They walked deep into the woods, their destination within eyeshot: a small clearing around an equally-small pond. There weren’t any trees within a hundred yards on all sides, and the ground was all rock and gravel instead of grass. Muddy puddles accented the ground throughout, remnants of last night’s rainfall and today’s light mist. A dense blanket of Stardust hung over the forest from the previous night- Lacy registered it as a faint, electric buzz at the back of her mind. Now that she knew it was there, it was difficult to un-notice.

“Today we’re going to work on fire,” Gwen announced. 

“I can use fire?” Lacy asked. She wore black leggings and a long-sleeved forest-green pullover, sneakers, and a light coat of makeup.

“All mages can use fire. It’s not even really a spell so much as a byproduct of excess magic and emotion.” Gwen wore her leather jacket, her torn jeans, and a dark red Alice in Chains t-shirt that hugged her bust. Her makeup was immaculate as always- Lacy made a note to ask her for another lesson. 

Lacy ran a hand through her fine hair; it had grown past shoulder-length, and she found it both delightfully euphoric and difficult to manage. It fell completely flat and straight down her sides, and spread in every-which direction at the slightest shove of wind. “Huh. That’s weird.”

“Why do you say that?”

Lacy took a hair tie from her wrist and pulled her long tresses into a ponytail. “Because I’ve never used it before.”

“Again I say ‘huh’. Are you completely sure about that?”

Lacy combed through her memories and found no flames. “Yes.”

“But I’ve seen you hurl lightning,” Gwen said. “That’s much, MUCH more difficult. Fire is usually the first thing any mage pulls off because it’s so intuitive.”

A bramble bush of shame poked through Lacy. “Well I guess I haven’t figured it out.”

“It’s not a bad thing, it’s just… Odd. Even I can use fire, and necromancer’s are generally shit at the druidic arts.”

“Well maybe this means I’m really a necromancer,” Lacy said somewhat hopefully.

“Probably not. Lightning and fauna I’ve definitely not seen anyone in my family do.”

“Your family?”

Gwen’s pale face blanched somehow whiter. “Yeah. They’re all necromancers too, at least on my dad’s side. I think I mentioned that before.”

“Is everyone in your family a mage?”

They came upon a clearing. Gwen stood in front of the pond, then pivoted directly around to face Lacy. Gwen folded her arms behind her back as she said, “Historically, yes. Magic is passed down through bloodlines, and my father’s is one of the more potent ones. It’s finicky, though- it can skip individuals, whole generations, sometimes a lot of generations. And sometimes, for basically no reason, after hundreds of years of no mages in your family, a new one can just be born. Doesn’t happen often, especially not anymore, but I’m guessing it happened to you.”

Lacy said, “The only magic my parents ever managed was making booze disappear five minutes after they bought it, so I’m gonna go with yes. Why doesn’t it happen anymore?”

“Fewer and fewer mages are being born to each generation,” Gwen said. 

“Why?” Lacy asked. 

“Nobody’s sure,” Gwen replied. “Just seems to be the case. It’s been happening for about four hundred years now.”

“Jesus Christ. And there’s nothing anybody can do about it?”

“Sort of,” Gwen said. “There’s… A theory, of sorts.”

“What is it?”

“Well, theory is a strong word.”

“So a hypothesis then?”

“Fffff not quite.”

Lacy gritted her teeth. “I’m gonna be blunt here-”

“What, you? Blunt? Perish the thought.”

Lacy’s eyebrow twitched. “I really fuckin hate cryptic bullshit.”

“Fffffffff well then you’re not gonna like the answer.”

“Just tell me. Please.”

“It’s a Prophecy.”

Lacy laughed. 

“Why are you laughing?” Gwen monotoned. 

“Because that’s ridiculous.”

“Lacy, we’re wizards. Literal fucking wizards. And I hunt literal fucking monsters for a living- I’m part of union of monster hunters. You can’t seriously draw the line at prophecies.”

Lacy’s brow creased, and she leaned back against a tree and sighed, trying to keep the fear and recognition out of her voice. Please please please don’t let this be going where I think it is, she thought. “Fucking shit. Okay. Fine. I’ll take your word on this one. What’s this literal fucking prophecy say?” she said, waving her hands as she uttered the last sentence.

Gwen had an odd look on her face. Lacy wasn’t sure what it meant. “It says that one day, a prophesied hero, a Chosen One, if you will, will rise up and fight a prophesied destroyer and conqueror, a Dark Lord, as they’re typically called, who’s in the process of ending the world. If the Chosen One is to succeed, then magic will reignite on earth, allowing the number of mages to swell to previously unseen numbers.”

Lacy sucked in her cheeks and avoided eye contact, trying to avoid comparing it to any recurring nightmares that had hounded her the past decade. “Sounds a little neat and tidy.”

“Probably,” Gwen shrugged. Seriously, what the fuck did that expression mean?

“Think it’s true?” Lacy said, shocked at her own boldness.

“Fff well, practically every culture on earth has at least one Chosen One narrative in it somewhere, at some point. Mages are ultimately just another human culture, albeit an unconventional one. And there’s truth in all beliefs.”

“That doesn’t really answer my question.”

Gwen’s expression shifted to a more comprehensible irritation. “Yes. I believe it’s true. And I also believe we’ve spent enough time in history class today. Time for field work. Now: I want you to hold your palm out flat, and I want you to think about something you’re passionate about. And then I want to see a fireball.”

Lacy nodded and did as she was told, part of her immensely relieved at the change of subject. Not as big as the part of her that wanted to know more about this prophecy, but she put it aside for the time being. Thinking about it now would just stress her out, and she needed to take things one step at a time for now. She closed her eyes and thought about her passions. She searched deep within herself and found… 

Nothing. 

The closest she could muster was working on radios, but that was less passion and more compulsion. She thought of God, but that was less passion and more devotion. She thought of the ghoul who had attacked her a few weeks ago, and she thought of the ghoul who had attacked her as a child, the ghoul who had killed Drew. She thought of her parents. She thought of all the times her father had struck her and her mother had looked the other way. All the times her mother had turned up the radio, or even just listened to the static for hours and hours and hours, trying to shut everything out, forget the world and escape into a formless, shapeless oblivion. It seemed preferable to the world she lived in, but that she could never spare a single thought for her own progeny made it a lot less excusable. Anger surged within Lacy, and her spark flared as she gathered magic. She channeled it through her left hand, into her heart, and out through her right palm. 

“Um…,” Gwen said.

Lacy opened her eyes. She looked at her raised palm and found not fire, but rather a sphere of water roughly the size of a baseball. It was stagnant, perfectly spherical, and yet utterly unstable: the partially-unbound particles of the liquid sent sparks through Lacy. It demanded Stardust, and she reached for more and more and more and more, until she realized there was almost none left in the clearing or in the surrounding forest. 

She let go, and the water exploded like a balloon. It splashed Lacy and Gwen’s respective faces and stung, causing their foundation to run.

Gwen reached into the inner-left pocket of her jacket, retrieved a makeup wipe, and cleaned her face. “Huh.”

“Huh?”

“I wasn’t expecting that,” Gwen said, offering a fresh wipe to Lacy.

Lacy dabbed at her cheeks and lips. “Expecting what? Water? Why?”

“Most mages can’t really use water. Like, at all.”

“So it’s a druid thing. Like lightning.”

“In theory, yes, it’s just… Very uncommon. Practically all druids can use lightning, it’s just that it’s largely a unique power to druids, like ‘toter engel’ and ‘todeshander’ are to necromancers. Water, especially running water, generally nullifies magic- it’s the classic thing of a flush river being the kryptonite to magical creatures. Druids can work around it, but it requires an insane amount of Stardust to pull off. I can tell just by looking around that you drained the whole area, but still- how exactly did you manage that?”

Lacy said, “I let it ignite my spark.”

“Your spark?”

Lacy explained. 

Gwen nodded. “Huh.”

“You keep saying that- should I be concerned?”

“It’s just I’ve not really heard of that before.”

“You mean don’t have one? Don’t all mages-”

“No, they don’t.”

A flash of blue light echoed within Lacy’s mind. The Star descending from the sky sent her to the Pale, to the Castle of Midnight Iron, across the Sea of Glass.

Lacy stepped backwards.

Gwen put both her hands up. “Hey, hey it’s alright. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Just means there’s more to work with here.”

“Well it’s just, you’ve said a lot of things here are pretty non-standard, but I’m not even sure what the standard is.”

Gwen exhaled, then stepped forward. “That’s fair. I’m trying to ease you into all this- getting thrown off the deep end would just overwhelm you. And this isn’t a bad thing- we can still keep going with today’s lesson.”

“Which is?”

“I’m teaching you to be a monster hunter. But first I need to teach you how to hunt. And before that, I need to show you how to make a weapon. See if you can gather up some water again.”

It took thirty minutes to gather the necessary Stardust, and for Lacy to channel enough emotion. Once she did, she assembled a small sphere of water in her palm. 

Gwen said, “Okay, now just try to take a little bit off of that and then shoot it at that tree ahead of us. Remember, Stardust gives us the tools for magic; emotion and belief give us the fuel; words give it shape.”

Lacy reached in with mental fingers, and tried to extract a bullet-sized piece of water.

Her sphere exploded in her face and knocked her back a few feet. “Ow.”

They tried again. And again. And again, day after day. 

After a week, Lacy was able to aim and fire. “Uisce pilear,” she said, and a pellet of water the size of a bullet launched from her sphere into a tree a hundred yards in front of her. 

“YES!” Lacy exclaimed. She jumped up and down, pumped her fist into the air. 

“Nice!” Gwen said, scooping her up for a hug. 

The rest of the day was spent learning to aim at moving targets: deer hunting. They were in season, and there were more than enough in the area. Gwen and Lacy went deep into the woods, and Lacy listened. She’d worked on honing her ears over the past weeks, and as her magic had grown stronger, so had her hearing. A thousand yards away, amidst a thick layer of trees and grass and weeds, a stag stepped on a branch and charged left. Lacy pivoted on her right heel and spun ninety degrees, and she fired a water bullet in the direction of the racing stag. 

The water bullet took it in the eye and brained it. She and Gwen carried it back to her cabin, where Gwen showed her how to skin it. Gwen carved up the venison into steaks, and Lacy helped her season them with garlic and pepper and parsley, then put them onto a hot cast iron slick with butter. They sizzled, and the aroma made Lacy’s mouth water. Gwen had Lacy knead the dough for fresh bread and slice asparagus while she slow-roasted the meat, then put the raw loaves on a cooking sheet and stuck them in the oven. 

“How do you feel?” Gwen asked, the sunset filtering in through the open window. 

“I feel,” Lacy said, “... I dunno. I guess I feel… Good? I think I feel good?”

“You don’t know if you feel good?”

“It can be hard to tell sometimes. I guess I’m not used to, to… To feeling? I know how that sounds, I-”

“I don’t. How does it sound?”

“It sounds like… Like I’m whiny and pathetic. Like I’m an idiot.”

“Why’s that?” Gwen asked as she flipped one of the steaks over. 

“I… I dunno,” Lacy said as she wrapped some leftover meat in plastic wrap and put it into Gwen’s fridge. “I guess it just feels like I should have a better handle on this stuff. I’m twenty-one, I should have figured out these stupid fucking emotions by now, but I still get surprised by the fact that I have them. I think I just spent so long burying them that I practically forgot I had them. And now they just baffle me when I do have them.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

“I mean… It beats not feeling anything. In hindsight, I’m not really sure how I managed that for so long.”

Gwen chuckled, then removed the finished steak from the skillet. She took a pair of tongs and placed a second steak to cook. 

“What about you?” Lacy asked.

“What about me?”

“How do you feel? You just kinda… Showed up again. And don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you did. But it’s like… You’ve been just helping me, being incredibly patient. It’s… Been a while since anyone’s done that for me. Thank you.”

“Of course.”

“But I guess I just wanna know how you’re doing too.”

Gwen was silent a moment, then said, “I’m doing better than I’ve been in a long while. Before I was here with you… Well to be honest, I was kind of a tragedy. As you can probably guess, you don’t get to be a monster hunter by having a normal childhood, and you find all sorts of ways to cope with that. I’d isolated myself from everyone who cared about me, and I was living in squalor because I thought that was my best option. But I got myself back off the ground, found a new direction.”

“Ghouls started showing up?”

“Yeah,” Gwen said, pressing the tongs against the sizzling meat. “They did. And I realized that I had the ability to do something about that. So I did.”

Lacy nodded in affirmation. Then she said, “Does it scare you? Where you used to be? The idea that you might fall back into that.”

“Constantly,” Gwen said. “It keeps me up at night. But I realized eventually the only way to keep myself from slipping back into that was to keep moving forward. No matter what.”

“Sounds exhausting.”

“It is.” The unspoken implication of ‘you better get used to it’ was not lost on Lacy.

“Is it worth it?”

“I think so,” Gwen said. She took the steak from the stove, and Lacy removed the vegetables and bread from the oven. 

The meal was rich and filling and delicious, and through the night they talked of where they’d grown up. Gwen spoke of Alaska, and Lacy spoke of Michigan. Lacy fell asleep on Gwen’s couch that night, and when she woke up, the slick popping sound of meat cooking on a griddle bounced through the air. 

“Morning,” Gwen said, not moving from her position at the stove. “Why don’t you go clean up, then we can eat.”

Lacy obliged. She went into Gwen’s bathroom to find a disaster area: the sink was covered with makeup and makeup wipes; a bottle of golden blonde hair dye sat on the counter, unopened, along with five opened and empty containers strewn about. Lacy showered, shaved, dried herself, clothed herself. She wrapped herself in her favorite blue dress, and the warmth and cleanliness went all through her and she could not help but to smile widely. 

Gwen sat her at the table and served her a breakfast of venison sausage, scrambled eggs, hashed browns, and orange slices. She poured two cups of coffee and set them in front of them before they ate. 

“You want cream or sugar? Milk?” Gwen asked. 

“I don’t really drink coffee.”

“You say that now, and yet this is the earliest I’ve ever seen you awake.”

“Why, what time is it?”

“It’s five in the morning, Lacy.”

“Wait, what?” Lacy’s eyes darted towards the window, where she saw the golden-red light of sunrise had yet to pierce the pre-dawn silver. “I don’t even remember the last time I was up this early.”

Gwen raised her mug. “Better get used to it, in this line of work. Cheers.”

Lacy clinked her mug against Gwen’s, then took a swig. Her face contorted with bitter shock as she struggled to swallow the coffee. Tears in her eyes, she managed to force it down her throat. Gwen slid her the canister of sugar and a serving spoon. Lacy shoveled four spoonfuls into her morning brown before it became tolerable to her. Gwen chuckled, then cut into her sausage with her fork and knife. Lacy did the same, but ate the items individually rather than together as Gwen did. The sausage was hearty and rich, while the eggs were soft and cheesy, and the potatoes cut through it all with crisp saltiness. 

After they finished eating, they spent the day working on Lacy’s water manipulation skills. By day’s end, she could forge six water bullets and fire them off in less than two minutes. Lacy ate both her next meals with Gwen that day, and when it was over Gwen started showing her how to sew using the deer’s pelt.

An hour after sunset, Lacy walked home. The night was clear and calm, the stars hanging around the full moon like an endless array of glittering jewels. She passed a few cars as she hugged the grassy sides of the road, and she didn’t care that they saw her. She wanted them to see her, wanted to be out in the world. It was a strange feeling. Utterly alien, hugely overwhelming. But when they saw her, Lacy was sure they saw a girl and not a boy.

Danny’s pickup was parked in the driveway when she arrived at home. Her ears pricked as Danny’s shouting reached through the walls and into the outside world. With mild trepidation, Lacy turned the doorknob and entered her house.

 Danny paced back and forth across the living room, holding his phone to his ear and glaring. He was taken aback when Lacy entered the room, his expression shifting to surprise and welcome. “I’m gonna need to call you back,” Danny said into the phone. A moment passed of him standing still, staring at Lacy. “Yes, that means I need to hang up now. Yeah, that means we’ll finish this conversation later. Yes, Mother, that is in fact what that means! I will call you tomorrow before I leave for work- good night!”

Danny hung up the phone, and then chucked it into the hallway. “Hi.”

“Is everything-”

“No.”

“Do you wanna talk abou-”

“No,” he said, turning and staring back into the darkened hallway. After a moment, he walked into the dark to retrieve his cellphone. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“What, throw your phone?”

“No, hung up like that. Yelled at her. Talked back.”

Lacy recalled her entire childhood and tried to recount a single time talking back to her parents had actually helped, and she found nothing. Mostly it just made her dad punch harder, and drove her mom’s head deeper into the sand. “Do you… Wanna watch TV?”

Danny turned back around, looked out from the darkened hallway. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

He stepped into the light, and Lacy winced. He clearly hadn’t showered in a few days: his hair was a greasy mess, his beard overgrown, zits breaking out on his face, and his thick eyebrows threatening to merge. He wore his rumpled suit from work, the shirt untucked and the tie undone, the clothes hanging off of him like burs. 

“Are you sure you don’t wanna talk abou-”

“I’m sure,” he said. 

He sat down in front of the tv, and Lacy joined him, and the whole night passed without them saying a word to each other. Eventually, Danny’s posture slackened, and his face relaxed, and he began to laugh at what they were watching, and Lacy was immensely glad for it. 

It was like Gwen said- the only way to keep yourself from slipping back into the dark was to keep moving. And, Lacy supposed, it was a lot easier to do that when you had other people to encourage you along.

She smiled, and she once more slept a dreamless sleep.