summer palace
andros
"Musa!" Aisha cried, half-leaping across the room to throw her arms around the musical fairy. "Oh! And Roxy! I'm so glad you're both here!" She whirled halfway around to hug Roxy as well, and Roxy tried not to be stiff.
"Hi, guys!" Flora was right behind her to greet the girls with hugs as well. "I've missed you both so much! How's Alfea? How are Brandon and Riven?"
"Where are Brandon and Riven?" Aisha asked as they all headed for the chairs and couches in he middle of the drawing room. "We can wait for dinner if they're gonna be late."
"Brandon couldn't make it," Roxy said. "Something about midterms and extra tutoring hours. He says 'happy birthday'."
"Riven should be here in a couple hours," Musa added. "We don't have to wait for him. He said he'd pick something up on the way."
"Okay, cool," said Aisha, standing back up. "Nabu's not coming til later, too. He has a tutoring session. Anyone want a soda or water or something?"
"I'll take water," said Roxy. Magical Dimension soda tasted weird. She couldn't quite put her finger on it. Just another thing that was different here. Aisha tossed her a bottle of water and she scrambled to catch it.
"I thought we were having a party!" Musa said laughingly. "If you drink soda at a sleepover you might as well be ten."
Aisha gave a small laugh. "Well, you know where everything else is."
Musa nodded and started towards the table with glass bottles on it across the room. "You want anything, Roxy? Flora? Aisha?"
"I'm okay," Aisha and Flora said at the same time. Roxy said, "uh, sure." She had only tasted Magic Dimension alcohol a few times before and had never really taken to it. But she was trying to have fun tonight. The whole day after meeting with Faragonda—the whole trip over with Musa—she had felt awful. Whenever she thought too hard about things it ruined the day. But she didn't want the day to be ruined, and she really didn't want to be a drag at Aisha's birthday.
Aisha, Bloom, Flora, and Musa were the only friends she had in the Magic Dimension, although sometimes she worried it was less friendship and more obligation to the girl they'd rescued. And she rarely saw Aisha, Bloom, and Flora—Aisha and Bloom were busy princessing on their respective planets, while Flora lived on Linphea now.
She reminded herself that she wasn't doing this today and let Musa put a drink in her hand. It was cold and pale green and fizzed slightly. She gingerly sniffed it while tuning back into the conversation that she'd drowned out with her thoughts.
"So Flora, how's..." Aisha paused for a second to remember. "Julian?"
"Who's Julian?" Roxy asked, and for just a second, confusion flickered in Flora's eyes, as if she was wondering the same thing.
Then she blinked. "Uh, Julian's the guy I've been seeing at home. And he's fine. He's nice."
"Oh, that's—" Aisha said pleasantly.
"It's not serious," she said quickly.
"Well, maybe you should bring him when we all hang out sometime. Go on a quadruple date," Musa suggested.
Flora laughed awkwardly. "I—no, no. It's way too casual for that. How are classes going, Roxy?"
Inwardly Roxy sighed but everyone went along with the blatant attempt to change the subject.
She debated whether or not to lie. She didn't want pity, especially since Musa was a teacher.
"They're okay. Right now I'm having some trouble in a few but the professors are being really nice."
"What about you, Musa? Have you guys set a date yet?" Flora asked.
"I still can't believe you and Riven are the first out of all of us to get engaged," Aisha remarked.
"I would've thought Sky and Bloom for sure." Musa and Riven had gotten engaged almost a year before.
"We're not thinking about dates yet. I haven't even started thinking of that," said Musa. "As for Sky and Bloom, I'm sure his mom's making him drag his feet. Bloom's practically the princess of Eraklyon already."
"And I think Stella was the first to get engaged, actually," Flora said. "Her and Prince Adon." The atmosphere grew a bit awkward.
Roxy didn't really know anything about Stella of Solaria, since Brandon was her main source of information about their friends' lives before Roxy had met them, and she didn't want to be the girl who kept asking about his ex. On the rare occasion that they met, she had always been nice. A little superficial. She had dropped out of Alfea in the other girls' last year, so she hadn't been a part of the whole Black Circle thing at all.
No one was still saying anything, and she wasn't sure what to say to express that it wasn't awkward to hear about her boyfriend's ex, so instead she took a sip of the green drink Musa had given her. It was kind of bitter and made the inside of her chest feel warm, but didn't taste as bad as the beer she'd occasionally snuck in high school, her main experience with Earth alcohol.
"This is really good," she said to Musa, even though it was just okay, trying to break the silence. "What's it called?"
"You like it?" Musa asked. "It's called Brilliant. Made with troll blood, that's why it's green."
Roxy couldn't hide her immediate, repulsed expression, while caused Musa to break out laughing.
"Musa, that's disgusting! Roxy, she's kidding, it's green 'cause it's made with Gilliflower leaves," Flora said, giving Musa a warning look. "She did the same thing to Bloom the first time she tried it."
"I can't help it!" Musa laughed. "Sorry, Roxy, sorry. Refresh your drink?"
Roxy grinned, not wanting to seem less in on the joke than she already did. "No, I'm okay, thanks. I would think anything related to a troll would smell a lot worse!" Inwardly she cringed at her very lame comment. Musa shrugged and refilled her own drink.
Aisha rolled her eyes at all of them and their silliness. "Anyway! Roxy, does Palladium still grade on a curve?"
A few hours later, the gathering was in a bit fuller swing. Nabu had arrived, and he and Aisha were trying to teach them all a complicated but entertaining Androsi card game.
There was music drifting across the room and people were laughing. Roxy felt a bit more at ease, probably helped by the fact that she'd finished the Brilliant. The game reminded her of poker, if it was played with tarot cards and magic was involved, and that made it a bit easier—she knew how to play poker, she had picked it up waiting on regulars at home. Flora was catching on quickly. Musa was not, and in fact was acting kind of strange; she kept getting distracted and snapping at people for no reason. Roxy wondered if it was because Riven still wasn't there.
Providentially, he called just a few minutes later. Musa grinned and got up to take the call, but only stepped a single pace away when she answered. Before she could say anything, Riven's voice came through the phone faintly, but still audible to Roxy and presumably the rest of the room. "Hey, babe. It looks like I'm not going to be able to make it this weekend. I'm needed at Red Fountain."
Musa frowned. "Really?"
"Yeah. Some sophomore punks did something stupid, fucked with one of the dragons. I need to—"
"You're not serious, Riven."
Roxy glanced around the rest of the table to see everyone else also meeting each other's eyes. At least she wasn't the only one who felt awkward.
"What?" Riven sounded annoyed.
"Roxy told me that Brandon was needed at Red Fountain and couldn't come to Andros." Musa had a sharp quality to her voice that Roxy had never heard before, and she cringed to hear her name brought into the conversation. She glanced away from the faces of those around her. "So why would you not get the time off? Where are you?"
"I just said." Riven also seemed to be on the brink of an all out argument. Roxy searched around the table anxiously to see if anyone would suggest slipping out of the room. But now everyone was just staring very hard at the pile of cards on the table. "I'm at Red Fountain too. They thought they wouldn't need us both, and now they do. Brandon just left for the night. I'm walking to my craft now."
"Tell Jordanna she can have you," Musa said into the phone. She looked furious.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Riven sounded furious.
"Are you not with her? Because you're not at Red Fountain. I know you're not." As the conversation escalated further, Flora gave them all a look and they tried to move to the nearby couches as discreetly as possible. Unfortunately they could still hear everything, or at least Roxy could. Aisha whispered something to Nabu and he jumped ship and left the room. But Flora and Aisha didn't go, so Roxy felt like she also had to stay and just endure the argument.
"I'm heading home. To our home, by myself. And I'm not justifying that to you. You want to call Brandon, call him. You don't trust me at all, fine." Roxy hoped that she wasn't going to have to call Brandon and be brought into this. But then again, maybe if it stopped whatever was going on here it was a good idea to call him. She pulled his number up in her phone just in case.
"Do you think I'm an idiot about her?" Musa said, nearly yelling at this point. Roxy vaguely remembered that Jordanna was the new nurse at Red Fountain. She was about their age, but blonde and bubbly; not really Riven's type at all, in her opinion.
"Damn it, Musa! I'm not going through this again!"
"Because you know I'm right!"
"Because I'm not going through this again! Because you always think the worst of me, and I have never done anything like what you—"
"Oh come on! I know you think I'm stupid, Riven—I know you think I'm really stupid, but I'm not that stupid!" Now Musa was definitely yelling into the phone.
"Why would I think you're stupid? Do you want me to ask you about that guy at the bar? Because I can ask about it if you're going to accuse me of being—" Riven matched her volume, which was kind of impressive since he was over the phone and Musa was present in real life.
"Ugh, you know—you know that isn't the same thing. You know there isn't anything there. This isn't cause I'm angry, it's because I'm right, I know what's going on!" She seemed almost hysterical.
"No, Musa, it's because you never stop with this!" Riven said loudly. "You never stop with this anymore! And you're—ugh, I'm not talking to you when you're like this."
Musa was about to respond but he hung up, the hologram disappearing with a snap. Angrily she slammed her phone down on the coffee table.
"You okay?" Aisha said.
"I'm fine!" Musa snapped, reaching for her drink. "I'm fine. He's an asshole. He's always been an asshole. I'm done with him. I don't want to talk about it anymore. I'm really done." She turned towards the couch like the reason they'd all sat there wasn't because she was having an argument with her boyfriend.
"Good," Aisha said, raising one eyebrow, not taking her words seriously.
Musa slammed her glass, which was empty, back onto the table and started to gesture animatedly with her hands. "He's such an asshole. He's always like this, and I know...I know...ugh.
"And he's being an asshole about the news too. I get that we can't do anything about the past, okay? I get it! But nothing is good anymore! Everything is broken, everything started breaking and we couldn't do anything."
Flora and Aisha gave each other looks, obviously preparing for a long ramble.
"We keep saying we had to move on, move on, just accept it and move on. But how the fuck am I supposed to move on from that? You can't ever stop thinking that maybe—that—that..." she took a deep breath and shook her head. "You know, that...you know. Everything got so awful. Everything's so awful. I don't blame Timmy, you know? Because I think about her every day. She was my best friend, how the fuck am I not supposed to do that?"
"Musa—" Aisha extended her arms to her and acted as though she were going to pull her friend down onto the couch, but Musa abruptly pushed her back, then stepped away, snatching her phone back up.
"Just leave me alone. I'm calling Riven back."
Flora, who was behind her, reached out and pulled her phone out of her hands. "You're not calling Riven. You just did that. Just calm down."
Roxy sat on the chair, watching all of this happen. She had known Musa liked to have a good time, and that drinking was usually involved. In fact, she very often saw Musa with a drink in her hand, sometimes even during the daytime. But she hadn't thought that she got, like...drunk.
"No!" Musa reached for her phone and Flora refused to relinquish it. "I need to call Riven and tell him what an asshole he is."
"He knows," Aisha said. "Trust me."
Musa remained stubborn. "I'm breaking up with him. We're not getting married. Give me my phone!"
"You're not breaking up with him," Aisha snapped, losing patience. "You're going to bed."
She seemed to seriously consider the idea for a moment, but then shook her head. "I'll go to bed after I break up with him."
"Go to bed now," Flora said, putting her hands on Musa's shoulders and pushing her that way.
"You can break up with him in the morning."
Musa was starting to cry. "He's gonna break up with me. I know he is. No one stays with me. I love him so much. My mom is gone, my dad is dead—and we don't even know about—ugh, and everyone else...everyone is gone, why should he stay around?"
"Yes, we've completely abandoned you," Flora murmured, half-pulling her out of the room. "Let's go."
"I love him so much," Musa repeated, sounding completely devastated. "But what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to stop thinking of—stop thinking of—how cold she must be?" Her voice shattered into sobs and she couldn't talk anymore.
Aisha watched them go. Then she sighed deeply.
"Is she okay?"
Aisha jumped, as though she hadn't realized Roxy was still there. She nodded, adopting a calm and unstressed expression. "Sorry you had to see that. She's never like this. She's usually..."
she shrugged uncomfortably. "But apparently she and Riven had a bad fight so, you know how it goes." She crossed back to the card table. "Do you want to keep playing when Flora gets back?" It was obvious she was trying to change the subject, but this time Roxy didn't really want to go along.
Musa's mom died when she was little, Roxy knew. She also knew that Musa's dad had died almost three years ago, that it had been kind of sudden and it had really torn her up. But...
"When she said she didn't blame Timmy, that she thought of someone every day…" Brandon had said Timmy and Musa had bad experiences with the Omega Dimension that was being destroyed; that was why he had gone to visit him. It couldn't have happened in the last couple of years, or Roxy would've known.
Aisha frowned sharply. "Let's not get into it. It's really nothing, and it's getting late."
There was something defensive in her eyes that reminded Roxy of whenever she thought about the Bad Night. That made her keep pushing despite Aisha's dismayed expression. "Musa sounded really upset."
"I told you, she and Riven got in a fight. They do it all the time. They're a disaster. They really should break up and I'd let her do it, if I didn't know she'd be mad in the morning."
"Come on, she was obviously upset about something else."
"Well, I don't think it's really our business."
"Aisha." She felt almost affronted at this point, that Aisha thought she could dismiss her questions, and apprehensive, too—she had never felt like she was on the same level as the other girls. They were older, natives to this strange place, friends with her mostly by virtue of being the ones to rescue her from the Wizards. She had never challenged any of them on anything.
Aisha hesitated for a moment, her lips slightly parted, her eyes subtly darting around, and her hands frozen still. Roxy recognized the too-familiar feeling of deciding whether or not to lie.
Then she pressed her lips together and sighed deeply. "The year before we met you one of our friends died. Our roommate. It was in the whole Valtor thing, I'm sure you've heard a little bit about it. Uh, her name was Tecna. And they never..." she gave a long pause, blinking up at the ceiling, and it took Roxy a moment to realize she was trying not to cry. When she spoke again her voice cracked just slightly. "They never found her body. And that made it harder, y'know? For everyone. Especially for, uh," she took a deep, shuddery breath. "For Timmy. They were dating. He still thinks she's alive. It was really hard on him. Fucking Dragon, I don't know why I can't talk about this today. I'm usually—usually I don't have any problems." She sniffed and ran her hands through her hair. "It's been a long day. But she's not still alive, she's definitely dead. And for some reason, we don't like to talk about it."
There was a long silence.
Everything felt different now, for no reason. Roxy felt like she'd been transported somewhere outside of her body for Aisha's explanation and was only now returning. She had never seen Aisha look so upset. "Oh," she managed to whisper around the lump in her throat.
"She died here," Aisha said in a very low voice, her eyes glassy, staring at nothing. "On Andros." She said the planet's name with surgical precision.
Roxy blinked. She wondered if Aisha felt responsible. She must, considering the total desolation in her expression. There was nothing to say, though, and the silence stretched endlessly.
Finally Aisha shook her head and looked at Roxy almost angrily, as though she'd done something very wrong. "Nobody wants to talk about this, Roxy. It's better if you don't bring it up again." She suddenly busied herself, walking over to the table and starting to clear up the cards. "Actually, I think we all should go to bed. It's been a long night."
Except Roxy couldn't sleep.
The spare room in Aisha's castle was possibly the nicest one she'd ever been in. The bed she was sitting on was four poster, with deep blue velvet curtains and a lot of silk pillows. It was so soft she was slightly sunken into the center. And yet instead of sleeping she sat, squinting at her laptop, typing tecna andros valtor wars into the search bar.
That pulled up a multitude of articles with headlines like Alfea Student Declared Dead and Fairy Lost In Omega, but she only lingered on them for a moment, to find the fairy's full name, before she opened a new tab and started reading more about the dead girl.
It was so weird. Someone had died—someone important to them—and she had never known. Well, maybe it wasn't weird. She didn't know how they acted in the before and after. She knew that something like that changed you, made your life all gray and made you so tired. Maybe everything had been different before. How would she know?
The first page was an online chronicle that seemed to outline the whole of the girl's person. Her life and summary paragraphs were very short. The paragraph under 'death' was very long.
Tecna Ciak of Zenith was a technology fairy and Alfea student. She was the daughter of Roman and Morela Ciak, founders of XemTech. She and her roommates, Princess Stella of Solaria, Princess Bloom of Sparx, Musa Kane of Melody, Flora Yuce of Linphea, and Princess Aisha of Andros, were noted by their teachers for their valiant participation in the Battle of Magix and called themselves the Winx Club. The same students came into conflict with Valtor of Grim after his escape from the Omega Dimension. The "Winx Club" was also associated with Specialist squad V-06, which notably included both Prince Sky of Eraklyon and Helia of Eiren, grandson of Headmaster Saladin. Tecna of Zenith dated Timothy of Magix, also part of Specialist squad V-06.
In closing the vortex that Valtor had created, she herself was lost in the Omega Dimension.
As her body was never recovered, she was declared dead on Zenith one year later.
Princess Stella of Solaria did not return to Alfea for her senior year, citing a desire to spend more time with her family and on her home planet. Several of the group members (Musa of Melody, Princess Bloom of Sparx, Princess Aisha of Andros, and Flora of Linphea) took part in the conflict against the Wizards of the Black Circle when they entered the Magic Dimension.
Roxy wondered why she had never bothered to search for information about her friends' lives before, but then again, she had never really wondered what they were hiding from her. She hadn't thought there was anything. She had heard that the girls had all roomed together and participated in stuff like the Battle of Magix, and even heard the name Winx Club thrown around once or twice to refer to them, but hadn't thought much of it.
Maybe everything had seemed just a little bit off, the way everyone tensed up when they talked about Stella—not just because Roxy was now dating her ex, but because although they were nominally friends, things seemed weird between them now. The way it seemed like almost everyone in the wider circle of friends seemed to have a complicated and soured history, either with dating or friendship: Brandon and Sky, Flora and Helia, Timmy and...everyone.
Finding any information about Stella was useless because as a princess and a fashion designer she was famous, and generated a lot of news. Anything from years ago was long buried by new articles about her engagement or reviews about the gowns she was designing. Aisha and Bloom were the same way, as princesses, and because Bloom had grown up on Earth there really wasn't much on her anyway: people had only started noticing her when she claimed her title as Princess of Sparx a few years before. Musa and Flora had very little about them, and it seemed to be the same way with Tecna other than her very public death and the news surrounding it. There wasn't any more information on the Winx Club, either.
For a moment Roxy was tempted to message Brandon, but it was late. Then she thought about putting her laptop away and being done for the night. But she didn't want to sleep. She had forgotten some of her protection crystals in her dorm, and only had one nightmare ward. That made her uneasy.
Instead she went back to Tecna. One of the first articles included a picture of the dead girl. It was jarring to see that. She hadn't thought she was imagining someone when reading all about the girl—the first page didn't had a picture—but still she was surprised by the appearance of the girl. She was pretty, and pale, with large greenish eyes, and smiling in the picture. And they had the same color of hair.
Roxy touched her own hair, which had been long when she had first come to Magix, cut short after the Bad Night but regrown, almost brushing her shoulders now. It would be back to how it was before if she didn't take scissors to it every month or so.
She didn't want very very short hair, like Tecna from the picture. But she also didn't like how she looked with long hair anymore. She didn't like that girl. She was stupid and made bad decisions and let people die for her when she was the one who deserved to die.
Tecna's hair was very short, asymmetric and cool-looking. She looked taller than Roxy, and paler, with an oval, sharp-featured face dominated by her large greenish eyes. They didn't look anything alike, other than the color of their hair. She knew this. They didn't look anything alike.
But had she ever turned around quickly, and one of them had gotten disoriented for a second, mistaking her for the dead girl? From far away, did they have to blink and remind themselves that no, that wasn't her, because she was dead?
She kept reading long into the night.