seemed to swallow the late afternoon light filtering through the dusty windowpanes.
"All right," Peach said as she ran her fingers along a whorl in the wood. "I'm ready when you are."
"How do you like it?" Bowser asked, still leaning against the edge of his desk.
"Excuse me?"
"How do you like the..." he paused to make an impatient gesture, "the table?"
Peach frowned. What was he getting at?
"It's a fine table, Bowser. Could you bring over a roll of parchment?"
"My great-grandfather made it. From a single tree he got from the forest on this island." Bowser crossed his arms. "Dinosaur Island used to belong to the Koopas. Bet you didn't know that."
Peach rolled her eyes. Of course he would bring this up now, just when she thought they were getting somewhere. Bowser's ego had always been enormous. There was nothing he hated as much as being corrected, but she didn't understand why this idiotic man couldn't swallow his pride and get on with it.
She smacked her palm against the table. "I don't want to hear it. This isn't the time to give me a history lesson. I don't know why your kingdom decided to abandon this territory, and I don't care. Quit stalling."
Bowser growled at her, but she refused to look away, and eventually his face relaxed.
"Fine," he said, blowing a small jet of flame through his lips, "but I'm not stalling. I'm trying to figure out how to approach this. The barriers around the castles are a state secret, and you can't blame me for not wanting to tell you how they work."
"I don't think you have a choice."
"You don't need to know everything. Imagine what someone could do with that knowledge."
"Give me a break, Bowser. I'm not going to tell anyone how to make the barriers. Even if I did, I don't know anyone capable of working that sort of magic on such a large scale. And besides, it's not as if I haven't undone your spells before," Peach added, flipping her hair. "I could take apart one of your barriers backwards, in the dark, while I was sleeping."
Bowser barked laughter. "We'll see about that."
If Peach were honest with herself, she'd have to admit that Bowser was far more talented with magic than she was. He always had been. Even before his horns had fully sprouted, he could make a book fly across the room and into his claws just by twisting his neck. He did things like this to show off, which annoyed Peach to no end. A part of her knew that such demonstrations were nothing more than the awkward posturing of an insecure young man, but this didn't make it any easier to stomach his constant attempts to one-up her. She had worked hard to rise to the top of her class, which was only what was expected of her as a princess. For some foreigner – and a Koopa, no less – to show up and casually pull off advanced magic that gave everyone else trouble was inexcusable.
Whenever she learned that Bowser was to visit the Mushroom Kingdom with his father, she would spend days preparing magic to humiliate him. If he wanted to make things fly, she would cause them to drop in midair. If he wanted to transfigure something, she would cause its shape to remain stubbornly fixed. If he wanted to breathe fire, she would cause his mouth to snap shut with ice.
Bowser grew more inventive as he got older, casting larger and more intricate spells. Peach was able to keep up with him, but she resented that he was always creating while she was always undoing. The salt in her wounds was that he didn't even see her as a rival. To him, she was nothing more than a metonym for her kingdom. She could tell he hated his visits to her castle, and she was never invited to his own. When his father died as the result of some sort of barbaric plot, Bowser became king, and from that point onward he never set foot in the Mushroom Kingdom.
Several years later, when her mother passed away, Peach ascended the throne. Her formal letters to Bowser received nothing more than perfunctory replies far too polite to have been written by him. Just as he had refused to see her as an equal when he was a prince, he had no time for her now that he was a king. She had her own country to run and her own business to attend to, but her grudge against the Koopa king never became less bitter. Because he used his size and his magic to intimidate everyone around him, Bowser had become known as "the Demon King," which Peach thought was only fitting. Peach's council and senate begged her to take action against the Koopa Kingdom, but she never considered Bowser a legitimate threat. He was a vainglorious braggart, certainly, but he wasn't clever enough to be dangerous.
This uneasy state of affairs could have continued indefinitely had not everything suddenly changed. One day, in the blink of an eye, almost every living soul in the Mushroom Kingdom was transformed into a monster, which could only have been the result of a terrible act of magic. As soon as the calamity struck, Peach immediately knew who was responsible. The first emotion to grasp her heart was an overwhelming sense of vindication. Bowser had always been careless, and now he would finally learn that his cavalier attitude toward magic had consequences.
Peach wasted no time in trying to set things right, but the spell affecting the Mushroom Kingdom proved too strong and too complicated for her to undo on her own. She used the most powerful magic she was capable of, but even this proved ineffective.
In her darkest hour, Peach returned to the great hall of the castle and collapsed on her throne, the princess of a ruined kingdom. She was furious at Bowser and terrified for the future. What sort of hideous malice could have motivated him to set this catastrophe in motion? If she killed him, would everything return to normal?
Just as she made a resolution to begin a journey to hunt him down, a letter had materialized on her mother's empty throne beside her. The seal along its edges was hot to the touch, and it bore a single line in Bowser's angular writing: Peach, please come. I can't do this without you.
When she arrived at his castle, Bowser was as obnoxious and ungrateful as she remembered, but the two of them managed to reverse the spell – and not a moment too soon, for something awful had followed her.
But enough of that. As the ruling monarch of a prosperous nation, Peach almost never had a chance to use her magic, and she couldn't deny that she was excited by the challenge of untangling another of Bowser's spells.
"If your magic is so great, then why are you being so shy about showing it to me?" she shot at him, crossing her arms to mirror his posture. "Get over here so we can get started."
Bowser grinned at her in response, his fangs shining in the sunlight.
