Time was not on their side.

Dorian’s personal notes, the ones he kept in the drawer, would call this situation ‘the worst case scenario’ – flooding, the machine failing, intruders. It was a trifecta of trouble.

But the most pressing trouble to Henry was that Hannah, in the midst of the run back to the tower, tripped and fell face first into the rising waters. Everyone sort of panicked in response. It was an understandable reaction, really. Each bit of water that surged into the bubble was a second ticking away.

Henry ran back to her, spending precious seconds splashing his boots through layers of oil and water. In the process, he stepped right over Dorian. The wizard did not appreciate that, but he was a little too concussed to do much more than frown in Henry’s general area.

“Lillian,” he called, “grab D--”

Before he could finish his sentence, Lillian’s skittering form was next to him. Without another word, she grabbed Hannah in her foretalons, with a surprising gentle touch.

“I will take her to the tower. Handle Dorian as you will.”

“Alright, yeah,” he said.

That was probably for the best, but it still left Henry to carry Dorian. Henry shouldered the burden with a grunt. How in the hell did Hannah make lifting Dorian look so easy?

“It’s hopeless, you know,” Dorian said.

“Shut up.”

Henry trudged through the rising water with a waffling wizard whining the whole time. Most of the whining was on the themes of ‘Wow, it’s all over, I hope you have a will written,’ or ‘I hope you’re happy, because we’re all going to drown now.’ Henry disregarded all of this, even as the water was past his ankles. Wills were for people who planned on dying, after all, and he had no such intention.

The tower’s front door was identical to the tower he’d known and loved, the place he’d sneak off to and see Bailey, but here, in the bubble, it looked less friendly.

Henry knocked his shoulder into the door. This did nothing but make his shoulder hurt.

“You know, there’s this nifty thing called a ‘doorknob,’” Dorian oh so helpfully said; “it’s the shiny thing sticking out of the door.”

The one problem there was that Henry had no hands free, which complicated the use of the doorknob tenfold.

“If I set you on your feet, could you stay up?”

“I have a skull fracture and a concussion, what do you think?”

And after a moment, Dorian added, “And thanks for those. I went my whole life with a bruiseless brain and a skull in one piece, and now I see the wonders of…”
The fact that Dorian never shut the fuck up was really starting to get on Henry’s nerves. And seeing as there were a lot of things bothering him, such as the disappearance of his girlfriend and the rising waters halfway up his calf, he was well and truly at the end of his rope.

“Lillian! Come and get this smartass out of my way,” Henry called.

Lillian’s snout appeared first. Then, out the hole in the tower’s top floor, the rest of her appeared, crawling down the tower wall.

“Come on, wizard, you’re taking the express route.”

“My lucky day.”

She plucked Dorian out of Henry’s arms and carried him in one talon, with all the grace of a person with a bag of rubbish in hand.

With that barrier out of the way, Henry opened the front door. He found the entrance hall to be gaudy and annoying to look at, which was all the more motive to get up the stairs and escape the oncoming tide.

As he moved towards the stairs, he passed all the self-portraits of Dorian, all their smug faces and fancy robes jeering at him. Between that and the water just below his knees, he was making a break for it. Or as much as he could in knee-deep water.

The worst part of it was how his clothes clung to him as they got soaked. His trousers were selected for their snazzy detailing and close fit, not their comfort, so as they got wet and heavy on his legs, he cursed himself. Of all the outfits to choose…

He emerged out of the water and onto dry stairs, and let out a sigh. The hungering tide was still on the move.

“I hate this,” he said, just for posterity’s sake.

And then, he made a run for it. He ran up step, step, step, after step and more step. After the stairs was the second floor common area, which he had no time to really take in. It gave the impression of a rich person’s sitting room or solarium, maybe?

Whatever the case, he kept moving. His efforts were rewarded with some fatigue and yet more steps. So up more stairs it was; Henry’s clothes dripped and clung, and he hurt in the most exquisitely bad way.

The water was not as fast as him, thank goodness.

But where he was fast, he could grow tired. Water did not tire and did not sprint; it ran at that same steady pace, the pace that would endure when every creature was long dead.

Henry was too tired to think morbid thoughts like that for long, though, and he found himself stumbling up the steps, still.

Though notably, the water was also flowing from above, too. Uh oh.

He stumbled up that last step and clutched his knees. Oh, man, did his lungs burn. Henry caught his breath in burning gulps, as a fire took air from the bellows.

“Oh, are you okay?” Hannah asked.

“Ye--” Henry caught his breath again. “No. No.”

He stood as tall as he could, and looked around. Dorian’s nightmare machine was leaking that same oily water as the tides from below, with several pipes burst open and spilling it out.

“Ugh,” he said.

When Henry survived the endeavor, he swore he would hate waterfalls for the rest of his days.

 

***

 

 

Dinner was a Thistle classic; breakfast for dinner. An omelet, with vegetables mixed in, bread toasted over a fire, fresh berries from a nearby bush. Bailey ate like she’d never eaten in recent memory.

The dinner conversation was… well, dinner conversation.

“So, Alice, how is freelance witching treating you?” Ozma asked.

“Not bad, but not always good. How’s it treat you?”

“Well, I’m not strictly a freelance witch. I’m more of a jill of all trades. I’m a midwife, I’m a carpenter, whatever needs doing, I do.”

“Ozma of the many hats,” Patrick said.

“Patrick of the silly nicknames,” Ozma countered.

She had him there.

“I like silly,” he said.

“And I like it, too. It’s why I married the silliest man alive.”

While their parents were being a mushy couple, Emma turned to her sisters, and whispered to them.

“I don’t remember them being this… much,” Emma said.

“Twenty-three years of demonizing them in your mind will do that,” Alice countered.

“I hate it when you’re right.”

Alice smirked; Emma frowned at that smirk. This state of affairs held until, suddenly, their mother cleared her throat and broke the sisterly cold war.

“I’m going to ask the three of you another uncomfortable question, now. You don’t need to answer, but I have to ask.”

Oh dear.

Bailey said, “Alright, shoot.”

Ozma fiddled with her fork for a moment. With a deep hissing breath, through shut teeth, she inhaled and spoke.

“Something bad happened to you three. Something more than just being transsexual in a suppressive and unappreciative world.”

“A lot of bad things happened, you’re going to need to be more specific,” Emma said.

That made Ozma’s face fall horribly.

“Let me put this another way, then. Girls. There must have been a reason Patrick and I didn’t tell you about us, and I cannot imagine what that is. Do you have any idea?”

Alice bit her lip.

“Telling you might… mess things up.”

“Alice,” Bailey said, “we’re eating dinner with our alive parents, in a year where I haven’t technically been born yet. We’re past ‘messing things up’.”

“Why does my little snot of a sister have to be right?” Alice asked, to no one in particular.

With a laugh, Patrick spoke.

“Ah, she takes after me, then.”

“No, dear, that’s a trait from me,” Ozma said, between sips of her drink.

Ah, so the smugness and oneupmanship was a familial trait, then. It was odd, strange, and bizarre for Bailey to see her own traits reflected so strongly. But for all the strangeness, it was also a comfort.

The three sisters looked between each other; someone was going to have to talk about the horrible stuff that happened to all of them.

“I’ll say it,” Emma cut in.

“You don’t have to.”

“Given what has-slash-will happen, Alice, I kind of do.”

Emma cleared her throat, with all the excitement of a person about to attend their own funeral.

“Saddle up, because this one’s a doozy.

“So in about a year’s time, a garrisoned unit of dragonslayers are going to march on the commune. They’re going to know every evacuation route, every defensive strategy, and have an exact headcount of people. All adults will be killed or arrested on sight, and the kids will be shopped out to orphanages, debtors’ prisons, convents, seminaries, and hospitals.

“They’re going to know this because now, as we speak, there’s a spy gathering intelligence, making friends with everyone. By now, the thought of her being anything but a friend is probably an unthinkable one… she has that tendency. I know I can barely stomach the thought of her being anything but good,” Emma said.

That hung in the air for a second, then two, then ten. Emma watched her parents muse on her words with stormy looks on their faces. Would they believe her? Was all that effort to admit she had been wronged for naught?

It probably was. Most things were for naught, in the grand scheme of things. Unless...

Patrick and Ozma shared a glance.

“Laura.”

“How did you know?” Bailey asked.

Patrick shifted in his seat, not at all comfortably.

“As much as we love her, sometimes… sometimes it seems like she never left the men she fled,” he said, “and it feels like she’s still doing what they tell her, even though they’re not here.”

“You also told me to watch out for her.” Ozma put in.

At that, Emma could only look at the floor in shame. She and her sisters had made a real mess of things, hadn’t they? Somewhere, in a trunk in her bedroom, there was a magic textbook that was frowning at her. Just because every change a person could make just resulted in another branch on the tree didn’t mean it was a good idea to go around making changes in the past!

Well, too late now. At least she wasn’t going with her original plan of having an alternate Emma killed so she could replace said alternate. That would’ve been murder, and also Emma would have been busted instantly.

Emma added, “But not because she wants to. She… she feels like she has no choice.”

Ozma still wore an ill look on her face as she spoke again, “But if things are left as they are, she will, won’t she?”

“Yes.”

“This is a nightmare.” Patrick clutched the vein on his forehead, and sighed. Bad news was a squall of acid-hot rain over a pleasant day; the revelation that a friend was up to no good was a hot terror to the nervous system.

“What… what happens to the three of you, after that?” he asked.

With the kind of hope that lived on borrowed time, Bailey said, “Well, it hasn’t yet…”

“Bailey, it kind of has. For us, it’s already past,” Alice replied.

Emma ignored her sister’s little aside, and continued.

“What happens, is, well. Laura--”

Her mouth formed the consonant sound for a ‘k’, but she didn’t say the word. A flareup of defensive rage burned in her stomach, the acid touch of decades of conditioning and upbringing.

“She… she… ki--”

She tried again. It was two easy syllables, for goodness sake!

“Kid. Naps. Takes. Laura takes me. And raises me as the Order’s own. She buries herself underneath the man she’s supposed to be and…”

Emma wasn’t going to cry. She wasn’t. Whatever the stinging heat at her eyes said, whatever the stuttering breaths of her speech moaned about, she wasn’t going to give in. Tears were for people with real trauma.

“Yeah. Then Alice and I find each other, and, well, get into a years-long blood feud. It takes Bailey being a meddling little shit for us to even exist in the same room again without getting into a fight. It takes Bailey risking her life in the dumbest way possible for us to start getting along at all.”

For some reason, there was a hand on her shoulder. She looked to its source and saw her father, or the man who had been her father first. He was looking at her with a strange kindness, both sad and loving.

It hurt to have someone feel that way about her.

“Why do you say this like a confession?” Patrick asked.

More hot, stinging tears. No. No. Emma was an adult! An adult with her life together!

“Because it is? I’m awful? If, if, maybe I’d put up more of a fight, or… done something. Maybe I could have helped fix it before...”

Ozma put her hand on Emma’s free shoulder, and let out a sympathetic noise. Fuck. No! Emma couldn’t cry, wouldn’t...

“You were a child, kiddo. You survived,” Ozma said, “and given what’s happened, that’s a fucking miracle.

“All of you, all three of you. You’re all miraculous. It sounds like the world we know, the ugly death machine, didn’t stop, and the fact that you didn’t get totally consumed by it is incredible.

“Each of us, each of us that grasp our own fate and gender, it takes miracles to keep going. It is so easy to just die. Inside or outside, slowly withering, or by our own hands, that’s the easy path. And who could blame someone for choosing that!

“But the fact that you’re still going… it’s not fair, it’s not right or good that it’s so hard, but the fact is, you’re here. You survived. A lot of people didn’t, and won’t. By the sound of it, at some point, that includes Patrick and I.”

“Well…” Bailey cut in.

Despite the pained glances of her sisters, she continued, “Uh, well, Mom, here’s the thing. You knowing all this is already a change… anything is possible.”

“A warning is a start,” Ozma said.

No one spoke for a while. The elder Thistles both wore deep creases in their eyebrows, the way that only an overwhelmed parent could frown. Patrick moved to take Ozma’s hand in the silence. It wasn’t a solution to the problems ahead of them, but it sure was nice to hold someone’s hand through the trouble.

“Can I ask a hard question,” Emma said. “I figure it’s only just that I get one.”

“By all means,” Patrick replied.

Right. Emma drew in a deep breath.

“How did you figure us so quickly? I know we’re not exactly queens of going incognito, but…”

Patrick stood up, and walked off to another room of the house. Emma’s sense memory told her that her parents’ bedroom was through that door, which was an odd thing for her to recall.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“You’ll see,” Ozma said.

“Will I?”

He reemerged from the room with something in his hand, but then immediately crossed over to a door on the other end of the dining room and vanished behind it. Emma strained to decipher what he’d carried with him…

No good. She couldn’t tell.

Once more, he emerged, and this time sat down at the table. In one of Patrick Thistle’s hands was a stuffed gryphon… and the other, a charred lump of fabric.

“Emma, that is, small Emma, is out for now, and I’ll be sure to put Beakly back posthaste.”

Wow, Beakly was in much better shape in the past. Even before Emma threw her into a fire to make a point, she hadn’t exactly been in the best way. Thirty years of life weren’t easy on a stuffed animal.

“So, a while ago, I don’t remember when,” he gestured with the burnt lump of fabric, “this appeared out of a hole in the sky. I kid you not. Actually, it’s far from the first thing for that to happen to… Anyways, at first I thought, what is this? But…”

He set Beakly down on the table, and turned the charred whatever in his hands.

“I examined the stitchwork… and it looked so familiar. And then I realized. This is my stitching! It’s subtle, but --” He picked up the charred fabric abomination and trailed a finger down its seam. “It has my fingerprints all over it.

“And then, one day, puzzling over it, I see Emma playing with the griffon Ozma and I made her… and I realized that this,” he gestured with the burned thing, “is somehow the same as this intact one. Odd, right?”

More than just odd! Impossible!

Bailey said, “That’s… wait. No.”

Alice didn’t know what to say, so she kept her mouth shut.

“That’s my griffon!” Emma said.

She spoke very quietly after a moment, and added, “The one, I, uh, threw into Alice’s fire pit, to win an argument.”

Only then, after that, did Alice speak up. She seemed relieved that Emma said it before she did, as if hearing someone else say it made it less outlandish or weird.

“No way. How did it get here?”

Patrick said, “Well, best guess, the same way you three did. I’d wager something screwy is going on.”

Wow. Patrick Thistle, captain of the Holy Sailing Vessel The Obvious.

“You have no idea,” Alice said, “truly. Truly you don’t have a clue how screwy things are.”

Patrick laughed. “So I figure.”

He turned the toasted piece of fabric in his hands, and said nothing for a bit. The screwy nature of reality had everyone around the table frowning, and the more a person knew the harder they frowned.

“Anyhow, I wasn’t sure how it got here, or the why, but all I knew is I could do something to repair it. So, I set about fixing it.”

“But… you can’t fix it! It’s burned. I set it on fire like an asshole and ruined your handiwork!”

“Emma, you may not recall, but Ozma and I have fixed you and Alice’s stuffed animals more times than I can count. To be loved is to be changed, especially when that love takes a stuffed toy through mud, or into the pond, or covered in spilled tea.”

Ozma said, “Or burned to make a point.”

“Or burned to make a point,” Patrick agreed.

Emma’s cheeks burned hot with shame and regret; the point she’d made by burning Beakly wasn’t even a good one. What a waste.

“But…”

“This damage is not trivial, yes. It’s a tougher fix. It might not ever be what it could have been before the damage… but it’s only too late if no one tries to patch it up.”

 

 

***

There was only one thing left to do, by Henry’s reckoning.

The water was rising at a slow and steady clip, and the little glass bubble of a world they inhabited grew less habitable by the second. The holes in the floor and wall each gave a nice view of the water...

Henry grabbed a drawer out of one of the worktables, and dumped the contents out to root through.

“What the hell are you doing?” Dorian demanded.

“You must have left some notes or something on how to operate the machine. If you won’t tell us how, then I’ll do it myself.”

At another worktable, Lillian was grabbing three different drawers at once and dumping them out. Tools and papers went everywhere.

“Any luck?” Henry asked.

“Hmm… no, not yet. We do not need schematics for an elevator right now.”

Hannah went at it as well, dumping piles of notes and files onto the same table as Henry.

“I’ll dump them out, you look through them.”

Water kept lapping at Henry’s boots as he worked, but thankfully, the massive holes in the room kept it draining. The level would not get any higher than foot level until they were well and truly out of time.

It was more cold comfort than anything else. At least it gave time for Henry’s shirt to dry off.

So many of the schematics and notes, Henry noticed, were authored not by Dorian… but by Emma.

“You’re never going to find my notes,” Dorian said.

“Not with that attitude,” Hannah replied.

But while Dorian went on to mope and taunt them all some more, Lillian’s eyes went wide like a cat’s and she stopped rifling through the layers of papers.

“Found them,” she said.

Every day was a new loss for Dorian, which was wonderful. Henry and Hannah gathered next to Lillian to examine the notebook. Even focusing on the task at hand, Henry couldn’t help but notice how tall Lillian was as a two-legged dragon person.

“Alright, how detailed… oh, it’s diagrams for different settings on the control panel,” Henry said.

Hannah asked, “But which one will get us out of here?”

Lillian asked, “How do we get Bailey back?”

He took the book and trudged through the glittering water, towards the groaning beast of a machine. As he walked, he flipped through page after page of different configurations of switches being on and off, buttons depressed or left up, and so on. Each was labeled, most with just the word ‘no’, along with a number and the letter E.

He went through twenty pages of ‘no’s before he found it: two pages back to back, one labeled ‘garbage dump’ and the other, ‘yes! Gullible enough E, #109’.

“Found it. Let’s try this,” he said.

“Oh good, Bailey can drown with you.”

“No, Dorian, Emma can help us fix this,” Henry said.

With Lillian and Hannah’s help, he set the control panel to the marked ‘Garbage dump’ setting, and pressed the big button to activate the machine. Light, warm and cozy, flooded beneath the machine’s door frame.

So all there was left to do was to knock.

 

 

***

 

 

It was getting late at the Thistle house, and dinner and dessert were long gone. With nothing else better to do, the five of them did the only thing they could think to: a game of cards.

That was, until there was an odd slosh of water from beneath the front door, and a knock.

“Is it a medical emergency? Or commune business?” Ozma asked.

All eyes were on the door. The source of the knock said, “It’s some kind of emergency, I’ll say that much. You wouldn’t happen to have Bailey, Emma, or Alice there, would you?”

Ozma looked at her daughters with a raised eyebrow.

“It’s for you?”

A look passed between sisters; ‘You do it’, ‘No, you do it,’ ‘No, Bailey, you do it’. Bailey rolled her eyes at that and stood up.

Who could possibly know she and her sisters were there, in that time? She went up to the door and said, “Hello?”

“Bailey! Holy shit, holy shit. Who was that I was talking to?”

“My mom. We really need to stop meeting like this, Hannah.”

“Your dead mom?”

Bailey bit her lip, which didn’t help.

“Yes.”

She braced herself for questions, quite sensibly. Most anyone would have questions about how this whole causality snowball began rolling.

Hannah said, instead of any of that, “Cool. I literally do not have time to unpack that. Is your sister who caused this whole mess there?”

“Yeah,” Bailey said, “Emma, come over here, you’re wanted. It’s Hannah.”

Emma marched to the door and said, “What?”

“We have a problem, and your machine is breaking apart. Do you know how it works?”

At that, Emma huffed.

“I should hope so. It only works at all because I fixed it.”

“Well, come fix it again. We’re on a tight schedule.”

The door took a second to pry open; Emma had to pull on it some. When it opened, her eyes went wide. Bailey followed her gaze when Emma said, “No…”

Water, colorful and oily, lapped at the ground of the Other tower. It fell out the windows and holes in the wall in great waterfalls; a layer of it sloshed into the front hall of the Thistle house.

Without any more words, Emma sprinted into the flooded room, straight for the controls, Bailey following behind.

“Oh Dorian, you fucking jackass,” Emma muttered, once she reached the control panel.

“I heard that,” said Dorian, who was laid out on a table, clutching his head.

“Yeah, well, screw you.”

She poked at the controls a bit, and frowned.

“It’s the stability bulb. Shit.”

“What’s a stability bulb?” Henry asked.

“It’s the thing that’s supposed to prevent this whole apparatus from doing… what it’s doing. You know, tearing itself asunder? It’s not supposed to do that. Though the flooding shouldn’t be this bad…”

Dorian groaned. “They popped the bubble. It’s all collapsed and we’re all going to drown, including your parents and your garbage bin past.”

“Can someone shut him up?”

Hannah said, “We’ve tried, I swear up and down we’ve tried.”

Emma nodded. “Yeah, that tracks.”

She went over to the controls, with a focused eye on the damage. The further she looked, the worse her expression grew; the worse her frown grew, the more she saw how boned the whole thing was.

“How did you mess this up so badly, Dorian?”

“Don’t look at me, I’m a genius. It’s these parasites that followed behind you that broke everything,” he said.

“Man, working with you was a mistake.”

She sighed, and turned away from Dorian.

“Here’s the deal: if we leave and go back to my tower, I think we’ll be alright… we just need to hurry, and there’s no coming back here.”

Lillian said, “That sounds good to me.”

“Yeah, that’s fine. Let’s hurry,” Hannah put in.

“Yeah, okay. Just one thing before we go,” Bailey said.

Before anyone could object, she dashed back into her parents’ house, back across the threshold of the living past. There was but one thing to do; she dragged Patrick and Ozma to the threshold.

“Uh, real quick. Mom, Dad, these three… these are my partners. Lillian, Henry, Hannah, these are my mom and dad.”

“Bailey,” Emma said.

“Shut up, let me have this.”

“Bailey.”

“I know we don’t have any time left, but… there’s so much I wanted to say, and ask, and -- I guess we won’t get to it. I…”

“Bailey.”

Ozma embraced Bailey and said, “Dear, it was wonderful to meet you. I am so sorry that your life has been so hard… all I can promise is that, with what you’ve told us, that we’ll try and make sure our attempt at this is better.”

Then Patrick embraced Bailey, too.

“Go out and wreak havoc, Bailey. The world needs hellions and miscreants. Doctor’s orders.”

Bailey felt two more sets of arms join the hug, too; Alice and Emma were there, too, also embracing her.

“We really need to go, or we’re all going to drown,” Emma said.

The hug broke.

“Goodbye, girls. Stay alive, no matter what happens,” Ozma said. “Don’t let the bastards keep you down. And Emma?”

She handed the burned scrap of Beakly to Emma, “Try not to burn this one again. Fabric is a fragile thing.”

“I won’t.”

“We’ll try and keep our heads up,” Alice said.

“That’s all I ask, girls. I hope we meet again someday.”

Emma said, “I hope so too.”

And then Ozma and Patrick Thistle closed their front door, and the three Thistle sisters all felt that sinking sensation that they would never see them again. But for however short and unfair their meeting was, it had happened, against all odds, and nothing could take it away from them.

Water was lapping at their ankles, and they had to move, but they didn’t, not for a few more seconds. They watched the front door and listened for the rustling and shuffling of their parents behind the door, like the last echoes of the concert before it was over, the final licks of flame before the fire died.

And then Dorian stood up.

“Emma, Emma. Emma,” he said.

“What?”

“Did you know I had to go through dozens of other Emmas to find a big enough sucker to help me?”

Emma said nothing aloud, but her fists’ curl said plenty for her.

“It’s true! All I had to do was find the most broken, lonely, selfish, ugly you, and as it turns out, you were the one! Congratulations, you’re a failure. No wonder my machine is broken, I never should have let you touch it!”

“Dorian. I fixed this machine. I made it work. Any success you’ve ever had was because I did the work for you, as far back as university. I’m getting my sisters and my annoying in-laws to be out of here, and this one last time, I’ll put in some effort for you, so you don’t have to die either.” 

Dorian smiled.

“So generous, aren’t you? No thanks. I’d rather we all drown.”

Emma said, “Okay,” and hit him with a spell that knocked him on his ass, straight into the water. He did not move, but he did let out a string of wet curses.

“Time to go,” Emma said.

“Yeah,” Bailey replied, wiping the remnants of tears from her eyes. “Let’s go home.”

If anyone cared to check, they would have seen Dorian cursing them, damning them, but no one paid him any mind, even as Emma set the machine up for one final trip.

***

 

 

When Bailey landed back in the world she knew, the one where her parents were dead and time had marched on, she landed on a pile of snow. It crunched beneath her.

This came as a surprise; she was expecting to land inside Emma’s tower, back by the machine. You know, indoors?

She looked up from the snowdrift. She was indoors, in the tower workshop. As were her partners, strewn about the room in their own banks and hills of snowed-over interior. Bailey could just barely make out the shapes of the work tables and houseplants underneath the cold hills.

Emma popped through the machine next, landing back-first on the floor.

“Where’s my roof?” Emma asked.

The roof, as it were, was no more. Its remnants, mortar, tiles, shingles, grout, were spiraling in the air around the machine. The material that had once held a building together moved like water spinning down a drain, into the maw of the great machine.

The walls were coming apart, too. The stone bricks were wiggling loose and floating towards the spiral of building materials.

Alice arrived last, and said, “We need to move. Now.”

And then the floor started going, too.

There was no argument from anyone, not even Emma. The collected group of intrepid adventures stood up and promptly made a run for it. They ran down the spiraling stairs, away from the workshop, as the tools on the worktables began to join the strange vortex above them.

They went past the common room, the site of Bailey, Henry, Lillian, and Hannah’s first romantic overtures. It was the place where Emma and Bailey had grown to be more than strangers with the same parents; it was the place of arguments, of breakfasts and dinners and lunches, of magic lessons and cups of tea.

Soon enough, the chairs and tables joined the vortex, as did the teacups and plates. Each was a physical store of memory, objects haunted with the sensations of past uses. The fragile pieces of memory broke apart once they hit the grand vortex; they broke like memories being forgotten, like the last goodbye before the final parting of ways.

The fleeing crowd were down to the ground floor of the tower, and the ceiling above them was going. The dead sprint continued far past the tower, out into the snowy night. Only when the vortex was a distant point of light in the storm could they stop, only when the harsh blue of it was a distant star in a constellation of falling snow.

Bailey clutched at her heart; seldom had it beat faster than it had then. It took many inhalations of sharp frosted air to slow it down.

From the near distance, a terrible noise echoed, like stone grinding on metal, like a skull fracture, like a banshee’s screech. The light of the vortex turned a hideous hue, and then flashed so bright that Bailey saw nothing but the flash.

There was a terrible silence, worse than the noise. The silhouette of the tower, the distant shape, was gone. 

“I’m going to check it out,” Emma said, clutching the scrap of Beakly with all her life.

“I’ll go with,” Alice put in.

Bailey didn’t have enough energy to argue with them; the adrenaline crash was already oncoming. Plus, by the time she thought of something to say, Emma and Alice were already trudging back toward the tower.

It was then that Bailey sat on the ground. Snow sloshed beneath her dark dress, but she was too tired to care about that. She’d probably ruined it by sweating through it, anyhow. What was a little more moisture?

Despite the disgusting state of herself, she felt a touch to her shoulder. She looked up to see Henry, smiling at her.

“Hey, you,” he said.

“Hey yourself.”

She batted her hand through his beard, which he laughed at. Ticklishness was Henry’s ultimate weakness.

“What are you doing?”

“You’ve got snow in your beard.”

“Oh yeah? Well you’ve got more snow on your head than hair,” he said.

His hands were soft and icy as they stroked at her hair. All Bailey could do was lean her head on his shoulder and make a self-satisfied noise.

“Oh, are we sitting on the floor? Fuck yeah. Sign me up,” Hannah said, sitting on the floor.

She reclined a bit, and extended a leg so it covered both Henry and Bailey’s lap.

“You’re not going anywhere until I say so,” she said.

It was then that Lillian, still in her feathery anthropomorphic glory, went and sat as well, wordless. She leaned her horned head against Bailey’s free shoulder, and wrapped her tail around so it sat in Bailey and Henry’s lap along with Hannah’s leg.

They all sat, silent, until Henry began laughing. His laugh came out like a pressure explosion, inevitable and powerful. It was the delirium of a near-death experience come to roost; it was the realization of the most obvious and yet absurd fact of their situation.

“Lillian,” he said, in between his laughs, “I just realized… you’re naked.”

“Turning into a thirty-foot long dragon will destroy your clothes, as it turns out.”

Henry’s laughter died down, and he looked to the ground.

“We’re going to need to get your coat out of the chapel, seeing as it’s technically a crime scene now,” he replied.

Hannah raised an eyebrow. Somehow, she still had enough energy and wherewithal to be surprised.

“What have you two been up to?” she asked.

“I killed a man and turned into a dragon. Which one I could face more reprimand for, I don’t know.”

Before anyone could respond to that, though, a pair of figures became visible through the snow…

No, a pair of figures and a horse.

“Henry! And the rest! Is that you?” called one of them.

“Wow,” Hannah said, “we’re ‘the rest?’”

The figures, and the horse, drew closer. It was Yulia, leading Apple Sauce, and Belladonna, keeping a wide berth between her and the horse.

“Hey, losers,” Yulia said, “we thought you were dead.”

“I didn’t!” Belladonna interjected.

At that, Yulia shot her a look.

“Don’t lie, Belladonna Billina.”

“I’ve already poisoned eight people tonight… or was it more? Either way, lying is really not beyond the pale.”

“Look,” Henry said, “it’s good to see you, regardless of how dead you thought we were or how many people you’ve poisoned.”

Yulia nodded, and tugged at Apple Sauce’s reins.

“No kidding. Do you have any idea how much of a pain keeping track of this horse has been? How did you even get her up to this floor?”
“Trade secret,” Bailey replied.

“Boo.”

“Anyways,” Belladonna said, “are you four okay? Where are Alice and Emma?”

 

 

***

 

 

Where there was once a tower, there was a tree. It was a gnarled, twisting thing, leafless and grey. 

Emma stared at it, and stared at it some more, but no matter how hard she looked, the tower was gone. Not one brick was left in the wake of its self-consumption. It was as if the whole building had eaten itself; the bricks were so hungry and the furniture so famished there was nothing left to eat but itself.

“So, how worried do we need to be about reality collapsing, now?” Alice asked.

“Not very,” Emma said, “it looks like the reality-eating has stopped.”

They both looked at the tree, regarding its branches and bark in the harsh outline of the snow.

“I guess that means we actually have to stay alive and make something of this existence,” Emma sighed.

“Yeah. No kidding.”

“It’s so much easier for the world to end, you know? Surviving can be such a pain.”

Alice shrugged, and said, “Well, it could be worse. It’s been worse before.”

“And it’ll be worse again.”

“Maybe!”

Emma shook her head, “Since when are you an optimist?”

“I’m not. I’m just interested to see what happens next! Plus, think of how much the combined power of us can get on Bailey’s nerves!”

“Yeah,” Emma laughed, “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Alice nodded. “Exactly! Though we should head back and meet up with them. No doubt they’re already getting in more trouble.”

 

***

 

 

The snow had become too much to bear, so Bailey, her partners, and Yulia and Belladonna took shelter in the chapel. For the moment, it was just an empty building with a broken window, which made it infinitely more useful than any time a service had ever been on.

Bailey leaned back against a stone pew, bundled up with Hannah and Henry. Lillian was out by the broken glass and blood surrounding Lord Gaius’ corpse. Yulia was very intently looking anywhere but her father’s corpse, and Belladonna was watching Lillian with a little smile.

“You alright over there?” Henry called.

“Just retrieving my coat,” Lillian said, “and any other evidence I can manage to clean up.”

It was then that Emma and Alice arrived through the ajar doors of the chapel, looking quite annoyed.

“You could’ve waited for us,” Emma said.

“Counterpoint: it was very, very cold,” Yulia replied.

Emma sighed, like she wanted to say more, but she held herself back. The ‘cross words’ quota was more than filled for the night.

“Fair enough. I’m glad you’re not dead, Yulia, Belladonna.”

“Us too,” Belladonna said.

Alice nodded and said, “Anyhow, the tower’s gone, like it was never there. Weird stuff.”

Emma said nothing.

“Gone,” Bailey echoed. “The tower is gone. Explain.”

“Gone. Like it was never there in the first place. There’s a tree in the middle of the courtyard now. It’s a pretty old looking one, too. How do you like that?”

Bailey tried to muster the energy to be alarmed, or even just surprised. 

Nothing.

Really? Not even a little perturbed?

Wow. She really was fading. A full night and morning of danger really wore a person out, apparently.

In my professional opinion, you need to get some sleep, the Sorceress said.

“I’m gonna miss that shithole,” Emma said. “It was a depression den… but it was my depression den.”

Henry laughed again, which earned him a harsh look from Emma.

“Don’t worry,” he said, not entirely kindly, “there’s this inn I know. They let you stay for a long time, apparently.”

“And it’s cheap,” Hannah said.

“Ask us how we know,” Lillian put in, with a fanged grin.

Emma said, “If I’m stuck with you three as my siblings-in-law for the rest of my life, I’m going to be so irritated.”

All Bailey did was shrug and say, “Too bad.”

Alice patted her twin on the shoulder and said, “There, there, Emma. If it’s any consolation, the three of them combined still aren’t nearly as annoying as you.”

And that was the last thing Bailey remembered before she passed into a deep sleep on a stone pew. There were vague sensations… warmth, slight motion, light voices, a descent…

But she slept through the whole trip out of the castle. After the past few months she’d had, she definitely earned it.

When she awoke the next day, surrounded by her partners in a big warm bed, she sighed in relief. The inn room was still small, the world was still kind of a wreck, but she was well-rested…

And she wasn’t by herself. She had her partners, she had her sisters, she had friends. She had… a head roommate. Someone really ought to have thought up a snappier name for that sort of arrangement with another person, honestly.

Whatever. That, and all the other pressing issues like ‘finding work’ and ‘finding a new place to live’ and ‘processing mountains of trauma’ would have their time. It was still morning, though, and Bailey was still tired.

She dug herself deeper into Lillian, wrapped her arm tighter around Henry, stuck a wayward leg to poke Hannah, and then promptly fell back to sleep.