"Alors sempre avanti!" - Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky
At 10:43 A.M., Hope Fearnley instated her plan to extract Marie. Head down, she marched briskly along a footpath some twenty years since last repair, and at the first sight of a building number she began, in rhythm with her pace, to conduct a series of mental calculations estimating her distance from the address where she was being kept. This was real, the equations told her. A woman who lived by rule of peace, she was minutes from shirtfronting the Attendants to the Deep Light.
She put her hands in two among her innumerable pockets. Other items in Hope Fearnley's pockets included: a cellular telephone whose ringtone had been The Presets' My People ever since she first heard it, which she recorded by holding it to the television while its music video aired; an empty chip packet she had found lying on the road two days ago and had meant to discard at the first sight of a bin but had since forgotten, and just here as she passed one now she finally did; a grief seed sitting comfortably at 2.8 on the Kaeder index; twenty Australian dollars and fifty-five cents in cash, inexplicably accompanied by one Malaysian ringgit; three charms which supposedly brought a life of prosperity to their owner, only one of which worked (and even then barely) but she wasn't intent on throwing them away to find out which; a guitar plectrum, notable in the fact that she didn't play a musical instrument; 1.13 mL of pocket lint, total; the key to her apartment; the spare keys to two other apartments she was to help clear out if their owners died; a spare key to the Cahill-Madigans' house; a spare key to the Cahill-Madigans' shed; a key whose function she had forgotten; and a key with no mechanical function whatsoever, but which aesthetically balanced the others.
She fumbled around for the grief seed, felt its contours, and held her ring-bearing finger gently against it.
The halfheartedly-industrialised outskirts of Sydney clung to the city like a scab around a growth, encroaching on the far reaches of the basin until it sputtered, died, left room for at least some illusory semblance of whatever, some one hundred years since federation, existed in the public eye as "unsickened" country. One might call it tumorous, if it hadn't so hideously apoptosised.
Even in the depths of what the Sydney area might so laughably call "winter", the stench of sun-beaten metal was inescapable. The light of a clear day was exclaimed without relent by a chorus of corrugated iron walls and dust-kissed windows at every possible angle. Prolonged exposure to this sensorium could be withstood only by people who directed industrial rock music videos.
Worse still, a select few had the misfortune of locking themselves in a warehouse with a very angry - and a very hungry - Marie-Clair Eleasha Crawford.
"So," she called aimlessly to the three low-ranking Attendants given the disposables' task of keeping an eye on her, "I've had some time to think while I've been sitting here, and I'm starting to worry I haven't made my intentions clear to your boss yet."
All three were very specifically instructed not to gratify her with any sort of response.
"Anyway, here's what's gonna happen. Some time in... let's say the next twelve hours or so, one of you is going to die. I haven't figured out which, and between you all and me, I'm not even sure I'd tell you if I had. So, to reiterate, that's twelve hours for each of you to go off, phone loved ones, all this, all that, and then one of you's gonna be in the ground and we'll see where we go from there. Sound good?"
One of the three, the type of girl with a face that only ever smiled when someone else told her to, the type of girl with a barely-veiled contempt which some ten or fifteen years from now would belong to a BS in Nursing only achieved for power over the vulnerable and a Facebook wall polluted with image macros whose contents would condemn her in a child abuse case, approached a pallet rack where Marie could make out a soft glow.
So that's where they were keeping her. A good fifteen metres from her body. Made sense, she supposed. They probably thought she was manageable at this distance.
The girl approaching her gem began to double over and gag. Marie smiled at her. "Tell you what, actually. If you're so generously volunteering, let's split your odds 60-20-20."
"What is...?"
"Oh, did someone think I'd have to have my hands free to kill them? That's kind of cute, actually."
"You-"
"Go on, grab yourself a grief seed. I think I hit you hard enough that you might need one."
Her assailant-to-be tried to glare daggers into her, but a sudden sluggish aura bore down on her like three atmospheric pressures.
"Lethargy. That's the first symptom, right?"
"Actually, um!" One of the other two saluted. "That would be mania."
"Right! Mania, lethargy, uh..."
"Low mood."
Right. Low mood, psychosis, cataplexy, braindeath. That's the order, right?"
"Correct!"
"Cheers, uh..."
"James."
"James... James James James. We met last December, right? Student of Deckard's?"
"That was you?!"
"Hey, I could ask the same. What are you doing rubbing shoulders with these clowns?"
"They've... saved my life, Crawford."
"Yeah, then they locked you in a room with me. Guess they're not as fond of ya as you might've thought!"
Claudia James took a step back. The room fell quiet.
"Mama likes letting pork cutlets broil," the third Attendant said at last.
Marie double-took at her. "What? Bloody good for her, I guess."
"No, no, I mean that's the mnem... actually, never mind."
"Wasn't planning on it."
The young, sunless hours clung to world-weary Tempelhof like a newborn being introduced to her grandfather. Somewhere the clouds were contoured by a mass of city lights on their last legs. The orange of Berlin seemed almost to neutralize altitude, or failing that catching Heaven in Earth's maw of a thousand needle-like teeth.
Someone opened Katarine's eyes. Someone hefted her body from a place of sleep, opened her cellular telephone, regarded the text it displayed reflected camera-obscura upon her retinas.
WAKE UP
She walked to the window, not someone by her legs, she herself, and surveyed the street below.
She didn't recognize the figure looking back at her. Not immediately, at any rate. She hadn't seen Alex outside of her labyrinth before.
"Katarine Garde."
"I presume I'm not owed the privacy of my own motor functions, then?"
"It was this or throw pebbles at your window like a wayward Casanova. Imagery I'd shudder to evoke, since I actually do not like you."
"And where's Kahnwald? You couldn't go waking her instead?"
"It's true that I have my favorites. But she's preoccupied. And the question is never 'where' with her."
"Of course."
"I'm confronting the oracle. For the last time, no less. I need your dumb muscle in case she puts up a fight."
Katarine had heard of the oracle before, certainly, but had no idea who she was. She considered it one of the Attendants' most deeply coveted secrets. The actual truth was that pure happenstance had conspired to never quite have her in the room at any particular time two or more other parties alluded to her. It was, perhaps, to the benefit of a silent little enjoyment deep within her that she didn't know this, that she would have the honor of attending the ultimate coveted tradition that only existed within her imagination.
"I'll be right down."
"You're at the window, aren't you? Come down now."
Audrey loitered viciously, if such a thing could be imagined, twice-across the intersection from the back end of the warehouse. She nodded curtly to Hope as she passed, then Danika and Thalia in turn.
"You still think this is the way to go?"
Hope bit at the inside of her cheek. "Why, having second thoughts?"
"I just think this whole idea sounds a bit... you know."
"Yeah. I s'pose I do. Still! With Thalia here-"
She hugged Thalia shockingly tight, with one arm around the waist (which was about as high as she could reach).
"-we're gonna be in and out without a scratch to show for it."
"Alright... well, as long as you don't get too confident."
Hope glanced up and down the intersection and scratched her chin. "Nah, I'll level with ya. I'm shitscared. Y'know, we've all seen before-after photos of grief warfare, and... well."
"But I'm here," Thalia tried.
"Yeah, yeah, Taz, and I'm sure you'll do perfect. That don't stop me from being a little frightened, is all."
Cautiously Claudia approached Marie. "You're not... actually going to kill us, are you?"
"Freakin'... I don't know."
"What do you mean you don't know? How can you not know?"
Marie had, by her own account, been boring. Not because she had spent her near-entire existence deathly afraid of the prospect of her having a personality (though that was very loudly the case), but because there was little in which she found enjoyment. She was ill of humour; she was the type to learn that sarcasm was the lowest form of wit, and then take to deep drilling for whatever reserves of it she could find. And yet, come exposure to sarcasm as a national pastime, she would outright abstain in a side-eyed staving off of the cultural cringe. She never told jokes of an anecdotal or observational nature, because she didn't have any. And much as she was dissatisfied with comedy she found no catharsis in its tragic sister, because similarly she had nothing to feel catharsis about. And though her poring over tomes of or above a particular girth to flaunt some faux-intellectualism over her peers (whom it needs not saying she always despised, all through primary and secondary education, before a qualtagh encounter with Claudia herself) remained constant not from since she was young enough to read but certainly young enough to rebel in some ineffective way, the very satirical throughline which in a century led from Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith et al. never struck her fancy (even though it had garnered the exact reputation she sought!), possibly because on some subconscious level she realised her sociopolitical stratum was almost exclusively the object of any good satire, and if she lost that all comedy had to offer her was criticising entire ethnicities. This always elicited a sort of grimacing hand-wring from her, even back when she didn't completely disagree with it, and the conservative imagination was limited enough before having to pretend Chris Lilley was funny anyway.
Music generally bored her, excepting the nascent brostep, which she was actually kind of angry she enjoyed. She never had an eye for the visual arts. She excelled in sport, but detested being rule-bound. In this post-human chapter of her life, she'd more desperately looked for enjoyment in physical intimacy, recreational narcotics, grassroots political activism under Fearnley's tutelage, the culinary arts, and the (she presumed) infallibly enjoyable act of messing with the most gullible minds she could find on anime message boards. None caught her fancy.
And so it came to be, in recent months, that she would discover she got her kicks from violence of the highest octane. It was, after a history of psycho-abusive self-harm, maybe not wholly unfamiliar to her, but it came with a certain spin that made her feel just absolutely fucking electric. It was painless, for one thing. Or at least, her own ganglia raised no objections except that she maybe clenched her teeth, God help whoever the prick she was having at was. And if she felt so inclined, she could easily palm it off on the coattails of any one of a dozen remotely in buzzwords. It was sustainable, par example, because the difference between intra- and inter-personal violence is that one eventually runs out of self to harm.
"Look at me, J. I'm tied up in a warehouse with the three stooges training weapons on my soul gem, your bosses are a manic, self-obsessed mutant who would slit my throat without a second thought and her bffsie's gestapo-sona with a revenge wish who domino-effected my dad into disowning me, I broke up with my girlfriend a couple days ago, my own chemist gassed me, and if that doesn't tilt your odds enough word's starting to get around about how I treat witches, and here you all are threatening me much more than one of those would. What do you think?"
A grief seed, already pulsating black, hit the concrete beside them like a dart.
Marie scowled at a fresh-cut hole in the roof through which it had fallen. "Oh, for... I'm in the middle of talki
Revolution 1.
How do you bring life to that which does not live?
Allow me to demonstrate.
Allow me
to demonstrate.
When I was six years old, I saw a zoetrope for the first time.
I was scared.
If you look in the slits, see, the horse moves. Yes?
I was scared.
If you look through the top, you can tell there is no horse in motion. There is only a sequence of still images devoid of life.
to demonstrate.
Imagine you have a choice: you may see the world for all it is, all in one, and it becomes apparent how lifeless and unfeeling the cosmos truly is.
Or you may confine yourself to observing the world through a narrow slit, and observe the illusion of living.
When I was six years old, I saw a zoetrope for the first time.
I could choose to observe the all-horror of the eternal cycle, or I could entertain its folly as a player within it.
I was scared.
Revolution 2.
How do you bring life to that which does not live?
Allow me to demonstrate.
Allow me
to demonstrate.
When I was six years old, I saw a zoetrope for the first time.
"Hello?"
Don't interrupt.
"Excuse me."
W
Wait
Wait how are you doing that
I can understand you how are you doing that
"And I can understand you! Isn't this great?"
The zoetrope slows a pace. Explain yourself.
"My name's Theo- err, it's Thalia. It used to be Theoris, when I was a witch like you."
I'm
A witch...?
"I'm sorry. I'm really sorry, this must be a lot to take in after you've just been born."
I'm a witch.
Why do I know what that is?
Why do I hate what that is?
"I can help you. I can. But I can't unless you let me by doing something for me first."
wh atAR Ey ou
no nonon ononon ono
"Please, please, just... relax. I-"
I / / n o t / b e / / t o / / y o u
"But isn't it good? Isn't this nice, being understood? Nobody else has ever taken me as being as eloquent as I must seem to you."
I don't want to be understood.
I'm horrible.
This isn't right,
I don't know what it is,
but it isn't right.
"Please... all I ask is that you help me, and I can help you."
I'm...
...beyond helping.
...too terrible to be worthy of help.
...better off dead.
I'm better off dead.
I'd rather die than accept help.
"That works just fine in my book. Deal?"
...
A spine-tingling lucidity hit Lara like a ship on high seas. Her face tensed. It seemed unnatural for a labyrinth to feel so, well, natural.
A hundred Marvins and Edgingtons stampeded around her. With newfound clarity, they changed course. Lara was caught in their tide which, unless her telepathic senses deceived her, threatened to drag her some way perpendicular to Marie's location.
She waited for the herd to subside. It did not.
Having shown a generous most-of-a-second's patience, she accepted that she'd not have the privilege of taking Marie on at full power. The familiars were relieved of no such honour, a path clearing in their ranks by way of random sawblade-induced cephalectomy. She vaulted over the thick paper torso of one steed which had strayed from its file, kicked the driver off the next, and drove Nedjem's blade through a third and final, ripping it clean in half.
She glanced around. She was out, then. That worked just fine enough for her: let Marie see her at 99%, then.
She plucked the soul gem from her tiara and looked it over. A healthy tincture, but still with remnants of the curse which had overtaken her yesterday: those would leave in their own time, but given their profundity, Deep Light only knew when that would be. Come to mention it, she was looking more pallid than was characteristic. Typically a sign of poor oxygenation; had she breathed at all in the past hour?
What was yesterday, again? Lara struggled to recall its events, save for Marie identifying her as suffering a mood disorder - and she may as well have been right, it wasn't like she could claim it didn't run in the family - but very little else beyond that.
Well, then she and Marie...?
No. That part must have been a dream.
"Lara Macquarie, right?"
She forced her gem back into her tiara and turned to meet...
"Woodward. I know who you are. What I'm wondering is why you're out of costume in a labyrinth. Are you stupid?"
"Well, I was hoping to avoid a confron-"
A flying sawblade severed the hair hanging on Danika's shoulder.
"Try avoiding those instead, unless you want to be a bleeding heart beyond just metaphorically. What's a pacifist doing extracting Marie? I thought you'd want someone tough enough to restrain her."
"I'm not... I'm not here to save her. I'm just here to stop you getting to her first."
"Oh, okay!" Lara smirked, shrugged, and darted off.
If we shadows have offended...
'Aggression' was the first word ever to spring to mind of that which others have only pretended at, the armour-afterbirthed tulpa, the Boltzmann brainchild. To exist is to do battle. Black coat, diamond-studded shoulders. She does battle to exist. Lavender scarf coiled around her neck like the threat of cessation. A sill-hidden axe keeps witches at bay, so the superstition goes. An axe in Danika's grasp similarly drives back any evil spirit that knows what's good for her.
Lara glanced over her shoulder to find Danika actually riding one of those ridiculous twelve-frame beasts toward her.
She cast another saw clean through this steed. Danika leapt free at the last possible moment, two-handing an axe across a Lara's-skull-ward trajectory. As she brought it down, Lara's left arm moved too quickly to follow. Caught the handle. Held Danika aloft by it.
"You're going to have to be a bit quicker than that if you want-"
Danika was a bit quicker than that. She let the axe go and sprung off one heel the moment she hit the ground, now with another axe in each hand, directly towards Lara's midsection. Lara barely had time to block each with two more saws of her own. Danika hesitated to push any further.
"Sorry, are you not feeling well? I thought you were supposed to be a lot stronger than I am."
"Fine. You want a lot stronger? Give this a spin."
The most interesting thing about the public parks of Berlin before the sun rose was that it as impossible to distinguish who was up unreasonably early and who was up unreasonably late. It was hardly 4:30 A.M. and already Alex had led Katerine past a group of suit-and-tied, briefcase-carrying gentlemen who staggered and rambled like drunk and overexerted ravers, a dog-walker giving shifty looks to anyone who appeared as if they might ask why she was walking her dog at this hour, and not one but two groups of people tossing frisbees amongst themselves.
"So, of all the meeting places we could gun for, why not something more covert than a public park?" Katerine asked. She felt stupid for asking, but she felt stupid for asking most things, so on balance it suited her fine.
"There are... cicatrices in reality, points of destructive instability, in places that, historically, have been wellsprings of immense suffering."
"And that's how the oracle sees the future?"
"She's, shall we say, gifted with the fortitude to withstand the fissure."
"So what happened in Berlin, then?"
Alex bounced a harmless dart of her gaze off of Katerine, turned back, and then took again, properly, bore into her. She cast a stupefied hand to nothing in particular, just a suggestion of calling to mind Berlin's skyline.
"Oh, really? Maybe I take for granted how horrible the last century has been for Berlin."
"Horrible? Consider for a moment surviving a decade of the police knocking people's doors down to round them up and execute them in the millions, so that you might live long enough to see the world's superpowers flattening the capital with guns and bombs, and carving up your country with new borders to starve you of resources for the next forty years."
"...That's terrifying."
"Yes. And that which terrifies can be put to good use."
The trees allowed passage of dawnlight sufficient only to capture the briefest segment of a line drawn through dead tissue some two, three meters above the ground. Beneath it was a girl of about sixteen on a park bench. In a hand she clutched a crystal ball because of course she did. This was just for show, but she understood if other people recognised what she was doing, or at least recognised what she pretended to do, then this would put them at ease. Trust was something she had difficulty effecting in other people, or at least believed she did, because just as in almost any other longevous specimen of her ilk, she had hurt and/or killed and/or neglected to protect girls of a fresher brood, time and again. She was uniquely attuned to the holes in reality people left. Guilt wore on her until it became what she was made of, like a fossil being formed by stone with only the impression of something existing there beforehand. She made no effort to conceal this around Alex, or indeed to pretend the crystal ball did anything.
"She's right, you know. This park used to be an opera house favored by the Nazis. The twentieth century's most gruesome massacres were dreamed up right where I'm sitting." A measured pause. She inclined her head in a rude politeness. "Alex. I foresee that you are here to kill me at last."
"It's precisely because of foreknowledge like that, that I must. Lest it fall into the wrong hands, you understand."
The oracle shook her head. "I don't want to die. You do know that, don't you? I don't. And you don't either. But you're here to ask a question whose answer will lead you to do terrible things to us both."
"I have to know. If you can see the future, you can tell I have to."
"I can't see the future."
"But the rift-"
"...Has made me very good at statistics, yes. Better even than the Incubator. But I can't see the future. So I ask you to prove me wrong."
Alex waved her to a back foot. "I need a stronger augmentation for my body. I need the strongest. You know what it is, don't you? What is it?"
The oracle sighed. "How about a riddle, then?"
"No."
"One more riddle, for old times' sake."
"I am your empress, and you will do as I say."
"Of course. Of course. I obey my empress, but my empress obeys the future. If you blew a tire on an unpaved road, you'd surely not blame the road sign which warned you of it...?"
Alex shared a glance with Katerine.
"Alright, then. One who has it doesn't want it. One who doesn't have it wants it. One who doesn't want it doesn't want to give it away, and one who does want it doesn't want to use it. What is 'it'?"
"Some bullshit, I'm sure."
"You're close!"
What could vaguely be called the overall structure of the labyrinth resembled, to Whitman's unreliably biochemical sensorium, a series of chambers separated by bright, strobing walls and dull veils with a texture of soft plastic. Movement from one chamber to another felt without any topological consistency from one to the other. In fact, it gave an impression more akin to being a scene edited around different regions of a motion picture's timeline.
This segment's walls roared by at unthinkable speeds, its extensive mural flickering as it went to give the impression of a red ball bouncing - a fundamental exercise in squash and stretch.
Whitman tore the thin film distinguishing spaces. And again, and again, across the labyrinth. There was a soul's stench bleeding through this reality, and she was almost upon it.
Once more, and the false celluloid hymen between this chamber and her destination gave.
"Crawford."
Marie had untied herself what was probably some time ago, and now sat one leg over the other in the chair, amusing herself by weaving torn strands of the rope which had bound her into various suggestions of shapes both yonic and phallic. In some strands a third shape emerged. Whitman understood who Marie had been seeing until recently, and tried hard not to think about it.
(Whitman was mistaken; Marie was rather trying to sculpt the silhouettes of various beautiful but deadly exotic birds and failing miserably, and an unnamed external party's reproductive behaviours were far less in line with those of Whitman and Marie's phylum (Q.V. chapter entitled Blinding Cameras With the Rattle Can)).
Marie discarded a nylon mesophallus of a cassowary. "Oh, Whitman! Good to see you! I was actually hoping you'd show up before rescue did." Slowly she stood - painstakingly, this was the first time she'd done so in some days - and realised a warhammer in her right palm. "Fewer witnesses that way."
She strode toward Whitman like her weight could shatter continents. In a fluid continuation of her step came down the hammer, squarely into Whitman's sternum.
It bounced off harmlessly.
"You know, Socrates liked to precede his points by calling on priority of definition. When I say 'fewer witnesses', what I mean-"
The room catches wind of a boom-bap's beginning, a tune taps a rhythm anew that the women assume - with Whitman bringing a hit, fit for a king and it whiffed, quickly: a swing and a miss off by a finger's width, wrist by her ravin who this fist, it still hadn't disturbed (but it maddened), her virginal ganglia's hurt hadn't happened. Whitman turned and had at 'em astern of this sap's arrogant, murderous haphazardness - head to head openly, the heat undead so Marie pleads and hedges hopelessly and keeps her fed with sophistr-
Whitman's gauntlet imploded under a sudden change of air pressure, nearly crushing her fist, before the responsible sound struck her. Immediately Marie fell back, concentrating basic healing magic into her inner ears.
A hole, something to the tune of a 130-centimetre radius, had been riven in the material of the labyrinth's reality. Ontological dust scattered in a terrible cloud, wisps emanating from an object imposed before Whitman's eyes.
It was Hope Fearnley's fist.
"Fearnley! What a surprise. And here I was thinking you were a pacifist."
Hope swung her arm as if performing chiburi, and sigils inscribed thereupon released a sharp glow. She spat to her left without an instant of breaking Whitman's eye contact.
"Pacifism ain't inaction."
"So the rumours are true, then?"
"Well, I don't pick fights. I just end them."
Whitman struck out again, but now her rhythm bordered on nonexistent. For someone who could bring her enemies low after only having touched them, she was losing ground - and fast - to the raw presence Hope exuded. Hope's approach to Whitman's laughable attempt at hand-to-hand combat was to navigate around it, rather than back from it, as if it were some minor annoyance interrupting an unspoken staring match.
"You're a brilliant fighter, I'm sure," Hope sighed, "But you're a tad shy of eighteen years under your belt."
"Impossible. Last time, I was winning."
"Last time wasn't a fight. You just gloated about how a warning didn't kill ya."
"And now?"
"Well, that's all down to how much you wanna get in my way."
Lara spat. Danika wasn't close enough to tell if it was saliva she'd spat, or blood, or some other human function as yet unknown to her.
"You're at your limit. Give up."
Lara shook her head, but there was a fraction of a second in her doing so where she was made of ice, then of metal, then of moonlight.
"If you push any further, you'll be a witch. Already you're starti-"
"Why do you care? Anything I'll ever be... would be strong enough to kick your head in."
"If you need to take five, that doesn't go against what I'm trying to do at all."
"You're stalling us for time... so you can get Marie out."
"And you need time. Time to recuperate."
"I'm keeping her... in check, you know. She's dangerous. She's dangerous... and you're not going... to take her away."
Danika readied an axe. "I was offering you a moment of peace, not a chance to tell me what you want us to do."
"I wasn't making a demand." A shiver seemed to elucidate the articulation in every one of her joints - a violent wrenching from her fugue state into the latest epoch of normalcy. "I did say us, not me. Whitman's en route to Crawford, and I'm diverting you from protecting her. Not the other way around."
"I don't know what on root means."
Lara unsheathed Nedjem's blade. "What about en garde? Know that one?"
"I don't want to fight you if I don't have to."
"You're not going to fight me. You're going to die."
There was an instant separating the moment of their conversation, and another where they were upon each other, the hunting knife carving up Danika's jugular and the axe splitting Lara's sternum. Adrenally-impaired chronoception struck them both as timeblindness. Now events only occurred in order, with no regard to
"Aren't you going to fight back?!" Whitman roared.
Hope navigated around each individual blow Whitman threw at a dangerous proximity. Both of them knew she was tantalising her, but nothing in Whitman's power seemed able to overcome that. When she accelerated, so did Hope. When she tried to grab her, Hope would bring herself closer than arm's reach, then slip away at the last second so that Whitman hit herself. Whenever she could have sworn she had her cornered, the topological laws of the labyrinth would prove her wrong.
"Ha! Marie, d'you hear that? Your friend's calling what she's doing 'fighting'."
"Yeah, of course I heard. If you want to step down, I can call what I do 'grievously mutilating'."
"You know, Marie..." Hope waved a hand. A wall of azure light bisected the room before Whitman, whose fist glanced harmlessly off. "Sometimes I wonder about you."
"Wow. Since when could you do that?"
Whitman threw another punch, this time managing a dent about six or seven millimetres deep.
"Actually, Whitto, truth be told, I wonder about you too." Hope turned her attention back to Whitman, and summoned her railgun.
"Hmph."
"You're gonna be here a while, so you might as well ask what I wonder about you."
"Fine. What do you wonder about me?"
"Well, the thing is that I know you know my reputation. And I know you're virtually indestructible, and you just need to make contact with someone once to beat them, and you still can't bring me down. So that's got me to wondering, you see."
Whitman's fist strained against the barrier, her gauntlet barely cracking its surface without sacrificing its own integrity. Then, with one final push...
"What must you think I am if you can't even hit me?"
...stumbled through where the barrier should have been, her wrist caught in the magnetic grip of Hope's railgun, Hope herself now keeling askance to an angle Whitman had just a moment to wonder if only the unique temporo-spatial signature of the labyrinth would allow, Whitman sent with her own momentum overhead, and landing on her neck at a speed which would have decapitated just about any other bilaterian weighing over five kilograms.
"You scared yet, or what?"
"You should have said 'howzat'," Marie grumbled.
"Call it a rainy day one-liner. But here's what's what, Marie. Y'see, Majjos - 'specially tough nuts like Inspector Rex over here - what they do is they bend reality to their own beliefs. I mean, that's how magic works."
"Of course."
"So if they're stubborn enough, and if you're sneaky enough with the tiniest bit of good ol' fashioned illusion magic - you know, even the basic stuff you do in front of humans all the time without realising it - you only have to fight half the fight. Their willpower makes the rest of it real. Well, real enough. So I can-"
"She's back up."
Hope double took. "Right on. Let's give 'er another spin."
how much time passed between them.
Lara grinned. "Nice aim. So are we going to wait around and see which one of us bleeds herself unconscious first?"
"I don't want to die," Danika seethed, "and I don't want to kill you."
"Why not?"
An honest answer in another timeless fugue. Circumstances reconfigured. Each knew she only had seconds to kill the other. The meaning of each second changed; Danika's prior nonexistence had made her a daughter of fear, and with the threat of the void rearing its head again, a new strength overtook her.
Alex rolled her eyes. "I've got it. It's meant to be the answer to my question, isn't it?"
"It is the answer to your question. And I can very much promise you that you'll not want to touch it. You'll not even want to know it, because knowing it means that there is a greater power available to those less afraid, or as it is, more terribly, terribly stupid than you."
"Try me."
"You understand, of course, that the mechanisms of the universe run not so much on what magic does as what it implies, yes?"
"Oh, for heaven's sake."
"Now, now, you're familiar with how magic manipulates virtual particles in a way physical law does not? You know the symbology of the tattoos engraved on your body? Do you understand how belief and reality run a two-way street?"
"Do you think they crown any old fool empress?"
"Do you want me to answer that question?"
"How dare you?" spat Katarine, who was certain the remark was an insult even if she couldn't tell how, exactly. Alex gestured for her silence.
"Tell me, soothsayer. Do you know of a sigil I should allow onto my dermal tapestry?"
"No, no, nothing so semiotic. In fact, your tattoos are perfect. It's just the ink that's holding them back."
"Are you saying I should have drained more potent grief seeds for their darkness?"
The oracle shook her head. "This might just be your downfall, Alex. You are too one-dimensional."
"And you're afraid of answering my question!"
"Then, then let me put it to you like this. You want power. You want to strike fear into the hearts of your enemies, and you wish a miserable unmaking on those who defy you."
"And ink made from the physical form of misery will not suffice to represent that?!"
"Well... no. No it will not."
"Do not think you can present me with snake oil, oracle."
"You need something older than grief, older than despair. You need the oldest signifier - implication, if you will - of fear."
"And that is?"
"Pain. What you need, Alex, is pain. And you are at exactly the right juncture of history to re-ink yourself with it. It will have to be thinned, of course - it's not in the ballpark of the viscosity a needle fine enough to penetrate skin can transport - or better yet, infused into, say, bandages or towels you apply to every already-marked part of your body."
"How do I drain pain from a witch?"
"You don't. You don't get it from other people, either. It has to be your own. Pain doesn't come from the soul, you see, it belongs to the central nervous system alone. That's why magical girls can cut it off. So the only pain you can take upon yourself is that from your own body." Despite herself, the oracle began to grin. "Now say, for a moment, say there was a substance which could effect in the bearer an experience so singularly excruciating, so unnaturally disturbing to the senses, unlike anything which presents itself in nature. Perhaps you may have heard of the bullet ant, an insect with notoriety for the sheer poneratoxic agony its bite causes. This substance is not so merciful.
"Besides, there are Mawé coming-of-age rituals which involve dancing in gloves filled with deliberately angered bullet ants. The pain is practically debilitating, but it is not unbearable. No. There is one substance which inspires such agony, that no retreat into your own soul gem, no matter how deep, can liberate you from it.
"See, we magical girls, we become complacent. We develop instincts to shrug off something which comes our way. We take a bullet to the heart, we move on. We get extremities severed, and not always in singular, clean blows, we move on. We suffer, perhaps months, perhaps years, of domestic familial abuse, we can tune even that out. But the Americans, not even planning to achieve this, simply managing to do so in their infinite cruelty, discovered a substance which disfigures and incapacitates so profoundly that its survivors are, perhaps, disheartened, mortified... whenever it leaves them still breathing. Something essentially costing nothing to mass-produce, save for the lives-"
"You have talked in circles long enough! Cease this and tell me what you'd have me mark myself with."
"It's simple. You'll have to re-ink your body with napalm."
Alex did flinch, just once. Not even sycophantic Katarine could attest to the contrary.
"And I presume I will have to burn it off?"
"You know, it only takes burns to about one-third of a human's surface-level skin to kill them in what is famously one of the most painful ways you can kill a human. You'll be burning off... a bit deeper, and a bit more than that. I hope you're afraid of that, Alex."
"Why?"
"Because the alternative is that I live under an idiot."
Alex chewed on those words for a duration, then turned and left. Once Katarine realized she wasn't rather going to pace about, and was at a distance one could only describe as departed, she jogged to keep up.
"So, that's all?"
"I don't see a need to have the last word with her."
"You think she was telling the truth?"
"I see the logic, and it fits with everything I know."
"But-"
"And that's a lot more than you do."
"Well, that goes without saying." Katarine tried to bow her deference, but it was difficult while walking.
"Let me buy you breakfast on the way home."
"That's... awfully charitable of y- you."
Alex scoffed at Katarine's sudden fumbling of du, and a last-second Sie. "Am I speaking too casually for your tastes?"
"I think I'm just not prepared for your undeserved kindness."
"Think nothing of it. I shudder to imagine how dull an end it would be to have a last meal in the company of myself."
Whitman went down again. Her wounded ego only made her more predictable, and her invincibility, hubristic.
Well, not true invincibility, Hope knew. She could be harmed by any means precisely once before developing an immunity. That gave every type of weapon exactly one chance to land a hit on her before obsolescence. For most, having one chance tended to prove more harrowing than none at all.
Hope Fearnley was not most.
She'd had time to think since the standoff in Maleen's labyrinth, and concluded that the dreams of a witch were so devoid of any straightforward reality, and so unique from witch to witch, that weaponising the environment should be an approach utterly alien to Whitman's ever-growing list of immunities.
Hope reached into the squash-stretch flicker of the wall and procured the ball at the height of its bounce. Cleanly it dug into the skin of her palm. If she weren't looking, she wouldn't have even noticed her own bleeding. She tilted her wrist. The ball was two-dimensional. Even with her generally enhanced strength (and, she tested, even with a quarter-second of invulnerability), no tissue could resist having its intermolecular forces disrupted by an object narrower than an infinitely sharp blade.
All of this transpired in the space of the first four breaths Whitman took after shrugging off a portion of labyrinth-ceiling brought down upon her. She straightened her glasses just in time to meet Hope's eye. Hope was bouncing... something... off the floor, but its appearance was incompatible with her preconceived notions of space.
"You know, I was content to just bop you with this thing." Hope snatched the mathematically perfect circle out of their air, very carefully pinched between two digits. Held it out so that Whitman could clearly see how it had lacerated her hand. "But if I play my cards right, I reckon I could kill you with it, no problem."
"But you don't want to."
Marie, who had begun to feel as if she really had very little of a horse left in this race, meekly raised her hand. "I... I wouldn't mind it, myself."
Hope flipped the circle like a coin. "See, that's the thing. Me neither."
"Liar. If you wanted to kill me, you had a chance in that other labyrinth."
"I tell you the truth, actually, I've been thinking about it for years, before I ever had a name or face to put you to. But I haven't needed to kill you, and of course morally, I object to the idea. Leave Marie be, and I still won't."
Whitman weighed up her options. Swallowing her pride was Herculean at any juncture involving Crawford. But... she believed in the minimisation of death where she could do something about it, and that included the risk of her own.
"Yeah? Bonza. Atta girl."
Hope tossed the ball aside. It bounced, once, before Marie dove in and, before anyone's Broca's area could fire the synapses necessary to demand she stop herself, she struck it side-on with her hammer. The hammer split in two. The ball struck through Madeleine's right kidney, which also split in two, with a chipping of the upper pelvis at the exit wound. Madeleine felt such a complete pang of shock that she forgot to so much as fall to her knees.
"Yeah, well fuck you too, Crawford," she panted.
Hope recoiled. "Marie, what did you just...?"
"Tell your cronies to tie me up again."
Madeleine winced. Marie only crossed her arms.
"Do it. I dare you, see what happens."
Hope had broken transformation now, and removed her overshirt - black chequered, thick, with time-torn elbows. Very apparently no thing of value, and offering it as a bandage to Madeleine would prove an unprepared but no less scathing test of how much more pride she could swallow.
"You're gonna exploit her weakness like that?" Hope asked.
"Honestly, I should be thanking you for telling me what it was. Though I probably would have put two and two together myself. And even if I hadn't, I totally would have done this anyway."
Hope held the shirt out to Madeleine, who snatched it from her and bound her gash expeditiously. The running of her blood became an unsteady drip with every flexing of her diaphragm, with each drop reduced to a claymated facsimile of itself as it hit the labyrinth floor.
Marie attempted to communicate with Madeleine with a conlang she was hastily drawing up from the obscene hand gestures of the world. Madeleine stormed toward her, heedless of this one-sided attempt at conversation.
"You know, none of this would have happened if you hadn't
tried to- what?"
There came a faint zephyr's-whistle and heat shimmer - the signature of a labyrinth's dissipation as the air molecules which had somehow stumbled through to aerate the barrier were now forced back to the waking world for reintegration with their kin. The witch Zoë had drawn six living souls beneath the surface. Her dissolution released five.
Whitman's feud with Marie and Hope let up the second they were returned to the warehouse. The cacophony of steel and concrete pulled a concerted effort in the evening light to become harder for the eye to bear than even the chromakey yawn which polluted the labyrinth walls. They each caught Thalia's image at sub-instant speed, despite the radiant padparadscha baked into her skull. She appeared no less confused than they, and certainly some way more distressed.
To say that Whitman et al. followed her gaze would do no service to the fact that they suffered only the passage of three quarter-seconds since they had all been freed from the barrier - though what a protracted three quarter-seconds they had been. It would be more in keeping with the slow spontaneity of the moment to say that all four did, at one pace or another, come to rest their gaze on their fifth, who at that moment made clear that she was the least wanting for it.
On the diffuse edge of a ceiling light of senile functionality, where the human eye abhorred to focus most, they saw Danika Woodward, unmistakably sobbing, rested on her knees and one hand, while the other clutched Lara's Egyptian machete to the point of it cutting into her palm.
The volume of blood upon its surface could not all have come from her hand, though, and it was common knowledge that dead bodies won't leave labyrinths unless physically taken.
Marie approached. There were fragments of something crystallised by Danika's knees.
A neatly-cut gem. Slightly transparent, with very little diffusion.
Purple.
Macquarie.
Whitman swallowed a congealment of shock.
"You make me sick."
That was all. She made no attempt to eke another fight out of this. She made her sick. She turned and stormed off. That was all.
"I didn't- I- I wasn't- I just..." Danika choked.
Nobody was listening.
PROFESSIONAL GRIEFERS
The practice of grief warfare has a long and storied history, most of which has never been told because almost everyone who has ever participated in it has died horribly. What little of it has been recorded has, in turn, mostly been destroyed by a combination of the world's religious and spiritual authorities (who generally understood it by the half-truth that it was a misuse of the power of the human spirit to conduct great acts of evil, or however their vocabulary approximated the idea) and fellow magical girls (who generally understood it to be exactly what it was).
That which has survived is mainly contained in a handful of volumes on how to conduct it, and almost exactly as many on how to prevent it. Both are few and far between, and therefore there exists very little consensus on what grief warfare is, excepting the fundamentals.
The fundamentals are generally accepted to be:
The deployment in hostile or contested territory, or the projection into hostile or contested territory, of:
A soul gem in the process of becoming a grief seed, a grief seed in the process of hatching, a grief seed charged to force its hatching (as in the case explored in this chapter), or a grief seed which, in being deployed or projected, will be placed in an environment that would force its hatching, for the purposes of:
Impeding, disorienting, harming, or killing another party, which, while not by definition necessary to be classed as grief warfare, typically yields the end result of:
The deaths of all involved.
While the strength of a magical girl is generally noticeably in excess of that of a witch, most witches' first few hours of life are their most unpredictable: the energy expended in a witch's nascence renders her weak, and to compensate for this she will, as a general rule, become violently territorial. Thus, the second-most generally accepted strategy for surviving grief warfare is to outlive the witch rather than engaging her. First place, of course, goes to killing whoever plans to initiate it pre-emptively, but both these strategies are laughable next to the empirically now-100%-successful strategy of personally knowing Thalia.
It is due to this unpredictability that only ever one grief seed is employed in the performance of grief warfare, although one account (recalled in Maria Llovera's 1812 epic, The Heart Wages War, and attributed to an old Korean folktale of questionable historicity) speaks of two magical girls resolving a violent feud by deploying two seeds at once, and notes the unique beauty of two labyrinths coming to be in the same physical space. According to the popular Carlos translation:
"She finds herself in two palaces, two times, two worlds. Every step through the grand hall kicked up sand, and every stride through these dunes rung out with the sound of her shoe on the floorboard. There was no contradiction between the red evening sky and the cavernous jade ceiling: their hues were the same. No world had ever made her feel so small as one she was only half the eyes and ears it would take to behold."
(A/N: Hey y'all!
This was going to be a blog post but I figure very few of you actually read that so, uh.
I dropped off the face of the Earth for like seven or eight months. Let's talk about that.
The TL;DR is that PFDM was gone for a while, and now it's back. If you're just here for details on that, jump ahead to the FUTURE PLANS bit.
2023 was just kind of not PFDM's year in general, was it? The whole thing pretty much ground to a halt and I can more or less attribute that to the fact that I'd been gunning for a chapter every two weeks for TWO YEARS beforehand. Why did I do that? I don't know. The To The Stars guy doesn't even do that and he's completely mental pace-wise by all other accounts.
On top of that I took a massive six-week holiday to a whole other continent to live with my boyfriend for essentially as long as I could afford, and if that wasn't enough I was also studying a six-month course that I thought would help me find a job (it hasn't).
Bottom line is I've been burned out. And it turns out the solution to being burned out by something is to not force yourself to keep doing it? So I rode that out and now I'm back with fresh eyes. Maybe I'll reread PFDM myself sometime soon! Hell, maybe I'll even give current-me's thoughts on past-me's writing over on the blog.
FUTURE PLANS
So here's what's going to happen in PFDM from now on.
- Updates will be slower than one every two weeks from here on out, but you won't see another half-year hiatus. I'm going to be taking my time, because if you've made it as far as chapter 51, you're probably in for the long haul anyway.
- I will probably commission more artists for more key visuals for PFDM? I have big plans on this front, but this is pretty much contingent on the whole aforementioned "having a job" thing.
- Once part 3 ends, there'll probably be a big break where I line up all my ducks for the home stretch. I know this is going to disappoint some people, but trust me, I think part 3's ending is going to tide a lot of you over for quite a while.
- I'll possibly be rereading my own work over on the blog, as said above. I might delete the two part-end writeups too, and have this replace that as my foremost explanation of "what is she thinking when she writes this shit?!". Unsure though.
- I dunno, anything else? I feel weird having left you all in the dark for so long, and if you want more transparency I'm ready to give it. Do you want me to use the blog more? Start a Discord? Figure out how the hell Cohost works? Shut the fuck up more than I have already? You don't care? Tell me what you think, anything's valuable to me.
A QUESTION I'VE BEEN GETTING A LOT
There's actually one pretty frequently-arising question I've been getting a lot throughout writing this, which is "how is PFDM not more popular?" or other things to that effect. The truth is I don't know, but the fact that I have virtually no public online presence is probably a solid factor. Beyond that, there's no way to tell who's keeping up with this because they saw it in a list of recently-updated fics on this site versus because they got into it by word of mouth, so I'd say "I dunno, tell all your friends!" but maybe you ARE actually doing that and I'm none the wiser. If you want PFDM to hit a wider readership, is there something I can be doing to make that happen? Is there something you guys can be doing? You tell me. You tell me.
Anyway that's all I had to say love you byeee)