When I woke up and remembered where I was and what was happening, I realized I couldn't afford to short out too soon. I closed my eyes and tried to summon the glass wall that prevented reality from reaching me. I had no way of knowing if I was successful or not. But when the ship began to shudder again and I was summoned on deck, I found my ability to feel vastly reduced. We were being attacked by a lot of dragons now. Jaania put me and Akanthus on protection duty blocking dragon fire with our bodies while the shield was raised and lowered intermittently. While the shield was up, I panted for breath. Circling around and around was hard work! This tactic kept the dragons confused, unsure when to launch an all-out attack. The weapons scattered them and knocked several out of battle, but there was a real limit to what could be done about a whole flock of angry dragons and their riders. I didn't worry. I just blocked as much as I could.

The airship descended, allowing ground forces to aid us. Magically enhanced arrows and various kinds of bolts fired by some kind of machine wounded the dragons. They retreated, probably in order to launch an all-out attack, since they weren't that badly wounded. Sure enough, they came back. Akanthus and I placed ourselves in strategic positions and waited for the shield to fall. I wished I was larger.

Someone decided to divert power away from the weapons and towards the thrusters. The airship barely completed its job of getting us to the Fissure. It crashed with the Fissure in sight range. Ports in the hull were kicked open and soldiers poured out, all armored in mana-resistant gear. Jaania was equipped likewise, her distinctive coat with the fancy trailing thingies replaced by a hooded black tunic adorned with Rose symbols. It completely covered everything but her face, and something about it didn't look right. She wore dark blue goggles, which also didn't look right. And matching boots. Her entire outfit looked weirdly ephemeral, like it wasn't quite real. She gathered Akanthus and I at her side. Along with the soldiers, we pushed forward.

As predicted, we met incredible resistance. Even with the glass wall down, or perhaps because of it, I felt dazed and confused. The only thing I knew how to do was follow Jaania. Akanthus did the actual fighting. I think. He had to, right? People were screaming. There were lights and noises everywhere. My eyes and ears were soon exhausted. I stumbled after her, functionally blind, deaf and mute.

Something very big happened. It was very destructive. I couldn't see it or think well enough to know what it was. I didn't even realize where we were until I slammed into Akanthus, earning my first broken nose. As I lay moaning on the ground, I heard him say, "The enemy spy cannot accompany us any further, my lady."

"I don't trust those golems to recognize a noncombatant," Jaania replied.

"For the sake of your goal -"

"I trust her, Akanthus." Jaania crouched over me. "Ama, promise me that you will not interfere with any attempt I make to end magic."

I wondered if my nose was bent and how much it would hurt to straighten if so. "I promise."

She helped me get to my feet, and we continued. It actually wasn't until much later that my mind caught up to reality. It suddenly occurred to me as we picked our way across yet another slope of slippery gravel, "Wait, are we in the Fissure?"

"We have been for the past hour and a half," Jaania replied.

"Oh my god." Despite what I said to Warlic back in Swordhaven, I hadn't seriously thought that I would ever get a chance to visit the Fissure. Not with my fighting skills. I wanted to hug Akanthus. He was so nice.

Descending a canyon turned out to be very hard. Some flying mechanical things flew down to meet us. They didn't do anything, just watched. A dragon's roar could be heard not far behind. Soon, I heard the Hero yell, "Stop right there!"

We turned. Amadeus and Alteon joined him. "Akanthus, your villainy ends here!" Alteon yelled.

"As well as the rest of you," Amadeus added.

"Akanthus, keep them busy." Jaania grabbed my hand. I nearly fell over the side of a small cliff as she and I ran deeper into the Fissure.

I didn't notice a faint whining sound until we reached a brief stretch of level ground. I glanced up. "Drone."

Jaania glanced at it. "No weapons." She didn't waste any time dealing with it. We let the drone follow us down into the Fissure.

Much, much later, I realized that I was alone with her. It was the perfect time to channel emotion again. I tried to raise the glass wall. Again, I had no way of knowing if I succeeded. My stomach started to tremble. That had to be a good sign, right?

No, it was just a warning sign that I was about to vomit from exertion. Jaania had to catch me before I fell down. She half dragged me the rest of the way.

I fell on my face next to her feet. My senses reeled. I watched the blood vessels in my eyes pulse. Even with adrenaline on full blast, there was only so much my body could do. I'd reached my limit. I'd exercised myself right into the hospital. If the Fissure had ambulance service. Anyway, my own blood vessels looked very pretty.

Jaania nudged my arm with her foot. "Here it is," she said. "The Mana Core. It's beautiful, isn't it?" She sounded like she was smiling.

Beauty. That was another abstract concept, one which I considered to be closely related to and sometimes indistinguishable from Love. I drew strength from it - thank the gods, the glass wall was gone - and pushed myself up on hands and knees. I crawled to the edge of the cliff. It ended in a sheer drop straight down to the Mana Core. The Mana Core was visible as a pulsing deep blue glow. "Yeah," I agreed. Deep blue was my favorite color.

"This close to it, no amount of shielding can protect a person," Jaania said. "You and Akanthus are the only people in this world who can safely venture this far." She sounded very, very happy. Lighthearted. Like she probably had as a student. "Well then. Time to end magic."

I sat back on my knees and looked up at her. She had somehow rolled up her sleeves without them making a sound. What kind of fabric was that? She had on bracers, black with glowing white lights. She called Hesperrhodos to her. The SoulTool appeared and began to wave his arms. She braced her left wrist with her right hand and held it out towards the Mana Core. In a flash of light, strings erupted from her fingers. They shot toward the Mana Core. Jaania gasped. Her eyes flew open wide and filled with a blue glow. Her strings turned from golden to blue, and it spread from her eyes and her fingers, all the way across her body. Her ephemeral clothes turned into sheets of spacetime studded with stars, and her skin shone the pale blue light that you would see if you could look at the underside of a glacier. Her feet lifted off the ground. Her hair flew away from her face. She was radiant.

I finally came back to my senses and realized what was going on. She was connecting herself directly to the Mana Core. She couldn't possibly survive that. I was witnessing her death. Horror sent me to my feet. I put a hand on her shoulder. "Jaania!"

"I have the power to change the world forever," she murmured in a voice that wasn't quite hers.

I scrambled to think of something to do. I had promised not to stop her, but could I somehow still convince her to not put an end to magic? "Be true to yourself."

She smiled. "I am a hero. I will save everyone from the scourge of magic."

There was no time to debate the heroism of upending the world's economy. I scrambled for something else to say, and didn't find it. I would need time that I did not have. I sobbed. I watched her strings fly, doing who knew what to the Mana Core. Finally, something clicked. It had always seemed wrong for Jaania to want to put an end to magic. Even after all she had been through, it didn't seem like a natural direction for her character to take. Why?

"You're a mage," I said. "That is also something that's true about you. You are a mage, and you could never not be one. You're ready to die to rid the world of magic because in a world without magic, you wouldn't want to be alive."

She smiled again. As I watched her smile, the full reality of the situation hit me. She did not want to live. She wanted to break her own heart and die in the process. She wanted to be a tragic heroine. That was her choice. And I had promised not to take it from her. A current of pure emotion zoomed through me. My whole body trembled. I gasped for breath. The reality of her desire to die was too pure, too strong, too real. I couldn't take it. I wrapped my arms around her waist, buried my face in her shoulder and cried out in pain. I did not want her to die. I did not want her heart broken. I loved her, and she rejected that. Rejected me. I sobbed, crying and shaking, occasionally screaming as a fresh burst of pain hit me. It was too real. Too much. Too real.

"Ama, what are you doing?"

I clung to her. I couldn't do anything else. She was there, I wanted to hold her, and she would very soon not be there and I would never get to hold her ever again and she would be gone. Someone I loved would be gone, absent from my life, never to be seen or spoken to again. I had never lost a loved one before. I had never known this reality. I cried out in pain. It was too terrible, and yet I couldn't deny it. I couldn't deny anything. There was no glass wall, no distance, nothing at all between me and the most horrible truths I had ever faced. I finally understood why she had asked me to choose between Truth and Love. Inflicting this unutterable agony could kill someone. I was going to die if I didn't get some distance. At least, if I did, I could stay with her. It wouldn't be so bad. I only wanted to stay with her, and she was abandoning me. I screamed. My muscles tensed strongly enough to tear themselves. My body was ripping itself apart.

"Ama, stop that."

I could not stop. I could not leave her.

"Ama!"

I lost the ability to hear her. The roaring in my head was too loud. I felt like the witch from the Wizard of Oz, melting, melting. I was falling apart. I felt my soul collapse. I couldn't cry out anymore. Like an overloaded circuit, I went dark.

The next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground. My head was near Jaania's leg. She was also lying on the ground. Her hair was totally white, as was her skin. I hadn't saved her. I didn't care. I breathed in and out, numb to it all. There was no glass wall. I just didn't have anything inside me.

Footsteps crunched. Familiar, giant, heavy footsteps. Akanthus looked down at both of us. He chuckled. The drone whined. Akanthus paid it no mind. He walked past my head and took off a small, inconspicuous backpack that he had worn for the whole journey. He opened it, lowered it to the ground and tipped it upside down. The Doom vessel slid out. It was larger than Akanthus. He started doing something to it. He was in no hurry. I kept expecting the Hero to show up and stop him, but it didn't happen. I realized the only person who could possibly stop him was me.

Well, that wasn't going to happen.

I watched him work. He hummed to himself. I didn't know he could hum to himself. He seemed happy. Just like Jaania. Doom and death made people happy, apparently. It was funny. If it was on a screen, people would laugh.

A screen…

An idea occurred to me. Jaania was dead. I didn't care about anything anymore. There was nothing binding me to this world. There never had been, except for my love for it. With that gone, I was free.

I tilted my head back and looked at the drone. It was only there to watch us. On the other end must be my friends, watching. Witnessing. I opened my mouth to apologize to them. But what actually came out was, "Goodbye."

Akanthus was nearly finished with whatever he was doing. He paused. "Who are you talking to?"

I reached out and grabbed his ankle. I closed my eyes and let go.

I passed through a brief moment of unconsciousness, then came back to the world. Akanthus roared. He jerked his foot out of my grasp and kicked me in the ribs, breaking several of them. "What have you done?!"

A diesel engine rumbled overhead, followed by many other engines. I wanted to say something pithy like "Welcome to my world," but didn't. First of all, I couldn't speak. And secondly, my heart was broken.

.

Several hours later, in Outpost Yeden…

Queen Victoria paced around the room. She had long since shed her formal dress, not because she expected to fight, but because she hadn't stopped pacing for the past several hours and the relentless exercise was making her sweaty. Warlic sat against the wall, lost in thought. Svezdana was out collecting information from the team in the field. No other Magesters dared disturb the Queen of Greenguard, on Svezdana's strict orders. They had the Magisterium's central chamber to themselves.

Svezdana returned. Queen Victoria finally stopped pacing. Warlic stood up. "The field team acquired the supplies and mana to set up shielding ten times as protective as that which they already had. This allowed them to go down to the place Jaania reached and retrieve both her and the Doom device," she reported. "They did not find any sign of either Akanthus or Ama, and detected no traces of magic."

"Where could they have gone…" Queen Victoria murmured.

"I…have a hypothesis," Warlic murmured back. "There's no way to confirm it, but… I suspect that Ama returned to her original world and took Akanthus with her."

Queen Victoria shuddered. "Would that explain the way they flickered? As if they were only holograms?"

"I don't know," Warlic replied. "Nobody was present when Ama first appeared in this world."

"It's unnatural to disappear without so much as a breeze. There should be a puff of air, a sound. Something."

"Ahem." When Svezdana had their attention, she continued on. "There's more. Jaania is alive."

Queen Victoria's eyes widened. "What?!"

"But… That kind of connection to the Mana Core should have unraveled her soul…" Warlic said while holding his head.

"She is unconscious, but very much not unraveled," Svezdana confirmed.

"But she wove her own soul threads into the Mana Core," Warlic said. "We all watched as she did it. We saw the amount of thread she wove in. No person can survive that!"

"She did," Svezdana said, sounding bothered. "I am just as perplexed as you. Nothing of the sort has ever happened in recorded history."

"Perhaps…" Warlic paced back and forth a little. "Perhaps it could be because of Ama. She was in great pain for no obvious reason, and Jaania asked her to stop doing something several times. Perhaps Ama somehow used parts of her own soul to keep Jaania's from unraveling, or to replace it." He tapped his chin. "That would explain why magic still works. If Ama was right about Jaania's motivations, then realizing that she was going to survive might have caused her to change her mind about ending magic."

"But then, what did she do to the Mana Core?" Queen Victoria asked.

"I have no idea. Did the field team find any clues?"

"None."

"Outpost Yeden will likely be studying that for the next several centuries," Warlic predicted.

"Are either of you interested in the fate of your champions?" Svezdana asked, looking critical.

"Of course! How are the Hero and his allies?" Queen Victoria asked.

"During the battle, Akanthus sliced through the illusion magic that 'Amadeus' was using. We have some questions about your Hero's choice of allies," Svezdana said with narrowed eyes. "He survived with few injuries. Your father, the king, is in critical condition, as is the Hero's dragon. The Hero has injuries in need of immediate treatment, but seems more traumatized by what Akanthus did to their dragon than anything else. Based on his physical injuries, he and…his friend could have chased down Akanthus and prevented him from going too deeply into the Fissure."

"The bond between the Hero and their dragon is strong, and I will not judge him in the slightest for staying to save the dragon's life," Queen Victoria retorted. "Warlic, would you be willing to teleport them back to the castle, or should they begin medical treatment here?"

"I would rather teleport a large party with my mana at baseline," Warlic replied.

"Very well. Svezdana, see that they are treated according to your highest standards of care."

"Understood," Svezdana said. "What about your other subject?"

Queen Victoria looked away. "Jaania…"

"May I propose something?" Warlic asked.

"By all means."

"I suggest that she stay here as a prisoner of the Magisterium, and also as a research subject. While the Magesters study her soul for clues as to what Ama did, they can keep an eye on her state of mind. When they have gotten all useful information out of her, she can be released into the custody of Swordhaven along with a detailed psychological report. Based on that, you could make informed decisions about how much of a danger she is or isn't."

Queen Victoria nodded. "Everything that has happened is going to be a headache. I don't want to deal with her on top of it. I support this proposal. Svezdana, what say you?"

"We are very interested," Svezdana replied. "If there is a way to protect souls from unraveling, restore them, or anything of the sort, we want to know about it."

Queen Victoria smiled. "Then I will release Jaania into your temporary custody. Contingent on one agreement, of course."

"Oh?"

"Whatever you learn must be shared with us."

Svezdana frowned. Then she looked down. "I suppose the raw information, with no suggestions about its potential applications, would be harmless enough." She and Queen Victoria shook hands.

Warlic sighed. "I wonder how Ama is doing…"

.

Several days after the flicker…

I lay in my hospital bed, eyes closed but not sleeping. I wore hospital clothes. My Pirates t-shirt had been removed for fear that it would cause a raging infection, as had all the rest of my old clothes. My nose had been straightened and my ribs set. The pain medication in my IV wasn't strong enough, but I didn't ask for more, aware of the risk of addiction. Besides, being in immense bodily pain was only right. I had, in fact, gone through something extremely harmful. It wouldn't be right to hide that fact away.

I wondered if Akanthus was in jail yet. He probably hadn't gotten far after being spotted by all those people driving by, but it was doubtful that any police force could have physically restrained him. It would not be surprising if he had been shot dead. I then wondered how big a file I had in the police office. Between all the witness statements, the fact that he was wearing extremely distinctive armor and armed with a gigantic sword, his abnormal size, the lack of a trail to explain how we had gotten there, and my injuries, we were probably generating the media storm of the century.

There was a light knock on my door. I had a room all to myself, yippee. "A police investigator is here to meet with you," a nurse told me. I opened my eyes. The investigator entered as room as quietly as possible. It was a youngish woman, her hair tied up professionally in a bun. She sat in the visitor's chair and waited for the nurse to leave.

"What is your name?" she asked.

I waited for her to try something else. She did not. She frowned, then repeated her question. I didn't know if I could move. I hadn't made facial expressions or shifted my limbs in days. My body language felt just as paralyzed as my spoken language. But when I looked down at my hand and concentrated very very hard, I managed to move it. I pointed to my mouth, then slashed at the air.

She was surprised. "You're deaf?" Then she scoffed, aware of how ridiculous it was to be asking that question verbally.

I raised my hand. When she was paying attention again, I spread my fingers wide and waved my hand from side to side. No, you misunderstand. I tapped my ear and made a weak thumbs-up.

She reached into her bag and took out a notepad, gave it to me along with a pen. I wrote, Ama.

She asked me other questions. I told her Akanthus' name, but nothing else about him. I said that yes, he had hurt me, but refused to answer the question about whether he had held me captive. She kept a neutral look on her face, but I got the impression as she left that this case was going to land in the newspapers as a kidnapping.

I closed my eyes and shifted to find a cushier spot on the pillow. Then my eyes flew open. I pressed the call button immediately. A nurse was at my door in a few seconds. I waved frantically in the direction the investigator had gone. The nurse expertly deduced what I meant and ran to catch her. The investigator came back to my room and sat down again. Ama is my chosen name, I wrote. My legal name is - I told her my legal name, my old name. It made me shiver to watch her read it. Claiming that name felt wrong, as wrong as claiming my name was Victoria or Warlic would have been. It was not my name.

After she left the second time, I lay back and sighed. This was it. I was going back to my old life, a life that no longer suited me. It was so small and tight, bound within the walls of my house most of the time and filled with the constant thought of what others wanted from me. It was a life of bending over to try to accommodate people, to try not to annoy them. I couldn't live like that any more even if I tried. I was going to have to enlarge it. I was going to have to face a lot of people and tell them new old things about myself, things I'd kept secret. I was going to face a lot of resistance, particularly in the form of disbelief as everyone wondered whether it was genuine or just an effect of whatever they assumed I'd been through. And I was going to do it without a single source of genuine, unconditional love and support by my side. No Cysero. No Warlic. No Jaania.

I still could not cry and had not recovered the ability to feel, but I was aware of how much that sucked. I remembered a poem from Cressida Cowell's The Wizards of Once series and hoped it would come true. I thought about it relentlessly, reciting the third stanza to myself over and over. The first stanza was specific to the plot of the books. The second wasn't relevant to my present situation. I only recited the third.

And I see once more the invisible track

That will lead us home and take us back

So find your wands and spread your wings

I'll sing our love of impossible things

And as you take my vanished hand

We'll both go back to that magic land

Where we lost our hearts

Several lifetimes ago

When we were wizards

Once.

.

A/N: I said in a note at the end of the first version that I would write an epilogue. On some level, I was aware that it was a woefully incomplete story. This version is complete. There will be no epilogue.

I took a little authorial license in this chapter. My personal spiritual beliefs are that everything in the universe, matter and empty space alike, is saturated by soul energy. And I do believe that it is possible to manipulate this energy. I believe that's why I have excellent luck and everything always seems to be perfectly timed. I cannot know for sure how or if this would translate into a world where another magic system exists, or if my belief is even true. But I really, really wanted to save Jaania. That is the one remaining bit of wish fulfillment I granted myself in the rewrite.

I was desperate not to have to end the story this way. I didn't even allow myself to consider it as an option. But "Hawk in the Sky" forced me to finally admit to myself that the story had to end tragically. My character could not possibly save the world in any other way than by returning to my own. Leaving all my friends behind.

The poem is real, and everything said about its source is real. The title of it is, "Once There Was Magic."

Reviews are welcome and appreciated.