Your Future Hasn't Been Written Yet
by K. Stonham
first released 18th April 2022
Krel was not completely fluent in human expressions, but he was pretty sure that he was justified in his instinctive reaction to Zoe's as she took possession of the empty plutonium fuel cell.
He stepped back from her savage grin.
Which only made her laugh. "Relax, blue boy. I'm on your side."
"And I am getting the impression that is a very good thing," he replied.
She grinned and patted the silvery chamber held in her arms. "I'll need about a week, but I'll get this back to you, filled and fueled."
"I trust in your capabilities," he said, wondering whether or not he should be texting Douxie about his not-a-girlfriend's dangerous proclivities.
Eh, Douxie had presumably known Zoe long enough that he knew her habits far, far better than Krel did.
"And if you happen to hear about something going on in Area 49-B..." Zoe blew a bubble with her gum, popped it, and used her oral dexterity to gather all the remains back in her mouth. She looked smug.
"If I hear anything, I will assume it is you causing chaos." And Krel would never, ever object to chaos being visited upon Colonel Kubritz and her reprehensible operation. "Good luck, and do not get caught." He hesitated. "And if you happen to see a giant alien named Buster locked up... maybe free him? He is a friend, or will be, and has been imprisoned there a long time."
"Buster. Got it. What's he look like?"
"Uh." Krel cringed, remembering humans' particular foibles about appearances. "A thirty foot tall giant insect?"
Zoe's eyes flew wide. "You are shitting me."
Krel shook his head. "No. Sorry. But he is good!" he promised, suddenly feeling somewhat desperate to get Buster out of the hell that Kubritz's clutches surely was. "So if you get a chance..."
Zoe huffed. "No promises," she said, pointing a shiny pink nail at Krel. "But if I see him, I'll see what I can do, okay?"
"I cannot ask for more."
"All right. See you, sailor." Zoe tossed him a salute and wandered off into the Arcadian night.
"Bye-bye!" Lucy cheered, waving her fingers.
"Be careful out there!" Ricky chimed in.
"Little brother," said Aja, wandering up behind him. "I would say you have the strangest friends, but..."
"...but I am not sure there are any normal wizards," Krel finished.
"She's going to get herself killed," Douxie swore from the dining table. Jim looked out the kitchen cutout to see Douxie, phone in hand, completely ignoring his breakfast in favor of rapid typing on his phone.
"Who is?" Jim asked, shaking his pan before flipping the eggs, one then the other. "Mary?"
"Zoe!" Douxie typed in one last thing, then very obviously /made/ himself set the phone down. He looked aggravated and more than a little wild-eyed. "You remember she was in charge of a plutonium heist?"
"For Krel's daxial array, yeah." Jim turned off the stove's burner.
"She's just bowed out of band practice tomorrow, which, well, we've all done it now and again and it isn't like we've got any gigs lined up in the next month anyway, so..."
"Douxie," Jim said impatiently, sliding his eggs onto his plate and fishing the hot toast out of the toaster on his way to the dining room.
Douxie huffed. "She then texted me privately and told me not to worry about anything I heard coming out of Area 49-B."
Jim blinked.
Douxie glared. "She's planning to steal the plutonium from 49-B, Jim!"
It took a minute for that to sink in. Then- "Is she nuts?" Jim hissed, wide-eyed. "Area 49-B's bad news for all of us."
"That's what I told her!" Douxie agreed. "And do I get any respect as a fellow wizard worried about her skin? No, I get this!" He snatched his phone back up and turned it around to show Jim a looping video of some cartoon hyenas laughing.
Jim couldn't help it. He sniggered. "But I thought being punk was about not listening to authority?"
"Maybe. But being punk is also not about being stupid and taking risks that could get you locked up and vivisected!" Douxie crossed his arms and, well, pouted.
"You have to admit, stealing plutonium from her is definitely Zoe giving Colonel Kubritz the finger," Jim pointed out.
Douxie groaned. "Not you too."
"Hey, do you see me going anywhere near 49-B?" asked Jim. "No you do not."
"Yeah, you just go to Gatto, and the Darklands," Douxie sassed back. "Don't try to convince me you play it safe, Jim. You're a decent actor but a poor liar. You're as reckless as any of us."
"Well, as long as we're not all reckless at the same time and are available to save each other's asses, it works out," Jim said reasonably. He pointed his fork at Douxie's plate. "Now eat."
"Yes, yes, mother hen." Douxie picked up his own fork as Archie sauntered into the room. "Arch, you hear the news?"
"I could hear it from upstairs, yes." Archie leapt up onto his chair and surveyed the breakfast options. "I'm fairly sure I could have heard it from the roof."
"She's mental," Douxie complained again.
"And I don't disagree, but it's her choice to make," Archie pointed out. "Zoe has lived this long by being careful and cautious-" Douxie choked. "-most of the time," the dragon admitted. "She's certainly able to make her own choices about where she steals from. And you have no authority over her."
"Too right," Douxie agreed with a sigh, stabbing a slice of ham. "For she will do as she do do, and all that."
She was texting. With a troll. This had to be one of the odder-and there had been many odd-experiences of Nomura's life. How had Draal even gotten a phone, much less learned to use it?
Well, she supposed that question was an easy answer: the human Trollhunters and their band of assorted miscreants were obviously the source of the device, and had undoubtedly shown Draal how to use it, and the human internet as well.
Though she doubted that they'd realized trolls would look at lolcat memes not as humor but as a menu.
At least he wasn't asking her to send nudes. Which a few (short-lived) male acquaintances of hers had done. Most of them had mysteriously vanished, delivered unwittingly as snacks for Bular. With one, Bular had been sloppy and the Arcadia Oaks Police had found a couple body parts. The last time she'd checked up on the case, the going theory had been coyote attack, which had made her laugh.
For now, though, she found herself wishing she had a more interesting story to tell. Wishing she'd been placed with a samurai family a century earlier, so that she might have a sepia photograph of herself in armor to show him. Wishing she had tales of honor and learning to care for revered blades so old even trolls would respect their age.
Instead, she'd been placed with Okinawan emigres in the 1930s. Admittedly, they had been leaders in their community, with positions of respect and influence. They'd also been enthusiastic about America and Western culture, and named their daughter for glamorous Zelda Fitzgerald. There had been potential there, what she can now describe as a heady mix of tradition and change. Unfortunately, the political climes that had led to the hells on Earth known as internment camps had destroyed everything.
Her familiar's parents had died in that camp, from malnutrition, overcrowding, and influenza. Nomura had simply vanished the next night, vaulting the fence in her troll form and disappearing into the dark. It had taken a couple weeks, but eventually she'd found the closest Janus Order operative. A child, a beggar, a supplicant, she'd been relocated to the safer interior of the country, and eventually placed with a pair of diplomats while she "finished" growing. She'd been stubborn, but also intelligent. She could be made useful to their work.
She'd learned languages and culture. She'd also learned to fight, bribe, and blackmail.
There was no honor in a changeling's life.
Draal doubtless wanted stories of great deeds, of nobility, of worthy causes.
He was so his daddy's boy.
/The Janus Order's dogma is this: serve only Gunmar, the Order, and yourself. In that order./
It was a few minutes before he responded.
/Does that make you happy?/
She glared at her phone, swiping furiously to connect letters into words. /No. But it makes me alive./
/Tell me something that makes you happy, then./
She hissed between her teeth. "Happy is for fools," she muttered.
But Strickler said they could change. He thought that changelings could be their own people, neither trolls nor humans, but something in between. Something both and neither.
Strickler is a fool. Changelings are based on a lie, on theft and chaos and murder.
Still, she remembered a trip to Japan, when she'd been in college. It was her familiar's homeland and she'd never been before. She knew the language, of course, had made sure she spoke and read it flawlessly. It had been a pilgrimage, of sorts; she hadn't made it to Okinawa, the trip's timetable hadn't allowed. But she'd gone with her group, gathering favors by acting as a translator when necessary, and been dragged to all the usual tourist traps: Tokyo Tower, Shinjuku, Osaka Castle, the bomb memorial in Hiroshima, Kinkakuji. None of it had connected with her, but she'd had the nagging sense that it all should. If she'd truly been Zelda Nomura...
But coming back down the trail at Fushimi Inari Shrine, she'd stopped for just a minute, letting the others walk ahead. There was a house, and beside and beyond it a bamboo forest.
She'd wanted to stay in that moment forever, letting the wind whisper through the bamboo to her.
She hadn't, of course. She'd turned on her heel and caught up with her group, without even a photograph to capture the moment. She wasn't fool enough to listen to whatever creature had been trying to call her into the forest.
But all the same, she carried the memory of that longing with her.
/Bamboo,/ she texted to Draal. And before he could ask for an explication, /Living bamboo. It's strong yet flexible, and almost impossible to kill once it's found its roots./
Like me.
Vendel sighed, looking at the opaque stretch of softly glowing heartstone that hid the trapped form of Morgana Le Fay.
"Like an ember trapped in amber," Blinkous murmured by his side, no doubt amused by his own wordplay.
Vendel sighed. "She was once our greatest ally in Arthur's lands, capable of reason and kindness in equal measure."
"Aye, and then she was slain by her very brother, and resurrected by the Arcane Order," Blinkous agreed. "The afterlife seldom has any mercy for those who escape its grasp. She returned a puppet, wounded and cruel. Malleable."
"You believe they took advantage of her."
Blinkous snorted. "She, who had previously wished for peace, sided with Gunmar, the greatest villain our kind has ever known. Either she returned so vitally changed that what had been black was now white... or, yes, the Arcane Order and their ambitions twisted Morgana's magic to their own ends."
"You, I suppose, would know," Vendel said mildly. His hands twisted around his staff, carved from this very heartstone... though not, he thought with relief, from any facet near here. Indeed, Morgana's area of the heartstone was one of the few their kind had largely left as it had been when they discovered it. Other areas had been carved into, to make homes, to take seed crystals, to decorate, to enchant, to trim away the dead parts and promote new growth.
Humans tended gardens of plants. Trolls tended those of stone.
"I must wonder whether we avoided this area out of instinct, or if it was lucky chance," Vendel mused. "Imagine, if you will, how we might have inadvertently released her centuries ago."
"Surely to our detriment," Blinkous agreed, nodding.
"Instead..." Vendel sighed heavily. "We only know of her prison because one of her children led us to it."
"Yet Krax was not affected as Nomura was," Blinkous mused, hand rubbing at his chin. "They are both changelings; why did only Nomura react to Morgana's call?"
"A call which no true troll heard," Vendel felt it necessary to point out. "But you assume a constancy of Morgana's intentions, Blinkous. It may well be she felt no need to direct Krax's actions."
"Ah!" His eyes lit up and he pounded fist into hand. "The Janus Order no longer are under her control; Morgana was attempting to seize dominance over the one changeling who ventured close enough for her imprisoned magic to reach."
"That seems likely." Vendel frowned, chewed it over, and sighed. "You, too, believe Trollmarket should fight against Gunmar."
"I believe it is each troll's right to fight against their oppressor," Blinkous said firmly, which prompted a smile from Vendel.
"That sounds rather like something your brother might have said."
Blinkous froze.
Curious, Vendel raised an eyeridge.
Blinkous swallowed. "Dictatious... is alive."
A comfortable stroll in the sun could not have shocked Vendel more. "Alive?"
His face set like unliving stone, Blinkous nodded. "In the Darklands. Serving Gunmar, for all this time."
"Turned to evil, then." Vendel swallowed. Even more so than Blinkous, Dictatious had been the scholar, preferring to hide behind his books (and write them) rather than facing the slightest hint of confrontation. There had been many in Dwoza who had mocked his cowardly tendencies, but it had never seemed to bother the elder Galadrigal brother, engrossed as he had been in raising his sibling after the unfortunate death of their parents.
Looking at Blinkous now, proud and strong and intelligent, it struck Vendel anew how drastically the last few centuries, and especially the last few months, had changed his protégé.
And how drastically in the other direction they might have changed his brother.
"I do not know if he is beyond redemption," Blinkous said, "but I do know that I can never again trust him."
"You do not wish to kill him, then."
Blinkous shook his head, heavy and weary with knowledge. "In his own way, he is as much Gunmar's victim as he is his counselor. He is what his imprisonment has made him. To my knowledge, he has not killed. However, the changes of centuries cannot be underestimated. He is clever and poisonous, and I fear his treachery as surely as I feared Usurna's."
He did not wish to know. But, as the leader of Trollmarket, he needed to. "What happened to him in your previous timeline?" Vendel asked, dreading the answer. Surely Blinkous had not murdered his own brother-
"He was blinded," Blinkous replied promptly, with neither shame nor hesitation. "By mine own hand as he swung to kill me, after weeks of torturing my son. He lived, and was equally cared for and guarded the rest of his days until the timeline was reset."
"Merciful," Vendel commented.
Anger flashed across Blinkous' face. "Dictatious may have become murderous and cruel, but do you truly think me capable of fratricide, Vendel?"
"No," Vendel admitted. "Though until this moment, I would not have thought your brother capable of surviving under Gunmar's reign."
"Yes, well, we are all full of surprises these days," Blinkous muttered.
Casting one more look at the smooth stone facet that for so long had hidden Morgana Le Fay under their very noses, Vendel could only nod in agreement. "Time grants us many surprises and horrors indeed."
Douxie scrolled through his phone until he found the playlist titled Adrenaline.
"You sure about this?" he asked.
Jim rolled his eyes and his shoulders, armored up and ready to rumble. "Yes, already."
"I just feel that this is somewhat unfair," Douxie pointed out. "You with a pointy stick and me with a... well, stick."
Jim snorted. "Me with a sword and you with sorcery."
"Sorcery's actually a slightly different branch of study-" Douxie began, but was flattened by the weight of Jim's glare. "Fine. Sword versus sorcery," he allowed. "Though I really don't know how you think you're going to get through a shield with it."
Jim looked unimpressed. "Dude, it's Excalibur."
"Which means precisely nothing."
"You seriously think the Lady of the Lake made a magic sword that can't cut through magic?" Jim pointed out.
Douxie opened his mouth to object, then paused. "On one hand, I want to say that we all know what it can do, because Arthur used it for thirty or so years. On the other hand..."
Jim nodded. "On the other hand, Arthur was a jerk, a moron, and an idiot, and I really can't see Merlin doing magic practice with him to help him figure out what it could do. So it's possible he didn't even know some of what it can do."
"All right. Well, it's your funeral," Douxie allowed.
"Shyeah. You really think you can beat me?" Jim's smile was a sharp slash across his face. Confident.
Douxie grinned at him. "Sword versus staff? No. Sword versus sorcery?" He let a bright blue flame flare to life in his free hand. "Sorry, you don't stand a chance, Jim."
Jim's shoulders hunched. He seemed to draw in on himself. Then he shook it off, obviously and deliberately. "That's what Merlin said," he told Douxie. "Before he turned me into a half-troll. But now I've got control of all three forms."
"Then bring it on," Douxie said. He slipped his earbuds in and hit go on his playlist, slipping the phone into his back pocket. And as the beat and rhythm filled his ears and his mind, he let go just a little, deciding to test a theory. If Jim was up for testing whether or not Excalibur had more abilities than were currently known... Douxie was going to find out whether music made his magic easier and lighter on him.
It had to be for a reason that connecting with his staff had turned it into a guitar, right?
Jim grinned ferally and launched himself.
A hasty spell circle, swept across the floor, conjured up a shield that the Trollhunter shouldn't be able to cleave. And indeed he couldn't.
Douxie returned Jim's toothy grin and, with his left hand, gathered a pulse of power, dropping the shield in favor of sending Jim flying.
He landed on his feet, skidding several feet back on the floor of the arena before bounding back. Spinning, Jim gathered momentum and launched-
What the blazes? Grabbing for a pair of shields, Douxie barely managed to deflect both of the double-curved blades, which went flying back to Jim's hands like they were boomerangs.
Jim caught them neatly in each hand, Excalibur sheathed on his back now, and blinked. "Wait, I shouldn't have these."
"Why not?"
"They came from the Birthstone," Jim said, still blinking wide-eyed at the weapons in his hands. He looked up at Douxie. "Toby has it. I shouldn't have these!"
"Time has memories, and you have the Time Stone," Douxie pointed out. "Maybe it remembered you should have these."
Jim's toothy grin suddenly returned. "I'm down with that." And without warning he threw them at Douxie again.
Who laughed and reached out his hands, trying to grasp the blades telekinetically.
It was like trying to grab mist.
"Douxie!" Archie cried.
Just in time, he threw up a pair of mini shields and deflected the blades again, then managed to shove at them, embedding the glaives in opposite walls of the arena. "I can't take them from you," he reported. "They're immune to magic's grasp." Probably because they were part of Jim's armor and therefore, like Excalibur, bonded to Jim.
"Huh." The blades vanished from the wall in a wisp of blue smoke and reappeared in Jim's hands.
"What other tricks have you got up your sleeve?" Douxie asked.
"You'll have to wait and see," Jim said, grinning.
Douxie crossed his arms and gave his brother his best unimpressed look.
"Fine." Jim huffed. "I got a shield from the Killstone, and a helmet that protected me from Gunmar's Decimaar Blade from the Eye of Gunmar."
"I highly approve of both of these additions," Archie said, licking the back of a paw and then using it to wash behind his ear. "From what little I've seen, your fighting style is almost entirely offensive. You could use some more defensive moves."
"Thank you, Archie," Jim said dryly. "Oh! And I put Angor Rot's eye in the amulet, so if that carries over too... I might be immune to his magic."
"Well, that'll be handy for when we go free him," Douxie said. "Also." He raised his hands. "You might want to duck." Imbued with his power, everything that wasn't nailed down raised in the air and flung itself at Jim.
"Oh, you-" Jim bit back what was clearly a curse word, dodging an easy chair and batting away gems, writing utensils, and the contents of his backpack. "This is cheating, Douxie!"
Douxie chuckled, not letting his power ebb for an instant. "Archie's right. You need a bit more work on defense from multiple angles."
"Fuck you," Jim called out, spinning and-
Fuzzbuckets! Douxie barely dodged the blade that was coming his way, heart pounding in his ears as he dropped to the ground.
"It'll take more than that to get him to lose concentration on his levitation," Archie advised Jim.
"Arch!" Douxie gasped at the betrayal. "Whose side are you on?"
"I'm on the side of the greatest entertainment and whatever helps both of you stay alive longer," Archie replied serenely.
"I will chuck you at him, see if I don't," Douxie swore.
"Oh, please. As if you could."
"Wait, what?"
"Levitation doesn't work well on living things. Well, animate things, anyway," Douxie told him, dodging and spinning as Jim's blade acted like a particularly evil sentient weapon, circling him and looking for any opening. "I could throw a tree at you-but throwing a cow at you would be a lot more difficult!" he yelped as the blade came within a hair's breadth of giving him a haircut. "It has to do with the level of innate magic increasing in different types of living beings."
"Which in turn is related to why he can't affect your glaives," Archie concurred. "You're favoring your right side, Jim."
"Go suck a lemon," Jim replied. But he shifted his stance in accordance with Archie's warning.
"Could you telekinetically control this thing before?" Douxie asked.
"What? No, I'm not-" Jim stopped and stared at his weapon, as if he had not realized what he was doing with it. "Holy shit. Shit!" he cried, crumpling and rolling as he was knocked in the stomach by a ping-pong table. He ended up balancing himself with one hand on the floor, staring at the weapon that had fallen to the ground even as he had.
"I wonder if you could do that with Excalibur," Archie said thoughtfully. "Douxie can certainly control larger things, as you've seen." He indicated his familiar with a paw.
"Yeah, but that took time. And not everything's suited to it," Douxie said, holding his storm of weapons still. Music pounding in his ears, he realized he didn't feel a drain at all. Not even a little one. Which was... interesting.
Music was emotion was magic. He was a musician, and had been for... almost as long as he'd been a mage, actually. What was nine years' difference against nine hundred plus?
Either that, or it was adrenaline-linked, and as soon as he put everything down, turned off the music, and let his heart rate return to normal, then he'd feel it. Because outside of fiction, he'd never even heard of music-based magery. And he'd heard, and seen, rather a lot. Plus music had always been there - it wasn't like electricity, which had been a fairly recent innovation. So it was really unlikely he was on the cusp of something new.
Shunting those thoughts aside, he focused on Jim. "Call the weapon back to yourself," he told him. "Ah! Not to reappear in your hand," he said, seeing Jim's fingers twitch. "Call it across the space, not between it."
Jim wrinkled his brow and stretched his hand out. He was clearly trying. But the blade remained still on the ground for long minutes. Finally he gave a sigh and shook his head. "I can't."
"Hmm. Interesting." Archie looked at Douxie.
"So it's something that happens in the flow of battle, then?" Douxie speculated. "That would make sense, for him."
"Well, that's useless," Jim groused as Douxie let his arsenal fly back to their original positions.
"Not useless. Just instinctive." Douxie grinned. "Harder to train, I'll admit. But can you imagine taking on Gumm-Gumms with a pair of flying weapons in addition to the sword in your hand?"
Jim's gaze went distant. "Ohh yeah," he said covetously.
Douxie exchanged a smirk with his familiar.
Author's Notes: Music that is helpful to me for trying to write battle/training scenes: Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax", Bon Jovi's "It's My Life", and Divide & Kreate's mashup of "Just Dance" by Lady Gaga and "Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This" by The Eurythmics. Douxie's line about Zoe doing as she will do is borrowed from the musical Cats. Zoe calling Krel "blue boy" refers to Eli_Eli_El's superlative story Tales of Arcadia: Heirs to the Arcana over on AO3.
