Chapter Twenty: Deus ex Magika

To the best of my knowledge, we were the first witches to ever witness our Mistress Starlight in all her spangled glory. She was breathtaking and glorious and not at all what I was expecting - for one thing, I'd always picture her as a slim woman with pellucid skin and straight black hair filled with glitter. But she was a lot more robust than that, dummy thicc, as the kids say, in the hourglass way a young mother might be, her skin as dark as night but spattered with stars of every color, and her gown was a veil of swirling galaxies transparent enough that it left little to the imagination. Her hair was a corona of coils sparkling like stars and trailing off like the rainbow gases of distant nebulae. And her eyes were dark and beautiful, her cheeks flush with vitality, an aura of iridescent power glimmering around her.

The Mistress gestured skyward, and the dome of the Gangling Men's sanctuary cracked open like a taut membrane yielding to a surgeon's scalpel. Beyond was the noonday sun hanging high in the sky, its beams seeming to purify. With a great cracking and tearing sound, the Tree of the One Voice started to fall apart, disintegrating into dust. I could see the Gangling Men below us running about in panic, some of them trying in vain to cast spells at us. And, as they did, they would collapse into inanimate piles of rags, for whatever remnant energy held them to our world was tenuous without a witch or warlock to hold them here. Now they were powerless against us - even the slightest attempt at magic would send them back.

The Gangling Men were helpless now, soon to be banished from our world. But they weren't the only ones in the broken sanctuary. A beam of intense violet shot up from the ground, hitting Starlight square against her chest, and I felt the tug of power drawn from me. A few moments later, the beam shot up again, and I felt the tug - and, while I could take many such draws upon my power, some of the witches around me could not. With a little mental push, I moved myself groundward to intercept whoever was attacking us. I shouldn't have been surprised - it was Rowan Bryce, wild rage in his eyes, a complex sphere artifice in his hands charging up for another shot. He pointed it at me.

"You took everything from me," he seethed, spittle flicking from his lips. "My son… my father… my daughter… you bitch. And if all I can do is send you to the same horrible place the pale men came from… it's a fate better than you deserve."

I shook my head. "Don't you realize that everything you've lost is because of your own anger and pettiness? I've only ever defended myself and tried to do what's right, and that's the honest truth. Every wrong you've thrown at me has come back upon you many-fold, which is the way of magic. A good man wouldn't be defeated by goodness and couldn't have his family peeled away by basic decency. And a weapon of evil turned against the good holds in it the energy of its own unmaking. Go ahead and shoot me, father."

"You are not my daughter," he said, and then traced a symbol out before jamming his finger on the device's control.

Something inside the artifice cracked. The sphere pulsed violet, but it didn't shoot out strange energies. Instead, it pulsed and pulsed again, burning Rowan's hands with strange symbols. He gasped, dropped the artifice, and stumbled away, right in my direction. And what should I see strapped to his belt but a chrome-and-leather control collar. With a tug, I pulled it loose and strapped the thing around his neck, activating it with a gesture.

Now, normally, as strong as my magical potential was, I didn't have nearly the power to control a warlock like Rowan Bryce without getting him to acquiesce to putting on the collar, himself. But this wasn't a normal time - I was bathed in Starlight's energies in the middle of a ley storm, and Rowan Bryce was in the radius of a strange violet energy of un-making… and about to get deeper.

"Step into the portal," I said.

"The… what?" He turned to look at me, confused. He'd been so focused on the strange, swirling vortex coming out of the broken device that he hadn't even noticed when I collared him.

"Step into the purple, Rowan Bryce," I said, and I drew upon my energy, a deep, vast pool I'd rarely ever taxed to fullness. If the average witch has the impressive magical power of a Ford F-150, I was walking around with the magic equivalent of a Saturn V rocket… but I was only gradually gaining access to that power as I delved deeper and longer into magic. But in Starlight's aura, I could suddenly access all of it, and I brought it to bear on Rowan Bryce, blasting him with my very-determined willpower and a Saturn V liftoff of magic. "Go inside."

"I… I don't want to…"

I shrugged. "Does that matter? If you like the Gangling Men so much, you can join them. And if you ever find your way back to our world, I'll be waiting to accept your apology. Now go."

He didn't want to go, but he did. His feet turned him around and, with plodding steps, he marched into the vortex and disappeared with a brilliant flash and an anticlimactic little pop! like a single kernel of popcorn bursting. All that remained in that crater in Tunguska was the ashen remains of a once great and horrible tree, and piles of rags where the Gangling Men had once stood… and even those rags were slowly unspooling and dissolving into insubstantial threads beneath Mistress Starlight's purifying power.

"Our task is not yet done, my children - while any of the cursed ones remain, your world's not safe, so all rejoin to battle with these other few."

+++++

From the ruins in Siberia, the ley lines crackled with energy and Mistress Starlight transported us to Lily's Sanctuary without so much as a by-your-leave (though I'm sure Lily would have gladly given it). There, the Gangling Men had established a smaller tree, currently with a hundred trapped occupants, with a few more being trussed up to join them. We floated in from above, a flock of hundreds of witches and warlocks wreathed in starlight. The tree disintegrated beneath us and the Gangling Men started to dispel. As the bindings fell away from one of the most recent additions waiting for the tree, I recognized her firm and shapely form.

"Cassie! Cassie, up here!" I shouted.

Cassie looked up, joy spreading across her face. "Natalie! Oh, thank the stars! What are you… oh… well, that's new…"

Immersed in the magical glow, she floated up to join us, sliding into formation next to me. I reached out and we held hands. Lily and I held hands, too, and so did  everybody to any side of anybody else, some forming Y- and T-junctions until we all floated along in a great human tree of witches and warlocks with Starlight at the center.

"Things were really bad at St. Circe's," Cassie said. "I think a lot of people died."

"What is done with magic can be undone with magic," Starlight stated, and with another pop we were at the ruined campus of St. Circe's.

From a hundred feet up, beneath the cosmic glow of our gathering, it certainly bore the marks of a place where a great battle had raged. The ground was scored with furrows, blast-marks, and upthrusts. I spotted at least two dozen fallen witches, with a handful cradling the injured or dying. The great chitinous carcass of Gigan lay collapsed off near the treeline, and the front of the administration building had caved in. I felt the steady but bearable draw of power out of my magical energies - pulses of energy shooting down the lines of our floating tree of witches, flowing into Mistress Starlight. And with little phosphorescent beads of energy, she sent her powers to the fallen below, even as the rest of us descended to earth.

"In making, must we unmake, too, for in all things a balance is preserved," she said, and I could see the buildings of St. Circe's crumbling away as great and primeval trees thrust up from the ground around them, the campus's manicured pathways and topiaries replaced by rugged undergrowth and dense foliage.

I felt an unexpected pulse of energy in my direction and, in an instant, I stood in a dense and ancient forest with something small and moving in my hands… something small and moving and bawling. It was a baby! A tiny, blonde baby with ice-blue eyes looking up in terror. I held him close and looked about for the others - Lily and Cassie weren't far off, and Mistress Starlight wasn't far beyond. Her glow had dimmed to a barely-visible aura of light that coalesced into a halo of stars whenever you examined her closely. I waded from the undergrowth, holding the baby up to protect it from the little branches and thorns that pulled at my dress.

"Natalie," Lily gasped. "What… who…"

"I think this is Lucian," I said.

"What essence there was left to have was not enough to make the lad, thus were we forced to make anew to sins of father's side undo," Starlight said. She bent over and smiled, something deeply maternal flickering in her dark, star-sparkling eyes. "An auntie you have scarcely known shall guide this child 'til he's grown." She pronounced it in rhyme, like it was a prophecy, and I could feel the subtle weight of fate descending upon us as she said it.

A moment later, Simone came stumbling through the woods, waving a stick in front of herself like a magical wand to stave of spider's webs. She came upon our little grouping, perhaps attracted by the subtle glow of Mistress Starlight's body, or else by the mewling cries of baby Lucian Bryce. She gasped, first looking at me, baby in my arms, and then to Starlight, who bore a strong familial resemblance to her - the dark mocha complexion, the aura of hair, the beautiful, high-cheekboned face, the regal height. I could easily see Simone looking a lot like that in fifteen years with great bodily maintenance and a kid or two to thicc her up (if she wanted to - any reasonably-talented witch can keep her figure looking however lean or curvy she likes as long as she comes to it honestly to begin with).

Mistress Starlight looked to Simone, that same maternal devotion in her eyes, and then to me… and that devotion didn't wane one scintilla. "Our daughters… you are all our children, but none more than you. Simone, Natalie, and Bethany… our order has been broken by corruption and indolence, and we are shackled with rules of the old order. We, therefore, charge you to forge anew five rules for the new age, for these shall be our law. And We charge and gift you for summoning us, should your moment of need grow dire again - only the three of you together shall accomplish this."

Then Starlight went to each of us, walking behind us and, in my case, moving my mass of hair aside to kiss the back of my neck, just as Lily had once done when she became my Mother Witch more than a year ago. As she did, I felt the bloom of magical energies within me, something strange and miraculous that settled on my mind and etched upon my essence a portion of a ritual that I might carry with me forever. And, fittingly, Dr. Sauvage crunched through the underbrush and ruined that beautiful moment.

She threw herself at Starlight's feet. "Mistress! Our school's destroyed! What can we do to restore it?"

"You cannot, Prudence. The school you knew is gone, but you will rebuild. You will make anew our School of Starlight and enshrine in it the new rules of our order - the rules our three acolytes have been charged with creating, for you see the world better than We from so far afar and above."

"Surely that should be tasked to the Thirteen, mistress," Sauvage said, managing to glance up from her prostration. "These two girls are barely witches."

"And yet far better than who came before, daughter… We care not for calcified covens, for circles and circles within circles… these divisions serve to ossify orders best overturned, to clutch at traditions that have lost their value, to roam along wild trails that have lost their way. We say to you: We have not given leave for you to exert power over anybody or for anybody to exert power over you. This is a fiction built by the weak to control their betters. Now… We have said our piece and soon must return to the stars, for We must shore our power for what comes next. But know that We are always here, are in communion with you always, and shall always answer a witch's call truly brought, whether in ritual or hour of need. Go in peace, daughters."

For an instant, the sky flared to life with far too many stars, far too bright, so bright the forest canopy above streamed starlight through like the noonday sun. And then it faded, stars winking out one by one until the only light was the faint pre-dawn glow in a forest grown strangely verdant despite it still being wintertime.

"I guess we'd better get to civilization," Simone said eventually, her breath billowing out in the cool air. "I'm not about to freeze my butt off in these woods."

+++++

St. Circe's was no more - it no longer existed as a school. Its campus had reverted back to its primordial state: four square miles of ancient, hilly woods with a lake, a small river, a handful of natural henges, and a small, rough-hewn stairwell leading down to a ritual chamber forty feet underground. Of all the buildings, that alone had been untouched by Starlight's undoing… I guess it had, somehow, been a fixture of the landscape since before witches set up shop in the woods of Eastern Kentucky.

Obviously, it was going to be a lot of work to rebuild the whole school, and we'd had to make arrangements for all the students in the meanwhile - Lily offered to honor all paid tuition, or else offer refunds, but all behavior plans and other contracts would have to be re-negotiated. That's because every contract ever made with the school was instantly null and void. Starlight hadn't dissolved the school as an entity (this would have dispersed the contract enforcement to the individual signatories on the contract) but had literally unmade it, which meant the anchor for the contracts had been pulled up and the terms left to drift off into the ether with no ill effect… apparently, a sufficiently powerful and pissed-off goddess could just void a magical contract if she liked. Good to know.

The grounds around Lily's house had been badly affected - the garden would take years to properly grow, since some of the lost specimens were quite rare - but the house was in surprisingly good shape. A huge, falling branch from the Tree of the One Voice had ruined the eastern edifice, but Lily and I were able to get it presentable again with a few hours of planning and a quick mending ritual… though my half of the edifice didn't quite match hers, since I misunderstood what the gables were supposed to look like.

"We'll keep it that way," Lily sad. "I like the asymmetry."

In the meanwhile, twenty girls from school whose parents either couldn't be reached or who didn't care to house their daughters were staying with us. Lily had a large house, but an extra twenty people was pushing it… and it was impossible to get decent time in at the bathroom. So we added a temporary wing onto the house, enchanting wards over the eastern side of the house and pushing the hallway back another forty feet and etching out doorways every ten feet or so until everybody had a small private room, and then we bought a bunch of bedding, mattresses, and beanbag chairs, loading compressed smartfoam mattresses and chairs up into a big moving truck and shipping them to Lily's front door. As the shipping guys unloaded mattress after mattress and labeled bags of bedding and toiletries, according to each girl's specifications, we got some strange looks. And, as the shipping guys they tromped through Lily's place with their twelfth or thirteenth mattress, one of the guys bent over and whispered to me:

"Are you guys, like, a cult or something?"

"We're witches," I said.

"Ah." Then he pulled out his phone and tried to take a picture of the animated clock in the atrium and ended up insta-bricking his device.

I pointed to the sign that I'd explicitly pointed out to the movers when they'd rolled up an hour before: Phones off, please! This house will brick your phone! "Sorry about your phone, but I told you. Tech and witchcraft don't mix."

I was allowed to say that now that we didn't have a gag order from the Gangling Men hanging over our heads. Strangely enough, it hardly mattered - people just didn't believe you when you said things were magical, and half of the magic we could do wasn't perceptible to non-attuned folks. They'd just readjust to the new normal and continue like nothing else had changed. The moving guy looked like he was about to argue over his phone, which wouldn't have gone well for him, but then I got called away by Cousin Val, who was applying her lawyerly knowledge to helping us formalize our new rules for the coven. Obviously, Lily, who had decades and decades of magical contract experience, was the one writing the contract for the new coven rules, but Val was helping us formalize and order the language and strictures to be more comprehensible and comprehensive.

"You're sure about the first rule?" she asked for the fifth time.

"Mistress Starlight literally said it," I replied. "It should be the first rule."

"I was there. I agree with Natalie," Lily piped in.

Val shrugged and produced her latest version of the rules. We read over them and all agreed that they were pretty good. We'd have lunch and give them a good think, but we didn't end up making any substantial changes to the list. The five rules we came up with for the Sisterhood of the Starry Night to follow were thus:
1) You are a witch, and your power is your own. Claim power over no one without consent and let no one claim power over you unless you can rescind it.
2) Use your magic with damaging intent only to defend yourself, your sisters, your sworn allies, and the defenseless.
3) Do good with your power when you can and, above else, do no harm unless you must do so to stop a far greater harm. Do unto others as they would have done.
4) Respect agency - do not use your power to force or coerce others, even if you do so for their own good. If someone cannot be convinced with reason, it is no business of yours if they fall into folly.
5) Respect your sisters and brothers, even if they are not from our order. Teach our ways only to those who would use them for good and eschew whoever would use them in malice.

"A lot of the traditionalists in the coven aren't going to like this," Lily said. "And we've got about two hundred more rejoining us after a long time in the tree…"

I shrugged. "They can go somewhere else if they don't like it. I'm sick and tired of magical assholes with an entitlement complex treating other people like their personal playthings. For the first time in a long time, we'll be able to use our witchcraft publicly. If we don't make ourselves act like the good guys, then we'll become the bad guys soon enough."

"There's still a lot of room for interpretation," Simone said.

"That's what jurisprudence is for," Val said. "The study of law. When people fuck up, and they inevitably will, then you rule on the law and set new precedents. I figure that should be the role of the Thirteen. Though you might want to make being in the group an elected office."

"I don't think witches have elections," Simone said.

Val shrugged. "Witches can start having elections. But I'm not in your coven, and I guess I never will be now. It's up to you." She looked so cute - I couldn't believe she was going to give all of that up to go back to being boring old Vince. But maybe that's because I couldn't imagine ever wanting to be Martin again. In any case, I'd promised her we'd get it done as soon as I got some fresh declension stones to work with.

Lily nodded. "We'll give it a good think, but it's not part of the rules, so there's no rush. And if we're all happy with the new rules to the Creed, I'll get this drawn up and the three of us will seal the contract at the witching hour tonight."

OvidLemma

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