“But we just got each other back,” Emika whispered. “I don’t want to leave you.”

“Not for long,” Melisande replied, and she looked like she was about to cry. “It’s just — I’ve got no clue if we can stop the summoning at all. And Heaven has always been state of the art.”

Emika frowned. ‘State of the art’?

“Can confirm that, at least,” Amagdala weighed in with her deadpan, weathered voice. “Back when Melisande was on trial, some lunatics tried to up her to S+ rank. The only reason I supported them was because it would have increased her chances of getting into Heaven, if she was seen as that strong. Being in the hands of Heaven isn’t ideal, but was the best shot at the time, especially compared to her being destroyed or kept by the Durands.”

Melisande glanced down at the phone. “What the fuck? You meddled to that extent back then?” she asked, somewhat bewildered. “What a shocker, I didn’t realise you had a—”

“A heart?” the woman offered with a laugh.

Melisande grimaced in heavy disgust. “Yeah, no, I’d never think that,” she said. “But anyway, what I’m trying to say is. Go there. Exploit the shit out of the place. Maybe they actually find something that could help you.”

“Not you too,” Emika whined, rolling her eyes. “That’s always the promise. ‘They might be able to help.’ It never works. I’d much rather spend my time with you.”

Melisande took a steadying breath. “Just go there for, like, two months. Or as long as you want. And then, you break out.”

Another laugh from the phone. “It would take some serious shit to break out from that place.”

Melisande nodded, and pointed to the phone as if that statement had in any way agreed with her. “Exactly! And if we know anything, it’s that we are fucking great at raising some serious shit!”

Emika laughed, and gently shook her head. “Okay, sure. You want me to go there. ‘Exploit the place.’ Fine, I can try that. I guess I’m just a bit sad that you want me gone so fast.”

Melisande gave her a melancholic look. “I want you to live,” she said. “If you go there, I think that increases your chances of, like, not dying within the next few months. Or like, if we stay together like this, maybe you just stay ‘alive’ as a tree, but you’ll be gone? What if that happens? It’s you I like. The brain inside you, I guess? The tree stuff is nice, but…” She trailed off, looking almost inconsolable. “Anyway, that’s why I’d like you to try. I’d like you to stay with me as you, not as a tree.”

These words, somehow, send shivers down Emika’s spine, and washed all her doubts away. Sure. Go there, exploit the place. Find out whatever she could about her curse from them, and then dip out, potentially with a cure, even. If it was Melisande’s plan, then Emika had a lot more confidence in it than if she’d come up with it herself. Not that lack of confidence in her dubious plans had ever been any of Emika’s concerns, but it did feel nice not to be in this alone.

“I’m gonna miss you,” she said, biting her lips. “We meet again?”

“Yeah, of course we do. Wait,” Melisande was saying, tearing open the fabric on her thigh and then fishing out another smartphone from within her tea. “I got your phone. We can stay in touch. They must have a place where there’s reception, right?”

Emika wiped a few small tears from her eyes, and gave a soft smile. “Sounds good. Back to long distance, then?”

“Only for a sec!”

“Only for a sec,” Emika echoed the phrase she’d never think of saying by herself, and chuckled at that.

“So, any clue as to when this might go off?” Melisande said after a moment, gesturing at the markings.

Slowly, Emika slid one of her elongated fingers across where she figured they might be. “Well… I think he used the phrase ‘in a few hours’. And that was… a few hours ago.”

“So, it could happen any moment. We could be talking to each other, and one second to the next, you burst aflame and poof, gone? Damn, that sucks. I guess it means we need to hurry with prep?”

Melisande was right. It could very much happen any second now. Or, it could happen within the next two or three hours. There wasn’t any way to know.

“What preparations are you thinking of?”

With that, the conversation started trailing off for a bit with Melisande explaining Emika’s cursed situation and then asking Amagdala questions about Heaven, most of which the old woman could only answer very vaguely and with lots of disclaimers about how dated all her information might be. The best way to break out was apparently to just jump off the island the moment one got the chance, though they’d do their best not to give any such chances. The truth was, Emika was likely capable of surviving a drop from any height, though depending on how much she’d grow in the meantime, it could leave a bit of a crater. The scarier aspect of it was what would happen if she fell into the ocean.

“Are you buoyant?” Amagdala asked at some point, and Emika really had absolutely no clue.

“I honestly think I might not be. I’m pretty heavy for my size. I could go down like a rock.”

A thoughtful hum echoed from the tinny phone speaker, and then the witch continued, “Well, let’s assume you’ll drop to the ocean floor. Question is, will you survive without oxygen? Maybe we can mount a deep sea rescue mission with the aid of some magic.”

That sounded like a pretty big deal, despite the nonchalance she had in her voice when suggesting it. “I… I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t drown. Depends on how many fish are around that I can turn into seaweed, I suppose.”

“Or algae,” Melisande supplied.

“I don’t want that, though,” Emika added after a moment. “Don’t want really like the idea of other beings suffering and dying to keep me alive. So, dropping into the ocean is a little…”

“Yeah,” the woman said from the phone. “Methods of immortality that rely on living sacrifice are a little vile.”

“Kinda sickening to hear you care about morality when it comes to magic,” Melisande interjected.

Amagdala ignored the statement. “How’d you get into that situation anyway?”

Emika shrugged, even though the woman wouldn’t be able to see it. “I just got cursed.”

“Someone cursed you with immortality?”

“With turning into a tree and killing everyone around me,” Emika corrected her. “It’s not like I wanted this, nor that I benefit from it.”

Another silence came over them, and it was clear that Amagdala had fallen into thought, as was her habit, apparently. What was there to think about, though?

“She killed a Cursebreaker with a touch,” Melisande spoke into the air after a while. Her tone was hard to decipher. There was maybe a hint of pride in it. And a bit of defiance, too. It was like she knew that she was saying something of certain unorthodoxy.

And Amagdala reacted fittingly.

“Impossible,” she spat. And then, again, nobody said anything. Neither Emika nor Melisande attempted to convince her. In Emika’s case, she knew what she’d seen and done, it was just something that had happened. And while Maxime had definitely been surprised… The logic seemed clear enough to Emika. It was a curse that turned every living thing she touched to plants. Easy enough. Things that weren’t alive were spared, like rocks or doorknobs. And plants were, somehow, spared too. Perhaps it wasn’t possible to turn something into a plant that was already one.

On that note — maybe Melisande was immune to the curse not because she wasn’t alive, as she had suggested, but because she was tea leaves inside? If Melisande had been powered on something that wasn’t a plant — something inorganic perhaps — would their first meeting have gone very different and much more tragically then?

“It’s completely impossible,” Amagdala repeated after a few minutes. “How would that even work?”

“Can you tell me why it would be impossible?” asked Emika.

A short sigh came from the phone. “Well, sure honey. Magic works by altering reality according to cognition. The mind casting the spell decides the effect, and the cost is determined by how unlikely that effect should be, how difficult it should be to accomplish using magic, in the baseline of cognition of all living beings.”

Emika was understanding none of that.

“So that means,” Amagdala continued, “Since everyone accepts that it’s impossible to hurt a Cursebreaker with magic, a spell or curse aiming to hurt a Cursebreaker would be that much more expensive. Take that much more time and resources to create. It is universally understood that Cursebreakers are immune to magic; that is their primary role, and they suffer drawbacks for that. I could imagine creating a spell to harm a Cursebreaker, and it would take me decades and an unspeakable amount of resources, but yes, it is conceivable to spend that much effort to create a spell that would pierce the immunity of a Cursebreaker.”

“So it’s not impossible then,” Emika said. “Someone must have just done that, then?”

“No, dear, you don’t understand the issue. Why would I spend decades trying to make a spell to hurt a Cursebreaker if I could just go and shoot them with a gun? Or beat them up? They are only immune to magic.”

“Oh,” Emika puffed out. Yes, that made sense to her. In that way, hurting a Cursebreaker with magic was akin to waiting for weeks for it to rain instead of using the tap. At the moment her mind provided her with that comparison, she realised her brain and body were screaming for water.

“Yes, ‘oh’,” Amagdala echoed. “And that’s not even the worst part. Nobody would ever make a spell to hurt a Cursebreaker. It’s impossible not because it’s literally impossible, but because nobody would even think of doing it, because it’s nonsensical and ridiculous. And your curse’s function seems to primarily be killing things around you and growing you with their scraps.”

Emika took a deep breath. “Okay, yes. But I’m not sure I am following along that well. Please, treat me as if I was very dense. Because I am, literally. I weigh a ton. So, what’s the worst about all of this? Please spell it out for me?”

Another silence came down, and Emika was starting to get annoyed. As much as she loved Melisande, and as much as she respected that woman on the phone who was obviously trying to help, she really wanted to just get on with this all and understand what was happening to her. Of course, both of them didn’t know. They didn’t know what was happening to her, they were just as puzzled. She tried to remind herself of that fact and just hoped they could make her understand at least the very basics before she’d poof out into Heaven.

Finally, Melisande came to the rescue. “It means that whatever your curse is — if it’s even a curse at all — it wasn’t built to kill a Cursebreaker.”

“Yes,” Amagdala said, exasperated. She took a deep breath before continuing, obviously trying very hard to put what was going on into words Emika could understand. “It means whatever magical affliction you are contaminated with, whatever it is, it just happens to break one of the fundamental laws of magic as a side effect. That’s the worst part about it. It wasn’t made to break that law. It is just that vile and powerful of a spell that it kills a Cursebreaker as a mere afterthought.”