Content Warnings

Ableism
Sexually derogatory language
Sadism
Gore
Sexual assault as a metaphor

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Scarlet Edge is beautiful. Everybody knows that.

All magical girls are beautiful, of course; it seems to be a requirement for the role, as if Dream-Gods have a keen eye for clear complexion, well-balanced faces, and good posture. All magical girls are beautiful in their own ways, not merely copied and pasted from a master mould of feminine standards, human or dreamlike or otherwise. It would be too easy to see the problem if they all had pale skin and big tits and simpering smiles. But even in all their variation you can’t help but notice how perfect each girl is, whatever her country of origin, her personal physique, the colour of her skin, the depth of her curves, or lack thereof. Every magical girl is perfect, even in her imperfections — no cripples, no skin conditions, no blemishes or birthmarks. Scars sometimes, but only when they’re picturesque and fitting. Fat only when it’s sweetly carried. Bad haircuts only when they are to be outgrown. For magical girls, even flaws become fanciful.

But Scarlet Edge is a cut above her peers. Everybody knows that too.

The media fell in love with her at first sight, on the day she was unveiled by the previous Trio of Albion. The public profess to love her comrades no less; Azure Infinity and Dawn’s First Gloaming get no less screen time, internet gossip, and fanart, no fewer front-page spreads, fawning interviews, or television specials.

Officially the Trio does not have a leader, but Scarlet Edge is always front and centre, most often the vanguard of a fight, regularly the speaker for all three. She’s the first the BBC turn to for a quick word after a Nightmare, though she is so economical with her speech, so unsmiling with her lips, so severe with her expressions. That’s part of why they like her; she is impossible to grasp, like a living flame, in which one can see anything one prefers.

She’s the one they’ve put on coins and banners, though her crimson drowns out so much else. Plush dolls, cartoon series, cosplay outfits; they all get those, of course. But Scarlet Edge gets more than most. And she’s the one with the most fanart on the illegal websites, the ones you need an equally illegal VPN to visit, though she seems so beyond human touch.

England’s flame-red rose. Our best foot forward. Our fair maiden. The hair helps. It invites comparisons with Churchill and Elizabeth the First, and foolish whispers about King Arthur returned in England’s hour of need.

Scarlet Edge is not what I was expecting. I’ve seen her on television and the internet thousands of times. In the sky, up in the air, dozens or more.

Distance and artificiality did her an injustice. The moving image failed to capture her beauty.

The long flame-like hair, licking the air with tiny upcurls of phantasmal fire; the set-back shoulders, the puffed-out chest, the regal poise, the grace and balance in her legs and hips; the smooth red silk of her exposed stockings beneath the cream-white satin of her dress, gliding across her calves and knees with a rustle like quiet flames, the insides like bleeding marrow from a cracked bone. The pinched waist, the swelling bust, the chalk-and-garnet lace about her throat and upper arms. Her face, sharp and strong, a statue animated by a spark of divinity. Lips too red, the angles of her face sharp enough to slice your heart open. Eyes like rubies held against a fire; the cameras and the newspapers never catch the way those eyes glow from inside, an inferno welling up behind mortal flesh.

Steam rises from the damp asphalt around her high heels. Her sword is already drawn, slender scabbard empty at her waist. A length of crystal the colour of dark wine, glowing with inner veins of caged fire.

Scarlet Edge is more than beautiful.

Only a few people know this, and it is a curse.

She stirs something deep within me, something only Willow has stirred before.

Her eyes travel slowly, first from me, to Nerys on my shoulder, to the blood on my prosthetic hand, to the open security door from which I have burst, and finally to the dead Section Special officer on the ground, with his face caved in and his skull burst out and his brains splattered on the damp ground.

Scarlet Edge looks at me again; her eyes make my heart leap and flutter. She does not repeat her question.

She stares at my right eye for just a second too long, those perfect orbits meeting my mangled scar. But my anger has fled before this fire, and whatever was inside me gutters out, overwhelmed and outranked. Why should she not stare? She is perfection, and I am a ruin, coated in the filth of my crimes. I am a cringing, unworthy, cowardly worm before the face of this divine flame.

Nerys opens her little zoog jaws and hisses at Scarlet Edge.

I raise my hands, shaking in surrender. My right knuckles are coated with blood. When I take a breath to speak, the air tastes hot and chewy, like distant wood-smoke from a wildfire.

“It’s not … ” I croak, choke on my words, on the taint of smoke in the air. “This— this isn’t what it looks like.”

Scarlet Edge raises her chin, dismisses my words.

“It looks like you’ve killed an officer of the law,” she says. “With your bare hands.” Her eyes flicker to my prosthetic. “Or whatever you call that thing.”

The crackle of distant flame underlines her voice. Pure Oxford, old home counties, a touch of Received Pronunciation.

I can’t even swallow. Barely shake my head. I should be down on my knees, face on the asphalt, prostrating myself. “No— no, it’s just— just a prosthetic arm. My— my prosthetic arm. Please. Please, I’m not a Dreamer, I’m not.”

“Dreamer or not, you are a murderer.”

Nerys tightens her tail on my upper arm, where the prosthetic socket meets my stump. “Step off, fuck-doll!” she screeches at Scarlet Edge. “I got here in time, this one’s mine! You want her head, you’ll have to fight for it! You want me to show my face right here, huh?! You wanna fucking go?! You’ll shit your intestines out in fear, and then I’ll fucking eat them!” She ends with a loud hiss, spitting droplets of black ooze — then whispers in my ear. “Octavia, ignore her! You have to portal out! I can teach you how, but you gotta do it yourself—”

I’m not listening to the devil on my shoulder.

I’m hoping for salvation. It’s absurd, but I can’t help it. I grew up here, like everyone else, and I am a wilting blade of grass before England’s flame-red rose.

“They shot me!” I say.

Scarlet Edge raises an eyebrow. “You look distinctly unshot.” Her free hand indicates the man on the ground. “While he lies dead.”

“Yes, yes, I know, I know. I-I healed, the— the wounds healed.” I clutch at my chest with my left hand, at the bullet holes in my jumper and shirt, at my blood still wet all down my front. “I-I don’t understand, I don’t— I didn’t ask for this— I— please, please, I just want to go— I want to go home. Please. You’re a magical girl, you’re supposed to protect us, aren’t you? I’m just … I’m nobody. A nobody.”

Scarlet Edge raises her sword, the point toward my throat.

“The vermin on your shoulder reveals you for what you are,” she says, then shakes her head, almost sadly. “Our faithful mouser is often too merciful. He should have killed you when he had the chance.”

Nerys hisses at her again. “Vermin!? You can talk, reeking of cat piss and dog cock!”

“You mean … John?” I splutter. “John Smith? Yes, yes he’s the one who shot me! You—”

“Cease your prattle,” Scarlet Edge says. “Stay still, or I shall cut you down without mercy.”

With mercy as bait, I bob my head. Yes, my lady, I will be a good girl, I will stay still and quiet and wait for your judgement, and please, please, please let your mercy fall upon me. I will go wherever you will, wherever you say, as long as you deign to withhold just punishment. I am before the one authority in all England that can protect me from all others, because magical girls are a law unto themselves. Surely Scarlet Edge, of all people, will see that I was the one done wrong here, that ‘John Smith’ shot me first, that I was forced to defend myself, that I am innocent.

Bullshit. Coward. Turncoat. The thought alone makes me sick at myself. What am I doing?

I killed two people. Hard to deny that now.

Scarlet Edge slips a slender mobile phone from somewhere inside her dress. She keeps her eyes on me, not a flicker, not a blink. The sword is steady as iron, pointed at my throat. She puts the phone to her ear.

Nerys whispers. “Turn and run! Octavia, run! You have to run! You’re one of my girls now, but you can’t face this overstuffed tart, not yet, not alone! Run and I’ll teach you how to leave, I can teach you how to translocate! Octavia! Octavia!”

The policeman in my heart still clings to life. I stay where I am. I want to shut Nerys up, but I don’t have the courage for that either. What if I pull her off my shoulder and offer her to Scarlet Edge? Would that be enough submission, enough betrayal, enough proof that I’m not worth bothering with?

But Nerys saved my life. The thought of betrayal curdles into self-disgust.

Scarlet Edge speaks into the phone. “Nice to hear you’re alive, you old fool.” She almost smiles, too subtle to be certain. “Yes, I’ve found her, she’s outdoors. Do we want her taken back … No, no it’s not in public, but there are plenty of cameras … all right. Keep the civilians clear. I’ll handle this.”

She lowers the phone, makes it vanish into her dress.

“Listen, please,” I say. Draw myself up, straighten my spine, try to fix my hair. “Scarlet … Scarlet Edge. I’m a magical girl now, apparently, and I don’t entirely know what that means. I defended myself, that was all. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, it just happened, but I’m … not … I’m not … ”

A murderer?

Scarlet Edge considers me with pure disdain. “What you are is weak. You could have resisted. You could have said no. I hate that you’re going to make me do this.”

Nerys sinks her sharp claws into my shoulder, through my coat, drawing blood, enough to make me flinch and hiss. “Octavia, come on, come on!” she rasps in my ear. “Run now, run, run, run! Bullets you can shrug off, but she can kill you for real! Move your feet, run!”

Scarlet Edge pulls back her sword, changes to a two-handed grip, adjusts her footing.

“Make this easy, on both of us,” she says. “Turn away and close your eyes, and I will take your head off in one strike. The pain will be over in an instant. You will feel nothing.”

Nerys leans forward on my shoulder, black ichor dripping from her snout, jaws wide. “I already told you, you’re too late, you tic-ridden bag! You want her, you go through me! And I’ll gnaw out your eyeballs!”

“Be quiet, you misplaced vermin,” says Scarlet Edge. “I will deal with you later, here or elsewhere, one way or another. Do not think we cannot find you, and we will, before your next victim.”

“Victim?” I whisper.

“She’s making shit up!” Nerys chitters. “You’re not my victim, you’re one of my girls, and I’m trying to get you to fucking run!”

“Make this easy,” Scarlet Edge repeats to me. “If you make me fight, if you make this hard for me, I will make it hard for you. The more you cling to life, the more I must make you suffer. Turn away. Close your eyes.”

“ … I … no, I’m a nobody, I … you want to kill me?” My voice rises, I almost sound like Nerys. “But you’re a magical girl! You’re supposed to protect us.”

“It’s the only way to deal with things like you.”

Scarlet Edge — the poster girl, the golden girl, the crimson-and-cream wank-fodder girl, the hijacked symbol of a wounded England in an age of monsters and nightmares — is going to kill me? After all the indignities and all the humiliations of the last decade of my life? All the stares and the assumptions and the process of strapping my body back together every day, all for long ten years, and it ends in this? This insult? After her predecessors killed my parents and took away half my body and left me with this jagged mess across my face? After being right and proper and upstanding, after trying so hard to be a sensible young woman? After scraping together the dregs of my dignity and lashing them to my chest, always running out through my fingers? After resisting the urge to shove my tongue down Willow’s throat and my fingers up Willow’s cunt?

After all that, the most beautiful, perfect, unblemished magical girl in England — or maybe in the whole world — is going to cut off my head?

After making me feel a dull echo of the way I feel about Willow?

And she doesn’t even want a fight?

My lips peel back. My teeth creak. A tingle runs down my neck, my shoulders, my upper back. Breath, hot and hard and shaking, heaving like bellows. Nerys hissing in my ear, scrabbling at my shoulder, but the words don’t go in. Barely know what I’m doing. Do it anyway.

Terror gives way, a thin shelf of ice above an ocean of crystal-clear rage.

I raise my fists. Prosthetic to the fore.

“Fuck you,” I spit.

Scarlet Edge frowns, a single crease across her porcelain-perfect forehead. “I tried to give you an easy way out—”

“I don’t want the easy way out!” I scream over her, louder than I’ve ever screamed before — louder than I screamed pinned in a shelter ten years ago. “I want to live! I want to go home! And you. You. I’ve hated you for so long. All of you. And now … ” I flex my prosthetic knuckles. Caked with blood, but it’s not dry yet, still closing just fine. My heart thunders in my chest. My veins fill with jet fuel. I start to laugh, high and wild, like I never have before. “And now I’m going to punch your head off your shoulders!”

Scarlet Edge blinks. Twice.

Oh the satisfaction, to see a crack in that exterior.

I didn’t want to kill those two men, those two random Section Special officers. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I broke their skulls because they were trying to kill me, and I don’t know my own strength anymore. Heat of the moment, heat of battle, all that. They had families and lives, and I had no particular desire to end them.

But I want to punch Scarlet Edge. Will it kill her like it killed them? Doubtful. She’s a magical girl, she can take much worse, just like I took those three bullets.

I can wail on her to my heart’s content.

I want to shatter that porcelain expression, smear blood and tears and snot on her oh-so-perfect cheeks, hear her cry out in pain and dismay. I want to see her weep and grovel, cheek ground into the gravel beneath my shoe. I want to see that white dress stained and filthy with asphalt grit and mud and rainwater. I want to ruin her.

Scarlet Edge takes a deep breath. Her hair brightens, colour deepening, the sky and the concrete behind washed out by her intensity. Heat-haze outline shimmers at her edges. The asphalt starts to dry in a wide circle around her feet. Her light forces me to squint, she’s so bright.

“Remember,” she says, voice like a flame. “When I have gutted you like a pig. Remember that you wanted it this way. You made me do this.”

She charges.

Scarlet Edge comes at me faster than I thought possible, a blur of flame and bleached bone and bubbling blood. Her ruby sword flashes out to one side in a whirling strike, so fast it turns to a crimson smear, roaring with superheated air.

I’ve made a terrible mistake.

I scream, scramble back, stumble over my own feet, almost fall down on my arse, because nobody has ever rushed at me before, let alone a super-human shard of the dreamlike and divine, faster than the human eye can follow. Scarlet Edge is not human, has not been human since childhood, and my body knows on a deep, instinctive, gut-and-bone level that she is going to kill me, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

The stumble buys me half a second. Her sword cuts a figure-of-eight flourish inches from my face, ruby tip blazing with inner fire, reeking of burning air. She didn’t expect the dodge; her eyes twitch with surprise, and her sword follows through with no meat to cut or flesh to burn.

Nerys is screeching and scrabbling at my shoulder, beseeching me to flee; I’m still not listening, because the anger’s still in me.

I use the momentum of the stumble, though I have no idea what I’m doing.

Pull back my right arm, gather my muscles, while Scarlet’s blade is still coming back around.

Full body weight behind my right fist, on purpose this time. My prosthetic arm, a lightweight collection of carbon fibre and foam filling and wire and motors. But it feels like a pneumatic piston. It’s not my arm anymore, it’s the hammer of the gods, roaring inside my head.

I’ve caught Scarlet Edge off-guard. My fist connects with the flat of her sword, smashes it aside with a clang like a cracked bell, almost tears it from her grip.

My punch lands square in her gut. My knuckles sink into dress, skin, flesh, organs.

Scarlet Edge reels.

Her eyes fly wide; her mouth jerks open, spittle flying, a strangled grunt as I slam the air from her lungs. She totters back on her high heels, putting distance between us. She stumbles to a halt, half-hunched, one hand on her gut, one hand on her sword. Perfect porcelain face creased with pain, eyes squinted with hate. Breathing hard, then a cough, an actual wheeze from that swanlike throat. Hair in disarray, flames flickering and guttering. Bloodstain on the stomach of her white dress, the imprint of my knuckles over her belly.

I have not punched a hole through her, not like I did with the Section Special officers. She is a magical girl, after all.

I’m shaking, sweating, breathing like a bellows, my head full of blood, my skin on fire. My mind is a crucible. My fist is a cannon.

This is the best moment of my life.

No, that’s insulting. The best moments of my life were all about Willow: tucked up together, hiding beneath the sheets, her hand in mine, her face so close; her eyes when I showed her the way I put my leg on, her curious questions, her pure lack of judgement; watching the way she puts her hair into a ponytail, and lets it down again, and then lets me at it with a brush until it’s silky smooth; her face, smiling just to see me; her lips against—

But I’m laughing through clenched teeth. I’m here and alive and there’s blood on my fist. My chin is held high, I can’t stop grinning, and Scarlet Edge is ready to beg.

“I’m going to hit you again,” I say through the laughter. My voice doesn’t sound like me, low and rough and raw. “And again, and again, and—”

A lash of yellow lighting and a bolt of royal blue fall from the sky, comets streaking from the firmament, to land either side of Scarlet Edge. Suddenly she no longer faces me alone.

Azure Infinity and Dawn’s First Gloaming, the other two thirds of the Trio of Albion.

They are no less beautiful than Scarlet, no easier to witness up close and personal.

Azure is dressed like a fairytale knight, in skirts of blue steel, slender gauntlets on her arms, throat cupped by a matching gorget, her chest-piece bright like the depths of a sapphire nebula. A long blonde ponytail reaches to her waist, flickering with a cerulean aura, as if she carries a clear sky always at her back. She is the smallest of the trio, perhaps a year or two younger than the others, younger than me, but she carries her massive warhammer like it’s made of paper. Her frown is deep and serious, the sea in a storm.

Dawn is all sunshine frills and gleaming layers and elegant loops of brilliant ribbon, a yellow dress festooned with bandoleers and pockets, short skirt showing off her bare legs. Her hair clings to her skull in perfect braided zigzags; her dark skin glows with captured sunlight, as if she always stands before the sun’s first moments. She has a brace of flintlock pistols belted around her waist, but they don’t need powder and shot. Her arquebus is cocked against one hip, not aimed at me. She’s taller than Scarlet, less stiff than Azure, green eyes twinkling above a quiet smirk.

Both of them stare right at me.

“Scarlet!” Azure shouts. “She get you? You cool? You good? Scar’?”

Dawn purrs. “Ohhhh, I think I like this one. Just look at her, not even a flinch. She landed a punch on you from a standing start, Edge? Either you’re getting sloppy or she’s special. I wonder if she could punch a bullet out of the air.”

Scarlet Edge straightens up, rolls her shoulders back, raises her sword. “I’m fine,” she snaps. “I don’t need your help. Either of you.”

Azure tuts and hisses, hefting her warhammer. “All together, Scarlet! We all go together, or not at all. Right?! And we saw her right hook! This isn’t just some shitty Dreamer!”

Dawn levels her rifle at my face, lazy and slow, hands stroking the bronze trigger mechanism. “Think I should give it a shot? She really might be fast enough to catch the round, and that would be a sight to see, ladies. Care to wager? A hundred pound that she tries, another hundred that she stops the round, a third hundred that it breaks her mechanical hand clean off. Azzy, you in?”

Azure pulls a face. “What? Dawn, shut up, no.”

“Too bad. Edge?”

Scarlet places the flat of her sword against the barrel of Dawn’s musket and forces her to point it elsewhere.

“She’s mine,” Scarlet says.

Punching a lone magical girl in the gut was one thing — implausible, possible, wild. But the prospect of fighting the whole Trio sobers me up fast. The rage-high dribbles away.

“She … she attacked me first!” I say, speaking to Azure and Dawn. “She told me she was going to kill me! And they—” I gesture at the corpse on the ground “—they were going to kill me too! They tried to shoot me! You two … you two aren’t just going to let this happen, are you? I don’t even understand what’s going on here! I don’t understand why … why … ”

But I do understand why. Dream Control, Section Special, the Trio of Albion, and every other magical girl in England, they all want me dead, even if they don’t know who I am yet. Because there’s a Dream-Goddess on my shoulder and her contract is lodged in my soul. Because I am now the enemy.

Azure softens her frown. “Octavia, right? You’re Octavia, aren’t you? We’re … we’re sorry, yeah? Sorry this has to happen.”

“You know my name? Please, I’m just a normal girl, a normal woman. Please!”

Azure lowers her warhammer and looks away, eyes full of regret.

“Don’t, Azzy,” says Dawn. “Just makes it harder.”

“But … but like, we just … she’s not … ”

Scarlet Edge snorts. “She’s defective. A weakling who gave in. Forget what you heard. Look at what stands in front of you.”

“Defective?!” I shout. The anger floods back. “I am not a weakling! I’ve done what I had to survive, and you, you … you’ve never had to even try!”

Nerys leans forward on my shoulder. “All three of you rancid dog-cock-holsters can fuck off before I gnaw out your guts!”

“See?” Scarlet says. “The vermin makes itself known. There is no other path open to us. But, my sisters, I will shoulder this burden in your place.”

Dawn puts up her rifle. Cracks a smile at me. “Sorry, girl. Guess it’s just not your day.”

Scarlet Edge raises her sword again.

“No!” I shout. “Wait! I didn’t mean—”

She explodes toward me, a tongue of flame from the mouth of hell, roaring through the air like a backdraft from a burning building. Her sword whirls out to one side again, blurring so fast it hurts my eyes, inner veins pulsing with molten ruby.

I yank back another punch, but I barely know what I’m doing, all the clarity of my anger is so muddied now.

And Scarlet Edge has experience. She’s seen the one trick I had.

Her charge burns the air, the sky, the earth; I try to roar, but it comes out strangled. I loose my punch, all my body weight behind my prosthetic fist — but this time Scarlet flows around the blow like flames around a tree branch. The tip of her sword catches the carbon fibre case of my forearm, tilts my strike, ruins my aim. My knuckles connect with loose dress, then tear through, into thin air.

Her ruby sword penetrates me low in the gut. Slices through skin and fat and muscle, cauterizing as it goes, ripping upward through meat and organs. The stench of my own burning flesh chokes me; I feel the blade as it punctures my diaphragm and collapses my lungs, scrapes against my spine, and punches out through my upper back.

She runs me all the way through, tip to hilt. Scarlet’s fists are against my belly, my blood slick on her knuckles.

White hot fire rends my insides, every nerve screaming, a cold flame eating at my core. I can’t breathe, can’t speak, can’t even splutter, because I’m drowning in a wave of my own blood, bubbling up and out of my mouth, dark as wine. It is the worst pain I have ever felt. Every inch of my skin is frozen with sweat. Meat inside me, grinding against the blade, like nails down a chalkboard magnified a thousand times. This is nothing like the bullets, nothing like being shot. This is death by burning and I am dying.

Scarlet Edge fills my world, right in my face, our eyes inches apart. Her porcelain perfection is gone.

She’s panting and flushed, lips parted and quivering.

She twists the sword. I try to scream, but there’s too much blood in my lungs and throat. Scarlet Edge whimpers with pleasure.

Azure shouts, “Just finish her! Scarl’, this is fucked! Put her down!”

“Yeah,” Dawn sighs. “Bit much, isn’t it?”

Scarlet Edge takes one hand off her blade and gropes at my right shoulder. At first I think she’s trying to get leverage to twist me on the sword again, or trying to rip my prosthetic arm off the stump, just to humiliate me in my final moments. But she hisses and winces, then whips back her hand, bleeding and bitten.

“Vermin—” she spits.

She’s trying to get at Nerys. The only person — well, entity — which has treated me as more than meat in the last six hours. My dubious salvation, my strange little friend, my fake zoog. My Dream-Goddess.

Nerys is hissing and biting, claws dug in so hard she’s tearing up the skin on my shoulder. She won’t let me go, won’t let them take me. And I won’t let them take her.

I can barely move, pinned on the sword, so I do the only thing left to me.

I dart my head forward, mash my lips against Scarlet’s mouth.

And bite down.

A kiss unworthy of the name. A split-second of velvet lips, hot as a banked fire, the taste of flame and wine and tears. And then it’s all blood and teeth and Scarlet’s muffled scream.

She rips herself away, reeling back, grip slackened for a second. Blood sprays from my mouth, all over Scarlet’s pretty face.

With strength that I shouldn’t have, I haul myself off the sword with a wet sucking sound. Feel it in my innards, crystal sliding loose, organs trying to follow. A torrent of blood spills from my belly and doesn’t stop, flowing out onto the asphalt, flowing up my throat, choking and burning, drowning me in my own life.

But I’m off the sword and staggering away. Scarlet is screaming, wiping my blood out of her eyes, spluttering broken words. And Nerys is still on my shoulder.

Azure and Dawn are shouting, all jumbled up through the pounding in my ears — “Scarl’, fuck, she’s getting—”, “Mouser’s not going to like this,” “—the pretender, she’s gonna flee—”

I turn away, try to run, legs won’t work, either flesh or prosthetic. Try to hold my guts in, but there’s so much blood pouring through my fingers, and it’s not stopping, not slowing, not like the bullet wounds. The hole in me is not slicking shut.

Heavy footsteps rush across the asphalt. A woosh of displaced air — Azure’s warhammer rising in both her hands, right behind me. The click-clack-clock of something that only pretends to be an antique musket, the slippery metal slide of rounds slotted into place by quick and practised hands.

The Trio of Albion, preparing to take down another newborn Dreamer.

Nerys hisses, right in my ear. “Right then, I’ll portal for both of us! No apologies for the destination!”

The world opens a mouth of purple darkness.

And swallows me whole.

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Magical girls. Let ’em loose and they’ll go at each other like a pair of dogs in heat. Ahem. Poor Octavia. All she wanted to do was go home. And now she’s going … elsewhere.

So! That’s the end of the first arc! Quite different to how I’ve handled opening arcs in the past; 4 chapters, short and sharp and very pointed. Arc 2 is currently 5 chapters long, and arc 3 is going to be similar. Combined together, the first three arcs make up a sort of extended introduction to the story, a ‘first volume’, kind of!

Next week is a break week. For those of you who’ve read my other stories, you know how I handle this. For those who are new, here’s how it works: Maidens of the Fall will be published 3 Saturdays in a row, and then take a week out, and then publish for another 3 Saturdays, and so on. ‘Break week’ is perhaps a bit of a misnomer; the story takes a break, but I use that time to write further ahead, outline and plan, and (hopefully) keep a healthy buffer for emergencies. However, Maidens is going so well behind the scenes that I might revisit this over the next few months, maybe publish bonus chapters out of schedule. Not sure yet, we’ll see! If you want to check if the story is on a break week, I will always keep this schedule up-to-date.

Also also! More art! From the Discord! This week we have the best thing of all – a regular zoog! (by Cera!) I was so delighted by this, it made me squeal. I suspect we’re going to be seeing quite a few zoogs in the story.

Break week also happens to be the perfect time for a shoutout! I haven’t done one of these in a little while, so: System Lost, by DarkTechnomancer, is a rather unique isekai story, by the author of Fates Parallel (which I think I shouted out several years ago now!) I don’t often shout-out litRPGs, but DT’s a real good writer and does some very fun things with characters. If you’re looking for something right away, and litRPG is your kinda thing, go take a look, you might like it! I sure did.

Meanwhile, if you want more Maidens right away, you can:

Subscribe on Patreon

Right now my patrons have access to three chapters ahead! For the moment I’m going to try to keep it as three; in the future I hope to push this out to more.

And thank you, dear readers. It’s good to have you here. I couldn’t do any of this without all of you!

Next chapter, Octavia’s taking a trip. Let’s hope it’s not to the zoog dimension.

Content Warnings

Discussion of suicide
Mental healthcare abuse
Gore
Implied homophobia & internalised homophobia

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Decent people shouldn’t speak to things that come from dreams.

Any young woman sober, shrewd, and sensible, would know to keep her lips firmly shut, and not to talk with an ink-blot illusion shaped like a zoog, squatting on the interrogation room table. A proper and trusting lass would follow instructions from her betters, and keep her faith in the government man who has offered her mercy and sanctuary. A straight-laced girl, fearful and confused, would run to the door, cry out for authority, and close her ears against whispers from across the shattered walls of the waking world.

I shouldn’t even acknowledge it’s there.

But in my heart of hearts I’ve never been what they wanted me to be.

“Kill me?” I echo, then swallow a hundred pointless questions. Too late, I’ve already replied, now I’m a lost cause. “You mean ‘John Smith’, the man who just left the room? Why would he kill me?”

The zoog on the table pulls a convincingly zoog-like expression of surprise, eyes widening, little flappy ears standing up, tail stretching out straight.

Every inch of the zoog’s body is dripping black. Globs of tarry ectoplasm slide from fur and flesh, sloughing off in sticky thick ropes. But not a single droplet lands; the tarry ooze vanishes as it falls, dissolving into thin air. The table stays clean, even where the zoog’s sharp-clawed paw-pads splay against the surface.

“What, no screaming?” she says, still speaking with that double-voice, a human woman behind the zoog’s raspy chatter. Obsidian lips peel back, showing coal-sharp teeth in her sooty snout. “Well done! From the looks of you I thought you’d be a real screamer, you know? You’ve got the face for it, but I should never judge a book by the cover. A good sign, we’re off to a great start! If you’d screamed then we’d be done already. Men with guns would burst in and shoot both of us. Not that it matters to me, but that would be the end of you. Well done, Octavia. You’ve already cleared the first hurdle.”

A dry swallow, cold and hard, matches the sweat drying on my skin. I lower my hands, uncurl my prosthetic fingers. A real zoog would cower before a raised fist, prosthetic or not, at least when alone. But my meagre weapons serve no purpose at the fore. This foe is beyond fists. I shan’t debase myself with fear.

Straighten my spine, compose a frown, think fast. She’s already claimed the initiative, I have to snatch it back.

“I should scream, shouldn’t I?” I say; the zoog shakes her head, snout swinging side to side, dripping phantasmal oil. “You’re not a zoog. You’re not even attempting a credible zoog.” She starts to nod, lips peeling back in that zipper-faced smile. “You’re a Dreamer.”

“Oh, pwauh!” the zoog snorts, little black eyes squinting tight. “Puh-lease. Don’t go mistaking the sea for a fish.”

“What else would you be? You appeared from nowhere. You’re clearly not earthly. You’re the Dreamer I saw earlier today, aren’t you? The girl in the white dress.” I shake my head, try to laugh, can’t quite make it. “Two Dreamers suddenly loose in Oxford? No, that would be a national emergency.”

The zoog puffs through her little zoog nose. “Then maybe it is.”

“You’re the girl in the white dress. You must be.” Because the alternative is too terrifying, and I’m already running on fumes.

The zoog rolls her eyes, almost imperceptible in black-on-black, obsidian spheres rolling without iris or sclerae. “She’s one of mine, but she’s not got the temperament for something so subtle as ‘rescue’. Besides, that’s the wrong question to ask. You’ve bought yourself fifteen minutes of grace, and you started off so well, stayed on target, didn’t scream, didn’t panic, all that good stuff. But now you’re drifting. Focus, girl! You ain’t got long ‘till that raggedy old thing comes back in here. That man is going to kill you, Octavia.”

“ … rescue? You’re here to rescue me?”

The zoog shows off her twin rows of razor teeth again. “Catching on quick! The more you speak, the more I like.”

She’s running way ahead of me, and I’m in no state for measured consideration. After six hours in this cell I am emotionally spent; everything I had left was drained away by the devotion and determination of self-sacrifice averted. A few minutes ago I had placed all my faith in the hands of mister John Smith, government agent of unknown provenance, and before that I was about to commit suicide to ensure Willow’s safety.

But now I’m talking to a Dreamer. She’s not killing me, not turning me into something unnatural, not melting the surrounding half-mile of Oxford into molten sludge. Which is not meant to happen, because that’s what Dreamers do. Instead, she’s telling me that John Smith is just another kind of death.

“You are a dream-thing,” I say. “And you are trying to trick me.”

“Tch!” the zoog tuts. Her tail lashes side-to-side, scattering droplets of black mud into the air. “And we were doing so well—”

“But!” I hiss. “But. Maybe you’re not lying, not exactly. But you are a Dreamer. You know my name, you know what I’ve been saying in this room, you clearly walked right through the walls to get in here. Who are you? And what are you? Give me the most simple version, as quickly as you can, even if I won’t understand it. Because I agree with you that I don’t have much time.”

The zoog’s mouth curves into a skull-splitting grin, black lips sliding back over black teeth like oil on volcanic sand, too wide for any real zoog.

“Remember not to scream,” she rasps.

And then the zoog is gone.

A woman towers over me.

She is eight feet tall, twelve feet tall, twenty feet tall — she is an oak tree, then a skyscraper, then a mountain. Her head and shoulders crash into the ceiling, break through the roof, soaring in dark clouds of cloying smog. She is hunchbacked and hook-clawed, an emaciated wreck beneath a ragged patchwork dress of pale leather, crowned by a tangle-fall of black hair, oil-slick face ruptured by a smirk, with scraps of bloody meat in her teeth. Her cheeks have been cut open and healed shut in a grin too wide for her skull. Ears cropped, nose clipped, ankles fettered but chain long broken, rat-like zoog-tail swaying from her rear. She stands on a plain of carrion, swarming with ten thousand zoogs, bare feet squelched deep in rotten meat and putrid rubbish. She cranes and coils toward me, twisting like a tentacle; she is extruded from a black ocean that flows and throbs beneath the mat of corpses.

A hand cups my right cheek, clammy and slick, callused and rough, a thumb tracing the line of my scar. My own left hand is already clamped over my mouth to muffle a scream.

“I’ve had plenty of names,” she rasps, the voice of a zoog grown god-like. “Nerys, that’s my current, and one of my faves. As for the ‘what’? Well, here I am. Need more?”

I shake my head. Nerys winks, lets go of my face, straightens up.

And she’s gone.

The carrion-plain, the oily black ocean, the giant woman, the clouds of smog, all of it is gone, replaced by a damp-looking zoog sitting on the interrogation room table. Nerys licks a paw and drags it over her snout, like a real zoog washing its face; the gesture achieves nothing, the black ooze is omnipresent.

I wipe at my cheek, at my scar, where Nerys touched me. My hand comes away clean and cold, but shaking. I make a fist, hard and tight, hold the shake inside.

“Nice try,” I say.

Nerys pulls a tiny zoog frown, as if baffled by a particularly agile mosquito. “Eh?”

“You may be very intimidating, but you also failed to actually answer my question. Do not take me for a fool, ma’am. What are you?”

Nerys grins again. “Three for three! Unrattled and confident, even before divine truth. Rare, rare, rare. I’m so good at scouting for you girls, I really am. Somebody should give me an award for this.”

“What. Are. You? Now, or I scream.”

“And get yourself shot?” Nerys straightens up, little zoog-spine pulled straight. Tail rigid, snout up, eyes relaxed. “You humans keep calling us ‘Dream-Gods’. That’s a stupid term, but I do so love the sound of it. Feels good to be divine, am I right? You can call me ‘my goddess’ if you like.”

I’m struck speechless. My insides freeze solid. The little hairs on the back of my neck all stand up.

I am trapped in a police interrogation room with a zoog Dream-Goddess, a mutilated deity of carrion and black tar and broken fetters. I have never heard of her before, and I doubt very much that she is one of the Dream-Gods who count themselves on ‘our side’.

If John Smith walks back in right now, will he simply shoot me? I think he will, and he would have good reason. Dream Control would burn this whole building to the ground to suppress what’s happening here. They would kill everyone involved. They would salt the earth. And maybe they would be in the right, for once.

But Nerys hasn’t hurt me. Yet.

“Okay, okay then,” I say, very slowly. “So … why would John Smith kill me? How do you know that—”

“Oh, he won’t do it right here,” Nerys says. “Smart enough not to shit where he eats. Which is a miracle among his kind. Filthy things.” She stands up and starts pacing around on the table, little zoog paws padding over the file and the photographs that John left behind. Her long prehensile tail drags in her wake, whapping at the tabletop. “He’ll make sure the police and Dream Control have got everything proper and official like, all the papers filed and the proper procedures followed, photocopied, stored in triplicate, scanned in, scanned out, shredded, un-shredded, rebuilt, and signed off by some big pig in charge. Then he’ll get you in the back of an official car, and he’ll let other people know where he’s taking you, people who matter, people who are supposed to make sure he does what he says. But you’ll never get where you’re meant to go, because he’ll stop in the middle of nowhere, out in a field or something, march you away from the car, and shoot you in the back of the head. Or maybe he strangles, but he doesn’t look like the strangling type to me. Gotta have passion for a good strangle, you know? So I think it’s bullets. All distant, hands off. Then he’ll dig a grave, and put you in it, and fill it back up. I don’t know where he does it, but I know he’s got a favourite spot, somewhere out there, somewhere everybody has agreed not to look. And the people who were supposed to know where you were going? They’ll pretend nothing happened, because they all know that people like you gotta go bye-bye and be forgotten.”

Nerys pauses over one of the photo printouts, the one that shows the girl in the white dress and her manic grin. She grabs the paper in one zoog paw and stuffs a corner into her mouth, then rips and bites and chews, chomping up and down, smacking her lips. The rest of it she scrunches up and kicks off the table.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I say.

“These mangy fuckers never do,” Nerys says through a mouthful of paper.

“Dream Control is right there, out there in the corridor.” I lower my voice to a whisper. “If he wanted to bury me, metaphorically or literally, he could hand me over to them. They’d put me in an I&O cell and dismantle me, take me apart. I’d be dead by the end, or as good as dead. Your story isn’t adding up, ‘Dream-God’. Why go to the trouble of shooting me?”

Nerys spits out a lump of masticated paper, shredded by zoog teeth, drenched in saliva. “Because he thinks you’re one of mine. Thinks I’m gonna come for you, get my claws in you, whisk you away.”

“And that’s exactly what you’re trying to do, isn’t it? So technically he’s right?”

Nerys nods. “Uh huh!”

“Then … go away?” I make a shooing motion with both hands. “Shoo? Before he comes back? Go on, shoo, shoo!”

Nerys opens her snout so wide I can see down her throat, then lets out a raspy gurgle, a zoog guffaw. “Don’t be stupid, he’ll kill you anyway! He’s taken a risk leaving you alone like this, but he thinks it’s safe, because there’s a giant Harding cage built into the walls of this place. Drool-face out there thinks I can’t get in. And hey, you know what? Now I’ve met you, I really do want you. You keep passing all my little tests. You’re a real candidate, Octavia.”

Lump in my throat, sweat down my back, a fist in my guts. “Candidate? For what?”

Nerys makes her little zoog-mask face do something zoogs generally cannot — a sardonic, unimpressed, amused little pout. Hard to pout with a snout. “You know what I’m offering.”

“Candidate. To become a magical girl.”

“Ding ding ding!” Her tail slaps against the table three times. “She gets it in one!”

“No.” I shake my head. “No, I don’t want that, I’ve never … never asked for that, never even dreamed of it. I just want to … I want to go home, I want my life back. If you’re really a god, you can get me out of here. I’m not going to make some kind of devil’s bargain with you, I’m not. My life has already been ruined—”

“And it’s about to end.” Nerys drops the amusement. “Trust me on that, if nothing else. I’ve already lost a dozen candidates this way. I’m always one step behind, one move too slow, and he keeps putting bullets in them. I have to go through all this convincing, all this talking, blah blah blah! All she has to do is use what you people already do to yourselves. Fucking humans, making all these rules that let you murder each other. I can’t get a word in edgeways!”

“She?”

Nerys waves a tiny paw. “His boss. See what I mean? You’re a smart one, you could be great, if only I had time enough to convince you. But I don’t, so you’re gonna end up buried in an unmarked grave before tomorrow morning.” She does a little zoog sigh. “Oh well. Can’t say I didn’t try.”

Nerys turns away and stomps in a little circle, dipping her head to worry at a corner of the folder which contains all the notes on my life.

Can I be so certain this Dream-God thing is lying?

‘John Smith’ didn’t give me a real name or a government department or any form of identification; Nerys has shown me a vision of her real face, which may or may not be true. But did John show me anything more authentic, anything even the slightest bit convincing? The dripping zoog currently chewing on my notes has just as much credibility as the government man who put the folder there. And if Nerys wanted me dead, or turned into a frog, or whisked off to the Dreamlands, then I would be powerless to stop her. Just like John Smith could shoot me in the head, and it would all be made legal.

They’ve always wanted me dead, tidied away, easier to forget. They! All except Willow. ‘They’ — everyone, everything, every system and institution and cultural standard. The girl is damaged goods, don’t you know? She’ll never walk unaided, she’ll never truly recover, and what is ‘recovery’ anyway? She can’t regrow her arm or her leg, and her brain will always be broken. Besides, who would want that half-a-face? Forget about her, there’s a million more without her scars and her pains. People with small and sensible dreams could never imagine this cripple as a person. ‘John Smith’ is one of them, another normal who would leave me in a ditch if he could.

But Nerys didn’t stare at my scar, or my drooping eyelid, or comment on the missing pieces of my body.

The vision of her true face had been cut and shackled.

Nerys is like me.

“Why do you care?” I whisper.

Nerys looks up and smirks again, but this time it’s touched with melancholy. Subtle, for a zoog. “Bast, Nodens, Hypnos, all the rest, all the Dream-Gods you’ve heard of, they sniff out their prey just the same—”

“Prey?”

“Their candidates. They sniff out their candidates the same way I do, and I can smell you from the far reaches of the Dream, Octavia.”

“My— my personal hygiene is impeccable, thank you very much.” I’m trying to joke, but my voice shakes too much.

“Don’t you just want to go totally apeshit?” Nerys grins wider, lowers her scritchy-scratchy zoog voice to a rasping burble. The woman’s voice behind the zoog is purring, low and soft. “You would if you could. You’d rip that door off the hinges and beat those Dream Control guys to death with the handle. You’d smash down the walls and break open John Smith’s face with a brick. You’ve got it in you, I can smell that. And you want to let it out, so bad, but these pigs have kept you down, made you think you can’t do anything at all. Made you scared, pliable, submissive. You’ve kept it bottled up for so long, it’s rotting you from inside. Just picture the looks on their faces if you walked out of this cell with a bat in your hands. Or an axe? Do you like axes? Bury one in a few skulls, find out how it feels, and they all finally get what’s coming to them. Pick your poison, Octavia. Guns? Swords? Knives? Bare fucking fists? We can do anything you want. You can do anything you want.”

“I … I-I don’t … ”

Of course I’ve had those dreams.

Who hasn’t? Who hasn’t fantasied about getting revenge on all this? Spitting in the oh-so-polite face of an emotional health and hygiene nurse? Taking a crowbar to the black-and-mirror helmet of a Section Special officer? Breaking into an I&O ward to throw open the cells and tear down the walls? Crushing the cold, slow, relentless cruelty of Dream Control with red and bloody violence?

“Don’t deny it,” says Nerys. “You can’t deny dreams to a Dream-God.”

I swallow hard; anger’s ghost goes down fighting, makes me want to vomit. “Those are just idle thoughts. Pressure relief. Pointless. Punching an emotional health nurse wouldn’t solve anything.”

Nerys smirks. “And you’d know about that, wouldn’t you?”

“I was thirteen. I was … she was asking things … things about … ” My throat closes up. “Sexuality. Accusing me of being a … h-homosexual a-and a—”

“And you shut her up and made her lip bleed,” Nerys says. “With a fist! Your fist! Do you remember how that felt? How good it felt to wipe the placidity off that face? The way she yelped? The way you made that old cow bleed for you?”

I remember the recriminations, my grandmother’s disappointment, the additional sessions, the wrist cuffs.

“I remember it made everything worse.”

Nerys laughs again, a raspy little zoog sound. “But it felt so fucking good, didn’t it? Don’t pretend it didn’t. You loved it. You still think about it sometimes. I know you dream of it. What if you could do it again, bigger and better?”

I try to laugh, but I’m shaking too hard. “You’re trying to seduce me with violence?”

“It’s working, isn’t it?”

“Violence alone will never solve anything.” Do I believe that? Do I believe anything I’m saying?

“It’ll get you back to Willow.”

My blood goes cold. “Don’t. Don’t you dare use her as bait. You keep her name out of your mouth, whatever you are.”

Nerys goes silent for a moment. “Tick tock. Time’s counting down, Octavia. That mangy thing out there is going to take you away and kill you, and Willow won’t ever see you again. You’ll never get to thank her for saving you today. You’ll never get to kiss—”

“Shut up!” I snap, almost a scream.

We both glance at the steel door. Nerys goes very still. But nothing happens.

Nerys curls her little zoog claws, dragging her tail back and forth across the table. Beady black eyes bore through me, digging into my secrets, no different to the emotional hygiene officers, the same as Dream Control.

“I am not—” I try to say, but my throat is too tight, my breath too hard, my face too hot. “What Willow and I did— what we— we weren’t— there was nothing wrong with it, what we did. Nothing.”

“Of course there wasn’t,” Nerys purrs. “It’s natural. Two girls loving each other. All that.”

“How do you even know? How do you know all this about me? What right do you have? Get out of my head. Out of my dreams.”

Nerys pads right to the edge of the table, claws clicking, as close to me as she can get without falling off. “Because I’ve been watching you. Watching your dreams. Poor little thing, all twisted up inside. No parents, no—”

“My grandmother takes perfectly good care of me, thank you very much.”

“But she doesn’t know you,” Nerys rasps. “Nobody knows you.”

“Willow does.”

Nerys flicks her tail into the air, arcing it forward over her body, a dark crescent moon. Ropes of sticky black tar drip from oil-slick flesh, sliding down from the sharp tail-tip in endless loops of phantasmal ooze.

“And you’re never going to see her again,” she says. “Unless you take my deal, and become a magical girl.”

So many young women dream of an opportunity like this, but the idea makes me sick, makes me want to pick Nerys up and hurl her at a wall.

“You’re a Dream-God,” I hiss. “You can get me out of here yourself, if you care so much. And even if you did, what then? I’d be on the run from the police. My life would still be over.”

“Not if you become a magical girl.”

A lump sharpens in my throat. “You’re lying. You’re trying to trick me into something I can’t take back. And I don’t … I don’t want to be a magical girl. I don’t want to be like them. I refuse to serve this, all of this, this … this! What we’ve become, what England has turned into, under them, under Dream Control. I would … I would rather be … ”

Rather be dead?

No, I wouldn’t. I want so very much to live. I want to see Willow again. I want to go home, and dream private dreams. I almost sob.

“You think I’m offering a position of service?” Nerys says. “Octavia, I’m free as free can be. And you can be, too. You want to tear all this down? Let’s do it.”

And she’s through, she’s into my heart, past my defences, my doubts, my better judgement. I am trapped in a room with a rebellious devil, and she agrees with all my most secret thoughts.

Nerys breaks into a new kind of grin, breathy with anticipation, as if we’re face-to-face, growing closer by the second, lips parting for a kiss. She shuffles her paws on the table, claws going tippy-tappy clicky-clacky. Her tail grows, stretching outward until it’s four times the length of her body, a slice of dark moon blotting out the interrogation room. The tail-tip rises into the air, extending toward my face.

A droplet of glistening black oil gathers at the tip, no larger than the end of my little finger; the black oil reflects the room, the harsh light, the steel door, the zoog-god-thing crouched on the table, and my own face, eyes wide, gone pale, hair a mess. Everything else is false. Only the globule of black is real.

“Drink,” Nerys purrs.

“You … you want me to drink your goo?”

This isn’t how magical girls are made.

Or rather, it’s not how they tell us magical girls are made. It’s not the image the government presents, it’s not the myth that culture has woven. They tell us it all happens in dreams. A girl with pure dreams, of duty and service and charity and sisterhood, wakes up one day and the world suddenly seems different, because in her dreams she’s been touched by the gods. Maybe there’s a formal meeting later, perhaps a ceremony, a day of conscious and joyous revelation. But the initiation is clean, metaphysical, unproblematic.

Maybe that was all a lie. Maybe they’ve all done something more like this. Maybe they’ve all drunk the goo.

“Drink,” Nerys whispers. “Take the deal. Then you’ll get to see Willow again. You’ll get to be everything you wanted with her, everything you couldn’t be before. Make a contract with me, Octavia. Become a magical girl, so you can wreck shit up.”

Feet won’t move. Heart racing so fast the blood blurs in my ears. Left hand clammy. Right hand stiff with phantom cramp.

“What—” I croak, then clear my throat. “What’s the catch? What do I have to do in return?”

Nerys leans over edge of the table, straining toward me, little zoog paws tightening to keep her balance. The droplet of black oil eases closer to my face, trembling at the tip. “There isn’t one. I won’t lie, being one of my girls won’t be easy. You’ll be hated and feared. But you’ll be you. You won’t be dead in a ditch. You’ll be free!”

My lips part. Quivering, leaning forward, ready to accept her, to accept the deal.

But then I close my mouth.

I stagger back, shaking my head. “No. No, this is a trick. It has to be. Nobody has ever just given me anything, nobody except my parents, and they’re both dead. You have no reason to care, no reason to do this if you don’t get something in return. Tell me right now, what’s the price? What am I signing away?”

“Nothing they haven’t already taken from you!” Nerys hisses. Her eyes dart to the steel door. “Octavia, drink it, now!”

“You’re holding something back.”

“Nothing, nothing! It’s this or death!” Her little claws scrape at the edge of the table; the tail stretches out, droplet of black oil glistening dark and smooth, an exotic fruit from the lands of Dream. “Contract, Octavia! Contract, now! I’m—” A tiny zoog sob. “I’m sick of losing you girls!”

“I need more—”

Time’s up.

The steel door opens with a click.

‘John Smith’ pauses one step over the threshold. He is carrying my mobile phone in one hand, inside a plastic evidence bag, and my good coat over his other arm. He does not look surprised; his face registers only blank acknowledgement.

Nerys opens her sticky black maw, and hisses at him.

Phone and coat fall to the floor. John goes for his handgun, steps to one side, calls out. “Code seven, code seven!” Loud but not shouting. “Code seven!”

A second man dashes into the room, heavy-footed, off-balance, in the black body armour and white ID strip of a Section Special officer, Dream Control’s muscle. He’s got a multi-spectrum man-catcher strapped across his chest, a pistol fumbling into his hands.

John raises his gun.

And points it.

At me.

A heartbeat is enough. Turn my head, open my mouth, wrap my lips around the dangling tip of Nerys’ tail. The fattened globe of glistening black oil dissolves on my tongue. Ashes mixed with chocolate, a hint of blood and mucus, the chemical reek of burning petrol. I start to gag, I’m going to vomit, can’t keep it down.

Three explosions punch me in the chest. So simple, so quick, just bang, bang, bang.

The world wheels aside, goes somewhere else for an eyeblink.

And then I’m down on my arse, slumped against the back wall of the interrogation room. Blood all down my front, oozing from three ragged holes in my chest and belly, punched right through my clothes, slippery under my hands as I try to press the wounds shut. Hot sharp pain growing faster than I can bear, forcing a rotten animal noise up my throat, robbing all my dignity at long last.

They did it! The bastards finally did it, after all these years. All the bullying and the emotional hygiene bullshit and the stares and whispers of ‘look at the poor crippled girl’.

They did it. They really did it. They shot me!

But then the holes in my flesh start to shrink. The flow of blood trickles off. The pain eases back down. My jumper and my shirt are ruined, but the bullet wounds close up, until the blood-slick skin is smooth and unscarred. I gape down at myself, pawing at where the holes should be. I’m whole again. Holed no more. I’m laughing, maybe, but it’s not a pleasant sound.

Magical girl.

I lurch to my feet, heaving for breath, wheezing with residual pain. I don’t feel very fucking magical.

Nerys is still on the table, hissing at ‘John Smith’; John is retreating into the corridor, gun still levelled, eyes darting left and right.

“Pull back, pull back,” John calls out, loud but calm. Turns his head, raises his voice. “Dream overspill, dream overspill. Hit the alarm. You, there, alarm, now.”

The Section Special officer isn’t listening.

Eyes wide with fear, face pale and waxy. He thinks I’m a Dreamer. Thinks this is it, this is the real thing, this is what he’s trained for, and he’s so scared he’s shitting in his underwear. He jams his pistol into a holster on his belt and fumbles with the MSMC across his chest — the multi-spectrum man-catcher, an unholy love child of taser, pepper spray delivery system, and high-powered sonic irritant weapon. Newborn Dreamers sometimes shrug off bullets just as easily as the older ones, but a Dreamer still emerging from their cocoon might be vulnerable to electricity, chemicals, or burst eardrums, before they’ve figured out how to make the waking world dance to the dream inside.

I lunge toward him, angrier than I’ve ever felt in my life.

He frees the MSMC from the straps, fumbles with the safety, tries to point it at my face.

I pull back a fist — my right hand, my prosthetic. No special reason, just the way I’m stumbling, the angle at which my body weight dictates I use my limbs. Pointless, because the prosthetic isn’t built to deliver a good punch; the angle won’t work, the kinetics are poor, and my knuckles might break on his jawbone. But I’m too angry to stop.

My punch hits the officer’s head like a sledgehammer smashing a melon.

His skull explodes, blood and bone and brains splattering against the wall behind him in a fountain of greasy gore. I feel his face crumple and collapse beneath my knuckles, feel him go limp, feel him die. I overbalance, almost falling after him as he goes down, decapitated by a single punch.

The Section Special officer crashes to the floor. The air reeks of gore and shit. The white plastic casing of my prosthetic fingers are coated with blood.

“ … ha … how … that’s not … not … ”

A weight lands on my right shoulder, zoog paws scrabbling for balance, sharp little claws snagging in my jumper. “Magical girl!” Nerys gurgles. “And just in time, too!”

An alarm rips through the air, a deep blare of panic.

“Time to run, Octavia!” Nerys rasps, breath hot in my ear. “I’ll teach you how to open a translocation portal, but we can’t do it inside the building, not inside the Harding cage. You gotta get out, beyond the walls, then you’re home free.”

“But … but he … ” I gesture at the dead man, his ruined skull, the spreading crimson puddle, my own bloody knuckles; I can’t take my eyes off the corpse. I did that. “I-I didn’t mean to— I can’t— that’s not possible—”

“He knew what he signed up for!” Nerys chatters, slapping her tail against my shoulder. “You gotta run! You’re too new-minted for a fight! Go on, out the door!”

“But—”

Zoog claws dig into my skin. “I’ve finally got another one of you, I’m not letting you die now! Run!”

I stumble for the steel door, pause to scoop up my phone and drag my coat across my shoulders, then stagger out into the whitewashed hallway.

John Smith waits thirty feet down the corridor to my right, handgun still drawn, flanked by a pair of very shocked Dream Control agents. A scrum of police and Section Special officers is forming up behind him. Shouts ring out — “There she is!”, “Don’t engage, don’t engage, don’t even look at her!”, “Lockdown, we need lockdown. Call a team up to the surface!”

John’s eyes meet mine. He starts to raise the gun again, then thinks better of it. Just stares.

“You shot me,” I whisper. “You liar.”

“Left, left, go left!” Nerys skritters in my ear, paws pulling at my shoulder. She wraps her tail tight around my upper arm, anchoring herself to my prosthetic.

I lurch to my left, pick up my feet, and run.

Running with a properly fitted prosthetic leg is perfectly doable, especially for a lifelong user, but it’s difficult without a running blade. A prosthetic leg has no bounce, no spring from hitting the ground; my running blade is back in my bedroom, and I never use it anyway, because I rarely have cause to run. So I careen down the corridor at a lopsided headlong lope, and I’ll feel it tomorrow in my hips and lower back.

Or will I, now that I’m a magical girl?

Am I? I don’t know what I am.

I also don’t know where I am or where I’m going, and that’s a much more pressing concern than whatever Nerys’ tail-goop has done to my metaphysical condition, when there are men with guns lining up to shoot me again. Three bullets hurt bad enough; thirty bullets might do enough damage so they can contain me; I don’t even want to think about three hundred bullets.

Whatever this building is, it’s a maze of concrete and linoleum and big dumb steel doors. Nerys guides me, riding my right shoulder, hissing “left!”, “right!”, “duck into that door and wait one … two … three … okay, go! Go go!” Booted feet rush past, shouts echo down the labyrinth, and I bounce off the corners, bruising myself as I flee.

“Can’t I—” I pant, already out of breath, “—fly, now? Isn’t that— shouldn’t I be able— to fly?”

“Not yet!” Nerys rasps. “You have to learn! And what would you do, fly down these corridors?”

“Yes!” I growl.

Nerys cackles. “That’s the spirit! You’re gonna make a great magical girl, Octavia!”

I want to pull her off my shoulder and punt her into a wall, but I don’t, because then I would be alone.

Nerys guides me up a stairwell. Has me pause and wait, breath held, pressed to a wall; feet rush past somewhere higher, men with guns clanking and rattling. Then we go up again, then down another corridor. The air lightens, brightens, high windows showing a rain-kissed sky. I can smell wet asphalt and hear the distant hum of traffic.

“Almost there, almost there!” Nerys chitter-chatters in my ear. “There’ll be a proper security door, you’ll have to break it down. See that brown door there with the bar? Open it and go through! On the other side you’ll have to do some punching, but it’s just a door—”

I slam against the bar and tumble through; it would set off an alarm, but the alarms are already maxed out. The room on the other side is a tiny corridor between the building and an external security door.

The security door is wide open. A Section Special officer is standing on the threshold, neither in nor out, MSMC in both hands.

He freezes. I freeze. Nerys hisses at him.

“Don’t,” I say, hands out. “Don’t, don’t make me do it. Don’t. Just … just step aside—”

The officer raises the MSMC, points it at my face, pulls the trigger.

A pair of electrode-darts slice through my jumper and shirt and stick in my flesh. Pepper spray coats my face and slams down my throat, burning like liquid fire. My eardrums burst with a pulse of directed sound, a sharp stabbing in the sides of my head. The world dissolves into pain, choking and retching, muscles locking up under electric current, ears throbbing, deafened, blinded.

But I’m a magical girl. Or at least something approximate.

I tear the electrodes out of my skin and flail with my right fist, at the flesh-coloured blur atop the officer’s body armour. My knuckles connect with a crunch of breaking bones and a tearing of wet meat.

Momentum carries me through the open security door, stumbling out onto crumbly asphalt. Carries him too, my fist embedded in the remains of his skull.

I shake him off, let the corpse slither to the ground. My hand leaves the wreckage of his face, meat and gristle and brains. I nearly vomit, stomach clenching, pounding at the door to my throat, because the sound is so awful. Or maybe that’s just the pepper spray, though the effect is rapidly fading. Wiping at my face, scrubbing away my tears and my snot. Sound throbs back, eardrums healing rapidly; distant traffic, open skies, my own feet on the ground.

“Time to go!” Nerys hisses in my ear. “We’re out, we’re out, you gotta portal! Portal time! Portal time, Octavia! Here, you gotta do it yourself. First concentrate on—”

The building I’ve emerged from is a squat monster of pale concrete and shining metal, every external corner studded with security cameras — Dream Control Oxford Headquarters, on the eastern edge of the new metropolitan area. Their most famous slogan is emblazoned on the side of the structure, taken from a million posters and public safety broadcasts.

REPORT STRANGE DREAMS

A tall chain-link fence separates the grounds from a broad and empty road. There’s a wall in the middle distance, some kind of security barrier. The sky is flat and grey. The asphalt is wet with fresh rain.

Nerys pulls at my shoulder, trying to turn me around. “You gotta go! We gotta go! Now, now, now! Octavia, concentrate! You have to—”

A corner of the sky explodes into crimson blaze, as if a miniature sun has been born twelve feet to my right, a comet crashing to earth, burning through the atmosphere. Phantom pain pulses in my right leg and right arm. The ghost of a migraine stirs behind my right eye.

The glow tightens, condenses, lowers itself to the ground. High-heeled shoes tap onto the asphalt. Cream-and-red skirts settle around long legs. A ruby sword glints in the rain-stained light.

“What have you done?” hisses a voice I’ve heard before, on the news, too many times to count.

A real magical girl.

Scarlet Edge.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Ad-hoc and untested meets seasoned and experienced. Careful, Octavia; you have no idea what you’re dealing with.

Well! Our girl certainly gave good account of herself there. Bit of a temper on her! But then again, can you blame her? Anybody would be a bit peeved after getting shot. But it takes a lick of darkly divine favour to stand up again so quickly. And Nerys is happy to provide! The licks, too. Zoog tongues are probably quite raspy.

Behind the scenes, I just want to say: thank you! Thank you to everybody who commented on the previous chapters, everybody who left a rating, or a review (I see you!), and everyone who just read along and enjoyed Maidens of the Fall. I gotta admit that for some reason I wasn’t expecting the massive positive response, and it kinda surprised me, in a very good way. I’m really glad so many readers have enjoyed the opening of the story, and I hope you enjoy everything I’ve got coming up as well!

Octavia certainly won’t. She’s in for a time.

Speaking of Octavia, we already have more fanart, from over on the discord! This one is a real treat: a full-on character illustration of Octavia, (by sporktown heroine!) being very normal, very calm, very normal woman, perfectly rational. Nothing wrong with her! I do love this illustration style, it’s so very her.

Meanwhile, if you want to read more right away, you can:

Subscribe on Patreon

Right now my patrons have access to three chapters ahead! For the moment I’m going to try to keep it as three, but in the future I hope to push this out to more.

Thank you all so much for reading! None of this would exist without all of you, the audience. Though, I suspect Octavia would be mortified to know there’s so many eyes watching her do all this.

Next chapter, what’s a ‘real’ magical girl like, up close and personal?

Content Warnings

Ableism
Mental healthcare abuse
Suicidal ideation
Suicide attempt (this is very borderline, but I’m including it anyway.)

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Six hours since the bombing and I’m still sat in a police interrogation room.

At least I think it’s been six hours. They took my mobile phone when they arrested me, and the room doesn’t have a clock. Walls the colour of dry pus, three brown plastic chairs, and a table bolted to the bare concrete floor. One way out, a steel door with recessed hinges. Light fixture in the ceiling behind a wire mesh, too bright for comfort. No windows, just a single vent the size of my palm, pushing air none too fresh. One corner plays host to a set of dubious brown stains. A bucket waits in the opposite corner, which was added to the room after I complained of a need to use the facilities. My stare, my condition, my use of ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’, and the unforced tremor in my voice, all convinced the officers to relent on that singular point of dehumanization; so, I have been let out a few times, led down spartan corridors to the ladies’ lavatory, so a female police officer can listen to me urinate.

They took my coat too, my good coat, with the fleece lining and my purse in one of the pockets. My jumper, shirt, long skirt, and thick tights are not enough to keep out the cold. I hold myself very still and very straight-backed, and try not to shiver. At least they didn’t take my gloves, though the right one is a little pointless at the moment, folded away in a skirt pocket.

A video camera on a tripod stands to one side of the table. They’ve left it running, in case I do anything interesting.

The police have done nothing but ask me the same few questions over and over and over again, and I cannot give them any answers. I don’t know the identity of the young woman in the white dress, I’ve never seen her before. No, I don’t know why she attacked a magical girl, of course not, why would anybody do that? I’d never seen her before today, she is a complete stranger to me. I do not know anything, officers. I am a nobody, I was so careful to stay beneath notice, and I should not be in this room.

My only way out is to keep telling the truth. To be a nice young woman, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hide inside that shell, as tight as I can.

So far it’s all been regular police, Thames Valley and Greater Oxford Metropolitan, accompanied by a few men in dark suits who say nothing while the uniforms talk. But I know worse is coming, because I know what they suspect.

I’m trying very hard not to shake. Harder still not to cry. They will not take my dignity.

The steel door opens with a click. I pull my spine straight, settle my left hand in my lap, and do what I can to soften my eyes. I am a proper young woman, and these conditions have me quite terrified, officer. What more do you need to know? Call my grandmother, she will be worried about me; have you raided my home, seen that I am nothing? Am I free to go yet? Don’t ask that out loud, it will make things worse. Be everything they expect, but nothing more.

A man steps into the interrogation room, angular and lean, leading with his eyes.

He’s new, not from the rotating cast of officers I’ve seen so far. Mid-forties, shaven head, raw grey stubble on cheeks and chin. His face is a study in expressionless self-control, eyes alert, intelligent, too wide. He wears a trench coat over a grey turtleneck jumper and a pair of jeans, heavy boots on his feet, but there isn’t much to him beneath the clothes, like a scarecrow without enough straw.

He crosses the room in silence, such a light tread in those boots. He takes off the trench coat and drapes it over the back of the chair. There’s a holster under his left shoulder, filled with a handgun.

He places a grey folder on the table, thick with papers, then sits down, and looks at me.

Dream Control.

He tries not to linger on my right eye — the droopy lid, the slack muscles, the narrow slit of half my vision. But he can’t help himself; nobody can, at least not on first meeting. Even Willow couldn’t resist, though she softened her stare with gentle questions, and eventually so much more. When I was a child the stares hurt, made me want to wear a mask, or grow my hair long and drape it in front of my face, or spend money I didn’t have on plastic surgery. But I am not a child anymore. I have built a fortress around my face, and I dare all and sundry to dash themselves against the spiked walls of my perfect redoubt.

His gaze traces the thickened scar tissue that runs from my right eyebrow, down the side of my right cheek, to end in the jagged snarl of flesh where a piece of broken rebar tore me open ten years ago. His eyes sustain neutrality. I’m almost impressed. Here’s the sort of man who has trained to keep his true self to himself. The perfect Dream Control agent, walking the walk instead of just talking the talk.

A little like me. How disgustingly ironic.

But he’s not perfect. His gaze lingers on my scar a second too long. He’s never seen severed nerves before. A flicker of sympathy passes behind his face.

Satisfaction in victory, but I keep it to myself. I am still trying to look polite, non-threatening, and safely, softly, submissively feminine. But what’s the point anymore? With the police, I could believe they might let me go, that this was all a misunderstanding, that I would be out of here in another hour or two. But the presence of a Dream Control agent means I was correct; I am a suspect in the worst possible way.

The dregs of my life, smeared out for the last decade, are about to be swept up and taken away.

A bitter taste in the back of my throat blooms as heat in my face and a cold sinking inside my chest. It takes me by surprise, I was expecting fear, terror, despair, worse, because I’ve known all those before. But this is different, not new, but hotter than ever before.

Anger.

Bright and hard as heated steel, threatening to blaze up, cut me open, and climb out from inside. It’s not fair! I’ve kept my head down, walked the straight and narrow, and yet I’ve ended up right here anyway, locked in a room with an agent of Dream Control. What was the point of all that outwardly good behaviour? What was the point in trying so hard to appear normal? Why have I been sensible, all this time? What’s the purpose of being polite now? Why not leap across the table and smash this man’s head in with my prosthetic arm? What’s the point in holding it all inside?

Steady, Octavia. Steady.

Don’t throw it all away. Maybe I’m wrong. I must control myself; self-control is my only weapon. I must be calm and collected and rational and smooth, because Dream Control do not like uncontrolled displays of strong emotion. Passion suggests psychological imbalance, vulnerability to dreams, and must be regulated. I must swallow my anger.

Which is not easy, because this man is here to be my executioner.

His eyes drop to my right arm, which is currently lying on the table, detached from the rest of me.

“You can put that back on,” he says, gesturing at the prosthetic. His accent is unplaceable, vaguely Home Counties, but too bland to be genuine. His voice is conciliatory, understanding, gentle.

Too bad for him, fatherly doesn’t work on me.

“That,” I say, with a click of my tongue, “would require me to remove my jumper and my shirt. Which I would rather not do in front of you, sir, nor in front of any other police officers. Thank you.”

The police made me remove my prosthetic arm when they brought me into the station — ‘Too much metal in there, love. You gotta take that off if you don’t want us to take it apart.’ Which was nonsense, because they let me keep my right leg attached. They wanted to humiliate and control, but they didn’t want to have to carry me. The motors and processors and myoelectric pickups in my prosthetic arm are not impenetrable technology, no matter how many adjustments and improvements I’ve made. But I removed it anyway, because they would have made a butchery of it. I carried it myself, cradled it like a baby, afraid to drop it and leave myself even more of a cripple.

Phantom pain is permanent without my arm attached. The limb was amputated ten years ago, but I can feel the fingers curled in my lap, curled too tight, curled so hard for so long that cramp has turned solid, deep in the muscles of fingers and palm, radiating back up a wrist that was disposed of as medical waste so long ago that the atoms likely now belong to some other creature. The phantom pain never goes away unless I am complete. I sleep with my prosthetics on as often as I can, damn the long-term consequences.

“Fair enough,” the man says. He points at the three empty water bottles next to my arm. “Need another drink?”

“No, thank you.”

“Have they fed you?”

Two protein bars and a packet of crisps. I’m very hungry. “A little.”

“I can get you a proper meal,” he says. “Fast food, anything close enough to the station that I can send somebody for it. What’s your favourite?”

I decide to push my luck, because there’s something I need more than food.

“Where is Willow?”

The man raises an eyebrow. “Willow?”

“Willow Finch. My—” I pause, wet my lips. My lungs and chest are shaking, despite my best efforts. I keep asking this question and nobody will answer, and that is worse than not asking at all. “The girl I was with when the bomb went off, she’s my best friend. She was being loaded into an ambulance when— when I was arrested. She was—” Another pause. “I don’t care about food. I just want to know if she’s … ” Tears gather behind my eyes, but I don’t let them out. Don’t show it, don’t show anything; this man is from Dream Control, he will use the tiniest piece of leverage as an excuse to start taking you apart. But I must know, I need to know about Willow, and I am willing to burn myself for her sake. “I need to know if she’s … ”

The man watches my face. Waits until I’m spent.

“Miss Willow Finch is in Oxford Holton Hospital,” he says. “I spoke to her an hour ago. She’s stable and conscious, on a morphine drip. Burns down her back and legs, a few bruises, two broken fingers. The burns are bad, she’ll have scarring, but she’s expected to make a full recovery, given time.”

Breath leaves me, too big for my body. Tears come quick, then vanish just as fast. The chair doesn’t feel like enough to hold me upright, so I grip the table with my left hand, staring at the stained plastic surface. My vision blooms as blood rushes to my head. My pulse pounds in my ears.

Willow gave of herself yet again, for me, who deserves it so little.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

“You got off light because your friend knocked you to the ground. Others in that crowd weren’t so lucky. No dead, but we’ve got over two dozen serious injuries. One man is going to lose his left eye.”

I straighten my spine again, blink away the echo of tears. “Did she ask after me? Willow, did she say anything about me?”

The man considers, face unreadable, eyes too wide. He tries very hard not to look at the scar on my face. “Are you not curious about what happened to Scarlet Edge?”

A sigh sticks in my throat and I manage to keep it down. A shrug is safer. “She’s a magical girl, I assume she walked it off.”

“Mmhmm. Conventional explosive, no magic. Knocked her out of the sky for a minute. Ruined her dress. Made quite a show.”

“Then I am glad she is not seriously hurt,” I lie.

The man taps his fingernails on the table. “What do you suppose was the point of doing that? Hitting a magical girl with a bomb, in front of that crowd?”

“I haven’t the slightest notion. I have told the other officers again and again that I have no idea—”

“I gave you news of your friend,” he interrupts. “You need to work with me, give me something in return.”

Deep breath, count to three, picture Willow’s face. I can’t be angry when I think of Willow, so I use her to shore up my walls of polite fiction. The slug of anger slides back down my throat, rough and hot, like bad alcohol burning in my gut, making me sick. I’ve been swallowing these feelings my whole life, I can endure a little more bile.

“How should I address you, sir?” I ask. “You haven’t given me your name.”

“John.” A pause. “Smith. No need to call me sir.”

John Smith is a liar and a coward. He is an agent of Dream Control and he thinks I’m the genuine article. That’s why he won’t give me a real name, because a Dreamer could use that against him.

But the name is too obviously fake. Is he trying to make me lose my temper? Riling me up by insulting my intelligence?

A shred of hope stirs in my heart. Perhaps Dream Control don’t have enough justification to take me in. They need me to break first, to scream and shout, to rant and rave on camera, so they can prove me a madwoman, and take me away for ‘emotional evaluation’.

I was correct. I must do as always. I must be ice.

“Mister Smith, sir,” I say, keeping my voice plain. I think of Willow, my angel, on the battlements of my heart, and I try not to picture her burned and bleeding. “I cannot give you anything in return except the truth, and the truth is that I do not know who that girl was, or why she did what she did. I wish I could help you. I truly do.”

John Smith sighs. “Then find something to give me.”

“Are you suggesting that I’m lying to you, sir?” I make a show of raising my eyebrows and blinking several times, a proper young woman scandalised by any suggestion of improper behaviour. But anger boils in my chest, rushes up my throat, threatens to pour out of my mouth in a crimson tide, too real to hold back; maybe it’s the relief over Willow, maybe it’s the pressure of flawless self-control, or maybe it’s the way this man is asking nothing with the same question, merely trying to make me snap. And I do so very much want to snap. I want to shout in his face and slap him across the cheek. But I swallow, hard and hot and raw. Control. Control. Control. “Because I assure you,” I say, “I have not lied, not once. I have no reason to lie to the police, and certainly not to you, even though you have not properly identified yourself yet. I have no earthly clue why that young woman did what she did. I find it as horrifying as you do, I’m sure. But I have been in here for six hours, and the police have done nothing but ask me questions that I can’t possibly answer. I can’t ‘give’ you anything, because I don’t have anything to give. Are you suggesting that I should make something up, sir? Are you implying that I should create a fabrication? And that when I do, this will somehow go easier for me? Is that what you want from me, sir? Because I will not cooperate with making false statements, or perjury, or whatever other legal classification such a lie might fall under.”

I look pointedly at the video camera, then back to ‘John’.

He doesn’t even blink. He waits for me to finish, then fills his lungs, as if reanimating from the dead. “I agree. The police aren’t doing a very good job with you. Don’t blame them, they’re not trained to understand this.”

“And you are, sir?”

“Stop calling me sir.” He takes another deep breath. “You need to tell me about that girl.”

“How many times must I repeat this? I do not know anything. Sir.” I look away, at the blank wall, and try to cross my arms over my chest, before I remember that I currently possess only my left. The stump of my right arm twitches inside the empty sleeve; the phantom pain lying in my lap clenches harder, brings tears to the corners of my eyes.

John Smith reaches into a pocket of his trench coat and produces the same printouts the police have been waving under my nose — grainy CCTV stills taken from the edge of Oxford New Park. He smooths them out on the table with both hands, though they are not the least bit creased, as if even the image of that girl resists being folded or marred by the waking world.

The first image shows part of the crowd, with myself and Willow centred, zoomed in too close, made up from too few pixels. I am looking at Willow in profile, our secret moment captured by a low-resolution camera. The second picture shows the girl in the white dress, clearly looking at me, and I am clearly looking back at her. A third shot shows her extracting the weapon from beneath her dress, drawing an impossible length of steel from nowhere. The final shot shows her in the moment just before she threw the explosive-tipped javelin, as she turned and grinned at me, exactly like the kind of maniac who would throw a bomb at a magical girl.

She’s still grinning. Her grin tears at the paper, her eyes meet mine. I half expect her to wave and wink.

Is this safe? I have no idea. It is not for civilians to know how Dreamers work.

John points at her. “You need to tell me about that girl. Whatever you told the police, you can repeat for me. I’m trying to help you.”

An easy lie. The truth doesn’t matter now, not to a Dream Control agent. He’s enjoying this.

“I don’t know her.” I look at John, trying to crack his exterior, to see beneath. He’s all hard angles, nothing on which to rest, except those eyes, and they’re too large, too wide-set, lamps in his face. “I’d never seen her before today, before that crowd. She made eye contact with me by chance, because I happened to glance at Willow. I have no idea who she is. If I was conspiring with a Dreamer, do you really think I would be sitting here, sir? Do you think I would be in this room, getting interrogated? I do not believe that is how it works. If I was her … friend or companion or something, wouldn’t she be breaking me out? If I was with her, you would all be dead, this police station would be a smoking crater. Isn’t that right, sir? Isn’t that how it works? I am not an accomplice to a Dreamer. If I was, I would … ”

Smash this cell apart and walk right over you.

John Smith shakes his head. “I don’t think you’re an accomplice to a Dreamer.”

I smile, thin and painful. “That is good to know, sir. I don’t even know who she is, and I already hate her, for ruining my life.”

“I’m not going to ruin your life.”

Yes you are!

I want to scream at him, leap up from the table and throw the papers in his face, knock him out of his chair and stamp on his head. It would be easier if he was gloating, leering, salivating at the prospect of my end.

Everybody knows what happens to people who’ve slipped too far into dreams, people who chase the unattainable angles of their imaginations, people who spend too long lost in fancy. Dabble at the edge of the Dreamlands, make like you might step over, and Dream Control will sniff you out. Plenty of people come back from Dream Control’s Isolation and Observation cells, but many others don’t. What they suspect me of now is enough to dissect me, perhaps literally. My mind will be picked apart, every last desire unspooled, so they can avert the next Dreamer, the next embryonic reality-warping wanderer who comes to their attention. John Smith is going to send me to a little white cube where they will dismantle me, for something I didn’t do.

I’ve been so careful, and now they’ve come for me, and I didn’t even do anything, let alone the things I dreamed of.

John Smith opens the folder on the table and splays out the entrails of my life.

“Octavia Carter,” he reads my name off a crisp grey printout. “Twenty years old. Date of birth, 19th of December 2004. Height, five seven. Hair, black. Eyes, grey. Distinguishing marks … ” His eyes go to the scar on my face, then the prosthetic arm on the table, then back down to the papers. “Parents, Coreen and Rafe Carter, both deceased, both on the same date, 6th of February 2015. You live with your grandmother on your mother’s side, Phyliss Lambert. Address, 47 Crowden Close, flat number 13. Both your parents and said grandmother were internal refugees from the London Exclusion Zone, dates not recorded, which is to be expected. All three then lived in Oxford since the nineties. No other places of residence. Your maternal grandfather and both paternal grandparents are also deceased.” He looks up at me again. “Do I have you correct so far?”

I shrug. My chest tightens around my heart. This minor violation is nothing, he’s just getting warmed up.

John waits, then sighs. “Octavia, please answer the question. If anything in this file is wrong, I need to know. I need to know you.”

Dream Control will know everything about me by the time they’re done. They’ve probably already raided my home, taken my grandmother into custody, and ransacked my bedroom. They will have my two diaries, the one I keep out in the open and the one full of observations about Willow. They will have everything else too, all my technical diagrams and notes, all the files and video games and homework on my laptop, every post I’ve ever made online, and they’ll comb through all that as well.

But the physical looting is just the start.

They will know all the things I’ve whispered to Willow in the dark, and the handful of things she whispered back to me, and the things I’ve wondered about whispering but could never quite say. They will record and analyse and dissect every time I have thought about her in my own bed at night. They will catalogue the number of times I have sat on the toilet, naked and screaming at my own missing limbs. They will have me recount staring in the mirror and trying to hide my scar with makeup, and the weeping that followed. They will write down every time I have remembered my departed parents. For the things they cannot get out of me with words, they will use their machines, the dream-reading machines and mind-ripping machines that the government swears do not exist. Everyone whispers that Dream Control have tame Dreamers somewhere behind all the normal faces and the quasi-legal occultists, breaking the law because they’re above the law, and I’m sure they will use those on me as well, because I will give up nothing without a fight.

They will take me apart, then lay me out clean and sterilised, ready for disposal.

They will tease out my dreams of Willow. They will see her as I see her. They will see her naked.

That thought makes me so angry that I start to shake. Willow belongs to nobody, not even me, and they will get their grubby paws all over her, stain her, taint her, file her away. All via me. They will make me betray her. They will learn all her secrets too.

Maybe I should lose my temper. Maybe then ‘John Smith’ will be forced to shoot me. Maybe then Willow will be safe.

“That’s correct,” I squeeze out. “Sir.”

“Thank you.” John’s eyes return to the papers. He picks up a new sheet. “You graduated from Millay Girl’s School in ‘22. You’ve been attending the attached Sixth Form College for the last two years.” He quirks an eyebrow. “Fancy school. High fees.”

“Life insurance.”

“It says here that this year you’ve applied to eight universities. Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield, Warwick, Edinburgh, St Andrews, New Imperial, and Durham. All for … ‘BCE’? What’s that?”

“Bio-mechanics, cybernetics, and engineering.”

He lets out a low whistle. I hold in a bristle, but he’s being serious, not mocking. “Aren’t you a bit old to be finishing your A-Levels just now?”

“I was in rehab, when I was little.”

He nods without meeting my eyes. “Of course you were. Missed a lot of schooling in 2015 and 2016.” He taps the paper in his hand, then puts it aside and extracts a thicker sheaf from within the folder, photocopies of handwritten pages. “As a minor you came to the attention of Dream Control five times, via the office of emotional health and hygiene, all between 2015 and 2022. The ‘22 contact was minimal, just a psychiatric checkup. I won’t read out the dreams, but the notes are pretty clear. You went to counselling, not an I&O ward, on account of being a minor. Counselling was deemed only semi-successful, three percent above the mandatory reporting threshold. DC has you under observation category five.” John places the DC record aside, then looks me full in the face, no papers in his hands. “You lost your arm and your leg in the same accident that killed your parents. Of course you were going to have bad dreams. I understand.”

My blood goes cold. The words slip out. “It was not an accident.”

John Smith holds up a hand, an apology on his face. I subside, because that wasn’t what I’d expected.

“What term would you prefer?” he asks.

I’ve walked into his trap.

Magical girls killed my parents, left me crippled and disfigured. Not the current Trio of Albion — though they were probably tagging along by that age, already chosen by the gods in the Dreamlands, though not allowed to engage. No, not this lot. Their most recent predecessors, the previous three to fill that role in this part of England, they are to blame.

They had not meant to kill anybody. I was just collateral damage.

Ten years ago a Dreamer walked out of the London Exclusion Zone. Walked, literally, straight through the minefields and the ring of steel and the military cordon that was supposed to keep things in, straight through the London Wall. Her name was Beatrix Ayton. She’d left the waking world behind over three hundred years ago, and when she returned she brought the Dream with her. She melted through the boundary that keeps the Dreamland overlap pinned within the corpse of London, turned automatic guns and bunkers into flocks of melting doves, transmuted shells and bombs into clouds of blood, and pulled jets from the skies with a flick of her fingers. She turned men into beasts, bullets into raindrops, and made it halfway into the centre of Oxford before she was stopped.

She killed four magical girls. In the process of stopping her they inflicted ‘extensive and regrettable collateral damage’ to the Oxford New Expanded Metropolitan Area.

‘Extensive and regrettable collateral damage’. That’s what the BBC called it. That’s me.

Logically I should blame Beatrix Ayton. But Dreamers are like hurricanes or floods or landslides, they are going to happen regardless of what anybody does. The ones who’ve been in the Dreamlands since long before the walls came down are impossible to predict or comprehend; the new ones who drift off on their own dreams night after night cannot be blamed for merely being human. Some Dreamers — perhaps most — never come back. Some go so deep into the Dream that they forget Earth entirely, forget what they once were, and they’re happy out there, as far as anybody knows. The few who return, or the ones who never really leave, they are simply inevitable. They are no different to the Nightmares that float into Earth’s sphere, the things that were never human in the first place. I find it hard to blame them. They cannot help themselves.

Perhaps I should blame Richard Harding. Many people do.

Forty one years ago the occultist Richard Harding performed a ritual in a dingy suburban house in East London. It was his life’s work, pieced together from ancient tomes and stolen from half-remembered dream quests. The ritual took four weeks and the lives of fourteen assistants. Maybe a Dreamer whispered in Harding’s ear, maybe a Nightmare planted the idea in his head, or maybe a Dream-God from the other side was in on the joke all along. We’ll never know, because Richard Harding was the first casualty of his own success.

His ritual tore down the walls between the waking world and the Dreamlands. The result was the London Exclusion Zone, the single largest Dreamland overlap on Earth. Three thousand and seven hundred square miles of English soil and concrete and glass and brick, where the rules of the waking world no longer apply, where ghouls and ghasts and horrors from beyond Earth’s sphere wander freely in and out, where Nightmares seep through from the further reaches of the Dream, where you cannot tread without the risk of coming undone.

You can see the dead city from Oxford sometimes. It glows like oil on water, reflected in a glassy sky.

It is unwise to look too long. Causes strange dreams.

England is not the only place blighted by a Dreamland overlap. When Harding completed his ritual, old scars opened all over the globe — a certain plateau in Tibet, a stretch deep in the Antarctic, a swathe of jungle in Brazil, a patch of the North American ‘empty quarter’, scattered spots in the Australian interior, and dozens more too small to locate, not to mention the Moon, or the stuff that comes up out of the sea. None are so active or so extensive as the ruins of London.

But I find it difficult to be angry with Harding. He’s dead.

Should I blame the failed emergency response on that day ten years ago, on the 6th of February 2015? The sirens and shelters are meant for hiding from Nightmares, or else from pupating Dreamers who haven’t yet slipped through the cracked walls of the waking world, not for ancient things that nobody can stop. The government and the army responded with sluggish confusion that day, herding us underground, then back up, then telling us to bolt our doors and draw the curtains, then out again and back into the shelters. England had not dealt with an ancient Dreamer since the late nineties.

My memories of that day are mercifully incomplete. My parent’s faces. The shelter walls caving in. Dust in my mouth. Pain so total it became meaningless.

I wasn’t trapped underground for long, but time didn’t matter. Two limbs were gone, my parents with them.

The government has never explained why Beatrix Ayton was trying to reach the centre of Oxford. Foolish people call that a conspiracy, whispering online that she was trying to save a friend, or punish a foe, or locate a long-lost lover. Optimistic voices suggest that we should have gotten out of her way, let her do whatever it was she needed to do, and then nobody would have died.

Nonsense. Beatrix Ayton was hundreds of years old. When she’d left the waking world, Oxford was not the capital. Or maybe she wasn’t trying to get into Oxford at all, maybe she was just walking in a straight line. Maybe she didn’t even see us, maybe we were as dreamlike to her as the dreams in which she was lost. The motivations of Dreamers are impenetrable to those of us who sleep soundly.

Can I blame the Dream-Gods of Earth?

The Dream-Gods took pity on us — at least, that is the official explanation — and granted a select few human beings the power to hold back the ceaseless flow of Nightmares. From their lofty aerie on the far slopes of Unknown Kadath, a mountain peak so deep in the Dream that even Dreamers cannot venture close, the Dream-Gods of Earth saw our new plight and rendered what help they could. The goddess Bast was the first to reach out, to ‘bless’ a group of young women, and make the first ‘magical girls’.

Why only girls? Why do all the myriad Dream-Gods only select young women? Only they know, and they don’t talk much.

Blaming the Gods is a little like blaming ourselves, because in the end that’s what the Dream-Gods are, according to the occultists — a dream, a reflection of the gestalt memories and minds of thousands of years of human history, congealed into a set of somethings that seem a little bit like gods if you come at them from the wrong direction. Powerful, yes, but just us. And Earth’s Dream-Gods aren’t the only ones out there; the Dream is so much deeper, and Earth is not the only sphere. What do they have to do with us? Nothing.

I blame the magical girls, because they’re human too, but they get to soar above it all.

Stab them, shoot them, blow them up, and five minutes later they’re back to the fight, dresses a little askew but bodies always intact. Worshipped by all, looked up to by too many, the heroines of the new waking world. They can do no wrong, and they do so little, personalities sealed up behind the media, behind whatever magic keeps their identities impossible to know.

If I was a magical girl, I would break out of this cell and slaughter my way to the exit, back to Willow’s side. If I was a magical girl, I would rescue myself.

John Smith waits for my answer.

“Extensive and regrettable collateral damage,” I say. “Dreamers are not accidents.”

“Mm,” John grunts. Have I avoided his trap, or did he read the critique of the Trio of Albion on my face? He gestures at me, at my prosthetic arm on the table, at my scarred cheek. “This sort of disability is very difficult for a young woman. Very visible, very hard to hide. And you don’t try to hide the scar on your face, do you?”

“No.” Why bother to explain my reasons? He’ll know everything soon enough.

Mister Smith puts the pieces of paper back into the folder, tidying away my life. He closes the folder and puts a hand flat on the surface. “Do you know why there’s a physical record on you?”

I’ve made a decision; it’s time to spend myself, with the only action left available to me.

There is a slender sliver of a chance that John Smith the Dream Control agent is not simply playing with me, that he really does need more justification to take me away.

For Willow that sliver of a chance is not enough. If they take me, they will learn things about her. They will learn her secrets, the ones we shared, and then they will dismantle her in turn.

I shift my position in the chair, placing my left leg for leverage. Leaping the table will be difficult, but the pain won’t matter, it’ll be over quick. I doubt I’ll actually be able to take the gun from ‘John Smith’, but I must try. I must give him reason to fear that his suspicions are all true, that I am a Dreamer, or on the cusp of becoming one.

He’ll have to shoot, put me down, in self defence.

It’s the only way to protect Willow. I’ll take her secrets with me.

Acid anger bubbles up from my throat, molten hot, burning bright to blot out fear. I’m shaking in my seat, breath coming harder, ready to do it. I lift my left hand and grip the edge of the table. Do it now. Now. Octavia, now!

John Smith stands up.

He steps over to the video camera on the tripod and turns it off. Then he opens the side of the camera, pops out the memory card, and slips it into his pocket.

In the second it takes for him to sit back down, all my anger has turned to ash.

“Don’t … ” I say. Don’t what? Beat me? Hurt me? Where’s all my determination gone? I’m shaking so hard, shaking all over, coated in cold sweat, stomach stabbing at me. A second ago my body was abstract, but now I’m back, and my body is filled with terror.

I sob as I realise. Suddenly I very much want to live.

John Smith’s face is unreadable.

“I’m not a Dream Control agent,” he says. “And I’m not from the office of emotional health and hygiene. I am trying to keep you out of the hands of Dream Control. Do you understand? I need you to give me something, anything, and it doesn’t matter what. Tell me anything you like about the girl in the white dress. Make up whatever sounds right. Lie to me.”

“ … excuse me?”

“Lie. I need you to lie. You were right about that part. Tell me you’ve seen the girl before. Tell me you knew her when you were a child. Tell me she was a friend of a friend and you spoke to her once or twice. Tell me something I would want to hear. Pick something, tell it to me on camera, and then stick to your story.”

I shake my head. “If … if you’re not a Dream Control agent, then what—”

“Once you’ve lied,” Smith interrupts, “you need to be ready to leave. There are two DC agents out there in the corridor right now, with half a dozen Section Special to back them up. If I can’t crack you, they get the next turn. This isn’t a regular police station, do you understand?”

My head is spinning, my body still flush with adrenaline. A few moments ago I was prepared to die, I was half a second from the act, and now I’m going to live? Reality feels unreal, too bright, too sharp. I was prepared to go, for Willow, but what do I do now?

“What?” I say. “No, no, I don’t understand. I was brought here in the back of a police van, with no windows, what—”

“Getting out of here will take us some time. The sooner we can start, the better. The sooner I get you out, the less chance that Dream Control can pull you into their jurisdiction.” John Smith takes a deep breath. “I need you to lie, quickly and cleanly. Can you do that, Octavia?”

Yes, yes I can. I’ve been lying my whole life, about what I am, about what I dream, about everything.

“What are you?”

John Smith blinks slowly. For the first time since he entered the room, he is something other than a mask. “I work for the Trio. With the Trio. And many other magical girls.”

I shake my head. Plenty of people work with the Trio of Albion, but their public presentation is squeaky clean. The same goes for any other magical girls, anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world. But ‘John Smith’ is too angular and hard for that. I cannot connect him with the Trio, I cannot imagine one of them being seen dead alongside him.

He sees I don’t believe. “I’m your only chance to get out of here. And I do want to help you.”

“Why? Why?”

John sighs. “Because I need to know who that girl in white was, and I know she wasn’t a Dreamer. I’ve been chasing her for a while now.” He shrugs, a liquid roll of his shoulders. “All I know is that she grinned at you. Which might mean something. I just don’t know what, not yet.”

“If she wasn’t a Dreamer, then what was she? I saw her pull that weapon out, from under her dress, breaking reality … ” The answer dawns on me. “Was she a magical girl—”

“Don’t say that out loud. Especially don’t say it when I switch the camera back on. Don’t breathe it, don’t think it. You never said that, and I didn’t hear it.”

I’m speechless. Still shaking, sweat all down my back, head pounding with my own pulse. Is any of this real?

“Octavia,” he says, and blinks slowly, a second time. “I need you to lie, and then I need you ready to leave. Can you do that now? Or are you going to go with Dream Control?”

An impossible choice. The certainty of an I&O cell, or the uncertainty of a strange government man without a real name.

“If I asked you to shoot me, would you do it?” I say.

John Smith shows real emotion for the first time; the idea horrifies him, or else he’s a very good actor. “No.”

I don’t trust this man, but I’m desperate to avoid Dream Control; the determination to spend my own life now seems alien and vile, an impulse that got inside me and almost won. I want to live. I want to live so I can see Willow again, thank her, touch her, whisper all the things I never got to say. At least ‘John Smith’ is offering me an alternative. Perhaps that alternative is worse than being dismantled, but I doubt that very much. At least this way the dreams of Willow stay firmly within my own skull, and the skull itself stays intact.

“I … if … if you want me ready to leave, I will need to reassemble myself.” I gesture at my prosthetic on the table. “And then … yes. Yes, I can lie for you. I’ll do my best. Is there any way you can bring my mobile phone? My coat? Before we leave.”

John Smith stands up. He leaves the file and the photographs on the table. “How long will you need to put the arm back on?”

Less than one hundred and eighty seconds. “Fifteen minutes.”

He nods, turns around, and walks to the steel door. He raps his knuckles three times and it opens for him. He doesn’t look back as it closes.

Without any eyes on me, either biological or mechanical, a breath leaves my lungs, crawls up my throat like a slug of cold tar, bitter and burning, the fermented dregs of all that anger. I swallow a whine, shameful and disgusting. I try not to curl up in my seat, curl up into myself, wrap myself in a ball of my own sick pity.

This might be the last fifteen minutes of privacy I ever get.

Spine straight, eyes dry, lower lip hard as iron. Show your spirit, Octavia. You still have your dignity.

Removing my jumper takes a moment. Unbutton my shirt, peel it away from my right shoulder, revealing the scars, the ruts, the flesh once riven to ribbons. The stump of my right arm snags inside my sleeve, so I have to reach over and free it, as I often must.

The stump is like me in miniature, truncated and ruined, half-saved by medical science, unable to do anything without external assistance. My little cripple. I cradle it for a moment, fingers of my left hand over the naked amputation site, massaging the tissues beneath.

Then I put myself back together.

My prosthetic arm is a WestEuro Bionics XMR Model 4, heavily modified by yours truly. By volume it is mostly carbon fibre and foam, which keeps it light; by weight it is mostly electronics, motors, battery, and myoelectric pickups. It is waterproof and corrosion resistant, extremely sturdy, and more precise than anybody expects. It cost a great deal of money and is insured for an equally eye-watering amount, the legacy of my parents’ life insurance policies. The outer shell is chalk white, sterile and clean. It was once covered by a sleeve of flesh-coloured silicone, but I tore that to shreds years ago in a fit of disgust.

Getting the socket onto my stump is easy, I just pick it up and press the nub of my upper arm into the padding, nice and hard. Suction does half the job, and rolling up the silicone sleeve does the rest. But the stump is too short to secure the limb safely, so there are two straps. One goes over my shoulder, the other goes over my chest. I don’t always use both; the chest strap rarely matters.

But this situation is rare, so I strap myself to myself, nice and tight.

A recessed switch is hidden close to my armpit. When I press it, the power comes on and the arm goes limp, fingers uncurling. I flex the hand by twitching the scraps of muscle in my upper arm; the nerves inside the remains of the limb have been surgically spread out to make this possible. I move each finger in turn. I relax the palm. I make and unmake a loose fist.

The cramp, the phantom pain, the part of me I couldn’t reach, it all fades. I’m whole again.

It’s easier to get my clothes back on if I stand up. I scoot the chair back, scraping rubber feet on bare concrete floor. Standing up with my prosthetic leg is second nature, I’ve been doing it for a decade, and it requires less fine control than the arm. But I’m shaky with the aftermath of my death averted, and I have to steady myself against the table before I can straighten my spine.

I seal myself back up inside what little protection I have left — prosthetic arm into the sleeve of my shirt, shirt buttons done up, collar straightened, jumper pulled down over my head, hair raked as neat as I can without a comb. Now that I have my right hand again, I can straighten the soft leather glove on my left. I reach into my skirt pocket for the other glove.

“You do know he’s going to kill you, yes?”

The voice comes from behind and to my right, outside my field of vision.

I flinch, stagger, knock my chair aside, bang my hip against the table. Hands raised, heart pounding in my throat, I whirl.

A ball of bristly black fur has appeared in the corner with the rusty red stains.

It’s a zoog.

Zoogs are an invasive pest species native to the Dreamlands. They are not quite the lowest of the low — that’s reserved for the things they prey upon — but they are far from the most dangerous creatures which have slipped through and established a permanent presence in the waking world. They are made of earthly matter, or at least a close enough analogue to infest several forgotten corners of England, gorging themselves on insects, small rodents, mushrooms, and rubbish. An average zoog is a little larger than a European badger, and bears more than a passing resemblance to the American opossum.

Similar to the opossum, they can look almost goofy, cute, or gormless, but this is a dangerous illusion. They are larger and meaner than a real opossum, with sharper teeth behind zipper smiles, dexterous front paws loaded with hooked claws, and a nasty habit of pack hunting for fresh meat. A lone zoog will flee from a human. Three zoogs might injure a child. Thirty zoogs will kill and eat a full grown man.

They are sapient and they can talk, though they are rarely clever enough to do more than engage in basic barter and threats.

They cannot, however, walk through walls.

Sudden and impossible appearance is not the most alarming thing about the zoog in the corner of the room. It is black, all black, all over — the long prehensile rat-like tail, the little grasping clawed hands that click against the concrete floor, the thickly matted fur, the softly twitching ears, the elongated snout, the teeth and tongue within, and the huge dark eyes that seem to look everywhere at once. The zoog glistens, dripping, saturated, as if dunked in oil, with a shimmer-sheen of half-glimpsed rainbow in every motion. The zoog is made of black slime, like a protrusion thrust upward from an invisible ocean of thick and tarry mud.

Before I can think to reply or scream or run to the door and hammer on it with my fists, the zoog trots across the room and jumps onto the table, scrambling at the edge to haul itself up the final few inches. Black goop drips from it in sticky loops and fat ropes, all vanishing into nothing as they rejoin with the unseen substrate from which this not-a-zoog has been extruded.

It gets up onto the table, sits on its haunches, and looks right at me.

It speaks again, the same voice as before — a double voice, two speaking over each other. One is the raw skritter-scratch of a zoog; the other is human, womanly, rich, and darkly amused.

“Octavia?” it repeats. “You do know that man is going to kill you, right?”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

(This is another author note! Hello!)

Phew, well! Now you’ve met Octavia. And England. Both of them are in a terrible state.

What more can I say? Nothing, at least not right away. I think Octavia would get quite angry with me if I tried to speak for her. Behind the scenes, Octavia has been a hell of a protagonist to wrangle; she’s bucked off my outlines and ruined my plans before we even got out of the opening arc. Which I suppose I should expect by now. I’d have it no other way.

As for that zoog … you’ll see. Soon enough.

Ahem. I shan’t say much more here for the moment! I’m going to be keeping these post-chapter author-notes pretty minimal to start with. The next chapter will be published next Saturday, and the story will be on a 3-week-on-1-week-off schedule (which can be seen over here.)

But if you want to read three more chapters of the story right away, please consider subscribing over on my patreon.

Hope you enjoyed this! I’ll see you again, very soon indeed.

Content Warnings

Ableist language

Next Chapter

Magical girls do not impress me.

That’s why I’m not looking up at the sky, when one of them decides to end what little is left of my life.

Everyone else is gawking skyward as the latest aerial battle crosses over Oxford New Park. Firework sunbursts glitter in shop windows, staining stagnant puddles with a familiar tricolour blush, strobing stutter-stop rainbows across the grey concrete pavement. A rush of air ruffles the treetops as a tattered company of tentacled gas-bags dash out from behind the nearest buildings — a flock of Volans polypus, ‘airborne polyps’. They scud overhead, their numbers already cut down to less than a dozen, though they likely started this incursion at over a hundred strong. Bright beams and showers of shining sparks chase them into the open sky, the signature moves of our noble protectors punishing and purging these interlopers in the waking world. Sirens split the air; they’ve been wailing for half a minute already, trying to herd we civilians down into the shelters, or at least indoors.

But there’s no Nightmares in Oxford today. No terror on the wind, no pressure on the chest, no scratching behind the eyeballs, no cold sweat down one’s back. People don’t need the sirens to tell them when it’s a real Nightmare. They run before they know why.

The whole park is at a standstill, pedestrians yelping and pointing, traffic snarled to a halt, people leaning out of windows, pointing and shouting, filming on their phones. Sirens can’t drown out the spectacle. The sharp crack of Dawn’s rifle, the flame-hot hiss of Edge’s sword, the gut-churning slam of Azure’s hammer. The Trio of Albion, calling out encouragement to each other, shouting warnings to we mortals below, and yelling challenges to enemies who cannot comprehend a word of the King’s English. And then, the hard-bone crunch and wet-flesh mulch of bursting polyps.

I try not to flinch. Clench my teeth. Don’t show disgust.

The evening news will edit out the gore. Perhaps they’ll leave a spot or two, most likely a picturesque splash of blood on the frilly hem of Edge’s white dress. The BBC always enjoys a tasteful touch of crimson to go with every victory, and Edge is particularly photogenic. The real stuff will be up on the internet within an hour, picked over by the enthusiasts, the perverts, other magical girls, and two dozen foreign intelligence agencies.

A cheer goes up from the other end of the park; they’re right below the thick of the fight. Some fool is about to get splattered with falling ichor from a violated polyp. The news will make sure to show one of the girls helping the unfortunate civilian back to his feet. Azure, probably; she’s always got the winning angelic smile. But the cameras will stop rolling just before Dream Control turn up to haul that fool off for a month in an I&O ward, just in case the ichor causes strange dreams.

We wouldn’t want strange dreams, would we?

A distant drone edges closer, hidden behind the jumbled skyline. Low flying helicopters, half a dozen Tiger attack craft scrambled from the bloated base at RAF Brize Norton. A machine gun blurts sudden staccato thunder, drowning out the cheers, shredding a stray polyp which had escaped from the Trio. Harriers roar past in the distance, pretending they’re not superfluous to all this pageantry.

The military likes to chip in for these easy fights. Show they’re not totally useless. A few polyps might bring down a helicopter if they try hard enough, but they’re no Nightmare. If the Trio were facing a Nightmare today, the choppers and the jets would be fleeing faster than the civilians, pilots chewing their own faces off and bleeding all over the cockpit instruments. One cannot fight Nightmares with bullets and missiles.

Besides, the polyps aren’t even trying. Disoriented and dazed, like beached fish. Probably lost their way in the Dreamlands, wandered through a portal made by something else. A bad joke by an unknown Dreamer, or the wake of some idiot god passing too close to Earth.

But the government calls upon the Trio of Albion regardless, just in case worse things turn up. To show that the waking world is still wide awake. To defend our sceptred isle.

The real reason is to show the colours, wave the flag, remind the public who keeps the Dream at bay.

A crimson blaze flares in the sky above the park, stains the grass and trees and paving stones blood-red for one blinding eyeblink. Edge, showing off with her sword, hacking through a thorny knot of polyp. Something up there squeals like a cross between a gutted pig and a set of bagpipes dredged from a swamp. The squeal turns liquid, sticky, clotted. The reek of burning meat fills the air.

The crowd oohs and ahhs. Another cheer rings out. A chant starts up — ‘Scar-let Edge! Scar-let Edge!’

My old wounds ache. Magical backwash from the fight, or all in my head? I’ll never know for sure; correlation isn’t causation. Migraine premonition flutters behind my right eye, anchored in the scar tissue down my cheek. The enclosed stump of my right thigh itches and burns inside the socket, where I can’t get at it until I have some privacy. My right arm is the worst. Phantom pain shoots all the way down my prosthetic, a spasm in muscles long gone. The motors in my fingers twitch and tremble, trying to free me from cramps that don’t exist. I reach over with my left hand, grab the socket where it joins real flesh, and squeeze as hard as I can, until I feel the stub of my amputated humerus grinding beneath the thin sheathe of scar tissue.

I keep the pain off my face, because this was supposed to be our last day together, and I don’t want to worry Willow.

Not that she’s looking. She’s looking up at the magical girls, just like everyone else.

Nobody’s perfect, but Willow Finch is the closest a waking mortal can get. She is everything I am not. A friend to all who deserve it, an implacable foe to the cruel and the heartless, a light to those who need guidance in the dark. She is an intellectual giant, riding the bleeding edge of the new mathematics with nothing but her own brains. A woman without a hint of guile in her whole body, and a smile suited for every occasion, no matter how much melancholy the moment calls for. She doesn’t really understand me, but that’s never mattered, because she accepts everything about me anyway, without reservation. She accepted me when we met as children a decade ago, when I rejoined school after physical rehab, even though I was a year and a half older than her. I was an angry, bitter, scared cripple, who cried at weird moments, couldn’t keep my emotions off my face, and couldn’t even walk half the time. She chose me then, and nothing else has mattered so much since. She never complains that I should brighten up; but I have, bathed in the warmth of her shadow, though I am a withered thistle to her wild rose.

Even today, on the day we are supposed to collect our A-Level results together, she is perfect. Dressed in a long pink skirt and a white sweater, like an inverted blossom with a pale stem.

Soft brown eyes gaze up at the magical fools in the air. Long brown hair in a low ponytail invites me to touch.

Not that I can. Not in public. That would be a good way to get picked up by Dream Control.

Willow Finch is my best friend, my first friend, my only friend, and maybe more, though so brief and fleeting. She protected me when no others would, when sometimes I didn’t deserve protection; she befriended a lost girl who had nothing else. She is better and brighter and more beautiful than any magical girl. I would tear the Trio out of the sky for her, if only I could.

But why not hold her hand, beneath this airborne spectacle? Other people are doing that, grabbing at their fellows, joining hands, pointing at the sky. Willow has both hands clutched to her upper chest, as if she can’t contain her delight, as if the sight of magical girls murdering lost animals is the most wondrous thing she’s ever seen. Her eyes glitter with their reflected light, but the brilliance is all her own.

Won’t you look at me like that, Willow? We don’t have much longer together, do we? Wasn’t this supposed to be our day?

I reach for her hand. It feels like the bravest thing I’ve ever done.

Today is likely our day of parting. Once we get those A-Level results, Willow and I are bound for different directions. Willow is a mathematics prodigy, she’s staying right here in Oxford, and not in the messy outskirts of the Oxford New Expanded Metropolitan Area, but right in the heart of the old city. She’s going to Magdalen College to study mathematics and computer science. Her results are a formality, they’ll have her working on one of the new Dream Institute super projects within a year or two.

But I’m going north, and it doesn’t matter where. Anywhere I can fix myself, anywhere I can learn how. I’ve been telling myself for the better part of two years that I can fix myself, make myself worthy of her, come back a new woman.

All lies.

I have no doubt that we’ll see each other again a few times before August is done, but this day is the fulcrum of our futures, and the fight in the sky is a bad omen.

This is far from the first time Willow and I have been caught beneath a fight together. We’ve been through much worse, but who hasn’t, these days? We’ve huddled close in shelters while real Nightmares raged and ravaged. We’ve slept beside each other on the school floor, with the city on lockdown, while the Trio and the military hunted larval Dreamers. We’ve waited in the dark, hand-in-hand, wondering if the waking world will be there when we emerge. We have clung together, when there might not be anything worth waking to.

But this was supposed to be our day, the last of our days. And the girls in the sky have ruined it.

If I ever come back to Oxford, Willow will be long gone. Married off, or vanished into the bowels of the military industrial complex, or both. Maybe she’ll be designing stuff for those girls in the air, or for the next generation coming up behind them, or even for Dream Control. Without Willow, I am going to struggle, and it will not be long until I fall apart. I was always going to slip up sooner or later. A year or two perhaps, then I’ll get picked up by Dream Control or Section Special, probably for some piece of behaviour I didn’t even know I needed to hide. And Willow won’t be there to be normal for me.

So why not hold Willow’s hand, like we used to, one more time? Why won’t you focus on me today, Willow? This is our end, isn’t it? Let me have you now, at least.

My fingers uncurl — my left, because if I’m going to hold Willow’s hand once more before the end, I’m going to do it with the hand that can feel, even if it is through a glove.

But then I stop, because something doesn’t fit. And it’s not Willow, because she fits anywhere she chooses.

There’s one other person not looking up at the sky.

A girl glides through the crowd on the pavement, parallel to the line of shops on one side and the park on the other. She slides like a fish in water, no need to shoulder her way past clumps of people, no awkward squeezes, no murmured excuses, moving like nobody else is present. White sandals tap on concrete, white sundress floats around her calves. Long hazel hair messy as brambles, all cowlicks and upcurls. My age or maybe younger, a teenager or slight enough to pass for one. The backwash of colours from the fight doesn’t touch her dress, or her pale forearms, or the bright green eyes that dart left and right. Her colours are untainted, too clear, unreal.

A smile curves her mouth, crinkling the corners of her eyes, full of mischief. Her lips twitch, holding back a cackle.

Our eyes meet, because we’re the only two not looking up at the magical girls.

She pauses, raises a pair of thick eyebrows, shoots me a wink. She stops as a little clearing forms in the crowd. She turns away, looks up at the magical girls finishing their show-fight, and smiles wider.

My face goes cold, my mouth hangs open, my heart climbs up my throat. I grab Willow’s hand, but there’s no romance in it now.

Willow finally looks at me, sudden concern on her brow.

“Octavia?” she says my name.

Behind Willow, the girl in the white dress is breaking the rules of reality.

She reaches under the skirt of her dress and pulls out a length of tapered steel, six feet long, as if producing it from thin air. A javelin, tipped with a thick triangle of dull metal. I have no idea what it is, but I know there is not enough room up that girl’s skirt to conceal even a quarter the length of that object.

The girl glances at me again. Her smile explodes into a toothy grin so wide it threatens to split her face.

She winds her arm back, takes aim at the sky.

“Octavia?” Willow repeats. “What’s wrong?”

I fill my lungs to scream a warning.

Dreamer!

The girl in the white dress — the unseen Dreamer among us, for she cannot be anything but that — hurls the javelin skyward, putting more strength into the throw than her slender body could possibly produce, hopping forward and overbalancing as the weapon leaves her hand.

I finally look at the sky as the weapon flies, as it arcs up into the air above the park, to join the darting forms of the Trio of Albion. They don’t see it coming. Azure is off over the trees, hammering a polyp to death. Dawn turns at the last second, levelling her rifle, trying to knock the surprise out of the air.

Scarlet Edge is right above us, cream-and-crimson dress flapping in the wind, ruby sword held at rest, posing for the cameras, for the crowd, for the glory.

She takes the javelin in the centre of her chest. The aim is impeccable.

The bomb in the javelin’s tip detonates right above the crowd.

The world turns into screams and black smoke and heat on my face. I see a snippet of scarlet flutter falling to the ground — Edge, burned and scorched, dress in cinders. My own field of vision spins, slams to the concrete, my head cradled by loving hands.

Willow has bundled herself on top of me, and protected my skull.

She has taken my share of the explosion.

Next Chapter

(Hello! This is a post-chapter author note! Just for anybody who’s never seen one of these before.)

Welcome! Welcome to Maidens of the Fall. Whether you’re reading this note on the day I launch the story, or years in the future, I dearly hope you enjoy it.

I won’t clog up this space with words right now; I’ll simply let the story speak for itself. If you want more details – the publishing schedule, future plans, other thoughts, so on – I’ve written a big public patreon post about it, over here.

There’s a second publicly available chapter going up right after this one; to read it, click the “Next Chapter” button, up and to the right. If you want to read even more chapters ahead (three at the moment!) then head over to my patreon page and consider subscribing to the “Magical [REDACTED]” tier.