Content Warnings

Ableism
Gore

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No point in excuses now, no matter how eloquent. No truth could possibly satisfy the green-eyed monster of Burning Bright.

I’ve been missing for days, and I turn up in her home, dressed in her sister’s clothes. My hair is damp, Scarlet’s t-shirt still spotted with water. We have frozen like thieves, metaphorical hands in the jar; our actual hands are joined together, my prosthetic right held in Scarlet’s left. Mutual afterglow smoulders down in my gut and aches between my legs, a sensation like none other, perhaps plain on both our faces. Can Bright smell the evidence on us? When she looks into her sister’s eyes, does she see that I’ve made her bark like a dog? Am I metaphysically different now, transformed in some way so obvious to all but myself? Feels like it, on the far side of an invisible boundary, my body transmuted by orgasm.

Explanations bubble up my throat, tasteless by the time they reach my tongue. Back on Luna with plenty of legroom for run-up and hindsight, I could have spun this any way I wanted, told half the truth and left out the details, found a way to frame this to Bright’s advantage. Hid inside a lie. Fed her false hope.

She won’t believe a word now. It would be an insult to try.

Bright stares in stunned silence, dirty topaz eyes dull as a bonfire through twenty feet of smoke on a moonless night. Perhaps she’s praying this is all a bad dream.

“Bethany? Bethany?” Scarlet makes it worse, crooning Bright’s mundane name in a voice so soft and gentle, doesn’t sound like her at all. She drops my hand and takes a step toward her sister. “Bethany, are you feeling okay? Please, I’ll— I’ll see you later, okay? This is, um— this is just a friend of mine, uh … O-Olivia! A friend from my schooldays. You probably don’t remember her, that’s all. She just dropped in, but I need to … to get her home, she’s uh, she’s got to go now. Bethany? Can you hear me?”

Bright’s eyes crawl from my face to Scarlet’s, slow as spreading rot.

“Beth?” Scarlet reaches for Bright’s shoulder, face creased with care. “Are you alright? Did something happen?” A tiny, loving smile graces her lips. “Do you need me to put you to bed?”

Bright flinches from Scarlet’s touch, stumbles back so bad I think she’s about to topple, but she gets one hand against the wall.

“Careful, careful!” Scarlet says, moving forward to lend support. “You’ll take a tumble, you—”

“Don’t!” Bright hisses. “Don’t touch me.”

Scarlet comes up short, open-mouthed, speechless.

Lips peel back from Bright’s hard-clenched teeth. She sucks a deep breath down into her lungs as if through a clogged drainpipe. Then another, and another, each breath inflating her, pulling her upright, flushing her exhausted frame with furious strength.

“Why?” she murmurs, voice wet with mucus. “Why do you always lie?”

Scarlet smiles, more false than any television appearance she’s ever made, like a doll trying to keep its face attached.

Bright takes another deep breath, rolls her shoulders with a snap-crackle-pop. “You always lie, you—”

Raise my right hand, index finger extended, and point at the ceiling.

Scarlet can’t see the gesture, but it’s not for her. Bright’s attention flickers back to me. I jab upward, eyes manic with silent meaning. Bright might be violent and unstable, but then again most magical girls do seem to occupy various points on that particular spectrum; I can hardly blame her for that, it would be deeply hypocritical of me. She is not, however, a total idiot. It should not take a mind-reader to interpret my gesture.

‘Moon!’ I mouth as hard as I can, gurning like a clown. ‘Translocate! Me!’

Bright hesitates, suddenly so much like her sister, family resemblance shining through the layers of exhaustion and illness and outrage. Didn’t expect me to request extraction, did you? Didn’t think I’d still be on your side? Come on, think logically, you big stupid dragon; we can share your sister, or perhaps I did nothing, but if you lose your shit here we both lose control. Get me out of here, get me back to Luna.

Her eyes travel down my body, rest on the big round lump in the front of my hoodie.

‘Zoog!’ I mouth. No, Bright, your sister has not gotten me pregnant with a litter of puppies. Bright blinks, one horror dismissed.

But Scarlet starts babbling through her plastic smile. “Lying? Beth, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’d never lie to you. Look, I just have to take Olivia home, that’s all. But I’ll be back later, okay? I’ll be back later, I’ll see you later. I can tuck you in, or read to you, or … or anything else you like, okay? I promise. Do you need … Beth? Is everything alright? You look worse than … than usual, like something happened. Bethany? Speak to me, say something.”

Bright’s eyes slide back to Scarlet in a hollow-eyed glare, my increasingly absurd gestures forgotten. Can’t stand the lies, can’t deal with Scarlet’s mask, can you Bright? I don’t blame you. I can scarcely imagine.

“Beth, whatever it is, it’s okay,” Scarlet is saying. “Look, why don’t we get you back to your room, so you can lie down? I’ll come see you later, if you want? But, well, right now I really have to get Olivia home, I need to … uh … drive her, yes—”

I stomp past Scarlet and stick my hand out toward Bright.

“O-Octa—” Scarlet tries to take my arm, but I shake her off. “I mean, Olivia! What are you— what—”

“Well!?” I grunt at Bright. “Yeah!?”

Burning Bright regards my hand like a missive from the devil; her eyes ascend to my own, ringed with pressurised hatred. She stumbles back another step, recoils from me. Then another, trying to shake her head. Then she stiffly turns and walks away, goes back the way she came, lurching around the corner.

“Bright!”

I give chase as best I can, steadier on my feet than I was an hour earlier, but still stiff and awkward with internal damage and deep bruises. A few lumbering steps carry me around the corner just in time to see a door slammed shut, followed by the thunk of a heavy bolt. The handle rattles in my grip.

“Bright!” I hiss through the door. “Bright! Just get me out, take me back to—”

A dull flicker passes behind my facial scar, the ghost of a migraine. The stump of my right thigh and my right arm both tingle with phantom sensation. I stagger back in shock. Is that a crackle of flame at the edge of my hearing? Gone the moment I focus, it could be my imagination, though I know it’s not.

Scarlet catches me by the shoulders and sets me right, then steps up to Bright’s bedroom door. “Bethany! Bethany!” She knocks, puts one ear to the wood. “Bethany! Just … just lie down and rest, okay? Lie down and have a nap. You’ll feel better soon. I’ll— I’ll be back, okay? Okay? Bethany!”

“I don’t think she’s in there right now,” I croak. Translocation. Bright went somewhere. Luna?

“What?” Scarlet squints at me. “What are you saying? And why did you call her that? Octavia, why did you call my sister that name? ‘Bright’? I … don’t … ” Scarlet’s eyes unfocus for no longer than a blink, skies clouding with the threat of rain; her mind tries to reconcile two known identities with each other, Burning Bright and Bethany Fairfax. But it won’t stick, not unless she sees Bright transform. She snaps back, doesn’t wait for an answer. “My sister,” she snarls in my face, “is none of your business.” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “Whatever has happened between us, my sister is not part of it. You understand? She is off-limits, she is not yours to interfere with. Protecting her is my right, my responsibility. Octavia, tell me you understand. Tell me. Say it!”

Breaking this is beyond me. “Okay. Yeah.”

Scarlet shakes her head, not reassured enough. She lowers her voice further, a hiss barely above hearing. “I think she might be able to tell that we … what we did.”

“That’s impossible,” I grunt. Not sure I believe it myself.

Scarlet shoots me a look filled with daggers, then forces herself to take a deep breath, fumbles her hand back into my prosthetic. “Never mind that now. She’s my problem, not yours. Come on, and quickly now. We’ve already delayed too much, we need to get you out of here, right now … Octavia?” She tugs me toward a set of stairs visible at the end of the plush corridor, but I stay planted, right leg solid as steel. “Octavia, what now!?”

“Wait,” I grunt. “Just wait.”

“Tch! You—”

“Wait!” I hiss.

Did you head back to Luna, Bright? Could you not bear to break your act in front of your beloved sister? And now you’ve told Grimgrave or Signal or maybe just Tissy exactly where I am, handed off responsibility. You’re not a fool, you’re one of us, we magical girls from the moon; you’re on my side and I’m on yours, and I’m praying to Nerys you haven’t forgotten that. Any moment now Grimmy is going to explode from the air in a shower of confetti and custard pies and haul my sorry backside back to the moon. Do that one sensible thing for me, Bright, and you can have a free potshot at This Machine anytime you like.

Just do it, Bright. We’re on the same side.

Seconds crawl by. Sweat collects down my back. The corridor does not fill with moon-skeletons led by a jester.

“Fuck,” I murmur under my breath. “Fuck, Bright, what are you doing? Come on!”

“Octavia!” Scarlet snaps. “Octavia! We have to go!”

“Alright, alright, lead on!”

Scarlet herds me to the stairs, lined with pale wood and wide enough for three people abreast, overlooked by yet more dull watercolour landscapes, England as pastoral idyll. Jolly-faced farmers and docile cows watch us descend around two full turns in the sweeping stairwell, me with one arm supporting the poor zoog huddled in the front pocket of my borrowed hoodie. We land in a long central corridor with pale carpet and white plaster walls, more mediocre art everywhere, poorly lit and overlarge, like architecture with gigantism, high arches leading off into other parts of the building. Both ends of the corridor vanish into tangles of blind angle. Scarlet wasn’t exaggerating when she called this place a manor house. Alone, I’d get lost in seconds.

We don’t pause to appreciate the place, a minor blessing, it looks insufferable. Scarlet leads us out, my hand in hers as we pass half a dozen doorways, some open on a dizzying array of rooms, all pale soft wood and small windows, others closed and kept shut with faux-antique handles made to look like cast iron. A pair of carpeted steps leads up to a set of glass doors, open into a cavernous space beyond — brick fireplace, oak panels, green-tinted sunlight falling through a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows, massive television playing a football game to itself toward the back. The rear of a blonde head is just visible over the cushions of a leather sofa; it half-turns as Scarlet marches us past the open doors.

“Francesca dear, is that you?” A woman’s voice pursues us, rapidly left behind. “Francesca? I need you to come look at these figures. Francesca! Come here!”

“My mother,” Scarlet hisses. “Ignore her.”

The corridor turns into an awkward tangle of three doorways, sunlight flashing down on one side, trapped in a tiny brick courtyard. Scarlet goes unerringly forward, slips around a massive wooden door, pulls me through into a ‘rustic’ kitchen larger than my grandmother’s entire flat. All exposed wooden beams and gleaming dark stone counter-tops. She hurries me past a table that looks as if it’s never been used and over to a jumble of shoes that spills from a low wooden chest. She stamps her feet into a pair of battered tan trainers, grabs a bundle of keys from a hook, unlatches a little side-door, and ejects us together from the dim and shadowy interior, out beneath blazing sunshine.

Eyes squinted against the swan song of an English summer, I can’t get my bearings. Scarlet drags me forward like she’s trying to tear off my prosthetic arm, down a pathway of pale flagstones, house wall towering on one side, dense green hedge on the other.

A few paces brings us into the open. Scarlet fiddles with the keys. A car unlocks with a clear click-clunk, lights flashing once.

“That’s mine, the Vauxhall,” she says. “Get in quick, the sooner we’re on the road the less chance of us being stopped.”

Seen from the outside, Scarlet’s home is an obscenity; I was right to judge it from the bathroom. A massive rambling pile of sallow stone and red brick, topped by a trio of peaked roofs, with two wings sweeping back from the sides of the structure. Almost certainly it has its own shelter somewhere, buried in a wine cellar or cut from the rock. Windows are set with metal lattice, ‘artful’ ivy climbs the exterior, perfectly manicured hedges stand to attention, outdoor pathways scoured clean. A garden rambles off out of sight behind the house; the front is paved with grey tarmac, host to three expensive-looking cars and an old Land Rover. The tarmac falls to crumbly gravel where the grounds meet a road, behind a boundary of low stone walls.

Beyond lies the countryside, a narrow band of fallow fields spread out before the house, dense woods in every other direction. A canopy of verdant green sways in a slow breeze beneath cloudless blue, a lake of trees thicker and older and more tangled with growth than any forest in England should be.

Scarlet’s family home is situated inside a true rarity — one of those places where the old wilds of the British Isles have come creeping back, an exhausted landscape made fecund and dank by dream-borne memory, the vast open-air factory of the countryside swallowed by an inexorable wave of woodland. Such things are possible in the decades since Harding’s ritual, ancient trees rediscovered, plant life growing at an accelerated rate when out of sight for too long. Not a Dreamland overlap, that would be impossible, just somewhere the rules of the waking world have grown thin, eroded by the slow steep of years.

Officially this phenomenon does not exist; the government denies it, and there are no attempts to study it, at least not here in England. But everybody knows, everybody’s seen the pictures of impossibly ancient trees passed around on the internet, the satellite photos of tangled woodland creeping across the south and the northeast. And no denial will explain Wales, the mist-shrouded Celtic rainforests sprouting oaks like mushrooms whenever waking minds have their attention elsewhere.

It’s not technically illegal to build within one of these areas, but permission is never given, certainly not up in the Welsh wilds where so much hides from mundane eyes, no matter how hard the government tries to scour the hills. Scarlet’s family home was probably here before the woods; the trees regrew around the house. Forests from long before Angles and Saxons, before Romans, perhaps before even the Britons, biding their time till this brief waking lapses back into dream.

The zoog shifts inside my borrowed hoodie; a long grey snout pokes out from the pocket, sniffing the scent of grass and trees beneath the sun.

“Holy shit,” I croak. “Look at this place. And you grew up here? That explains a lot.”

“Tch! Not here!” Scarlet hisses, dragging me toward the car. “We didn’t move here until after I’d become a magical girl. You think we had money, when I was growing up? Now here, get in, quickly!”

Scarlet’s car is a beefy dark red compact SUV, clean enough to eat off. She opens the passenger side door and gestures me inside, one hand on my arm for support. Hot car-scent almost makes me recoil, a reek of plastic rolling up into the air. I hesitate only a second, not looking forward to the process of folding myself up to get into the seat. Deep breath, grit teeth against pain.

A meteor falls from the empty sky.

Wreathed in flame and trailing black smoke, a blood-red javelin crashes into the tarmac not thirty feet from the car, broken gravel raining down in its wake. Slabs of corded muscle ripple and flex beneath flowing layers of wine-dark scale. Horns and claws like bloody diamond glint and flicker in the fire. Carmine talons crack the tarmac. A bone-tipped tail lashes the air. A mouth of razored knives opens wide, smoke pouring from the throat behind, a glowing cinder lurking in the dark. Eyes glow red-hot, hard with hate. Heat-haze turns the air to an oven.

Burning Bright didn’t go far.

“Octavia!” she roars, voice like an avalanche of molten rock. A cloud of birds explode from the edge of the woods, spiralling up into the sky.

The engine of my heart stutters toward a cold start, pistons sticky with congealed oil, dregs of fuel not enough to take spark. Even if I could transform in my current state, I would not be well enough to outfight this dragon.

Bright advances, footsteps melting the tarmac; her fire is no phantasmal effect this time. A wave of heat washes over us, whipping Scarlet’s hair back from her face and tightens my skin against my skull, a wall of searing air that makes my eyes water and my lungs burn. She points at me with a fistful of ruby-red claws.

“You traitor!” Bright rumbles. “Liar! You promised, you swore!”

Scarlet Edge steps to the fore, plants herself in Bright’s path, one arm out to shield me. Her face is creased with confusion. She speaks to me over her shoulder. “Octavia, I thought this was one of your comrades?”

“Not right now she isn’t.”

Bright halts, massive knife-like teeth clenched hard, black smoke trailing from the corners of her mouth. “This isn’t about you, Francesca,” she says. “Get out of the way.”

Scarlet’s eyes tighten. “You do not give me orders.”

“Out of the fucking way!” Bright roars.

Scarlet’s attitude shifts, transforming her without transformation. Body language, the angle of her head, the set of her face. Gone are the soft inner layers that I’ve come to know over the last day. Scarlet Edge stands tall and unbowed, eyes hard as granite.

“I remember you,” she says to Bright, voice dripping with contempt. “From the fight on the hospital rooftop. You knew my name then, when I was transformed, rubbing it in my face. Who are you? How do you know me?”

Bright rumbles with strangled fury. Red drool runs from between her teeth, staining her chin.

“No answer for that?” Scarlet almost laughs, words twisting with mockery. “You were quite obsessed with me, weren’t you? But Azure kept you pinned. If you cannot overcome even Azure Infinity, then you are beneath me, friend of Octavia’s or not. And I gather that currently you are not her friend.”

Bright makes a sound like the start of an earthquake, a great terror rising from underground.

“Bright!” I snap. Step away from the open passenger-side door. There’s a clear way out of this, though I doubt it’ll work. “Bright, you fucking idiot, I didn’t have a choice in this. She picked me up after the fight, she saved me, brought me here. I didn’t even know where I was, I was unconscious for three days. Bright! For fuck’s sake, Bright, listen to me.”

Bright’s glare could melt solid steel. She doesn’t care if I’ve kept my promise or not.

“Worth a try,” I mutter.

Scarlet shakes her head, gestures at me. “Your friend is no traitor!” she says to Bright. “She’s telling the truth, I brought her here. And she hasn’t given up any of your secrets! She hasn’t betrayed—”

“Shut up!” Bright roars. “Shut your fucking mouth!”

Bright’s roar is so loud it shakes the air and hurts my ears, rustles the tops of the nearest trees like a pulse of wind. The zoog in my front pocket hisses and rasps, clinging to the fabric in frantic fear. Bright’s half-flame hair blazes hard, darkening from clean fire toward blood-red with the rising of her own internal heat.

“That’s not why she’s angry, Scarlet,” I mutter.

“Then why!?” Scarlet shouts at Bright. “You’re here to do what, to kill your own companion, to kill Octavia?”

“Yup,” I say. “She’s absolutely gonna kill me.”

Not that I haven’t earned it; did break my promise, didn’t I? Extenuating circumstances or not, I have betrayed Bright’s trust. Perhaps that’s why I feel so calm, despite a dragon that wants to rip my head off. Or maybe I just know that Scarlet Edge will protect me.

As long as she doesn’t know that’s her sister.

Scarlet glances back at me. “Octavia, what is this? What is this about?”

Promised to tell the truth, didn’t I? “She and I had a … an agreement. Which I’ve broken. Never really respected it, I guess.”

Scarlet’s eyes narrow. “An agreement about me? She was to have first go at me, was she?” Scarlet’s lips flicker with a grim smile. “Then I’m glad you broke it, Octavia.”

Bright resumes her advance, tarmac melting and buckling, tar running away in little black beads. “Get out of the fucking way, Francesca! You have no fucking right to stop me! Move!”

“Because of me,” Scarlet says, turns back to Bright, disgust plain on her face. “Because of me. You are obsessed with me, aren’t you? You cannot bear that Octavia — This Machine! — beat you to the punch. Treating me as a prize. Huh! This does not impress me, you animal.”

Bright seethes with humiliated fury. Her body shudders, heat-haze turning the air to liquid, each breath the pounding of a train down a tunnel of flame. Black tears leak from the corners of her eyes, like running mascara. Stringy red drool hangs from between her teeth. Her taloned feet grip great furrows in the tarmac.

“This is beneath me,” Scarlet says. “Leave.”

Burning Bright howls with a lifetime of frustration, then surges forward in a wave of fire.

A pillar of flame with a core of molten ruby scales, rippling sheets of muscle wrapped in heat-haze and the stench of burning rock, slams toward us with the inexorable force of pyroclastic flow. Bright is more force of nature than magical girl, a dragon from an ancient time where human feet should never tread. I will be dead on impact, insensible ashes, won’t even feel the moment she tears my guts from my belly with those claws. Though I saw Azure go toe-to-toe and trade equal blows with her, an instinctive part of my mind cannot believe that anything is capable of stopping her. Bright could tear through a nuclear fallout shelter, a meter of solid lead, raw bedrock. This Machine isn’t remotely ready to turn aside those claws; I gather up everything I have, every scrap of magical energy Scarlet Edge has transferred to me, but it’s not anywhere near enough to turn aside this pyrophilic climax.

Scarlet gets there first. She bites her lower lip and explodes into her blood-soaked transformation in fast-forward, drowned in crimson fluid, the blossoms of her red-and-white dress blooming from within the gore, red hair flowing free, clean flame clearing a space amid Bright’s dark smoke, like fresh air pumped from a pinhole in reality. Her own heat-haze pounds against Bright’s, clashing auras pulsing in the air between them.

Her ruby sword sings a crystal note as she draws it from the scabbard. Bright bears down on her, one arm wide to swat her aside, tail lashing for a follow up. Bright’s red-hot eyes are fixed on me, not even paying attention to Scarlet.

Her mistake.

Scarlet parries Bright’s claws one-handed with her ruby-red sword, sparks and flame spraying into the air, heat-haze deforming around the blade’s edge. Bright stumbles, force turned aside, as if she didn’t expect Scarlet to fight back. Scarlet’s free hand snaps forward like a snake, closes on one of Bright’s great curling horns. She yanks Bright off-balance, drops her sword low to take Bright through the gut.

To run her own sister through, the way she did with me.

“Scarlet, no!” I shout. This isn’t what she wants, but she doesn’t know it.

A screech of metal on metal drowns out my voice. Scarlet’s blade glances off Bright’s scales, scores a deep scratch in her armour, slides wide, out to the side. Scarlet draws back her arm and tries again, hacking for the underside of Bright’s ribs; but Bright gets her feet under herself again, hands clutching to block the sword.

Wide-eyed with unfamiliar panic, she tangles Scarlet’s blade in her claws. “Out of the way, Fran—”

Scarlet roars in Bright’s face and powers forward, the pair of them locked together by claw and sword. Her charge carries Bright away from the parked cars, across the width of the tarmac. They crash into a hedge, naked flame igniting the leaves, scorching slender branches to ash, setting fire to either side as they fall through the gap. They smash through the low wall on the far side and out into one of the fallow fields before the house. Scarlet and Bright tumble together down a shallow slope, grass on fire in their wake, streaks of black ash on the ground, red flame licking the soil.

I hurry to the gap burned in the hedge, ignoring the terrible heat.

Scarlet and Bright disentangle as they roll to a halt at the base of the shallow slope. Scarlet springs free and up to her feet, sword at arm’s length, point at Bright’s throat. Her red-and-white dress is no longer in the tatters to which she tore it last night, repaired and returned by whatever magical processes keep her anchored, but now the edges are singed and scorched.

Bright swats the blade away with her claws, struggles to one knee; the grass around her blackens and burns, little green blades wilting and dying, a ring of fire spreading outward.

Scarlet declines to press the attack, takes a step back. She glances up at the sky, wide with panic. Then back at me.

“Octavia!” Scarlet says. “Run!”

“How!?”

“Take my keys, get in the car, drive!” She starts to pat her dress, feeling for her car keys. “Every magical girl in a hundred miles will know about this fight soon. You can’t be here, you can’t—”

“Look at me,” Bright rasps. “Look at me!”

Scarlet whips round. “You! Leave! You want to kill Octavia, perhaps that is between you and her. But I will not suffer her to be captured by Dream Control, I will not have her placed back in the hands of a Dreamer. Surely you can’t wish for that!?”

Bright’s eyes slide to me, smouldering with hatred.

“Don’t think she cares how I die,” I say. “Just that I’m out of the way.”

Scarlet’s lips curl with utter disgust. “All over an obsession with me? You sick thing, you—”

“You’re finally looking at me, Francesca,” Bright hisses. She pulls herself to her taloned feet. Black tears roll down her cheeks. Habitual exhaustion creeps back into her magical girl form, shoulders rounded, eyelids heavy, breathing too hard. “It had to go this far, huh? For you to just give me what I wanted, after all this time. I had to lose you, just to get you to look at me?”

“I don’t even know you,” Scarlet spits. “You have no prior claim on me.”

“Yes I do!” Bright screeches, breaking down into terrible wet sobs. She stamps, one taloned foot driving hard into the soil. “I do, I do, I do!”

Scarlet’s face twists with frustration. “I don’t have time for your games, whatever this is.” She glances back at me. “Octavia, go—”

“Don’t look at her!” Bright howls, drooling red mess, her face a mask of dark tears. “Look at me!”

Scarlet whips back to her. “You want DC to capture her? You want—”

“I don’t give a fuck about DC!” Bright screams. “I don’t give a fuck about any of it! You and me, Scarlet. You and me! You look at me now, only me! Fight me, fight me, fight me! You want to leave, you have to kill me first! You run and I’ll burn both of you! You translocate and I’ll hunt you!”

“Scarlet!” I shout. “Scarlet, she’s trying to bait you! You don’t want this!”

But Scarlet doesn’t reply. She raises her sword again, hilt held in both hands, face dyed with loathing. She turns her body side-on, as if preparing to face an opposing blade.

“I’ll slay you quick, dragon,” she says. “If that is your wish.”

Burning Bright breaks into a beaming smile, weeping with ecstatic pleasure. “Yes, yes!”

Scarlet doesn’t give Bright time to reassume a fighting stance. She lunges with a two-handed hacking motion, her blade arcing overhead and falling with a hiss of superheated air. Bright takes the blows on her forearms, scales denting and screeching, trying to grab the blade with her claws. But Scarlet strikes with blinding speed, her sword a semi-visible blur, staining the air with ruby-red light. Bright is so strong, a wall of muscle and scale and crimson claw, but she’s forced backward by the sheer strength and speed of Scarlet’s sword, her taloned feet digging trenches in the dirt.

Scarlet’s lips peel back in a wild grin. The very same battle-lust she showed when fighting Grimgrave on the hospital rooftop.

This is the other aspect of Scarlet Edge the public never sees, the side of her they don’t put on television. She loves this part of what she is, the wild beast inside the woman.

Bright’s bone-tipped tail whips out from behind her and crashes into Scarlet’s left flank; the disadvantage of Scarlet’s style, leaves her open to counter-attack. The tail catches Scarlet in the ribs with a cratter-crack explosion of breaking bones, knocks her from her feet and tosses her through the air like a rag-doll. She sails in a shallow arc and rattles to the ground in a boneless heap, sword spilling from her fingers, red hair spread out on the green grass.

A mundane human would be dead. Heart and arteries shredded by bone fragments, lungs collapsed, in too much pain to stir, let alone regain her feet.

Scarlet Edge hauls herself upright, grabs her sword, spits a gobbet of dark blood into the grass, and wipes her mouth on the back of her hand. The left flank of her dress is bloody with pulped flesh and spikes of exposed bone; she takes deep breaths, inflating her lungs on purpose, hissing through gritted teeth. Her body reknits at incredible speed, broken ribs sucking back inside, skin sealing shut. The dress is still torn and stained, but Scarlet stands untouched.

Bright stares as if watching the descent of an angel, awe and love and fascination and worse. She lets out a broken sob, mouths a silent prayer.

Scarlet points her sword at Bright.

“One.”

“What?” Bright asks.

“That was your limit. You shall not get another.”

Bright laughs through worshipful tears. “I don’t care, Francesca! I don’t care! This is all I’ve ever wanted! You won’t pay attention to me any other way! And now you’re mine!”

Scarlet charges, heat-haze rippling across the burning grass, sword in a two-handed grip. Bright replies with a charge of her own, claws raised, tail lashing, wings of living flame unfurling from her back to crack at the air and set the grass on fire.

They slam into each other, trading a flurry of sword-blows and claw-strikes, bone and steel and ruby and scales screeching and squealing as attacks bounce off, deflect and parry, go wide, slide past, and find their targets with bone-shattering impact. Waves of scorched air radiate out from the duel in a dome of heat-haze, blackening the verdant grass, setting little fires in dry patches, even beginning to curl and crisp the leaves on the nearest trees, the edge of the forest which overhangs the fallow field.

Scarlet fights differently now, sword in both hands, wary of Bright’s lashing tail, guard held close to her body when she’s not lunging or twisting to make an attack. She works from the sides, jabbing and spearing at Bright’s guts and belly, feinting for her face and throat, then switching targets with flicker-flash speed; her sword moves so fast that my untransformed eyes can barely track the blade, the edge cutting ripples of displaced air in the heat-haze aura. The point of her sword bounces off Bright’s scales, but she attacks again and again, begins to open cracks in Bright’s armour, sending scores of ruby-red scales broken and flaking to the earth like burning cinders. She changes tactics faster than Bright can keep up with, opening shallow gashes on Bright’s face, filling her eyes with boiling blood, forcing her to shake her head like a wet dog.

Bright gives as good as she gets, no more retreat. She barely bothers to defend herself, letting her scales do all the work. She rakes and claws at Scarlet, ripping at her red-and-white dress, opening great rents in the flesh beneath, each wound healing so fast it’s closed before the next attack lands. She rips and tears to no avail, then closes her fists and pounds at Scarlet instead, forcing Scarlet to deflect with her sword or suffer bone-breaking blows on her ribs and forearms.

Bright whips out with her tail again, bone spike aimed at Scarlet’s heart. But Scarlet is wise to the trick now. She executes a complicated twist with her sword, raising it in a curling arc, deflecting the tail with a ring of ruby on scales, a shower of sparks, a defiant shout.

I scramble down the shallow slope and into the field, following the duel as it veers toward the treeline, flames washing out the dim shadows beneath the woods.

No idea why I’m trying. Can’t intervene, not as I am.

If I was whole and flush with girl juice, This Machine could match Burning Bright blow for blow, crack her scales with a punch, or at least withstand her fury. This Machine might be able to knock some sense into her. Octavia Carter is unarmed and unarmoured and burns rather easily. In the back of my mind lurks some half-hearted notion that I need to stick close to Scarlet, whatever happens; if Dream Control or other magical girls really are about to turn up, then I need to be where Scarlet can reach me first, or I’m going to get captured and taken away, or perhaps just executed on sight.

But when I stumble to the bottom of the slope — prosthetic leg catching my balance in hard-packed, summer-baked earth, nostrils clogged with the reek of burning grass, waves of heat washing over my face, flames crackling across the field — I realise why I have to stop the fight.

Scarlet’s going to win.

Bright should be an unstoppable battering ram of armoured muscle and diamond-hard claw. Back on the hospital rooftop she fought Azure to a stalemate, both of them battered and bruised and bleeding by the end. But now she’s fighting like a fool, wailing on her sister as a child attacks another, weeping smoke-black tears and sobbing as she flails. Alternative strategies spiral outward with every strike, but she takes none of them; she could launch herself into the air on those wings of flame and swoop down on Scarlet like a bird of prey, or back away and drown her sister in fiery breath, or break her sword in diamond claws, or lunge and grapple Scarlet to the ground. But instead she throws a tantrum.

And Scarlet heals so quickly, flesh zippering back together after each passage of Bright’s claws. Bright cannot out-heal her, cannot outlast her, cannot leave any permanent mark on the perfect and untouchable mask of Scarlet Edge.

Scarlet’s playing for keeps, aiming for limbs and neck and belly. She’ll break Bright’s armour and skewer her through the heart.

I stumble forward, suffocating in the heat, no plan. Bright scores a nasty strike, an open-handed blow across Scarlet’s face, claws raking her right cheek, opening her flesh in triple gashes, bone-deep. Scarlet’s head whips aside, a spray of blood fountaining into the air, a grimace of exposed teeth across her torn cheek.

Bright hesitates. Scarlet turns back, face already sucking itself shut, teeth full of blood. Her sword whirls in both hands, a horizontal shockwave aimed at Bright’s neck.

“Scarlet!” I scream, but she can’t hear me over the flames. The intake of breath scorches my throat, chokes me on superheated air.

Bright gets her claws up in time, deflects the sword with an ear-splitting clang. Scarlet follows through, whirling her sword back for another attempt, aims the next decapitation strike at the other flank. She’s roaring now, spitting insults in Bright’s face, words lost in the blaze.

She’ll kill her own sister, and she won’t know it till Bright’s corpse hits the ground.

Does Bright really want this? To die at Scarlet’s hand?

Scarlet doesn’t.

I saw the way she looked at Bethany, back in the house. Whatever madness has unfolded between these two, Scarlet loves her sister, however cramped that love has become, however rotten it has gone. A win here would break her completely, no matter what other framework of being I’ve begun to offer her over the last day. If she wins here, there will be no future for her, as Scarlet or Francesca or anything else.

Pick up my feet, stumble toward the duel, into the furnace. Nothing to put between the combatants but myself.

Failed to save Willow, didn’t I? Am I going to fail again?

Fuel trickles through the engines of This Machine, thin and weak as stale water, still leaking from a hundred cracks and punctures. Not enough to spark transformation, let alone sustain. Anger sputters and gurgles, so little of it left, the deep wells of my fury breached and broken. I’ll burn if I throw myself in front of Bright untransformed; if I don’t, both of them will die.

But I’ve other fuel sources now. As transformation becomes do-or-die, deep tanks of strange fluid respond to hidden pumps, fuel lines flushing, engines flooding with strange new potency.

If I don’t save Scarlet here, she’ll never bark for me again. That’ll do.

Raise my prosthetic hand, even as I stumble forward. Close my fingers in a fist. Swing hard, strike the air, strike the world.

Transformation takes me.

I’ve no idea what it looks like from the outside; in a blink I’m clad head-to-toe in imperishable black steel, armoured in truth, my heart a pounding engine, my limbs a set of pistons. Fragile still beneath my shell, loose and grinding and unstable, barely enough to tank a single solid blow, but there’s no other choice; at least I’m not full of holes anymore. Heat and flame licks off my armour, untouchable inside. I don’t even break my stride, picking up my feet and hurling myself toward the duel.

Scarlet and Bright both turn in shock. Bright roars, “No!” Scarlet flourishes her sword to force Bright back, makes space for my arrival.

“Octavia!” Scarlet shouts. “What are you doing!?”

I skid to a halt, almost go down. Scarlet’s free hand catches me under one arm. Red eyes search like I’ve gone mad. Perhaps I have.

“Scarlet,” I pant from inside my helmet, voice a mechanical rasp. “You don’t want this. You don’t want to kill her, you don’t—”

Bright roars like a dragon. The skirts of Scarlet’s dress flap as if in the wind. The side of my black steel armour flares hot, glowing red.

“Shut up! Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Bright screams. “This is between me and her, me and her! I told you, you filthy lying cunt cripple, she’s mine! Mine! Mine! She was supposed to forget you! How the fuck are you even still here!?”

Scarlet turns a glare on Bright, pure with contempt and disgust. She doesn’t need words.

Bright sobs, humiliated and lost and drowning in her own rage. She takes a tripping step backward, then draws herself up, filling her lungs with a great breath, wind whistling through her massive knife-like teeth. A vortex of flame and heat-haze and thick black smoke swirls toward her.

Scarlet tries to pull me aside, but there’s no escape from this. She raises her sword, as if she can deflect this attack. I shake free of Scarlet and take two steps forward, place myself before her, brace my legs. Deep down in the belly of my armour, I feel the zoog burrow deeper, protected by layer after layer of black steel.

Bright heaves forward, her whole body jackknifing, head projected out, jaws open wide.

She vomits a stream of red-hot flame, the core a spear of roiling blue. It hits me in the chest and face, a physical wave of force and heat, blinding me with red and white, turning the world beyond my shell to an inferno. Black steel armour rings like a gong, creaking and groaning under pressure. My heels dig furrows into the grass, forced down into the soil, but I cannot bend or break, or else the wave will wash over Scarlet. Cannot even twitch or else my armour will buckle and then the flame will consume me, regardless of my own internal fires, fed on richer fuel.

Three, four, five full seconds — and finally the flame sputters out. Smoke and steam rise in a thick dark cloud. Bright lets out a hacking, coughing, retching sound, like she’s trying to vomit up her own guts.

Smoke lifts. Scarlet steps around to my left, the edges of her dress charred to cinder, but otherwise intact. My whole front is red-hot, but rapidly cooling toward black.

Bright heaves for breath, rasping and spluttering. Her eyes find me, blazing with hate. She rights herself again, begins to inhale a second time.

“Coward.”

A dark mechanical crunch, my own voice. Bright hesitates, so much like her sister.

“What?” she growls. “What!?”

Not sure what I’m saying. The word came from my heart. Have to hope it’ll work.

My helmet peels back from my face, folding down into my collar as it did before. Heat washes over my exposed skin, draws sticky sweat from my face, makes my scar itch. My hair flows free, borne on the fiery updraft, black tips dancing against the flames.

“Coward,” I repeat. “Burning Bright, I pronounce you a coward.”

Bright’s teeth clench hard. “You shouldn’t even be here, you lying cripple fuck! You promised, you made a promise, and I trusted—”

“Cancel your transformation.”

Bright’s insults die in her throat. “What?”

“Cancel your transformation. Let her see.” I gesture toward Scarlet with a twist of my head. “Isn’t that what you want? That’s what all this is about, right? You want Scarlet to see you, to pay attention to you, to know you? Then cancel your transformation. It’s that easy.”

“Shut up!” Bright snaps. “Stop— stop it, shut up! How would you know anything, you’re a dead fucking bitch you—”

“Cancel your transformation!” I roar back at her. My engines throb and grind, heat in my scar and behind my eyes; down in my guts pieces of me are shutting down, giving up, pushed too far on too little rest. “Show her! Or are you all talk, Bright? Was all this just an excuse to commit suicide? You’d rather goad Scarlet into beheading you than tell her the truth? You don’t want her to see you after all, you just want to punish her with your own death! You’re a coward, Bright. You are a coward. And I will stand my ground or see you be honest. Your choice.”

Scarlet must be bewildered, but she doesn’t ask questions or gawp at my words. She moves to my left shoulder, facing Bright, sword in a double-handed grip, ready to back me up.

Flames rise higher on all sides, great swathes of the field on fire, the edge of the woods catching alight as the conflagration spreads. For a moment Bright just stares, slow tears running down her scaled face, as Scarlet and I stand side-by-side amid the blaze.

Bright’s face collapses into weeping. She screams and sobs, face a wet and incoherent mask.

She turns aside and rips a hole in reality with her claws, a volcanic fissure in midair. With an inelegant leap and a flick of her tail, she slides through, body swallowed by the space between the waking world and the dream beyond.

The rift slides shut, vanishes along with Burning Bright. Translocation complete.

She really is a coward.

“I assume,” Scarlet hisses, “she’s not on her way to inform your other comrades as to your whereabouts?”

“Doubt it.”

Scarlet takes a deep breath and lowers her sword. “Then come on, we have to get moving. Right now!”

One step almost fells me, even transformed and inside my armour. Spent everything I had just to get here and tank that fire-breath. Scarlet hooks her arm under mine and drags me stumbling across the field, through sheets of billowing black smoke and the smouldering remains of burned grass. She hauls me up the shallow slope, through the hole smashed in the wall, past the torn hedge, and back onto the semi-melted tarmac of the courtyard.

She cancels her own transformation, charred dress collapsing back into casual clothes. Mine stutters out a moment later, black steel armour folding up and away as if sucked back inside my body; still no idea what that looks like from the outside. Makes me sag and stumble, like a building with the supports kicked away. This Machine coughs and stutters, engines failing, heart juddering out of sync.

Scarlet hauls me toward her car. “Move, move! We have to leave, right now! Somebody will have picked up the transformations, not to mention all this fire!”

The field in front of the house and a long section of woodland is ablaze, pouring smoke into the sky, flames flickering against the blue.

“What—” I croak, can barely speak, barely walk, everything weak and shaking. “What about the house? Your parents? This is a full-on wildfire!”

“About which we can do nothing!” Scarlet snaps. “If we stay here much longer, we’ll be found! Get in!”

She bundles me into the passenger seat of her car and slams the door, then hurries around the front and slides into the driver’s side. A yank of the key wakes the engine with a deep mechanical purr; at least she takes good care of the car, or somebody does. Scarlet slams the handbrake down and hits the accelerator, hands on the wheel. The car leaps across the tarmac, away from the flames, gliding down the driveway. Scarlet doesn’t pause at the turning into the road, just yanks the wheel hard to the left. We speed off down the tree-lined country lane.

In moments her family home is dwindling in the rear-view mirror. Lost behind us, then swallowed by woods and smoke and the light of leaping flames.

Neither of us speak. I pant for breath, rasping and stuttering, concentrating on the awful feeling in my heart. Scarlet, wide-eyed and white-knuckled, concentrates on driving. The country road widens out as it plunges between the trees, descending beneath a thick green canopy, deep in the shadows of the woods. The wildfire can’t be more than a couple of miles away, but you’d never know. Perhaps the revived ancient woodland will swallow it like the sea.

The zoog in my front pocket noses halfway out, little paws grasping at my side. Absently I pet him on the head, still panting for breath, realising we must reek of smoke. Ruining the fancy interior of Scarlet’s expensive car. At least my hair’s dry now.

“Seatbelt,” Scarlet mutters.

“Eh?”

“Fasten your seatbelt,” she repeats, shellshocked and distant. She takes one hand off the wheel to draw her own belt across her body. “Octavia, fasten your seatbelt. I won’t have you go sailing through the windscreen. Seatbelt. Now.”

Not the time to remind her that she’s not the one who gives orders. My hands feel so weak, shaking with exertion, but I grab the seatbelt and drag it into place with a click. I wrap my right arm around the zoog, cradle him tight in my lap.

Scarlet cranks up the air conditioning, tries to clear the reek of smoke from our clothes.

“What … that girl, the dragon girl … ” She keeps her eyes on the road, but her voice is a distant quiver. “She … ”

“Burning Bright,” I croak. “Her name.”

“Burning Bright, okay. She’s obsessed with me, is she? Why? I don’t understand. I’d never seen her before that fight at the hospital. Octavia, she’s one of your comrades, isn’t she? Why … I’ve never seen anybody … her face … ”

Scarlet’s voice is all wrong, a confused quiver behind her words. Her mind fights her soul. Instinctively she must have drawn connections — the shape of her sister’s face, the sound of her voice, the hunch of her shoulders. Her waking mind refuses the truth, but the dream tries so hard to break through.

Can’t leave her with this doubt.

“Scarlet, shouldn’t you call home or something?” I ask. “The house might catch fire. Your sister could be hurt. She’s still in her bedroom, right?”

Scarlet blinks, once light, then hard. Shakes her head. “What does that have to do with anything?” she hisses. “Bethany left before us. Octavia, I don’t appreciate you talking about my sister. You have a great deal of leeway with me now, you know that. But don’t abuse it. Bethany is off-limits. Understand? Do you understand?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Besides,” Scarlet adds, “there’s plenty of clear ground between the woods and the house. And those woods are wet on the inside, even in the summer. When we get a bit further, I’ll call it in. I’ll call it in, it’ll be alright.”

Bethany left before us?

Technically true. Scarlet knows it, but doesn’t know how she knows. She just knows that Bethany Fairfax is now in no danger.

The trees on either side of the road thicken and darken, sucking us deeper into the woods. Shadows grow heavy further from the road, undergrowth thick as tar. Scarlet follows sweeping curves past road signs and side-roads, far from any villages.

“Stop the car,” I say.

“What?!” Scarlet hisses. “What now? What are you talking about?”

“This is not going to be easy for either of us,” I say, swallow my own heart. “Scarlet, stop the car.”

“Why? I’m not—”

“I need you to be a good girl for me. You should not be driving when I say this. Stop the car.”

Scarlet obeys, turns us off into a crumbling lay-by, inches from the treeline. She tuts and hisses and mutters, but something in my voice keeps her from complaining too loud. She kills the engine, lets out a big huff, then turns to me, eyebrows raised.

“Well!?”

Eyes forward. Can’t look at her. My fault, I’ve fucked this up. Now I have to fix it.

“Scarlet, I told you I wouldn’t lie to you, so I need you to believe me. I need you to trust what I’m about to say, no matter what. Can you do that?”

Scarlet frowns, baffled. “Yes? Yes, fine, what is it!?”

Not my secret to reveal. But Scarlet trusts me now, in a way she has perhaps trusted nobody her whole life. I promised her I would not lie, but I am lying right now, by omission and silence. She will not believe my words, she will not accept any of this, and it won’t be her fault, it’s just the shape of the world, the weight of dreams. But if I keep this secret now and allow Bright to make things worse, then Scarlet’s trust will collapse the moment she discovers.

She’s not going to believe me. Likely she’ll hate me for this. It might ruin the fragile bridge of gossamer we have built between us.

But the alternative would be worse. She’d never forgive. I would be just another peddler of yet another falsehood.

I turn to look her in the eyes. Blue-grey as rain clouds.

“Burning Bright’s mundane identity is Bethany Fairfax,” I say. “Burning Bright is your little sister.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

That’s a bold strategy, Octavia, especially alone in a confined space with a woman who can kill you very easily. Let’s see if it pays off!

This chapter was really fun to write; I’d been looking forward to this confrontation for a long time, and I gotta say, Bright did not disappoint. She went even further than I expected. This girl is deeply unwell. I love her.

Ahem!

Anyway! I have a shoutout for you this week, a very unconventional shoutout. It’s not for a web serial; it’s for a computer game. I also want to make extra clear that the developer of this game did not ask me for this shoutout. I was not contacted at all. I’m bringing this up because I have had such an incredible time with it, and it is 1000% relevant to Maidens of the Fall.

So.

Do you like magical girls? Do you like comedic magical girl fiction that plays with all the magical girl genre tropes of the last 30+ years? Do you like little rpgmaker games? (‘Little’ is inaccurate, this took me 40 hours to finish, there is a lot of game here.) Do you like magical girls being incredibly gay with each other? (I cannot emphasize that last point enough, this is one of the most lesbian magical girl works I have ever encountered.)

Then I would like to draw your attention to Angelic Acceptor Alouette, a magical girl yuri RPG, by Large Battleship Studios.

Why am I recommending this? Three reasons. One, I am not exaggerating when I say this is the most satisfyingly lesbian magical girl story I have ever seen, (outside of web serials, possibly???). If you like Maidens, you might like this, though it’s a lot more comedy and a lot less violent. Two, LBS is a very, very, very small indie outfit; the game is made mostly from free assets, the game itself is free. And three, as it contains adult themes, it’s blocked from showing up on itch.io’s internal search. That’s right, if you search for yuri or magical girls, you don’t even see this thing! Which sucks! So I am doing my part to recommend something I deeply enjoyed. Anyway! Go take a look!

Also this week, I have some fanart to share, from over on the discord server, hooray! First up we have a little doodle titled Scarlet Acquires Vital Information, (by Cybran). Then, a much more complex doodle (which made me laugh), Anatomy of Octavia, (also by Cybran!). And finally, a piece that made my jaw drop; this one might not make sense if you’ve never seen Puella Magi Madoka Magica, but this piece is Octavia, interpreted as a Madoka-style witch, reduced (elevated?) to simply her heart and her prosthetic arm, (by Hydrahead Hunter). Absolutely incredible to see so much fanart, thank you all!

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

Subscribe on Patreon!

Right now 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 repeat myself here every week, but I always type it out anew. Thank you so much for being here and reading my little story, it means the world to me that so many readers out there are enjoying what I’m doing here. Without you, Octavia would never have reached the page, let alone her current position. Thank you all!

Next chapter, Octavia dances through a minefield. Better hope Scarlet really does trust you, Occy …