Tristan, weak, powerless, directly below her on the cursed totem pole of their family, waited on the stairs that led up to the roof. He had a rifle across his lap, had it cocked and aimed as she approached. Tristan fired the gun, and the bullet tore through Gwen’s shoulder. 

And yet she did not stop. Her horrible momentum carried her up the stairs, and she swatted the gun away before Tristan could fire another round. Gwen decided then to honor her little brother who could not do magic by killing him with the death-angel. White wings spread across the interior of the castle, matching the shade of Gwen’s Star, mixing with the moonlight reflecting off the snow outside. Ashes tainted the pure-white, and Albrecht blood carried into the sky and seeded the clouds.

***

A river babbled over the hill, carving a path into the valley below. The road snaked up the mountain alongside the kokanee salmon’s route, in a winding road amidst myriad douglas fir. It was a dirt road, and branches smacked the car’s windshields as they drove through. The Albrecht’s had certainly chosen an out of the way spot for their school- Colorado’s western slopes had proven spectacularly isolated. In the last two days, they’d passed a mere half dozen towns with only a few hundred people to them apiece; it reminded Lacy of far northern Michigan, of the Upper Peninsula, where nobody lived save for a dozen or so very angry people who were very upset about everyone forgetting they lived there. Or that where they lived even existed. 

Lacy breathed slowly. She still wasn’t acclimated to the thinner air up here. She’d gone wide-eyed with shock at the sight of the Rockies in the distance a day prior- after so many endless hours of driving through flatlands, it was jarring. It was taller than anything she’d ever seen- she was accustomed to the rolling hills of Michigan, to gentle slopes. This was… Something else. It was like a pack of giants all sleeping on top of each other, threatening to wake up at any minute, tear the earth to pieces and shed the puny humans atop it like fleas.

Gwen and Quentin drove at the front of the pack, with Isabella and Lacy behind them, Joshua behind them, and Danny as the caboose. The air was dry, and the sounds were crisp and clear through the echo of the valley. Finally, they completed their ascent and parked atop the crest of the hill. They all got out of their vehicles and looked down at the valley. 

A steep slope descended, and at the bottom was the first of the school’s buildings. It was a simple rectangular design, a tall structure with a flat roof; behind it were three more buildings lined up in a row, built into the beginnings of the mountain on the other side, while behind those, atop the rising slope, was a final building of identical design. They were all made of stark gray stone, and there were no windows anywhere. 

The river ran through the center of the valley, between the first building and the three behind it. Save for its babble, no other sounds came from the school.

 “I’m not getting any heartbeats from in there,” Lacy said to the others. 

“Well, I can guess what that means,” Gwen said, scowling. She hadn’t stopped cracking her knuckles or rubbing at her eyes for days. 

Quentin stood next to Gwen, a full head taller, and put one of his disproportionately long arms around her. “My dear, this shall be a trying day. However, I believe in our ability to push through it and persevere.”

Gwen gave his hand a squeeze. 

Lacy’s eyes darted down to Isabella’s hand, which was firmly grasped around World-Carver’s pommel. She looked away. 

“So this is the place?” Danny asked. His beard had grown back in a bit over the past few days, and the bags under his eyes rivaled Lacy’s own. She hadn’t seen much of him in transit, but this was a lot to process- he needed the alone time to come to terms with it all.  

“Yeah,” Gwen said. “I haven’t been here in a few years. It was deserted last time, but I guess school’s back in session.”

“You been waiting a long time to say that?” Isabella asked. 

Gwen chuckled nervously as her eyebrows darted up. “Maybe.”

“Can we review the plan one last time?” Danny asked. 

“We divide ourselves into teams of two and sweep through each building until we converge on the final one,” Lacy said, pointing to the one furthest away. “If we see any ghouls, we engage the enemy. But if we engage one, we have to make sure we get all of them.”

“Good work,” Gwen said, smacking her shoulder. 

“And we need to avoid causing a mudslide.”

Everyone looked at her. 

“Oh, yeah, that’s not actually a part of the plan,” Lacy said. “It just kinda occurred to me right now that this would be a really bad place for a mudslide to happen.”

Joshua pursed his lips and nodded. Danny gave her a funny look. Isabella gave her a different kind of funny look. 

Quentin said, “Excellent point! Capital, truly capital.” He offered Lacy a firm, vigorous handshake, which she accepted. Lacy could certainly see why people liked having him around. He’d honestly lightened up the trip a fair amount, just by being himself.

“We all weaponed up?” Gwen asked. 

Isabella and Joshua held their respective swords. Quentin opened his greatcoat to reveal the small armory he carried within. Danny bared two guns in his hands and two daggers holstered on his hips and two extra clips affixed to the interior of his jacket. 

Lacy checked for the two pistols she had at her side. Six bullets apiece, plus an extra clip for each one. She looked over at Gwen, who nodded. Both women touched their hearts, and from both emerged Stars. Gwen’s White floated above her in a circular orbit, casting its sharp light upon the world. Lacy’s Blue circled her at a level with her chest, an azure memory of strength and pain. Power surged through her, every inch of her body coming alive and unable to ignore the world. Her Star shot toward the school. “Well I guess that’s that then,” Lacy said. She was the first to step forward.

The others followed her down the hill. 

***

“This central building is for the classrooms themselves,” Gwen said as she kicked open the front door. Their Stars shot inside, and they followed, revealing a wide, tall lobby with tiled floors and African Blackwood walls. The lack of windows restricted the amount of light to what their Stars offered, and created a rich claustrophobia in spite of the size of the place: like at any moment the darkness could seize up and swallow them into its jaws. “And believe me, there’s no good reason to bother with stealth here. I’d be astonished if they didn’t know we were coming.”

Lacy stepped forward.

Gwen put a hand out in front of her. “One sec.”

“I thought we didn’t need to bother with stealth?”

“We don’t. I’m just waiting for-”

A hideous screeching saturated the air. Lacy twitched as she adjusted fifty degrees, and her Star illuminated the hollow darkness of the school’s austere hallway. On all fours, a rotting ghoul with a face stretched and contorted came running at them. Two more in identical states of decay followed close behind.
Gwen’s hand remained across Lacy’s chest. 

“Wait for it,” Gwen said. 

***

Isabella drew World-Carver and held her tight as Joshua swung his massive buster sword, Maremoto, through the door and caused it to fall inwards. According to Gwen, this was the dormitory. The door opened to a common room with a hearth burning despite the heat, while a dining table stretched over the room next to it. The firelight had no escape, and so everything was bathed in its scintillation, rough hands of light and heat pawing at everything trapped in there with it. Two ghouls sat at the end of the table by the hearth, carving up a human leg with their elongated claws. 

The ghouls looked up nervously. Then began screaming. Then jumped up and charged at Isabella and Joshua. 

***

They stood at the front of the mess hall, the mere concept of which made Danny, in this particular context, want to throw up. Or maybe that was just his hangover talking- the previous night had required even more vodka than usual to get him to sleep. He breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth. He steadied his hand as Quentin lobbed a grenade into the building. It exploded three seconds later, and the foundation rumbled lightly in the boom. A few moments later, ghouls ran towards them from deep within the mouth of the building, a darkened, sterile-smelling place with an aura of ravenous pain. 

Danny shuddered as Quentin drew a hatchet from his coat, side-stepped as the ghoul charged him, and lobbed the ghoul’s head off in a single swift motion. The head landed on the ground and rolled out like a bowling ball while the corpse was carried forward by its momentum for a few more feet before it collapsed on its front. 

Another ghoul, screaming far louder than its predecessor, came charging at them. 

“Your turn,” Quentin said with a sincere smile while stepping backwards. 

Danny did a double-take, then froze as the ghoul came upon him. 

***

Lacy drew power from her Star, taking hold of as much Starlight as she could manage without sending pinpricks of pain through her arms and chest. She was so busy that she managed not to notice a mountain lion with a hole in its head running up behind her until it leapt over her and pounced at the ghouls, making quick work of them. 

Lacy looked to Gwen. “Did you-”

“Saw the corpse on the drive over- figured it’d come in handy,” Gwen said. “Come on, we need to move forward.”

“Forward,” Lacy affirmed.

Their Stars guided them up the stairs. The zombified mountain lion stayed behind and kept scouring the first floor for more ghouls. The second floor was nothing but classrooms, open-doors with a dearth of students and a surplus of desks. Lacy’s Star stood in front of a closed door at the end of the hall. 

She opened it, and saw it was empty and darkened. She listened, and she heard something shift. Her Star shot forward, its light revealing three ghouls eating severed arms straight off the bone. These ghouls looked somewhat more human- their faces were normal, and their skin wasn’t yet discolored with coagulated blood. Their eyes were piercing red, however, and fangs and claws poked outwards from their human features. 

They charged, far faster and far more agile than what Lacy was accustomed to. 

Lacy pulled her gun and fired.

Bang. First round clipped a ghoul’s shoulder. It slowed its assault slightly, moved in a jagged dip as it lost balance. Lacy aimed her gun towards its head, but the ghoul slammed into her as she pulled the trigger. She fell backwards, the round firing into the air.

The soundwaves danced like snowflakes before her eyes. She reached for them, and she stretched them with a wave of her hands, and she fed them Starlight. The gunshot sound rang again, and again, and again in the ghoul’s face, causing the ghoul to screech and cover its long, pointed ears. She pointed the gun right in front of the ghoul’s face and fired. The bullet caved in its skull, sent brains and viscera splattering out behind it. 

The limp, soggy body of the plague doctor appeared before Lacy’s eyes, the ghouls’ screeching a cacophonic choir accompaniment. Lacy shook her head and ignored it.

Her chest was tight, and she ignored that too.

The second ghoul was upon her, claws grazing her shirt and sending a singing pain through her shoulder and arm. She scrambled backwards, and drew from her Star for wind. She put a wall of wind between herself and the ghoul, slowing its assault, as its injured brethren got up from the floor. Lacy held her gun, but the pain in her shoulder made it difficult to aim. She switched to her right hand, and felt her aim decay immediately. She would have to make do. 

How to aim, how to- wait!

She unloaded the clip into the miniature stormwall she’d assembled, then poured her will into the wind to guide the bullets. Her perception of the world tunneled around the ghoul as she launched the lead-and-wind barrage at her target. The wind-strike landed, and bullets found their way to a ghoul’s heads. 

Her two opponents dead at her feet, Lacy breathed slowly. The plague doctor drowned in a sea of blood amidst the pitch blackness, and Lacy reached for her, but Drew pulled her hands back. 

Her ears twitched at the sound of gunfire, then at a machete carving about in the air and rending flesh. No time for guilt, Lacy thought. Just try to live for now- let God decide whether or not you go to hell.  Her Star shot over her head, out the door and down the hall. Lacy tore off a chunk of her shirt to wrap her shoulder, then scrambled after the Star to find Gwen. 

***

The ghouls charged in a wide-flanking assault, attempting to navigate around their enemies’ very large weapons. Isabella swung World-Carver in a tight arc as the first ghoul came upon her. The blade sliced through the ghoul’s neck, and a portal appeared directly behind the creature. She jumped through and pushed the corpse in with her, and as the next portal appeared right in front of the next ghoul, it was distracted by the spraying viscera of its fallen comrade launching at it. She swung, hacking through the ghoul at the ribcage and bisecting it, then ruptured its skull with the tip. 

She heard growling behind her, and she turned around to find Joshua carving up three ghouls with a single swing of Maremoto. Then, as two more ghouls came at him from opposite sides, his hands glowed and the sword dissipated into two smaller blades. He lunged both blades and punctured the ghouls’ faces. 

Isabella grinned, while her stone-faced friend gave her the thumbs’ up. She returned it. 

A spike of pain rammed through her skull. She gripped her temples and clenched her teeth. Oh Goddammit not now not now not now!

When the pain subsided, a sensation of hollowness overtook her. From out of the shadows, the white fox emerged and darted past her.

Joshua’s eyes followed the fox.

Without saying anything, Isabella carved a portal. She needed to get to Lacy, before this got any worse.

***

Danny’s bullet found the ghoul’s brain, creating a puddle of red on the floor as the corpse met the ground unceremoniously. Relief and pride fluttered in his chest- he did it! He’d actually done it! Holy shit! Holy sh- Ooooh Goddammit there’s still more!

A small platoon of ghouls came barreling forward to avenge their fallen comrades. It made vomiting an even more appealing prospect to Danny- this was just barbarous, everything about it. He gulped as Quentin jumped in front of him and fired off all his guns one after another while screaming at the top of his lungs. It was a truly astonishing array, ranging from pistols to sawed-off shotguns, all of which were hidden within his trenchcoat. As he screamed, smoke plumed from his mouth- he was a fire-user, like Gwen had said. Even the weakest of mages could manage a bit of fire. 

When Quentin ran out of bullets, all the ghouls were dead… 

… Except one, which jumped from the darkened corner. 

Danny reacted instantly, tossing his knife and taking the ghoul directly in the forehead. 

“Haha! Excellent work, young man!” Quentin said, clasping Danny’s shoulder. All Danny could offer in response was a goofy grin and a repressed feeling of shame. 

***

They cleared the upper levels, at which point they both collapsed to the floor. They sat on opposite sides of a large room, surrounded by a platoon of dead ghouls. Lacy stared up at the ceiling, her arms and legs heavy as boulders, chest heaving up and down in a looping avalanche. She stared at her Star hanging overhead. Beneath her, the floor turned to a Sea of Glass, and shattered under the weight of her guilt and shame. She fell through the darkness until finally she reached hell, where she burned face-down in the Lake of Fire for all eternity. The plague doctor stared up at her through the upper layers of the inferno, and Lacy reached down for her. 

Drew’s hands grabbed Lacy and yanked her free. 

Lacy gasped as her Star darted back downstairs. She leapt to her feet and chased after it, Gwen following immediately thereafter. They made it down to the third, second, first floor, then finally began descending the stairway to the basement. 

“This place have a dungeon too?” Lacy asked as they ran.

“Yup,” Gwen said, her Star keeping pace with Lacy’s. 

The stone stairway led down a plunging path into the ground. The dungeon dug deeper than expected, and the ceiling hung higher than anywhere else in the building- you could fit a pylon inside it. Lacy stopped at the bottom step, and Gwen slammed to a halt behind her. 

Runes were carved directly into the graystone ground, a single circle in the center marked with a raven carved into the rock. Four crevices were dug into the compass-points surrounding the raven, each carved with its own symbol: at the top, an owl; on the left, a serpent; on the bottom, a bear; on the right, a bull. Blood flowed from the mouths of each animal into the connective veins between them, gathered into the mouth of the raven and flowed downwards into the young man nailed to the center through his wrists. 

A dozen ghouls’ red eyes surrounded their victim. 

Fear and wrath surging through her in equal measure, Lacy stepped forward. However, Gwen stepped in front of Lacy and said, “You’re all my father’s students, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” one of the ghoul’s, a young woman, mostly humanoid, said. 

“He did this to you all?”

“We volunteered,” the ghoul said with a wicked grin. 

“Why?!” Lacy shouted. 

The ghouls didn’t answer. They simply cackled with hysterical laughter. Lacy’s blood boiled. Her Star quivered, and she reached for its strength and then sent her will into the earth. As the ghouls ran at them, tree roots burst through the floor and began surrounding and entrapping all the ghouls. Once it had its grip on all of them, Lacy screamed and shot forth a bolt of lighting. The tree roots caught fire, and the ghouls burned. 

Lacy lept into flames and grabbed the man from the center rune, only for the man’s eyes to turn red. He dug his claws into Lacy’s wound and shoved her to the ground, pinned her down, only for Gwen to fire a shot and hit him in the skull. Lacy felt him go limp atop her, and shoved the body away into the flames. 

She breathed heavily as her chest throbbed and the scent of burning flesh hit her nose. Sleep called to her as her muscles ached and her head pounded. Gwen extended her hand, frowning. Lacy took it, and they began climbing the stairs back up. 

The door opened, and a dozen more ghouls came pouring in. 

Lacy reached for her guns- all empty. Gwen was in a similar state of affairs. Lacy reached for Starlight, let it warm her and fill her as the smoke began to strangle the room. She didn’t have enough strength for lighting, or for more roots, and the air was too thick with smoke for wind. That left water, but the river was too far away to get here in time… 

The blood!

Lacy reached for it, and it began to rise from its position on the floor. It shattered in her metaphysical grip, but then Gwen clasped her hand and poured her own white Starlight into it. 

Her mentor grinned at her and nodded. Lacy nodded back. “Together.”

“Pilear Uisce!” Lacy shouted. 

Simultaneously, Gwen screamed, “Blutrausch!”

Their Stars danced together in perfect harmony. From behind them, the blood rose and assembled into a sphere of ammunition before their eyes. As the ghouls poured down the stairs, Gwen and Lacy fired the blood like a gatling gun, crimson bullets tearing through the air and ripping apart ghouls like cardboard. 

Finally, they ran out of blood, and they ran out of ghouls, and they began to run out of air. They ran up the stairs into the main room of the first floor. Lacy fell onto her back once more, groping for breath. 

Gwen sat on her rear, her Star dangling above her head in a stationary position. Smoke billowed out of the dungeon. Every part of Lacy’s body was sore with overexertion- she hadn’t felt like this since her first day of training with Gwen. The glass beneath Lacy threatened to shatter once more, but she dug her hands into the proverbial shrapnel even as it made her bleed. She was here, and she would not fall. She would not become a monster like these necromancers had. Not willingly. Not like they had. 

“How could they… How could anyone volunteer for that? Just throw away their humanity, become a monster?” Lacy asked, looking out the back window. The sky above had clouded over while she was inside; now it looked like it would rain, washing everything away.

“I don’t know,” Gwen said. “I really don’t know. Lots of mages, they get taken when they’re too young to know better. And even more of them are born to this world, from families who’ve always been mages and don’t know any other way besides fealty to their Prince or Princess. Indoctrination goes deep.”

“So we’ve killing innocent people?” Lacy asked, horrified. 

“I wouldn’t exactly say innocent,” Gwen said, not looking at her directly. “They all volunteered for the change.”

“But they didn’t volunteer to get taken by the Sovereignty. Or to be born into it in the first place. They didn’t know better.”

“Yeah, they didn’t,” Gwen said. “But none of those ghouls were children. A fully-developed adult brain can still make choices on its own, regardless of what it was raised to believe. And besides, ‘they don’t know better’ doesn’t matter a whole lot when they’re trying to kill you, now does it?”

Lacy blinked rapidly, sat up straight and hugged her knees. “I still don’t understand.”

“Then perhaps I can explain,” came a new voice, rich and deep.

Gwen’s head snapped around to the mouth of the building. In the entranceway loomed a five foot, ten inch man in a flowing black robe that stopped just short of the floor. Beneath the robe was a black tunic with a silver raven insignia on the chest. The man was a tightly compact frame of lean muscle, with white hair flowing down his back. He had Gwen’s gray eyes, and her delicate, angular face. “Hello, Guinevere,” the man said. 

“F-father?” Gwen said, hands shaking. 

Lacy gulped. Before her eyes stood the High Prince of House Albrecht, Chief Necromancer of the Sovereignty. Next to her, Gwen’s hands shook violently.

Alistair Albrecht spoke: “We took them in, and we gave them strength. Not power, for they were born with power, as all mages are. But the strength to use that power, now that must be taught. And because of the strength that we instill, that we have instilled in our followers for hundreds of years, House Albrecht commands loyalty, both from those whose families have always bent the knee to us, and those whom we retrieved from the wild as children.”

“They had no choice,” Lacy said, pulling herself up to her feet, backing away slowly.

“Were they to hear you say that, they would find you insufferably condescending,” Alistair smirked. “All I did, all we do, is give them the choice to be more.”

The plague doctor stood in front of Lacy, mocking her, laughing at her ignorance and her shame and her self-loathing. Lacy fell to her knees and threw up blood and stomach acid. Her head was dangerously light, and the world spun around her far faster than it should have. These had been innocent people once. She didn’t care what they said, these people didn’t have any real choice, and she’d been butchering them. She’d been butchering them for years, one after another, and thinking nothing of it. 

“Is this the Dark Lord you’ve brought me?” Alistair asked, looking at his daughter. “A pitiful creature, by the look of him.”

A poison tide washed through Lacy’s gut. In an instant, all her sorrow and all her terror all transmuted into pure, unyielding rage, and the soreness in her arms and legs evaporated. Above her, her Star throbbed with blue light. Most of the Stardust in the area had been used and wouldn’t recharge until nightfall, but she still had her own battery. So she reached for it, let it pulse through her body even as she cried out in pain. “It’s she, actually,” Lacy hissed. She raised a hand and fired a bolt of lightning from it. 

“Entropy,” Alistair Albrecht said. A thin barrier of purple light erected around him. When the bolt came within an inch of it, the lightning simply stopped. There was no explosion, no flames, no sparks; the bolt was completely negated without the slightest backlash.

Lacy balked, but then grabbed onto the sound waves, supercharged them and forced them towards Albrecht. A quarter note of thunder sounded before instantly petering out. Alistair didn’t move, didn’t even speak. “Is that the best you can do, boy?” Alistair said. “I expected more. Guinevere, are you sure this is the right one?”

Rage became unadulterated rancor. Lacy clenched her jaw, drew her knife, and charged. There was a blur of motion, a crushing hit as the wind was knocked from Lacy’s gut. A hand wrapped around her throat and lifted her from the ground. 

“Unimpressive,” Alistair said. With his free hand, he reached for Lacy’s shoulder wound. His gray eyes bled to scarlet, and claws sprouted from beneath his fingernails as he dug into Lacy’s wound and tore off a morsel of skin. He held it above his mouth and lowered it into his mouth, swallowing it. “Hm. Very well then, it seems you are the one. A pitiful Dark Lord you are. So many we’ve had in our history, and after so long awaiting the last one, the Dark Lord beneath the boot of which all others would break, it’s a pitiful, disgusting little boy like you.”

“Ngh bwth,” Lacy choked out.

“Speak up, lad,” Alistair smirked, loosening his grip around her neck.

“Not a boy,” Lacy hissed. She kicked Alistair in the groin, and he grunted and loosened his grip. She slipped out of the choke-hold and hit the ground, rolled into the fall and side-stepped as she rose. Alistair was still blocking off the exit- she needed to force her way through, get to safety. “And you’re one to talk about disgusting, you freak.”

“I became what I must to ensure the culmination of my life’s work.”

“So you became a monster.”

“I became the King of the Ghouls,” he said. … No. No. Not ‘he.’ It. This man, he’d made a choice to no longer call himself human. All that remained was a monster. An ‘it.’

Lacy’s eyes widened as her ire and virulence boiled over and blew off its proverbial top. Lightning crackled between her fingers. She didn’t throw the bolt, but held it tight and channeled it into her knife. She screamed, and narrowly missed her target as it sidestepped. The lighting came hurtling out of the blade and exploded against the inner wall of the school’s entrance, leaving black scorch marks on the gray stone. 

The backside of Alistair’s hand crashed into Lacy’s cheek and knocked her to the ground. Alistair’s foot appeared on Lacy’s chest as she tried to get up, and a painful weight hovered over her ribcage. She looked over to Gwen, who still stood there, unblinking, hands trembling, Star hanging utterly stagnant over her head. 

“GWEN!” Lacy cried. “Gwen, please help!”

“It’s no use, boy,” Alistair said. “My second daughter has many strengths, but courage was never among them. It’s in her nature to allow others to die fighting for her. If it provides you with any measure of comfort as Azrael takes you, know that I do not think she does it deliberately- she is simply a coward, desperate to hide from the world and from herself. It is fortunate that she found you, and fortunate she found her way back to me, just as I’d hoped; you will not have to suffer under her inadequate tutelage for too long.”

Wrath like she’d never felt before, an animalistic fury threaded with moral outrage, a primal need to fight and kill the abomination before her eyes and scream over its corpse, saturated every cell in her body. She spat in the creature’s face, and when it flinched ever so slightly, she wriggled her way out from under its boot. Then, she bit it just above the ankle. 

Finally, to Lacy’s immeasurable joy, Alistair grunted in pain as it shook its leg free of Lacy’s jaws. Bits of its skin, dry and rough as sandpaper, and bitter black blood filled Lacy’s mouth. As she got up she spat that too into Alistair’s face. “Two can play that game, asshole.”

“You don’t have the stomach, boy,” Alistair said, wiping its face. 

Lacy backstepped, trying to gain distance. “I’m not a boy.”

“You clearly are.”

“No, you’re clearly insane and delusional.”

“And what makes you say that? Because I don’t indulge your ridiculous claims?”

“No, dickhead! Because you’re an evil sorcerer trying to take over the fucking world, and you chose to do so by becoming a fucking monster! You know who does that? Crazy people!”

“Incorrect.”

“‘Incorrect?!’ That’s your comeback?! That’s your defense of all this fucking lunacy?!”

“I don’t need to explain myself to a pathetic thing like you,” Alistair said. “Yes, that’s right. A thing. You claim not to be a boy, and you’re clearly not a girl, so that makes you a creature. An ‘it.’ You’re small-minded. That you’re saying all this proves you don’t deserve that Star, don’t deserve your Destiny. You think it insane to take responsibility for your Destiny-”

“Is it your Destiny to take over the world? I thought that was mine,” Lacy growled. 

“And yet you consider it insane and delusional for no real reason other than that you’ve become committed to maintaining the status quo. You’d rather our world die a slow death than enter the crucible and rise like a phoenix from the ashes. You refuse to acknowledge what you are, refuse to do what you were meant to do. You only accepted that Star recently, and it shows. All that power and you’re still repressing it. And even if you stopped holding back, you’d destroy yourself. You cannot handle this power- it would consume you before you could realize its potential. That Star belongs in the hands of someone who can wield it properly.”

“And that’s you?”

“Yes.”

“Says who?”

It looked at Lacy in the way her old school teachers did when she asked what they considered a stupid question. And then it smiled, revealing a maw of shark’s teeth. “Why, says I, of course. That’s all the permission I need to save the world.”

“You think you’re gonna save the world by taking it over? And you’re still insisting you’re not crazy?”

“Magic is dying,” Alistair said solemnly. “Fewer and fewer mages are born to our world with each passing generation. Our numbers are in the thousands now. But I’ve seen beyond the Pale, into the cosmic west, where the Star-flames burn everbright. The walls must come down for magic to come to us, to surge back into our world and allow our ascension. I shall save the world. I shall save magic. I shall save the human race from its own inadequacy.”

Lacy stared at Alistair for a moment. Then her eyes narrowed, and she said, “Bullshit.”

“Excuse you?”

“You don’t really believe that,” Lacy said in a flattened monotone, shaking her head lightly. “That’s completely ludicrous. You’re just a power-hungry asshole, and you can dress that up in all the fancy words and good intentions you want, but you don’t really believe it, because nobody is that fucking stupid. If you’re serious about what you wanna do to me, at least drop the fucking act and don’t treat me like-”

“How DARE YOU!” Alistair screamed. 

Lacy gulped. 

Alistair bounded towards Lacy. “The impudence to suggest my motives are impure, to suggest that I do this for myself. How dare you, you small-minded child. You live in a dreamworld, and I intend to shatter it, you stupid animal.”

The King of the Ghouls loomed over her and tapped its chest. Not one but two Stars emerged: one red, one purple. They orbitted him, the red running clockwise and the purple counterclockwise, passing each other twice each rotation and releasing a low, blunt resonance each time. Starlight poured out and cast neon color over the barren hallway. 

And Alistair looked so very, very pleased with itself. 

Lacy spat in its face once more.

Alistair threw a punch. 

Lacy dodged the first blow, but wasn’t quick enough for the second or third. 

“Not everyone is content to live in a broken world,” Alistair said as it rained blows down upon Lacy. “Some of us actually want to fix it. I’ve often wondered if I should look forward to killing you, to stripping you of the Destiny you do not deserve. And I realized that it does not matter if I should want it, because I simply do want it. Oh, I do, so very much.”

A gun fired, and Alistair grunted in pain as the bullet took it in the right tricep. Lacy’s eyes darted over and saw Gwen, still trembling, breathing heavily, tears streaming down her face, holding and aiming the gun in her unsteady hand. 

Alistair’s predatory smile blossomed once more. It chuckled once, twice, three times as the smile became an exuberant cackle. “Excellent, Guinevere. Perhaps you have finally grown.”

Gwen choked out the words between tears, “Given what I did last time we saw each other, I wouldn’t go doubting my resolve. Or my follow-through. Old man.”

“I am an old man,” it said with a smug grin. “But I’ve never felt better in my life.”

“Not alive,” Lacy growled before she bit it in the leg again. It shook her off, kicked her in the nose. Blood broke free of the cartilage. 

Gwen pulled the trigger again, but the bullets all stopped short and fell to the ground- they all simply lost the will to keep moving forward when they hit its violet shield.

“You’re still aiming at me,” Alistair said, stepping towards Gwen. Lacy cradled her swelling face, tried to force herself to stand in spite of the bruises on her stomach and chest. “Still, after all this time, after everything that’s happened, you’re aiming at me! Dry your tears then, girl, and fire! Fire! FIRE!”

“Yes sir,” Gwen whispered. And then, when Alistair stood only a few feet away, Gwen snapped her fingers and ignited a wall of fire directly underneath him. 

For a moment, Lacy found the strength to stand. 

And then the fire died, and Alistair stood unscorched. Its eyes had once more bled to scarlet, while its skin had paled to a decaying gray, and claws had sprouted from its fingers. It still stood tall. “Unimpressive. As. Always. Guinevere.”

Gwen screamed.

Lacy screamed. 

Alistair raised his arms and shouted, “ENTROPY!”

Lacy’s body moved without her mind as she called her Star back into her chest, and Gwen performed the same automatic process. A frigid calm infected the air, everything was beautifully silent. Lacy wanted to bask in the emptiness, even as a building crumbled around her.