Content Warnings

Unreality
Gaslighting
Children with PTSD
Self-harm
References to covid-19 (fictional)
Internalised homophobia

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Summer sunlight slants from high windows, drifts down through sticky-warm air to glisten on glossy swoops and swirls of abstract wall-art. Bird song chatters beyond stout walls, muffled by the struggle of anaemic air-conditioning indoors. Antiseptic scents, the shuffle of distant feet, a low murmur of politely hushed voices. Phone calls in far-off rooms, the muted squeak of trolley wheels, whispers from a wall-mounted television tuned to a near-silent cartoon.

A familiar waiting room, in a familiar hospital, with all the familiar old pains.

Numb, empty, awash on the tide.

My name is Octavia Carter. I’m ten years old.

My mum and dad died a few months ago, but I don’t try to keep count of how many months exactly, because thinking about that makes my eyes all hot and itchy, but nothing happens, because I’ve used up all the tears inside me and I need to wait for them to refill. I’ll cry for my parents plenty over the next decade, so it’s okay if I can’t cry right now.

I’m sitting in a waiting room in the hospital, by myself, nobody else around. Which hospital, I don’t remember, but I don’t think that matters very much. Can’t recall how I got here, whether I’m waiting to see a doctor, or if I’ve seen the doctor already and now I’m waiting to leave; all these appointments blur together, a procession of prodding and poking and staring and assessing and dressing and redressing and it all makes me shut down and stop thinking. I’m used to that by now. Shutting down. More meat than mind.

My grandmother is nearby, just out of sight. Around a corner, speaking with a nurse. Through a door, questioning a doctor. Buying something from a vending machine. Fetching something from her car. Doesn’t matter, I don’t remember anyway; she would have checked and doubled-checked before she left me here. Are you alright on your own for a moment, Octavia? I won’t be beyond earshot. You’re sure? Granny’ll just be over there. Be right back. I promise.

Granny’s a liar. She’ll betray me eventually. Feed me poison because the government says so.

I can’t follow her even if I wanted to, stuck in my wheelchair. Standard NHS issue, muscle powered, no motor, and me with only a left arm. Can’t wheel myself around with a stump, can’t hobble on a crutch with no right hand to grip the crossbar. Can’t even get up to use the toilet.

Phantom pain is still relatively new, but I’ve gotten to know it well. A slow, steady, sullen throb, from a missing leg that should be dangling over the canvas seat of my wheelchair, and a ghostly arm clamped to my side like a dead python.

A plush toy, a rabbit, is my only companion. Dirty, stained, gripped hard in my lap. I’m parked next to a row of chairs, within easy reach of a stack of children’s books and brightly coloured magazines, but I don’t want to release the rabbit, for fear I’ll drop her and won’t be able to pick her up again and Gran won’t hear when I tell her and we’ll leave her behind by accident and I’ll never see her again and the nurses will sweep her up and throw her in the bin and she’ll die.

I know I’m dreaming; but I’m also ten.

I remember punching Willow in the face, beneath a great and terrible storm on the surface of Luna. But that’s all in the future. Right now, I’m ten.

Time oozes past, a slow river sliding sluggish toward an infinite sea; if I turn my head just right, I’ll be able to stare directly into that sea. Such things are possible here, though looking may not be wise. Posters on the walls warn of childhood diseases, advise on vaccinations, educate about vitamin differences. A big bold slogan near the top of the longest wall reminds people to REPORT STRANGE DREAMS. Bit late for that, no? When I blink, the words change to REPORT MY ARSE. Other posters show smiling children doing smiley things. Another wall is covered by a mural of two magical girls — I don’t know who they are, probably ones from back when I was ten — handing out boxes with big red cross symbols on them to grateful parents.

Red-black light flickers far to the left, from one of the many ways into the big waiting room.

It holds steady for a moment, like somebody has opened the door to an otherworldly operating theatre where wonderful changes are made, where that red-black light can be put inside a person and make them all better again. My left hand twitches around the plush rabbit, half a thought of reaching for the wheel of my chair. But then the red light flickers and fades out, as if my hesitation was a disappointment, and a door has closed.

A figure appears from the opposite direction, framed for a moment by another entrance to the waiting room. It pauses, waits for me to look.

A little girl, around my age.

She steps into the waiting room with tentative tread, peering at me from a wary sideways lean, as if I might leap out of my wheelchair to attack her, or shout at her to leave me alone, send her scurrying off with rejection. She walks up to me, stops well beyond arm’s reach, stares back at my dead-eyed look.

Eyes the colour of mud, hollow and haunted. Messy brown hair hangs far past her hips, tangled and greasy. Her skin is peeling, flaking and raw, as if she’s been sunburned over and over. Little plasters cover her tiny hands, cuticles ragged from being picked and gnawed, little spots of exposed blood drying and clotting. Two fingers are wrapped in more serious dressings, concealing what I somehow know are the ugly craters of ripped-out fingernails. She wears a pair of grey jogging bottoms and a t-shirt with a cartoon of a smiling sun on the front.

Willow Finch. Ten years old.

Anger stirs not. Octavia Carter at ten years old possesses only a dry wound instead of emotions. The version of me that can protect myself is a decade in the future.

Willow sits down in the nearest chair, to my right. Her trainers don’t quite touch the floor. She wedges her hands under her thighs and stares elsewhere, chewing her lips.

“This is where we first met,” she says eventually. She speaks like the child she is, in a voice I don’t remember.

“ … I … ” Takes me a while to find my own voice, lost at the bottom of memories I don’t have. The voice of a ten-year old, one I didn’t use much that year. “I thought we met at school?”

“Mm-mm.” Willow shakes her head, hair getting in her eyes. She gathers up the whole greasy mass and puts it over her opposite shoulder, to keep it out of the way. “That was just something I made up, because it made more sense, it was neater and prettier that way. Kids are meant to meet at school, right? That’s normal. That’s what happens.” She finally looks at me, a sideways glance, sees that this does not make sense. She shrugs. “We didn’t meet at school, no. I came to school ‘cos of you. It’s the other way around.”

I glance left and right, at the dull old waiting room. “Here?”

“Mmhmm!” Willow brightens, a fractional smile. “I’d slipped away from … from the people who looked after me—”

“Who?” I demand, feeling uncharitable. “Tell me. And no lies.”

Willow drops her gaze. She gestures in the direction from which she appeared, at the mouth of a corridor leading back into the hospital. “Who do you think gets used to keep a Lucid Dreamer under control? Other Dreamers, silly. Sometimes a magical girl or two, if I’ve been … bad, or they want to make me scared. That day it was … ” A pause, gnawing her lip. “Seema and Artash, I think. Who cares, doesn’t matter.”

“Handlers.”

“Yeah.” She puffs out a sigh, a child imitating the action of a stressed adult. “I guess. Anyway, like I was saying, I slipped away in the hospital. No special reason, I just wanted to be alone for a bit. I was feeling sad and stuff. I wandered around the hospital for a while, but it just smelled of dying and old people and cancer, but then … ” She turns her face to me, smiles with desperate eyes and cracked skin. “Then I came in here, and I saw you. You were sitting right there, right where you are now.”

She waits, like I’m supposed to smile back. But that’s nonsense, she’s not that clever. We’re both just ten.

“And I thought,” she carries on, “I thought, wow. Wow. There’s a girl just as mucked up as me.”

She smiles again, weary, hopeful.

“I hate you,” I say.

“Mm-mm.” Willow shakes her head. The smile goes away. “No, you don’t. That’s … not … not how this works. You hate her. Her. The me in the future. The me that I’m gonna turn into. Though … ” She frowns the difficult frown of a small child trying to understand things not meant for little minds. She looks at her hands for a moment, picks at a corner of ragged cuticle, puts it to her teeth, snips off a fragment of skin, watches a bead of blood well from broken flesh, then sucks on the wound for a moment. “It’s kinda hard to tell where I stopped and she started. But I think this is far back enough that it’s all me and none of her. I hadn’t … you know, done anything, to you, now, here. And anyway, it’s not you that hates her, it’s the you that you’re gonna be that hates the me that’s gonna be. You and me, we don’t hate each other. We only just met.”

Future me would know enough to shrink back into my wheelchair, to look away from the Dreamer in my head, to spit in her face, to scream until she leaves, not to listen to her words. But I can’t, I’m ten years old, and I’m still numb with the shivering topography of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“This is a dream,” I say. “Are you even … ”

“Real?” Willow almost laughs, lips twitching, not funny. “Define real. But yes, I’m really here. You’re really here, too.”

“You’re trying to do something to me.”

“Mm, no.” Willow shakes her head again, looks pained. “She was gonna — the me in the future, I mean. But you kinda messed it up by punching her in the face.” Willow smiles a little, snorts an abortive laugh, a real one this time. “Wow, Octavia. Never would have imagined you’d be in a punch up.”

Despite everything I almost smile too; at ten years old I never could have imagined slugging anybody, let alone in the face.

“Huh.” Not a laugh, close as I can get. “Yeah. Funny, right?”

Willow smiles more. “Right.”

We both trail off, the memories of two awkward children. Willow swings her feet, gnaws on a finger, bleeds a little. I clutch my plush rabbit and stare at the wall, sliding back down into the place I was before.

“This is … weird,” I say. “Why am I here? Why are you doing this?”

“Oh, um, no,” Willow says. “I’m not doing anything. This is all just kinda like leftovers. And it won’t last long.” She gestures vaguely at the waiting room. A shadow passes over the sunlight from outside, a drifting shape too large to be any bird. A tremor trickles up through the floor, then ceases. “She — me, I mean, in the future — she made up a whole new dream for you. It was supposed to be a ‘cottage core’ thing?” She does the little air-quotes, one finger each. “Lame, right? Anyway, in that dream you were gonna be older, and you worked for a big important company, as an engineer or something. She doesn’t understand that, so she skipped most of the details, she was gonna let you fill them in. And you were just arriving home after a long day at work, at this little cottage where you and she live together. She was gonna be baking a cake or something, all house-wifey. Everything was gonna be comfy and cute and pretty, and nothing was gonna be wrong or bad. Nobody was gonna be around to take you away from her. And then you’d forget everything, all about everything that had happened.” Willow waves her arms, indicating ‘everything’, lowering them as she finishes. “But then you punched her in the face. So now we’re just kinda, in the leftovers, and she’s all disoriented, so I thought I’d come see you, and … and like … make sure.”

“Make sure? Of what?”

She shrugs, won’t meet my eyes.

“Willow,” I say. She looks, reluctantly. “I don’t remember us meeting like this. I remember school.”

Sadness and guilt builds behind her eyes, more than a child could possibly bear. “Yeah. She made up a better story. You know? I’m … I’m sorry.”

“But why?”

Willow frowns like I’m being a bit slow, then shrugs and gestures at herself — her patchy, peeling skin, her bitten, bloody hands, her weird hollow eyes. “She wanted to be pretty. Thought you’d like her more, if she was pretty.”

Willow was always immaculate, from the day we first met. Skirts always pressed, shirts never creased. Hair long and shiny and combed silk-smooth. Skin flawless. Smiling like the sun. She never had a bad day, never cried over spilt milk, never fought with other kids, never skinned her knees or laddered her tights, never screwed up and forgot to do homework, never even got out of breath.

A story she made up.

“Are you the truth, then?” I ask.

Willow — the real Willow, a girl I never even knew — nods slowly. “Hi. I guess.”

“This is the first time I’ve ever met you, isn’t it?”

She nods again. Sniffs loudly. Chews on a nail, tugging at it with her teeth.

“Why?” I hiss.

Willow looks at her right hand. “Ten years old was … I guess, the last time I ever felt … clean? Mm. Before I — she — started doing things to … to you and … and … ”

“No,” I croak. “Not that. Why? Why any of it? Why?”

Willow looks surprised, wide-eyed with something no child should feel. Then she looks away, sniffs wet and loud. Looks at her hands, starts to scratch.

“She … I … was afraid,” says Willow. “She started small. Every step seemed like it made sense at the time. She made it so you and her met at school instead of here, made you forget this, then made it happen all over again, so she wouldn’t have to explain why she was in the hospital. Since she was changing things anyway, she thought she might as well clean herself up, make herself really pretty, so you would like her more. And it … it worked. It worked!”

Willow’s voice quivers with amazement over that final word. Her eyes go wide, staring at her hands, at a bead of blood welling up from her latest self-inflicted wound.

Specks of gold glitter in that crimson bead.

“Before then, she … ” Willow swallows hard. “Nothing added up. Dream and reality, it wouldn’t … wouldn’t click together. She … I couldn’t control anything. A stray thought killed my mummy and daddy. More stray thoughts burned me all over. Put me back together again. It … it hurt, I died, more than once. I wanted to leave it behind, go to the Dream, but … but I was scared, and— and they wouldn’t let me, said I had potential, kept me here, kept me … ” Another swallow, hands shaking. “But when she saw you,” Willow whispers. “From the moment she saw you. Then the world all made sense. The world started to just … do as she asked.”

Golden flecks fade from the bead of blood. Willow looks up at me. Deep breath, shaky lungs.

“Then it just kinda snowballed from there,” she says. “She couldn’t show you the truth, what her life was really like. Dreamers and handlers and the whole … thing. And they let her do it. They let her do it!” Willow goes wide-eyed with terrible need, then looks away, as if she can’t face me. “The other Dreamers, the people who’d taken me in, they let me go to school. Because of you, I was allowed to be a little bit normal. So I had to keep it up, I had to be normal, I had to, else I’d have to go back with them again. And there wouldn’t be any normal life at all. Just … ” She shrugs, lost. “I had to keep it normal. Had to. And because of you, she could. She could. You made everything just … do as she said. You made the world right.”

“Love at first sight?” I croak. “At ten years old?”

“Y-yeah?”

“She never kissed me. Never kissed her.”

Willow bites her lip. “I think we have to—”

The waiting room smears sideways, an old-school video tape on fast forward, walls blurring, sunlight churning. Willow’s face melts like warm wax.

Focus snaps taut. Fast-forward stops. Sharp as the waking world.

Heavy dark rain clouds have replaced all memory of summer sunshine, waiting room soaked in clammy grey shadows, windows glazed with cold drizzle. Air gone tense and stagnant, reeking of medicine and bleach, a hint of rot and death beneath chemical cleanliness. Nurses’ feet hurry to and fro beyond sight, machines beep and whirr from hidden rooms, doctors call out half-heard rallies, retreats, surrenders. Bottles of hand sanitiser sit on the tables. Discarded face masks litter some of the chairs.

Willow has aged five years, grown taller, filled out. Hair clean and neat and recently cut, clothes a little closer to the ones she wore in other dreams, a soft sweater, a long skirt, sensible shoes, though perhaps not quite so starched to perfection, not quite so flattering as in my false recall.

She’s not the Willow I knew.

Eyes hard-edged and desperate, a bulging stare underlit by a quiver of paranoia and jealous control. No more peeling skin, but blotchy with long-term damage. Her jaw hangs open, breathing through her mouth. Her shoulders sit in a permanent slouch, as if curled up to protect her belly. Her hands aren’t covered in plasters and little wounds anymore, but they are in constant motion, picking at fibres on her jumper, fingers fluttering and twitching, putting her thumbs between each knuckle in an unceasing cycle of ritualised gesture.

“—move things forward a little,” she finishes, voice a clipped, sharp, nasty little thing. “If we’re going to discuss intimate relations.”

False time has pushed me up the scale to fifteen years old as well. Scrawny, awkward, self-conscious, still lacking my prosthetic limbs. I never used a wheelchair at fifteen, even when the phantom pain and the exhaustion threatened to end me; old shadows of bitter pride and fragile dignity haunt my mind, so much more closely remembered than the numb shell of ten years old.

I let go of the plush rabbit, let it sit in my lap. Didn’t need that comfort anymore, not at fifteen. Because I had Willow.

All lies.

Anger trickles up from a deep substrate of my soul, a faint premonition of the future, enough to make me frown, straighten my spine, sharpen my tongue.

“Why did you never kiss me?” I demand. “Why, Willow? Why invent a dream-life and keep me inside it, and then not even hold me? Why? You wanted me but you didn’t? You were too much of a coward? You were just, what, an idiot?”

Willow — a teenage girl I don’t remember, wearing faces that I never knew — averts her gaze, stony and closed, sharp at the edges.

“I’m not a homosexual,” she says. “I’m just not.”

The waking Octavia Carter would have laughed, not insensible to the echo of her own self-denial, and then heaped bitter cruelty on Willow’s head. But I’m fifteen years old and still terrified of being noticed, catalogued, interviewed, condemned, taken away, dismantled. Her denial — or is it truth? — only serves to widen that trickle of anger, to confuse the target, to still my tongue.

After a moment of silence Willow nods at the hospital, the shadows and the rain, the quiet churn of desperate activity beyond our bubble of dream.

“Five years ago,” she says. “Two thousand twenty, the plague. Remember that? I — she.” A tut. “She kept you safe through that as well.”

“Pandemic.”

Willow frowns at me, narrow-eyed, sour.

“Pandemic,” I repeat. “Plague is inaccurate. Plague is a specific disease. I hate when people call it that. It was a pandemic.”

“I didn’t know you felt so strongly.” A touch of sarcasm. My Willow, my dream-girl, would never have been sarcastic.

A shrug. “You don’t know me. You never knew me. You trapped me in a dream and played with the shadow I cast on a wall. Because you couldn’t face yourself? Because you were a coward? Are a coward? You trapped me in a dream, Willow! So you didn’t have to face the fact you wanted to, what, to fuck me?! Because you’re a liar. Liar. Liar!”

Willow’s face hardens, the first glimmers of golden toxins behind her eyes, dancing like flecks of rotten snow. “At ten I hadn’t yet started to change. At fifteen I’m getting there, and it’s terrifying.”

“Change?”

“Mmhmm.” Her hands twitch and shiver, sometimes too fast to follow, leaving behind afterimages in darkened gold. “By fifteen you’re the only thing anchoring her — me? huh — to the waking world. By fifteen she’s fully aware of that, knows what it means, knows the price of failure. If she loses you, off she goes, no more lucidity. And we’ve both been changing, changing so much she can’t control it, can’t keep a grasp on you anymore. I — she! — peers into your head and she sees … things that make her feel sick and strange. Things you want to do to other girls. I see the dreams you have on your own, when I’m not paying attention. And I’m in them, but I’m not me, and I’m doing things I don’t recognise. It’s all you, you, you, me as your reflection. And it makes me sick, makes me sick to see, to see, but—”

“You’re saying this is my fault?!” I hiss.

Willow glares at me through narrow slits edged with golden glint. “You have no idea what it’s like, being a Dreamer.”

“Try me.”

Willow hunches further forward in her chair, regards me like I’m an implement of her torture. Her voice drops to a whisper. “Imagine one day you wake up and you can see the face of God. It’s staring back at you from the mirror. It’s on every street corner, in every window. On the television, on your phone. It’s everyone you’ve ever known and everyone who has ever been. Every saint, every monster. It’s all of us, it’s everywhere and everything. And that revelation turns your mind inside out. Consciousness and unconsciousness swap places. Your decision making becomes opaque to yourself, the process of observation and thinking becomes occluded, you can’t see yourself anymore, just another facet of that … that edifice, that gestalt thing we’ve been building in the Dream since the first upright ape saw itself reflected in the water. Your emotions, your fantasies, your idle thoughts, they become external, impressed on the world.” She pauses, blinks hard. “That’s how my parents died. A child’s foolish thought that she hated mummy and daddy, just for a second, just for a moment. And the thing we all are, it responded.”

She looks away from me, breathing hard for a moment, continues without looking.

“Dreamers forget what they are. There’s this tugging, this urge, always saying it’s time to go. Time to leave this behind. Time to move on to better things. Because that’s what Dreamers are. A better thing. The next step of a process that we’re all going through, all humans, everyone still waking.” She draws a sharp breath through her teeth. “And I don’t … I don’t want to go. It’s terrifying. I just want to live. Wanted to live.”

Anger pools around the base of my rib cage. “And the price was keeping me in a dream?”

Willow turns back, regards me with a cocktail of spite and guilt. “By fifteen, she thought so. I thought so. I told myself. She told herself. She wanted to hide you from the world. And the world from you.”

“And now?”

Willow drops her gaze. “Every time you wrestled yourself loose, you started drowning yourself in booze. Pouring it down your throat. I had to empty your stomach, clean out your blood. Pick you up off the floor, sobbing and shaking and covered in your own vomit. You … needed me. You need this. We both needed each other.”

“Perhaps I would be more grateful if I remembered even one moment of that.”

Willow shakes her head, won’t meet my eyes. “You shouldn’t be. She put you there in the first place.”

“I was trying to escape.”

“She knows.”

Willow falls silent, watches me from the corner of her eyes, twitching and shivering as if in the grip of a silent fever, her outline leaving behind golden afterimages.

“This is all a trick,” I say. “You’re trying to make me less angry at you.”

Willow half smirks. “Is it working?”

“Maybe.”

Willow shakes her head, tight, hard, angry. “It’s no trick. Promise. You’ve already won, Octavia. You already punched me — her!” She snaps, hisses. “It’s too blurry up here at fifteen, I can’t keep it straight, her and I and I and her.” A huff. “You already punched her in the face. This?” She nods up and around with a jerky motion of her head. “This is just transition.”

“Between what?”

She frowns at me, as if I’m asking a very stupid question. “You tell me.” She points past my shoulder. “You’re the one doing it.”

Red-black light floods from the left-side entrance to the waiting room, a steady-state glow of paradoxical negative radiance. My left hand twitches toward the wheel-rim of my chair, but the light gutters and flickers, goes out by the time I have a grip. I stare at the whitewashed hospital walls, willing that promise to return.

“See?” Willow mutters. “You’re the one doing this. Full of doubts, still.”

I turn a frown on her, can’t help myself. “You started it! And why? You still haven’t answered why, not really. What gives you the right to keep me in a cage? What gives you the right to— to— to all of it! To act you did, to—”

“Because we’re better than you,” she says. “I told you already.”

I stop, dumbfounded.

Willow shrugs. “At fifteen she … I, I had already started to believe it. At ten I would have said sorry, but I won’t now, and she absolutely won’t, because it’s the truth.”

“We? ‘We’ are better? Who is we?”

“Dreamers.” She manages a weird, shaky, nervous smile. “It’s not even worth explaining it to you, Octavia. You’re a human being, homo sapiens, awake and stupid as all shit. You can’t even begin to understand what it’s like, as I already told you.” But then she leans forward, intense, eyes pulled wide. “Think about it for a moment. Think. Really think.”

“About what—”

“You think Harding’s ritual just punched a hole between the waking world and the Dreamlands? The Dreamlands, Octavia, it’s where we come from. Our minds, our souls, the bit that turns us from animal to conscious ape, whatever you want to call it. It’s us, it’s a reflection of us, reflected in the universal substrate. Harding didn’t make a portal to an alternate dimension, that’s an explanation for children and morons. The real wall he demolished was up here.” She taps the sides of her own head with both hands, hard enough to hurt. “In all of us. And we’re all crossing over, some slower, some fast, some fighting against it. Dreamers are just the ones smart enough to know it’s past time to leave. We’re taking all the next steps, and you … you ‘baseline’ humanity, mundane, uninvolved, whatever you want to call it? You’re getting left behind.” She thumps her chest. “But not us. Not the ones who stay lucid, the ones who decide for themselves. We’re staying ourselves, and we’re taking the next step at the same time. Here, in England, this is where a new kind of human civilisation starts. With us. And you’re all just so much mulch.”

Willow leans back again, shivering and shaking, visibly sweating, eyes elsewhere.

“You really believe that? A crock of megalomaniac fantasies?”

A laugh, weak and watery. “At ten? Of course not. At fifteen, maybe. There’s only so much ‘domestication’ you can endure before you start to believe what they tell you. By twenty?” Another laugh, dark and bitter. “After all she’s done, what else is there to believe?”

“And where do I fit into this vision?” I hiss.

“Why do I think I kept you in dreams?” She whispers. “At least there you were safe. You were mine—”

Click. Click. Click. Footsteps snap my eyes to the right-hand corridor mouth, the one that Willow emerged from.

A crowd has gathered in that empty mouth; shadows and shades, half-glimpsed figures beyond the threshold, outlined in thin bands of toxic gold. Ghosts of Willow’s past, of every version of her that has ever been. Solid forms lurk behind the phantoms, things like people but stretched out of all waking shape.

One detaches, compresses down, shoulders through the shades and shadows.

A man steps through the entrance, hands clasped behind his back, eyebrows raised in sardonic surprise. Long hair pulled back in a smart ponytail, face like a bird of prey, perhaps early thirties. Expensive suit, immaculately tailored, a tie that costs as much as a car, shoes so shiny they constitute a visual hazard. Something about him is too sharp, even his flat surfaces would slice flesh to ribbons. Light itself seems to split as it touches his form.

He strolls across the front of the room, eyeing everything, lingering on Willow, ignoring me. He stops across from us, rocking on his heels.

“How quaint,” he says. Posh accent. “A hospital, really? I suppose you always did go in for pointless sentimentality, Finch. And this is your pet, is it? I could get you a dozen with better looks, bigger tits, a stable of breeding sows for your—”

Willow rises to her feet, blurs across the gap, and slaps the man in the face so hard her fingernails draw blood.

She doesn’t pause to entertain his wail of indignation. She grabs him by the collar, expensive tie askew, and hauls him back the way he came, kicking him in the backside to encourage him along. Her hands seem to shred and bleed and reform wherever she touches him, while he blackens and crisps and cooks beneath her grip.

Another pair of figures have appeared in the entrance from which the man appeared, solid people close to the front of the wall of gilded shades. Willow shoves him into their arms, muffling his complaints. He vanishes into the bowels of the hospital, back into the outskirts of this private dream.

Willow walks back to me, face like thunder, ashamed as she makes eye contact. Her hands have healed back to normal, no trace of the brief fight. She doesn’t sit, stands there awkward and lost.

“Who was that?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “Others. Like me, I mean.”

“And the shapes in the doorway?”

“The same.” She shrugs. Looks down at her hands. “The rest of me, too. Waiting out there for all this to end so she can go back to … being in charge.” A loud sniff. “I don’t like being fifteen. I don’t like it at all. It’s too close to her.”

The waiting room smears sideways again, time pulling backward. Sunshine flows through the windows. The air turns warm and sticky. Willow shrinks, grows younger, back to ten years old, skin peeling, hands in blood-flecked tatters.

She smiles at me, awkward, tentative. “That’s better. I’m kinda scary the older I am.”

I’m young again too, numb, withdrawn, adrift. Grope for the plush rabbit in my lap, squeeze it hard, don’t dare let it go. “Mm.”

“You like me like this?”

A shrug. “I suppose. When I was ten.”

Writhing shapes obscure the sunlight, ragged sheets of flesh casting filthy shadows on the walls. Far-off in the hospital, somebody shouts, wailing lost in languages I don’t recognise. The ground shudders, the beginning of a fever.

Willow’s eyes cloud with the kind of dread that only children can feel.

“Can I … ” She gestures with one hand, an awkward half-grip closing on a limb I don’t possess. “Can I … maybe before it ends … can I … ”

She can’t finish.

“The dream’s ending?” I ask.

Willow nods. Her eyes are so round, whites too wide, staring at a point on the floor. “When it ends … I’ll go back to being … her. I really don’t want to.” She glances up at me, furtive, shy. “C-could we—”

Red-black light explodes from my left, a solid wave flooding from a breached seawall. An inferno of crimson negation spills over into the waiting room, the advance guard of a looming tidal wave, dying the floor, the chairs, the abstract murals on the walls, washing out the sunlight, plunging half the world into paradoxical blood and darkness. Even Willow is not immune, her face lit in sudden ruby profile, one eyeball stained scarlet. A line of division forms where the light ends, a boundary of heat haze.

This time the light does not gutter and fade. She who it heralds has arrived, though she was here all along.

She stands at the threshold, clad head to toe in heavy dark metal, a black knight from the bloody end of a million grim fairy-tales. Nemesis and villain, abhorred abomination, no place at the round table for the likes of this figure, a stalking horror from the fens and the marshes, the woods and the moors, a thing spat out by hell’s machinery and wandered in from the wilderness beyond so-called civilisation. Her armour drinks the red-black light and pours it back out into the world, corrupting the dream with the backwash of her inner furnace.

The plates of her armour interlock so perfectly that each moves against the others without need of oil, soundless as she raises her right hand. That fist, her gauntlet, is threaded through with veins of deepest molten red, the metal itself inadequate to the task of containing what lies beneath. A black cloak hangs from her shoulders, a slice of void cut from the universal constant. She carries no weapon, needs only her fists.

She raises her right hand to her faceless mask. The mask becomes a helmet, was always a helmet, her previous form not yet complete. The right side is riven by a jagged rasp of bleeding red.

The black knight removes her helmet. Dark hair falls free, shimmering like oil. Eyes of pure red meet mine, molten from the forge; one whole, the other a familiar narrow slit. Her scar — a jagged mess down the right side of her face — glows from within, throbbing in time with her heartbeat. Unsmiling, undying, inevitable.

Octavia Carter.

She reaches out with her other hand, offers me a way into the future.

Tears have appeared on my cheeks, slow and silent and without sobbing. I fumble for the grip on my wheelchair’s left wheel. But I can’t, or else I’ll drop my plush rabbit, and then I’ll be alone, forever.

Paralysed by my own red-black apotheosis, afraid she might grow impatient, turn away and leave me behind and never come back.

“P-please, please, w-wait … ”

No answer. No movement. She has always waited.

The floor shivers and shakes, too hard now to deny. The sunlight outside dies away, birdsong falls silent. Strange winds howl and whip against the exterior walls of the hospital. Vast shapes pass overhead, shadows beyond the windows.

Willow looks from the magical girl to me, then to the plush rabbit clenched in my lap, faint tears misting her eyes.

“You’ll have to abandon part of yourself,” she says softly, wet in the back of her throat. “I think that’s how it works, when you want to move on. You have to cut out the parts of yourself that don’t fit anymore. Even if it hurts. No different to me, I suppose.” She catches my distraught look, gestures weakly at herself. “I left this behind, piece by piece. Me at ten. I … I don’t think it was … a good idea … ”

I raise the rabbit. Can’t let go. “I don’t even remember her name!” I whine. “The— my bunny, I mean, I don’t, I don’t— I don’t even have any of this in the first place. I don’t want to forget again! But I … I … ”

Willow bites her lower lip, frowns with the kind of stony determination that only a child can muster. “Are you sure you want this?”

Blink up at her. “What?”

She points at the other me. Red-black. Grown up. Dangerous.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes! That’s me! The real me, or the me I should be. And you — I mean the other you, in the future, she’s trying to stop me. She hurt me so much. You hurt me.”

“Not me,” Willow says, trying to blink away the sheen of her tears. “Her. The person I will be.”

“You will hurt me, then.”

“I’m sorry, Octavia.” A loud sniff. “I only ever wanted … I never meant to … you were really my favourite person, you know? You always will be.”

“I won’t forgive you,” I whisper.

“I know.”

“I … I’ll hate you.”

“I know.” She nods. Steps behind my wheelchair. Takes the handles.

“Wi-Willow!? What are you doing!?”

She wheels me forward, turns my chair to the left, toward the future, my own outstretched gauntlet.

“If I do it for you,” she says, voice thin and quiet, “then you won’t have to leave anything behind.”

The other me, bathed in red-black glow, framed by the blurred outline of the hallway behind, doesn’t react to Willow’s charity. She keeps her eyes locked on mine, her proffered hand steady as a steel beam.

Willow wheels me forward, plunges us into the tidal overflow of paradoxical light. Red-black soaks through my skin, warms me like an open flame inside my veins, stains my sight, my touch, my sense of smell and taste, tugging on me from inside, like the linked arms of an old friend around the muscle of my heart and the meat of my organs. Willow sniffles and swallows behind me, fighting her sorrow.

My eyes are full of tears too.

“ … are you … ” I whisper. “Willow. Are you still inside her? The future you, are you still inside her? Can I … can I save you?”

“Probably not”, she murmurs.

“Will she remember any of this?”

“Yes? Maybe. But she won’t pay attention, she won’t pay it any mind. It doesn’t matter to her. I don’t matter to her.” Willow’s voice breaks softly. She takes one hand off the wheelchair, to scrub her eyes. “I’m not even … not even a memory for her anymore. She thinks I was stupid.”

Octavia Carter, magical girl, looms tall as a steam engine, a machine-god at the threshold of a new heaven. We are only a few paces from her now. One last push and she will be close enough to touch. I want to be her so badly, more than I want my limbs back, more than I miss my parents, more than I want anything else in the world.

But I don’t want to leave Willow — this Willow — behind.

“W-Willow?” I murmur. Can’t get the words out. Feels so unfair. “Can … can we … ”

Somehow she knows what I’m going to ask. Willow pauses, lets go of my chair, comes around in front, facing me. My future towers behind her, a machine of iron and magma and the empty void of space, framing this tiny scrap of flesh, a ten-year-old girl who never got to live.

Willow mounts an admirable rear-guard action against her own tears, biting her lips, scrunching her eyes, fists balled up tight. She loses the war when I hold out my left hand, still clutching my plushie, to confirm my simple request. She sobs once, then bawls and wails, even as she leans down and pulls me into an awkward, sweaty, badly-angled hug.

Is this the first time we’ve ever really embraced? In a dream, as it fades and fractures? Willow’s chewed fingernails dig into my back, her blood spots my clothes, her tears blossom as a wet patch on my shoulder, and her body shakes, wracked by sobs, as we cry together.

The dream bucks and jolts like a planet coming apart. High winds howl beyond the thin shell of hospital’s memory. Vast shapes roil and drift beyond the windows, held at bay only by the stone-steady glow of red-black light.

Willow lets go, wipes her eyes on her forearm. “I guess this is … this is bye … ” She moves to step behind the wheelchair again, to finish handing me off to the future.

I put out my left arm, block her way. “Wait.”

“Octavia? No, no you can’t, you can’t— I can’t— you can’t give yourself up to her— t-to me— it’s not … ”

I offer her the plush rabbit. Willow’s eyes go wide.

“I remembered her name,” I say. “Flopsy. Kind of cliche. But sometimes cliches are good.”

“No—”

“You hold onto her, Willow.”

Willow shakes her head. “You can’t— you can’t rescue me. Octavia, you can’t rescue me. I don’t exist outside of this dream. When this ends, I … ”

I push the plush rabbit against her, force her to accept it, force ‘Flopsy’ into Willow’s trembling hands.

“Hold onto her for me. And never drop her.”

Willow nods, clutches Flopsy to her chest, tries not to cry again.

I reach down and grab the rim of my left wheel, though my arm is too weak to propel myself forward alone. “One last push, please?”

Willow nods, ducks behind the chair, takes the right handle. Between my left hand and her right, we wheel the memory of my broken body within reach of my future self.

Octavia Carter regards me with eyes of solid molten red, tiny windows on a sea of infinite rage harnessed to greater purposes, the right narrowed to a slit of old pain. My left hand trembles as I let go of the wheelchair, sweaty and clammy as I stretch out my fingers, reaching for her metal gauntlet.

My tiny pale hand vanishes as she closes her grip around mine. She pulls me out of the wheelchair, lifts me into the air, wrenching joints out of place, the hard metal angles of her steel body digging into my vulnerable flesh, compacting my bones as she props me against her hip, like a mother holding a child. I don’t struggle, don’t resist, don’t cry out or sob at the pain, because this is the pain of transformation, the strange sweet agony of dreaming oneself anew.

“I love you,” I tell myself.

“I know,” I say.

She raises her black helmet with her right hand, lowers it down over my head.

And then I am her and she is I. She was always me and I was always going to be her, with all the universe lined up for this moment of transformation, every atom since the big bang dancing and weaving to create this single twist of the self, a sideways transition predetermined at the birth of time. This Steel Lady, this Black Knight, This Machine has lived in my heart since before I was born, when I was a dream and a sigh beyond the wall of sleep, when I waited at the threshold to be made flesh, when I was slick with blood and amniotic fluid, when I took my first step, when I spoke my first word. My entire life has led to this moment. My parents died to keep me alive, my mother crushed by rubble and my father’s back broken by the weight of material reality. But now I am here, I am the fruit of that process and more, despite all the attempts to crush me into the dirt and grind me to pieces. I’m still here.

This Machine is eternal. A Tungsten Engine roars to life. An Iron Angel is born in dreams, and it’s only a one short step across the ruined wall, out into the waking world.

I open my own eyes, look across a dissolving dream.

The hospital is ripping apart at the seams, shuddering and shaking as if in the grip of an earthquake, riven by deep rents glowing with colours the waking mind could never name, shapes crawling and writhing to get inside. Only my own red-black light keeps the collapse at bay, a space of negative reality where the hospital has already ceased to exist.

A chasm opens across the width of the waiting room. Willow — ten years old, clutching my plush rabbit to her chest, tears falling from her eyes — is already on the far side.

A crowd of clutching ghosts waits in the opposite entrance, a hundred arms outstretched to welcome her back to herself. Half a dozen dark figures lurk beyond. Willow’s people, who I never knew.

Willow pauses on the final step before recombination, before forgetting herself in her own future.

She looks back, makes eye contact, says nothing.

And then she’s gone, one step forward, subsumed by a decade of other selves, embraced and lifted up and swallowed by the Willow who will exist five years from then, ten years from now, her dream-form digested into the darkly glowing mass, a ten-year-old girl taken apart thought by thought and recycled for other ends. A tiny speck vanishes into the distance — my plush rabbit, or perhaps my imagination.

The hospital finishes collapsing, falls away like an eggshell. A whirling void howls open on every side, a riot of dream-stuff madness, inhabited by a million formless presences.

Willow’s recombination drives all that away like a storm purging the breeze. She plunges us together into a starless darkness that goes on forever and ever. Empty light years stretch away in every direction.

She is a titan, a black hole churning golden toxins around herself in stellar spirals of glittering destruction, but I am armoured in imperishable black metal. She gets in my face, screaming and sobbing in humiliated frustration, but my helmet is proof against her voice. She is towering over me, trying to pick me up, her fingers splitting and bleeding against the sharp edges of my steel machine. She is a corpse, begging me to join her in the grave, so at least we may lie in death together; but I cannot, because machines never die.

I raise my right fist, a prosthetic inside my black steel gauntlet, surrounded by the whip and whirl of Willow’s accretion disk, untouched by her scrabbling fingers, her broken nails, her caustic tears, her lying voice.

“I know who I am,” I say.

The voice of a billion screaming stars denies the truth, tells me I have no idea what I’m saying, demands I come home.

My fist says otherwise.

~~~~~~~

Translocation completes; dream shatters like stained glass.

Momentum carries me forward fist-first, knuckles parting fog-thick air like a steam engine through a forest fire; black steel boots scrape twin lines of hot sparks from the cold asphalt of an Oxford street. Willow — a scrap of gold-sputtering flesh — flies end over end, knocked sideways, slammed back, sent spinning by my fist against her face. Spewing a trail of toxic gold, she rolls across the tarmac, shatters part of the pavement, crashes through a brick wall. Her golden blood cools on my black steel knuckles, sliding off, unable to find purchase.

I come to a halt. Breathing like bellows. Limbs like pistons. Head an engine, heart a furnace.

Straighten up. Unmake my fist. Lower my arm.

Encased in black metal, leaking red light, I have never before felt so much like myself.

But there’s no time to bask in self-aggrandisement and navel-gazing, no pause to take in my suit of armour or wonder over the strange feeling that all my limbs are prosthetic now, that my organs are machines and my brain is a living circuit of pistons and gears and valves. No moment to think about this machine.

Earth, England, Oxford.

Nightmare.

Air thick as fog — but not fog, lit and choked both at once from every side by sheets of light that fall like rain, throbbing and pulsing like the inner bowels of some great beast that has swallowed the city, sluicing and surging between the visible ghosts of buildings on every side, a fun-house full of mirrors that reflect nothing but themselves. Impossible colours range and riot beyond the human visual spectrum, colours for which we have no names; searing dark pink that is also rot-green at the same time, a colour that reaches into my brain stem and makes me want to vomit.

Strange forms and unthinkable shapes dart and lumber through the radiant murk, bobbing in the air or scuttling low to the ground, the lost and the displaced from the far side of the wall of sleep. Screams and shouts and gurgles and rattles swirl on the sucking air. A reek penetrates my helmet, a stench like smoke and thunder and animal flesh and the bottom of the sea washed up onto the shore.

Overhead, occluded by the maddening light and the false impression of thick mist, a jagged leviathan drags itself across the stained sky. It is so large that its passage cuts runnels and eddies in the atmosphere, washes the streets below with backwash pressure.

A crown of thorns in bronze and umber, surfaces crawling with colours that make sight swim and head pound.

The heart of this Nightmare?

It sings a silent song, a throbbing note that makes reality bleed at the edges of vision, conjuring leering faces in the ground, turning the shadows of buildings into the legs of titans in the dark.

Pressure mounts behind my eyes, all too familiar, the same any mundane human must endure as a Nightmare passes over. But unlike every previous time — huddled in a shelter, eyes screwed up tight, hands clamped over my ears — the pressure does not overwhelm, does not spill into madness as reality unwinds itself. I am still here, sane and whole.

Magical girls can endure Nightmares; magical girls are supposed to fight Nightmares. Up there, somebody is fighting hard. Shouts, explosions, the crack-crack of firearms, all echoing into the swirling false fog, swallowed by the light-in-darkness.

I open my mouth to call out. Translocation brought me to England, to Oxford. Did it bring me to Grimgrave, Bright, Signal?

Willow steps from the shattered brick wall.

Bleeding from a hundred cuts and grazes, golden light spilling from her wounds, clothes torn and wet and dirty and ruined, hair lank as rat-tails, eyes fixed on me with love’s sour dregs.

She straightens up. No more guttering golden toxins, no more spluttering of a failing reactor, not down here on Earth where she belongs. Her wounds slick themselves shut, lapping her skin over to creamy smoothness. Her clothes restitch themselves. She steps forward, clean shoes appearing on her feet. Her hair dries, combed to silken perfection.

Only one wound stays true, and turns her blood to red instead of liar’s gold; a nasty bruise forming around her left eye socket, edges grazed and scraped. A black eye from my right fist.

There is no trace of the cold slug she placed in the back of my head; it has been burned away.

She doesn’t smile. Tears gather in angry eyes.

“I’m not yours anymore,” I say, voice ringing out from inside my black helmet.

Willow’s lips curl in a cruel, hateful smile, stained by fresh tears. “So you think, Octavia. But down here, I’m the one who’s free. Have fun by yourself, my pet. You’ll come crying back soon enough.”

She steps backward, sinking into the sucking miasma of impossible light and illusory fog, swallowed up by dream-stuff maelstrom.

No more Dreamer to keep the pressure at bay, no more magnet to hold open this brief eye in a storm.

Willow vanishes; Nightmare wave-front closes over my head.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

A final dream, one last thing shared before the transformation, and it might be the only truth they’ve ever had in common. Poor Octavia. Poor Willow, even? At least the Willow which existed before all this.  And now Octavia’s deep in shit. But at least she’s armoured now.

This chapter really surprised me! It grew during the planning/outlining process for the arc, from a few paragraphs of one chapter into a whole sequence unto itself; I was almost sort of surprised how early this ended up being, but I’m trying not to pull any narrative punches in Maidens, no artificially holding things back. So Octavia and Willow took charge here, and I wasn’t going to tell them no.

A couple of other things this week; I’ve got a schedule change, and a shoutout!

I’ve adjusted the upcoming schedule over on the Maidens Contents Page (https://hungryshedgerow.net/maidens-of-the-fall-chapters/); I’ve moved the next break week forward one week.

There won’t be a chapter next Saturday, and then publishing will resume as normal.

 

And I also have a shoutout again this week!

Baron & Zombie (by EE Sharp) is not the kind of thing I usually recommend or shout-out to my audience (mostly because it’s not yuri, what can I say, I have a type, right?) but I am shouting this out because it is very good and deserves some more attention, and EE Sharp is a really, really skilled writer and storyteller. I am, as some of you might be aware, famously terrible at writing blurbs or explaining stories, so I am going to just paste EE Sharp’s much more professional blurb; go check it out, you might enjoy it!

 

 

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

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! I know I say this every single week, but I mean it nonetheless; none of this would be possible without all of you and your support. You are the juice that powers magical girls, I am merely the dream-thing feeding them my mysterious zoog oil. Thank you all, thank you for reading!

Next chapter, Octavia is down deep in the Nightmare, and she’s not quite alone …