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Glimmer takes lunch in an empty ballroom, where the ceilings are high and the space is wide and open and ill-wrought beginner’s spells can go blitzing from wall to wall without adverse consequences. This is how she’s taken her lunch every afternoon since that stupid argument with Adora. She has cake nabbed from the main kitchen that’s all gone to crumb, and an ewer full of ice water that has, by now, fully melted. Shadow Weaver finds her practicing illusions: tiny hooves parading across crescent-shaped carrara tiles, leaving sparkling imprints where the sole and the marble make contact. Sparklets shake and fall, noiselessly, from the conjurate’s fur. Glimmer made a baby cervid with four eyes. It leaps, and its shimmer lags behind it. It’s an extinct species, driven to starvation by the Horde’s rampant deforestation.
It is sunhigh-bright. The windows are carved hardstone, so the light spills on the floor in the shape of flat, puddly diamonds. Right now, somewhere, in broad daylight, the Horde is killing people. And getting away with it.
“I was wondering where you’d slipped off to,” Shadow Weaver says. Normally she enters rooms all slinky, but she’s holding a clay pot with a bonsai on her hip and it makes her gait as awkward as anyone’s would be. Glimmer startles and her cervid’s trot stops. She unflexes and the illusion disappears. Even its sparklets blink to nothing on the floor.
Somewhere—probably from Aunt Casta, but it could have been from Shadow Weaver—Glimmer heard that Dad had mastered illusions before he turned thirteen. She thinks she’s doing well for someone with nearly zero formal training in sorcery, but still. Her skin is tender, chafing from constant veiled—and not-so-veiled—comparisons to her mother. She’s embarrassed. She didn’t want Shadow Weaver to see until she was already getting it mostly right.
“Don’t let me interrupt you,” Shadow Weaver says, “Ì was just looking for a cool place to work, at least while the sun is at its highest.”
“Not a summer person?”
“It does terrible things to my complexion.”
That’s a joke, Glimmer knows, but the low, confident drone with which she delivers it makes the punchline come at a delay. Glimmer gestures, like, ‘sit anywhere’—she wanted to practice in private, but now that Shadow Weaver’s here Glimmer doesn’t feel like kicking her out again. Her mother’s gone, her friends aren’t talking to her, she’s eaten alone for the past week, and there’s something about another warm body in the room. Or… no. She has guards and servants, but there’s something about a warm body that’s also willing to tell you no. Isn’t that what she likes about Bow and Adora, at the end of the day? Just picturing Adora is raising her blood pressure, though, so she lets the thought slip back into whichever part of your mind thoughts go when you don’t let yourself fully think them.
Shadow Weaver finds a wall and sits with the bonsai in her lap. Glimmer draws a shape in the air and another illusion is birthed from it. It stumbles youngly and flickers like an old lamp. She twitches her fingers and makes its legs move, but she doesn’t quite have it down yet. Each limb strides a little bit out of time with the others, like First Ones’ tech when it’s gone glitchy. Uncanny valley, terrible portent.
“You’re close,” Shadow Weaver says. “Let me help you.”
Glimmer drops her hand and the illusion fades. She wipes her brow with her forearm and crosses the room, first to her sweating ewer—downing what’s left of it, replenishing the water she’s lost to perspiration. Then she approaches Shadow Weaver and crouches in front of her. Shadow Weaver fingers each tender leaf of her bonsai like she can tell the healthy from the diseased with just a tickle. One sprout does not pass inspection; clippers slip from her sleeve and she cleaves it. Should she have access to sharp objects? Adora’d be pissed about that. Glimmer sets her ewer on the marble and the clack echoes. She wishes she could see whatever’s going on beneath that mask: is Shadow Weaver’s brow furrowed, her invisible feelers catching an imperfection, signs of internal rot? Does she smile, now or ever? At minimum she often sounds like she might be smirking. Shadow Weaver moves the pot from her lap to the floor and claps dirt off her hands. Then she extends her hands outward, downturned.
“Show me what you’re doing,” she says.
Glimmer strips her gloves off and offers her own. Shadow Weaver’s hands are rough, just like Glimmer’s are; it took until Glimmer was thirteen to learn how to keep her spark at length, and there are burn scars, as a result, quilting the crinkles of her upturned palm: pale, raised carpenter’s stars, not ugly. She has poor sensation in her hands as a consequence. When Shadow Weaver drags her fingers down from Glimmer’s lumbricals to her eminence, Glimmer feels it like this: badum-badum-badum, like wheels rolling over old wood slats. Something, nothing, something, nothing. With her free hand Glimmer molds the light in the air and brings an illusion to life.
“Here’s a trot.” Glimmer demonstrates by moving her fingers up and down. Shadow Weaver presses her finger into the center of Glimmer’s palm and Glimmer’s hand instinctively curls. The illusion spasms. A doctor’s hammer and a flinching knee. Shadow Weaver’s mask makes her undivinable, but whatever she’s searching for, she seems satisfied. Her weight shifts back and her shoulders slope down.
“Your form is good, but your fingers are too tense. Relax your muscles.” Shadow Weaver presses a point on Glimmer’s hand and the muscles in it instantly go slack. Freaky! But she understands: the illusion’s movements stutter for a moment and then get nice and buttery. “Your control will improve the more you practice. But tell me: what good are children’s illusions when you’re face-to-face with a Horde soldier?”
The reprimand is completely unfair, Glimmer thinks. This isn’t any kind of formal training session and she’s on her lunch break. But Shadow Weaver’s fingers trace her cheek before she even opens her mouth to voice her indignation. “You misunderstand, my Queen—what good are children’s illusions when you’re face-to-face with a Horde soldier?”
Ah, Glimmer says, not with her voice but with the shape of her mouth. Glimmer doesn’t have to think for more than a second or two. “Obfuscation. Distraction—”
“And when you’ve sight of a commanding officer, a small, well-placed illusion can be devastating. Now let’s say the target of your psychological warfare is an entire army. How would you apply the same principle at scale?”
“We could make our own army seem bigger. That’d really put a dent in their morale. It’d be hard to control that many individual illusions, but if they’re all marching in time…”
“Or manipulate Catra into splitting her forces,” Shadow Weaver says. “By the time she realizes half her people have been chasing ghost troops, her situation is unrecoverable."
“Can you do something like that?” She knows it’s a stupid question—what can’t Shadow Weaver do?—but it’s hard to imagine conjuring multiple troops, Glimmer panting as hard as she is from just baby animals.
Shadow Weaver glances down at Glimmer’s spark-scars. “I could with the Black Garnet.”
Glimmer nods; her neck is hot and she’s already dehydrated again, but this is why she loves Shadow Weaver—loves training with Shadow Weaver, she means. Frustration has morphed into something fresher. Her vigor is renewed.
“Are you ready? The amount of energy necessary will scale with size and complexity.”
“Nothing to do but try, right? We can start with a squad and go from there.”
“Inhale.”
Shadow Weaver’s fingers trace back up, eminence to lumbricals, and Glimmer shivers. They stand, face-to-face, and they both breathe deep; magic coats the alveoli. Home is in their lungs. That’s only half a metaphor. This is the magic of Etheria, their world. Glimmer can’t feel it yet, but there’s a stake through its heart, and it’s crying.
They sit with it long enough that Glimmer’s face starts to look a little blue, then—“Release.”
Out they come, libations pouring forth from the font of the planet, each of their palms dripping with light. Glimmer, the princess-come-queen of light, is more deft at shaping it than average, but she’d be defter if Mom had let her go to Mystacor, to follow in Dad’s footsteps. She feels like an idiot next to Shadow Weaver, who shapes the light with insulting ease: spooling it into rune-shapes like she’s playing cat’s cradle, like any child could do it.
When their hands come down, the room is populated with ten or twenty people, uncanny figures standing stock-still in their standard-issue Bright Moon armor. At least their faces are covered. Glimmer’s are flickering and their boots seem to be melting into the floor. Five seconds of holding the illusion and Glimmer already shakes. She strains her fingers like she’s hanging on the edge of a cliff with them… then her grip breaks, snap, snap, snap. Her ghost soldiers dissipate, and she doubles over, breathing hard, holding her knees to keep upright.
Shadow Weaver lets her own illusion hang for a moment longer just to show how effortless this is for her. She rests a tentative hand on Glimmer’s bowed head when she lets it drop.
“That was a very impressive first try,” Shadow Weaver says. Placatingly, which only makes Glimmer want to swat Shadow Weaver’s hand away.
“I pulled too much from myself,” Glimmer pants, “and not enough from the Moonstone. I get it now. One more time.”
“You are tired, my Queen. You’d been training for a long time already when I arrived. Rest, and we can return to this tomorrow.”
“We don’t have time for me to be tired. We’ve been up on the Horde since we ran them out of the Whispering Woods, but the longer we wait, the staler that advantage gets. This is the first plausible tactic we’ve thought of in weeks. One more time.”
Shadow Weaver doesn’t argue. They square up again, and the light comes.
Glimmer finally understands just how potent the Moonstone is, now that she no longer has to recharge to use it, and she wonders: was Mom scared? Knowing what Dad could do, what Glimmer might be willing to do, imagining the intersection of his skill and her power? Glimmer misses Mom horribly. None of their arguments ever saw closure. The light sieves through her fingers and scorches the yet-unscarred flaps of skin between them. Fuck, no—she thinks about Mom too hard and now she wants to cry and the energy crests—too much, too hot, the light spills all over the floor and burns everything and expands and spiders around the room and Glimmer can’t control it; she flinches and pulls her hands away—
Shadow Weaver yanks Glimmer’s hands back and clamps them between her own.
The light slips out of her, suctioned; all the heat is gone; the shock is frostbitten. Glimmer’s vision goes dark and she sees without seeing: arms and hands, fractal sprouting stalks of them. Grabbing, jerking, wrenching, reaching. Red, tumorrific eye-boils with treasure-mark pupils. From the center of Glimmer’s palms it feels like the Moonstone is leaking out of her. The figure before her cannot speak but she can hear its thoughts and it’s practically screaming, want need take mine mine mine mine mine mine mine—
Enough, another thought gravels. This second thought pushes the mass away only briefly, and with noticeable strain. For a moment Glimmer can feel it, too. Mathematical equations, combinatorial rune tables memorized. Dad’s face, thirteen; Adora’s face, just a baby; Glimmer’s face, days after her mother’s funeral, eyes bloodshot from crying all night but her mouth set in a strong, determined line. Shadow Weaver’s many fears: Hordak, angry; the Horde, marching, and Mystacorians on the field, last-ditch attempts at warding spells painted on the grass in their own blood. Their stupidity. A hot spit of anger that wants to swallow everything: pointless deaths, guilt at having been party to them; pride in her own ingenuity, in being the cause.
The connection cuts and they stumble apart. Glimmer finds herself on the floor. If she was breathing hard before, she’s downright anaphylactic now. She chokes a few times on nothing before she remembers how to make the air go down. Shadow Weaver catches herself on a nearby column. Her eyes are round, shocked—how does Glimmer know that?—and then she smooths her expression over, even though the mask obscures it—how does Glimmer know that?
“Forgive me,” Shadow Weaver says. Or doesn’t say. It’s so quiet that it might have been the window panes creaking. Glimmer can’t imagine Shadow Weaver uses those words in that order very often.
“It’s fine,” Glimmer says quickly. It’s not, obviously, and her mind keeps playing it like a looping record, an itch too deep in to be scratched. Mystacorians on the field, blood pooling under their bodies. Guilt. Pride. Anger. Exaltation. What had happened? What had—what? “It is, really. Let’s just—I’m a little dizzy, so give me a few seconds to calm down, then we can talk about what went wrong—”
But the last thing Shadow Weaver wants to do is stick around and wait for Glimmer to calm down and talk about what went wrong. She’s not tired; she feels it buzzing between each layer of dermis: the stolen power. The Moonstone is not native to her physiology so it barks and slavers for release. Glimmer doesn’t know how she knows all this, but in the tick of two seconds a silent agreement is reached between them, and Shadow Weaver slips away, leaving her clay pot and bonsai knocked sideways on the floor.
♠
Misfortune’s silver lining is that no one bothers Glimmer between the ballroom and the kitchen. She’s losing a war and she’s an orphan twice over, so if she looks a little sick and a lot tired, nobody’s going to think anything of it, and she was a princess of Bright Moon a long time before she was its queen, so every guard and servant in the castle already knows she’s not to be henned at when she’s in a bad mood. She drops her ewer and her empty cake-platter back in the kitchen and the day’s cook doesn’t even glance at her. Then she uses the last of her energy to blink back to her bedroom, falling into her mattress without bothering to pull the covers over herself, falling into a deep, immediate sleep.
Glimmer has weird dreams. She only remembers the last one; she sits in the center of some reception in Mystacor and makes small talk with a graying man in a red-and-gold set of robes. A toddler darts between her ankles, and it takes every bit of self-control not to rap the little brat on the ear or kick her out from under the table. The graying man spares dream-Glimmer a strained smile. “You’ll be an uncompromising mother one day, Light Spinner,” he tells her. Glimmer feels her mouth open and hears a familiar voice say, “Let Despondos freeze over before any of you say my name in conjunction with the word mother,” which earns a few chuckles around the table, but she’s looking across the room when she says it, where fat-cheeked Micah is showing all the other juveniles how to trace out rune shapes with their hands.
It’s already past dark when Glimmer wakes up from her nap. Her stomach feels sharp and she thinks she should get up and grab dinner, but at some point in the evening she’d wrapped a blanket around herself and it’s soft and warm and she feels good, if a bit heavy-boned.
Sleep the night through, a thought suggests. It’s there and gone: the thought equivalent of a nip at her earlobe.
She feels around for the corduroy rabbit that she usually keeps on her bed and pulls it close to her chest. Were she totally lucid she’d feel a little embarrassed snuggling up to a children’s toy, especially while she has a guest hanging around in her brain, but she’s too deep in the twilight to care about anything but her creature comforts, so she presses her nose into the toy’s stitching and breathes it all in. Mom gave it to her when she was little and it’s still got all her smells in it: unrolled lint, sweet berry hand lotion, a smear of chocolate truffle and freshly-laundered chiffon. The scents of home.
She pictures Dad, a little older than he was in the dream but not by a lot: eleven and a few months, clutching a beat-up rabbit stuffie of his own. He’s tangled in his blankets and his knuckles are bloodless from clenching. Fire alarms ring down the Mystacorian dormitories. The medic gave him some herbal sedatives after he sustained a bad injury in a sports game, and even with that ungodly noise he manages to keep on sleeping. Glimmer imagines scooping him into her arms. He’s so… small, in Glimmer’s imagination. Light as a feather. She sees and feels this as vividly as a memory.
♠
The twilight feeling ends when Glimmer awakes and remembers: Mystacorians on the battlefield, the white scream of laser rifles, shaking panicky half-runes drawn in blood. How does Shadow Weaver cope with seeing this in her head every day? More importantly: Shadow Weaver did this. Not single-handedly, but she gave coordinates, knew the insides and outsides of Mystacor’s many warding measures and made sure her intel package had every detail accounted for. This was how she first earned Hordak’s favor. Dad and Casta were there during the attack! Casta was a little kid and Dad was barely a teenager! Suddenly Adora’s objections to her and Shadow Weaver’s arrangement seem more than reasonable. Glimmer’s stomach flips and flips.
A thought flits by, terse: none of this information is actually new.
It takes Glimmer a moment to tease this thought apart and recognize it as foreign. It’s not like she’s hearing Shadow Weaver’s voice in her head. It bobs unobtrusively in the same mental gestation fluid from which all thoughts emerge; if not for the intonation, it’d be indistinguishable from the laundry list of intrusive thoughts that form and echo around and die in the space between her ears. Normally she’d chalk this-and-all-the-rest up to stress-induced neurosis, but given the circumstances…
Glimmer thinks, What’s going on? What did you do to me?! and directs it vaguely outward, toward the idea of Shadow Weaver.
I’m projecting my mental landscape onto yours. I must, as a barrier; the alternative is worse.
Glimmer thinks how, then she imagines yesterday’s incident, but from the reverse POV: all the light spilling everywhere, Glimmer’s face frozen in a confused, fearful contort. Her hands—Shadow Weaver’s hands—reaching out to absorb the excess energy. Glimmer thinks why, and she sees again the twining tendrils, red eyes pulsing, probing, hooking on, refusing to let go, want need take mine—
Glimmer rolls out of bed and blinks safely upright before she hits the floor. Shadow Weaver stutters excuses as she storms around for her boots. Glimmer’s thoughts are barely coherent: it’s a bubbling brew of just like when you drained me in the Fright Zone and just like when you tortured me with the Black Garnet and I was an idiot and how could you and I trusted you. She demands, Where are you? Shadow Weaver clearly doesn’t want to answer but it seems she has no choice; the royal gardens flash for an instant in Glimmer’s mind’s eye.
Glimmer is there as soon as she’s pulled her boots on, fist up and full of sparkle.
Shadow Weaver’s clippers make a soft, tamping sound as they fall from her sleeve and onto the soil beneath her. She freezes, hunched over a bed of henbane. “Explain everything, now, or else,” Glimmer barks.
Shadow Weaver cautiously uncurls herself and says, “Your Majesty, can we not discuss this peacefully? I promise I am not your enemy.” At the same time Glimmer hears something akin to, Just my luck to jump from an insecure, unstable tyrant to an insecure, unstable teenaged tyrant and Moons forbid she listen for five fucking seconds before threatening to melt my face off.
Glimmer blinks back for a second. Her first instinct is to snap, “I’m not unstable,” but the spark sits hot in her still-raised palm. Flustered, she lowers her fist and lets it extinguish. Shadow Weaver, meanwhile, shifts uncomfortably. She didn’t want Glimmer to hear that. She doesn’t want Glimmer to hear this, either: the ruminations on what she does and doesn’t want Glimmer to hear.
What a trainwreck. Seriously.
“Half my power lies in deception and manipulation,” Shadow Weaver says. The frankness is jarring, but she doesn’t exactly have a choice, does she? “What could I possibly gain from letting you read my mind?”
“But how do I know this is all unfiltered? You could be projecting your thoughts selectively, tricking me into thinking it was an accident—”
Against her will Glimmer remembers: she’s shorter than she is now and her hands are gray and lithe and yet scarless. Her right hand is splayed atop a squirrel’s chest and a rune is burned into its fur, right beneath the star-points of her fingers. Its muscles are spasming and it’s blinking at her with its three round, winterberry eyes and its heart is beating erratically in its ribcage. Someone shouts, “Light Spinner! You’re hurting it!” before a strong pair of arms hook around her middle and drag her away. “I wasn’t trying to,” she hears herself say, hiccuping, infanta-voiced, frantic. “I just wanted to see if the spell would work—I wasn’t trying to!”
“Okay!” Glimmer shuts her eyes tight, as if that’s any defense. She doesn’t actually want to see Shadow Weaver’s most intimate memories, even as proof that Shadow Weaver isn’t doing this on purpose. Her own shameful memories are starting to surface; she has enough perspective to recognize that they’re nowhere near as bad as Shadow Weaver’s but that doesn’t mean she wants to broadcast them any more than Shadow Weaver does. Her final argument with her mother is starting to play sound bites in her head. “Okay, you’ve made some strong points. Now how do we fix this?”
“I’m working on it.” Blessedly, this interrupts Glimmer’s train of thought with images of tomes, margin-to-margin in byzantine equations, archaic rune patterns and all manner of miscellanea thieved from the vaults of Mystacor.
“Is that what those yellow flowers are for?”
“Yes,” Shadow Weaver says curtly. Of course, she’s incapable of not elaborating—henbane is a powerful deliriant, and thus a useful component in any spell that requires the manipulation of a mental link.
A rustling branch interrupts them. Bow pops his head between some foliage. His expression is concerned, but not too concerned, which means he can’t have heard too much. If they were even speaking out loud. There were points where it was disturbingly hard to tell.
“Princess Alliance meeting.” Bow is obviously addressing Glimmer, but he still nods his head at Shadow Weaver because he’s polite. Glimmer curses. She had forgotten.
Glimmer goes with any parting words. What would be the point when Shadow Weaver can literally read her thoughts? ‘Parting’ isn’t the most accurate vocabulary word, anyway. She grabs Bow by the shoulders and teleports them both to the war room. Glimmer may suddenly be hundreds of meters away from Shadow Weaver’s body, but Shadow Weaver’s mind hasn’t gone anywhere.
“Princess Alliance meeting,” Glimmer echoes. They won’t notice how shaky she is if she just jumps straight into it. “What’s on the agenda?”
The usual suspects make a half-circle around the table: Frosta, Mermista, Perfuma, Adora. They were talking amongst themselves before Glimmer blinked in and it takes a minute for their voices to die down. Frosta is stiffer than usual, but not as stiff as Adora, who snaps, “You’re late,” before anyone even has a chance to fill Glimmer in.
“I had to consult Shadow Weaver about something.”
Adora mutters something snarky about this—Glimmer doesn’t even hear what it is but it makes her want to grab her by the collar anyway. Say it out loud, she nearly barks. Just say that you don’t trust me. Lay all your stupid grievances on that war table and see if anyone else agrees with you. But before Glimmer can get too worked up she’s confronted with another mental image: six-year-old Adora shivering under a gray, Horde-issue comforter, her fever-flushed face hot to the touch. Silvery tears dot her eyes and she’s grabbing at the red-robed arms that reach toward her. It knocks Glimmer’s anger totally off-kilter. She’s never imagined Adora so small.
At the same time a thought comes coolly in her ear: do not allow her pettiness to become your authority. Show her that your self-control is stronger than hers.
Don’t tell me what to do, Glimmer snaps, but she takes a deep breath anyway, smiles at Adora, and finds her way to her seat. She says, “Frosta, fill me in. What’s wrong?”
“The Horde took control of my supply lines. Foraging is hard on the northern perimeter, so without rations from Plumeria…”
Glimmer pinches her nose and sighs. Great. All the effort that went into destroying the Whispering Woods outpost and they got to breathe easy for, what, less than a month? “Why are they targeting the Kingdom of Snows, anyway?”
“That’s what we were just talking about,” Mermista says. “Of all the kingdoms they’re, like, the furthest away from the Fright Zone. What’s the goal here?”
It’s likely a distraction.
“Maybe it’s a distraction?”
“Even if it is, Frosta’s soldiers are going to starve if we don’t do anything,” Adora says. “There’s one primary supply route that goes through the mountains. There are a lot of choke-points along the pass, and Catra’s taken control of basically all of them.”
The princesses talk strategy. Fortunately there doesn’t seem to be a need to send out squadrons; small, focused task forces will do the trick. It won’t be quick—they’ll have to spread out the attacks over the course of the next couple of weeks, mostly so they can gather intel as they go—but if all goes according to plan, none of Frosta’s soldiers will starve. The meeting breaks. Everyone disperses to armor up, eat breakfast (now Glimmer remembers that she’d missed dinner last night, and she’s starving), and give Bow some time to identify all the most important targets and how they should approach them and in what order. Frosta’s tension lets off by a fraction now that they have a plan.
Bow hooks Glimmer by the arm before she manages to slip away. “Are you okay?” he whispers, after everyone has already left the room. “You seem… preoccupied.”
This is Glimmer’s chance to tell someone about what’s happening. Bow is smart. He won’t have all the answers, but he’ll offer a few good starting points. Then she remembers the look on his face when he found her in the garden with Shadow Weaver less than an hour ago: that strained, plaster-over smile, the disapproving crinkle in his eye. He doesn’t trust me either.
They’re resentful, Shadow Weaver tells her. They hate that you’re becoming something they can’t control.
Glimmer swats her away like a fly. Just because that’s how you treat your relationships doesn’t mean everyone else operates that way. Nevertheless she unhooks herself from Bow and says, “I’m fine, promise. I think I just need something to eat.”
Glimmer blinks to her bedroom and washes her face; she tames her hair, which is a whole seven-step process; she strips her clothes for laundering and spelunks her disaster of a closet for something suitable to wear. She thinks, where on Etheria did I leave my shoulderplates? and Shadow Weaver thoughts gently usher her toward the bottom shelf, beneath a wrinkly pile of plum-and-fuschia jumpsuits.
Glimmer’s spine snaps straight. How do you know what’s in my closet?
I don’t, but you do. It’s right here, filed amidst the rest of your memories.
Every embarrassing adolescent screw-up, every stupid spat she’s had with her mother, her deepest fears, her silliest crushes, Bright Moon’s military secrets, all of it on display.
Only if you focus on it, a thought soothes. Glimmer feels something without feeling it: fingers tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. It’s just the mental version of Shadow Weaver’s usual physical platitudes, but it feels extraordinarily intimate now, naked and alone in Glimmer’s childhood bedroom.
♠
She can’t help it, though: the more Glimmer tries not to focus on the bad things, the more aggressively they try and muscle their way in.
Even combat fails to offer reprieve. She’d been hoping that tearing her knuckles up a little would distract her from anything embarrassing, but it’s like she’s stuck on loop. Don’t think about the stuff you’re ashamed of, followed cheerily by, gee, you know what awful thing I can totally associate with the present moment? There’s like, a million memories to choose from. Here, let me broadcast them all at once! While she was grabbing breakfast she remembered how she used to bully Bow for being a picky eater, and how he squirms a little at dinner time, even now—she hasn’t brought it up in ages, and she hates that she made him feel insecure over something so harmless, but it’s the stupidest things that never go away. Now she blasts a bot sky-high and she thinks about one of her earliest self-defense lessons. She got angry and accidentally burned a kid’s hand in a sparring match, even though Mom told her not to use her magic against civilians. He went home crying and never came back.
Like it’s some kind of consolation, Shadow Weaver parries with a memory of her own. She’s thirteen and she’s just been called for her first formal duel. Within thirty seconds her opponent is on the floor, choking. This is a particularly detailed memory: she can see the other kid’s eyes bulging and the purpling tint of his face. The whole scene is deeply disturbing. “I didn’t break any rules,” she hears herself say, after the referee drags her off stage by the veil and bans her from future brackets. “All I did was conjure something inside his respiratory tract. It wouldn’t have worked if he hadn’t stood in one place for so long. Why should I be punished for developing an intelligent strategy? Why should his incompetence be rewarded?”
Was that supposed to make me feel better? Glimmer wants to scream, when the memory fades. She can’t actually—Perfuma is behind her, tying two Horde soldiers up by their feet.
I’m trying to make you understand that you’re not alone.
Okay, one: you and I are not the same, and two: even if we were, it wouldn’t exactly be a source of comfort!
Glimmer returns from the mission tired and agitated. When she was a princess, she could’ve hit the palace baths or locked herself in her bedroom and that would’ve been that. There is no such peace for a queen. She doesn’t even have time to rub salve on her scrapes before she’s pulled in front of a crowd. A group of soldiers have returned from the southern front and not all of them came home with their vital organs intact. Local children made crépe paper moons to hang over their coffins and Queen Glimmer needs to find a few words for them before they’re sent off for burial. Shadow Weaver runs runic calculations in the background and Glimmer can’t think of a single well-formed sentence.
Stop, Glimmer begs her. Stop thinking for just a second, please.
I can’t. I told you that the alternative is worse.
Then help me.
Here we stand united, Shadow Weaver says, by a profound sense of injustice. We will never forget the service of these thirteen brave Etherians; it is only through their courage and their sacrifice that we are able to stand here now, safe another day from Hordak’s siege... Glimmer repeats what Shadow Weaver feeds her without really hearing her own words. Whatever they were must have been politic enough, because when her voice finally falls a few of the mothers start crying, and the courtyard bursts into relieving applause.
♠
That night, Glimmer thinks, Aunt Casta would know what to do.
As soon as she laid down she felt something: a warmth beside her, and a hand spidering up the base of her neck to twist soothing silk-knots in her thick, comb-needy hair. At first she thought Shadow Weaver had somehow snuck into her bedroom, but when she shot up and blinked at the darkness, only darkness blinked back at her.
I’m working on it, Shadow Weaver thinks. Her touch sharpens briefly when Casta’s name is mentioned, but then it smooths back into something pleasurable. She’s refusing to even entertain the remark.
How soon?
Soon, by which she means sun-up, if she pushes herself. Anyway, there’s no alternative. Mystacorians lying blood-soaked on the battlefield, et al. If Castapella found out what Shadow Weaver’s done to Glimmer, the rest of her short life would probably be spent shackled on a ship to Beast Island.
It’s where Shadow Weaver probably belongs. Glimmer could send her there just as easily; honestly, after this whole disaster is dealt with, she should probably reconsider Shadow Weaver’s relatively unrestricted status as prisoner. Instead Glimmer presses her face into her pillow and pretends she’s not pretending that a mass murderer is playing with her hair.
It better work. It’s been less than twenty-four hours and I’m pretty sure everyone thinks I’ve gone insane.
You have more to contend with than average.
It’s too much.
It’s a ridiculous proposition, asking a teenager to play queen.
This rankles Glimmer. She’s not “playing” anything. But she won’t get angry at Shadow Weaver for thinking it. If she had enough energy to be angry right now they wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place, and if she starts a fight they could go on forever. They don’t have the luxury of choosing their words.
I never picked up that bonsai you knocked over.
I retrieved it shortly after, while you were asleep.
Could Dad have conjured an army of illusions, when he was alive?
He had the skill, but he would have needed a source of power.
Did you keep tabs on him even after you betrayed everyone?
Extensively.
What did you think of me?
A memory: Hordak’s face, out-of-focus in the Fright Zone’s naturally gauzy light. He says: “And the Moonstone princess? Have they sent her to Mystacor? Does she know sorcery?” And Shadow Weaver says: “Micah’s death turned Angella into a coward. The Moonstone princess lives a sheltered life; if her mother has her way, she’ll never take a single step outside those silvered halls.” And Hordak says: “Are you sure it’s not some sort of ploy?” And Shadow Weaver says: “This is what’ll kill them, Hordak. We have Adora. They let their greatest resource squander.”
What does your face look like?
The image that this conjures is a pleasant one, though Shadow Weaver tries to shut it away. This, of course, only makes her fixate on it more.
Glimmer tries to soothe her. Is that all? I think you look nice.
You’re sleep-deprived.
Yes, but you’re also in my head. You know I’m not lying.
The scars shame me.
The scars make you look distinguished. I’m surprised you’d get caught up on something as frivolous as beauty standards, anyway.
It’s not a question of beauty. They’re a persistent reminder of how I failed.
If Glimmer wasn’t already prone and jelly-muscled she would’ve physically leaned in. Shadow Weaver’s mind has no issue supplying more context: she and young Micah trace runes in the air. She thought she could handle the Spell of Obtainment but she had miscalculated. Micah calls her name and his voice cracks and hearing him so terrified makes her heartbeat momentarily arrhythmic. Then it has her: the all-consuming thing. Its eyes are like red pus-boils and while inside its belly she opens her mouth and swallows down a hot and hateful darkness. It eats everything inside of her. Had Micah not been there it would’ve eaten everything outside of her, too. She imagines an alternate universe where it had eaten him and she is hard-pressed to think of a more singular pain.
Glimmer spasms. At first she thinks this is a part of the memory, too, but then her arm twitches out and knocks one of her stuffed animals to the floor. She opens her eyes and the figure doesn’t go away. She tells herself she’s hallucinating. There’s no way it’s floating in the room with her really. Purulent eyes edge into her breathing space and blink crosses at her one-by-one. Squelch, squelch, squelch. One of its hands slithers up her cheek and then grabs the flesh like she’s a piece of meat and Glimmer gasps—
Stop focusing on it!
I wasn’t focusing on it! You were focusing on it! Is this what you meant by “the alternative is worse”?
Think about something else right now, Glimmer.
She shuts her eyes tight and tries to focus on anything other than the hallucination monster currently dripping seepage down the collar of her nightgown. Math homework, she thinks—like she’s going to defeat this thing through the power of calculus. Bow. Adora. Frosta, Perfuma, and Mermista. What few memories I have of Dad, one of which is now him nearly getting eaten by the Spell of Obtainment, so nix on that. Mom. My last argument with Mom, but she cringes away from that the moment it tickles past her. Tomorrow’s dinner menu. Princess Prom. Sports. …Economic policy? Fuck.
Sex, Shadow Weaver tells her seriously, or violence. Addiction. Something you cannot put down.
If one could blanch mentally, Glimmer would be doing that now. She thinks, definitely not sex, which of course means it’s the only thing that sticks; she thinks about one particularly enthralling training session where she pinned Bow on his back and accidentally dragged her palm down his slick abdomen and agh. Then there was the time she took Adora to the baths, and Glimmer looked back at the wrong moment and caught a glimpse of her stripping, hair loose, for once, around her tightly-muscled shoulders, her skin all rosy from the steam—
Shadow Weaver interrupts this with a memory of eight-year-old Adora trying to prematurely pull at one of her loosened baby teeth. Oh, gross. Glimmer has just invented the most awkward situation ever conceived. Out loud—because that feels more grounding than talking in her head—she says, “I know, I know! I’m trying to not make this insanely awkward for you.”
Think about the boy all you want, but I veto the child I raised from diapers.
“Don’t think about elephants…” Glimmer mutters. She still feels Shadow Weaver’s hand ghosting the back of her hair. Suddenly the subject of fixation transfers. Glimmer rolls onto her stomach and exhales. She doesn’t even have anything real to work with now—just handsome lines on a face she’s never actually seen. A ghost touch that’s easy enough to imagine wandering downward.
Shadow Weaver jerks when she realizes where Glimmer’s mind has turned. Glimmer can’t help it; she’s lonely and just coming off the far slope of puberty and this is the most intimate she’s been with anyone, even if it’s weird and completely inappropriate, and she has no idea how to compartmentalize. “I’m so sorry,” she groans. “You literally told me to think about sex. This is why you don’t root around inside of people’s brains.”
It’s fine, Shadow Weaver thinks. It really must be, then; it’s not like she can lie. It worked, which is the only thing that matters.
♠
Etheria’s largest moon—the reddish one, whose surface always looks sand-swept and cracked and a little sad—rises over the mountains. The air is warm now, and melony-sweet with summer blooms. Glimmer’s never been more grateful for the arrival of day.
They meet under the Moonstone, where Glimmer will be best-anchored, after Glimmer announces—with no room for argument—that all of her AM meetings are canceled. It’s honestly a little underwhelming when they finally do it. Shadow Weaver spends thirty to forty-five minutes meticulously drawing out circles on the ground. A few memories pass between them, almost like gossip: Catra nearly dying at Glimmer’s hand less than a month prior. Shadow Weaver threatening much the same when Catra couldn’t have been more than nine. It’s objectively sickening. Glimmer shares headspace with two monsters. That’s the sort of lucidity one is granted in the daytime.
Still, Glimmer keeps the thought of Shadow Weaver’s hand resting placidly on the nape of her neck.
Shadow Weaver finishes drawing the last rune and yawns upward like a lion. Step into the circle, she thinks.
It isn’t a pleasant spell. The monster writhes and Glimmer gasps for air, just like the first time, and when the hook finally comes un-popped it feels a little bit like something is dying, but then it’s over, and they’re both lying winded on the ground, the runes smudged and Glimmer’s clothes chalky, and the space between her ears is joyfully silent.
Glimmer turns to look at Shadow Weaver, and is almost surprised to see a mask instead of a face. She’s as undivinable as she was before. “You alright?”
“Never better,” Shadow Weaver says, in her usual drone. The way she twitches when she pushes herself upward indicates that she injured her left shoulder in the fall. Not everything is lost, then. Even if the connection is gone, an intuition, at least, seems to have been retained.
There really is no good possible send-off. They both need space. Glimmer coughs, then brings her hand up to wave. She means to communicate something like, well, let me know if there are any complications, but she forgets to say it out loud.
“You’re still gathering intel on the northern perimeter?” Shadow Weaver asks. It isn’t a real question, of course, but Glimmer nods anyway. “I have myriad leftover components appropriate for manipulating mental links. You might find a truth spell or two convenient additions to your oeuvre.”
“I’ll schedule a training session for later this week.”
“Yes, my Queen,” Shadow Weaver says, which sounds ridiculous after having lived in her head for a day, but Glimmer likes hearing it anyway. Maybe it’s just a pretty word.
♠
Several weeks and a handful of training sessions later, Glimmer threatens to torture a soldier on the battlefield. Not on purpose—but truth spells supposedly hurt like hell when they go wrong, and the Horde is, once again, giving them the fucking run-around. They need information. Bow and Adora are angry. They don’t understand—they don’t know what the worst of it looks like. They don’t dream what she still dreams, grass dripping with eleventh-hour blood runes, Mystacorians with glassy expressions, the squelching slimy blink of the Spell of Obtainment’s anglerfish eyes.
“Are you alright?” Bow whispers. He startles her with a gentle hand laid on top of her hair. She twitches away from him.
“Didn’t we just talk about this?” Glimmer snaps. “You made your point crystal clear. Don’t push it.”
“Not…” He sighs. “I’m just asking. You seem really… intense, lately.”
“It’s war, Bow.” But she sees he won’t leave until she assuages him, so she sighs and leans back into his touch and says, “You were right, okay? I won’t do it again. I went too far. Don’t make me talk about it.”
They exchange a few more hollow words and he leaves her with a half-hug. As soon as he’s gone she’s already brainstorming ways to make the truth spell less conspicuous. She’d consult Shadow Weaver, but she’s elsewhere today. Glimmer is enjoying a rare moment alone in the garden.
Glimmer understands Shadow Weaver, in her own, muted way. Not actually—even at her angriest she could never imagine betraying Bright Moon. Some lines are just uncrossable. Before Mom died, though, she was the weak princess. She sees something stronger than her and she wants to hold onto it, slip into its joints like a suit of armor. Want, need, take, mine.