A/N: Thanks so much for the reviews, everyone! They really do mean the world. Hope you all have a Happy New Year!
"Remarkable, isn't it?"
The Director's voice was unmistakable. It mimicked that of the usurper queen upon which Charlotte had once sworn vengeance. No two recruits had seen the same face when looking upon the Director, a fact that'd spawned countless arguments about what her true appearance might be.
Ursula saw her father. Harrold, his wife.
Noah had confessed to seeing the traveler that'd brought pestilence to his village when he was a child.
Charlotte saw the woman who'd betrayed her parents to their deaths.
"The things we don't know we're capable of." The heels of the Director's shoes clacked against the floor with every step she took toward that long metal table, and Charlotte sensed a monologue was imminent. After all, wasn't that the way of villains? The Director clicked her tongue. "Name calling is quite beneath us, Miss Sawyer. If I'm a villain, what are you?"
Charlotte followed the indentations left behind by her hands. How had she not felt the metal give? How had she not known, even in some instinctual part of herself, that it'd been reshaped by the pressure of her grip? "I'm not like you."
"Not yet." The smirk was evident in the Director's voice. The usurper queen mocked her from a rewritten age. "But give it time. We are all the hero of our own story, Miss Sawyer. Good, Evil. Right, Wrong. Hero and Villain—these are merely the roles we assign each other once we've reached the end. Who can say, really, until the journey is complete, which methods are truly virtuous and which are the unfortunate means to a necessary end?"
Charlotte turned around. Faced with a façade. Pretense personified. If a person wore every mask but their own, who were they? Anyone? Or merely the fragments of those they'd hidden behind?
"Well, now we're just being spiteful. And here I had hoped we could reach an accord."
"I'm done making deals with you."
The usurper queen's eyes narrowed, an action so slight as to be nigh on imperceptible. But Charlotte saw. The Director thought Charlotte naïve. She wasn't the first.
"Not naïve, my dear. Simply…untried. You'll come to see things my way, in the end."
Charlotte couldn't say what provoked her, what'd incited a sudden insurgence of courage, only that there was something inside her, small though it may have started out, that refused to go quietly into whatever fate the Director had crafted for her.
She couldn't say what'd changed from the moment the Director had tried and failed to crush her heart, only that something inside her, dormant thought it may have been these past months, had awoken.
She couldn't say why, but for the first time in a long time, Charlotte felt unbreakable.
"Who's to say the end isn't now?"
The wind swept like a whisper across her soul, an old friend, overdue for reacquaintance. The seas churned, a stirring tempest in her veins. The earth shivered, its particles ripe with anticipation for what was about to be unleashed. But it was the flames of an undying inferno, untouched by time, unknown by any save her, that stoked the embers of a slumbering fury. It was with fire that she would reshape the worlds.
As swiftly, as absolutely as such frenzied thoughts had seized her, they vanished. Between one breath and the next. Charlotte blinked that cold gray room into focus again and saw the same triumphant smile she'd seen before the usurper queen tossed her sister into a cell.
The Director laughed. A sound Charlotte had both heard and not—from the queen, countless times, but never from the Director wearing her face.
The Director wasn't one to indulge herself in humor. Her smile was just another tool of her trade. This was something else. Something untamed. Otherworldly.
It turned Charlotte's stomach.
"Indeed." The Director advanced, the room echoing her authority. Less than a foot separated her from Charlotte when she leaned in close to whisper, "And who's to say you aren't still dreaming?"
Before Charlotte had time to panic at the implications of this question, the Director reached forward and pinched her arm, then disappeared.
She was alone, save for Noah, still prostrate and unconscious on the floor.
—
There was a phrase in the Enchanted Forest about quiet paths on moonless nights—something that mirrored a similar idiom in the Land Without Magic about circumstances that seemed too good to be true.
Charlotte was reminded of them both as she'd wandered the facility's empty halls. Not a guard or guide or recruit in sight. There was no need to sneak or to scurry—she walked as freely as though she were the queen of the castle, head high, the fears of her former life far behind.
This was surely a trap, but what choice did Charlotte have except to step right in?
She stood at a threshold she'd only recently discovered, a riddle staring up at her from the place it'd been carved into the floor. Beside the same keyhole caked in dirt. A hasty scrawl that'd resurfaced in Charlotte's mind when Noah told her she already knew the way out.
Turn back to (go?) forward.
She searched the walls of that circular room for some accompanying release switch. A loose stone that, when pressed, opened the escape hatch. Above only rafters, and a ceiling that narrowed steadily to a sharp point. Had this been one of the fabled towers described in her mother's books—the sort of place they locked misbehaving princesses away?
Was this to be her fate, as well?
If she turned around now, would the Director be standing behind her, ready to trap her inside until her lesson had been learned? Until she was calm and complicit? Until every surviving shred of willfulness had been whittled away by long hours spent alone?
"Not as simple as you appear."
Charlotte closed her eyes and exhaled a deep breath, her shoulders sagging in defeat. Knowing how things would end hadn't kept her from hoping. From putting her trust in maybe.
Maybe circumstances were not too good to be true. Maybe the facility only seemed deserted because everyone was in lectures or with clients. Maybe she'd escape, even if it was by the skin of her teeth. Maybe the Director was not the all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent entity everyone, Charlotte included, assumed her to be.
Maybe the battle was not lost before it was fought.
As the last shred of hope abandoned her, Charlotte knew beyond any residual doubt, that she was only getting what she deserved.
She'd brought this on herself.
Wrought her own fate through selfish acts.
But she'd be damned if she went down without a fight. It wasn't in her blood.
Charlotte opened her eyes, spinning on her heel before another contradictory thought had time to dissuade her.
She aimed for the Director's chest, just left of center. Reached her hand inside and closed her fist around the beating epicenter of the council's control. Strange, it felt no different than Noah's. Did that mean the Director was mortal, just like the rest?
She crushed it before she could find out.
It was then that Charlotte's eyes caught up with her actions. She took in the person before her. Not an otherworldly entity at all. No long, dark, flowing hair or dark eyes tinged with gold. No superior smirk. No cackle at their lips to mock Charlotte's last-ditch efforts to survive.
He gasped a final breath and fell to his knees. A lifeless heap of flesh where a man once had stood.
"Phillip?" Charlotte looked to her hand, caked in the ashes of his heart. "Phillip!"
She knelt beside him, stared into his vacant, unseeing eyes. When she reached forward to stroke his face, a gust of wind rose up around them, and Phillip vanished in a cloud of dust.
"You know," said the Director, stepping forward from the shadows, "the inscription doesn't mean anything. All part of the design, I'm afraid. Give the tower's inhabitants something to hold onto—well, I don't have to tell you how persuasive a force hope can be."
She came nearer to the place Charlotte had fallen. Sauntering as she so often did. Her entire being radiating the pride of a trick well played.
"Phillip?"
"Consider it a warning, my dear. A promise of things to come."
Charlotte's limbs still trembled. Knowing it'd all been an illusion didn't lessen the horror of believing she'd crushed the heart of the man she loved.
Her nerves were frayed. Her resolve in tatters. What more could the Director take from her?
"Get on with it," she said. "Finish me off already."
The Director clicked her tongue. "My dear girl. I'm not going to kill you. Oh no—potential such as yours would be a terrible thing to waste."
"What do you want from me?"
The Director crouched beside Charlotte, placed her hand under Charlotte's chin, and tilted her face upward. "I want you to see." She pressed a tender kiss to Charlotte's forehead and smiled. A soft expression, completely at odds with everything Charlotte knew of the Director. And of the woman whose face she'd taken as a mask.
"When the path is quiet and the night is dark, I'll be waiting."
With a flick of the Director's wrist, a glowing light outlined the counterfeit hatch—meant to keep the prisoners of that tower clinging to the idea of freedom that would never come—and the stones inside fell away.
"Safe travels until we meet again."
The Director didn't move, but suddenly, Charlotte was propelled backward. She was falling before she knew what'd happened. Blue skies rose up around her, and she looked up at a castle suspended in the heavens.
She was spinning, spiraling, tumbling down.
Was there a world below her? Or infinite sky?
What was the Director's plan in setting her free? And was she truly free if everything she did somehow aligned with the Director's scheme?
She had nothing. She was nothing. Just some cog in the council's magic machine.
And as the wind whistled in her ears, as her hair whipped around her, catching her in the eyes, as her limbs shot out on instinct, desperate for a handhold, desperate for anything, there was nothing Charlotte could do but scream.