When the Auradonians looked at the magic map, during the emergency meeting, they saw people writhing in pain. Non-magical friends and relatives looked on as ragged peasants screamed their return of magic from dirty carpets and broken couches.
When they tried to use it afterwards, they saw only static.
As if someone quite magical had destroyed the enchantment from the Isle side.
Aurora went back home that night, after the council meeting, and as usual, she didn't speak to Phillip. He pointedly avoided her gaze. They went back to bed in different rooms.
But predictably, Aurora couldn't sleep. Her mind was racing with potential disasters and consequences, and so, she did what she always did when she couldn't sleep. She took a walk through the gardens.
The palace was well guarded, but faeries often slipped in. Technically they were pixies, the little ones like the tribe on Neverland, but Aurora didn't know about distinctions of fae tribes. All she knew was that ever since she was blessed and kissed awake by her fairy godmother, the pixies tended to flock around her when she was outdoors. It was why she always went outside alone.
It wouldn't do for the only child of King Stefan, who died fighting for humans, to be seen with her people's traditional enemies. But by this time in her life, Aurora had grown used to the titters and giggles that came from behind bushes as they watched her. It reminded her of home, the little cottage where she grew up, with the three faeries who raised her. The little laughs and whistled songs were comforting to her, and it was why Aurora always came to the gardens when she couldn't sleep.
It only took a few minutes for her to realize something was wrong, and then the creeping fear set in, pooling in her stomach like a lead weight, chilling her body in a way that was nothing like the chill of the night air.
The gardens were completely silent.
• • •
"Welcome to my humble island." Mal announced graciously, wearing her ceremonial officer's uniform with Evie at her right hand side. "I was forced here by Auradon, but we've made the best of what we have."
And then, she rose from her throne, her face became less welcoming and more steely.
"I killed my mother because she was weak, and driven mad by what humans had done to her." Mal explained, and her announcement was accompanied by raucous cheers before she held up a hand for silence.
"That said, I have many good friends who are human. I will not condemn their species like they condemned ours. I won't stand for violence towards any of my court who are other than fae!" Mal looked sternly at each face assembled in the crowd, none of which she recognized. All of whom were her subjects.
"I have chosen them. They are my court. You will respect them as you respect me."
And then the assembly broke off, with a gesture from Mal, into happy laughter and chattering small talk, as the fae lined up in rows to greet Mal and pledge their loyalty to her reign. Quietly, Mal rested her head on Evie's shoulder for a moment. She was tired, and still very sore from her magical agony, and later her fiery rage. Mal was a good queen, but she was only seventeen. Barely seventeen. It was exhausting. Diaval sat behind her now, on the top of her throne in his bird form, and watched the approaching guests with careful yellow eyes.
"Merry met, my Queen." The supplicants said, one by one as they bowed before her, and Diaval murmured that this was a fae greeting, and Mal should repeat it with a gracious nod. She did so, steeling her expression into pleased regalia, but inside, she was half-asleep.
"Dizzy, come here." Evie murmured, and taking a notepad from her bag, wrote instructions for a potion of her own invention that would help Mal stay awake. "Brew this, and get it back to me as soon as possible."
The blue-haired queen petted her lover's hand, and smiled graciously at Mal's subjects, and steeled herself for the longest night.
When dawn finally broke, hours later, creeping over the horizon like the sun itself was sleepy, Mal was feeling ready to fall asleep on her feet. Her guests were directed to stay in the spare rooms of the Bargain Castle, while she and Evie fell into her mother's old bed. The other humans of her court had already left for Dragon Hall and Hell Hall, depending on which house they were in. The pirates had declined to come, which suited Mal just fine.
While the girls were sleeping, Jay and Carlos got to work. They'd slipped away half-way through the night while Mal was still greeting her subjects. The girl had noticed them go, and gave them a nod, because there was nothing they could do to help her. Thus, they had gotten some sleep, and were ready to get working.
"I wonder if I can grant wishes now?" Jay mused to himself, idly rubbing at the bands of gold that covered his skin like paint, while Carlos tinkered. "What would you wish for?"
And that gave the boy pause, as he thought about the future, and what he wanted, more than anything.
"I suppose I'd want Mal to be on the throne." Carlos replied slowly, making sure not to actually use the word 'wish', just in case. "I'd have to word it carefully though. If I just said to 'put Mal on the throne', it could send her anywhere, to any throne in the world, and she probably wouldn't even legally be queen. She'd just be a random person on a random throne."
"Oh, right." Jay noted, recalling his father's often told stories. "Even Aladdin, who wished to be a prince, had to keep up the act. No one had ever heard of the guy, and he acted like a commoner. It's how Jafar saw through his disguise."
"Exactly. Maybe I would phrase it as something simpler, like to have the Isle registered as an official province of Auradon, or to get everyone's houses fixed, so that no one has to live in shacks anymore, or in a house with no heat, or a leaky roof, etcetera." Carlos explained, and he was pulled away from his work, because if there was anything that boy loved (besides Jay), it was experimenting. He pulled out his schematics notepad, and flipped to a new page.
"What would you want?" Carlos asked his taller boyfriend with a grin.
"I already have everything I want." He laughed, scooping the white-haired boy into a kiss. When they broke apart, Carlos laughed too, and whacked Jay lightly with his notebook.
"Seriously? You're such a dork."
"What can I say?" Jay replied. "I'm a simple man."
"Seriously though, I just need an example. What would you wish for?" Carlos pressed, and Jay thought for a moment.
"A lot of food. I'd wish for good healthy food for everyone, with plenty to go around." The young man finally answered, sort of fantasizing about the heaps of food, visualizing a grand buffet.
"Okay dude, so let's write it out in the best way possible to avoid getting screwed over by Wish Logic." Carlos explained, and wrote out on the notepad: I wish for ten thousand bags of flour, ten thousand cans of fruit, and ten thousand cans of vegetables to appear in our storeroom.
"You should specify the fruits and vegetables." Jay noted. "Otherwise, they might all be pears and green beans. I hate those."
"Right. Let me ask for Mandarin oranges. Citrus fruits have lots of vitamins and help the immune system." Carlos amended his sentence for Mandarin oranges and mixed vegetables.
"Also, didn't those kids from Auradon give us a bunch of flour?" Jay added, and Carlos nodded in agreement.
"Right. I forgot about that." The white-haired boy pursed his lips and rewrote the sentence.
"Okay. How's this? 'I wish for ten thousand cans of chicken, ten thousand cans of mixed vegetables, and ten thousand cans of Mandarin oranges to appear in the Dragon Hall storeroom." Carlos read aloud from the page, and Jay shuddered.
"Um, dude. You just read that aloud." The half-djinn murmured, still feeling the tingle of magic that ran through him. Realization dawned on Carlos, and he cursed.
"Goddamn it! Did that count?" He asked, bemoaning the loss of his wish.
"I think so. It felt like it worked." Jay shuddered again. "Magic feels weird."
Suddenly, his cell phone rang, the one that connected him with Mal like a walkie-talkie from across the island.
"Mal?" He spoke into the receiver, and got a bit of a surprise.
"No. Antoine." The male Tremaine cousin spoke into the receiver, and chuckled. "Mal gave me her phone before she went to sleep, and told me to direct all problems to you. She said not to disturb her unless the island was burning down."
"Ah, how good to be trusted." Carlos sighed, knowing that even though Mal was so much better with people... She needed her rest.
"Anyway, a goblin is here, and he's telling me he was almost squished when thirty thousand cans of food dropped from the ceiling. I wasn't inclined to believe him, until I saw it for myself."
"Sorry, Tremaine. We we're performing an experiment, and we didn't think anyone was in the storeroom." Carlos apologized, and felt a bit sorry for the goblin.
"What the hell are you getting up to, DeVil?" The other teenager muttered aloud, and Carlos hung up on him.
"What was that about?" Jay asked, surprised at his boyfriend's rudeness.
"We can't let it get out that you can grant wishes, Jay. This power could be seriously bad in the wrong hands." Carlos explained. "I couldn't think of an excuse, so I just hung up."
"Right, I know what you mean. What if someone wishes for like, the ground to be made of lava or something?"
"Jay, who would wish for that?" Carlos laughed, confused.
"A five year old. What? You've never played that game?" Jay retorted, and Carlos went solemn.
"I was too busy doing chores or hiding from my mother as a child. Not much time for games." DeVil murmured, getting a glazed look in his eye, and knew he had to get Carlos to snap out of it.
"Let's play it now." Jay smirked, and started throwing pillows and blankets onto the floor.
"What? We aren't children anymore, Jay!" Carlos exclaimed as his boyfriend scooped him up in both arms and jumped from pillow to pillow, avoiding the floor, as if it was made of lava.
"Who says? Let's play!" The taller teenager exclaimed dropping Carlos on a pillow and poking him. "Tag, you're it!"
Laughing, Carlos shouted something competitive, and off they went, chasing each other around the room, never touching the floor as they laughed and joked around. Meanwhile, from the workstation, Dan (the goblin whose name could not be pronounced by human tongue) watched with a faint smile. He was growing rather attached to Carlos, and it was good to see him having fun, and acting his age. Dan went back to work on the young man's latest invention.
• • •
The reader might recall Hildegard and Juan DeVil, two of the children who were rescued on the day of reckoning, when Mal killed the sinners and purged the Isle of wrongdoing. Hildy was taken in by Evie, who loved her very much like her own child, and who was teaching her how to be a witch. For a long time, Hildegard didn't believe she was really magic, because she'd been raised behind the barrier. Her mama (her real mama, and not Evie, who she secretly thought of as mama), told her that she would never be able to do magic as long as she lived on the Isle.
But last night, things changed. Hildy felt the first stirrings of magic, within her very bones. It was was like discovering you were a long lost princess all along. The stories her mama told her were true! At breakfast, she used a magic spell to reheat her lukewarm oatmeal. Afterwards, she walked across the Isle, to her favorite rosebush behind the greenhouse, and made the roses bloom, even though they weren't in season. She enchanted Juan's ukelele to play by itself, and she invited Dizzy and some of the older kids to dance with them (for Juan wanted to be a musician like his older brother Diego, but wasn't good enough to not be obnoxious yet).
The visitors came then, a whole detatchment of pixies, who played little flutes and drums, and harps together. They all danced in the graveyard among the tombstones, because Mal had declared today a day off, and there wasn't anything better to do than dance.
When Mal and Evie got back, in late afternoon, having slept the day away, they were greeted with spiked punch and a bonfire, with laughter and music, and kids getting too flirtatious. After what they'd been through last night, with the ceremony and graceful smiles and dresses and pomp, it was refreshing. It was a real Isle welcome.
Mal was encouraged. She remembered, for the first time in several days (since Jane arrived), that she wasn't doing this for her people (the fae whom she only met a few hours ago), or her throne (the tainted throne her mother had groomed her for until the day she died).
Mal was doing it for them. For these ragged children and young adults, who had to deal with keeping themselves and their families alive. For the hordes of rescued little ones who Evie coddled in a way that was not quite villainous. For her island, her wife, the law and order she built with the four of them from the ground up.
For Hildegard, who took her first day using magic, and made music, for her friends to dance.
God help Auradon, who had taken all this away from them. There were no damsels on the Isle of The Lost. There were only girls who'd never forget a grudge, and who'd never back down from a fight.
And Mal was gearing up for one hell of a fight.
• • •
That very same moment, King Adam was hunched over a desk, sweating bullets, and feeling like his hair was going to gray from the stress of it all. Why hadn't that damned Alice changed her vote!?
Now, he was going to have to choose a side. The court was divided on this, and no matter what Adam chose, people would get hurt. Taking into consideration both sides' arguments, Adam honestly wasn't sure what to do. Ethically, as his wife had so frustratingly pointed out, he would be upset if his becoming a beast had lost him his throne. Could he take away someone's birthright because of their parents' crimes? But then again, if he didn't reinforce the barrier, they might use magic to overcome it, and unleash their evil back into Auradon, his nation (and his family, Ben and his darling Belle! What would happen to them?)
When he thought about it that way, Adam had only one choice. So he summoned his two most trusted servants.
"Lumiere, please get Fairy Godmother on the phone." Adam commanded his major domo, who went to make sure it was done.
"Cogsworth, please call the High Council members. Let them know that I vote yea."
Adam continued, and Cogsworth puttered away.
"Indeed sire, it shall be done! I'll tell everyone you plan to reinforce the barrier!" The former clock hemmed and hawed on his way out, chattering away as usual. It didn't help alleviate Adam's fears.
He wasn't a very spiritual man, though he went to Mass on Sundays and Holy days. King Beast put no stock into premonitions and psychic powers. Only witches and sorcerers dabbled in things like that, and there was a reason magic was outlawed in Auradon.
And yet, despite how much he refused to believe in premonitions, King Adam felt sick to his stomach, and he had a sudden, unexplainable thought: This could be the end of everything.
As soon as it crossed his mind, it was gone. He was reinforcing the barrier, so why worry about silly feelings, when he was dealing with the real threat, and neutralizing it?
Premonitions were for witches and sorcerers. And magic was outlawed for a reason (because Adam was afraid of it.)