The dream was coming to a close, but it wasn’t over just yet.

They were walking, the new and old sorceress. When the new sorceress asked where they were going, all the old said was ‘To a warning.’ Bailey thought the battle ruins were warning enough; she said as much.

“I see what’s happened here. I know fighting the church is risky business. I get the idea.”

The old sorceress said, “I’m not sure that you do,” and then kept on walking. Bailey watched her go for a moment or two.

There was no need to belabor the point. She could look out over the battlements of the fort and see the ruins of a dream, the smoking remains of a communal future. Bailey didn’t need any more object lessons…

But she followed along anyway. Partially, it was curiosity; the other part was so she could express a bit of irritation.

She caught up with the old sorceress, who had a hell of a powerwalk for a three-and-a-half-century old ghost, and said, “You’ve made your point.”

“Again, Bailey, not quite. You have my blessing to do this plan of yours; but you need to understand something.”

The old sorceress stopped. For a moment, despite appearing to be, what, mid-thirties, maybe early forties, she looked ancient. There was something in how she carried herself that made her presence feel as old as she was from the moment of her birth, nearly four hundred years prior.

“My blessing to do this is also a burden. Even if you only embody her once, becoming the Sorceress is a one-way trip.”

She sighed.

“This thing you’re doing is going to send reverberations. You might not hear them for a long time. Hell, you might not hear them in your lifetime. But there are people who have spent generations preparing for when another Sorceress would pop up. They’ve spent centuries sharpening their blades for this to happen, Bailey.”

Bailey said, “So I shouldn’t do it?”

The Sorceress sputtered, as if asked a truly ridiculous question.

“Of course you shouldn’t! I shouldn’t have even made myself known to you. But from the snippets of your life I’ve observed, you don’t seem the type to change your mind about this.”

She was right. Bailey was already raring to go and ruin a party. Very little could convince her to alter course, and even fewer would actually get her to give up the ghost.

“So I have one last thing to show you, in case it’ll help you come to your senses. Come on.”

They reached a set of stone stairs, cracked and faded with age, and went up them. The stairs led them up from the battlements into a higher floor of the castle.

Two paths split; one led to a stairwell that went further up, and the other went to a plain wooden door. The once and previous Sorceress paused at the door. Its plainness irradiated a sense of dread, a feeling that literally anything could be behind it.

Was it dead bodies? No. Or… no. Probably. Not.

The Sorceress, first edition, went to the door and wrapped her hand around the handle. She did not open it. She did not want to open it; she had to open it.

Okay, not dead bodies. Something even worse? Something gruesome beyond belief? Bailey’s dead body, but from the future?

Bailey didn’t have a chance to guess further, because the door swung open, and she could see what it contained. There were no dead bodies, nor anything similarly gruesome. It was just a garden, choked with weeds.

But beneath the weeds, she could see the remains of a truly beautiful garden. The dry and crinkled lump of old plant material was clearly once some kind of flower… several kinds, actually. Intricate stonework was laid out in intricate shapes and forms. They were rectangular grey stones, arranged in complex organic shapes, beautiful chaos. The soil looked ill-cared for and tossed about, and when Bailey touched it, it was dry and dead.

The previous Sorceress looked at Bailey like she was expecting something from her; Bailey would have given her that something if she had the faintest idea what that was. She didn’t.

“I haven’t been here in… years. How long have I been dead?”

“Three hundred fifty-six years,” Bailey said, “and counting.”

“Wow. Yeah. It’s been a while.”

The old Sorceress sat in the dead, unweeded soil. Her dress caught crumbs of dirt in its folds.

“After we locked ourselves in, everything went quiet. No one wanted to say anything, and the siege outside just… stopped. The wall was already knocked over, and all it would have taken was a single battering ram and we’d be dead within the day.”

“I’m sensing a ‘but’ here.”

“Yes. The ‘but’ is that nothing happened. A day passed, a week, and we didn’t hear anything. The one hundred and fifty of us that had started the town’s defense had been whittled down to about thirty when we locked ourselves in, you know? They could have knocked the door down and cut our throats open, no problem. But we didn’t see anything.

“For a while, Laila, the one people called ‘The Dragon’, was convinced that they were going to climb to the roof, but Annabelle, Moonflower, they called her, said, ‘No, not everyone thinks so vertically. I think they’re leaving us to start eating each other.”

Bailey laughed, but only a little bit.

“Richard, that’s the Knight, wasn’t so sure. Bless him, he thought they were waiting for us to come out and surrender,” said the old Sorceress, with love on her tongue, “he was always an optimist like that.”

It would have taken a fool to not see the echo of resemblance in the names of the old four with the current four. Bailey considered asking for the Sorceress’ name, but she didn’t want to interrupt the story.

“None of us dared leave the entrance hall. We knew we were done for, and the thirty of us left didn’t have the energy for hope. Fighting over a week of a siege will do that to anyone.”

Bailey’s hands were starting to itch for motion. She reached for the nearest weed and started to tug at it, to see how deep it went. It put up a pretty good fight for a weed. She had to respect it, even if she really needed it to go.

“But after the seventh quiet day passed, all of us eating rationed-out bread and dried fruits, that’s when they started banging on the door. They had a battering ram, yeah, but you know what’s funny? They didn’t knock it down with that. They had some hotshot pyromancer burn the door down.”

The previous Sorceress laughed, like she laughed at a long-scarred over trauma.

“Serves us right for using a wooden door.”

Bailey didn’t think it served anyone right.

“It was three in the morning when this started. The night watch folks jumped to action, while us morning people woke with a start. When we all set off all the traps we’d built into the room, we booked it out of there… and there I was, in my nightrobe. My robe was the one luxury I let myself keep through it all, you know, and there I was, paying the price for it. Heh.”

“Booked it to where?” Bailey asked.

“Upstairs, tighter quarters. We made the bastards fight for every speck of territory they gained. The guerilla war was back on.”

The weed in Bailey’s hands was in there pretty deep. As she tugged at it, it was bringing up all kinds of dirt and bits of crushed soil with it. She was listening, but her hands were fully engrossed in the pointless task ahead of her.

“Over that quiet week, you know, I’d been thinking. When I was studying magic, I’d learned a thing or two about immortality theory. People had all kinds of ideas, you know. But I was always fascinated by the idea we’re all like, music.”

“Music? What does this--”

Bailey cut herself off.

“Me, Richard, Annabella, and Laila, we ended up hiding in this here garden. Our people were scattered through the keep by then, hiding in every nook and cranny and taking out church troops. And that’s when I finally had enough.”

The Sorceress laid down in the dirt and pressed her hand into it.

“I thought, shit. We’d fought for a decade to build a model world that we might want to live in. How long did it take to sort feelings in our stomach? You know, what was liberation, what was just plain starvation. And – all of us, coming from absurdly bad backgrounds. Laila was put to work in the fucking anvil for writing mildly critical pamphlets! Richard was a church knight, and he was on the run. And Annabelle… man. Married to a notorious apocalypse preacher.

“And that was what broke me. We all suffered so much to survive, to build this garden together, to make something we could stand existing within! And here we were, about to die like dogs.”

Bailey looked to the Sorceress; her eyes were closed, and she was clutching some dead flowers in her stomach. She was laid out like a body in a coffin.

“So I tried... a spell.”

“What kind of spell?”

“A scream of rage.

“If we were music, playing until we were stopped short or played ourselves out… I thought, I’m going to scream. And that scream, that spell, it made us, all four of us echo. Maybe our love wasn’t enough, or we were just unlucky, or maybe the church was right, and we were corrupted and worthless wastes of life. But I decided, when I screamed, that I was going to preserve us,” the Sorceress said.

She was no longer lying down like a corpse at her funeral. She was up on her feet, towering above the cosmos in her own way.

“I guess it worked,” she said, “because that’s the last thing I remember. Anything that happened after, it’s gone. Maybe we found a way to live… but probably not.”

“That’s it? You don’t know?”

“Bailey, that’s what I’ve said for the past three hundred and fifty-six years. That’s it? I don’t get to know the rest?”

She laughed.

“That’s the warning. You can do whatever seems right, but there’s always a chance it just. Stops. Like. That’s it, goodbye, goodnight, there’s no more.”

“So?” Bailey asked.

“Now what do you mean by--”

And that’s when Bailey woke up.

She didn’t have time to figure all that out, because she had to get ready for the party. One didn’t impersonate the Sorceress with hours of prep work, after all.

As I was saying, said the voice from her dream, what did you mean by ‘so?’

“I’ll answer your question if you give me advice on how to look the part better.”

Deal.

 

***

 

On the other side of the party, temporally speaking, hell broke loose.

Hannah, in her years, had fought people before. When people talked shit about Henry and Lillian, she had a habit of breaking their noses, except when they were adults, and adults were to be respected. But that was then; Hannah was an adult now, and she knew for a fact that most adults were full of shit.

Like that Dorian guy.

Sending her girlfriend Bailey to ‘the trash dump’ was what she called ‘the last straw’. She made her opinion on that clear with her fist as it smashed against Dorian’s face. The impact made a satisfying crunch; blood issued forth from the wizard’s nose.

It took him a second to recover from that hit. But he didn’t quite ‘recover’, exactly. His head didn’t quite stop bobbing around, and he was clutching the side of his head like his intestines were leaking out of it. And, of course, the blood was flowing out his nose in a thin red stream.

Dorian tried to grab for her; but he grabbed about an inch off from where she really was, and she managed to jump back from him.

This left him wide open for Lillian, who grabbed him by the neck like a dog toy in her talons. In her human-ish dragon shape, having two hand-talons and two legs and a mere seven or so feet of height, she could throw him like a pebble.

“Where are they?” she asked, with a deep growl in her voice.

“Up yours, feathers.”

As it turned out, he didn’t bounce like a pebble did, he just sort of flopped onto the ground. Maybe it wasn’t Lillian’s best throw. He did make an interesting noise as he hit the ground, though.

But he didn’t stay down long… and the air in his hand was glowing.

The glowing was formless, at first, but it resolved itself into a long shape. A familiar long shape.

“Ugh,” he said, “why’s it got blood on it?”

He held, in his hands, Lord Gaius’ lance, as it was after taking a vacation in the Lord’s neck.

“Whatever. It’s a dragon slayer’s weapon, it’ll do.”

He brandished the lance and swung it around like a hammer. Hannah was ninety percent sure this was not the correct use of a lance, but she wasn’t interested in explaining this. She found it far more interesting to dodge out of the way, because he was swinging it around like a baton or a conductor’s wand.

Lillian backed off, too. She was perhaps the only person in the room who had training in weapons use; she once told Hannah that ‘An untrained wielder of a weapon is more dangerous to themselves than any other person,’ and so it was wise to let Dorian fuck up and stay back.

He lunged for Hannah, with the pointy end facing her. His swing was a little off, and he was clutching the orbit of one of his eyes, but it was still close.

“Stop it! Stop being two of you!”

Dorian jabbed the air near Hannah, and that time, actually managed to catch her. The bloodied point tore a thin strip of her blue dress off. The lance looked less like a weapon and more like a blood-spattered flagpole after that maneuver.

Being on the back foot like this was familiar to Hannah, and it made her feel beyond irritated. How often had this happened? Getting put on the defensive, being forced to dance around to avoid harm. It was bullshit.

She remembered, as she dodged another volley of jabs, the first time someone had truly put her on the defensive. It was about the time she first got a crush on Henry, so she must have been about ten or so. After church, her dad took her aside, and said, ‘I can see the moonflower growing in you, girl. You gazing at that…’

He then misgendered Henry. The memory of it was worse than whatever damage Dorian’s lance could do to her. Her father added, “We can catch this early. We can help you.”

“Why do I need help? I just like looking at (him).”
She threw herself to one side to avoid a jab in the torso.

“It’s… it’s insidious, isn’t it? It feels innocent, nice even, to feed that desire. But let it be known, girl, that the moonflower is the death of hope for a reason. First, you feed it with a short gaze, with a little crush. But it grows, and grows. If you don’t starve that hunger now, if you don’t get a handle on it…”

Dorian threw the lance aside and charged her with his fists. There was a wild look in his eyes, and wrath in the swing of his fist.

“You only get so much energy before you die. Like the sun, yes?”

Hannah met Dorian’s fists with her own. She punched him right in the face. She no longer had to play anyone else’s game. Hannah could fight back, even if it was a little later than she would have liked.

“...Yes.”

“This appetite will grow and grow, Hannah. If you spend all your life feeding your worst animal impulses, there will be no time to pray, no time to be a wife, no energy to bear children. And I would hate to see that happen.”

“Yes, sir. I won’t look at (Henry) anymore in church, sir.”

“Good.”

She punched Dorian not just in the face, but in the gut, and then also the face again. Hannah was good and angry, and she would let that ‘animal impulse’ carry her until she dropped dead. Dorian’s blood was warm and syrupy on her knuckles.

He was already thoroughly tired and concussed, but that round of blows dropped to the floor. Dorian was not knocked out, but he was also not really in any shape to be fighting. Diverting years of rage and pent-up desire for autonomy and power really worked wonders!

“Well done,” Lillian purred, “though we really do need him conscious.”

“He’s conscious, trust me.”

“Of course. Henry, are you having any luck with the machine?”

Henry said, “Uh… sort of. Can I get you two’s opinion here?”

 

 

 

***

 

They were on a mountain, that much was clear. The peak stretched out in the nearby distance, and there was a town near the base of it. The mountain was plateauing around them, with some outbreaks of hills (like the one she, Alice, and Emma were on top of).

And very close by was a collection of buildings… and an old fort. One of its walls was knocked down, and the keep of the center of it was missing. Not fallen apart, not in ruins, not there at all. Huh.

Neither of the three sisters said anything for a long, long time. They watched the clouds roll by in the sky, soft edges of white and hard edges of dark silver.

“You know what?” Alice asked.

No one answered.

“There are worse places to be stranded than here. This isn’t so bad, really.”

“Oh yeah? Name one place worse.”

“Emma, you are such a killjoy.”

Emma said, “Loudly and proudly.”

No one spoke up once again. More clouds passed. A light wind kicked up and blew sun-warmed air across Bailey’s face.

“Where are we, anyway?” Bailey, who found peace like that unnerving, asked.

“I don’t want to think about it,” Emma said.

“Good question,” Alice said.

Alice was looking around, as was Bailey. Emma was still laying down on the grass, moving only to pull shoots and blades of it out the dirt and rolling them through her fingers. It was damp, sweet-smelling wildgrass, the kind that swayed in the breeze.

“Wait…”

Alice pulled herself up, onto her feet. She was staring at the collection of buildings and straining her eyes, like she wasn’t sure whether they were an illusion or not. Bailey could have easily confirmed that no, they were the real deal.

“What?” Bailey asked.

No answer came. Alice, without a single word, began to walk towards the buildings. Her facial expression might be called ‘enchanted’ as much as it might be called ‘horrified’ or ‘disbelieving’. Whatever the case, she was walking towards the building like driftwood floating towards a shoreline.

Bailey said, “Hey, Alice, what’s going on?”

Because she was predictable as all hell, Alice didn’t say anything. Even when she was adrift in time and space, in an unknown location in a strange era, her reticence still held. This annoyed Bailey to no end.

“Emma, come on, we need to go after her.”

“Do we?” Emma whined.

Bailey grabbed at Emma’s arm, like a child trying to drag their parents away from church, and pulled. Emma grunted, and sank deeper into the wild grass and flowers. It was an unstoppable force vs. immovable object.

“I’m comfortable here. You go on ahead.”

“Emma.” The inflection upwards really sold the younger Thistle’s pleading.

“Ugh.” Emma rose up, obeying Bailey’s pull. “Fine. Let’s go.”

The two of them went stomping on after Alice.

Okay, no, Emma stomped. Bailey moved with a hesitant purpose. She called after Alice a few more times, but because life was full of annoying little things, Alice didn’t respond. The only conversation to be had was with the hum of the warm winds and the motion of the flowers.

The clump of buildings, the town, was close now. The buildings were somewhere between ‘ramshackle’ and ‘pretty decent, actually’. They were fusions of old wood, the remains of an older and more ancient town, and this new thing.

Bailey looked at it all and felt a stirring somewhere in her mind.

This is… Hmm. That’s the old fort…

What are you saying?, Bailey asked.

This place, whatever it is, is built on the ruins of my old home. Which was in turn built on the ruins of the Anvil, the Sorceress said.

Hmm.

It occurred that Bailey might want to bring that information up, but for the life of her she couldn’t bring herself to tell her sisters about her brain roommate. What if they didn’t believe her? What if they thought she was weird? Or…

They know you’re weird.

They know I’m weird, sure, but not ‘I have another person in my body with me’ weird, Bailey said.

Fair.

Alice had stopped walking, just ahead of the town’s main road. She was staring at the big sign next to the road. Her jaw was screwed shut, and she was tapping her left foot wildly, and her fingers were hyper-extended in a tight fan shape.

The sign was just far enough that Bailey couldn’t make out the words. It looked like a sign declaring a town’s name and population, perhaps? But what kind of town name would have Alice staring like that?

Emma, who had gotten ahead of Bailey, saw the sign, and her jaw fell open. She said ‘no’ a whole bunch under her breath, and her right foot was curled into the soft mountain soil. What possibly could have both her sisters staring at--

Oh.

Oh, Bailey saw, and Bailey knew.

It read, “Ancient Gulch Commune, pop. 23 45 65 76 92! All Welcome!”

“I knew it,” Alice said, “I knew I recognized this place.”

“Fuck,” Emma said.

 

***

 

Henry hadn’t the faintest clue how to operate the accursed machine. There were a lot of dials, a couple of big levers, and some truly unhelpful words engraved across the control panel. What did ‘AUX’ mean? What did ‘PRESSURE OUTFLOW’ do?

Hannah and Lillian came over and took a look.

“I figure the pressure outflow makes pressure flow out,” Hannah said.

“I concur.”

Even though that was in fact not at all helpful, Henry wanted to kiss the both of them for that, anyways. Though the question of how to properly kiss a dragon occurred to him… Lillian’s head was about the size of Henry’s whole torso, shoulders to hips, if not bigger.

That question would have to wait. A more important one loomed over him.

“Okay, so, I’m… I’m trying to figure out how we get Bailey and Alice and Emma back. And then also how to turn this thing off,” Henry said, “because to be honest, this thing feels like bad news.”

It rumbled and groaned before them, like a sick animal. The turning of gears inside its stomach was strained; the pipes along the outside of its corpus whistled. Henry regarded it as a veterinarian-in-training might regard a rabid bear.

Lillian said, “Oh dear,” and then came up by Henry.

“Don’t… touch it,” Dorian rasped, from his spot on the floor, “you’ll break it.”

“I won’t if you tell me where the off switch is,” Henry said.

Dorian laughed, in a stuttering sort of exhale. His hand was pressed up to his skull like it was the one thing keeping bone fragments from exploding out the side of his head, and his face was a smug glower.

“There is no off switch, idiot. This is the source of my power.”

He blinked out of existence, and blinked back a few feet away from his previous spot. One of the pipes of the great machine let out a metallic moan of pain, and a bit of fluid began to leak from it. It was an iridescent, watery substance, shiny like it was coated in oil.

Dorian fell over after teleporting, by the way.

“Don’t do that again,” Henry said.

But damn it, he did. He teleported once more, and that time, brought a section of the floor with him. The floor below looked strangely naked, without that patch of ground to cover it up. More oily fluid leaked out; in fact, the whole pipe was now spouting the stuff onto the stone under their feet.

For a long moment, all was quiet, other than the machine. It thumped and bumped along, and the liquid from the pipe kept on dripping and flowing. But there was no Dorian.

There was no Dorian when Lillian stalked around the perimeter of the room, as a cat stalked a nearby mouse might. There was no Dorian when Hannah called for him, with her bloodied fist curled up for action. There wasn’t even any Dorian when Henry went over to the discarded lance and kicked it.

No one dared declare them safe.

Some of the fluid sloshed at Henry’s boots. It was thick, like syrup, and took a bit of effort to step out of. It clung to his boot and made it shine in kaleidoscopic colors.

“I’m going to try to work on turning it off. Or something,” Henry said.

He made a move back to the machine.

And then Dorian appeared.

The wizard stood between Henry and the machine, protective as an inventor of their new killing machine. All in all, the man wasn’t looking so good.

There was the blood from his nose, and the nasty wound on the side of his skull. Those were old hat by then, but still noteworthy. But he was also looking exhausted. Dark bags hung under his eyes, and he was making slow, frustrated breaths.

His hands cracked into tense shapes, and Dorian cracked his neck and set his jaw tight.

“Play time’s over.”

And then, as he twisted his hand around, a piece of the tower’s wall broke off from the building, and Dorian launched the wall segment right at Henry.

The wall piece collided with him, and sent him flying. Henry got a really solid idea of what each individual brick was like, its weight and texture, as they smashed against his face and broke the replica armor pieces he was wearing off.

(“Should we get real armor?” Hannah had asked, before the party, “in case things go really bad?” “No, no,” Henry had said, like a doofus. “We’ll be out of the party before anyone has a chance to attack us.” “...If you’re sure.”)

In a stroke of extreme luck, the amazing flying brick wall ended up knocking him out the tower window, instead of smashing him against a wall and crushing him and making him into Knight-flavored wine.

The downside of flying out the window was obvious, though. He hit the quiet ground of the bubble at great velocity, from three stories’ worth of height. A fall like that was liable to kill anyone.

But it didn’t. When he hit the ground, the ground bounced beneath him, like a mattress. Or like the inside of a bubble.

He looked out to the edges of this bizarre little hole in reality, and he understood. It was a bubble in the most literal of terms, or an air pocket in dough, or whatever. It was a stable little gap surrounded by a greater mass that would be more than happy to fill it back in.

So when Dorian blasted out another wall of his tower with a burst of magic, and levitated out through the new express door from the third floor to the first, Henry stood his ground.

“How are you not dead? Why can’t anyone do what they’re supposed to?”

“I’ve never been a big ‘rules’ guy,” Henry said, “sorry to disappoint.”

Dorian flicked his hand shut, into a vague fist shape, and a mass of blasted-out stone from the tower coalesced above him. Each bit of brick had been sharpened by the blast, made into a pointed projectile that could probably skewer Henry’s heart right out of his chest.

“Be careful, there,” Henry said.

“I don’t think you understand what’s happening here.”

“No, no. I know you could kill me easily. But those look awfully sharp…”

Dorian, through a concussion, a potential skull fracture, a bloody (broken?) nose, and a hateful glare, said, “Yes! They are! Thank you for noticing!”

Henry smiled.

“You’re welcome.”

“What are you smiling about?”
He could see the shape of Lillian, stalking out from the tower’s attractive new balcony view. Her talons gripped the stone without so much as a sound, even as she climbed.

“If you miss me with any of those projectiles, you risk popping this bubble thing we’re in. Which I don’t think you want.”

“Please. I’ve shored this thing up enough,” Dorian said, “you don’t know anything.”

“Then please, explain it to me at great length. Spare me no detail. Tell me how you did it, O great genius, O grand tinkerer.”
Dorian narrowed his eyes (he had to recenter his focus a few times to narrow directly at Henry instead of directly near him). Behind him, Lillian was up on the tower’s roof, finding purchase for a good pouncing spot.

“You’re stalling,” Dorian said.

“What for?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

Henry took great pleasure in making him wait. If only the great genius had thought to turn around and look behind him.

Oh well.

“A dragon to pounce on you and ruin your day.”

“Wh--”

The wizard was too busy being pounced on to say anything more.

***

“So, serious question. Now what?” Emma asked.

The three of them stared at the town, stared at the sign. Emma had not felt this lost, this confused, in… a very long time. She had spent her twenties listless and unmoored, and it looked like her thirties were shaping up to be less ‘listless’ and more ‘confounding and terrifying’.

Dorian had sent them here? Sent them then? ‘The garbage bin,’ he called it. Weird. Foreboding? Eh. Who knew.

“I say we leave,” Alice said, “we try our luck at Ancient Gulch and see if we can figure a way back.”

“Are you serious? No. I say we go in and see if we can at least get some help,” Bailey replied.

“Ah, yes. ‘Excuse me, we’re a bit lost? Can you point us to--”

Alice never got the chance to finish sassing Bailey again, because Emma was gesturing for her to shush. She was doing it rather frantically, like if Alice didn’t shut up, disaster and disarray were forthcoming.

As it turned out, it would, because there was a woman and two little kids behind them.

“Hello,” she said, “I haven’t seen any of you before!”

The woman was tall, with a contralto voice, and brown hair that played at being red. It fell down in waterfalls of loose curls, around the sides of her freckled face, down her long black dress, over her shoulders. Her face was dominated by a welcomingly large nose and dark green eyes.

Emma knew that face. Emma had mourned that face, cursed that face, wished she could forget she ever saw that face.

“I’m Ozma Thistle,” said her birth mother. “I’m not much of a welcome wagon, but I figure you girls ought to come on in with me, and I can get you to someone who can get you set up here.

“Uh… yes. That would be great,” Bailey said, after a not insignificant hesitation, “and I’m… I’m Bailey. These are my sisters, Alice and--”

Emma cut in, but it was too late.

“Emma,” Bailey finished.

One of the two kids with their mother spoke up, in a voice that was willful and possessive.

“You can’t be Emma! I’m Emma. I picked mine! Get your own.”

Oh shit.

Little Emma was about tall enough to reach the top of a stove without a stool. Her hair was dark and pulled into a tight series of braids, with little wildflowers tied into some of the more robust knots. She wore an orange dress that matched the flowers in her hair, and she looked at Emma with an incredulous gaze, like the way she might look at a robber breaking into her bedroom.

Alice stifled a laugh, but she failed at stifling it. Emma felt the urge to throw something heavy at Alice, but there was nothing to throw.

“Dear,” Ozma Thistle turned to little Emma, “sometimes, other people also have the same name as you.”

“Hmph,” Little Emma said.

The other kid, Little Alice, was staring at Alice, as a cat might stare at a wall. She had hair down to the bottom of her neck, and was dressed in a shirt and colorless trousers. She seemed… sad. She was presenting as a boy, still, still thought she was a boy, and Emma’s heart hurt for her.

Emma, Alice, and Bailey’s mother turned to Little Alice, and said Alice’s deadname, which the three adult Thistle sisters pretended they didn’t hear. And then, Ozma said, “Can you not stare at the nice lady? She looks like she’s been through a lot, and we should try and welcome her and her sisters.”

“Okay,” Little Alice said.

Ozma Thistle patted her on the shoulder, and directed her two young daughters to go on ahead into town. Little Emma obliged, and took off like a shot, while Little Alice paused for a second. She regarded Big Alice with some skepticism.

“Is there something on my face?” Alice asked, “You have to tell me if there is. Bailey wouldn’t tell me if there was because she’s too polite, and Emma here would tell me there was just to fuc-- mess with me.”

“No.”

And then, Little Alice walked, not ran, down the main drag into the Ancient Gulch commune. Would it have been gauche to laugh at Alice a little? Perhaps. But Emma laughed a little, anyways.

Ozma smiled at Emma and her sisters.

“Sorry about that. They’re six, and they’re not used to strangers,” Ozma said, with a laugh, a laugh that Emma knew she sometimes did when she was exasperated.

“I get it,” Alice said.

“We’re an odd crew,” Emma added.

“So are we! You’ll fit right on in. Come on, let’s get you in town.”

So, following behind their mom like a bunch of overgrown ducklings, the three of them entered the commune.

What hit Emma more than anything else was the scent. It smelled like… home. Sausages cooking on an open fire, sweet grass scents, and allergenic wildflowers. Each inhale was a punch to the face of nostalgia.

The buildings, as chimeric and shabby as they were, held up pretty well. The public house, (‘Publick House’, it was labeled’), looked like three buildings stuffed into one single frame. Emma’s birth mother gestured for the three of them to go on into the place.

But before Emma could go in, she caught Bailey’s gaze. Bailey, sweet Bailey, awful Bailey, was staring at someone with naked hostility, the kind born of true hatred. Emma followed the gaze to its target and--

It was Emma’s… dad? No. That word didn’t feel right. She tried to find a better word, but none came to her.

Whatever the case, the person who had/would go on to raise Emma was there, in a white dress. Little Emma and Alice were both clumped up with her, with Little Emma vying for their attention with things like, “Laura! Hey Laura! Laura!! Ms. Lauraaaaa.” Little Alice would poke Little Emma and say, “Stop being annoying,” to which Little Emma would say, “Laura’s fine with it!”

Little Alice would say, “You’re annoying me, though,” which was just about the most Alice thing she could have said.

That conversation between the twins was background, though.

“Laura, thank goodness, can you look after them for a second? We have some newcomers here from…”

Ozma Thistle turned to the three sisters, “Where did you three blow in from?”

Both Alice and Emma went silent. There was a way to navigate the treacherous conversational waters without spilling the whole ‘from the future’ deal, but…

“Watermilfoil,” Bailey said.

Laura, or Emma’s parent, or whoever the fuck she was, Emma did NOT have the mental space to process that, made a face at that.

“That’s a long way, friends,” she said.

Bailey restrained a look of hatred towards Laura and said, “Yes. Yes it is.” Her smile was too perfect, too pearly and shiny, and when she spoke through her teeth, it made the whole effect quite unnerving. Laura noticed this effect, and in a tiny way, shrunk from Bailey’s gaze.

“Well… Ozma, yes, I’ll look after them for a second. Go get them settled in.”

Before Laura turned around and finally paid Little Emma some mind, she caught Emma’s gaze, and met it. There was a touch of… recognition? in Laura’s look. Her eyes flicked from Little Emma, and back to Emma, and then Laura turned away and shepherded the young twins into the throng of the commune.

Bailey watched Laura go, and frowned. Ozma watched Bailey watching Laura, with an intense curiosity.

“You know her from somewhere?”

A hand found its way to Bailey’s shoulder. Was it Alice or Emma’s? Either way, it was a hand of warning, a hand of ‘watch your mouth, we’re in dangerous territory here.’

“Laura? Yes, you could say that. From… another time. Even if she doesn’t know me…”

“Why don’t you come in, then?”

Bailey’s angry gaze faltered, and she went on in. Alice followed behind her, and Emma stood there for a second. Now that she was actually back in time, changing the flow of events, it felt a lot scarier than she thought it might. Sure, it wouldn’t actually overwrite the world she knew, it would only split off another tree branch of reality, but…

This was nothing like her plan. Her plan to just, you know, impassionately change things and step in like nothing was wrong. But, as it turned out, the past was not an object a person could engage with without emotion. Like the place one grew up in, there was an attachment.

So there the three sisters were, sitting at a table in a bar in a strange time and place. None of them drank, while their mother had a bit of whiskey. But… wasn’t she…

Wasn’t she either pregnant or pregnant-to-be with Bailey? This nudged at the insides of Emma’s skull, like there was some detail she was forgetting. Alice caught her eye, and shot a look at the whiskey.

Good, at least Emma wasn’t alone in that worry.

Wait, Emma was agreeing with Alice about something? On the same side of her and relieved about it? Ew. Yuck. What happened to their nice, simple, blood feud? She made a mental note to tell Alice her fashion sense was two decades past being interesting to look at, or something.

“So,” Ozma Thistle said, “what’s the truth, here?”

What?

“The… truth,” Alice said.

“Explain,” Emma put in.

Their mother laughed, and drank a bit of her whiskey.

“I saw you three, up in the hills. You appeared out of a hole in the sky. And here you are, looking like grown versions of my kids. I’ve had my share of weird shit in my life, but this takes the cake. So, out with it.”

Bailey spoke up, “We--”

Alice clamped her hand on Bailey’s shoulder, tight as could be.

“Don’t.”

“We’re already--”

“Bailey. Every second we’re here… Mo… Ms. Thistle.”
Ozma Thistle squinted.

“Mm-hhm?” she asked.

“I’m so sorry. We’ll just be on our way. Apologies for the inconvenience.”

Alice stood up and slid her chair back in. She did so with great haste, with the speed of a bat out of hell. Emma matched the move, and Bailey protested.

“Come on! We--”

“No, you come on. Let’s go.”

There was a battle of wills between Alice and Bailey. It was conducted entirely through their eyes, through their gazes. To Bailey’s credit, she was the Sorceress, or something? So she had a will of flame and thorns. But the funny thing was, Alice was her older sister, and so she won by default.

“Fine. Ms. Thistle?”

“Yes?”

“Watch Laura,” Bailey said, “watch her closely. Be careful.”

And then, indulgently, she said, “I love you,” and then stood up, and followed Alice and Emma out of the building.

***

The return to the hill was silent and fuming. Most of the fuming was Bailey’s… but only most of it. Alice couldn’t help but fume. She thought Bailey was, to be perfectly honest, smarter than this. Playing with reality was bad news. This knowledge was obvious to anyone with proper magical training; the fact that Bailey didn’t know or didn’t care was a bad sign for her actual understanding of magic.

When they were back at the hill, the one they had been deposited onto from Dorian’s weird spell, Bailey spoke up.

“What the fuck!”

“Bailey…”

“No. Uh uh. No. I won’t stand for this. Explain what the hell we’re doing here,” Bailey said.

She stood before Alice, resolute in demand, as only a Thistle girl could.

“We’re not fucking up time, that’s what. Things happened a certain way. Let it be.”

“We’re here, though. The fact that we’re here changes things whatever we do. It’s not ideal, but… I don’t know. We have a chance to do something worthwhile, if we’re going to be stuck here.”

Of course, Bailey hoped against hope that they weren’t all stuck in the past, with maybe a year before things were to go terribly wrong in the commune. But as usual, someone had to take up the reins and make a decision, even if every single option was an awful one.

“This was Emma’s plan, Bailey. And we both know Emma’s plan sucked.”

“Hey!”

Emma’s objection was ignored, but the point was still made. The key difference was this was an improvisation to deal with the bad situation in front of them, while Emma’s scheme was to… what, kill and replace another version of herself with a happier life? Bailey was a little unclear on that.

Whatever the case, the point was roundly ignored. Bailey spoke up again and gestured at the hill.

“So, okay, Alice. What do we do? Do we just sit here on this stupid hill and hope it all works out? Because things don’t just work out without someone doing something.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” Bailey said, “That I’ve been doing the heavy lifting for both of you, emotionally and otherwise, for a long time.”

Wait. Bailey didn’t mean to say that part out loud. Yes, it was true, yes, it sucked, but…

“What… what does that have to do with anything?”
Well, in for one coin, in for ten….

“Fuck, Alice. Everything. Any opening up you’ve done has been because I begged you to tell me something, anything. You’ve got all this knowledge about what life was like before it all went to hell, and you wouldn’t tell me any of it. And then!”

Once she started, Bailey found it quite difficult to stop. Like water coming to fill in a leaking boat, or air rushing in to fill a displaced object, her grievances spouted out from her and painted time with grief beyond her own reckoning.

“And then, boom. Here we are. In the time before I was even born. I have a chance to see what it was all like! To see what Mom and Dad (and Dorothy, who I had no inkling about until you randomly dropped that on me) were like before their lives were reduced to a smoking ruin. This is dangerous, sure, this is a bad idea. But!”

(“You didn’t tell her about Dorothy?” “Shut up, Emma, you didn’t tell her either.” “Yeah, because I figured she’d know.”)

She was running out of steam, but she had at least another sentence left in that rant.

“But nooo, you have to keep the secret all to yourself.”

Okay, yeah, that was it. She took a breath for the first time in over a minute, and retired to sit on a rock. Bailey picked up a loose stone and threw it off the hill. The sound of it hitting the ground reverberated around the hills, singing a percussive song of rage. After all, where the voice faltered, songs of natural rage would do.

She was onto her fifth stone before Alice made a noise, and on her seventeenth when Alice finally said a coherent sentence. When that happened, on stone number seventeen, Alice came and sat on the rock next to her. Before Bailey could throw her nineteenth rock, Alice took her arm in her hand and sighed.

“That’s not why I… Bailey.”

“What?”

Like always, Alice didn’t say anything. Bailey let rock nineteen hit the ground and echo its unsung voice while she focused her ire towards Alice.

“What? Come on. Alice, hit me. Say it.”

Alice let Bailey’s arm go, and sighed.

“I… Yeah, okay. I’ll talk.

“Bailey, all these memories have ever been to me is a burden. All that remembering when Mom and Dad weren’t overworked, depressed wrecks ever did was make me resent them for changing… which isn’t fair! I know, I know, I know. But I don’t talk about it because… I don’t think about it. Thinking about this, about the commune? It hurts. This was the labor of dozens of people, loving and living and building, and what did they get for it?”

She didn’t leave time for Bailey to answer one way or another.

“It all burns. It all ends. It's a tragedy. And do you know what marks a true tragedy?”

“No.”

“Inevitability, Bailey. A fatal flaw in the initial construction that makes a hero and their efforts doomed.”

Alice shifted her weight around on the rock, and looked Bailey right in the eye. This was comfortable for exactly nobody, but Bailey would take it, if it meant her sister would keep talking.

“I’m sorry I’ve been a real piece of shit. I know I haven’t been a good sister, but I don’t know that I can be a good anything. As hard as I tried to be, I’m not Mom. I jump between hobbies and jobs constantly; I can’t focus on something, unless I focus too hard and forget to eat or sleep. I flunked out of a dozen schools as a kid, I never had a friendship last longer than a year. I am a human shipwreck.”

Bailey considered all that for a time.

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“No!”

Bailey placed a rock in Alice’s hand, and took one in her own. She threw her twentieth rock, which bounced its way down the hill nicely. Alice threw hers, and the rock just plopped down where it landed. When Alice took another rock up to try again, Bailey spoke up.

“Alice, shipwreck or no, you’re my sister, first off. And second? You can be good. You can be kind, and caring, and thoughtful. I’ve seen you do it.”

“I have, too,” Emma put in.

“See? Even the girl you’re in a death feud with agrees!”

Emma smiled, and demonstrated her own rock throwing technique. She did it underhand, which was a big mistake. Bailey would have corrected her on it if it weren’t for the ongoing conversation.

“Look, I get it. The three of us, we’re a bunch of fuckups, right? We’re angry, we’re bitter, we’re stubborn and unpleasant and we swear too much and we ask too much of the world. But… I don’t know. I think the real problem with that stubbornness is that we’re, I dunno, so stubborn we never talk about how we’re feeling. You say it hurts to remember, yeah?” Bailey asked.

“Yeah.”

“You can share that hurt. Alice, I wouldn’t be much good as a sister if I wasn’t willing to help bear that burden.”

Alice threw another rock. It flew fast and true and landed on its jagged side.

“And this goes for you, too, Emma. You’re hurting, and it’s totally okay to express it.”

“No, I’m--”

And in unison, both Alice and Bailey said, “Yes, you are.”

Emma thought about that for a second.

“Okay, I am. But…”

She threw a stone.

“I don’t understand sisterhood. I’ve been functionally an only child… hell, I was really the only child in my life as a kid. None of the Order kids would even look at me. You know, I used to just… hide someplace, and wait until someone noticed I was gone.”

“Did they?” Alice asked.

“Sometimes. Usually it was my… d--”

Emma caught herself.

“Laura, but they, she, would only come get me after the day of work with the Order was over. Occasionally I would hide someplace like a closet and a servant would end up finding me and shoo me away, but that was sort of it. Most days, when I hid, I had to be the one to decide to come back out.

“And now that I say it out loud… fuck. I’ve been re-enacting that same dynamic with you two. You know, Bailey, when I was telling you off at Alice’s party, my main thought was, let’s see if she comes after me this time. I figured you wouldn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because of the three of us, I’m no good.”

Bailey set her thirtieth rock down, hard, and stood tall.

“Uh-uh. No. Not letting this go on. I’m hereby banning self-deprecation from this conversation. It’s an unproductive line of reasoning, and an unhelpful way of going about things.”

“Fine. Would an ‘I feel’ statement be better?”

“They’re on thin ice -- hey, wait. I’m doing the emotional heavy lifting again,” Bailey said, “damn it. This is what I meant earlier.”

Both of Bailey’s sisters made faces at that.

“Yeah, damn, I see what you mean. Sorry, Bailey. I think I’ve been a real jerk,” Emma said.

“Oh, you think?” Alice shot back.

But then, Alice sighed.

“Fuck. There I go being an asshole again. Sorry, Emma. And sorry, Bailey, I’ve really taken your whole… ‘Emotional maturity’ thing for granted.”

“Is it okay if I’m actually not at all okay with that? And maybe a little bit bitter about it?”

Alice went back to throwing rocks; Emma stopped to look at Bailey.

“Yes,” Emma put in, “you’ve been stuck in the crossfire of two of the most bitter, stubborn, petulant girls in history for a long time, and left in the dark about the why. I think, all told, you can be as mad as you damn well please. Hate us, even.”

“Yeah. You deserve a bit of rage,” Alice said.

The conversation could have ended there. Bailey could have taken that progress and been satisfied… but… no. There was something she needed to say, to get out, before she lost her nerve.

She said, “See, I’ve got more than ‘a bit’. I’m… nothing but rage. Some days, I wake up, and I feel nothing but anger. Angry at the church for keeping us down, angry and Mom and Dad for dying, angry at you two, angry at everything. It’s a shapeless thing, you know? A blob of incoherent fluid stuck in my lungs that expands and contracts like a muscle.

“I’m pissed off, all the time. I’m pissed off that we live in a world where even wanting things to be better is a crime. I hate that our imaginations are so fucking shackled to an inhuman system that just keeps on going, not matter how bad people think it sucks. And it’s hard not to… give up. Turn away from it and say, fuck this, this world isn’t good enough for me, I quit. Because that’s usually what my anger wants; it wants out. Like a caged animal.

“And I’ve felt that way about our sisterhood, this family of ours. Just walking away and letting it all burn. But I don’t…

“I don’t want that. Not really. I’m just tired, and my imagination can’t see a world where we’re all getting along and happy.”

And that was when Emma did something so alien and strange for Emma to do; she wrapped Bailey up in her arms. Bailey thought, for the first couple of seconds, that this was an inept attempt at murder, perhaps strangulation. But, as time went on, she realized that this was indeed… a hug. She hugged her sister back, as fiercely as she could manage.

“Hey, Alice, get in on thi--” Emma didn’t get a chance to say the rest, because Alice wrapped both sisters in a hug that squeezed the air out of the both of them. Had either of them had the air in their lungs, they might have said ‘ouch’.

“Whatever happens,” Alice said, “however we make it through this, I want to make it plain. A lot of terrible shit has happened to us all. Some of us have been pretty nasty and cruel to each other. But I… love you two.”

Emma made an ‘ick’ noise, and Bailey chided her for it with but one glance.

“Maybe I could ask for better sisters. Maybe there is another version of the three of us that’s not so fucked up and mean and stubborn. But I don’t care. Emma, Bailey, you’re really all the family I’ve got. And it’s not because of blood, even.”

“What else, if not blood?” Emma asked.

“The bonds we’ve built. The ties between us. Even when we hate each other, that’s a bond. Dad used to say we nearly strangled each other to death in the womb, you know? With the umb--”

This destroyed the hug. Emma shoved Alice to the ground, with an expression somewhere on the spectrum of ‘bemused’ to ‘disgusted’. Alice hit the ground with a devilish grin and a laugh like, ‘Heheheheheh’. As much as she wanted to, Bailey couldn’t begrudge Emma for the shove.

Just because Alice had a lead stomach didn’t mean the rest of them were down for hearing that.

“I do not want to think about that, you weirdo.”

Alice just laughed some more.

“Besides,” Emma put in, “baby me would have kicked your ass. If anyone is strangling anyone in utero, it’s me strangling you. You’re skinny as a twig and about as strong as one, too.”

“Oh, would she? I don’t think she would, honestly. Plus, we’re identical! You’re not exactly a thick cut of steak yourself.”
“I know she would. I’ve always been the feisty one; you’ve always been the quiet one.”

Both twins laughed, and Bailey shook her head. They were truly the weirdest fucking human beings she had ever met. And, because of this, she loved them deeply. She was blessed with her sisters; she was cursed with them.

It was only when Emma asked Bailey why she was crying that Bailey felt tears running down her face. Once asked, though, the torrent came. She wasn’t even crying because she was sad. She was laughing her ass off as tears ruined what remained of her makeup, as they ran down and then off her face.

“This is all I wanted,” Bailey said, “this is the only thing I ever was asking for.”

“What, Alice saying gross shit?”
“No! Us being able to talk.”

Emma laid back in the grass, and smiled a little.

“Yeah… I guess this is all I wanted, too. I used to dream about you two coming to play hide and seek. Finding me in some cave or crack in a rampart.”

“You guys are dorks,” Alice said, “real grade-a losers.”

“Oh, like you’re any better.”

A pause settled in between them. For the first time in a long, long time, all three Thistle girls exhaled breaths they didn’t even know they were holding.

“If either of you have kids,” Alice said, after a long time, “I’m going to be just the worst aunt, by the way. I will spoil them so rotten.”

“You’ll have to spoil your own. Or Bailey’s. Kids aren’t on my agenda. Sure, would I like a husband? Yeah. But children? Ehhhhhh I don’t know about that,” Emma replied.

Both twins looked at Bailey. Bailey looked away from both of them, because what the hell else was she supposed to do?

“I’ve barely started dating my partners. Give me a break!”

They said no more on the subject out loud, but their shared smirk said it all. Bailey found herself thinking second, third, fifty-seventh thoughts about having two sisters. Unfortunately, it was too late. She had too many sisters, and she would simply have to pay them back for their insolence.

Before someone could say, “So what happens now?”, they saw someone approaching.

He was a prim man, dressed in a duster so sanitary you could eat dinner off of it, with hair tied up in a little knot. His eyes were deep and dark, and he had one of those faces that never stopped moving. Sometimes, his mouth would curl for the hell of it, or his eyes would crinkle.

“Ho there!”

Emma bit down to keep herself from speaking; Alice tried and failed to pretend not to see him.

“Hello!” Bailey said to her father, “can we help you?”

“Well, see, Ozma said… well, Ozma seems to think…”

He toyed with a glove, taking it off, putting it on, sticking his thumb in the pinky hole, that sort of thing.

“She can explain it better than me,” he said, brimming with love for Ozma Thistle, from toe to tip, “but I’ve been sent to invite you three to dinner, to sort a few things out.”

Bailey would do evil, evil things to taste her parent’s cooking again. When all else about life had been unpredictable and awful, when the whole world was tents, sleeping in guest rooms, and hiding in basements, Patrick and Ozma Thistle’s cooking remained the same. The ingredients varied, the quality of the stove (or campfire or whatever) varied, but it always tasted good. It had actually taken Bailey a long time to start eating food beyond what either they or she had made herself.

“I’m going.”

She fully expected her sisters to complain, to raise a fuss, to tell her she was wrong. They didn’t.

“Sure, yeah,” Alice said.

“When?” Emma asked.

“Oh, in a bit. You’re welcome to come by the house and get settled in in the meanwhile, though.”

***

Lillian thrilled in the hunt, apparently. As she sailed through the air and pounced on the annoying gnat known as Dorian, she felt a deep kind of joy, of power, of finally being able to do something. Being an Inquisitor, on top of being an inherently unjust job that relied on awful power structures, was so restrictive. An Inquisitor was not an animal with needs or desires; an Inquisitor was a living instrument of the church. They were to prune the diseased branches of the tree, cutting out the useless and nakedly corrupt, all without ever examining the roots.

Maybe one dragon alone wouldn’t be tearing the whole tree out. But the talons and the wings and the size offered a great deal of leverage.

Dorian was kindly demonstrating that leverage for her by remaining pinned to the ground below her.

“Let me go, you rabid animal,” he hissed.

Dragons, being birds… or reptiles? Both? There was a great deal of debate about how to classify dragons in the greater animal taxonomy…

The point was, dragons were not susceptible to rabies.

She held him down and studied the rage on his face. The layer of blood from his nose had dried over his upper lip and his cupid’s bow, deep crimson and cold. His eyebrows were twisted in hateful angles (definitely greater than ninety degrees. Where was a unit circle when she needed one?), and his mouth was frozen in fury.

“Can you even understand me? Or are you just a dumb creature, some mutant half-thing? Do you even remember humanity, you malformed pile of feathers?”

“I do. I founnd it rather disappointing,” Lillian said.

“I bet you never were a human,” he spat. “I bet you were always some thing in a vague human shape. Arms, legs, a mouth. A mouth that ate and ate and never bothered to give back to society.”

Lillian snorted and chirped a laugh.

“What interest have you in society?”

“I want to rule it, that’s what. It’s inevitable. I can see the line from here to there. And it starts with this.”

With a might of powerful magic, he tore jagged chunks of stone out of the tower’s facade, and launched them Lillian-ward. On contact they were sharp and cruel, blunt sharpnesses that cut at the skin beneath her feathers and scutes. She was fairly certain the wetness at her side was a trickle of her blood.

It took a second for the pain to register as pain, but when it did, she let out a screech. Each sharp brick lodged into her flesh was an explosion of pain, a hot welt of angry nerves and pain receptors. Lillian’s leg hurt very very much, so much that she wasn’t standing anymore.

Dorian, now free and smug about it, said, “You aren’t the only ones who can stall, morons.”

With a pained heave, Lillian brought herself back on all fours. Muscles she didn’t even know she had hurt. She trembled in pain, but she would be damned if she didn’t get back up anyway.

“I hate you, you puny little wizard,” she hissed.

The burst of cold air out of her mouth caught Dorian good and off guard. He clutched at himself as icicles formed over his extremities; he made a pained groan as frostbite gnawed at his fingers and nose.

It was then that Henry and Hannah caught up with them.

“Dorian. I hope you know just how bad you’ve fucked up,” Hannah said, “because if not, you are about to learn the hard way.”

She picked up a piece of exploded tower in her hand, and smacked it against her open palm. Dorian, in response, pulled one of the icicles off of his arm and held it out like a knife.

“Bring them back and we can all walk away,” Henry said, rubbing at the friction burns on his face. He made an ‘ah’ sound of pain when he touched them, but kept doing it anyway.

“Over my dead body. The garbage stays in the garbage bin.”

“Your funeral,” Henry shrugged.

If only any of them had thought to look behind them. Had any of them looked behind them, towards the membrane of the pocket world, they would see a chunk of stone lodged in it… and the rush of oily fluid flowing from the crack.

To wrench an air pocket in a grand cosmic sea was a dangerous feat, after all. And the grand cosmic ocean was more than eager to flow and reclaim the space.

***

The walk down from the mountain was a long and contemplative one.

Alice had always wondered why her parents never moved in with the commune officially. Sure, they had calls out to Ancient Gulch, but it would have meant fewer trips up and down the mountain…

And there she was, walking behind her (alive) father, and she could ask. It would be easy to say the words, to say, ‘Hey, doctor, why live in the town when you could live where all your friends are?’

But that was the thing. Talking and expressing her thoughts was hard. In her natural state, Alice could go a whole day saying maybe a dozen words.

It wasn’t that she couldn’t do it; not usually, anyways. Most of the time she could speak and it wasn’t even that difficult. But turning her thoughts and feelings from concept to language was such a chore. She wanted everyone to just understand exactly what she meant and wanted it without having to go through all that effort.

Plus, she wasn’t always good at speaking. She recalled being a kid and going days without saying a word. Then, as a teenager, her already on-thin-ice voice betrayed her by dropping away like a trap door panel beneath her feet.

Sure, she could talk a lot now, but it was only after extensive voice training that she could do it. And even then, it was an inefficient way of communicating.

But clearly, she needed to figure out something. Her failure to communicate had hurt Bailey badly, and that was unacceptable. Something had to change.

The distant shape of Ancient Gulch resolved itself into a closer one. Alice couldn’t have forgotten it if she tried.

The city’s grand cathedral was the tallest building in the city, and its huge spire pricked at the sky like a sewing needle to the sky’s skin. The second tallest was city hall, situated right next to the cathedral; some argued that the cathedral was just another government building. They argued it very quietly and away from holy ears, though.

Outside that central plaza, the buildings got shorter and sprawled outwards. Residential and commercial areas grew out of the landscape like clusters of mushrooms, in organic clumps of shop, house, house, apartment complex, cafe, shop, and so on.

As the procession out of time entered the town proper, she was hit by a wave of nostalgia straight to the nose. The wafting scent of a bakery punched her in the face with the sheer power of the memory.

The scent smelled like the small hours of the morning, after Mom and Dad got off work, going to eat the freshly-out-of-the-oven bread and pastries. Technically speaking, the bakery was closed during those hours, but the owner insisted, “Patrick, you gave me a kidney transplant when no one else would. I’d be dead without that. Sit down and eat some bread.”

And so they ate. Every week.

Until the week that Alice, the six month old Bailey, and their parents didn’t live in Ancient Gulch anymore; when they didn’t live anywhere but the road and the haunted hillsides.

But that was all yet to come. The one upshot of being stuck(?) in the past was that there was a lot less ambiguity about what was coming next.

“Alice,” Bailey nudged, “Alice. We’re here.”

“What?”

“I said we’re here. The house is right there. Are you ready to go in?”

Alice looked ahead of her; a house was there.

But it wasn’t just any house. This was the House. The place that had sheltered and loved her for seven years. This was the House that her dreams always returned to; this was the House that she had never really left.

Seeing it in a not-burned-down state was almost too much. Without thinking, she ran up to its rough stone facade and hugged it. She told it, the House, how much she missed it, how badly she missed the feeling of the grains of stone against her hand, how badly she yearned to jump on the bed and look out over the back garden.

Emma went up to the House too, and just sort of looked at it. Her face betrayed nothing. It didn’t ally with or support anything, either.

“Uh… wow,” she said, helpfully.

“Yes! Wow!” said Patrick Thistle, Alice, Emma, and Bailey’s alive father.

Alice snapped out of it and let go of the house. Doing that would certainly raise questions --  ‘Who are you and what does this house mean to you?’ ‘Why are you so weird?’ and other such queries.

“Let’s go inside,” Alice said, faster than she meant to.

Her father opened the door, and swept his arm in a ‘come on in’ gesture. This was a welcome and lucky reprieve for Alice, and so she walked into the House with a brisk step. Emma followed behind, and Bailey…

“Are you coming in?” said Alice, Emma, and Bailey’s dad.

“Yes. Yes, I am,” Bailey replied, after a moment.

Inside the house was blurry and weirdly hot on Alice’s face, like…

Oh, she was crying. How embarrassing!

 

 

***

 

How Henry and his partners were to truly neutralize Dorian was a puzzle, a puzzle that none of them had a chance to solve.

This was because a trickle of opalescent water was flowing beneath his boots. It was shining in greens, pinks, purples, reds, and silvers, the whole of the night sky glittering on the empty ground. Henry gaped at it--

Which left him open for Dorian’s assault. The mage brought his knife-icicle around and stabbed it Henry-wards, with fury in his voice. The knife missed Henry by a hair, but Dorian’s body made contact with Henry’s, and bowled both of them over.

Slick water found purchase in Henry’s hair and clothing, and as he strained to get Dorian off of him, it soaked his back and neck.

“You just had to ruin all of this, didn’t you? Couldn’t just,” Dorian grunted, and tried stabbing him again. Henry just barely grabbed the attacking wrist and held the knife back from his neck.

“Couldn’t just let me have this, could you?”

The knife was getting awfully close to the skin of Henry’s neck, and it was awfully cold. Such could be expected, but the reality of the frigid blade mere centimeters from his jugular vein was still a shock to the system.

“Hannah! Lillian!”

The call was swiftly answered, thank goodness. Hannah kicked Dorian in the already-concussed head; Henry wriggled out from underneath his quarry, and bucked him off when the wriggling didn’t suffice.

Back up on his feet, and sopping wet with shining water, Henry breathed in.

“We’re all doomed,” Dorian hissed, from his spot on the ground, “and it’s all your faults.”

Water was no longer trickling. It was lapping at the topside of Henry’s boots, licking at Lillian’s talon-knuckles, and soaking Dorian’s mage robe.

“We’re not doomed until we’re dead,” Henry said. “How do we get out of this?”

“You don’t. You drown, and you--”

Dorian clutched his head, and gurgled, as water found its way up his nose.

“We need you alive, bud, so I’m just going to--” Hannah grabbed him, and hoisted Dorian up over her shoulder. He raged against being grabbed, but he wasn’t in any shape to escape her clutches.

“Okay, back up to the death machine,” she said.

There was no argument there, except from Dorian. He rattled on about how they were all doomed and that it was too late. This was no help at all.

Henry and Hannah sprinted back towards the tower, as the water’s lapping sped up and found higher and higher spots on their legs to lick at. Henry felt his ankle and the inside of the boot grow soggy. As far as good signs went, that sensation ranked quite low, if Henry was totally honest.

 

***

 

The dining room of the house was like many others across the world, but Bailey’s heart hurt to see that particular one. Everything about it hurt to see, from the scuffed floorboards worn down from sliding chairs to the chipped vase full of mountain wildflowers.

Oh, and lest she forget, her alive mother, sitting in one of the dining room chairs.

“So. Welcome, welcome,” Ozma Thistle said.

Bailey looked at her sisters. They looked at the floor and the ceiling, but not at her.

Ozma took this as a sign to keep talking. She said,  “So, as you might imagine, I have questions. Considering the way you got here and all, plus. You look, each of you, related to myself and Patrick. So… I’ll start with the easy ones.”

She leaned forward in her seat.

“Who are you and why are you here, also, how are you here?”

Bailey moved to speak, but then shut up. She felt the curious gaze of her mother upon her, the look that examined and questioned, and felt herself getting nervous. What if her mother didn’t like what she saw? What if she had failed her parents, failed at being their Boy, their last chance at a son?

“You know what,” Patrick cut in, “I’ll make us all tea.”

Ozma smiled, but it was a smile that gave nothing away. She leaned back and beamed at her future-daughters. Did she know something? Or was this some grand bluff, to play them into giving away the truth?

“So. Watermilfoil.”

“Yes,” Bailey said.

“I hear it’s nice this time of year,” Ozma said, “but that it’s so much easier to live with it long by your backside.”

Was it? Bailey didn’t really like the idea of leaving the city behind. There was no telling how bad another move would hurt her.

“I like it,” Alice put in.

“You do?”

“It’s home, better and worse.”

A kettle hissed from the other room, with all the joy of a cat doused in boiling water. Bailey was pretty sure she’d heard that same sound from Alice’s kettle… maybe it was the very same one.

Even in the wake of tragedy, death, and fire, something material remained. 

“Hard to leave home, isn’t it?” Ozma asked, “I know I would be hard pressed to leave this house behind.”

Mysteriously, Bailey found herself sucking in air through her mouth and digging her hands into the table. She didn’t mean to! It was just that, well, there was a perfectly good (fiery and horrible) reason coming in, what a year?

Alice laughed. It was one of those laughs that pretended to be not-awkward, but it was not a great actor. She realized her laugh was a shoddy performer and had it thrown out of her theatrical company.

“So, what do you three do? Students, are you?”

“I’m a working witch,” Alice said.

“I’m a mage, but I’m looking to change careers now, I think,” Emma put in.

Bailey frowned, with Emma in her line of sight. “I’m unemployed.”

“My condolences.”

It was then that Patrick Thistle returned to the dining room with a tray in hand. Five cups of hot tea sat on the tray, each with a unique-but-similar floral print. He handed out a cup to each person in the room with a smile and a warning for the temperature.

“Thank you dear.” Ozma wrapped her hand around the handle of her teacup. “Now. Who the fuck are you?”

Who were they? Well, ma’am, the three of them were daughters of yours from the future, wait, no, what do you mean ‘get out of your house?’

Bailey’s hand wrapped itself around her teacup’s handle… in the same way that her mother was doing it. Fuck.

“We’re…”

Was there any use for secrecy then? They were already drinking tea (holding the teacups waiting for the liquid to cool, more like) and talking in their parent’s house, in a time and place that they couldn’t call home anymore. If each shift in causality was just another branch on the tree instead of a new draft…

“This is going to sound absurd,” Bailey said.

“Bailey--”

“I’ve got this, Alice.”

Bailey cleared her throat.

“Ahem. So. We fell out of a hole in the sky because we’re from the future. A future, not the future. We’re a little bit… stuck… here.”

Patrick Thistle’s eyes went from his tea to Bailey’s face. He considered her for a moment, before saying, “Yeah, I buy that.”

“What, just like that?”

“I have questions, but I accept the premise. It checks out. Can I guess at a few things?”

Bailey shrugged. Why not? She could correct any wrong guesses.

“You, Emma, bear a frightening resemblance to, get this, Mine and Ozma’s daughter, Emma. Now, if you’re from the future, I might take a stab and guess you are a grown-up her.”

What was the point in keeping secrets at all? Bailey felt her stomach and her heart shake hands in her bowels. Was the whole damned cosmos beyond surprise, save for immediate not-dead-in-the-present family?

“Dammit! Is it that obvious?” Emma asked.

“No, he’s just that good,” Ozma said.

“Flatterer.”

“It’s only flattery if it’s not true, my dear, and I only speak the truth.”

Emma made a gagging noise at that display. Perhaps love unguarded by layers of defenses and half-serious teasing was anathema to Emma Thistle’s fragile condition.

“What are you, five? They’re allowed to express affection,” Bailey said.

“So says the poly bitch with three partners.”

“Anyways,” Ozma said, perhaps eager to change topics, “if what you said before is true, and the three of you are sisters…”

She looked between the three girls.

“Tell me, do the three of you have any other siblings, living or dead?”

“No.”

“No brothers?”

Ah. Bailey saw where this was going. Time to face the music…

“No,” Alice said, “no brothers. Just us three sisters.”

“I was the holdout brother for a while. But it didn’t work out,” Bailey added. 

Ozma nodded, as if this all made perfect sense. It didn’t, of course, but that was her power. She could make any absurdities look nice and squared away with a confidant expression.

“So all three of you are…”

“Trans, yeah,” Bailey said, with some hesitation.

Like some kind of imp from the silliest depths of the goofiest underworld, Ozma made a high pitched ‘hmm!’ noise. It was a sound of mirth, like some grand joke had finally hit its punchline.

“Is… is that a problem?”

Patrick Thistle looked deadly serious and said, “No. Never. In this house, that is something worth celebrating.”

That… sounded too good to be true, if Bailey was honest.

“It is?”

The answer came instantly, as if the most obvious thing in the world, “Yes!”

He paused, and considered his cup of tea. With great care and caution, he took a sip of his tea. He hummed a light tune as he drank. It was a floaty, precise tune that his tenor voice carried joyously.

“I’m biased, of course, but my bias only makes me more correct. To create yourself is a beautiful, holy thing, more holy than the greatest cathedral.” He set his cup down.

Ozma rolled her eyes, the way only a total drama queen could, and said, “There he goes, waxing poetic again...”

“Am I wrong?”

“No, darling, never.”

She then added, with a wink to him, “Except when you are.” The whole sentence was punctuated with a kiss from Ozma to Patrick’s lips… or, at least, the side of his lips. They both sort of missed the mark, there.

Some key detail eluded Bailey. Her picture of what was happening there was incomplete, a painting missing its final coat, a story missing its first chapter.

Bailey gave her sisters an inquisitive look, the kind that said, ‘Do you know what’s happening here? Because I don’t.’ Neither Emma nor Alice helped her in any way. Once more, Bailey had to do everything herself.

“You’re biased? Biased how?” Bailey asked.

Whatever spell held her parents broke at that question. For some reason, they both looked at Bailey with curious expressions, like her question didn’t quite make sense.

“Well… you know. About Ozma and I here.”

“Know what?”

A lot of things happened, in the span of silence. Her parents looked to one another, mystified. The wind blew lazily through an open window, like the breath of a flutist on the holes of their instrument. The crack in the wall looked a little bigger and a little wetter than before.

Before Bailey could really focus on that strange gap in the wall, though, her father spoke up.

“That…”

“You really don’t know?” her mother cut in.

“No. Know what?”

Once more, there was a shared look between Ozma and Patrick Thistle. It was the sort of look that said, oh, hell, time to have this conversation. Ozma, her mother, was smiling an exhausted grin. Meanwhile, Bailey’s father was frowning, though not in anger.

“Do you want to say it, or should I?” Ozma asked.

“You do it.”

And then, with all the tact of bitterly overbrewed tea, she turned to Bailey and her sisters, and said, “Girls, we’re transsexual.”

Bailey was too stunned to speak, move, or think. Really? The whole time? And it never came up? Of course, it was their right to tell or not tell whoever they wanted to. But the fact that not once before their deaths did Bailey know that…

She had agonized over whether her being trans was a shame to them, like she was the poor bastard who had to be ‘the boy’ for the family so her sisters could be their true selves. How many a night had she tossed and turned over that fear?

Too many. Far too many. Though apparently ‘any at all’ was too many. Bailey couldn’t help but wonder if she could turn in all her nights of sleepless shame in for a free meal or something, because otherwise all that pain would have been a total waste.

Without skipping but one beat, Alice said, “Define ‘we’.”

Emma took a sip of tea, and betrayed no emotion in the motion of setting her cup back down.

“Myself and Patrick, of course,” Ozma said.

“Both of you?” Alice asked.

“Yes.”

“Since when?”

“Over half of my life,” Patrick said.

“Since some fool determined me male without asking first,” Ozma said, somewhere between humor and bitter disdain.

Emma interrupted this exchange with the raise of her hand. She had the look of a woman doing arithmetic on one side of her body, while the other side was writing advanced literary analysis.

All that to say, she was attempting some serious brain project.

“Wait. So. There are five people in this room,” Emma said.

Okay, maybe the brain project was a little less advanced than Bailey thought. At least, on the arithmetic side of the equation. Maybe Emma was more of an arts and literature type.

“Five cups of tea, five sitting at the table… I suppose so, yeah,” Patrick replied.

“And of those five… all of them are trans.”

Bailey had to suppress a ‘so what?’, because she was extremely used to being surrounded by trans people on all sides. But she was trying to be nice to Emma; any sass might reopen recently triaged wounds.

So instead, Bailey turned to Alice and whispered, “Is this another thing you neglected to mention?”

“Don’t look at me. I didn’t know.”

“Well,” Ozma Thistle said, “Now you do. How does dinner sound?”