"Beauty endures only for as long as it can be seen; / Goodness, beautiful today, will remain so tomorrow." - Sappho of Lesbos
One could say the train's passengers filed out quickly onto the city centre station platform in the same way that one might say phlegm filed out quickly from a coughing, hacking throat. Marie stumbled from the double door when it ejected a particularly violent splutter of rushing crowd, but much to her chagrin, the Incubator perched on her shoulder saw that as no sign to slow or pause the telepathic debate she had initiated to pass the time.
"How can you claim that a life as a human would be more fulfilling if you could perform feats in the span of a single contract that would take centuries of work otherwise?"
"I'm fine," she projected back in a haze of irritation once the bustle had slowed to a trickle and she could right herself. "Thanks for asking."
"You're avoiding the question."
"And you're being a real pain in the neck."
"My apologies." He smiled and jumped down onto the tiled floor. "Is that better?"
Staggering down the street with abnormal sobriety for a new year in Sydney was a young woman - no, she reminded herself. More specifically her name was Thalia, just in case anyone asked (and nobody was going to ask! She didn't need to worry but just in case somebody did, she could rest assured knowing full well that telling people her name was Thalia was a skill she had under her belt) - who Kyubey found himself making even less ground with than Marie.
Thalia winced beneath the hood of her jacket as yet another firework let out a deafening flash too directly overhead for her liking. She wasn't the type to fit in. Maybe she was cynical to think as much, but in her mind there was little room for her to see eye to eye with other people. She was glad, then, that for once she had something in common with everybody else: being ensnared in the Machiavellian schemes of an extraterrestrial ferret wasn't her biggest concern at the moment.
What she found much more pressing by comparison was the fact that tonight the sky was frighteningly loud and bright at unpredictable intervals, which made thinking clearly close to impossible. She had to get to shelter of some form or other, and without being spotted. Being seen meant being hunted. Being hunted meant being killed, or worse-
"Hey, 'scuse me."
Thalia shivered when she locked eyes (or eye, in her own case) with the girl who had just tapped her shoulder. She adopted a fighting stance and gritted her teeth. The other girl withdrew her hand with a heedful calm, but if she registered Thalia's defensive hostility as a threat, she didn't show it. If anything, her expression softened.
"Sorry, sorry mate. I'm looking for a place called Abject Permanence, d'you have any clue where that is?"
Thalia racked her brain for the correct response. She knew what some of these words meant. Could she piece the rest together from context?
"I... I'm Thalia. My name is Thalia." She frowned. That was about the best she could do.
The other girl stroked her chin as if that single unambiguously true fact was enough to lose her in a quizzical daze. Thalia couldn't help but notice the silver ring on her finger studded with a small aquamarine and engraved with the name "Hope". She knew she should have taken the opportunity to turn and run - this was the closest she'd been to a magical girl without a fight - but the power this girl seemed to radiate was enough to paralyse her with fear, and as unassuming as she seemed, her soul must surely have shone with might and wisdom beyond her years.
"...Right. D'you speak English?"
Thalia wasn't quite sure what that meant, but it sounded like an accusation. She shook her head.
"Righto. Sorry for the bother," was all Hope said, and just like that... she left. That was all well and good in Thalia's book, but she might be back later. Hell, there might be more of them with her. It was best to keep on moving.
"But the act of understanding myself is a gradual process that takes my entire life," Marie groaned through gritted... brain, she supposed. "If I cut it short, I'd paradoxically never find anything worth wishing for in exchange for that future. See?"
"Do you suppose you would be more enlightened in knowing what would make you happy and not achieving it than you would achieving anything you wanted with only an educated guess as to whether or not it could bring you long term happiness?"
Phoebe Deckard and Claudia James patiently watched the station entrance for the human girl Kyubey had said would be joining them tonight, but given the psychic ruckus she was causing, they needn't have bothered. Humans, Phoebe swore. No volume control.
The girl seemed to be engaged in a sardonic, bad-faith back-and-forth with the Incubator on her shoulder. It reminded her of someone, another human girl she met a long while ago, who wouldn't stop getting into annoying debates with him about making a contract. What was her name again? Something like...
"Marie! Marie Crawford!"
Marie looked ahead at the two girls down the road and the Incubator at their feet. The one on her shoulder announced, "I think we should postpone this debate. Phoebe has more important things to discuss with you than providing important philosophical questions for you to avoid. Also, this body should take its leave now. I already have one here."
Without another word, he flung himself into the darkness of the night and scampered to parts unknown.
Marie looked back at the two girls and strode over to them. "Do I know you...?" she began, but Phoebe raised a hand to cut her off.
"My bad. The name's Phoebe Deckard, but when we first met I didn't have this name or this body."
The Incubator took this as an opportunity to butt in with an explanation. "Phoebe stepped in to stop two enemy magical girls from killing each other. She wanted them to understand each other's point of view. To make a long story short, all three girls share the same body, gem, and for the sake of convenience, name now."
"...Wow. What's that like?"
Phoebe laughed. "I suppose it depends on which one of me you ask!"
Marie offered a small, polite chuckle, but Claudia doubled over like it was the funniest thing in the world.
"You good?"
Claudia turned her gaze up to meet the wall of mild contempt Marie's presence had become and went carnation red. She rose to salvage what dignity she could. "Sorry, it... it was funny."
It wasn't.
"It's cool, it's so cool you could hold it on a swollen eye and numb it," Phoebe cut in, and turned to Marie. "This is actually what I'm here for. I like to spend what little free time I have helping new girls find their bearings. Speaking of, I reckon we should probably get going, huh?"
Though it was growing late and he found himself accosted by the looming inevitability of sleep, Bill stayed as awake as he could. He was an artist, as it happened, and though she couldn't muster a single cent, the attentive looming of his biggest fan spurred him on to make manifest the visual abstractions of his thoughts and feelings he had set out to make. This, he believed, was his duty as an artist. This was his raison d'être, and even if he was only doing it for a penniless, quiet teenage girl with a tattered coat and a face only a mother who was looking at something else could love, then he was doing it nonetheless!
"This is what?" she grunted like a wooden door on loose hinges, and pointed with a six-fingered hand at a corner of his canvas.
"What's that? Ah, I don't know. That's the thing with art sometimes. You've just got to put something down because you feel it, not because you know it."
"Looks like home."
He squinted at the exact spot she was pointing to, and the two stayed almost perfectly in place for seventeen seconds like that.
"That's a stray splatter of yellow paint, son. I don't think it looks like anything."
"Looks like home," she insisted.
"If you say so! Keep yer pants on, kid."
She did just that, but she was going to anyway.
"Hey! Hey, excuse me!"
Unbeknownst to Bill, this was the second time a complete stranger had shouted this at his sole fan in the last twenty minutes, and the second time that stranger had been a magical girl. It was, perhaps, just as well that he didn't know, because learning this would have had no bearing on his life whatsoever and completely wasted his time.
His fan, however, saw no reason to stick around, or even look back at the girl who had called her - she didn't have anything to gain from checking to see who it was (after all, she didn't know anybody in the city), so she simply sprinted off into the night. While later she would realise that she could have turned to confirm it was her being addressed, the fact of the matter was that Thalia didn't need to be paranoid to believe that almost every magical girl in Sydney was after her. This was helpful to know, and seeing as she didn't need to be paranoid for this reason or in fact any other, she had opted not to be.
"What was that all about?"
The girl who had spooked Thalia away strolled over to where Bill had set up his canvases. "Sorry about that, mister, uh..."
"Oh! Um, Campbell."
"Yeah! Right. Sorry, mister Ohum-Campbell, but there's been word of a serial killer going about. I just thought when I saw your friend there, she fit the description we've got."
"Her?" He spluttered. "She wouldn't hurt a fly!"
"I'd be impressed if she could, though."
"How's that?"
"Insects don't feel pain, sir."
"Why'd she run off, then?" Marie scratched her chin all too melodramatically.
Bill hadn't noticed that the two other girls nearby were something of an entourage to the first rather than a part of the general crowd of the area.
"You'll excuse my friend Marie here," said the first. "She's trying to 'gotcha' over questions she already knows the answer to but you don't."
"No I'm not. I'm actually wondering. Do you have a reputation or something?"
"Look! Look. It doesn't matter why she ran away, I think we should give her the benefit of the doubt! It probably wasn't her anyway! And even if you two do want to track her down-"
Marie shrugged. "It's whatever, really."
"-We're heading in that direction anyway. Who knows! Maybe we'll come across her, talk a few things out, and figure out that this was all one big misunderstanding! Imagine the look on you two's faces when..."
Phoebe looked back and forth between her companions.
"You don't care about her, do you?"
"Nah."
"Not really. I thought we were looking for a witch."
"Excuse me," Bill said, very rudely interrupting what was clearly an important conversation, "but would you mind moving somewhere else? It's a busy night, and if someone wants to buy a painting they won't be able to get past ya."
Phoebe held up her soul gem, swirling with veins of red, gold, and green for her two companions to see. "Looks like this is the place!"
Bringing up the rear, Claudia helped herself under the caution tape across the entrance. "Seriously? Why an abandoned... what was this place, a car park?"
"Marie?"
Marie rested a fist on her hip and waved her other hand about. She'd been studying witches for years now, and felt she'd be doing herself a disservice if she didn't let herself answer the question as intolerably smugly as possible.
"Witches tend towards quiet, isolated back streets and abandoned buildings because they only ever want to get into fights on their own terms. Think about it for a second. If you were a witch, would you want to stick around bustling, crowded avenues where every magical girl could see you?"
"Oh! Oh, right. Of course. Sorry."
"Nothing to be sorry about!" Phoebe assured her. "I'd keep your voice down if I were you, though. We're getting close to the barrier."
The trio fell silent, save for the squeak of Phoebe's thick-soled boots where the concrete floor had begun to wear into rough spots. Marie was so caught up in the thought that she too would keep her voice down if she were Claudia, because she would have an unpleasant and grating one, that she almost completely missed the telltale shimmer of a barrier being revealed. The air before her seemed to collapse on itself and unfold into a mandala-like, mosaic kaleidoscope, radiant with the brilliance of its creator's fury.
Phoebe took one deep breath and turned to face her companions. Though she was silhouetted against the light of the barrier, her soul illuminated her features enough to pronounce their graveness.
"Once we cross over, everything will be different. Space, time, the way we understand our reality... You know that, don't you, James?"
"Only in theory," Claudia admitted. "But... but I'm not scared! I'm ready!"
"Great to hear. Crawford?"
Marie delivered a particularly casual salute, and secretly wished Phoebe wouldn't call her "Crawford" again.
"Let's go, then. Into the belly of the beast!"
The three colours of Phoebe's soul spread outward, until they illuminated her entire body. Her form flickered and jittered and stratified itself into a red-green-gold mass and it shifted and spun and shaped itself into a wheel, caught in a motion as hard to follow as it was caught in its own fluid elegance. What Phoebe was now shaped the oscillation of the soul, like a potter, or an accretion disk, and a new shape sprung forth - that like Athena emerging clad in battle armour from the mind of her father.
Phoebe Deckard stood before them now, reality twisting to adorn her in short green robes ending in a steel-plated skirt, and light green armour upon her arms and upper body. Her soul gem now rested in three distinct pieces, with a brilliant emerald upon her chestplate and identically cut ruby and amber on either side of her collar. They seemed... off, somehow. Not that they were unusual, and in fact, seeming off was a deliberate function of many of mankind's greatest inventions of the last two centuries, such as the lightbulb or the electronic computer.
"The most important thing I've learned in my triplicated little life is which third of my soul to use when," she grinned, and a fern-green lance appeared in her arms. Although she'd seen her fair share in the past four years, transformation sequences were entirely unique, and the most spectacular still took Marie's breath away.
"My turn!" Claudia declared. Yeah, she transformed too, Marie supposed. It was decent.
The three girls took each other's hands and dove into the barrier, and a silence draped itself loosely across the forgotten parking space. Once she was certain she was alone, Thalia crept out from behind a concrete pillar. She wished she knew some curses so that she could whisper them to herself. She had been hunting the collector witch, and along came these happy-go-lucky hotshots and claimed the battle for themselves? How despicable.
She decided to stick around, though, just in case the witch killed them. She wouldn't wish death upon anybody, of course, but at least she extended that sentiment to herself!
Maybe the witch too, now that she thought about it.
A tunnel reaches on infinitely. The deeper it runs the more it uncovers.
Lines of festering rot fed upon by a thousand thousand thousand shifting tides of insects, framed in memories of indomitable hatred.
What is this place?
It is as it has always been.
What is this place?
What is this place?
It is as it has always been.
It is as it is now.
It loathes you more than you know how to loathe.
Should we really be here? This place feels
wrong.
You are welcome here
And you are most definitely not welcome here. Come in.
This place
This is the collection.
I don't belong to the world
so it must belong to me.
There's something wrong with the shape of this place.
Do you ever feel like you've just seen something you shouldn't?
Everything
Is that the way out?
There's something wrong with the shape of this place.
I know that isn't the way out.
is exactly
It's times like this I remember what my dad taught me.
Are you alright? You've gone rather pale all of a sudden.
Are you even listening to me?
where it needs to be.
What's this about your father?
What's this about your father?
What's this about
A long silence.
Possession.
Power for power's sake,
hypocrite.
And quirks. And oddities. And too many uncomfortable deviations where a mind fills in the empty spaces in a dream.
I don't dream anymore, do you?
Or maybe this is the dream. If this is the dream then the fact I haven't woken up is the ultimate testament to how much I hate myself.
Hypocrite. Hypocrite. Hypocrite.
My dad's in real estate.
Hypocrite. Miserable, lifeless hypocrite.
He used to teach me about building standards. It was a substitute for a personality, to him.
Streets and streets of memories.
You never stopped to ask me if they were good.
Streets and streets of self-reassuring falsehoods.
Some of it is a memory.
(Are you forgetting something?)
Most of it is a dream we have to reassure ourselves that we remember.
A light shuts off.
The dream is poison if you don't let yourself dream it.
Why do I
Some of it is a memory. The rest is just a backdrop.
Each building only has one normal side, is the thing. And they all lie in view of a single point.
Silence.
If I said I knew the way, would you believe me?
All the lights shut off. A door opens. Something is leaking out from behind the door. It's everything you ever loved.
Enter a bastard, twisted, mangled maelstrom of a body, all arms reaching at nothing, avaricious enough to dare to need.
I'm sorry.
When the truth of me is laid bare to them I am assailed. My arms are cut with a thousand swords so that I fall farther still from the world I want to reach. A lunatic fancies herself a hero and blasts my face apart with a shotgun.
I think she's right. And I hate how
(I'm sorry.)
There is welcome to be found in implements of harm - a familiarity in those designed to remove or distance or prevent. There is no such comfort or kindness to be found in a loving embrace as a hail of a hundred twisted arms reach for
get off me
You're worthless. If dust and ashes had a mind of their own they would pity you.
Do you hate me?
Yes.
You hate me, don't you.
Yes.
If you hate me so much, you should tell me.
I hate you.
The glint of steel reflects no light when the blade disrupts the shapely purity of my neck.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I can say it so many times and it never ever feels like I fucking mean it. If truth is beauty you are all atrocious liars.
It's done.
There is a sweetness to familiarity with the mutual understanding of reality's underpinning logic when it takes the place of its own absence. The soft whistle of the summer night breeze. The flat, sour smell of a humid Sydney street. The eroded smoothness of the concrete ground and the soft shadows of city lights. No piece particularly outstanding on its own, but all connected through one rare and wonderful commonality: they made sense.
It was done, the witch was dead, and the trio were exhausted, but they were alive and unharmed. It was as if the weight of the labyrinth had been exchanged for that of the outside world again - a heavier weight, perhaps, but a far more bearable one. Marie let out a breath she never seemed to notice she held at times like these.
But time passes differently in a labyrinth, insofar as its creator wills, and the girls found themselves on the cusp of midnight.
"Wow," Claudia struggled to catch her breath. "That's... I don't understand any part of what just happened. That's a witch?"
Phoebe gave her a pat on the back almost firm enough to bowl her over. "Yep! A pretty tough one, too, but because we stuck together it was over in no time flat! Hope you had fun there, bucko, because this is your job now!"
"Magical... swordfights? Ha...ha... Alright. Do I get paid for it?"
"Sure do!" Marie picked the small black jewel off the floor and tossed it in Phoebe's direction. She fumbled and caught it. "Looks like you could get a few uses out of that one. Keeps your soul gem clean when you burn through it too much."
"Oh... that's good, I think...?"
"You get a hit in at all, Marie?"
"One or two, but all I've got is a lacrosse stick. Not exactly designed for turning the tide of battle, you know."
All three chuckled as they caught the last of their breath before Marie continued: "Thanks for tonight, by the way. I mean, it's getting late, so I should head out now. Gotta be back home before my parents, you know how it is."
"Go for it! Thanks for coming out all this way!"
"Ha! Hey, no problem. I had no idea you were this good at it! Sweet navigation skills back in the labyrinth!"
"Heh, I know."
A smile on her face and the usual dose of nightmare fuel in her mind, Marie turned and left at what happened to be precisely 11:59:50 P.M.
"Ten!"
Thalia leapt quietly from the roof of the building to the ground, careful not to be seen. Not to be seen *again*, she corrected. She was glad the human festivities were picking back up in intensity, despite the sensory overload it took much of her willpower to suppress. It suddenly didn't take much to disguise the sound of her footfalls under the crackling of pyrotechnics or the chant of its audience.
"Nine!"
Hope marched in through the front door to her apartment. Her flatmates cast quick glances away from the skyline to nod acknowledgement at her, before seeing the frustration in her eyes and looking back out the window again. Zoey let out a soft sigh of empathy. Hope paused before admitting the sigh of her own, not having realised she had held it in all this time. Danika's face lit up and draped an arm over Hope's shoulder. Hope beamed and braced for a new year where she could pretend something had fundamentally changed. As if by magic, she might have said.
"Eight!"
Ruth sat forward in her armchair, as if sheer force of will could clear the picture quality on her television. She cast her mind back to this day twenty-two years prior, before Sarah had wound up in that fight that left her in her current state. Before Graham - the right proper piece of shit - had announced that he couldn't love his own daughter anymore and run away. For sixteen years, New Year's Day had cemented itself in her mind as a family occasion, and it had never quite stopped feeling that way.
Then again, her daughter sitting silently by her side had always been the only family she ever needed.
"Seven!"
Lara stood up the back of the crowd by the Harbour Bridge, still grinning with relief. The countdown had been timed perfectly. Her sister had just asked her why the back of the jacket had said what it did, and she was mortified by the possibility - the All-Permeating Abyss in all its infinite dark majesty forbid! - that she would have had to provide an answer! Life wasn't about answers, in her opinion. Life was about a black leather jacket with "Do Not Resuscitate" stitched on the back.
Life was also all about flirting with Madeleine, she supposed, but at least Sisyphus took breaks to let his boulder roll down the hill. She could wait.
"Six!"
Hours later, on the other side of the world, Margaret leaned back in her diner chair whose creak in response suggested that it was the elder of the two. The look on the face of the girl across from her said she would really rather be anywhere else, but if she had any intention of speaking as much aloud, it was cancelled out by her embarrassment at the absurdity of her situation. Besides, the two of them had a very important job in the days ahead, and work only became more pressing in the festive season.
"You could at least get your feet off the table," she telepathized. Margaret pretended not to hear.
"Five!"
Wai-Fong braced herself a mere fraction of a second before she burst shoulder-first through the seventh-storey window and hurtled toward the street below in a shower of glass and blood (mostly not even hers!). Time slowed in freefall, and a jet of flame from the explosion spewed forth from her impromptu escape, very narrowly missing her head. As she turned to look, three enormous, bony arms clawed their way out of the building's exit wound. She winced. No doubt the witch that used to be the girl she was just fighting. As she readied her weapon, she felt a small degree miffed at forgetting until now that she said she would be studying for her finals tonight.
"Four!"
Hüriye's eyes snapped open. She stumbled backward into her turntables and stopped them silent. Instantly, all eyes in the room were upon her. She grinned. Her mind swam with the infinite possibilities self-realization brought. She knew the way to a joyous and fulfilling life. She loved herself, and she knew that the corner of the universe she called a self loved her back. She knew that when she woke up tomorrow, it would be to the first dawn on a perfect life, one where she could-
Huh?
Oh, shit. The music.
"Three!"
The youngest daughter of an eons-ancient force of destruction stirred from her sleep, woken by the counting down of the humans ignorant enough to believe themselves her parents. For a moment, she thought she saw a shadow by her doorway - poised like a cat, but with longer ears and a bigger tail - but when she rubbed her eyes and blinked, it was gone.
She was hungry. Hungry in a way she didn't know other people weren't. She didn't understand what the urge really *meant* she wanted. This feeling was normal to her, but she had never quite satisfied it, and she assumed it was something that would come and go as a standard part of growing up. In a sense, it was.
Every child on the path to becoming a teenager wanted to destroy the universe. What made her so special was that she could actually pull it off.
"Two!"
Beyond the limits of the universe as all of the above understand it, untouched by the white lies called time and space, a brilliant deity draped in a flowing black cloak writes by the deep blue light of her soul gem. Her words are inert as she pens them, but their meaning is alive and dynamic, shifting into the shape of a cosmos.
This cosmos, too, is filled with life where she wills it - or does it will her to write? Which one informs the other? - life which understands itself through the words she builds them from. She is the speaker-god, and her words and the universe are one and the same.
And she's mighty humble, too.
"One!"
When Marie stepped out onto the street, the warm summer air struck her like the kind of blow she imagined a kind and charitable God would have reserved for that bitch Macquarie. She took it in stride, though; her eyes were fixed on the illuminated city skyline and the shimmer of the lights upon the harbour. And by her feet, another pair of eyes, beady and scarlet, joined her.
"Happy New Year, Kyubey."
"Happy New Year, Marie."
PUELLA FURIA DARK MAGICA
PART 1: UNTIL THE DARK
DARK MAGIC
Dark magic has been a phenomenon observed among magical girls since before the evolution of the modern magical girl (Puella Furia), and well documented and understood since close to the invention of the written word. In practical terms, dark magic is the manifestation of a more volatile soul's - say, one contained in an external receptacle - willpower, in manners which affect the world without the soul.
Dark magic, true to its name, does not interact electromagnetically, and thus cannot be observed by an individual who is incapable of perceiving their surroundings without a body's sensory organs. Typically, this restricts observation to magical girls (in the various stages of their life cycle) and those similarly aware of their souls as in, for instance, the Incubator. There are, however, exceptions to this rule, as dark magic is capable of interacting with matter and energy through the other fundamental forces (including those not yet theorised to exist by the soul-unaware). To use a practical example of this function, consider illusion magic, which manipulates light according to the will of the soul rather than directly being observable itself.
As advances in the understanding of dark magic continue, the phenomenon's discovery is misattributed to significant contributors to the study of magic. These include Penelope of Skyros (310 BCE - 291 BCE), for her use of it in elaborating on the Aristotelian conception of a "fifth element", Aisha bint Hassan (703 - 739), the first person to write the equations for dark magic stability and its relation to emotional energy usage when her trail of thought became derailed while she was trying to figure out how to fit a rolled-up rug through the front door of her house, Anneliese Holzknecht (1828 - 1871), whose extensive writing on the matter had resulted in the SI unit for dark magic being named the Holzknecht (abbreviated as Hk), and who had invented both the time paradox and being found dead 7000 kilometres from the last place you were seen, and Rachel R. Parker (1981 - 2002), who had actually coined the term.
Parker's coinage of the phrase came about in 1998, in response to the discovery of "dark energy" named to suit the nomenclature established by dark matter. She had come up with it during a game of table tennis, wherein she had joked that if the name ended up sticking, the entities whose bodies were comprised of dark magic would have to be renamed to "witches" and "familiars" and was shocked to discover the following week that this was exactly what had happened. What she was not shocked to discover, however, since neither she nor anybody else ever knew this, was that mere days after she made this joke, a woman in another country altogether was giving birth to an immaculately conceived child. Had she known, her entire understanding of consciousness and free will would have been thrown into question and it's entirely possible that this would have made her feel less bad about the joke in comparison.