Chapter Text
Dishonor Tremaine was a quiet baby, from the moment she was born on the third of June. When they pinched her to ensure that she was breathing, she did not cry so much as plaintively screech once and then return to her quiet. Lady Tremaine approvingly said that she had Anthony’s coolness. She also had Anthony’s eyes and, most importantly, his surname, but everything else on her resembled her mother. Anthony squeezed his lover’s hand, and she (Chinua, a daughter of the Huns) smiled tiredly, and Dizzy cooed over the baby while Anastasia cleaned it off.
It was an optimistic evening; the baby was healthy, with a name and disposition that would serve her well on the Island. They put her in a onesie that Drisella had stitched together and set her in a crib to sleep, but she was too distracted by the colorful mobile that Dizzy had made to close her eyes, so she fell asleep in Anthony’s arms instead. Her first laugh (the creation of a new fairy, if the stories were to be believed, but it was hard to believe in anything anymore) wouldn’t be for another ten months, but it was the day that she was born, the night of the third of June, that truly started things.
Exactly three people felt Something in the exact moment of the child’s birth.
One was Fauna, who was in Fairy Cottage that night and swore to Flora and Merryweather that she itched in all of the spaces between the atoms of her physical form, to which Flora suggested that she “Just have some tea, dear” and Merryweather appeared not to have heard at all, as she was busy arguing with a pizza delivery woman.
Another was Maleficent, who was a lizard at the time (she would say through no fault of her own) and found herself reaching hungrily for the swell of magic, almost imperceptible, that she felt pass over everything...until she recognized the ‘taste' of it and recoiled, deeming, in a rare instance of near-human lucidity, this new player the last thing she needed just now.
And a third was Captain Hook, who was on the Island but rather remarkably in-tune with these sorts of things. He was actually having a fairly good night, humming sea shanties to himself and tiredly contemplating his distorted reflection in the base of his hook, when suddenly he caught a chill and found himself petrified in his seat, unsure why his heart was now thudding out a warning behind his ribs and his skin had become clammy from panic. He chalked it up to madness and, trembling all over, found the nearest bottle that had a corner of rum left and downed it slowly.
It was another few minutes before anyone else felt anything.
A majority of the citizens of Neverland merely noted the unusual surplus of fairies and sprayed their repellant accordingly, but the tribes and the men who had once been Lost Boys smelled the coming of a storm of a familiar kind, wrathful rains and furious thunder, and they had their families indoors and their houses locked tight a minute before it started up (with the exception of Tootles, now named Todd, who had to hunt down one of his daughters who had been out playing with her friends and, as such, arrived at his house drenched and shaking with fear, but with his child successfully found and procured and extremely confused).
The First Lost Girl understood the signs, as well, but was not quite as worried. She did instruct Margaret to stay in for the night and called her brother to be sure that his children were accounted for, but that was only a precaution. Jane (a common name, in this case meant to refer to the daughter of Wendy) knew that no supernatural force had any reason to be angry with her, because she had never promised not to grow up. She sat in the rocking chair in Margaret’s nursery as the little girl slept, assuming the role of sentry while reading a book that had been recommended to her by her mother’s friend, Alice. The windows were all closed, but not locked.
And then, after another hour, everyone felt Something.
Evie, who was setting out her outfit for tomorrow morning, froze in place and said “Oh!” in a tone of surprise verging on slight discomfort.
“You felt that, too?” Mal asked, throwing aside the homework she’d been doodling all over and hopping out of bed. Her eyes had gone bright green; she blinked it away impatiently.
“Um…” Evie’s lips thinned for a second, her expression contemplative. Then she forced a smile. “No, I’m sure it was nothing. What did you feel?”
“I felt like I could breathe fire right here, right now, as a human,” Mal answered. The feeling had abated, though; it had only been a moment. If Evie had felt anything like it, Mal could understand why she would brush it off as imaginary.
In another room of the same Auradon Prep building, Jane (a common name, in this case meant to refer to the daughter of Fairy Godmother) was sitting between Carlos and Jay, playing a video game while they watched and provided commentary and warnings.
“Good shot,” Jay said, a moment before all three of them went rigid.
Jane’s stomach dropped with a feeling of nonsensical foreboding. “Oh,” she breathed, unknowingly in unison with Evie.
“Whoa,” Carlos marveled, smiling uncertainly.
“Wow,” Jay said. “What was that? That felt good.”
Jane found she couldn’t disagree more.
Miles away, several pirates of the Lost Revenge whispered, “Uma?” hopefully. Harry, who was overseeing the three crew members who were on Chip Shoppe duty that night, shook his head, rambling, “That’s…That ain’t her. ’S not her. Tha’s something else. Something different,” in a sort of raving manner that the others could be forgiven for not taking seriously.
The captain herself, lurking under the sea, didn’t hesitate when she felt the seemingly-sourceless surge of power. She tried to harness it, to attack the barrier, but it was like bringing a handful of water to one’s mouth to drink; by the time the hit landed, there was no longer enough power there to even leave a mark. She growled and, in her frustration, pondered the reason for the magical feeling no more. It was just another thing that hadn’t brought her back to her crew.
To some degree, every person in every kingdom felt Something the night that Dishonor Tremaine was born, but most all of them eventually went to their rooms and beds and then to sleep, overall unbothered.
Fairy Godmother, who always tried to ignore the random magical sensations she sometimes experienced (in order to set a good example) felt as though she had gone teeth-first into an ice cream cone; she shuddered and, despite already being in her nightclothes, reached for her car keys. It might do well to pop in on the Museum of Magical Artifacts; she could feel that something very dangerous was now very angry.
A random trio of merpeople happened to have a bit more insight; as they would tell King Triton later that night, they had witnessed it with their own eyes when a lone elder fairy came into its corporeal form, saw its reflection in the waters of the ocean, and screamed in anger.
…
Jane, daughter of the Fairy Godmother, was used to waking to the sound of her phone, but even before she was fully awake, she knew that something was wrong this morning. Firstly, the sound she was hearing was not her alarm sound, but her ringtone, and at that it was the ringtone specific to incoming calls from her mother.
More to the point, though, the sound was coming from below her, and she couldn’t feel her bed.
Jane opened her eyes, and her arms pinwheeled frantically as she took in the sight of her night stand two feet below her face. She was hovering midair, floating, drifting sluggishly around the room. Her heels were almost grazing the ceiling.
The urge to scream was strong, but her instinctive disinclination to be too noisy in the dorms allowed her the time to regain a level head. So to speak. She grabbed her still-ringing phone and answered it.
“Mom?” she said, her voice high with stress but still politely casual.
“Maleficent has the scepter,” Fairy Godmother said without preamble.
Possibly the only sentence that could momentarily distract Jane from her own news. A chill ran over her whole body, and...
“Mom, your voice-”
“I know,” her mother said tersely. “Just relay the message to the king. I’m on my way back from the museum.”
“Mother,” Jane said, her voice having somehow jumped an octave higher. Intuiting that her mother had been about to hang up had panicked her. “I’m floating.”
There was silence on the other end for several seconds. Then, Fairy Godmother’s voice, impossibly sad and soft, breathed out, “Oh, Bippity Boppity…Jane…Call the king. Relay the message. I’ll be there in just a few minutes; I’ll help you down, okay, sweetheart? Just stay where you are, understand me? I’ll be right there.”
Her mother’s clear distress should have stressed Jane out more, but somehow it sharpened her focus. She didn’t understand; this was weird and a little scary, but it wasn’t as much of an ordeal as her mother’s tone seemed to imply. In fact, she was almost relieved to see something of her mother’s purported power in herself. Before, Mal and Uma had been the only ones she’d seen to inherit anything of the past generation’s magical prowess. She had assumed herself disappointingly normal, but here she was, in midair…
“Jane?” her mother prompted, seeming alarmed by her silence.
“I’ll call Ben,” Jane said.
“Tell him to gather his parents and Mal and the others in his office. This is an emergency.”
…
At some point during Jane’s phone call with her mother, Uma was also woken up. In her case, what roused her was not a cell phone (certainly not, submerged as she was), but the feeling of the surface that she had been resting against suddenly vanishing. Disorientation registered for a second, before alertness shot through her:
The surface she had been leaning against had been the barrier.
It was gone.
The barrier around the Isle of the Lost was gone.
She didn’t wait to wonder why or how; she didn’t know how long it would last. She poured all of her strength into swimming the full distance to the docks. She was in. She was in. She gave no attention to the sharks that moved out of her way with delicious deference, or even to the sludge that began to populate the water as she moved in closer, despite the pollutants stinging her eyes and the murkiness making it more difficult to find the right place.
As she began to occupy tighter spaces, her tentacles receded, replaced with her much-less-powerful legs, but she was still perhaps the Isle’s best swimmer; in another ten seconds, she was pulling herself up onto the creaky dock outside the Chip Shoppe, shaking her hair out of her face for a moment before the shocked and awed faces of Bonnie and Little Ears, who had apparently taken the morning shift fishing for Cook.
“The barrier’s down,” Uma said forthrightly. “Tell the others to get to the ship.”
Little Ears took a second to marvel at her sudden appearance, but Bonnie sprang into action, tugging him after her.
Uma sprinted to the end of the one dock that provided the best vantage point to see the other side of the Isle, and her suspicion was confirmed; the bridge was not up. The barrier was down (and she could feel the magic seeping into this dry, magic-less place, confirming that the barrier was still down), but there was no magical bridge. This would give them a little time, because it meant that it would take longer for some of the Isle’s inhabitants to know that the barrier was down at all, but it also made their ship a target. Those who couldn’t swim would want to sail. The OG villains. Their children would be welcome, but the villains themselves…no, they needed to be contained.
The doors to the Chip Shoppe opened behind her, and she heard a pair of beyond-welcome voices say, “Uma?” in unison.
She turned and saw her boys. Her Harry, her Gil. Harry, dressed in darker colors than usual, like a caricature of mourning put together by someone who was simultaneously still figuring out open emotionality and out of his seafaring mind, and with his eyeliner so thick and smeared that it was a possibility that he hadn’t actually washed any off of his face in several days, but rather just applied more each morning. Gil, dressed in a particularly coherent outfit, which suggested to her that he hadn’t had to rush out of the house; Gaston was probably in his man-cave today.
Both of them had articles of clothing on that she hadn’t seen before. New shirts, new shoes...things that had been obtained in her absence. Somehow, that, and not their relieved, confused, and positively raw expressions, was what really hammered home the wrongness of them having been apart. The space between them suddenly disgusted her. Barriers. No more barriers.
She ran down the dock, and Harry raised his hook in a way that anyone else probably would have seen as threatening. Uma felt a grin split across her face, and when she arrived in their midst, she curled her finger around the hook with a look of almost crazed excitement that he readily matched.
“Uma, you’re back,” Gil said, sounding almost as though he was informing her.
She raised her free hand and dapped him up without releasing Harry’s hook, and Gil's stunned look morphed into one of such unabashed delight that she lost her train of thought for a full second.
She wished that things weren’t urgent, wished that they could just marinate in this moment and she could ensure them fully that she was here, back with them, and they could ensure her fully that they didn’t hate her for failing or for being away. She wished they could just stay and be high on the fact that they were all in one place, in one piece.
Then the second passed, and her smile dropped when she remembered. “The barrier. Guys, the barrier’s down.” She looked past them, at the crew members who were emerging from the Chip Shoppe’s exit like bubbles from the mouth of a fish. “Half of you need to get to the ship, now. Guard it; make sure no one gets on who shouldn’t, and get it ready to set sail. After ten minutes, the ship leaves no matter who’s on it.”
“Half of them?” Harry repeated.
“The other half will run retrieval,” she said. “The kids, Harry. The young ones on the streets, the ones who can’t escape their parents, even those geniuses who went and joined the Anti-Heroes. We have to get as many as we can out of here. It will take ten minutes for the ship to be ready to sail, anyway. That is, if you guys have kept it in shape.”
“It’s not fallen into disrepair,” Harry affirmed.
“Not worse than it was already, at least,” Jonas said.
“Go then,” Uma said. “Half to the streets, half to the ship.”
They went, many lightly brushing their fingers over her as they passed, soon leaving only the captain, her first mate, and her second mate standing there. Gil doubled back into the Shoppe and retrieved a sword from the Sword Check for her, and she took it. Uma glanced at the sign over the Chip Shoppe’s door one last time, wondering with dread if her mother knew that the barrier was gone and whether her mother would take the opportunity to swim free.
“You go defend the ship, Gil,” she said (instantly hearing the sound of retreating footsteps as Gil obeyed), before looking down from the sign, into Harry’s eyes, which were focused unblinkingly on hers. He would be the best to help get the ship ready to leave. The deftest hands for tying and untying ropes, the most familiar with the anatomy of seacraft. And as long as he got on the ship now, then he was guaranteed to make it out, as long as the barrier stayed open for another few minutes. Oh, if it closed and they didn’t make it out… “You, too,” she managed to say. “Get the ship ready. Make sure at least some of us sail out of here. I’ll go round up some kids and send them your way. Make sure to set sail in ten minutes, no matter what, okay?”
His expression was hard. He knew what she was asking of him. She was asking him to prioritize the kids and the crew and himself over her, over them together. To save the Anti-Heroes Club, potentially at the expense of his captain. She was asking him to be a hero for her, and she hated it, and he hated it, and maybe this would be the time when he would say no, would defy her outright.
“Aye aye, Captain,” he said hoarsely, and he left.
Her hero.
Nah. Never that.
She made for the streets, running through the list in her head of kids who her crew might forget. Above her, the canopy of clouds that had hovered over the Isle for all these years began to break apart.
…
Jay overslept, because he was dreaming that he was locked in his father’s junk chest.
That was the chest in which Jafar had kept old, broken things, bits and bobs and parts and scraps, that could be used to fix the steals that were mostly intact. He had swiped things from that chest to give to Carlos, before, since his friend had always been curious about the inner workings of tools and machines, and Jafar had once threatened to lock Jay inside it for a night, but he had never done it. Jay was too sly to let himself get caught for the same thing twice, and at that point had been too quick and strong to be worth disciplining anyway.
But in the dream, he was locked in the chest. It was…hot. And musty. And cramped. The edges of various objects digging into his skin, barely enough room to breathe, and he knew, in the ridiculous sort of way that one knew things in dreams, that he had the strength to break the chest apart from the inside, if he just pushed hard enough. He pushed, straining his every muscle, exploiting every angle...He could faintly hear Carlos’s voice outside the box, calling him:
“Jay? Jay?!”
If only he could manage to-
And suddenly, his eyes flew open, the dream folding entirely. Hands were shaking him, and they must have belonged to Carlos because that was Carlos’s voice- he’d know it anywhere -but he couldn’t see through the red smoke that was filling the room.
He coughed and rose lithely from his bed, grabbing onto Carlos to be sure he didn’t lose him. But it didn’t seem like there was a fire or anything. Just smoke. “Aw, geez. Chad try to microwave popcorn again?”
“It’s coming from you,” Carlos said.
Jay let go of his friend. “What do you mean it’s coming from me?”
“I mean it was issuing from your body while you were sleeping. See, it’s clearing now.”
So it was. Enough that Jay could see that, despite his vaguely annoyed tone, Carlos looked extremely worried. Was it possible that…that Jay had actually been…?
Then a shrill ringing had them both covering their ears. Dude whined and scurried under the bed.
The smoke alarm. Of course.
“They’re gonna think we were smoking weed in here,” Jay groaned, hoping the insane explanation that his body had merely been producing smoke on its own would save his spot on the tourney team.
“Forget that,” Carlos said. “We’ve got to tell Mal about this.”
Jay snorted. Carlos was all kinds of smart and fun to be around, but having been the smallest of the four for so long had made him quite the little kiss-up. It was always “We have to tell Mal”, “Does Mal know?”, “I agree with Mal”. Sort of adorable.
“Oh yeah, she loves being woken up early in the morning,” he said sarcastically.
“It’s after ten; she should be up. Come on, let’s go to the girls’ room.”
They left the room, walking against the current of people who were heeding the smoke alarm and flocking outside.
Incidentally, the girls were not in their room; they were in King Ben’s office, having been able to notice and read the text message summoning them because their bedroom had not been smoking.
That isn’t to say that they didn’t have problems of their own, though; no amount of blinking was returning Mal’s eyes to their default color, and Evie was beginning to panic over her inability to return her skin to its normal shade; it had turned blue to match her pajamas, earlier, and it was now a sort of blue-and-red plaid to match her blue dress and her red purse and shoes.
“From the reports we’ve received, it seems like this isn’t an isolated incident,” Ben said. “There was an unexplained surge of magic at four this morning. It’s been impossible to get in contact with any of the other kingdoms, but we know from Audrey that Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather have been frantic; she said she called them, like she does every morning, and they were barely coherent. She said they were all talking over each other and that it sounded like they were panicking about their magic, and then the phone cut off. Fairy Godmother called Jane from the Museum and told her that…that Maleficent has taken her scepter back.”
“So she’s the one who's doing this to us?” Evie asked, looking to Mal who had gone as white as a ghost.
“No way,” Mal said uncertainly. “There’s…there’s no way. I would have noticed if she wasn’t in her cage, wouldn’t I?”
“Not if she got out while you were sleeping,” Ben said gently. “When I texted you to come here, you were just waking up; you were still reacting to your eyes and Evie’s skin, and you came straight here when you saw my text.”
“But if my mom…If Maleficent came back into power, why didn’t she end us then? I mean, she was in my room. She could have just gotten rid of me, and Evie. Why would she leave us?”
“Maybe she learned to love,” Ben suggested. “Maybe that’s why she came back.”
That was when Fairy Godmother and Jane arrived, and everybody gasped when they saw how the former hobbled in, her hair white, her face lined. Not the fairly-young headmistress they knew, but every bit the old woman who had gotten Cinderella ready for the ball, even to the point of being dressed in a hooded cloak.
“Fairy Godmother?” Belle said, her eyes as wide as saucers.
“This is Maleficent’s doing,” Fairy Godmother replied, and even her voice sounded old, barely like herself. “We don’t have time for questions, so I’ll explain everything now. Where are Carlos and Jay?”
“Thought we didn’t have time for questions,” Mal muttered.
“We’ve been calling them,” Evie said. “Over and over again, but they haven’t answered.”
“Calling is no good; there’s a smoke alarm going off in the dorms. I doubt they can hear you.”
“Fairy Godmother, can you fix this?” Evie asked, desperately holding out her still-patterned arms.
“Only you can fix it, because only you made it happen.”
“What do you m-?”
“No time for questions!” Fairy Godmother reached into her cloak and pulled out her magic wand.
“Fairy Godmother, that belongs in the Museum,” the Beast chastened.
“Not anymore it doesn’t. Maleficent has the scepter, and she’s even more powerful than before. Zip!” she added when everyone in the room tried to question her. “Just let me…Bippity Boppity Boo!”
With a flourish of her wand, Jay and Carlos appeared in the office, both looking startled and holding each other.
“Good. Everyone’s here,” Fairy Godmother said dryly. “Have a seat. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
…
It was a slow morning for fortune-telling in Celia's alley. The uptick in customers she’d had in the immediate aftermath of Cotillion was a distant memory; hope had gone out of style again, in Uma’s absence.
Celia liked Uma, but she also liked winning, and everyone knew it was the Good Guys who won. (That was why they were all here, after all; Good triumphed over Evil.) And Uma couldn’t shake the villain aesthetic, no matter how often she broke the mold and did lowkey heroic stuff. So Celia stayed neutral, instead of aligning specifically with Team Uma or Team Whoever.
But anyway, that still left her…here. At her table, with her cards, waiting for a taker. Normally she made sure to sit up straight and keep her expression cryptic, so that anyone who rounded the corner would think that she had been expecting them. But today she sat with her face on the table and her fingertips idly skimming the cards. There was a sensation there that was entrancing her; something like static electricity between the cards and her hand. She sat up to inspect…
And then she saw a shadow on the wall to her left. A human shadow.
Oh good; somebody's coming, she thought with glee. “Would you like to have your fortune read?”
The shadow tilted its head, then nodded.
She beamed and looked to see who was rounding the corner, but there was no one. Nobody casting the shadow, just…a shadow, by itself, appearing to watch her (as much as something with no eyes or obvious facial features could watch anything).
She stared for a few seconds, then waved at it.
It waved back.
Okay.
She returned to her place, and fanned out her cards. She had promised it a fortune, after all, not that she knew how it intended to pay her. Running her fingers over the top edges for a few seconds, she pulled…
The Life card.
And because (as was sometimes the case) she could feel that she wasn’t done, she pulled another card.
Power.
Life and Power.
She set the cards down on the table.
Normally this was the point at which she gave her interpretation.
(On her end, they were mostly guesses, but they tended to be right like the cards tended to be appropriate. It never felt magical; just lucky, on a consistent basis. It had earned her some notoriety, when she had started fortune-telling as a little girl, giving predictions like “You’ll be getting some very bad news very soon,” and then when they actually happened, people had been furious, proclaiming that she had cursed them. The accusations hadn’t been good for business, but they had been good for making sure that she was left alone, for the most part, when she ran her errands. To the best of her knowledge, the rumors had died out now that it was clearer than ever that curses did not work on the Isle, full stop period. But that didn’t mean she didn’t still feel powerful when she made some casual statement and it ended up coming true.)
But at this moment, rather than ramble out whatever interpretation came naturally to mind, she felt like she had been punched in the chest. She inhaled sharply, and when she exhaled, the only word that she could find it in herself to say was, “Birth.”
The shadow nodded sagely, then clapped for her, odd soundless applause.
Celia pocketed her cards and walked up to touch it, but felt only the wall. The wall and maybe something like the static she’d felt from the cards earlier, but a little different. The shadow’s head bent, as if it was looking down at where her hand was touching its stomach. She retracted her arm, as it occurred to her that it was probably as rude to just reach out and touch a shadow as it was to touch any human stranger.
Her daddy had taught her better.
“Are you a Friend?” she asked.
The shadow nodded.
Celia moved to stand in such a way that her shadow stood facing the personless shadow, and in roughly the correct size proportion. She reached out her hand, and the Friend shook the hand of her shadow. A thrill shot through her, watching her shadow shake hands with another shadow while she stood completely still, her hand outstretched.
Then suddenly, the Friend ran off down the street, dragging her shadow by hand after it.
“Hey! That's mine!” she shouted, and made chase, barely breaking pace long enough to turn the ‘Fortune-Teller Is:’ sign to ‘Out’.
It wasn’t easy to keep up; the streets were crowded, even more so than usual. Maybe normally she might be curious as to what was going on that had everybody out and about, but at the moment she was preoccupied by her own little situation. She absentmindedly slapped away each hand that tried to steal her cards from her pocket and kept her eyes on the departing dark shapes.
The Friend should have outrun her easily, but it kept stopping to let her catch up, only to speed off again. It was playing with her. Making a game of it.
I ain’t losing to no shadow, she thought, smirking.
She climbed up the drainpipe of Yzma’s place and ran across the rooftops, where there was no foot traffic. She soon found herself closing in on them, only for her own shadow to point her out to the Friend, alerting it to her progress, and for them to shoot forward with renewed speed.
“Traitor!” she called down at her own shadow, which only pointed and laughed at her as they all but flew down to the street.
She was tempted to laugh, herself, but to do so would mess up her rhythm. Her feet pounded on the roofing.
Then, with a sudden squeamish feeling, she noticed where the shadows’ path seemed to be leading:
They were approaching one of the dimmer parts of the Isle: the broken docks near the wooded area where the hyenas and other villainous animals liked to lurk. Not Uma’s docks, but the utterly trash-filled docks on the opposite side, where the darkest of deals were made and the unloved dead were dumped.
Celia jumped down onto an abandoned kiosk, determined to catch up to the shadows before they reached the awful place. Her shadow finally demonstrated some reluctance to side with the stranger; it started to drag its feet and reach for her, but the other shadow refused to slow down.
“Hey, Friend!” Celia called, her trepidation increasing as the streets grew more and more sparsely populated. They were too close, too close to the bad docks. The shadows rounded a corner, out of sight. “Come back!”
She was abruptly stopped by a hand closing painfully around her arm, followed by another hand pressing a knife to her throat from behind. Big hands, rough hands. Too strong to break free of, even if one didn’t count the knife. Celia’s heartbeat stuttered. Near-empty streets and a big, strong guy with a knife. Not great. Given the part of town she was in, he was probably either one of the servants of Chernabog, or someone who made deals with the servants of Chernabog. Not strictly an enemy to her father, but there was no love lost there.
“Your daddy didn’t tell you not to come to places like this?” The voice was so low as to sound gravelly. “Shouting for attention like an Auradon princess.”
And now Celia’s mind blanked in the worst way, leaving only panic. This man knew who she was, or else he wouldn't have referenced her dad at all. He knew, and he didn’t care.
She pushed aside her fear; there was no room for it. Fear never added a coin to anyone’s pocket. “Well, my grandmama was a voodoo queen, so call me what you want.”
The man did not appreciate the boast; he twisted her arm and pressed the blade more firmly, bringing tears to her eyes. “You VK brats. All legacy, no skill. I wonder if Facilier would pay more for your return than I would get pawning your organs.”
The shadows swooped back into view, apparently having noticed that she had stopped chasing them. Celia leveled her gaze on where she imagined her shadow’s eyes to be, and determination sank into her. In a cool voice, she instructed, “Come.”
Her shadow moved with impossible speed and agility, contorting in ways she had never seen in her real body. It closed the distance between them, grabbed the shadow of the knife from the shadow of the man, and the real knife clattered to the ground; it tackled the man’s shadow to the cracked street, her hands around his neck, and the real man fell at the same time, the wind knocked out of him.
Celia was almost too amazed at her shadow's rescue to run away, but she saw the Friend in her peripheral vision, waving for her to follow it to the bad docks.
And because the few others on the street were staring at her with palpable hostility and blocking the way from which she’d come, she actually did.
She followed the Friend around the corner and down a grassy slope, soon accompanied by her shadow, which seamlessly resumed mimicking her movements like a normal shadow. Back in the area they'd just left, voices started screaming, in fear or pain or something, and Celia wasn't the least bit curious what was happening to them. (Maybe they'd started fighting amongst themselves or something.) She followed the Friend all the way to the smelly, murky docks, where she was surprised to see no trash, no decaying corpses, and no people doing high crimes. It was empty, and silent but for the faint sound of water lapping lazily at wooden posts.
And it wasn’t dark. It wasn’t even dim. It was bathed in more light than she’d ever seen on the Isle, so much that her eyes squinted, and the sky was a vivid blue that she’d only seen in fabrics and poisons before, and the clouds, far from filling the sky, were small and puffy and white. It was like the sky on Auradonian TV, but better. Clearer. Almost too beautiful to bear.
“Friend?” she breathed, tears running down her face for a different reason than before. Of course she didn’t get an audible answer, and she didn’t look for the Friend’s physical response- not when the sky was so beautiful that it felt like blinking might make it go away, turn back to gray and misery and dimness. “This is different.”
It was more than just the sky. It was her senses themselves. It was like she could smell life and death and something else that was like a thick gloss over everything, sweet and sour and bitter and hot and cold and itchy and tickly and…Magic. That was what it was. Magic was here, for the first time. No. Not for the first time. It was back, after a too-long sleep. Blood coursing suddenly through the veins of a long dead animal.
She wanted to pull it towards her, to let it coat her completely like a second skin. Lacking the ability to do that, she instead just basked in it, familiarized herself with the way it moved and pulsed. When she managed to pull her eyes away from the sky, she noticed how the magic seemed to react strongly to her shadow Friend, radiated from it and orbited it and recoiled from it, where in comparison it seemed to pass her by near-indifferently. And the Friend just lay there on the dock, arms crossed behind its head, once even picking its nose with a pinkie finger.
“You’re a powerful Friend, aren’t you,” she marveled, and the shadow visibly preened at her compliment.
Then suddenly, it was like the static electricity she’d felt earlier had become a smell and was filling her lungs. The magic that had been swirling around the shadow and bouncing off of it now went wild, and Celia stiffened as a voice said, “You think that’s good? Wait’ll ya see.”
Before she could whip around to see who had spoken, the magic was pulled over her like a shade, fantastic and overwhelming and everywhere. Her legs buckled, and she was caught by someone who smelled like…birth. And death. And every horror in-between.
The magic was a gloss over her mind, slowing everything down and making it smooth and soft.
She was already too far gone to try to get a look at the entity that was holding her; all she managed was to deliriously mumble, “Daddy…” and then slip entirely into sleep.