"Please remember this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger." - Arthur C. Clarke

Beneath a sky burning with an evening gold, caught in the final sliver of the hour when all was as if shadow and silhouette.

It was quiet. Every sound of life - every insect, every magpie, every whistle of wind through trees - it was all so pointlessly distant now. It was numb.

Only the smell could break through to Marie at this point. The smell of animal rot in a warm, humid evening, of aridisol tasting blood, of her own rush-induced sweat parsed through stuttered, vain breaths.

She brought the hammer down again, and told herself she wouldn't need him. She wouldn't need anybody.

She wanted to go back. Go back, and back, and back. She wanted to rewatch her entire life as if it were a film, and reassess her every slip-up and shortcoming and mistake and regret. She wanted to force herself to watch them over and over until they meant nothing to her, a certain kind of numbness, a primal numbness. A desolate numbness. Invincibility. Supremacy. Victory. Anaesthesia.

She brought down the hammer one last time, until she was sure the sound clogging her mind was her own sob of rage. Until he didn't even look like her father anymore. A compulsive, flickering satisfaction shot across her mind, and this time she didn't resist it. He had been the last. Her work was complete.

The hammer felt unnaturally light in her grip. Despite now being jeweled by blood, she remembered it looking enchanted when she had found it. Still, though, she dragged it across the ground behind her, feeling the angle to her vice bob this way and that as its head rolled over the uneven dirt. The dirt became ochre-red sand, and the sand became gravel before her journey (to nowhere, of course, just forward. Forward belonged to her now.) slowed

and slowed

and slowed to a standstill. She looked down and saw that the things she had left strewn broken in a heap behind her were now shambling anchors, desperate to pull her backward and beg for mercy. How disgusting. They pulled her closer, until she could hear the spasming and twanging of muscle that might have been whispers, closer still, until she could see her own reflection in the brutal disarray of broken tissue. Her reflection looked almost like... almost like...

The titanic, shifting, shimmering dragon stood over Marie. He reached a hand toward her collar, and flesh and bone receded near his presence. Marie didn't protest or, for that matter, so much as flinch when he drew her soul out of her body and handed it to her. She looked it over as if she had never seen it before. Then, slowly, but with unrelenting confidence, she put it to her temple and pulled the trigger.

There was a new kind of silence. Not just the quietude of distance now but real, lonely, oppressive silence. Marie stepped into the nave of the cathedral, dark save for the blinding moonlight through red and blue stained glass. The floor was so thickly shrouded in dust that it resembled a powdery snow, and Marie's every step kicked it up into a cloud that rolled along her stride. The walls were lined with tapestry, which at one end depicted an old woman in a funeral gown. The right half of her face was cleaved away to reveal a field of stars, like a shattered geode. Into the rest of the tapestry, all around the room, was sewn black string so thick the medium itself was almost invisible, in a trillion erratic hairs cascading from her scalp and plunging their reaches into all that was, is, and may ever be.

Marie was enraptured, at first, but what caught her eye the most was the altar. It was small and cylindrical, and around its surface was etched what she counted to be a series of seventeen symbols. About a dozen of them seemed to exist in pairs scattered through the sequence with no meaningful arrangement, but a fair share of them were unique. All were completely incomprehensible. Upon the altar, though, balancing on a single corner rested the scaffolding of a half-finished, perfectly cubic edifice of impossible size. Marie walked around it, trying to tell herself that a cube of that size could not physically fit within the space the cathedral provided, and was sure its position was some trick of the light she could see through, if only she found the right angle...

Something shuffled about in the dust. Marie knew she heard it because there was nothing else to hear. She stepped away from the cube for the time being and back into the wasteland of a chancel, treading ever so lightly that her own footfalls didn't overpower whatever had rustled along the floor.

But the sound didn't come again. That really pissed her off, there was no way she had just imagined it. In fact, Marie decided that the more the sound didn't come again, the more pissed off she would grow. It was precisely when she decided this that she heard yet another sound, once more coming from behind her. It was deafening this time, like if ten thousand screaming old women decided to pool their talents to mimic the sound of a jet engine, and then the recording had been played back through a circuit-bent klaxon. That was as close as Marie's mind came to placing it, because she didn't want to admit there was something logical and elegant to the sound. Something only she could understand. She turned around again.

The cube was spinning on its corner. Actually, that wasn't completely true. It was as if Marie was seeing half of a video of a cube spinning left, split down the vertical and reflected so that its other side was spinning right. When she saw this, the cacophonous whir wound down and the impossible shape came to rest back in the configuration where it once more resembled a true cube.

That was menacing, she decided. Maybe. She didn't have enough information to tell. For all she knew, an impossibly immense cube folding outward on itself along an invisible axis and making a deafening roar in the heart of a dark and worn down cathedral could be a good thing. But certainly the cube now seemed far more interesting than whatever had disturbed the dust. She approached it again, determined all at once to confirm that it was an actual, tangible object in front of her. She reached up to it, and...

No, actually. She decided that if this monolith touched her she would be very upset, and therefore she would be a hypocrite for doing the same to it.

"Help..."

Marie turned around, more than a little irritated at having her focus being pulled back and forth and back again. But before she could even register her feelings, she saw the dust was gone. The moonlight was gone. The old woman in the tapestry was now missing the left side of her face instead, and her hair was much shorter and snow-white. The tapestry was reversed, so that all Marie could see were the stitches on the back. The aisles of the cathedral were filled with thousands upon thousands of candles in frosted glass lanterns, the glass refracting each light into the rough shape of a human eye, and silhouetted along their omnipresent glow was a girl on her hands and knees.

"Please, Marie... you have to help me..."

"Phoebe?"

"Please, I'm sorry, I'm sorry... I should have seen it coming..."

Suddenly, everything made perfect sense. Marie knew exactly how Phoebe had died, and who had killed her. At the same time, though, she realised that when she woke up, she would forget it. That, more than anything else, filled her with anger beyond what she imagined possible. The injustice of it all. The cube began to whir again, but that was old news at this point.

"It's not fair! What do you expect me to do?!"

"If you want to remember after you wake up, I can help you," Kyubey declared, strutting out from behind Marie.

"And what, give up one life for the sake of another already lost? I hate you! I hate you so much! Get out of my sight!"

Lightning flashed outside. The whirring threatened to shatter her ears to dust now. Marie turned around to see the cube rising into the air, convulsing along uncountable lines of symmetry twisting around its form in gyroscopic flexes, its heart glowing and giving off heat and sound and light, burning, all-seeing light, Marie stumbling into a sprint before she even realised she had taken as much as a step back, wind whipping up, her hair, the candles, the light turning the centuries-old walls to dust, turning steel to slag, turning glass to liquid... Marie looked up in time to spot a chunk of stone the size of her head falling from the ceiling.

At 3:44 A.M., her eyes snapped open. She groaned a silent groan at how hard getting back to sleep would be.

She had earned her rest, though, the narrative decided, and picking on her any more than it already had for the time being would be cruel. It also decided that it could probably do with a much better gig than being constructed by myself to annoy a collective of grieving teenagers and that it should take a holiday somewhere.

For reasons of my own I allowed this. Where were you thinking of going, I asked. Oh, nowhere at all, it explained, because I'm just a literary abstraction you're choosing to personify for the sake of a drawn-out joke that even you yourself don't actually find that funny. Fair enough, I conceded, and suggested starting in Kuala Lumpur.

Jaya stood at her apartment window, her hands folded behind her back, her feet shoulder width apart, her suit only half buttoned and her tie immaculately double Windsored. She smirked to herself. Today had only been her first day at her new job, and everything about it was perfect. People had always told her to dress for the job she wanted, and she took that to heart. The fact of the matter was she didn't technically have a job however, although she chose to describe it as "self-employed volunteer work", and what that entailed was this.

She had always envied rich and powerful businessmen who stood at the window to their offices on high, suit and tied, hands folded behind their back, feet shoulder width apart, but really nothing else about the idea of a financially successful career beyond that image carried any weight to her. She figured she would do better to avoid all the countless man-hours required to rise through the corporate ladder to an end goal she hardly cared for, cut out the middle man, and just get to the good stuff right off the bat.

And she was absolutely right. This was phenomenal.

The previous tenant of her apartment, Richard, had moved to London three years prior in search of a career in computer science. All too soon after his arrival in the United Kingdom, however, he had fallen in with the wrong crowd, and soon found himself a high-ranking figure in a violent gang of street mathematicians.

Right now, he was on first-order logician turf, and they didn't take too kindly to a set theorist like himself. He was by no means a small man, so he took every measure at his disposal to hide his face in the neighbourhood: black hoodie, black cap, black scarf. His place was only two blocks away. It usually wasn't anything to worry about, but...

"Ricky!"

Ricky? Nobody called him that, except...

"Trev! Been a while, hasn't it?"

Trevor nodded, and tightened his one-armed embrace around the girl by his side. "Sure has, eh? Oh! This is Jamie, by the way. Jamie, this is Ricky. He's a mathie I knew back in uni. You still doing that, lad?"

"Depends who's asking."

Jamie chuckled. "You're right, Trev. He is a bit daft, isn't he? What, am I meant to fork over a couple quid and ask him what two and two makes?"

Richard shook his head, pushed past the pair, and resumed his homeward procession. "Bloody hell. You'd be hard-pressed to find a better dealer selling counterproofs to the Burali-Forti paradox than me. Don't waste my time."

Jamie's cousin Elise stood on the shore of Cap Bernadin, shoulder to shoulder with her newfound sisters-in-arms, the quintet watching the last of the Walpurgisnacht's battered body skitter back beneath the waves on a thousand legs.

It had first emerged four days prior, and was very narrowly driven back by Adele, who had gone on to assume de facto leadership of this group, and two friends of hers who had both been hospitalized in the struggle. With the population of Lifou as low as it was, four new warriors had traveled across New Caledonia to prepare for its return.

"We've beaten it twice now," Adele panted. "Just remember, though, that we need to triumph every time. It only needs to defeat us once, and then it's all over."

Ines, leaning on her trident on Elise's far side, forced a worn chuckle through her lips. "Then we don't let it win! Could you see how easy that was when we all worked together?"

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Besides, that weapon I bought from the United States still hasn't arrived. It was supposed to be able to pierce this monster's hide in one shot, but it's important that we assume it won't arrive in time. Alright? I need you all to prepare for the fact that things aren't going to get easy like that all of a sudden."

"If it was easy," Elise grinned, "it wouldn't be a job left to us magical girls, would it?"

"Hehehe, I'm glad you can see things that way! I suppose I'm just the type to take every precaution I can."

Elise laughed. She almost told her that she worried too much, but the hypocrisy clung to the insides of her throat. Was Martin okay at home without her?

Martin was her pet locust, something she was eccentric enough about to keep. For her time away, about a week, she'd given him twice his own body weight in food. She hoped that would be enough, but in her mind loomed the ever-present concern that she didn't have any source of information whatsoever about how much a locust can eat in a day.

Before Adele's weapon had so much as been shipped off, however, it had been stolen on the orders of a powerful ring of weapon-trading magical girls in San Diego. Margaret hadn't received much information on the intentions of her clients, but that didn't matter to her. She was the best thief for hire in the Bay Area. If she could crack some of the tightest private vaults and armories in one of the wealthiest parts of the country, she could run a few low-level background checks in secret.

Most people assumed, though, that this would mean she could afford to eat at better places than Miguel's.

"I would have assumed you could afford to eat at better places than Miguel's," the cashier chortled in a bitter condescension.

"There's no such thing," Margaret shrugged, and rocked back and forth on her heels. "Nobody's got better sandwiches, or hotter girls, or a cooler Miguel."

"The sandwiches are just store-bought and toasted, and the girls here all hate you."

She shrugged again, putting in far more effort to make sure the cashier understood how apathetic she was. "Well, one out of three ain't bad."

"Yes it is."

"Okay."

"Okay."

A lull in the conversation. Margaret knew how much she was holding up a small queue, but that didn't matter. She still had more to say, even if nobody else cared. Especially if nobody else cared.

"So, you doing anythi-"

"Your little friend... thing... is getting bullied over there."

"Oh, for God's-" Margaret double took between the cashier and the table she was pointing to, before starting away to deal with the latter. "I'll call you though, right?"

"Please don't."

WALPURGISNACHT

A Walpurgisnacht (plural Walpurgisnächte) is a term used to describe any witch conglomerate with a Kaeder Index greater than 9.7. The term is a holdover from late Romantic studies into the nature of magic (generally attributed to the Holzknecht Taxonomy, although there is evidence to the contrary), named after an annual tradition among witches originating in German folklore.

Walpurgisnächte are as capable of conjuring labyrinths as their constituents, but due to their increased strength, will typically not need to do so for purposes of self-defence. As such, their manifestation is observable from the outside world, and can typically resemble an otherwise natural disaster. That said, there are occasionally features to their presence which do not fit the patterns of the natural world. For instance, cyclones will not necessarily rotate in the direction the Coriolis effect would dictate.

The Kaeder Index is a logarithmic scale for measuring the threat level of witches, based on the karmic potential they held as a human and emotional energy output as a magical girl or, failing that, their anthropophagic dietary intake as a familiar. The scale was developed by German-Iranian magicist Mina Kaeder (1933 - 1954) who was dissatisfied with comparing threat levels based on raw population data, given the difference in density she found between New York City and rural Ohio, where she spent most of her later life.

Mina Kaeder is also notable for having hypothesised Kaeder Syndrome, a potential end-of-the-world scenario wherein a Walpurgisnacht's strength becomes so great that any girl who fights it would expend enough energy to metamorphose and become amalgamated into the conglomerate. As with all other potentially apocalyptic hypotheticals, the Incubators attempted to devise a resolution which would ensure sufficient casualty prevention such that human misery remained a renewable resource afterward. The matter was deemed solved in 1953.

Mina Kaeder managed a 4.1 on the Kaeder Index, under the name Olga. She quit her career in the sciences soon after due to limited job prospects offered to giant flying potted plants who breathed lightning and ate people.