“You thought that I was the one behind those creatures?” Battered and defeated though she was, Queen Inumbra still managed to throw her head back in laughter. “I’m afraid, my dear Elizabeth, that you’ve been operating under a very grave misunderstanding indeed.”
Reyna wasn’t sure exactly what time it was, when she felt Liz’s approach. Perhaps three or four in the morning, with how dark it was outside; or perhaps that darkness was an illusion born of looking outside through a window which had been under her influence for so many hours.
Whatever time it was, it was too soon. Liz shouldn’t have been here at all. She should have been resting comfortably in bed, sleeping the sleep of a victorious hero. Or, if she were truly so troubled as to be unable to bring herself to sleep, she should have been at her desk, researching a way to fix the issue.
And yet here she was. As Reyna had known, in her heart, that she would be. And so no choice was left except to stand, and climb up the stairs, and await Liz in the lobby.
The temple’s lobby had once been small, and grey, and dusty. But Reyna had spent the night pouring as much magic as she could muster—which had been quite a lot even before Queen Inumbra’s defeat the previous evening, and had since grown to even more—into the building, carefully preventing it from overflowing into the surrounding area or even into the temple’s outer facade, and at this point it was more hers than any building she’d ever been in.
The lobby was luxuriously large, now, with a balcony looking down from the second floor, although no staircase rose up to it, nor did any upstairs doorway open to it. The old wood-and-stone architecture had been replaced with dark obsidian, reinforced with titanium which also doubled—despite Reyna’s best efforts to channel her power in practically-useful directions only—as a source of decorative detail-work, and the once-moth-bitten curtains over the windows were now a grand and solid purple. The wide staircase from which Reyna emerged rose from a basement which the building had lacked, the day prior, and was the only exit from the lobby except for the doors to the street, which she now watched as she waited atop the staircase.
She wasn’t kept waiting for long. It was only perhaps half a minute before the door opened and Liz’s silhouette—shades of pink barely visible on her clothes, lit from behind by the streetlight outside, and sword already held in her hand—appeared in the gap.
It should have taken a minute, for Liz’s eyes to adjust to the point of seeing clearly in the darkened temple. But she spoke with a quiet surety nonetheless. “Reyna.”
“What are you doing here?” Reyna asked, as though she didn’t already know.
“I’m here to destroy the altar. What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to stop you from making a mistake you’ll regret for the rest of your life.”
Liz nodded slowly, but her sword remained materialized in her hand. “I… am aware that this will hurt me, if that’s your concern. I know it already. I’m going to destroy the altar anyway. Don’t try to stop me, please.”
She knew it already. As if that made it any better. Reyna shook her head. “Don’t try to destroy it, and I won’t try to stop you. Do you know how much I hoped, as the night went on, that I was wrong, that you weren’t coming here after all and all my preparations would be for nothing? I don’t want you to do this to yourself. This is…” she shook her head, trying to bring back the words which had flowed so freely when she’d imagined this conversation playing out hours ago. “This is worse than the time at the radio station, even.”
“I’m sorry, then. For needing to hurt you, too, in order to bring this to an end.” Liz ignored the jab about the radio station. “Still. Please don’t try to stop me. I’ll try to make it up to you afterwards, as best I can, but this needs to be done. And…” she took a breath, “and you’ve never won a sparring match against me. Not a serious one, not with both of us giving it our all. I don’t want to have to fight you, but if I do, we both know which of us is going to win. So just don’t. Please.”
“I’ve never won a serious sparring match with you,” Reyna said. “That much is true. But I’ve never lost one either. I was…” she laughed, briefly, even though it wasn’t funny. It felt appropriate, for the role she now played. “I was never giving those matches my all, not like you were.” She lit her magic circles in preparation for combat, lines of purple energy blazing into the air in front of her hands. “Practice was… a way to spend time with you, a way to learn to control my power, a way to get better at fighting for the times when it really counted. But the practice, itself, was never of true importance to me. Not like this is. So… if you really won’t change your mind, then try me.” Her voice trembled only a little, at that declaration. “But it’s not going to be as easy as you’re expecting.”
Liz sighed, but nodded, and took a step forward towards Reyna, materializing a glowing ethereal image of a book in her right hand to balance the sword in her left as she entered a proper combat stance.
“I understand,” she said. And then she lunged, a concussive blast already emerging from her book.
A small blast of that size, from Liz, was just probing, and wouldn’t hurt much more than a punch even if Reyna raised no defense at all. But nonetheless Reyna fell back, stepping her way backwards down the staircase—which, with just the slightest attention, smoothed out into a ramp under her feet, before becoming jagged and treacherous in front of her, to complicate Liz’s pursuit, from the floor and walls and ceiling, began to invoke pre-arranged spears of stone, shooting out to jab at Liz as Liz’s blast had at Reyna.
Liz’s already-raised personal shields would be more than up to the task of repelling the spears. Reyna rarely even reached the point of cracking them, when the two sparred. But Reyna’s primary intention with the spears wasn’t to batter Liz’s shields; rather, it was simply to contact their outsides, to wrap spears around them and thus hinder Liz’s movements. And her secondary intention—taking into account that Liz was familiar with her tactics and would accordingly dodge when she could and blast the spears away with force otherwise—was simply to put up an act of fighting in her normal style.
Liz cut and blasted her way down the stairs, systematically dismantling the meager traps Reyna had laid throughout the staircase. Reyna squeezed, with her power—the largest expenditure she’d made since Liz’s arrival, and not one she would be able to repeat very many more times that night—and shut the staircase behind her, leaving Liz’s back suddenly pressed against a wall. And that was that. Liz was now firmly in Reyna’s domain.
Liz paused in her advance, briefly, to turn and examine the wall. Reyna made no effort to press her; every moment that Liz spent not attempting to advance through the temple was a chance for Reyna to continue talking her out of her plan.
“Suppose you win,” Reyna said. “Suppose I fight you, and give it my all, and in the end it’s not enough and you knock me unconscious and destroy the altar. Then what?”
Liz turned back to face her again. “Then people will be safe. At least from the wraiths. You’ll still have your powers. You’ll be able to protect everyone, if other dangers arise.”
“That’s not the point! I’m not asking what happens to everyone else. What happens to you, then?”
“I lose my powers. I go back to how things were before. I… hope you still stay my friend, despite everything? Life goes on, either way.”
“And am I the only one, between the two of us, who remembers ‘how things were before’? You were… not even miserable, back then. You were empty. I remember it. I remember what you looked like, back in middle school. How you acted, how you clearly felt. Never managing to turn yourself towards anything for more than a few minutes, if the teachers weren’t forcing it. Never managing to stay in touch with anyone you tried to befriend, in the long run.” Reyna ignored the pang of regret she felt at that, of wondering what might have changed if her and Liz’s efforts to reach out to one another back then hadn’t petered out, if the two had managed to truly connect back then. “Your magic saved you. Is saving you. You spend so many hours, now, every day, on research and practice and on going out and using what you’ve learned to save people. You’re happy! I’ve seen it. And you’re going to just throw that all away for the sake of… abstract ideals of heroism?”
Liz’s expression darkened, ever so slightly. A shift most people would have found imperceptible; but it shone clearly, to Reyna, even as Liz’s voice remained as calm-sounding as ever. “I am. My happiness—just me, just one person—against the hundreds who will be possessed over the next few years if I do nothing? It’s not even a question. I… I can be selfish, too, when I want to be, you know? I take more than my share of the food, sometimes, at meals. I don’t put my full effort into my homework, even knowing doing better would make my teachers happier. But that’s… small. You’ve seen how much damage a wraith-possession can do, even just in the span of an hour or so. I’m not that selfish.”
“But… but you…” Reyna couldn’t articulate her thoughts any further. The mistake seemed so clear, in her mind. Liz should have been that selfish. It would have been better for her. But the ideas were getting all gummed up, somewhere along the way to being turned into words.
Liz seemed to recognize that the conversation was coming to an end; she returned to her fighting stance, and raised a shield behind her to block off the more obvious surprise attacks Reyna could otherwise perhaps have launched from her newly-formed wall. “How did you rearrange the building? It has a basement, now. After our fight, will I need to punch through the ceiling to reach the altar?”
“No,” Reyna said. This question, at least, she had prepared for. Her answer was technically true, even! “There are stairs, here and on the next floor. If you’re going to beat me, it’s not going to be just from cornering me, this time.”
Liz nodded in acknowledgement. A neutral gesture, but a tell in its own right, a sign that she was taking Reyna seriously enough as an opponent to hide her reactions.
And, with a blast of energy from Liz—which was promptly deflected by a spike Reyna grew out of the floor, this one a bit more reddish-colored than the previous ones—the battle resumed.
Reyna and Liz had sparred and practiced their magic in a variety of environments, previously. With the unpredictability of their true battlefields—one never knew who might get possessed by a wraith, or what abilities they might manifest during their possession—Liz had always emphasized the importance of keeping their practice equally unpredictable. But nonetheless, as a matter of practicality, the majority of their sparring had taken place in a field on the edge of town. They had only sparred in tight-quarters indoor environments on two occasions; fewer, even, than their number of true battles in similar environments. But such surroundings were perfect for Reyna. This was her first advantage.
Moreover, Reyna had only rarely had the chance to prepare a battlefield as thoroughly as she had this time. Wraith possessions were sudden and urgent, hard to plan around. Attacks on Queen Inumbra’s bases were less urgent, typically—today’s emergency rush aside—but the bases were guarded by such beings as would notice, when Reyna began to wrest away Inumbra’s claim on the territory surrounding them. The only place she’d spent more time preparing than this had been her lair, during those few weeks she’d spent on the street before Liz saved her; and that had originally been an alleyway, rather than a building, and moreover one she had twisted far more with the intent to live in it than to fight in it. This—the likely-close-to-eight hours Reyna had spent preparing the temple, prior to Liz’s arrival—was her second advantage.
And, moreover, Reyna was the most powerful she had ever been, and filled with determination besides. With Queen Inumbra’s defeat, no others remained within hundreds of miles who were capable of drawing upon the Dark Realm as Reyna did; the power available to her felt almost limitless, tonight. And she fought Liz with the fervor she reserved only for those who personally threatened Liz, which she was never able to muster when it was merely her own well-being or the future of humanity at stake; for, tonight, Liz herself was the greatest threat to Liz. This was her third advantage.
With all these advantages, Reyna fought better, more enduringly, more ruthlessly, than she ever had before. Traps she had prepared throughout the floor were called upon, one after another, to attempt to ensnare Liz’s feet, or surround her in a shatter-resistant prison of stone, or simply turn a room’s air itself into a slow and gelatinous substance which would be a challenge even to stay conscious while breathing, never mind to move through. Floors shifted around underneath the two of them. Attacks shot out from walls on all sides of Liz, even behind her, while her own blasts and shields, although stronger, could come only from within the immediate vicinity of her own body.
…with all these advantages, Reyna held out for perhaps ten minutes before being forced all the way back to the grand spiral staircase which served as the sole remaining exit to the basement.
Liz was a shining beacon. Her shields—currently numbering five—flew around her almost faster than Reyna could follow, intercepting spikes of stone, repelling snares with light pulses of energy, even on occasion serving as flat platforms on which Liz could stand when the floor under her grew particularly treacherous. Her sword lashed out at Reyna’s particularly sturdy attacks, where its speed and sharpness were sufficient to slice through whatever her shields and energy blasts couldn’t stop. Even those blasts, weak though they were, were now being tossed with plenty of force to serve as suppressing fire, and on one occasion an unexpected array of six of them, fired simultaneously all at different angles, had very nearly hit Reyna with enough force that she might well have been truly knocked out in the manner of the hypothetical she had been asking about not so long ago.
More importantly than any of that, though, Liz was simply the more skilled, between the two of them. She’d started learning to fight with her magic several weeks before Reyna had, and she spent far more time studying and practicing each day. And, if Reyna was fighting with unusual determination for the sake of protecting Liz… well, Liz, in turn, was fighting with equally-unusual determination, for the sake of protecting everyone else.
As soon as Reyna backed into the stairwell’s center, the floor under her feet flew upward, and she began setting off the traps she’d planted throughout the stairwell as Liz ran up after her, tilting and sometimes even entirely dislodging the steps, reaching out towards Liz with grabbing tendrils of stone from the walls that Liz had no choice but to remain next to as she climbed.
None of it was enough. Liz was, perhaps, breathing slightly more heavily with exertion, as she emerged to the first floor, but even that faded within seconds as she paused to catch her breath within the doorway. She had already sliced all the traps to pieces, there, and it would be a large and conspicuous expenditure of energy for Reyna to reactivate them now, one which she’d have been better served to spend elsewhere even if she weren’t specifically trying to spend lulls in the fight on conversation rather than on ineffectual attacks.
(A part of Reyna wondered: even if she were to get a hold of Liz, even if she were to knock her entirely unconscious, what would she do then? It wasn’t like Liz remaining unconscious forever was an acceptable outcome, here, and it wasn’t like being beaten in a fight had ever dampened her heroic impulses before, once she recovered. But the rest of her ignored these concerns. Every second Liz spent fighting Reyna was another second spent not destroying the source of the magic which served as the central pillar around which she’d built her life. Even if that was all she could accomplish, even if the greatest success she could muster would be met only with a better-planned second attempt the next day, it would be worth it for that alone, to postpone the end. (And, perhaps—in her more unrealistically optimistic fantasies—to give Liz a chance to change her mind.))
“Why are you even so sure Queen Inumbra was telling the truth, about the altar creating the wraiths?” Reyna asked. “Maybe she was lying! She’s not like you. I wouldn’t put lying for the sake of revenge past her.”
“I don’t doubt she would lie to us. But she didn’t, yesterday. At least not about that.”
“How do you know? I saw your face! You believed her as soon as she said it. Was it some sort of mind control, like what the wraiths do? Making you fixate on destroying your own power source and ignore everything else which would make that a bad idea?” It wasn’t a thought Reyna had had before. She didn’t really believe it, even now. But it was comforting, nonetheless. It would mean all she’d have to do was to keep fighting until she could find a way to break Inumbra’s influence, rather than forever.
“Because I already half-knew it!” Liz shouted.
A moment of silence passed. Liz looked more distraught than Reyna had seen her all night.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve always been able to feel the wraiths. Where they’re going, who they’re targeting, what the people they possess are doing. Ever since that first day I got my powers. I assumed it was because the altar wanted me to fight them. Why else would it show me exactly where they were? But… do you remember the time at the school? There was… a moment, there.” Liz’s voice was breaking up, and Reyna wished she could walk up and give her a shoulder to cry on, that she could be sure Liz wouldn’t view it as an attack or as an opportunity to attack. “A moment… when it felt like the wraith was going to go for you. And I hated it. I didn’t want to let it. I didn’t want to have to fight you.”
Reyna turned her head slightly downward, in as much of an apology as she could muster without interrupting Liz or giving up her battlefield awareness.
“And then I thought… that, if it had to possess anyone at our school, it should at least be Scarlet instead. And it did. It stopped focusing on you at all. It got into her. And you know the rest of how that went.”
Reyna remembered. Scarlet had rushed off to her and Liz’s classroom at the same time as the two of them rushed off to the bathroom to transform in private. The three of them ended up fighting in the hallway outside. Scarlet never realized Liz was one of the people she was fighting, but she was ranting the whole time, about… something. Some argument she’d had with Liz that morning. How she’d use her newfound powers to throw her into the Dark Realm, for revenge or to prevent Liz from fighting her like that again or whatever it was. Usual wraith-victim things. Reyna thought Liz had even mentioned to her, later that day, that the wraith almost went into her instead. But she’d never heard about this, these details.
“I assumed it was a coincidence. I ignored it, and almost forgot about it. Until yesterday. When she said it, and I… looked. At the threads of the next upcoming wraith. At where it was pointed. And I realized it would aim at whoever I wanted to, if I just wished it. That. That’s what you saw on my face.”
Reyna was silent, wishing she had some way to respond, some way to comfort Liz.
Liz clenched her fists, and forced her face back to calm.
“Queen Inumbra would lie,” Liz concluded, a slight edge remaining in her voice. “But I suppose she didn’t need to, this time.”
Several heartbeats passed, and no more was said.
Eventually, Liz returned to her combat stance.
And the pair of them took to battle once more.
The temple, in its original layout, had been a simple and innocuous building. There were two floors. The first floor had a lobby with three doorways: one leading out to the street, one across from it leading to various storage and meeting rooms, and one leading up to the second floor. The second floor was simpler, containing only two major rooms: one towards the front of the building appearing to be some sort of workshop, and one towards the back containing the altar Liz now sought to destroy.
When Reyna set her influence about the temple, she had added a third floor, and expanded the floor-space of both preexisting floors. The bottom floor, she made a labyrinth: its hallways and rooms were tight and twisting, with no sight-line going uninterrupted for long, and the path from its closed-off entrance to its exit had been a long one. It had been an ideal environment for traps, snares, and other such surprises.
Here, a floor higher, Reyna had made no such circumlocutions. They stood in a wide hallway, lined on one side with windows through which leaked a reflection of a reflection of moonlight. The hallway ran in a straight line, longer than the original length of the building, before taking a turn, wrapping around the building’s perimeter in a U-shape leading to the next stairway up.
As soon as Liz started moving, Reyna summoned forth her prepared defenses along the length of the hallway and began to launch her attacks. No subtle floor traps or thin projecting spikes, this time, but thick slabs of stone, black quasi-obsidian pulsing red with Reyna’s heartbeat, tossed up from the floor and towards Liz as if by catapults, attempting to do by sheer brute force what the subtlety had failed to accomplish on the prior floor.
The slabs were thick and heavy. Liz’s blasts were too weak to carve through them quickly, and could only lightly disrupt their trajectories. Her sword, although sharp enough to cut through them—sharp enough to cut through even diamond, Reyna knew from the second wraith-fight they’d done together—could cut them, but do little to deflect them. Only rapid deployment of her shields saved Liz from being slammed right back into the stairwell, when the first slab reached her, and Reyna felt, through the slab, as two of Liz’s shields cracked and dissipated under the strain.
…and then they reformed, seconds later, accompanied by two new shields, bringing the total to seven. The sword and book dissolved from Liz’s hands.
The next two slabs, piling up behind the cracked and still-upright shape of the first, had less impact still. Only one shield cracked, that time, quickly replaced. And Liz stepped out from around them—having correctly intuited Reyna’s stupid decision to, in her preparation of this floor, omit the subtler traps from her repertoire and aim only for brute power—and began advancing once more, four shields hovering in front of her while the remaining three covered her flanks.
With an exertion of power, Reyna tried to extend tendrils from the used-up slabs to entangle Liz from behind. The whole hallway pulsed gently with her heartbeat. Liz fired energy blasts out of two of the shields behind her, and the tendrils were shattered. Reyna launched a fourth slab at the distracted-and-exposed Liz—just one, this time—only for it to hit the shields at an angle, once again shattering two of them but being deflected to the side of the hallway in the process, barely even slowing Liz’s walk.
And on it went. If Liz’s advance through the trap-filled bog of the basement had been rapid and aggressive, she had now seamlessly transitioned into a slow and methodical advance. She made no attempt to attack, nor did she run forward: she simply walked, and withstood Reyna’s attacks, and waited for Reyna’s preparations to run themselves dry.
Realizing this, Reyna upped her own pace once more, even at the cost of burning more rapidly through her prepared assemblages. She ran backwards, attempting to draw Liz forward more quickly through the used-up region. She fired off most-but-not-all of her prepared defenses, in some sections of hallway, in order to fire the remainder off at Liz from behind once she’d passed them and was distracted with the next wave from the front. Whatever it took to keep the fight moving quickly, this floor in particular.
(Liz blocked everything, even when it came from behind. Of course. As if she had additional eyes embedded in the shields hovering behind her, even though Reyna was almost certain that wasn’t something Liz’s magic was capable of. Some day Reyna needed to learn how she did that. At least if she did that ever again, after tonight.)
Liz didn’t cooperate with Reyna’s efforts. Just before the U-shaped corridor straightened out at the end of its bend, Liz held up a hand, backed off, and stood there, resting. (Reyna could see Liz resisting the impulse to sit down in her rest; it seemed that she was succeeding at tiring her out, at least, even if nothing more than that.)
“Why are you rushing into this so quickly?” Reyna tried asking.
“Quickly?” Liz looked quizzical.
“You know that Queen Inumbra was telling the truth. Okay. Fine. You want to stop the altar from creating more wraiths. Fair enough. I’d be behind that too if it weren’t going to destroy your life. Why tonight? Why not wait a week, or a month, to think about alternatives? Maybe there’s a way to stop the altar from making the wraiths without destroying it and losing your magic in the process! Maybe, now that you know what you’re doing, you’ll be able to learn to control it! Why are you jumping straight to the most drastic possible solution without even trying to do anything else first?”
“I did try,” Liz said. “For several hours. Earlier in the night. I tried to suppress the next oncoming wraith that I could feel, to delay or prevent its emergence from the altar. Or to make it possess the altar, rather than a person. Or to make it possess nothing, to just float forever. Nothing. It wants a real human target.”
“You tried for a few hours and gave up? That’s not like you. What happened to the Liz who spends weeks studying topology, drilling exercises in it, in order to be able to make your projections into more complicated shapes faster? Not even just to make them at all, but just to make them faster! And here you gave up after a few hours?”
“The next wraith is coming out in about forty minutes,” Liz said.
“What?”
“The next wraith is coming out in about forty minutes. The one after that, in about one-and-a-half days, I think. I can re-aim them, but I can’t stop them.”
“I don’t understand,” Reyna said. “Why does that mean you can’t take a week to think? We can just go and blast the wraiths down like we usually do.”
“Because people will still be being possessed, before we can defeat them. Because sometimes, when the wraiths possess people, they manage to do real damage to the people or places around them, even while we’re there; and because, sometimes, they put up enough of a fight that we can’t just ‘blast them’, that we need to regroup and think before we can win. Not to mention the psychological aftermath for whoever they possess, dealing with the memories of whatever they did. Should I just let another three or four people, and the people around them, to suffer through that before I destroy the altar?”
“Yes! If that’s what it takes to find a solution where you end up happy, then that’s exactly what you should do!”
Liz shook her head. “I know you think that way. That I’m the most important person in the world. That I’m the only one who matters. But you’re wrong.” She returned to a battle stance once more. “I’m just another person. If I give up a bit of my happiness for the sake of saving half a dozen others… well, that’s what a hero is supposed to do, isn’t it?”
“But what if you’re wrong?! What if you can have both, can shut down the wraiths and keep your magic and your happiness? You’d be able to save more people that way, too!”
“Save them from what? Inumbra is banished, and her control systems in ruins. There’s only one danger left to save people from, now, and it’s the one sitting somewhere above us as we speak.”
Liz began walking forward once more, bringing her shields around herself in preparation as she re-entered the line of fire of Reyna’s as-yet-unfired defenses.
Reyna suppressed her urge to keep talking. She had to keep Liz distracted, yes; but that didn’t mean she could afford to get too distracted in conversation herself, or she was just asking to accidentally let Liz past her, or maybe even take a suddenly-fired-off blast and wake up ten minutes later with Liz having already blasted the building apart and destroyed the altar.
Instead, she resumed the frantic rush of high-powered attacks that had characterized her tactics this floor, and kept it going right up until the two of them were safely up the staircase at the end of the hall and a few bends into the labyrinth—laid out once again in the manner of the basement—which made up the building’s remodeled top floor.
Reyna was tiring out. She didn’t train like Liz did; she lacked both her physical fitness and her ability to hold herself back and exert only the bare minimum of necessary effort to claim victory in a battle. She’d been on her feet fighting her hardest for probably twenty minutes at this point, with only occasional breaks when Liz paused her advance to rest. Whatever illusions she may have held regarding her chances of pulling off a clever surprise attack and knocking Liz out in a moment of inattention lay thoroughly shattered, together with the rubble of the dozens of her traps which had failed to do exactly that.
This final floor, she made only the smallest token attempts to launch attacks in Liz’s direction. What had failed at the beginning of the battle would only fail harder, now, with the relative rates at which the two were tiring.
Fortunately, when first preparing the building, she’d had the foresight to prepare a variety of different emplacements. Defense in depth: she didn’t know which of her combat-relevant capabilities, if any, would be capable of holding Liz at bay for any extended time, and so she prepared successive and varied layers of them in the hope that at least one would succeed. Small and precise attacks prepared on the bottom floor. Large and imprecise attacks on the second floor. Waiting in their combat’s future, in the room with the altar, the largest and sturdiest defensive shield she’d ever managed to get the nightmares to build for her. And here, on the third floor: small-scale defensive barriers.
Reyna wasn’t trying to fight any more. She knew fully well that wouldn’t work; she’d hit Liz with a half-day’s worth of varied and subtle traps, as well as the strongest brute force she could muster, and they’d done nothing. Now all that was left was to try to physically block her.
Several-inch-thick protrusions slid down from the ceiling to block Liz’s path as she advanced through the hall, made of a twisting semi-transparent stony substance—pulsating, now, no longer just with Reyna’s heartbeat, but with her every thought and action—which no longer particularly resembled obsidian.
Liz experimentally tried slicing through the first, and when her sword made no more than a minor chip she tried one of her usual rapid blasts, and only when that failed did she call up a narrower more-focused beam of superheated concussive energy and begin methodically carving the barriers apart, even—as the lack of more active attacks became clearer—dismissing two of her shields in order to lend her carving additional speed. The first barrier took her about a minute; by the fourth and fifth, she was down to perhaps half that time. Reyna tried to melt the carved edges back together in the wake of Liz’s cuts, but the barriers were too thin, and the cuts too wide, for the structures to survive for long even with that extra reinforcement.
“This won’t stop me.”
Reyna was surprised, momentarily, by the edge of hardness in Liz’s voice as she carved through the seventh barrier. (Only another… twenty-two? left, before the jig is up.) It was rare for her to speak that way. Reyna wasn’t sure Liz had ever spoken that way to her. She really had become the villain, here, hadn’t she?
“You must know as well as I, now, that this will end only one way.”
Reyna wanted to reply. She was supposed to reply, when Liz gave her the chance to talk. To keep trying to persuade her. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to force any words out past the near-sobbing hyperventilation her body had apparently decided to start.
“What do you expect to gain by prolonging your defeat?”
Another two barriers summoned between them. Reyna didn’t trust herself to react quickly, if Liz tried to sneak a strike against her through a hole in one of the current barriers.
“You…” the hardness in Liz’s voice wavered, replaced with an almost pleading tone. “You don’t want the wraith to possess someone, do you?”
“Wh…” Reyna finally managed to force a response out. “What?”
“You’re not fighting any more. You’re just delaying. But, if you delay too long, another thirty minutes, the wraith is going to emerge.”
“It…”
“And then it’s going to possess someone, just like wraiths always do. It’s going to forget everything restraining them from whatever goal they’re most immediately thinking about when they get possessed, just like wraiths always do. And it’s going to give them the power to destroy whatever stands in their way, just like wraiths always do.”
“I don’t…”
“And then the people around them will be hurt.” Liz’s hardness had almost completely gone, now. With her arms, she hugged herself, even as her cutting-beam continued to move through the floor’s twelfth barrier. “Their family, or their friends, or their coworkers, or…” she shook her head. “And you’re here fighting for that wraith to get that chance. Not even to stop me! You’re not stopping me. You’ve stopped trying. Just to slow me down that extra half-hour. Why? I…”
“I don’t want that!”
A silence descended in the wake of Reyna’s shout, broken only by the buzz of Liz’s beam as it continued its cutting.
“I don’t… I don’t want people hurt. That’s not the thing I want. I don’t want the wraith to come out. If you could shut it in there forever, I’d tell you to do it and never look back.”
Liz opened her mouth to argue, but Reyna cut her off.
“But! I don’t want you hurt either. Not you. Never you. I’d turn into a wraith myself—I’d get possessed by a wraith myself—if it meant saving you. You saved me when no one else could. You showed me that I could use my powers for good, that I could be more than just the monster people whispered about. You helped me learn to control my powers. And doing this, destroying the altar and losing your magic? That will hurt you.”
Barriers twenty and twenty-one came down from the ceiling. Reyna had almost forgotten to get them between her and Liz, as the eighteenth barrier came down.
“So I’m going to keep stalling and fighting you. I’m going to try to slow you down. To slow you down more and more, until you come entirely to a stop and don’t have any choice but to change your mind and find a different path. Something better than this.”
An almost-thoughtful expression Reyna couldn’t quite read came over Liz’s face, and for a moment she said nothing. Then another two of her shields disappeared from behind her, and she formed a second cutting-beam.
If Reyna had thought ahead and prepared some real attack-systems in the corridor, Liz would have been a sitting duck. But, it seemed, she’d managed to read Reyna correctly. Predictable. Not good enough. Should have thought ahead better.
“I understand,” Liz said, after cutting through another two barriers at suddenly-far-greater speed. Reyna was forced to backpedal hurriedly as she deployed her final three barriers. “I see now. You still think you can stop me.”
Reyna was backed into the end of the corridor. A dead end, finally. Her prepared labyrinth had run its course. With no remaining options, she opened the wall behind her and stepped back out, onto the balcony which had overlooked the entryway.
They had come full circle, through a linear maze of passages and back to where they started—now blocked off aside from the exit to the street, the once-present staircase barely an indent in the floor below where Reyna had squeezed it shut—without ever running into the altar room. As had always been the plan, the second-last trick up Reyna’s sleeve.
Liz broke the floor’s final barrier, as Reyna hopped down from the balcony back to the front entryway and scurried underneath the balcony, preparing to pull a barrier down from the underside of the balcony to shield herself from Liz’s presumable pursuit. But, instead, she heard Liz come to a stop atop the balcony above her, and not come any farther.
…was she going back into the upper hall? That would be bad. Reyna craned her head up and leaned carefully out from under the balcony to see if Liz was still there, ready to duck back into cover in the event of an attack. Liz was, in fact, there, looking back and forth between the doorway out to the street and the hall she’d just come through.
“Are you still so sure I can’t stop you?”
Liz fixed her gaze back down on Reyna, but didn’t immediately respond, or attack. It was only when Reyna was about to speak up again that she said, “yes.”
“And yet here you are. Stopped.”
“You hid the altar.”
“I’m not seeing how that—”
“You hid the altar,” Liz said again, a bit more steel in her voice. “But it’s still in the building, somewhere. And you seem like you’re trapped, now. I could knock you out, put you in a force-cage, and cut through every last wall in this building until I found it.”
Reyna swallowed her instinctive response, of asking how Liz knew the altar wasn’t hidden elsewhere. She was right, after all. Instead, only betraying a slight tremor of nervousness, she said, “I’m not trapped.”
Liz jumped lightly down from the balcony, re-forming her sword and book in her hands. Reyna pulled down the balcony’s barrier between them.
Once again, the two of them faced each other in the entryway, Liz’s back to the door. But this time Reyna’s back was to a wall, with no staircase-passage to retreat through.
“Where will you go, then? Through the wall, back into your maze?”
Reyna glanced at the wall behind her. “Yes.”
“If you do that, I won’t give chase,” Liz said. “I’ll just get started on my carving.”
This left Reyna without a response. It was the tactic she’d spent their whole fight fearing Liz might pivot to.
“But then the wraith might break free. And… you say you don’t want that. And I want to believe you. So… please. Don’t make me do that. Don’t make me cage you, or make me waste time opening up every wall not knowing which one is the right one. Don’t let this last wraith out. Just show me where the altar is, and let me destroy it. And… then, do whatever you like to me, if you’re still upset. I won’t be able to fight any more, then, after all.”
There were tears in Liz’s eyes. There were almost tears in Reyna’s, too, as she clenched her fists and fought back the tangle of undirected defiance on the one hand and upset at that last comment on the other.
But fight them back she did. Liz was right. She hated it; but Liz was right. She couldn’t fight any more here. And, if Liz was now treating her like the villain she was… well, she could at least resist the urge to cry. That would just upset Liz more, make her less able to take satisfaction in Reyna’s defeat, if Reyna in fact was defeated.
“I suppose you’re right,” Reyna said, her voice tight. “About hiding the altar. There’s little point in keeping the ruse up, now.”
She turned and opened the wall behind her, under the balcony, above the indent where the staircase had once lain. Behind it was the mid-point of the long U-shaped hallway they’d fought through not so long ago, piled up with the rubble of her failed attempts to batter Liz down.
She stepped into the hallway and waved a hand, and the wall across from her slid down into the floor as well.
Behind it, in the center of the U, was a vast room. At the room’s far end laid the altar, beneath a dark window, looking barely different from how it had looked two months ago when the two of them had first found this place.
Reyna stepped into the room. She didn’t look back. If Liz blasted her out here and now… it would be a failure. But it would be no more than she deserved, and betraying any insecurities would only make it likelier that Liz would blast her.
“Did you know the altar protects itself?” Reyna asked. “I could barely reshape this room at all before it started fighting back, forcing the Dark World away. I couldn’t just hide the altar, at least not if I wanted any of my power left over for the fight; I had to hide the whole room.”
A third of the way to the altar. She heard Liz stepping into the room behind her.
“And all for nothing, I suppose. Since here I am, just walking you in here. Maybe I should have added a basement the easier way, rather than going to all the effort of sinking the building and adding a third floor on top. It’s not like the misdirection amounted to anything, in the end.”
Two thirds of the way there. As soon as she crossed the notch in the floor which marked her progress, Reyna turned on her heel and faced Liz, who followed about twenty feet behind her.
“You were wrong about one thing, though.” Reyna smirked.
Liz cautiously re-raised her sword in Reyna’s direction, but it was too late for it to matter. Reyna pushed with her magic, even harder than she had at the staircase. From the floor, a thick semi-transparent barrier shot up; from the ceiling, a similar barrier came down; meeting in the middle, the final barrier—less brightly-tinted than on the floor above, but shot through with veins of a darker red—surrounded the altar, keeping Liz out while Reyna stood just inside the protective bubble.
“Just because I couldn’t do anything but stall out there, doesn’t mean the same is true in here.”
Liz was already stepping forward to burn through this new and latest barrier as she had the barriers on the third floor. She brought back her cutting-beam and set to work.
But the altar-room shield, unlike the smaller shields on the floor above, was thick and sturdy. Liz burned a hole through it, taking perhaps thrice as long as it had taken her to go through the barriers upstairs. She began moving her cutting-beam sideways, aiming to cut a passage through as she had done upstairs. But, as she did, the space her beam had previously been occupying closed up. Stone from above the hole flowed into it, and the area above it thinned very slightly, but the shield’s overall structural integrity remained.
It took no more than twenty seconds of this before Liz realized what was happening. “Stalling again,” she said, and shifted from cutting sideways to instead cutting upward, into the portion that would most naturally restore the shield in her lower cuts’ wake.
Reyna didn’t respond. She wanted to; but keeping this shield going was taking all her attention. It was the final defensive measure she had prepared, and, although not the most tiring to use—it was, after all, intended to be used continuously and indefinitely, much like the shields above, in the event that Liz was at all blocked by it, whereas the one-off offensive emplacements she’d set in the earlier portions of her maze were, as one-offs, safe to expend unsustainable quantities of power on if that was what it took to disable Liz—it was far more tiring than any of her shields above, running at almost the limit of her sustainable capacity. Perhaps beyond what her limit would be, if the stakes were any lower and if she were any less determined to give this her all.
Instead, she just kept focusing on the shield. This shield, unlike the others, was made with repair in mind as a core functionality. The shields above were designed to be cheap and easy to reconstruct, to—if they had been sufficiently hard for Liz to break through—be possible to indefinitely create anew. Liz broke through them too quickly; it would have driven Reyna to exhaustion, to generate new shields as opposed to just running through those she had already seeded. But this shield? It wasn’t made to break at all. It was made to be thick, and sturdy, and repairable. The shields above, if she thinned out part of them to fill gaps in the other, would have just collapsed; this one was designed better. The stone constituting the shields above, when it was melted, became difficult to mold, her influence not having been put through them in such a way as to persist through such radical state-changes; the stone constituting this shield was made to remain hers, no matter how thoroughly it was melted. Even the small portions of it which were entirely vaporized, floating temporarily in the air, remained hers: harder to control for now, perhaps, but still directable towards the rest of the wall, where they could be made to adhere to its surface and become controllable along with the rest of its mass.
Liz cut upward; Reyna began filling the gap from below and to the side, instead. After all, here, she could do that.
Liz progressively dissolved more and more of her shields, glancing around for any surprise attacks that might be coming from her surroundings, and intensified her cutting-beam, even adding a second so as to cut two lines in parallel. Her book vanished into motes of light. Even her sword followed before too long. If Reyna had prepared any traps, she’d have been nearly defenseless, forced to dodge the hard way or to materialize a shield far more hurriedly than was typical for her.
The shield held.
It took all of Reyna’s attention to keep the stone flowing correctly—to properly recycle the melted and vaporized stone, to keep the wall’s thickness approximately uniform except where it had been most recently cut, to avoid drawing excessively on her backup stone-reserves from the floor and ceiling which would run out quickly if overused—but the shield held. Reyna even felt like she was recovering slightly; it wasn’t even taking up the entirety of her energy.
After perhaps another two minutes of fruitless carving, Liz backed off. She blasted a half-foot-wide beam at the shield, with what Reyna knew to be nearly all the strength she was capable of, and still the shield held, the energy too dispersed to punch cleanly through.
And then she stopped. She rematerialized her sword and book and shields, and stared through the wall at Reyna; but she didn’t attack further, or at least not immediately.
When the shield was repaired back into its original state, Reyna relaxed as well, a satisfied smile flitting across her face for the first time since practically the beginning of their battle.
“I don’t think I am just stalling, this time,” Reyna said.
“I suppose not,” Liz said, her voice slightly clipped. “You might manage to stop me for another twenty minutes. To allow the wraith free, despite my best efforts to avoid that outcome.”
“I don’t suppose this shield can be modified to conveniently keep the wraith in as effectively as it’s keeping you out?”
Liz shook her head. “Wraiths don’t move through space. Not really. That’s just the best metaphor I’ve got for how they do actually move. I don’t think a wraith would have struggled to enter even the alleyway behind the pizza place, and there’s a whole lot less of the Dark Realm here than there was there.”
“Could it keep wraiths in, if I pulled the temple deeper into my world?”
Liz paused longer, this time, before shaking her head again.
“You can barely keep me out, and I’m an ordinary mortal human moving through by ordinary mortal human means. I’m not sure even Queen Inumbra herself could have kept one of the wraiths out of her lair, if one had tried to enter.”
“I’m stronger than Inumbra was, now.”
“You have more raw power. That’s different. You should know that better than anyone. You have more raw power than me, too, after all.”
That brought Reyna up short for a moment, but she rallied.
“But does that mean I can’t do this? Maybe I could trap the wraiths in the temple, given preparation and practice. Then this would all be over, and you wouldn’t keep trying to throw your life away.”
“My life? I’m not killing myself, Reyna! I’m losing my magic. That’s it. Life goes on. And you’re not stopping me. I’m going to get into that bubble, with or without your help.” Reyna opened her mouth. “And, to answer your question: you can’t. Maybe you could with months or years of study. But you can’t right now. Not with what you know how to do. Not with anything you’ve been practicing lately. Not with anything I know how to teach you. If there’s a method, hidden somewhere in a book hidden somewhere in Queen Inumbra’s base, which could solve the problem after a week’s practice, neither of us knows where to find it. And that would still be too long, even if we did.”
“I guess we’re at an impasse, then,” Reyna said after a moment. She was supposed to feel something, seeing Liz like this. She was supposed to feel upset, or triumphant, or something. But she just felt empty. The fight had been too long. She sat down on the floor, not seeing any need to remain standing now that Liz was no longer attacking her barrier. “And… no. You won’t die. That’s true. But you won’t live, either. You told me yourself that you never had, before getting your magic. I don’t want you to go back to that.”
“Then I’ll get a hobby. Is that all I need to do, to make you stand down? I’ll do it.”
“I hope you do,” Reyna said. “If you find some way to beat me. But I’m not going to bet your happiness on it.”
“I’m serious.” Did Liz seem… slightly offended, now? “I really will do it. Not just to make you stop delaying me now. But for my own sake, too. I don’t want to be unhappy. You know? And after everything I’ve done these last few months—everything we’ve done—do you really think helping myself is the one thing I can’t do?”
“I think you weren’t even considering it before the start of our fight,” Reyna said. “I remember you earlier, talking about self-sacrifice. I don’t think you’re lying, because you don’t do that. But I don’t think you’re right, either, right now. You’re saying whatever you think will get me to let you through, and talking yourself into believing it as you go.” She giggled. “Not so different from me earlier trying to stop you.”
“Maybe I am, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong!”
Reyna shook her head, and sat without saying anything. Liz began pacing around the barrier, occasionally briefly trying a new shape of attack-beam on it, and on one occasion even tried putting her sword through it.
(Reyna coated the sword in a thin layer of stone; after a moment, Liz let it dissolve and rematerialized it in her hand.)
Several minutes passed in this fashion. It was odd, being suddenly so free with her time—free enough even to just sit in silence, to recover slightly from her stress—after however long she’d spent on the back foot in combat, grasping desperately at the slightest opportunity to get more speech in. “Do you think you’ve won?” Liz asked eventually.
“No,” said Reyna. “I won’t have won until you agree not to keep trying this. I’ve won the battle, maybe, if you want to call it that. Not the war.”
“You haven’t done even that,” Liz said.
“No? The battle looks pretty over to me. The altar is in here with me. You’re out there. You’re not getting in here. What’s left?”
“I already told you. I am getting in. The only question is whether I’ll do it before the wraith emerges, or after.”
“How?”
“A secret method.”
“Why wait?”
“Because I don’t want to hurt you. And I might, if I break in by force. Better to keep trying until the end, rather than give up early.”
“Liz. I know what your magic is capable of. I’ve seen you fighting your hardest, against people and things that you were willing to hurt. Unless you’ve been holding back throughout all those fights—which you haven’t—you can’t blast much harder than the one you did a few minutes ago. And my shield withstood that. Or are you telling me you have been holding back all this time?”
“Of course not,” Liz said. “I wouldn’t do that to everyone. And you’re right. I don’t have what it takes, right now, to beat you with brute strength.”
“But?”
“But I have something. A way that I will beat you. I don’t want to use it. But I’m going to, if I have to.”
“You know, I almost believe you,” Reyna said, standing back up and walking forward towards where Liz stood behind the barrier. “But you were just saying that you’d get in before or after the wraith. Probably you do have a way to break the shield, if it comes down to it. I thought you hadn’t, but if you say so, okay. You do. But, if you were really able and willing to break in, you’d do it before the wraith. You don’t want to hurt me, right? And, apparently, you’re afraid you will, if you do whatever this is. So. Are you really sure you’ll be able to do this? I don’t think you are.”
“Please. Don’t do this.”
“Then stop. If you don’t want to hurt me, then don’t. If you want to fight the wraith together and forget this ever happened, then do that. If you want to fight the wraith together and have nothing to do with me the rest of the time, then do that! All that matters is that you’re okay at the end, and I will give up anything and everything I have to in order to make sure you are.”
Liz shook her head. Made a pained noise, shook her head again. Then she sat down in front of Reyna, just on the other side of the barrier, and buried her face in her arms, and said nothing more.
Minutes ticked by, and Reyna sat down across from her. She didn’t know what time it was, but she knew that, whatever time it was, the wraith would be coming out soon.
Behind her, she felt a disturbance. A distortion in the Dark Realm’s influence on the world, coming from the altar; a shift in the field which had prevented her lasting warping of the room around it, not strengthening its effect overall but altering the precise pathways along which her power’s flow was inhibited.
Liz stood up.
“For whatever it’s worth,” Reyna said, quietly, standing up in turn, “I don’t want to be hurt.”
She wasn’t sure if she was audible or not, over the hissing sound of what she assumed to be the wraith emerging from the altar behind her.
Liz’s lips moved, but Reyna didn’t hear whatever she said over the suddenly-even-louder hissing as—as if out of nowhere—a dark purple mist enveloped her.
What?
Reyna had seen that mist before; but only once had she seen so much of it in one place. At the radio station, when the operator had become possessed right in front of the two of them as they were being interviewed.
What did she just do?
Over the next few seconds, the mist thinned, and behind it Reyna saw Liz once more. Thin streams of mist seemed to be emanating from her eyes, and from her hands, and from her sword and book and shields. Tear-tracks were visible on her face where it had been covered, but her expression now showed no sign of sadness. She simply stared through the barrier, towards the altar which sat still at the back of the room behind Reyna.
—no. She stared towards Reyna herself.
“Last chance,” Liz said, more forcefully than Reyna had ever heard her voice before. “Know when you’re outmatched and give up. Now.”
Reyna shook her head, already bracing for an attack.
From the air in front of Liz, a beam of light appeared, perhaps a foot wide, aimed directly towards Reyna. The beam was a deep purple, unlike Liz’s usual pinkish white, and it slammed into the barrier with more force than any attack Liz had called forth before her possession. Suddenly, all Reyna could focus on was her barrier and holding it together.
Two of Liz’s shields disappeared from behind her, and the beam suddenly multiplied in intensity, growing wider and brighter. Across its now-maybe-one-and-a-half-foot diameter, the wall began slowly thinning despite Reyna’s ongoing repairs, as had previously been accomplished only by the short and narrow cutting-beams which seemed to take most of Liz’s energy to invoke in just a tiny thin line.
Reyna put her hands against the shield and began actively funneling mass from the surrounding walls, no longer aiming for a sustainable cycle but just to keep the wall in front of her intact.
Liz took a step back, in turn, and flung her sword and book aside, and dissolved all the remaining shields which had been floating around her. Her beam intensified yet again, now looking to be close to three feet in diameter, and what had been a slowly-losing battle became a quickly-losing battle.
First to go were the walls to the side. They weren’t directly between Liz and the altar. They didn’t matter. Reyna kept her hands pressed up to the most important part of the wall, as if the beam were a physical shove she could deflect by shoving back hard enough, and she drew stone in increasingly-large pulses off of the walls to the side, until no walls to the side remained.
If Liz hadn’t been possessed, if she had retained her usual tactical mind and focus, that would have marked the end of the fight, right then and there, just by moving her beam’s source-point a bit to the side where it could blast through to the altar unimpeded.
Next to go was the portion of the wall above the beam. The part below was needed for support, but the part above could be consumed for extra stone, enough to last at least a few moments longer.
If I stay between the beam and the altar, when the shield breaks down, will she hesitate?
Reyna didn’t know. If Liz had been her usual self, she would. But she was possessed, now, and who knew whether she could focus on anything at all, now, besides the altar?
Reyna let her sweat-covered arms down, and waited for impact. The beam didn’t abate.
Three feet of almost-blindingly-bright purple melted through the final few inches of barrier and slammed into Reyna. She flew across the room, and heard a great cracking noise as she hit the wall.
The world went blurry, and then dark, and Reyna could do nothing but slump onto the floor where she’d fallen.
“-na? Reyna. Reyna!”
There was a voice. Liz’s. What was happening?
“Wake up, Reyna!”
Reyna tried to open her eyes, but her muscles were tired and she could barely take a slight peek outward. A high-pitched tone—probably illusory, from the impact—filled her ears. A blurry purple shape could be seen in front of her.
“…Liz?” Reyna asked, blearily.
“Don’t move,” said Liz. “Just wake up.”
A few moments passed, and Reyna slowly focused her consciousness and opened her eyes more fully, glancing around.
She appeared to be down near the floor. Liz stood above her, purple mist still spilling from her eyes. And from her hands. And…
And from her sword. Which was pointed down at Reyna. Which, as she saw that Reyna was awake, moved to be aimed directly at Reyna’s throat.
“Surrender,” Liz said.
“Wh…at?” Reyna croaked out.
“I said: surrender. You’ve lost.”
Reyna didn’t understand. If she’d lost, why was she… here? With Liz standing over her like this? Were the wraiths able to persist even past the destruction of the altar? But why would a possessed Liz still be aimed at her? When Clara had managed to fend off Liz and Reyna and kill Luminia, the wraith had just left after that, unable to persist once the object of Clara’s obsession was no more.
An explosion of brightness and sound brought Reyna back into the moment.
“If you won’t surrender,” Liz said, “then get up.”
Reyna didn’t understand. Was she about to die here? She couldn’t see what the possessed Liz was doing, now.
If the altar is still intact, I need to keep her attention, she realized.
Shakily, still struggling to focus her attention anywhere beyond her immediate personal space—which didn’t stop containing a sword, as she moved, although Liz at least pulled her sword back enough to give her the space to get up into—Reyna stood up. As she did, she turned, glancing around the room for the altar.
It was intact. Or at least mostly so. Not very far to her right. A bit crumbled, around the bottom, but the core of it was still standing.
That’s important, I think.
It took a few moments for Reyna to grasp why it would be important, but then it clicked and she jolted into greater alertness.
I haven’t lost yet.
Reyna took an experimental step to the side, away from the altar. Liz’s attention followed, but once again she made no more effort to impede Reyna’s movement.
“Are you ready to continue, then?” Liz asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Our battle. You still think you can fight me. Right?”
Reyna didn’t understand. But she gave Liz a slow nod, nonetheless, and—
Liz lunged toward her. Reyna didn’t even have time to respond, beyond an ineffectual backwards stumble, before her limbs were individually surrounded by rings of the same sort of force Liz constructed her shields out of, leaving her barely even able to flinch as Liz’s sword came towards her head—
And tapped her gently on the throat. “You lose. Again.”
“I don’t—”
“Why can’t you just accept it?!” Liz pulled back her sword and was suddenly shouting. “You can’t beat me. You can’t even hold out a defense against me. What do I need to do, to make you understand?!”
The purple mist continued to pool around Liz. There was no question that she was possessed. But still she ignored the altar and focused on Reyna.
“Explain it to me. Why? Why are you still pretending you can fight? What do you hope to accomplish?”
“I’m not… pretending,” Reyna said.
The bindings on Reyna’s limbs suddenly fell, and Liz threw her sword aside, stepped forward and pushed Reyna over with both hands. She fell to the ground with a thud, barely able to cushion herself as she landed. She winced in pain as something twisted in one of her wrists where it helped cushion her from the impact.
“You’re not even able to stand up, never mind fight,” Liz said.
“Then why am I alive?”
The question seemed to bring Liz up short, for a moment, before she replied. “If you were dead, you wouldn’t be able to acknowledge that you’d lost.”
And it clicked. Suddenly, the possessed Liz’s behavior made sense. Liz had miscalculated. When she went and made the wraith possess her—that was, Reyna was pretty sure, what had happened—she’d been focused on the wrong thing. Not on destroying the altar; not even on beating Reyna; but on making Reyna acknowledge her own defeat. Liz had wanted her to acknowledge her defeat so she wouldn’t need to get possessed and potentially kill her in the ensuing fight; but, now, here she was, fastidiously not killing her, for the sake of a goal whose motivating reasons had long since slipped away.
Unable to do anything else, Reyna laughed.
Liz almost growled in frustration. It was so unlike her. Suddenly, Reyna couldn’t see that as anything but funny. Liz had outplayed herself, at the last minute when all of Reyna’s own measures had failed.
“Get up,” Liz said. “If you won’t surrender, then keep fighting, until you understand.”
Reyna shook her head. This was too perfect. Liz was distracted focusing on her, no longer even thinking about destroying the altar. And, if Reyna just laid here, Liz wouldn’t be able to do anything—
Reyna felt an impact on the side of her ribs, and shouted in pain. Liz had kicked her.
“Stop ignoring me!”
“I—” Reyna said, before breaking into a coughing fit. “I’m not ignoring you.”
“Then answer me.”
“About… what?”
There was a sound of something falling, or maybe crumbling, at the edge of Reyna’s awareness. She couldn’t spare the attention to focus on it, with Liz right there above her.
“Why you’re not giving in. What I need to do, to make you see.”
“I’m not… there’s nothing you can do. I’ve won.”
“You’ve… what?”
“You won’t kill me. A sword to my throat doesn’t mean anything, if you won’t use it. You’ve got all that power, and nothing you can do with it to make me give in. The fight is still going on, and you have no way to end it.”
Again, Liz seemed to come up short trying to respond to this. But instead of rallying, this time, she just began muttering to herself. Liz couldn’t hear everything, but she heard snippets.
“—just keep fighting? No, she’s not—”
“—control? With this extra power—”
“—dn’t really be her doing it, though, then—”
“—Threats? But she wants those—”
“—Can’t even keep thinking like this, that’s the sort of stalling she’s after too—”
The crumbling sound at the edge of Reyna’s awareness repeated once again, and this time she looked towards its source—
Just in time to see the altar tipping over and hitting the ground, hard, the cracks she’d seen near its base before having multiplied to the point of entirely undermining its structural integrity.
It fell as if in slow motion. For the first time since her brief stint of unconsciousness, Reyna reached for her magic, grasping desperately to keep the altar intact. But she was too slow, not put-together enough to do anything as the altar hit the floor and seemingly half of the crystalline shapes embedded in it cracked or shattered or fell off all at once.
Reyna stared at the destroyed altar in empty stillness, not even taking in a breath. Above her, she heard Liz’s mutterings slow down and come to a halt, and the quiet hissing which had accompanied the wraith’s mist faded into silence.
Liz spoke, suddenly quieter and sounding very much more like herself. “Reyna?”
Reyna didn’t reply. She just kept staring at the place where the altar had stood. The sound of her heartbeat echoed in her chest, and all of her laughing amusement from a few moments prior seemed to have transformed into an irresistible urge to sob.
“Reyna? Are you okay?”
Reyna curled up into a ball on the floor, and wept. And, as she did, the blurry darkness from before crept back into the corners of her consciousness, and the world slipped away from her once more.
“Another wraith attack? We’re running low on beds, but we can fit her. Bring her on in. I suppose you’ll be going now, like usual?”
“Not this time. She’s… a friend. I’ll wait by her side, this time, if you’ll let me.”
“Policy allows up to two visitors at a time. Come on in to the back.”
Elizabeth wasn’t sure exactly what time it was, when she heard Reyna stir into activity in the other room. Perhaps three or four in the afternoon, if she had to guess, from the way the sun shone through the windows; but she wore no watch, nor did she keep any clocks in her room, and so the exact minute eluded her.
Three or four in the afternoon wasn’t bad. It was the latest she’d woken—the longest she’d slept—in the past week since their battle had finished.
Taking one last glance over the paragraph she was reading, Elizabeth set her book down—load distribution could wait—and ventured out into the broader apartment.
She found Reyna in the kitchen, pushing the toaster down with her good hand.
“Good morning,” she said, quietly. She always said that, even when it was, in fact, the afternoon.
Reyna mumbled something inaudible, not turning towards her.
“Do you want me to get you anything?”
Reyna shook her head, and said, slightly louder, “you don’t need to.”
That hadn’t been an answer to her question. But then, Reyna had never been very good at asking things of Elizabeth, even at the best of times. And now was not the best of times.
Elizabeth lapsed into silence. Small talk had never been her forte. She could talk Reyna’s ear off—metaphorically—about the precise tactical significance of different battlefield conditions during their combat practice. In theory, she could do the same about her studies of magic—a twinge of pain at the thought—although, in practice, she’d given up on doing so once she’d realized that Reyna wasn’t actually interested in the topic and was only listening out of the sense of obligation which seemed to pervade almost all her interactions with Elizabeth. She could negotiate, or speechify, when she was out trying to save people. But, when it came to talking about nothing—to what her father had always called ‘kitchen-table conversation’, fittingly enough considering their current environment—she never quite knew where to start.
Instead of trying to come up with something to say and likely missing her mark, Elizabeth turned towards the cupboards and began retrieving some food of her own. Untoasted bread, alongside a jar of raspberry jam. And two plates; even if Reyna couldn’t bring herself to ask for help, that was no reason not to give it to her, especially while she was still recovering.
“I’m serious,” Reyna said, when she saw, although she didn’t refuse the plate. “You don’t need to take care of me like this. You should be taking care of yourself, instead.”
“I know you’re serious,” Elizabeth said. “I do know that. I just… want you taken care of. And you can’t do it yourself, very well, in your current state.”
A concussion, and a broken rib, and a sprained wrist. That was what the doctor at the hospital had said, while Elizabeth guiltily waited at Reyna’s bedside. Plus various smaller scrapes and cuts which she hadn’t bothered to enumerate. Reyna was doing her best to walk around as if nothing was wrong, but Elizabeth knew it was still weighing on her.
“I’m fine,” Reyna said. “I can feed myself. I can get exercise. I can control my magic. You don’t need to worry about me. You’re the one with the problems, right now.”
“Even if you were right that my problems are bigger, I wouldn’t ignore yours,” Elizabeth said. “And I don’t think that they are bigger.”
“You’ve broken your whole life. That’s worse than a few weeks convalescing, I’m pretty sure.”
“When I decided to destroy the altar, I thought you were right,” Elizabeth said.
Reyna didn’t look like she’d been expecting that. She put down her toast onto her plate and turned her full attention Elizabeth’s way.
“I remembered my life before magic as well as you had. I thought things would be like that again, afterwards. But they’re not.”
“You seem pretty unhappy to me,” Reyna said.
“I am,” Elizabeth said. “After everything I did to you, and after losing my magic, how could I not be?”
“You’re trying to focus on me being hurt again. It’s still not a big deal.”
“It is—” Elizabeth interrupted herself. “Regardless. I’m somewhat unhappy right now. I admit it. But I’m not… I’m not empty.”
Reyna’s eyes widened.
“Do you know what I was doing, before you got up? I was reading. Not homework. I was reading about architectural engineering.”
“You… were?”
“I was. Because of you.”
“Me? But I failed! I couldn’t shield the altar from you. And you didn’t even want me to! You still think you did the right thing, even now. How did anything I did help you with that?”
“Do you remember, a few minutes before… the end? I was desperate. I said everything I could think of to convince you to let me in.”
Reyna nodded.
“It wasn’t my first time thinking about how to make it end happily for me too. I’d thought, before, about whether there might be another way. If I could force the wraiths not to emerge. But I hadn’t thought, before, about whether I could keep living as myself after destroying the altar. You made me do that.”
“You mean… the nonsense about getting a hobby? Or… you mean… it wasn’t nonsense?”
“You were right that I hadn’t thought of it before that moment,” Elizabeth said. “But you were wrong, too. I wanted nothing more than for you to be wrong. So I argued myself into it. I made myself see how to save myself. I didn’t even realize I’d done it until the day before yesterday. But I’m reading about architecture. I’m keeping up my exercise routine. I’m even studying methods for researching things online!”
“And… enjoying it?”
Elizabeth spent a moment thinking, before she answered.
“I think so,” she said. “It’s not magic. Maybe some day I’ll find something else like magic, but I haven’t yet. But it’s something. Something I want to do specifically, and not just because I want to do something.”
“…researching things online?”
“Ah.” A slight blush came to Elizabeth’s face. “Well. Only if you want me to, of course. But I was thinking… I can’t protect the town any more. At least not directly. But you still can. The last couple months, you were doing all the research, tracking down rumors that might lead to Queen Inumbra’s bases of operations. But now… if I can’t fight on the front lines, I was thinking maybe I could at least help you from behind? If another magical threat comes by, I mean.”
Slowly, Reyna’s face lit up. “You really are still here,” she said wonderingly.
“I told you I would be.”
The meal passed quickly, after that. And, somehow, in the following days, Reyna no longer seemed so quiet or so withdrawn.
Together, the two of them stepped forward into their new day-to-day existence.