"They were in love. Fuck the war." - Thomas Pynchon

"Annika! Hello!"

Annika looked up. "Ah! I take it you're Nadia's friend, right?"

"Well yes, I..." The question gave Hüriye pause to consider. But the confusion was only natural - they hadn't seen Annika since before their N.Y.E. set epiphany. "Oh! No, no, no. Try to imagine me without the metal plate grafted to the lower half of my face. And I would have been wearing an orange shayla, too. And maybe a really douchey varsity jacket, too, like-"

"Hüriye? Hüriye Sançar?!"

"The very same. Glad to see you're doing well!"

Annika frowned. Shifted her weight. It was abundantly clear that nothing was in the right sleeve of her shirt.

"I think 'well' is a strong word," she confessed.

Before Hüriye could implore she elaborate, the aforementioned Nadia made her way through the crowd.

"Hüriye! ٱلسَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ! I'm glad you could make it."

"وَعَلَيْكُمُ ٱلسَّلَامُ."

"I don't suppose I've dug up any old rivalries in getting the two of you together in one place? Hahaha."

Annika forced a smile. "I'm sure time will tell."

"No, no. That is completely fair. I only called the two of you in for this since you already knew each other. If you're aware of each other's capabilities, I imagine that would make you all the better at working together?"

Neither of them had an answer. Well, Nadia hardly had a question.

"Very well. With me." She descended back into the crowd, the others hurriedly in tow. "And excuse my German, by the way, Annika. I mostly only learned the more formal side to your - might I say - very beautiful tongue."

"Oh! If not for the Londonian accent, I wouldn't have noticed. I know other Germans who speak more formally than thee."

Nadia smirked and led them out into the street. It was still raining, but all three had prepared for that. In their own ways, at least. Misunderstanding Hüriye's mechanism to avoid dampening, Annika held her umbrella over them. The gesture was too kind to turn down. They were going to extend their aura of warmth either way, but the display of mutualism felt like burying the hatchet. It was like the hatchet had passed away suddenly and viciously, and now had to be given a closed-casket funeral. Loving axe, cleaver, and blade to two children. 2007 - 2009. Rest in Peace.

"Where to now?"

"Just keep walking," Nadia glanced back. "You never know who might be listening."

An uncomfortable order in its meteorological context, but by no means a tall one.

"I'm not sure if either of you have heard the rumors about Hamburg."

Hüriye couldn't say they had. Annika seemed less certain.

"One of our species' most esteemed benefactors, though I hate the term, because it implies some kind of condescension on the part of a human for stooping to help our ilk. Researcher, if you want. A scholar of the sciences who has helped us understand more about ourselves. A woman named Ruth Cahill-Madigan. Do either of you know the name?"

"Not at all."

"I can't say I do."

"Her claim to fame is translating Holzknecht to English. Now she's trying to get back in touch with what she claims to be a Holzknecht family, as impossible as the existence of such a thing sounds. Or sounded, until..."

"Until," Annika answered, "the Attendants of the Deep Light caught word of a housing lease signed in the name of an Anastasia Olivia Holzknecht."

"Exactly. An uncommon surname, of course, but not unheard of that someone else might have had it. What was the clue that she might be related?"

"First was that her handwriting is nearly identical to her ancestor's, as if she'd read her often at a very young age. So we might presume that she has knowledge of her heritage. Second was that when we- when they raided her apartment, they found a not-insignificant amount of human skulls upon the upholstery."

"...Ah."

"That would do it," Hüriye admitted.

"That's why you need us, isn't it? I know that while it's not the capital, Hamburg has much fiercer Attendant overwatch than here. If we had this conversation there we'd be dead."

"Correct. The two of you are to travel there and find Anastasia. Although not even the deeplighters have found her yet, so how difficult that might be is unknown. I'll put you in touch with Mrs. Cahill-Madigan. Your occupation is to introduce her to Ms. Holzknecht, and to extract her if possible. Any questions?"

Hüriye asked first. "What is this for? Do we think she might know something about her great-great-grandmother's writing that nobody else does?"

"They do, and that's what matters," Annika shook her head. "Maybe some kind of lost scientific knowledge she kept to herself, or who knows what else."

The intentions of the Attendants to the Deep Light were not unknown to Hüriye. And the purported impossibility of Anastasia's existence implied not even the Incubator knew of her. If that were, somehow, the case, she could only be human. And if that were true, and she did stand between the Attendants and something, then...

"If you're still answering questions: how likely are we to die?" Annika winced.

"In this situation? God only knows. In life? 100%."

"We'll do it," Hüriye answered.

"Hang on, we will?!"

"I don't mean to flatter you, but I know your fighting prowess. Maybe better than anyone else. And I can't imagine standing by Alex's side for so long was easy. So I don't doubt that if there's anyone I can stand by and pull through, it would have to be you."

Nadia beamed. "Excellent! And Hüriye makes a good point. You call it what you want, but there must have been a reason Alex didn't want someone as capable as you close by if you had a chance of standing up to her."

"I don't think it's like that."

"And who told you that it wasn't?"

Annika faltered.

"Was it Alex?"

"She could have killed me if she wanted. If she let me live, that means she still believes in me on some level."

Nadia thought it over and nodded, but the thought didn't sit well with Hüriye. They put a hand on Annika's shoulder and quietly offered, "But do you still believe in her?"

Annika stared at them from the corner of her eye, but not for long.

"So what's our verdict?" Nadia put her hands together. "Your awareness of the events in Hamburg makes you uniquely qualified to find your way around there. We can't do this without you."

Annika shared a glance with Hüriye. They didn't offer her a mote of telepathic reassurance, nor did they try to sway her away from the matter. Each looking for an answer to their own internal conflict, they stumbled upon the same thought by pure chance.

Annika hit the pavement. Her rifle was not far behind. But at least the former had the privilege of doing so in one piece. She rolled over back to a standing restart, but the second she was upright, the broadsword was at her throat.

Despite herself, or perhaps because of, Hüriye grinned. "I guess this means I win, right?"

"Go ahead," Annika spat. "Do it. Kill me."

"Kill y...? Ha! You thought I was going t...!" She dropped her sword. "Do all deeplighters lack perspective this badly, or is it just you?"

"What?"

"Maybe you think you're God's gift or something, but the reality isn't that you're out of your depth. It's that you're so badly trying to be. I don't know or care about your ideology, really, but teenage girls murdering each other in the streets? Is that really what you want this to turn into?"

"It's a fact of life."

Hüriye snapped her fingers, and her sword went up in smoke. "It's not a fact of my life."

"I had every intention of killing you."

"And that's exactly why you were never going to. Think about it." She stepped away, raised her eyebrows in mock profundity, walked off, glanced back, and raised her eyebrows for what was either emphasis or sheer fun.

"Wh- where are you going?" Annika dropped her hands.

"Puppetmastaz just put out a new album. I want to go see if it's any good."

Nadia nodded. "Well, then. Somebody will meet with you tomorrow to supply you with two train tickets. Godspeed, both of you."

"Thank you," Hüriye nodded. "Take care, yourself."

She nodded again. All said and done, she departed... hesitated as if there were something yet more to say, and then left with certainty.

And all that left were two mortal nemeses to make small talk.

"So... the hijab?"

"Hm?" Hüriye looked up. "Oh! It didn't feel right to wear it once I stopped being a girl."

"Once you stopped what?"

"You know. Being a girl."

"Then you're transgender?"

"Indeed I am! I had a realization back in January, that there's so little we take for granted as humans that just don't sit right with me as I am now. I thought that doing away with these things would help me focus better on what really matters. Some of the things I gave up were physical - like this metal mask here? It stops me breathing or eating or using my voice, all things it turns out we can survive perfectly fine without - but some were more constructed than that. Like gender!"

"You don't need to breathe?"

"Not as a pyromancer. I can magically incur the oxygenation of my lungs at will. Actually, it feels more comfortable than breathing. I have more control over it."

"That sounds..."

Annika furrowed her brow.

"That sounds like cheating, somehow. Like it shouldn't work."

Hüriye shrugged. "Well, it does. And what about you? What happened to your arm?"

Half a beat. Annika grimaced.

"Was that for... trying to leave?"

"I didn't," she mumbled. "I questioned Alex's intentions, and I was exiled. This... this is her way of branding me for it."

Where were the words? For the telepathically inclined, where were even the sentiments? Just as human flesh can be cauterised to stop bleeding, so too can a magical girl's be cursed to not grow back. It was apparent on inspection now that Annika was cursed by one of the most powerful people on the planet. Her arm was more than severed. It was gone.

"Have you considered prosthesis?"

"Of course not. Are you crazy?"

Hüriye threw their hands up. "I didn't know there was something wrong with it."

"Body modification is strictly prohibited. It's a pathway to unnatural strength only the Empress may..." Annika trailed off, breathed for a moment. "I don't have to listen anymore, do I? I'm not an Attendant."

What parts of Hüriye's face that weren't fused to their mask smiled. "Welcome to the real world."

"It's funny." She tilted her head outside the umbrella's domain. The rain began to let up. "Alex told me more or less the same thing when she cast me out."

Thekla watched undetected from a mere two metres in front of Annika. Either suitably satisfied or alarmed, she fled the embassy. Where to? Irrelevant. Anywhere quiet, that she might consider her options. Of course, the city saw to it that quiet was only relative.

To the right side road, back alley, or canalside walk, the acousmatic urbanite essence became a stranger in its own stomping ground. Post-war and post-reunification, Berlin had not merely undergone, but been characterized by, a piecemeal ecdysis. A constructed chimerism. One set of cells where the Soviet government had, in its unchecked power, stricken the city with insalubrious poverty and inequality, and disenfranchised generations of the working class. Another, ideologically opposite set of cells where the capitalist free market had, in its unchecked power, stricken the city with insalubrious poverty and inequality, and disenfranchised generations of the working class.

But it was not upon these streets that Thekla found herself, in the face of her every natural expectation. The office of her empress was not so straightforward, even while bearing the title of high retainer. All she had done was consider an appointment, and idly stumbled her way into a grand white palace, its walls bearing fountains of red best uncontemplated.

The moment complete awareness of circumstance befell her, two far inferior attendants stopped her.

"What business do you have with the empress?" demanded one.

"That's far above your station."

"Very well," bowed the other. "If you would-"

She was beyond them in an instant, without discernible mechanism. She had time for a great many things, but she didn't have time for this.

The running of the fountains indicated the direction of a tremendous, ornate gateway, through which Thekla came to a tremendous dome-shaped chamber, divided diagonally across the floor to white marble where she stood, and a red pool where she was pleased not to.

"Your Majesty," Thekla began to orate. "I come with news of Schneider!"

Opposite her ascended a figure from the murk, lotus-pristine, arms spread wide, flesh marked with ink augmentations telling of the bloodshed of a hundred sagas, wards of every ilk of spirit and grudge, diagrams of strange anatomies that did not belong on her. She rose until small ripples lapped at the soles of her jackboots.

"Empress!"

Thekla prostrated herself before Alex's bloodbathed form.

"Speak."

Thekla's hair stood on end, and her teeth went cold. That, or the other way around. "Er, ahem... concerning Schneider. She's been sighted conspiring with the common folk."

Not a muscle of Alex's body shifted. Someone less aware than her right hand would assume that her heart would be something of an exception.

"If you would advise, my Empress..."

"She is in exile."

"But has that punishment sufficed?!"

The moment the words left her mouth, she was crushed beneath her own guilt. It weighed on her neck, pressed her forehead upon the ground.

"Stand. Look at me."

Thekla did as she was told.

"I know you ask only out of concern. But Schneider is intelligent enough that eliminating her would be a waste. I thought it more fitting that she be sent out into a life without branding as one of our own so that she might learn just how hard it really is. As such, she cannot be found guilty of dissent, because she is no longer one of us."

"But... if she should return...?"

"If she still finds herself disposed toward whatever knee-jerk insurgent ideology she's adopted, then I would at least ask for her silence if she wishes to take my side again. I know well enough there are some minds you can't change."

"Would that really be enough? I don't doubt your capabilities, Empress, I only worry for your safety. Can you do with only asking her to keep her beliefs to herself?"

"Weren't you listening?"

The ripple beneath Alex spread. Breaching, almost her size, was the head of a myriapod resembling a molar, with its roots as the mandibles. Below its neck was the watercolored body of a hundred-handed giant, a full row of teeth resembling a centipede's bodily segments embedded down its spine.

It was the witch of this labyrinth.

And it was in terrible pain.

And it was in terrible

terrible

terrible

terrible

make it stop

terrible

makeitstop

terrAnd Alex tugged on a chain she held around its throat, and it behaved itself. It leaned forward, close enough for Thekla to see Alex's own teeth, see her for the first time in as long as she'd known her, grinning.

"I said, I would at least ask for her Silence."

Another tug and the witch pulled back. Alex unlimbered a wicked harpoon from its reins, tested its weight in her hands.

"Or perhaps... perhaps there's something more interesting we could do than that."

"Yes, my Empress?"

"There is talk of a weapon, developed by human hands. Of course, it's such a closely-guarded secret that it's going to have to be repeatedly disassembled and reassembled all around the world, but... 'all around the world' is exactly where the roots of our empire lay."

And it would be, in the coming months, that this weapon's collection and final assembly would be conducted by one Madeleine Whitman.

For all its mystique, for everything it represented, the weapon was light enough to carry with both hands, and small enough to hold with just one. Squarely outside the domain of her own office hours, she found her way to the depot without detection by the unworthy eyes of her inferiors.

But not without detection.

While the shape of Waking Without Horizon gathered before her, the crepuscular streetlight from the window to her anterior cast the shadow of another upon her.

"Who...?"

"You know," its owner wandered closer, "I don't know what you're trying to achieve. But it doesn't have to go this way. You don't get through life making enemies."

"Oh, Crawford. I should have guessed, really."

"There's this concept called the black swan fallacy. Named after the explorer Willem de Vlamingh, the Dutch explorer to first reach Whadjuk Noongar land at where Perth is now. His whole life he'd believed that all swans were white, because in the totality of his experience living in Europe, every swan he'd ever seen was white. So when he landed over on the west coast, he couldn't believe that there were black swans even when he was looking at them."

"Get to the point."

"My whole life," she continued, at a leisurely pace, "I've believed that law and justice were the same thing. I thought the law was flexible, because it could tell right from wrong. But these past five months or so? Living with Fearno, et. al.? I've had to rethink that entirely. But you! Look at you! I know you're not pure bloody evil like Macquarie, you're different! That's what you tried to show me when we first met, that you could tell right from wrong. And that even when you'd forced yourself to confuse the two, you could still keep your head up. So are you going to prove me right, or are you going to be my black swan?"

"What, are you still on that 'you're better than this' bullshit?"

She nodded. "I know you can change for the better. I mean, look at me."

"Look at you? Look at you? You ruined my life!" Her grip on the weapon tightened. "And what for? So that I'd start seeing eye to eye with you?!"

"All I did was give you an opportunity to own up to the shit you did of your own volition. And you didn't, and people died. I never lifted a finger. That was all you."

Madeleine's expression shifted, subtly, but about as pronouncedly as it could have. To see someone who had cemented herself in the minds of her enemies as impervious to harm in such pain almost beggared belief.

The goddess cleared her throat. "If you don't mind."

"Keep out of this."

"Keep out? Oho! What's this? Do you think I have time to hang around and watch two emotionally confused young adults air their grievances and go through the motions of some dramatic showdown? How about you both stop talking and I show Little Miss Syllogism over here the door?"

"So no peaceful option, then?" The room rang out with the head of a sledgehammer striking the concrete floor. "That's fine. I'm not above the divine art of violence. In fact," and here she rested an iron nail against her temple and stood to strike it in with her hammer, "I'm all in."

With a single stroke she penetrated the wall of her skull, and the hunger overtook her. That which was no longer Marie bolted at Waking.

The goddess, for her part, showed no signs of caring. With the wave of a hand, she threw it against a wall. She drew a shortsword with little attention and lazily swung the blade through its torso, a cross-section of its body instantly rent to gas and dust. It tried to breathe a single breath, no matter how small, but as Waking turned away, she jabbed two fingers at the ground and blew both halves of its body downward through fifteen metres of concrete and soil.

The fight was over before it had begun. The rest was just histrionics.

Despite what she'd just said, Whitman fell an unwell flavour of quiet at the display. Her mouth was ajar. Her eyes couldn't find anything to focus upon. Her breathing was a hot tremolo.
"Anyway!" Waking Without Horizon rubbed her hands together. "I do believe you had a weapon for me to deliver."

DRESSED TO EMPRESS

The title of Empress Eternal is the highest position in the hierarchy of the Attendants to the Deep Light, over the course of its history being held by twenty-nine different individuals, and none of the most recent twenty-eight have considered the "Eternal" component to be in poor taste.

The First Empress Eternal was Jade du Bois, of the original Lyonais Attendants. She held the title for two years, until other people found out that she held it, at which point she was widely criticised and scorned by her peers. Scorned extremely harshly, in fact, up to and including being assassinated. For decades, the rule then passed from city to city before arriving at last in Paris in 1987. Or at least, such is claimed by the Attendants' current orthodoxy. Others sooner made it to Marseille and parts of Italy and established themselves well, and one United States nationalist named Jaelyn Rose Winfield (1971 - 1999) who nobody really listened to or followed.

Power did not stay in Paris for long, however, and none of the splinters demonstrated any longevity. In response to Germany's economic growth through the 1990's, the highest-ranking Attendants moved one after the other to Berlin. The exception to this was the nineteenth Empress, Carmen Ménard (1977 - 1996), who was replaced by her former royalists with Berlin native Regina Fischart (1978 - 1996). Despite her brief tenure of two months on the throne, she represented to the hierarchy a complete shift to a German authority. An authority which, by way of the presence of the European Union and the approaching implementation of the Euro, was not very much of a shift at all.

The current Empress Eternal is Alex (b. 1990), real name a closely-guarded secret, nicknamed as such of her own insistence based upon the rumour that before she was an Attendant, she was busking in Alexanderplatz for change. This rumour has long been debunked, but is nonetheless circulated as absolute truth by both the propagandists upholding the notion that supporting their cause allows anyone to achieve political power, and the uneducated magical girls susceptible to this legend.

The witch she subjugates is named Hecate. Before they were Attendants, she was Alex's classmate in grade 6. She considered Alex her close friend. Alex didn't even know her name.