Mag appreciated all of the groveling. Everyone outside the compound groveled, maybe not as impressively as Le Cercle had to Celestia until ten minutes ago, but certainly with aplomb. The pavement in front of the compound door was strewn liberally with people anxious to beg Celestia’s forgiveness.
The compound had, at first, met the kidnappers with guns bristling, demanding they get on the ground with their hands on the backs of their heads. Mag found this less satisfying than she’d expected. Certainly less tense, as it could not have been clearer that Celestia would protect Le Cercle from any bullets. She practically stood over her prisoners to prevent anyone from getting a clear shot. Mag suspected no one was going to pull the trigger on something that belonged to Celestia in any case. Celestia had a way of suggesting with her expression and posture that any sentient being standing in her sphere of awareness effectively belonged to her. In a completely benevolent way, of course.
Jeff, Jeff’s partner Ellie, and Something-or-Other Gradely from the meeting all lined themselves up in front of Celestia with an air of deep contrition. Mr. Gradely kept glancing in the direction of the countess and lady. He recognized them. Jeff ignored them, but obviously recognized them too. Mag couldn’t get a read on Ellie, but Mag doubted she alone was uninformed.
Celestia approached the trio. “I found them all. The countess and the lady would like to discuss something with you, and I see you know exactly what.”
“Your majesty—” began Jeff and Mr. Gradely simultaneously.
“First things first,” said Celestia. “Ladies?”
Lady Valérie stepped forward. “I, Lady Valérie Castan, am here to confess to the kidnapping of Margaret Wilson.”
“And we’re her accomplices,” said Sadie, one of the lady’s three underclothed and extremely annoyed guards.
“Those three are unarmed, obviously,” said Bittermann, three immaculately folded military uniforms over her shoulder. Sadie’s mouth thinned. Dora’s eyes went flat.
Mag considered the situation. Celestia had that calm little smile she wore when she was about to get her way, and Gradely was sweating again, though that might have been the heat. A game was going on and Celestia was winning.
What, exactly, was the game? No, it was clear enough. The compound had promised safety, and then some of their own sponsors had made off with Celestia’s human teddy bear, forcing Celestia to hunt them all down herself. She’d done it and now she was back again, and sooner or later she would innocently bring up the press conference they’d promised her, along with the ultimatum she’d delivered: “Have a preliminary pre-conference arranged by tomorrow or I’ll handle it myself in ways that leave you completely out of the loop.” And of course Celestia would be explaining the deal she’d struck with Le Cercle.
In her mind, Mag surveyed the next few hours and realized she didn’t have the energy for it. They would want her to describe exactly what happened, and Luna would have to give her own statement, and Celestia would raise hell in her usual agonizingly genteel fashion, and the countess would throw her weight around in that placid tone while walking around a military installment barefoot.
No, there was more to her feelings than that. Looking over her kidnappers, the soldiers, the executives in charge—the people who controlled Mag’s life—she felt horribly exposed. She wore clothes now, but they were the countess’s clothes, and all the other clothes she currently had, had come from the compound. All her clothes were at home, just as they had been when she was handcuffed to that chair.
“You know what? I need to not be here for a while,” Mag said to Celestia.
“I understand completely,” said Celestia. “You look tired, and you should be. Would you like to go to our room and rest?”
Mag nodded.
“Luna, would you please—”
“—look after her,” Luna finished. “Of course, sister.”
“Can I as well?” said Bittermann.
Celestia raised a playful eyebrow. “Can you what? Rest in our room, with Mag?”
“I meant guard the door,” said Bittermann hastily with another of her blushes. Mag felt the breezy whoosh of a social cue going over her head, but whatever it was, it could wait.
“Please do,” said Celestia.
“Those are your orders, then,” said Jeff. He reached behind his back and under his coat, unbuckled something, and pulled out an armpit holster and pistol, passing it to Bittermann. Bittermann pulled out the gun to look it over, then reholstered it and began to tighten the straps on the harness.
“If anyone tries to get around you, anyone at all, shoot them,” said Jeff, straightening his coat and tie.
Bittermann clipped the armpit holster in place. “Sir, those aren’t legal orders.”
Jeff shrugged. “Yes, that’s right. And you were technically AWOL this morning. But sometimes you’ve got to keep the bigger picture in mind, don’t you think?”
Celestia stepped between them. “If I may, as an alternative, you could call for Luna rather than using a weapon. Her solutions to trespassers will likely be safer for all involved. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Gradely?” Celestia said the last sentence with a proprietary smile.
“Yes, your majesty,” said Gradely. He smiled back, and then at Mag. “Ms. Wilson, as one of the heads of this organization I’d like to personally apologize. This is not going to happen again.”
Yep, the next few hours would be nauseating. Better to sleep through them until someone needed her for something. Mag walked past Gradely without responding and then to the building, with Ellie smiling at her for some damned reason.
Bittermann darted past Mag to open a staff door for Mag with a bow, and shot a look of bantam defiance at Gradely, but he wasn’t looking.
The staff door opened into rows of closed and padlocked storage units. Like everything else in the compound, the structure looked brand new and a little cheap.
“I haven’t been down this way before,” said Mag. “You’ll have to lead the way.”
“Yes, m—yes,” said Bittermann. “Yes. Good. Cool.”
“Did you just call me ma’am?”
Bittermann rolled her eyes. “No.” She began to walk.
Mag followed. “Is that right? Because when someone calls me ma’am, I take it as condescending except in the bedroom.”
“Jesus!” stammered Bittermann. “I was not going to call you ‘ma’am.’ I was going to call you ‘Mag,’ but then I stopped because I’d rather call you Wilson.”
“Oh. Well, ‘Wilson’ is a man’s name, but I’ve been calling you ‘Bittermann’ in my head, so it’s cool.”
Bittermann cleared her throat. “Yes. Anyway, we’re just going to keep going straight along this hallway until we reach the barracks, and then it’s a pretty short walk.”
“Okay.” Mag waited the bare minimum amount of time necessary for a change of subject to feel natural. “So how did your Celestia ride go?”
“What?”
Mag feigned nonchalance. “You went on a magical horsey ride. Remember? She let you ride on her back. How’d that work out for you, would you say?”
“I thought I liked flying. Turns out I don’t.”
***
Mag took a drink from Bittermann’s hip flask. She didn’t know why she had it, but then again, this was only a dream. It sure as hell didn’t have apple juice in it now, if Bittermann hadn’t been lying in the first place. Now it was throat-searing hard cider, thick and rich as blood. Mag passed it to Luna, who took a healthy swallow and passed it back to Mag. Mag took a long sip and handed it over to Luna. They passed it back and forth until it was empty.
The fire made two dots of pale light burn in Luna’s eyes. She wiped her mouth with a foreleg. “Mag, What have you learned from us so far?”
“What?”
“Don’t question it. This is the time to be formal.”
Learned? Luna had been teaching her, certainly. The answers there would be obvious. Had Celestia been trying to tell her something?
Well, yes. “You taught me some magic, and how to use the book of Pasithee, if I ever remember it while lucid. You taught me that the worst things about me are advantages too, and that ‘unworthy’ is just a word.”
“Good. What else?”
“Celestia showed me there are a thousand ways to say something. She showed me you can read minds if you pay attention, and care about people. She also showed me you can talk your way out of absolutely anything.”
“What else?”
What, more? “Are you looking for something specific?”
“I’m trying to get a feel for how you’re changing,” said Luna. She scooted closer to Mag. “You are tired, but there are things we can do in dreams that won’t drain you. Important things.”
“We haven’t made you a body yet,” Mag realized.
Luna smiled at the fire. “There is no rush, but I have a possible method in mind that would not disturb your rest, which uses the tools at hand and allows us to put you through your paces.”
Mag stood up, tottering a bit from the alcohol. Luna leaned over and caught her.
“Just sit,” said Luna. “This method requires that we sit in comfort.”
“Good.”
“We are going to tell a story together,” said Luna. “It is the story of how a human woman, through wisdom and courage, quested on behalf of a patron deity to find something that deity had lost. What shall we call this story?”
“Let’s call it ‘Mag the Unworthy.’”
“Irony? How literary.” She opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it. The corner of her mouth twitched. “Here, now. A thought occurs. Celestia would be annoyed, would she not, if I took any less than every possible precaution? I think you should take refuge in the narrative power of the number three. You have your book and you have your knowledge, so I’ll place a third power in your care. We are going to perform a little trade. Stand, step back from the fire, and sit again.”
Mag had to admit she felt apprehensive. Both of the gifts Luna mentioned had come with intimidating responsibilities, and the word “trade” didn’t help at all. Which of Luna’s things would she be looking after?
Mag stood up, stepped back, and sat down. Luna stepped into the space Mag had occupied, blocking the light of the fire and enveloping Mag in the shadow of the princess of the night.
A delicate weight settled on Mag’s shoulders, on the top of her head, on her feet and back and heart and behind her eyes. A pleasant kind of cold wrapped itself around her arms like the sleeves of a jacket. A peaceful, satisfied bittersweetness settled into her. Nostalgia for absent friends. The silence of stars. Memories of the smell of rain.
Mag exhaled and could see her breath.
She looked up to find Luna grinning down at her. “There. I don’t doubt you are now as safe from harm as any human that ever lived.” She went back to her place, still smiling at Mag. “Do you notice anything different?”
Mag hardly had to think. She looked behind her to see that, yes, now she had Luna’s shadow, hooves and all. Luna spread her wings and so did her shadow, even though it was no longer connected to her.
Mag raised her arms and saw movement near Luna. She waved her arms in the air and waggled her fingers, and so did the shadow that stretched away from Luna’s form.
Mag put her arms down. “Okay, so that’s interesting. Don’t you need your shadow? I think you told me these are important.”
“In the ‘real’ world,” said Luna, making air quotes around the word “real” with her hooves, “that shadow was my armor, or a small part of it, the part I wore in times of peace. It protected me well enough, though it tended to be redundant, as crossbow bolts and lightning strikes meant little to me in any case. In dreams it does nothing at all for me. I could count on my fingers the number of forces that can harm me here.”
“You don’t have fingers.”
“Precisely. Well, no, I exaggerate, but my shadow would not avail me in any of those situations.”
Mag concentrated on the new shadow and realized she could feel the ground underneath it. The shadow was sensitive, like fingertips.
“What about my shadow?” said Mag.
“I’ll keep it safe,” Luna promised. “In fact I think I might lay a few enchantments on it. Give me time and it shall be a suit of armor in its own right, and if anything it will be more useful to you than mine is now. Where were we? Ah…”
***
The legends of Mag the Unworthy are as numberless as the pine needles of her forest home.
(Huh? First I’ve heard of it.)
(Hush. You are arguing with dreams again.)
We have all heard of Mag the Unworthy, she with her book of dreams, her magic shadow, and her spells of making and unmaking. Which story shall I tell? Have you heard of the time she won an ancient tome of power from the cunning Giant of Underlake? You have? I see. Then shall I tell you about the time she defeated the Cult of the Sun with only her wits and her friends? Oh, but everyone knows that one. Perhaps the tale of how she looked into the eyes of the King of Naught, and kept her sanity?
(None of that is—)
(Hush.)
You know all of them, then. Well, here is a story that no one knows, not even me. We shall tell it together. This one is called, “How Mag the Unworthy Built a Goddess out of Dreams.”
(We’re both telling this?)
(If you’d stop interrupting, the story would build enough momentum to tell itself, and then you might step into your role and play your part. Hush.)
(Sorry.)
Now, Mag had a friend who never left her side. Her name was Luna, and though Luna was older than Mag, they were fast friends. It is possible you’ve heard of Luna as well, for she herself belongs to many old stories, under many different skies.
(I want to hear those too. Sorry.)
(Some other time, perhaps.)
At this point in Luna’s existence, she had been brought low by forces she didn’t understand. She had no home, nor any responsibility to hold on to, nor even a body with which she might search for a new purpose. She had only her sister, the great Celestia herself, and her friend, the legend Mag.
Though Luna was not ungrateful for her remaining friends, she wished to rebuild, and, having such a powerful friend, she decided to seek her help. It would be nothing short of miraculous to create a body that could pass into the waking world. But dreams were the seat of Luna’s greatest powers, and Mag had her magic Book of Pasithee; could they not arrange for a miracle? Luna enlisted Mag’s help, though Mag resisted, believing she was Unworthy and therefore incapable.
Luna taught Mag everything she could think of on the subject of dreams. Mag, for all her strength, was a mortal and therefore had certain limitations regarding memory, understanding, and consciousness. But she learned quickly, even greedily, for she was a human and therefore delighted in knowledge. Mag grew in strength, and when Luna could no longer tolerate being without a body, Mag was strong enough that Luna enlisted her help. Giving Mag her now famous blessed shadow—
(Am I going to—sorry—am I going to have this when I wake up?)
(I haven’t the faintest idea. We shall find out together. Isn’t learning fun? And hush.)
(Sorr—)
—Luna sent Mag the Unworthy to find a way.
Away from the fire and in the absence of light, Mag closed her eyes and felt for the strange new shadow. Yes, it was still there, and the darkness empowered it. The shadow wrapped around her like a heavy cloak. She could intuit well enough how it would work. In bright light, the shadow would sharpen to a scalpel’s edge and move however she wanted it to, cutting through anything from walls to wishes. In the dark, it would be the ultimate shield, a garment of protection and healing. Its weakness would be twilight, where its edge would be blunted and it would function only weakly as armor.
Mag hugged the book of Pasithee, tried to hold onto everything the princesses had taught her, and stepped deeper into her own dreams. And that would be important to remember—these were her dreams. They would work however she expected them to work, the rules would be rules she herself subconsciously set, and every enemy was her.
(That is a useful attitude to adopt so long as you remain cautious. Forgive my interruptions, but I don’t like to leave you alone.)
Whatever Mag needed, she would find it at the center of everything, and the center of the Earth was down. The answer would be beneath her feet.
Mag searched for a way to descend into the underside of the world, and found a crevice in the sand of an endless desert of hard, cracked earth. The crevice was only a foot wide, but deep enough that she couldn’t see the bottom. This would be her way down.
How should she get into the crack? She doubted she could squeeze her way in, and trying to do so would be undignified and uncomfortable. Mag opened her book and paged aimlessly through it, past diagrams, chants, capriccios, nocturnes, equations, limericks, and a painting of a little gray moth.
Mag stopped to contemplate the moth. The artist had taken a minimalist approach, summing up the portrait with all of six or seven watercolor strokes in muted shades of gray and brown. The moth, in spite of its simplicity, had a softness and an energy to it that told Mag it could be as real as she liked.
So, then. Ride the moth into the dark, or become the moth and fly down herself?
The latter. Mag pressed the picture to her forehead and dreamed of transformation. It didn’t hurt at all.
A little gray moth with an outsized shadow flew into the dark, and, to her mild surprise, she found she liked the shape. She had never thought of moths as vermin, only as butterflies with less charisma. It felt… fuzzy. She had fuzzy legs and fuzzy feelers, which felt pleasantly feminine. And what was a moth, after all? A small animal that only ate while it was a child and lost its mouth when it reached adulthood. It rested under the light of the sun and spent its nights chasing after lightbulbs, or, so Mag liked to imagine, trying to reach the moon. Inevitably the moth would die, whether to a predator or in an accident or by starving to death.
Moths couldn’t feel fear or pain. All they wanted was light. Yes, okay, they also wanted to mate, but this particular moth didn’t see any urgency there.
Mag landed on some kind of fibrous surface. She changed back into a human to see it better.
She’d hoped to be underground, but no; she had simply found another sky with its own moon. A palace of broken towers and crumbling stone stood before her. Seeing no other obvious direction to take, Mag walked through the doors, which had been broken open years ago in some siege.
She walked and walked, and the ruins slowly turned to a well-kept but empty palace home. Eleven-foot intricate bead curtains led her to a great throne room, lavishly decorated, with silver torch sconces and a tapestry on every wall. Two rows of incense sticks burned on the floor, and between the rows there sat a line of knitted rugs leading to a golden throne. In the throne sat a king, a hunched, goggled-eyed man with the curling tusks of a boar.
“Are you the Lord?” asked Mag.
“I am,” said the king.
“I come for a miracle,” said Mag.
“My gifts only go to the worthy,” said the king.
“Then you are not the Lord, only a lord. Where is the Lord of Lords?”
The king surged to his feet. “I am the Lord, and I’ll prove it by snapping your bones.” He reached down his throat and pulled out a hammer with a haft longer than he was tall.
Mag opened her hand and held up her mage’s light, and her winged, horned, four-hoofed shadow turned black and sharp. The king rushed at her, hammer held above his head. Mag threw the light behind her so that her blessed shadow darted forward. A sweeping wing cut off the king’s right tusk and the horn put out his right eye. He bellowed in fury, and the wind of his voice put out every torch in the castle, leaving only the glowing embers of the incense.
Mag put out her light and wrapped the shadow around her. The shadow hid Mag, but the smoke of the incense swirled around her so that the king could find her by following the trails. He swung his hammer at where he knew her to be—but his hammer passed harmlessly through Mag and broke the stone beneath her feet.
Mag opened her hand and cast her light again, this time in the king’s face. The light blinded him and sharpened Mag’s shadow again. She took his remaining eye and tusk.
“You want to talk about worth? You aren’t even worth killing. Here’s my gift to you: if you find the most pathetic creature in the world and kiss its hands, your eyes and tusks will grow back.”
Mag turned to the wall and walked deeper into dreams. In truth, she was fairly certain the king would cease to exist the moment she stopped dreaming of him, and wouldn’t have time to solve her riddle if he was even a conscious being in the first place, but Luna had made it clear that adhering to form was the important thing here.
(A typical story about arrogance and retribution, with overtones of the comic book serial. Would that human folktales were not so violent.)
Gentle ocean waves pawed at the shore and kneaded the sand. A red setting sun crested the horizon, turning the few scattered clouds to tawny pink.
“I need an overcast, moonless night,” muttered Mag.
(Certainly, but now that you’ve gotten that out of your system, please look for peaceful answers in the future. This may be fiction, but the results of your decisions will not be.)
The hero watched and waited, and in the fullness of time, the moon left the sky and clouds obscured the stars, and the sea turned black. Mag pulled her shadow around herself and waded into the sea, up to her knees, up to her hips, up to her neck. The chill of the shadow protected her from the chill of the sea. She closed her eyes and let herself sink into the dark.
Her eyes were useless here, but Luna’s shadow had grown vast, and allowed Mag to feel her way through the currents. Mag floated forward and drifted downward, and ran tendrils of shadow across the sea floor as she went, until she found the end of the shallows, past where Luna’s shadow couldn’t touch the bottom unless Mag swam down. She let herself sink. The Lord would be at the center.
How would she extract a miracle from the Lord, once she found him? She refused to pray, and eating his heart to gain his powers would probably make Luna uncomfortable. Maybe she shouldn’t have brought religion into things. But why shouldn’t she? These were the folk stories she knew best, and if she might have the opportunity to twist them to her own ends, all the better.
The sensation of sinking into a lightless void, compounded with the thought of being under the surface of the open sea, gave Mag a kind of twofold vertigo. Seawater stirred and churned around her like wind, and little vortices of water curled between her fingers.
In time, Mag’s feet found purchase in sand that had never seen any sign of the sun. The water around her was thick with detritus that fell like snow to the sea floor, the disintegrated remains of everything that had died at some point somewhere up above. All the rot of the ocean surrounded her, and things crawled through it, scavengers and blind invertebrates that lived off an eternal feast.
One evening in a fit of drunk, insomniacal research and arithmetic, Mag had calculated that, if every person who had ever lived were to be given a traditional Christian burial, the graves would cover all the land in the world and their tenants would be stacked six deep. Giving humanity a proper funeral (she'd mused, scratching at the bourbon bottle label) would require creativity. Sky burial? Cremation? Cremation was cheating.
She’d settled on sea burial. Everyone would be wrapped in sailcloth with a cannonball tied to their ankles, and would be thrown overboard by whatever inherited the Earth. Moths, possibly. The result of this plan would be landscapes of cloth sack mountain ranges across the sea floor, which had struck Mag as perfectly acceptable. If humanity was to be worm food, let the worms be six feet long.
But Mag never told anyone her idea, so the worms had to live on fish bones and empty shells.
But back to work. Could a gravekeeper be a king? Mag looked up and saw a disembodied bulb of bioluminescence. The bulb was a little larger than a beach ball, but was dim enough that it illuminated nothing except itself. Mag reflexively pulled back her shadow. She could imagine what was in front of her, and didn’t particularly want to touch it.
“Are you the Lord?” said Mag.
Mag imagined its teeth parting like the blades of a threshing machine from Hell. “I am the lord of this place,” said the invisible face from behind the light. Its voice was a whispered, uninflected croak, as if these were the first words it had ever spoken.
“I come for a miracle.”
The light bobbed as the lord considered. Then it said, “I do not give gifts. Swim back to the bright waters, lost one, and make your own miracles.”
“You are not the Lord,” said Mag.
“But I am the lord of this place,” said the lord of the deep, with the finality of someone too patient and elemental to bicker. The bulb of light wafted away, eclipsed by the lord’s body at it turned. Its scales were rough and its flesh was a livid white.
“Where can I find the Lord?” Mag asked it before it could leave.
The voice was distant. “That is a secret I keep.”
“I have a secret too,” said Mag. “Let’s trade.”
“Very well.”
“I’ll go first. When I was nine I got bit by a dog during full moon. I thought I was a werewolf for nearly a week after that, and got suspended for biting people. I think that was the happiest few days of my entire life.”
“Hm,” said the lord of the deep. “Dig.”
Of course.
Mag opened her book again and flipped through it; the water didn’t touch it. After finding no digging implements or elevators, Mag gave up and turned to the back page, which was blank. On the preceding page was a picture of a pencil. She pulled it into the story, the dream, and tapped the blank page thoughtfully. What would be the fastest way down?
Mag drew a circle and filled it in. She turned the book so that the spine faced her and held the book so that it blocked her view of the sea floor in front of her. The sand hissed and flowed over her feet toward where the book faced. She closed the book, and saw that she’d made the fastest way forward, something she decided would operate on dream logic rather than what she thought of as conventional physics. A vertical chasm, and she hadn’t drawn a bottom for it. It would go down until there was no “down” left to go.
The flow of the sand pulled her off her feet. She slid into the hole and went into freefall. Come to think of it, if she hadn’t needed to set up a fairy tale narrative, she could have done this in the first place.
This would be the third lord, magic number three. Luna would approve. Couldn’t she have come up with a story that didn’t involve otherworldly royalty? She’d met so many, recently.
The worst thing about falling to the bottom of the world was that it gave her time to think, and thinking in the dark was never something Mag enjoyed. Ambrose Bierce had defined the word “alone” as “in bad company.” Mag agreed in full.
The dream shifted, light returned, and all the water was gone. She was still in freefall and the ground was a considerable distance away, but she wasn’t worried. This didn’t feel like a dying place. It felt like a dead place, and to find yourself here was to find yourself beyond all harm except inevitability.
The other end of the cave mouth was no longer above her head, only a blank gray sky. Pillars of ash-white smoke stretched from the sky to the ground, falling rather than rising, and the surface was the same shade as the smoke.
Mag landed roughly on her feet, but it didn’t hurt—there could be no suffering here except what you brought with you, and even that would be muted. There was no sensation here that wouldn’t die out in time.
The ground was soft whitish dust, the product of the pillars of falling smoke that had coated the floor of this place since the beginning of the omniverse. The surface of the dust flowed slowly, slowly, in one direction. Mag decided to follow it.
She walked without tiring, already knowing what she would find. Did she know because she’d made it or because it was already obvious to her what this place was?
The flowing dust led her to the inevitable sinkhole, wide as the base of a mountain.
The pit, the end of the story, the end of the universe. King of Kings and Lord of Lords. It didn’t think; it was the absence of thought, the absence of anything at all. Now she knew what the clouds were. In the above worlds, where things could still feel and remember and exist, each thing would live out its purpose, and when its dharma ran out it would rot. The rot would lose all character in time. Bodies turned to dust, photographs turned to dust, plants, empty bottles, discarded papers, cigarette butts, books, hopes; all stories, in the end, turned to dust and fell, kept falling and falling until they came here inside a pillar of white smoke. Eventually, every single thing would disintegrate and slip into the hole, and then the last trace of it would be gone forever.
It was time to end the story and hope for a reward.
“Are you the Lord?” asked Mag. It was a futile question, but everything was futile here. Yes, this was the Lord of creation.
“I came for a miracle.” But there was no such thing as miracles.
But the hole did have one gift to offer: whatever happened to you, you could be absolutely certain there would come a day when you and all traces of your existence would be wiped out forever.
“There is no such thing as miracles, and nowhere left to go,” said Mag, and knew the story could only end one way. She walked to the edge of the hole and looked down into it. She raised her foot to take a step—
Luna’s shadow turned jet black, threw open its wings, and wrapped Mag up like a cocoon. Mag couldn’t move.
“Absolutely not. What is wrong with you? Look up.”
The shadow unwrapped again, and Mag found herself wearing four black moth’s wings the size of sails. She took a deep breath, and flapped them once.
They wouldn’t flutter like a normal moth’s wings. They were too big for that. They would be powerful enough to let her take off, however. Mag, turning her back to the pit so she wouldn’t have to look at the thing anymore, crouched, held her wings above her head, and flapped while jumping as hard as she could.
She took off, and, taking to the air, she saw why Luna had told her to look up. In the pillars, something glowed like a star. Mag, now realizing she was fighting a downdraft, pumped her wings harder and aimed at the clouds. There was something awkward about flying in human form, but Mag tried not to think about it.
The downdraft pushed harder inside the smoke, and Mag could no longer see anything except the glow. Mag flew blindly toward the glowing speck until she had it right under her nose. She wrapped her hands around it, and felt it warm her palms.
The story ended, and Mag was sitting once again in the light of Luna’s fire, but with her hands closed in front of her.
“I think I did it,” breathed Mag.
“Mag, do humans have such a thing as psychologists?” said Luna.
“No. What’s a psychologist?”
“Liar. But time may be of the essence. Open your hands, please.”
Mag held out the glowing speck. It seemed hollow, somehow, and eerie; but noble, like the death mask of a gentle queen.
Luna leaned in to examine the speck. Mag could feel the princess’s breath on the tips of her fingers. “Ah, yes. Here we are. This, dear adventurer, is a possible solution. Close your hands again, as tightly as you possibly can. Tighter. Now… wake up.”
***
Mag woke up with her hands clenched in front of her. She sat up and opened them again, and found that the speck was still there.
“Holy shit,” said Mag.
“Indeed. Now, I haven’t yet worked out how to access your magic, but if this is at all possible then I can do it with words alone.”
“Dream-thing, can you still recognize me when there is so little left of you?” said Luna. “Wake up. Your story needn’t be over. Together we may continue, and look after one another.”
The speck began to fade.
“God-thing, to whom did you belong in life? A city? A hero? Wake again, and become the body of the wanderer Luna.”
The speck dwindled into nothing. Luna sighed.
Mag dropped her head back into the pillow. “That’s it, then?”
“For this particular plan, yes. If it is any comfort, our execution was flawless except for the part where you tried to kill yourself—don’t for a moment think I forgot that, by the way.”
“I was caught up in the mood of the place.”
“And where did that place come from? You.”
“Did it?” said Mag. “It doesn’t feel like I made that pit. It feels like I found it. And if you’d been in that place too, you would know what I’m talking about when I say that it… sort of gets into your head.”
“The distinction between finding and making can be very hazy indeed where dreams and stories are concerned, so the nature of that place is your responsibility either way. And do you recall your drawing in the back of the book, of the hole with no bottom? Yes, you created the cave with the drawing, but it could as easily be a drawing of the pit.”
“The Throne,” said Mag. “That’s its name. It’s the throne of the true god.”
“I thought it was the Lord?”
“It needs a name, so I’m giving it a name. It’s the Throne.”
“I would rather forget it than name it,” said Luna.
Mag got out of bed. She would rather not go back to sleep while Luna was scolding her. She took off her hairband and pulled a black comb out of a drawer, deciding that, after getting her hair out of her face again, she would do something about the piles of clothes. Or should she shower first?
“Hm,” said Luna. “I spy something quite interesting.”
Luna used Mag’s left hand to point at the wall. Mag saw that she still had Luna’s shadow.
“Perhaps that is where the speck went,” said Luna. “I doubt my shadow will be at full power for you outside of dreams, but it should be potent protection all the same. And—”
The shadow tilted its head without Mag moving. It opened its wings wide and then closed them.
“Ha!” said Luna. Her shadow stood up and danced a quadrupedal dance. “Look! Look at me, Mag. You can see me in the waking world, can you not?”
“I see you,” said Mag, feeling a little better. If Luna could be happy with how things had gone then maybe it wasn’t so bad.
“Let’s find Celestia and see how long it takes her to notice,” said Luna.
“Sure,” said Mag, and pulled her shoes out from under the bed.