A dread light presided over the snowy night.

When Lillian poked her head out the door, into the fresh chill of the evening, she could see it. It was a grey shine in a hail of white, it was a blue glare in a colorless expanse of weather. The light was emanating, as far as she could tell, from Emma’s tower.

This smelled like bad news.

Unfortunately, there was no time to process this information. Every second she spent not running was a second Lord Gaius was gaining on her, Henry, Yulia, and Belladonna.

“What’s the verdict?” Henry asked.

“All clear. It is time to go.”

The closest building to the four of them was the chapel; She stepped out of the worker’s tunnel towards it. It would at least provide a few moments of quiet to figure out the next move.

Four people went traipsing out into the snow. Lillian, on sheer instinct, let some of her feathers fluff out from beneath her suit jacket. Henry was shivering, so she gripped his hand. Yulia and Belladonna were both decked out in rather warm dresses and tights, so they trudged along without complaint.

The chapel, thankfully, was unlocked.

Lillian let the four of them in, and in another stroke of luck, it was empty. When the last of them had come inside the sanctuary hall, she went ahead and barred the door shut.

“Well,” Yulia said, relaxing in one of the pews, “great. Now what?”

No one knew quite what to say. They were out of immediate peril; the snow would cover up their footprints, and Lord Gaius had not seen them leave the central keep. That was a victory. But it was a victory that left them all unsure of the next step in the dance.

“We need to reach the tower,” Lillian supplied, “but only once we locate Bailey and Hannah.”

“In this weather? They might already be dead,” Yulia said.

“Yulia--”

“Bella, don’t ‘Yulia’ me, okay? It’s true. They’ll catch their death out there.”

In all that time, Henry had not spoken up. He simply rapped his knuckles against a wall and shifted his weight, right foot leading, left foot leading, right foot, left foot.

“Be that as it may, uh, we can’t jump to that--”

“They’re not dead,” Henry said, quite suddenly. He was still focusing most of his energy towards his shifting around and moving in small ways, and he was not looking at anyone else.

He continued, “And if they are, it’s still our responsibility to find them. This weather is a problem, though. Lillian?”

“Yes?”

He looked to her, with his incisor digging into his lower lip.

“You’re… could you do it?”

It could have been anything. She considered the meaning of it for a long moment, rotated it in her mind, and considered the context clues.

No, nothing. She was fresh out of ideas.

“Do what?”

He went up to her and whispered, “Go fully dragon. You’re a frost dragon, yes?”

She said, in a voice all could hear, “I am not ready for that. If I could, I would, for them. For all of us. But I cannot. I… I may never be ready.”

Henry nodded.

“We may have to see if the weather breaks, then?” he said, as if it were a question. It wasn’t. It was a statement of horrible fact.

Perhaps Bailey and Hannah had made it to the tower, and that light Lillian had seen was evidence of that. Maybe the problem was already solved and all they had to do was wait for a good time to leave and--

Bang.

Bangbangbangbangbangbangbang. Bang. Bangbang.

“This door wasn’t locked before,” called Lord Gaius’ voice, as he bang knocked bang at the front door bang, “I was told locking this door was a grave fire hazard, by a very wise and not at all vile little beast of an Inquisitor.”

Lillian put her pointer finger to her lips, and made a small ‘shh’ noise to all gathered in the sanctuary. If they waited and did not panic, maybe he would give up and leave.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

“It’s cold out here… let me in. I need some of the holy warmth only a chapel can provide.”

It was spoken like a command. No one moved or spoke or even breathed. Lillian felt her chest rise and fall in exquisite, painful detail. Each exhale was a yell; each inhale an operatic high note declaring her presence.

Bang.

“Hmmm… maybe there’s another way in?” Lord Gaius said, in the way that implied he already had another entrance in mind.

He audibly stomped his way around the perimeter of the chapel. Each step rang out like a note in a wholly discordant scale, a musical decree of oncoming terror. His boots falling sounded like the entire bottom half of a harpsichord being played at once, like a cacophony of percussive low notes.

But then, his steps grew more distant, and softer.

“Go lock his office door,” Lillian hissed to Henry.

“On it.”

The steps were still faintly audible, but Henry was moving faster than him. Surely they could lock him out and wait for him to give up. Right?

Henry went and checked the doors to Lord Gaius’ office. They didn’t budge. Never had the sound of a door refusing to open sounded so sweet or so musical.

“Already locked.”

“Thank goodness.”

And then something happened.

The doors Henry had just declared locked burst open and knocked him to the floor.. From the inside. They had been locked; but they opened from the office-side of the door.

Oh.

Oh no.

Lord Gaius emerged from the burst-open double doors with his lance in his half-frozen fingers.

“I had to break into my own office,” he shivered, “in the cold. It was wet, it was slippery, and you will all pay for this inconvenience.”

He brandished the lance in one hand, and a shield in the other. He held the weapon over his head, bearing it down at a threatening downward angle at Henry.

“You’ll pay first, whelp,” Lord Gaius said.

Before he could bring his lance to bear against Henry’s body, though, Yulia stood up and did something highly inadvisable.

“Dad!” she called.

This broke the aggressive spell on Lord Gaius, and his attention went from Henry to Yulia. The man’s eyes went wide and horrified as he laid them upon his daughter.

“You…”

He kept his lance and shield at the ready as he approached.

“What have you done, my son?”

Yulia wore a mask of intense calm. She breathed out through her nose and in through her mouth, and forced her hands to remain open, even as they curled themselves into fists.

“I’ve taken my life into my own hands, my lord,” Yulia said, “and fashioned it to my wants. Is that so wrong?”

“My boy… my only boy. You would mutilate yourself? For sick pleasure?”

Lord Gaius was close, now, and his lance was even closer. Something inside Lillian was growling at this, and Lillian felt her muscles crackle with potential energy.

“Sick or not, it’s mine to take, right?” Yulia said. It was a fact, ending in a rising tone, not a real question.

Lord Gaius looked like he was about to be sick; whether from poison or vile bigotry was anyone’s guess.

“Father… my lord… Dad. I’d say I’m sorry I couldn’t be your son…”

Yulia stepped close to him, close enough to get lanced through the neck. “But I’m really, really not.”

And then she swept her leg in a violent motion against Lord Gaius’ legs, and he lost balance. His grip on his shield faltered, and in a panic, he tried to lance at his daughter. The lance’s point missed its mark, thank goodness.

But Yulia’s advantage was fading fast. She was a dirty fighter who could handle herself in a brawl, but brawls didn’t usually involve shields, lances, and semi-geriatric dragonslayers.

Dragon slayers…

Lillian’s teeth felt ill-fitting inside her mouth. Her face was tight, too tight, for the shape bubbling underneath her skin. She could fight the shape, she could push it all back and intervene in a more normal capacity, as a human being fighting another.

Or she could intervene, as a dragon against a slayer.

The idea made her salivate.

So, instead of forcing it down, she shrugged off her jacket, unbuttoned her vest, and coaxed it on.

The same invisible force that she had put into herself, the one she guilted herself for, the one she denied herself, went to work. It pulled and pushed at her, it coated her in iridescent white feathers and purple under-feathers. It gave her hands an exciting new talon shape, and it only kept on working.

For a time, the world had shrunk down into only herself. She was shifting, changing, improving, and that was all there was.

But the world hadn’t actually shrunk. She had, in fact, grown. Lillian had grown quite a bit, and the shredded remains of her shirt sleeves and trousers fell to the ground limply. Her face had a new shape: it was a snouted thing, long and full of teeth, covered in scaly spines, with a pair of horns jutting out from the back.

Head to… tail… She was a dragon, in full feathery splendor, wings and all.

She let out a noise that she tried to make a roar; it came out as more of a bird-of-prey screech. Every single glass pane window in the sanctuary hall shattered into tiny pieces, save for the central one. It went on depicting the same old dying dragon with a lance spearing its poor soft neck.

“I knew it,” Lord Gaius said; “I knew you were suspect.”

He prepared his lance, but his shield had fallen to the wayside. Lillian’s wings shadowed over him; he looked like a shrew, staring at an oncoming falcon.

“My father, and every father who called himself ‘Lord Gaius’ has stood against your kind, beast. If you debase yourself to a mere animal, you will die like an animal.”

“Oh, do hush,” Lillian said.

She then let out a frigid burst of air from her mouth; it smelled like rain, it smelled like cut grass. The already half-frozen hands Lord Gaius called his own seized up in the cold, and he dropped the lance.

On her four talons, Lillian slithered closer to him. She moved like a lizard; she moved like a crocodile; she moved like a cat on the hunt.

It was a strange feeling. She felt like a liquid, like quicksilver. Every muscle in her glorious new body was a perfect tool to achieve her will.

And her will said to scare the shit out of this man.

In her left foretalon, she grasped the lance, and considered it. It was a piddly little thing in her claws, like a stick a child pretended was a toy. It was dangerous in the wrong hands… but she was more dangerous than the small little human before her. What right did he have to a title like ‘Lord’? He was a small little biped, a puny ant of a creature before her.

“Yulia,” said the dragon known as Lillian Andrei Stone, “how would you have this… creature… dealt with?”

Lord Gaius’ defiance was holding, but he was shaking. Or shivering. Or both.

“I don’t know,” Yulia said.

“Son--”

“I’m not sure of who I am yet, really, but I know I’m not your son.”

The puny little man took great offense to that, apparently. He cast his eyes to the last remaining window in the room, the mural of the speared dragon.

“I’m sorry, great-great grandfather. I don’t know how I raised such a disgrace.”

Every eye in the building was looking at that window, at the poor dragon as they screeched in pain. A lance through the neck was a horrible way to go… and it was even worse that that was all the glorious being depicted was remembered for.

“Lillian,” Yulia said, “I have an idea.”

“Do tell…”

She looked to the lance in Lillian’s talon, then to the mural, and then to her father’s neck. Yulia then drew a line across her own neck.

“Are you quite sure?” Lillian asked.

“Deadly sure.”

Lord Gaius was standing transfixed at the stained glass. That was, until Lillian took her right foretalon and shoved him to the ground and pinned him to the floor.

“Look at your mural and weep,” Lillian said, “because this is going to hurt.”

She drove the lance into his soft neck. His cervical curve and its many vertebrae made a snap noise as the steel drove through them. A spurt of hot blood emerged, covering Lillian’s talon and left forearm.

For a long time, no one moved.

Snow piled in through the shattered windows. It intermixed with the broken glass and made mountains of sharp softness as it went along. Yulia stood there, breathing, watching her father’s corpse. Lillian stood there, breathing in deeper than she ever had, and breathing out longer than human lungs would ever allow.

Henry and Belladonna came up to the scene to look upon Lillian’s handiwork. It was gruesome work; she wasn’t proud of it. But it did feel, all in all, necessary. The man had put down, or had ordered the putting down, of many a dragon.

And he was a bad father, and an even worse leader. She only felt remorse for taking a living creature’s life, for the mechanics of it, but there was no shame in her heart for Lord Peter Gaius’ passing beyond that.

“We should go,” Yulia said. She did not stop looking at his corpse as she said it, though.

“Agreed,” Henry said.

“Definitely, yeah,” Belladonna said.

Lillian didn’t say anything, because anything she said would sound alien to her. Her voice was her own, in a way that it had never been before. But, having just taken a human life into her hands and crushed it out of existence, the euphoria of a new form and all it entailed took a back seat.

He was dead. Dead dead. His candle had been snuffed out, by her, on purpose, and she would have to live with it. She did not mourn him; he was a bastard through and through. But she mourned that he was a bastard, and that his life had become a weapon in a war that never should have happened.

The church would not mourn him, not really. They would call him a martyr, they would put his name on a monument, but the flesh and blood man would be absent from all that. Peter Gaius the man was never the point. The point was to build weapons out of people, to cauterize their care for others, to make them unthinking soldiers in a war against the chaos of life, the variation of existence, the love that flowed from queer people to other queer people.

It was a rotten thing to hold in her heart. She didn’t want to carry the memory of this man with her… but who else would? Lillian had done the deed. Necessary as it was… she was still on the hook for it.

“We should leave, yes. Let us find Bailey and Hannah,” she said.

“One more thing,” Yulia said.

She kicked Lord Gaius in the face, with a grim expression across hers. It made a wet smack noise that echoed through the stone chapel.

“I always wanted to do that. Let’s get out of here.”

Right.

“Where should we go?” Belladonna asked.

“I don’t care, as long as I don’t have to share a room with my father’s skewered corpse, thank you.”

Lillian spoke up, in her voice that was both the same as before and yet completely altered. “I will climb to the roof and see what there is to see.”

She stalked up to the horrible stained glass window, and stepped over the pulpit, the way a cat stepped over an inconvenient footstool in their path. With a, “Sorry. Rest in peace, dear dragon,” she touched a talon to the glass dragon.

After this brief touch, she breathed a burst of frosted air on the window. The cold of it left the glass brittle and fragile.

So, with the swipe of her foretalons across the glass, the window fell apart. Shards of crimson, white, grey, and sky blue fell all around her. Glass fell like snow; over the pulpit, over the stone floor, over the choir’s reserved seats.

Lillian pulled herself through the window, and up onto the side of the chapel. She found each little bump and divot and imperfection on the stone and took advantage. Her talons and her liquid gait brought her onto the roof in no time at all, even with the heavy snow pushing her down.

Having defeated both gravity and the snow, her next problem became apparent: the chapel’s roof was at a sharp angle, and the pointed top of it would make a terrible perch for a creature her size. She stepped along the roof and let out an irate huff at this fact.

She stepped over the shingles of the roof until she could crane her neck to see over the front of the chapel. There wasn’t much to see, really, other than the distant pale light of the tower and--

Oh hell.

Just barely, she could make out the distant stone labyrinth, and a crowd of armed men marching into it.

Bingo. She climbed back inside the chapel.

“I found Bailey and Hannah,” was the good news, “they are under siege,” was the bad.

 

***

 

By Bailey’s estimate, she, Hannah, Apple Sauce, and The Sorceress had little more than a minute and a half to live. After the news had sunken in (this took about ten seconds total), they all had come to the next natural step: panicking.

“Fuck! This is not how I was planning on going out,” Hannah said. “I was hoping to at least die at a sexy party, not in the world’s coldest afterparty.”

“I’m thinking,” Bailey said, despite the fact she couldn’t think of a single thing of use. Her brain was mostly generating thoughts like, this never would have happened if you’d simply stayed a man, and other useless things like that.

You have some serious self-loathing, The Sorceress said.

Oh, and this is news to you? What happened to ‘haunting my brain since I was born’, hmm?

The Sorceress said, This probably isn’t the time for this conversation, as if the time for that conversation would ever have a chance to arrive. It wouldn’t, of course.

“Not to bring you out of your reverie, but if you or your roommate have any bright ideas, now is the time,” Hannah said.

Bailey leaned up against the vine-infested wall and sighed. At the end of everything, when she had about a minute left before a violent and grisly death, all that was left was expired dysphoria and unaddressed self-hatred. She laughed, coldly, as cold as the weather.

And me!

Oh yeah. And the new brain friend she would never get a chance to get to know. Her too.

Her hand found a bit of half-frozen whorling vine. Once, not so long before that day, the plant had spoken to her. Where was it now? Why had it deigned to speak up then?

We are right here, Sorceress. We are very cold, but if this is you calling, we are here.

Bailey’s eyes went wide.

“What’s happening?” Hannah asked.

“I might have a way out of this; hold on.”

You have a bit of a crowd with you, Sorceress. And other sorceress,” the vines said.

More like an infestation, The Sorceress put in.

We can help with that. Let us be your weapon, Sorceresses.

What did that mean?

“What does that mean?” Bailey said.

Let us show you exactly what we mean.

With forty-five seconds to imminent death, Bailey agreed to it. All this had to do was be better than instantly dying, which was not a high bar to clear.

“The plants say they’ll help.”

“Ah,” said Hannah, who was numb to pedestrian emotions like ‘shock’, ‘confusion’, or ‘surprise.’

After a moment, she asked, “How?”

All Bailey could do was shrug. The vines were a little unclear on this point, after all. All there was to do was wait and see what happened next.

After five seconds, nothing happened. After another five seconds, nothing continued to happen like it was nobody’s business.

“This is what we get for asking for help from a plant, huh?” Hannah said.

But the second she said that, the ground beneath them began to shake.

 

***

 

Lillian was learning all sorts of things about her new shape.

One such lesson was that having three people riding on her back made her significantly slower. Another was that those same three people clutching her feathers in a death grip hurt.

Whatever the case, even with the extra weight and pain, she ferried herself and her three passengers to the chapel roof.

“Couldn’t we,” said Yulia, whose grip was the tightest and most afraid, “get a saddle or something so we don’t fall off and die?”

“I would sooner die than be saddled, thank you,” Lillian said.

She made it to the front edge of the roof and scanned around the castle grounds; the soldiers were still gathered inside the maze. But… the maze was… shaking? Shifting?

Uh oh.

“I hope you are all ready to fly,” Lillian said.

“Wait! Have you ever flown before?” Yulia asked.

Lillian hadn’t, so she said, “No.”

“Glided?”

“No.”

“Landed?”

“What? No. How would I have landed if--”

“We could die from this! Especially in this weather. Hell, we probably will die!”

“Of fun,” Belladonna put in.

Lillian spread out her wings, and tested the muscles that governed their movement a few times. She had never had wing muscles before. It was an ecstatic feeling, moving these muscles, like recovering from an injury she didn’t even know she’d had.

“Ready?” Lillian asked.

“When you are,” Henry said.

“Yeah!” Belladonna said.

“Sure, whatever, let’s do it,” said Yulia.

Lillian drew back from the edge of the chapel, far enough to get some runaway space, and then sprinted towards the threshold. She moved her wings in powerful flaps as she approached the edge. When her talons no longer had roof tiles beneath them, she did what felt right, and beat her wings.

She was flying.

Holy shit!

Lillian Stone was living the wildest dreams of a younger version of her. Her idle thoughts had been filled with the fantasies of flight, of being above her problems and soaring. Of course, she hadn’t known that she would end up doing it in reality, let alone that she would be flying toward her problems instead of over them.

Her wings beat joyously, and she flew onward to the stone maze.

“I hate this. I hate this. Oh, I’m going to throw up,” Yulia said.

“What, did you have any of the wine?” Belladonna asked.

“No! Humans were not meant to fly, that’s why!”

It was a good thing Lillian wasn’t fully human, then, wasn’t it?

“And Henry, are you alright?” Lillian asked.

“I will be when we reunite with Hannah and Bailey.”

“Indeed.”

 

***

 

With about thirty seconds left on Bailey’s ‘time to live’ countdown, the whorling vines in the maze did something horrifying and beautiful.

They shook the ground. Stone walls and flooring buckled and cracked as the vines snapped and shifted underneath the ground, like veins and arteries, like great green snakes slithering beneath everyone’s feet.

The stone wall before them split open in two clean pieces, in right angles and perfect squares, and fell over. A great vine emerged from the ground; it was the diameter of an oak tree, if an oak tree was a dead green color. The winter cold was no good for the Whorling Vines, but all the same, they were still fucking huge, and in their own bitter way, thriving.

The big vine split open, too, but instead of two rectangular pieces like the wall, the pieces were organic and uneven. In some places, the fleshy green was sheared and pulled apart, and in others it was sliced through, like a cross-section.

In that strange shear cross section, there was a lumpy root. It looked like a misshapen collection of potatoes; it looked like a strange little man made of plant matter.

“The crown root… how the hell was this supposed to help us?” Bailey asked.

“That’s what we get for listening to a talking plant,” Hannah said. She said it in a way like a parting shot, like a last drink before the bar closed, like one last kiss before the party came to a depressing and swift end.

The roots, in defiance of their sass, pulled themselves apart. Each piece of plant fiber rendered itself into an individual long thread.

Fifteen seconds until Bailey’s death prediction either came to pass, or didn’t.

The threads of plant fiber weaved into and out of one another; the whorling vines’ central root was a tapestry weaving itself. It reshaped and reformed itself, molded and created itself, into a new shape.

The new shape was a long, fibrous staff, made of roots, flowers, thorns, and leaves. At its head, there was a basket made of roots, containing a prismatic flower that shone in many colors.

I am your weapon, Sorceress, said the plant(s), use me as you will.

Bailey picked it up; it was warm in her hands, somehow.

It was five seconds to Bailey’s death prediction. A group of soldiers, armed and angry, stood at both exits to the maze, a wall of human flesh and armor, weapons at the ready. Thomas Byserson stood at their head.

“Sorceress--”

Four seconds. Bailey, in the heat of knowing there was only one shot at this--

“STOP,” Bailey commanded. Her staff went from warm to hot, and the prismatic flower at its head shined a bright green.

It was so bright; it made the sun look like a campfire. It was so bright, it made all bright things look like the depths of a cave. It was so bright, it hurt.

The vines surged and moved again, but this time, it didn’t feel chaotic in the same way it had the last time. It was, in some strange way, under Bailey’s command. They warped and wrapped around the human wall of soldiers, and pushed out. The vines were a wave of green against the sea floor of snow, the vines moved and shifted in a tidal motion as they tore the maze apart and swallowed Bailey’s enemies whole.

When the light faded, Bailey had to sit down and catch her breath. Hannah was bug-eyed, looking around the sea of verdant flesh and boggled at it all. She ended up sitting down by Bailey’s side after another moment, and joined her in breathing exercises.

“So,” Hannah said, after ten exhales and inhales, “now what?”

“I don’t really know,” Bailey said.

I really, truly thought we were all going to die there, the Sorceress said.

“My new roommate says she believed in us all along,” Bailey reported.

Somehow, without speaking a word, she felt the Sorceress fume.

Right. If she wasn’t going to be speaking up herself, it would only be right to accurately report on what she was saying.

Also, calling her ‘the Sorceress’ was a strange, strange thing. If that was her name, it was fine, but if that wasn’t a name and instead a title…

I have a name. We’re not there yet.

Fair enough, Bailey said.

“Did she?” Hannah asked.

“No, she thought we were done for.”

Hannah looked over to the sea of green again, and huffed a big sigh.

“So are those guys dead or what?”

“They’re alive, I think. I said ‘stop’, not ‘die’. I’m not one hundred percent sure I’m ready to be taking human life,” Bailey said.

I never got used to it, back in the old days.

Bailey stood up, but it took a second. The snow was still coming down pretty hard, and it felt as if it were weighing her down, a great big blanket of cold.

It was at that moment that a great big shadow flew over Bailey and Hannah; it blocked out the snow from above, creating an oddly-shaped umbrella over them.

There were a few things of note about the shape. First of all, it was on a descending path at a rather harsh angle. Second of all, it was a long, feathered shape, with great big wings and a tail, with a soft belly of fluff underneath…

“Is that?” Bailey asked.

“I think--”

The shape, the dragon, was flying in a strange circle, a long spiral downward. They made an awkward landing and perched down on the remains of a stone wall.

“Well,” said the dragon, in a voice that sounded like Lillian’s, but not quite, “it appears you have this under control.”

“Barely,” Bailey snorted.

This dragon, this beautifully feathered beast, this mother-of-pearl creature, laughed. It was a bird-like chirp; it was a human chuckle; it was a cat’s purr.

“You look good, Lillian,” Bailey said, “this suits you.”

“Thank you, love.”

Lillian turned her neck to the trunk of her body, and spoke.

“You can stop clutching so tight, you three.”

At this, Henry, Yulia, and Belladonna dismounted. They all looked quite haggard, and they got down to the stone wall with quivering bodies and frightened expressions.

Henry got down to the ground. He stepped over the many vines, wading through the shoreline, and made it over to Bailey and Hannah. Yulia wobbled her way to a soft bit of green vines, and sat down. Belladonna sat up on the wall.

“Remind me to never, ever, ride atop a dragon again,” Yulia said.

“I don’t know, it was a little fun,” Belladonna put in.

“Oh, you would say that.”

Meanwhile, Lillian took on a liquidy shape, like a cat might, so she could place her head down with her three partners.

“What happened here?” Henry asked.

“I like your staff,” Lillian put in; “if we’re talking about new things suiting each other, it gets an honorable mention.”

Bailey laughed. Lillian’s voice had a slight rumble to it, and that made Bailey feel some things that would require further research.

“Alright, yeah. So… There's a lot of ground to cover, but the short version: me and the vines made an agreement. So now… this is my weapon. I didn’t anticipate this, though.” Bailey gestured to the strange ocean of thorn and vine surrounding their little island of snow and stone. How could she ever have guessed that ‘stop’ would mean this?

Perhaps it was all plant-centric spells, with her new staff.

“But… we’ve gotten a little off track. We should probably move ou--”

From within the vines, an arm stuck out, like a drowning man’s last gasp for help.

“Bill….” came a voice, from the arm’s body.

Belladonna’s face went pale, and her jaw went slack. She went over the arm, and kicked it.

“You little!” The arm grasped for Belladonna’s boot, but she was too fast. She smashed Thomas Byserson’s hand against the thorned vine. She stamped on it, once, twice, thrice.

“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. I hope you drown in there, Thomas. I hope you rot. I bet all you’re ever good for has been plant food.”

“Bill… help…”

“Why?” Belladonna’s face was getting red. “Why? Why? Why? I hate you. You took every chance to hurt me, to twist me into a new horrifying shape!”

The hand was twitching, under either pain or anger, or perhaps both.

“I did it all so you would man up, you little freak! So many men get the same treatment as you, get the same upbringing, and they take and they grow strong and sharp,” said Thomas Byserson, a man trapped beneath a dozen layers of vine. “So what makes you special? What makes you think you can run away?”

Instead of answering that, she stepped on his hand again.

“I hope you liked all that wine you drank. And the pork and beef! I hope you’re really liking how they’re settled into your stomach, douchebag.”

And then, with that, she walked away from him, as he began to yell all manner of nasty things at her. He waved his arm around to emphasize his anger. This motion was pointless, because no one was paying him any attention anymore.

“Alright,” she said, having pulled Yulia into the greater planning conversation. “What’s the plan?”

Bailey looked over to the tower; it was radiating out a harsh grey light that cut through the snow and the clouds and the strange colors of the overcast night.

“We go there,” Bailey said, “and we find out how Emma’s screwed up.”

 

***

 

Conversation.

A walk through the ruins.

That was what happened next in the dream.

“So what even happened here?” Bailey asked.

The Sorceress was leaned up against a turret, up along the fort’s remaining defensive wall. Bailey was standing, not leaning, but she was watching the same slice of carnage that her companion was watching.

“In all the reincarnations, it’s always looked like this,” The Sorceress said, which didn’t answer Bailey’s question at all.

When Bailey looked at her with a quirked eyebrow, she continued, “The first time I reincarnated, I thought it was some kind of joke. The second time, that hell was real, and that this was mine. And now, after four or five go throughs, I get it. You can never leave the carnage of the past behind.”

“I don’t know if I agree with that,” Bailey said.

The Sorceress only shrugged.

“If I wanted to, I suppose I could have made contact with some of the past go rounds. Said hi.”

“Why didn’t you?” Bailey asked.

“Fear, I guess. I feel like the world’s worst bad luck charm, you know? When your whole life’s work crumbles and burns around you, it’s hard not to find fault with yourself.”

Hmmph. Bailey didn’t know what to say to that.

“But as for what happened? It’s simple. We held them back for about a week and a half; our forces made the church’s men fight for every speck of ground.

“But once they got up here on the plateau, the guerrilla war was over. The town burned quickly. It’s way easier to win the fight when your enemy is trying to climb a mountain and lug their huge siege engines with them, but once they’re on flat ground? Sheer numbers and force does the trick. Everyone who wasn’t willing or able to fight had already evacuated, so there were just a hundred and fifty or so of us left when they got to the town, and there were easily four hundred of them. Plus with their fancy siege weapons and pyromancers? Fuck.”

The Sorceress stopped leaning on the turret, and instead sat against it. It was a move that made her seem small, weak, like a crumpled-up piece of paper.

“We lasted an hour in a straight fight before we retreated to the keep. As you saw, that was a real last ditch effort. I mean, it was our plan F or G to hide in the keep and wait.”

“What were you waiting for?” Bailey asked.

“The end, mostly.”