"One girl's single simple act of kindness can overcome even the deepest curse. I pray it will never have to." -L.M. García (translated from telepathic abstraction by Harriet Bentley)

By the time Hope Fearnley made it to Abject Permanence, it was almost midnight.

The pub had an older harbourside charm to it, wearing its seventies-style decor on its sleeve before quietly covering the sleeve up with a thick woolen jacket. Hope herself hadn't been here before, but since the majority of Sydney's magical girl population was on the less alcohol-related side of eighteen, licensed venues were a sort of neutral territory.

The first thing that greeted Hope was the smell - the unmistakeable pub smell of being forty-five years old and saying words like "bloke" and "mate" without the slightest hint of insincerity. Of course, the place was packed front to back on New Year's Eve, with the television over the bar broadcasting the live news from the harbour outside quietly enough to be unintelligible over the din of the customers, but loudly enough to make the overall hubbub just that ever-so-slight bit more annoying. A small group of people near the door shared a few drinks they could very well afford but secretly didn't want to, toasting "to a night we'll never remember!"

"Hey, Fearnley!" Someone thought loudly enough for her to hear. "I'm up the back, over by the window. Come on, let's talk." She recognised the voice, and briefly considered walking back to her apartment for the night and watching the fireworks from her balcony, leaving Sydney in the morning to move out into the country with Auntie Ruthy and her poor daughter Sarah never to return.

Better still, Hope mused while nonetheless trudging to the back corner of the room as if in a funeral procession, would be to leave Australia altogether. She'd never even left New South Wales before, but she believed that the people of Sydney were kind-hearted and beautiful, and that the dread her forthcoming conversation was going to elicit ought to be taken as far away from them as humanly possible.

"Fearnley!" The girl who had called Hope over exclaimed with mock surprise (or rather, Hope assumed it was mock, but she knew better than to take the most logical possibility for granted around... her). "Great to see you, homegirl! Take a seat."

"I'd rather stand," Hope muttered.

"No, you wouldn't." Her smile spread almost mechanically, and each syllable out of her mouth reminded Hope of the time when she was seven and had accidentally applied a stapler to her own hand. "Take. A. Seat."

Hope pulled out a chair and deflated into it. "If I told you I came here thinking, 'gosh, I hope they don't send Lara tonight', would you believe me?"

Lara laughed. "Of course not! I'm great. I'm really just fantastic. Besides, most of us are a lot less... pleasant... to negotiate with."

Hope rolled her eyes and shrugged. She was not, under any circumstances, to fall on the back foot. "This isn't a negotiation. I don't bargain with terrorists."

"Okay, okay, okay, okay... okay. First off, I've told you, we're not terrorists. I've got a pen if you need to get that down somewhere."

"Yeah? What's the difference between a Deeplighter and a terrorist?"

"The former tends to be prettier," Lara cackled. Hope couldn't believe her ears, but did anyway because it made life easier than the alternative. "Second off, some of my sisters are in need of housing. You've got a couple of apartments, plus you're a big deal community leader-"

"We're already packed. Aren't you pretty well off anyway? Why don't you do something about it?"

"Out of the question. My parents wouldn't understand. My sister would, but that's almost worse in a way."

"And the other Sydney leaders?"

"They're aristocrats, Fearnley. They practically spend their free time rehearsing excuses for this kind of thing."

"True enough," Hope groaned. "Still, though. Deeplighting is extremism, and I ain't gonna accommodate it."

"God, you're such a liberal. What part of our philosophy constitutes extremism?"

"All of it."

"Name even ONE thing."

"For starters, the conquest of humanity and the slaughter of all dissenters."

"Shhhshhshshsshsshshsshhsh!" Lara urged when a waiter passed by to deliver a bottle of apple juice and a plate of fish and chips. "Not so loud! I- Oh. By the way, I didn't get you anything to drink. Kyubey said you were gonna pick out something alcoholic, and I'm seventeen so..."

"No worries, I had dinner earlier."

"You know," she took to trying to remove the juice's lid, to no avail, "you really shouldn't drink. Do you know how many health problems it's linked to?"

"Probably nothing I don't already have."

"You'd be surprised."

"What, about the alcohol, or just in general?"

Lara half-winced, and the lid came ever so slightly loose. "Bit of both. The world's a surprising place."

"I'll drink to that," Hope concurred, and then didn't.

"Anyway, where were we? Oh! Right! Yeah, yeah, yeah, the conquest stuff. I mean what does it matter? You HAVE to admit that a bunch of people with reality-warping powers designed to spread love and hope would do so much better in charge than all the current governing bodies in the world and stuff, right?"

"Sure."

"And I'm more of a 're-education' kinda girl on the slaughtering front."

"Fair enough."

"So what's the problem?"

"The problem is that humans outnumber us several dozen THOUSAND to one, and that trying to usurp some kind of... political power from an entire species is genuinely maybe the quickest way I can think of to get all of us utterly eradicated."

"Not all humans would align themselves against us, don't be stupid."

"Not every majjo would team up with Attendants to the Deep Light, even if their life depended on it. Don't be stupider."

"Oh yeah? Name one who wouldn't."

"Me."

"Name two."

"Me, and Denise Montgomery."

"Name three."

"Me, Denise Montgomery, and Zoey Day."

"Name four."

"Bloody hell." Hope huffed. "The fact that you can't even run the numbers in your head proves you shouldn't be in charge of something like this."

"I've run the numbers, Fearnley. The numbers are standing at the end of the one hundred metre sprint, sweating and panting like nobody's business."

The lid on the juice bottle finally came off.

Hope rubbed her temples. "You could potentially be out there killing innocents who get in your way. And who knows if any of us would survive the backlash," she said.

"If they're in our way, they're not innocent," Lara said.

"A locust can eat its own body weight in a day!" The fun fact written on the inside of the juice's lid said, although nobody paid it any attention.

"You're missing the point. People are gonna die if you go through with this. Not just here in Sydney, not just in Australia - worldwide. Hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions."

"And the same isn't going to happen if humanity maintains its current course? Is it not worth the risk, breaking free of all these structures of inequality and what-have-you? Aren't you tired of being a gazillionth-class citizen in your own country?"

Hope frowned. She wouldn't say this was "her country" as such - it was Dharug and Eora land, always had been. That was a semantic problem, though, a poor choice of words on Lara's part, and pressing it wouldn't magically keep people like her from massacring innocent bystanders. "What risk? It ain't a risk if there's a zero-percent chance of success."

"Zero? Oh, Fearnley, Fearnley. You underestimate me. What if I told you I actually had the capacity to do this? I'm on the cusp of wielding a whole new kind of magic. Nothing you'd understand."

"You know, everyone in history who's said that turned into a ruthless tyrant, a witch, or a violent mess of blood and scorch marks."

"Yes, yes, yes, because that was all leading up to this! The world's changing, you know? It's the 21st century! The internet is connecting our people around the world! Our understanding of magic is so advanced now that the Holzknecht Taxonomy of Curses has been completely rewritten! There's an omnipresent god who brushes your teeth for you now! This is THE time to be a magical girl." Lara rolled her eyes and ughed a soft ugh under her breath. "Look. Maybe you want to compare me to some authoritarian radical or other, like Fierro, or Woronovska, or... what was that Yank called? Eighteenth century. Manipulated a ton of poverty-stricken prepubescent girls into dying for her. Name like Innes or Irvin or something."

"Her name w-"

"I don't CARE what her name was," Lara struck the table with her fist, hitting the edge of her plate and catapulting her fish and chips out the window. Hope glanced out after it to see a flock of gulls take to fighting over it.

"My point is... Fearnley. Fearnley! Look at me, I'm trying to talk to you. My point is, it's been centuries. We've moved on as a people. We've improved. Now we're at a tipping point, and in a couple more centuries we're gonna join the Incubator and all his friends among the stars. And we need someone to help our kind cross this one last hurdle. I think that someone is gonna be me."

"Wait. Is it a tipping point, or is it a hurdle?"

"It's both. It's like how a photon is a wave and also a particle."

"Is it like that?"

"No, it's not like that at all. I just made that analogy up. Come on, try to keep up."

"Is this a Deeplighter thing, or are you just going insane of your own volition?"

"I feel like you're not taking me seriously. Being a magical girl takes initiative, and courage, and a constant want to make the world a better place. We're the perfect people to do what we've gotta, you know? We chose this path."

"You're not telling me anything I haven't heard before."

"And do you agree?"

Hope didn't say anything.

"Oh! Ha, wow, you really must be the worst possible person in Sydney to have this conversation."

"You're the one who invited me here. Maybe next time you could think things through a little better beforehand."

"Maybe you could give my peers a roof over their heads," Lara scoffed.

"Maybe they could stop plotting domestic terrorism," Hope shrugged.

"A locust can eat its own body weight in a day," the bottle cap kept saying, and more forcefully this time, but still everyone ignored it.

Lara bit her lip and watched the gulls eat her dinner for a second. Then, without warning, she stood up, slipped her jacket on (black leather with the words "Do Not Resuscitate" embroidered on the back in golden Roundhand), and extended her hand to shake.

"Well, Fearnley, it's been a pleasure as always, but I can tell we're not getting anywhere."

Hope stood up and nodded. Lara hesitantly withdrew her hand. "Still, though. All the best from one 'majjo' to another. Have a happy new year, Fearnley."

"Same to you," she started absentmindedly, but Lara jumped out the window before she could finish.

Hope watched her sprint off through the crowd gathered along the harbour, all eyes on the fireworks minutes out from the countdown. She groaned and stuck her hands in her pockets. There was something in one of them, she noticed. Some round, cold piece of metal. Cautiously, she pulled it out and held it to the light. When she saw what it was, she flipped her phone open and immediately dialed Zoey.

"Hope, darl. What's the good word?"

"Auntie!" She snapped.

"What's wrong, girl? Ya sound spooked by somethin'."

"Did you know a locust can eat its own body weight in a single day?"

Silence.

"Auntie?"

"Lara's gotten into yer head, hasn't she? Gotcha thinkin' about somethin' weird."

Hope shared a confused glance with the bartender on her way out, who had apparently been watching much of the affair. "Oh... right. You knew she was gonna be here?"

"I told ya, darl! Phoebe's out huntin' tonight!"

"I think I would've remembered you saying something about that."

"Hrm. Well, I definitely told someone."

"Wasn't me, then."

"Why not?"

Hope lowered the phone for a moment to process the question.

"Sorry, what?"

"Ah, don't worry about it, darl. How far away are ya right now? The countdown's gonna be startin' soon. And endin' soon too, I s'pose, which is the important part."

"No worries. I'll be there on time. But for now I've gotta give Phoebe a ring, you know? Fill her in on tonight's brouhaha."

"Righto. See ya then, darl!"

"See ya!"

Click.

The tactile sensation of finality between thumb and red button served as a beat in Hope's thoughts, a fixed temporal point dropped like an anchor from the drifting of her reverie. Lara knew more than she'd let on, for sure, but she'd let on far more than Phoebe would have. It was a blessing and a curse, in a sense. If she was telling the truth, then Hope knew something was happening ahead of time, and could deal with that. But what time would that be? And what if it was a bluff? This early in Hope's leadership, failure to accept it could get people killed, or worse. Failure to call it, on the other hand, would have her dismissed by the others for overreaction, and the city would fall into the clutches of the incompetent, or the negligent, or... how had Lara put it?

"They're aristocrats, Fearnley. They practically spend their free time rehearsing excuses for this kind of thing."

That much was certain. But until she knew what was going on, her hands were tied and her mind was in the dark with room to dread and not an ångström more. Heavy was the head, of course. When she checked, though, she was glad to see that her worry hadn't dusked the lustre of her seafoam-green soul.

She called Phoebe as soon as she decided she was done with the line of thinking. Nobody picked up. She knew she should have expected as much, of course - true to the kick upside the laws of thermodynamics' head which magic proved itself to be, information could not escape a witch's labyrinth unless she willed it - but it unnerved her nonetheless for a reason she couldn't quite place. Perhaps the on-demand unavailability of an ambassador was disquieting in a way that political tensions she glimpsed beneath the curtain tonight seemed only to intensify.

Her head swam with possibilities. It felt like too much was happening at once to be purely coincidence. Her taking up the role of community leader. That sundowner who'd apparently blown into town last week, the one whose path she never quite seemed to cross. Lauren and Danika. Now whatever Lara was planning! She wondered if there was anything she was forgetting, or if she was tripping over an assumption intimating her in the wrong direction. There was the classic Holmes quote about eliminating the impossible, but even casting aside the undeniable truth that her mortal mind whose finitude filtered reality to a near-vacuum could never hope to account for every possibility and impossibility, she had no idea what mystery she was even trying to solve in the first place.

Hope meandered up the steps out the front of her apartment block. She was tired, that much was for sure. When she let herself in and ambled over into a slump on the stairwell handrail, old, varnished, and smelling of weed as it was, she decided that she was in no state to spend the rest of the night doing much more than stamping out the artefacts of misdirection which Lara's flagrant unreason seemed to bid to congeal in her mind. Lara had told her a lot of things, sure, but not what she hoped to achieve, or even what she was doing to get there. It was only as she began her climb that she realised how much work she'd have to do.

When she rounded the bend on the first floor, she weighed up the implications (or uncertain lack thereof, rather). It was possible that the Attendants to the Deep Light were up to something beyond the scope of her understanding. It was possible that her selection for her current role was made in the knowledge that she was doomed to failure. It was possible that the stranger from out of town was caught up in everything for all she knew. Beyond all this, and perhaps worse still, it was possible she was being goaded into a state of unstable paranoia. She couldn't do anything about those possibilities, though. Not with how little she understood.

When she reached her flat on the second floor, however, she decided it was certain that something was amiss. There was quite a lot she could do about that.

ATTENDANTS TO THE DEEP LIGHT

The Attendants to the Deep Light is an organisation of extremist advocates for a global magicracy founded in 1955 in the city of Lyon, France by Laure Pinel (1938 - 1957), Jade du Bois (1939 - 1957), and Aurélie Durieux (1936 - 1957). Pinel and du Bois had acted as advisors to the previous ruler of the city, Liliane Petiere (1936 - 1955) for the entirety of her four-year reign prior before deciding that she was a tyrant who would have to be deposed. The two eventually devised a plan wherein the magical girls of Lyon would live in a state of post-scarcity at the expense of its human population. Durieux, an assassin hailing from Paris, later joined the duo in killing Petiere, who was found completely ossified in the floorboards of her office shortly after the discovery of her death.

The trio took the organisation's name from an ancient Byzantine poem by Julia the Voyager, which featured a powerful knight clad in brass armour which wailed like horns in the breeze. In the poem, the knight would wander eternally through a desert, looking to stoke a fire only referred to as the deep light. With the overwhelming majority of the poem seemingly lost to time, it's unclear what the name means, but the Lyonais cabal found the imagery striking nonetheless, and the name stuck.

Throughout the late 50s and early 60s, the Attendants became the world's most popular magicratic organisation, with some cities having as much as 15% of its magical girl population join its ranks. This expansion has been controversial in the eyes of many, however, particularly magical socialists, who claim that the the group fails to address the prejudices and inequality of most human societies and serves merely to maintain the very status quo they claim to challenge. Ironically, the original group was met with no such criticism - although this was primarily because nobody had noticed they'd replaced Petiere until two years after her assassination.

After the cleaning out of Petiere's office, a statue was erected in her honour just by the front door, although nobody knows who made it or why.

More pressingly, the rule of a purely magicratic society is challenged, disestablished, and covered up seamlessly in every instance where it arises by agents standing in for the Incubator. He has yet to explain why, but the most popular hypothesis is that this is an attempt to force the metamorphosis of the area's ruler who is, without fail, an abnormally powerful figure. The Attendants in particular have only ever assumed control of six cities worldwide and have yet to hold one for more than twenty months, but given the thoroughness of the cover-ups, it is currently unknown which six.