Quinn vs. Amelie – Round Four
Simple. The thought echoed in Quinn’s mind, strangely unaccompanied by others. It pounded in time with the throbbing in their head as their eyes darted from the wish on the counter to the woman standing beside them. It’s so…simple.
Touch the wish. Just reach out and touch it. They had done much worse to get here; it should be so easy–
And the yet they couldn’t move just as surely as the woman beside them wasn’t making any moves either, eyeing them as much as Quinn couldn’t help eyeing her.
Another witch. The steady hum of magic belied her, even if it was much nicer and somehow more familiar than the sound of the witch from the first round. An unasked question hung in the silence between them: Who’s going to go for it first? If I take a step, what would you do to stop me? They had only had a couple of moments to restring in the mindscape before they had ended up in this mundane touristy hell. The new G-string wasn’t even fully tuned and wasn’t likely to hold a consistent note anyway for a couple of play throughs. It was only a couple of steps across the room to the counter anyway–not nearly enough time for a good spell, even if their opponent looked even worse than they felt.
Seconds ticked away. Eventually, the witch heaved a heavy sigh.
“Look,” she said, and her voice was more kind than they would have expected from someone who made it this far into a demon tournament, “I’m tired. You certainly look like you’re tired. Let’s cut the crap and go for it at the same time so we can get this over with, okay?”
Simple. On principle, they considered going along with an opponent on anything a shit idea, but…
But their headache had never fully gone away from when they had smashed it against the mirror last round, and they were pretty sure that the room wasn’t supposed to be tilting…If the witch didn’t want to fight, that was fine with them.
They nodded, pretending that the motion didn’t make them want to throw up.
Simple.
The witch made a count of three. They both lunged, but not towards the time wish.
In the same moment that Quinn Foley swung the lute in an attempt to knock the witch sideways off of her feet, the witch brought up her cane and shoved the butt in front of their ankles to trip them. Quinn tumbled forwards, and the lute swung wildly and ended up clocking her between the shoulder blades. They both landed on the floor with a hard oof. The witch did some impressive swearing.
…Okay, they realized, trying to push themself to their feet while the room spun around them, apparently neither of us is planning on playing fair.
Vertigo aside, Quinn still made it to their feet a little faster, only to almost trip again when they ducked to grab their lute and the cane (humming a pleasant and loud middle C) whacked their left ankle again. They bit their lip to bite back a yelp. Calm! Keep calm; it’s only a couple more steps.
They had staggered across forward again and were almost to the counter when they heard a soft whisper of words and hrrr of magic behind them before getting hit like a ton of bricks with some kind of stunning spell that knocked them (once again) off of their feet. The little momentum they had going this time carried them forward to bang their shoulder into the counter as they went down. So close! The time wish wobbled in place, rolling towards the opposite edge of the counter. The witch limped doggedly after it, barely a step away.
Their fingers pressed into the lute’s strings. Their feet scrambled to get them back standing. Start playing! Grab the wish! Do something!
The witch stumbled into the counter, grabbing the edge to keep herself steady as Quinn finally wobbled to their feet, head spinning. The wish tilted on the far end of the counter, swayed, and for a moment perched on the very edge, equally persuaded towards steadying or falling. In this moment the Quinn Foley and the witch, out of the primal instinct that is to catch a falling thing, forgot magic and forgot reason and leaned forward, arms outstretched to grab the time wish before it could roll out of reach.
It became immediately apparent that this was the wrong move on Quinn’s part. The witch was taller than Quinn by several inches, giving her just enough added reach to stretch her hand forward that extra little bit. In that moment, time seemed to freeze, their vision shrinking down to the blinding sight of her fingers brushing the time wish, skin just barely meeting its smooth round surface but meeting it nonetheless. And in that instant they felt it–the unspeakable terror of someone suddenly without excuses, without meaning, without a way forward. It left a curious, empty feeling in spaces once too full. It felt numb, they thought. It felt like death.
It was a sound that brought them back to life.
The sound was not a victory sound–no blaring trumpets or shouts of exaltation. Nor was it a song by any musical sense of the word.
The sound was a pop. A pop as a second time wish appeared right next to the one that had just rolled off of the counter under the witch’s touch.
The sound didn’t stop there, though the frozen way that Quinn and the witch stayed sprawled across the counter, staring in confusion and abject horror felt a lot like its own kind of silence. The little plips of time wishes popping into existence continued until there were five, twenty, seventy, too many of the glowing spheres to count, rolling across the floor only to bump into others as they appeared out of thin air. Plip, plip, plip. In time with the pounding in their head and the rushing of lungs that dared to breathe again.
“Oh you have got to be kidding me,” the witch said under her breath. In the proximity of their still immobile states, Quinn heard it clearly, along with the sweet humming middle C that mingled with the magic clinging to both her and the cane. I know that sound. They realized, deep down underneath the relief and horror building inside them. They knew it like the brush of wind through summer leaves and the dancing of pixies in the woods behind the sanctuary, where once long ago they had heard its whispers and named it music.
Faery magic, something stirred in Quinn Foley’s chest, and thankfully this time it was something kinder than guilt. How the hell did she learn fae magic?
This they pondered, racing heart and pounding head, as the number of time wishes grew and grew and grew until they filled the floor, brushing against their ankles, rising up to their waist, rising to fill the entire room and surround both contestants until they were drowning in the very object of their own desires.
Just as Quinn began to wonder, rather detachedly at this point, when the multiplying would have to stop, the walls of the gift shop began to swell, groaning and stretching under pressure from the mass of its contents. Quinn wheezed as the spheres pressed against them, pushing up around their chest, their stomach, their face, and they clutched the lute desperately, as if it were an anchor.
And then, with a clamor and a creaking snap, the walls, the floor, and the ceiling of the room burst, falling away to reveal a limitless void of darkness and madness, lit up by hundreds upon hundreds of newly born time wishes that spread across the space like stars in the night sky.
Simple, Quinn Foley thought, but by no means easy.
The fear of falling only lasted an instant as the floor disappeared and gave way to a vast nothingness. Strangely enough, Quinn did not fall away with the frame of the room they had stood in but instead found themself floating in mid-air, weightless.
“No gravity,” the witch said next to them, seemingly to herself as she gazed around at the array of time wishes, “but obviously there’s still air–we’re breathing…”
Air or no air, Quinn was quickly beginning to realize the problem with the ‘gravity free’ thing as they waved their arms around in an attempt to propel themself further away from their opponent and only managed to spin their body slightly to the right. ‘Touch the time wish,’ the demon said. They could only assume that the rule still stood, assholeish plot twist or no. How the hell are we supposed to do that if we can’t effing move? A sharp turn of their head to watch as a golden sphere floated by just out of reach sent their vision blurring slightly, and they concede that maybe it was time to admit that they might have a concussion. Gods, please tell me this can’t get any worse.
It got worse.
That humming middle C of fae-touched magic spiked, building into a steady purr, like the sound of an engine. Quinn snapped their head around again (Ouch, ouch, ouch–no more sharp movements!)just in time to see the witch mount her cane as if it was a magic broom stick and go zooming forward, swerving wildly towards the nearest wish.
…Oh, that’s just not fair. Quinn Foley was really starting to hate witches. They really, really were.
A thing like panic began to pound through their veins–in their heart, in their head. Do something! I’ve made it this far, just…
Instinctually they clutched the lute close, watching their opponent zoom further into the field of wishes. Music magic could do many a useful thing, but as of yet it could not make them fly and it could not give them wings to serve the purpose. At a loss and at the end of their mental rope, they did the only thing they could think of and grabbed the lute by the neck with both hands. They made some clumsy rowing motions as if the instrument were an oar. It felt like they moved a couple centimeters, but the action mostly just sent rotating in place, which was doing monstrous things to their head.
The only noticeable change around them now that their opponent had sped off towards almost certain victory was that their eyes slowly began to adjust to the darkness. The stabs of violent colors bleeding from rifts that cut through the mostly empty dimension offered little illumination. The golden orbs of countless fake time wishes did a little bit of a better job, meaning that as their vision settled they could now see shapes moving in the darkness, some gently floating and spinning like items cast aside in a stormy sea. Others…others moved more slowly, large and shapeless forms creeping deliberately at the edges of their vision.
They tried again with the lute, aware of unblinking eyes staring from the dimensional cracks, watching, watching, watching as they struggled. Flailing bought them a couple more centimeters. It lost them their breath and what little calm had managed to survive thus far. In the distance there was a soft whump from the direction the witch had gone. They wondered what had caused it–they didn’t want to know what had caused it. They didn’t know what they wanted. They swung the lute again. Swung and swung, putting all their strength behind it but getting nowhere closer to the goal in front of them. Damn Alcor and his stupid buttwings too! How was this even supposed to be possible?
It was probably by pure coincidence that a wish happened to float just near enough that if they stretched their fingers they could reach it. The demon’s instructions (touch the wish, touch the wish) were so urgently playing in the forefront of their mind that it didn’t occur to them until too late that touching a fake wish might have its own consequences.
Their fingers brushed the sphere, warm to the touch and vibrating with something other than magic. Instantly and much to their shock, it popped under their hand, releasing an outward burst of energy that sent Quinn spiraling backwards into the nothingness around them, cartwheeling through space. With nothing to stop their motion it took ridiculously long before they finally slowed to a halt, and even longer before their vision stopped wobbling and their head stopped throbbing. Had standing been at all necessary they probably would have been down for the count. As it was, they were so nauseas from all the spinning (and possibly from concussion as well) that they bent over and retched…only to find that instead of any sort of gross stomach contents they coughed up a stream of rainbows instead.
What the actual hell…They managed to think once they’d recovered enough for thought. Maybe the fake wish had given them some sort of disgustingly cute disease. In the distance they heard the humming of the witch’s magic again, flying in uneven patterns away from them. They wondered idly why it was that every time there was a witch around bright colors were somehow involved.
Since there weren’t any fixed landmarks in the field of time wishes, Quinn had no way of knowing how far they had been thrown and still no way of moving effectively. The wishes were fewer and farther between here, so maybe they were near the edge of the field, if there were any sort of edge at all. There seemed to be more miscellaneous objects floating around in the void here. A blue baseball cap was lighting a couple of meters out of reach. A little closer, a couple of pages fluttered without any wind, covered in elaborate drawings and text that they couldn’t make out. Over to their left it looked like there might have been an eight ball cane drifting around, this one without a witch attached, and off in the distance it looked like–
Something hard and metal bonked their head and Quinn bit off a curse. Clutching the lute in one hand, they instinctively reached up and snatched the offending item out of the air with the other before it could get away. Their fingers closed around a cool metal handle that fit easily in their grip, and when their eyes focused on the item their dead, tired expression turned to one of utter disbelief.
This is a…grappling hook gun? How the hell would something like that have gotten here?
As Quinn Foley stared at the item in their hands, the hopeless feeling dragging their limbs seemed to drag a little less, as a clear, calm, inspiration struck them. A smirk curled their lips. Their hand cocked the new instrument experimentally.
I’ve got a grappling hook.
They had a chance.
A grappling hook wouldn’t propel them, but it could certainly pull them, if it had something to latch on to. And the field in front of them was full of things. Lute firmly grasped in one hand and grappling hook gun in the other, Quinn aimed at the nearest time wish, counted their lucky stars, and shot, holding on for dear life.
The kick from shooting off the gun jolted them backwards a couple of centimeters, but otherwise they didn’t move. The hook missed the wish on the first shot. They retracted it and tried again. Another miss, but closer this time. The third shot barely caught, but it caught nonetheless, and suddenly Quinn was being moved again, this time by their own volition.
The time wishes weren’t fixed in their locations, as had been apparent by the way they seemed to float aimlessly through space. Because of this, there was nothing to anchor Quinn as the grappling hook pulled them towards the wish, and as it was they were not so much pulled towards the wish as both the wish and Quinn were pulled towards each other, yanked through space by the grappling hook until they met in the middle. The wish smacked into Quinn’s chest before they could even dare to hope it might be the right one. It wasn’t, obviously, because the moment contact was made, the thing burst, just like the first. Once again Quinn was sent spiraling.
I think I want to die. It took longer for their head to stop reeling this time when they finally came to a halt. When they could focus again, they faintly heard the purring sounds of the witch’s flying cane off in the distance somewhere, so it looked like they’d been pushed closer to their opponent. Great. At least they didn’t start puking rainbows again. Something definitely felt off, though, and it took them a moment to realize that half of their field of vision was dark and there was a small pressure over their right eye. Concerned, they tucked the grappling hook between their feet and reached up with their free hand to feel at the cloth covering part of their face–an eyepatch. When the cloth was removed from their face without any problems, they breathed a sigh of relief…only to suck it back in again when they opened their eye only to find their vision still gone.
Blind. The word pounded in their head. Their head pounded of its own accord. Blind, blind, I’m half-blind. It was hard to breath. Like someone had sucked the air from their lungs.
Calm, calm. They told themself. You can still do this. You don’t need both eyes to win. Breathing came a little easier. Their head did not stop spinning.
They were so caught up in their deliberately not panicking that they didn’t immediately notice how close they were to one of the rifts, with its staring eyes and shifting colors. They also didn’t notice the shadowy shapes moving among the free-floating objects, just on the edge of their now narrowed vision. They didn’t notice any of this until a cold feeling dragged their limbs, and the heavy, inescapable feeling of being watched stabbed through them like one of Zee’s knives.
Is there something in here with us? It was not a good thought. In fact it was a very dangerous thought given how far they were already slipping from composure. The eyes from the void were staring at them. Staring, staring, staring. Unblinking and accusing like so many other eyes they’d seen before. The eyes were getting closer, closer, closer–they could feel themself moving towards the tear in space and time as if being pulled.
Shit, shit, shit! Shakily they raised the gun in their right hand and tried to take aim at a wish. Their hand was trembling too much. They shot and missed. They reeled in again, and felt themself sinking closer towards those awful, awful eyes. They aimed again. Missed again, this time by an even wider margin because their vision was swimming. Their head was throbbing. Their eyes were stinging. Do something, do something, do something…!
Music floated to their ears. Curiously it wasn’t their own.
The witch flew in from the right–their blind side, that’s why they didn’t see them before they heard them. Before they could properly flinch away, a hand grabbed them by the their jacket collar, and they were being dragged away from staring eyes, from bleeding color and despair by firm hands and a jerking cane.
“Hold on!” the witch said as they lurched away. “I don’t have the best hang on this flying thing yet!”
She…helped me? At this point the thought was just one of many baffling thoughts floating in their shaken mind.
“Why?” One of the thoughts managed to escape their lips somehow, even though they hadn’t meant to make a sound.
The cane slowed to a near stop, swerving to avoid plowing in to another sphere, and the witch tossed them a curious look over her shoulder.
“Well, why not?” she said.
Because I might be out of the picture otherwise. They thought. Because it would be so much easier if you’d just left me. Quinn didn’t say any of that, though. From the grimly determined look on the woman’s face, she knew these things as well as they did, which made it all the more curious that she had helped anyway. When they didn’t respond after a while, she sighed, shaking her head as if to shake away a troublesome thought. “You got a name?”
Oh, why the hell not. They had told that Zee kid anyway. Maybe this person would actually remember it. “Quinn.”
“Amelie,” the witch said. Then: “Well, Quinn, I hope there’re no hard feelings, but I’m going to drop you now.”
Quinn barley had half a second to take that in before the hand holding them up let go.
Shit. Their teeth dug into their lip angrily as they watched to only reliable form of transportation in the entire damn space zoom away, faery magic dancing in their ears like laughter. Never trust a witch!
They watched through one eye as Amelie swerved to avoid most of the time wishes in her path. At first they thought that curious as well. Sure the time wishes were apparently a crapshoot, but they still had to somehow touch the real one if they wanted out of this crazy place. In order to touch the real time wish they were going to have to sort through the fake wishes as well, so avoiding them seemed counterintuitive.
On the other hand, Quinn pondered as they watched the golden spheres rotate in the air (were they really doing that or was that just their vision still settling down?) while they themself were significantly hindered in their ability to touch time wishes, Amelie could easily touch any within reach. Amelie could afford to be selective and careful with her choosing. Quinn…Quinn was finding themself rather limited to the nearest spheres within grappling range, consequences be damned.
Whenever we get out of here, I want to have words with the Dreambender. Probably a bad idea, given unlimited demonic power and all, but right now it was so much safer to be angry than to fall into panic again. Anger was productive. Anger bore schemes. And they could use a damn good scheme right now.
What do I have to work with? They had a lute, a grappling hook, and their backpack. Nothing in the backpack would be very helpful so far as they could see, especially not with their hands already full. The hook they could move with, if clumsily. The lute was usually the most valuable item in their arsenal, but as it currently stood…
Tucking the grappling hook between their feet again, they plucked at the new G-string. The string made a flat, muted sound, vibrating too loosely. They sighed, resting their forehead on the neck of the instrument. New strings take time to hold a tune. The new string simply wasn’t broken-in enough to hold a steady note yet. So, either I play without a G-string again or I don’t play at all. Which meant Cacophony might once again be their only good option playing-wise–a thought that wasn’t exactly filling them with warm, fuzzy feelings. Singing was another option, though it wouldn’t have as powerful an effect as playing. The other thing they had to consider was…
The problem is that the targeted person has to be able to hear the song for it to take effect, Quinn realized. At least for the songs that affect the mind, anyway. And the problem with having a flying opponent in an endlessly open space was that she had every ability to fly out of hearing range and they had no practical way to pursue her without breaking the song.
So, no practical lute use, and nothing to keep Amelie within listening range and under the effects of most of their spells. That…really, really sucked. But that did leave one song left. One possibility that might be able to shake up their opponent. In fact it had already worked on one witch this night.
They grabbed up the grappling hook again. For a moment they contemplated putting the lute back in its case, safe and easy to carry. Their fingers tightened around the instrument reflexively. It’s my only weapon. Well, the only one they had practice with, anyway–they didn’t count the grappling hook. It deflected Zee’s lightning; it might help against any spells from Amelie as well. And if their thoughts were turned to the fear they felt at the very thought of facing down an opponent with too-empty hands, well, no one need know that.
They hooked a time wish on the second try this time. When they touched it, though instead of anything changing on their person the fake time wish changed from a sphere into an angry looking gnome that almost bit their hand off. They panicked and whacked the creature with the grappling hook gun, sending it flailing wildly into a cluster of brightly colored sweaters. The next shot they thought they had in one, but the wish floated to the side at the last moment, making them miss.
It’s not my imagination, Quinn realized after two more such occurrences that resulted in bad pop songs playing out of nowhere and a large question mark appearing on their shirt, the time wishes are moving deliberately. Oh, it was slow, for the most part, but the deeper into the cluster of time wishes they made it the more they noticed. The time wishes were floating in fixed patterns. Some drifted up, some down, some to the sides and all around, but all of them were moving inwards, as if rotating around something. It should be illogical since there was no force of gravity present to drive the motion. But, well logic didn’t seem to be a common trend in these challenges.
The time wishes look like little stars. So, what if they act like stars as well?
Their head was still pounding, but they noticed it a little less as another smile tugged at their lips. This was Alcor’s game, after all, and while Quinn might not be well versed in demonology as other forms of lore, even they knew that the guy had star motifs coming out his ass.
When they could see Amelie as more than just a dot flitting around in the distance, they let themself stop and float in place. They couldn’t play their lute, true, but lute playing was not the only way to make music. And even with a tired throat, Conflagration was not a hard song to sing.
Without an instrument to play they couldn’t create a harmony to focus the magic with. That was fine, because for once Quinn was in an open space–the perfect setting for a rain of fire. Right as Amelie grew to be about the size of an acorn in their field of vision, Quinn parted their lips–breathed in and out and in again. In the half second before that first sound left their lips, that familiar weight settled in their chest, heavy and accusing.
She did save you. The particularly annoying place in their mind reminded them.
They breathed in, breathed out again. Being nice was her choice. They gripped the lute neck and gun handle hard. Zee had been nice too. Look where that had gotten him.
…Is it really worth it? All of this?
The nice thing about singing spells was that there were no fingers involved to freeze on strings, not hands to fumble and falter. One last time: a breath out, a breath in.
There were no words this time–there was no need since they weren’t trying to focus the magic. It was just a simple, eight note tune, a little shaky at first, as voices were wont to be under direction of a shaken tongue. Only the first two notes wavered, though. The third came out strong and clear, a mezzo-soprano that sang louder without words and somehow rang with more purpose. Under the singing they heard it: the buzzing of a building magic, creeping into the air and shaking with anticipation of becoming.
Five measures in, the first flame blazed to life.
With no lyrics to designate one point to set alight, the magic that sat like a crouching cat burst to life, sparking and catching and condensing into balls of fire. Had gravity been a factor, the fireballs would have fallen towards the ground, causing a deadly rain that would catch and spread. As it was, there was no gravity in this place, nowhere for the flames to fall, so instead they flitted happily wherever they pleased, mingling with the star-like spheres around them.
They heard Amelie’s stream of curses filling up the air even before they heard her magic this time. They ignored it. They sang on, letting more and more fire blossom to life. And if some of it bloomed a little too closely for comfort, well, they had their jacket, and the lute should be able to hold up against a little fire, even if the flames were born from magic.
With their right field of vision out of use, once again they almost didn’t see Amelie come careening to a stop only meters away, clothes and hair singed, and a pissed off tilt to her eyebrows. She dismounted her cane, floating just within what most magicians would consider proper casting range. Shit on a stick. Their next note cracked dryly, making the flames leap and stutter, but they kept on, looking the witch in the eye as the melody fell from their tongue.
“Are you insane?” Amelie shouted, cupping her hands over her mouth, presumably to be heard over the singing.
No, I don’t think that one’s been added to the list yet, Quinn mused. A ball of fire sparked right next to Amelie’s foot. (Completely a coincidence. Amelie didn’t look amused.)
“This place is dangerous enough without adding fire to the mix!” she shouted. That was true enough, they knew from experience–their sightless eye still a glaring hole in their vision and that gnome was still drifting around somewhere, glaring at them. Amelie obviously had seen her fair share of fake wish effects too: there was glitter falling off of her in a shower of sparkles, and they were too far away to tell for sure, but it looked like there were more fingers on her hands than there had been earlier.
It didn’t matter, they told themself. As long as the flames were burning, their opponent was close to immobilized. Maybe they couldn’t sing forever, but Amelie couldn’t avoid the spreading fires forever either. If only they could just incapacitate her until they could think of a plan. If only they could just get rid of that damn cane. If, if, if…
Apparently realizing that Quinn wasn’t going to be stopping to join in the discussion, Amelie raised her cane, moving it in a sweeping motion, through the air. That was odd; Quinn hadn’t seen anyone cast with such a wide motion before–
Fire gathered around the tip of the cane like moths chasing a light, condensing all of the nearby flames into one massive blaze in front of the metal tip–was that a hammer at the end? Quinn kept singing, partly on instinct but mostly because they weren’t quite sure what they were seeing exactly. Over their own song they heard the buzzing of fire magic (louder, louder, so much louder than it was just a moment ago, how was that?) mingling with the steady middle C of Amelie’s magic.
Amelie knocked back the end of her cane, as if shooting off a bullet. The fireball flew from the end, straight towards where Quinn was floating. The song dropped from Quinn’s lips in shock. Their hand pulled up the lute in front of them–instantaneous, instinctual after facing down multiple magics with nothing other than the instrument’s wooden frame for a shield. They heard the sound of too loud, too powerful magic in their ears–heard the vibrations of their fire spell ringing with the sounds of someone else’s song.
They felt the impact like a griffin bowling them over. They heard the snap of strings and the crackling of wood as the amplified version of their own spell overpowered carefully placed enchantments. It echoed in their ears, more haunting than even Cacophony’s madness.
No, no, no, they thought, flailing in the air to get a purchase on where they were, to make everything stop moving for a second, they just wanted everything to stop. The grappling hook dropped out of their hand, and they barely had the presence of mind to grab it between their legs so that it wouldn’t drift away as they cradled familiar wood in both hands, flipping it over to inspect the damage and telling themself that it wasn’t so bad–their lute had withstood lightning, it could withstand this too.
They knew it was a lie even before they stared down at the charred wood in their hands. Most of the body was a splintered mess, just from the impact of the blow. The strings had all snapped and were hanging from the tuning keys; the sudden release of tension had sent them lashing across their hand, leaving blood dripping off their fingertips. They barely noticed. As they held the instrument close to their chest–five years of experimentation, practice, and love worn into every surface–the remaining wood split and crumbled, leaving all but the neck to break free and drift into space. Between the loss of vision in one eye and the wetness setting the other half of their vision swimming, they barley saw.
It’s not real. They told themself. It echoed in time with the throbbing of their head. Not real, not real, not real. They had never felt so eager to wake from a dream before. Never so torn between wanting two things at once. This is all in the mindscape. Breathe, just breathe.
The fire had all died down by the time they looked up again. In the air there hung a heavy silence. It was not the comfortable sort of silence that might have come after the ending of a song. It was not even a stunned silence that might be expected after a blow to one’s heart.
No, the silence left in the wake of this destruction was a loud silence, one that screamed of a harsh reality and choked Quinn Foley’s lungs with every breath. It was a silence as audible as the humming of magic still floating in front of them, as audible as the lack of lute strings to play.
This was not the silence that lies at the end of a storm, but one that builds in its wake.
Amelie stared at Quinn, and Quinn stared at Amelie. Then, moving quicker than they might have thought possibly with limbs that felt frozen and a mind that was replaying the same two seconds over and over and over, Quinn snatched up the grappling hook again. They shot before they aimed properly, and the hooks missed both the witch and her cane. It gave Amelie enough time to hop back on her cane to speed off again, this time with no flames impeding her progress. And in the hollow place where there once was guilt and there once was doubt Quinn Foley knew that if that were to happen–that if they didn’t do something right now to force themself forwards again, then they were going to lose, and that all of this was going to have been for absolutely nothing.
They readied to fire again, but they didn’t have to, as it turned out. They would never be sure exactly why Amelie decided to fly towards them rather than away. The best they could guess was that she had reasoned that they would be more reluctant to shoot at her if she shortened the distance between them, increasingly the likelihood of self-injury. As it was, Quinn didn’t have a chance to reload and shoot before Amelie came soaring directly overhead. On reflex born out of climbing trees and catching clumsy fledglings who thought they could fly, Quinn’s right hand dropped the useless neck of their lute and shot up to grab the back of the cane before it could shoot away.
There was a glaring problem with this course of action. This was the unavoidable fact that they were now holding on for dear life while shooting through the dark field of fake time wishes, jerking at every turn as Amelie tried to dislodge them.
“Get off, get off!” She shouted into the air whipping around them both as Quinn struggled to not let go. A time wish zoomed by below, and they pulled up their feet to avoid hitting it. “I can barely fly this thing as it is!”
“No!” Quinn shouted back stubbornly. They sounded like a petulant child but they couldn’t quite bring themself to care just now. They were still blinking past tears, and wetness was lingering on their cheeks. They didn’t even bother telling themself it was from the air whipping their face. “Make me!”
“We don’t have to fight this round,” there was something a little pleading in Amelie’s voice.
“So don’t, then,” they said, letting the snarkiness that fell from their tongue cover the pain that wanted to come seeping out instead. “Fine with me!”
Amelie sounded like she was about to say something, but another time wish floated into their path at the last moment and she swerved sharply to avoid it. Quinn gritted their teeth and gripped the cane harder, head throbbing and spinning almost enough to distract them from how horrible everything else was currently. Once their vision came properly into focus again, they watched the golden spheres floating around them, moving noticeably quicker than most they had seen. They were deeper into the wish field than they had been before, and it seemed like everything–the wishes, the random objects, everything floating around seemed to be floating just a little bit faster. And just like on the outer edges everything seemed to be moved around something. Orbiting around a central point. Like stars in a galaxy.
“Turn left!” They shouted without thinking, right as the cane was already turning to do just that. “Towards the–“
“The center,” Amelie nodded. “Yeah, I noticed too.”
The problem, though, was getting there.
The closer to the center of the wish field they flew, the more time wishes there were hanging around, which made it much harder to dodge. It didn’t help that, just like everything else in this damn tournament, the space they traveled through didn’t make much sense. In the outer parts of the field, even with only the grappling hook Quinn could zoom past multiple spheres and travel a significant distance in only a handful of seconds as long as they had the right propulsion. Here, in over a minute it felt like they barely moved forward at all.
Between getting whipped around like a flag in the wind and not thinking about the hole in their chest, they didn’t have much time to ponder too deeply. Just find a way to get to the real time wish. Find a way to get the witch away from her cane. Calm, calm–I can still do this! Their shaking hands were not so sure.
They had finally started gaining a bit of ground (space? void?) and Amelie seemed to be focusing less on shaking them and more on navigating when a time wish floated into their path and Quinn didn’t pull their foot up fast enough to avoid kicking it.
Shit, they barely had time to think before there was the familiar whump of a fake wish bursting. Except this time the thing didn’t just burst–it exploded.
In the shocked moment of ‘what the hell’ that followed Quinn was barely aware of a couple of things: their hand being yanked from its hold on the cane, Amelie’s arm flailing out and hitting them in the face, and their back hitting something distinctly solid that stopped them from careening wildly into the unknown. When their vision finally stopped tilting for what felt like the hundredth time, it came to their attention that they were trapped in what appeared to be a giant bubble. Worse yet, they were trapped inside a giant bubble with a witch.
Quinn stared through the clear, pink, and seemingly plastic material surrounding them. They looked at Amelie. Amelie looked at them. They leaned their head back against the plastic and groaned.
“Great,” Amelie said, rapping her cane against the plastic. Her cane let out a low trill with every tap. “Fantastic. Is this…is this a giant hamster ball?”
Quinn glanced up and spotted a circular hatch in the plastic, exactly like the type you would see on a hamster ball. They decided it wasn’t worth much questioning.
“You’re taller,” Quinn pointed out. Ignoring Amelie wasn’t going to get them out of here. Whipping out the grappling hook and shooting her with it wasn’t going to solve anything either, even if they really wanted to. “Think you can reach it?”
It took a bit of maneuvering, but Amelie was able to poke at the hatch with her cane. The cane made a few more low sounds at the contact with the plastic barrier, but it didn’t budge. She muttered some choice words under her breath as gradually her experimental taps turned into harder shoves until she was practically beating the door with the hammer end of the cane. Quinn flailed back a bit, wishing that there was more space between them and the blunt object being swung.
“So,” Amelie said after a moment, a bit out of breath, “any other brilliant ideas? What can you do, exactly?”
Oh, and if that wasn’t a calculated question under all that irritation, Quinn was a unicorn princess. “Well, you know, I might have been able to do something. If only someone hadn’t broken my lute.” And, no, there wasn’t wetness pricking at their eyes again. They didn’t have time for that. Breathe, just breathe.
Amelie’s eyebrows furrowed. “Can’t you just…I don’t know, do that fire magic thing from earlier? That might weaken it.”
“Oh sure,” Quinn said. They laid the sarcasm on extra thick. It made it easier to talk around the knot in their throat. “I’ll just do that. Of course there’s no guarantee that the fire won’t pop up inside the stupid hamster ball–then we’d be trapped in our own nice little oven.”
Amelie made a frustrated sound. “Okay, fine…this is…fine. There’s still air in here obviously, so propulsion should still be possible,” she was looking thoughtfully down at her cane. “This might work actually. If we can still move, well, it looks like this ball is pretty sturdy. While we’re inside we can’t touch anything outside, obviously, but by the same turn–”
“Nothing can touch us, either,” Quinn realized. “Including the fake time wishes.” Oh, maybe they could make this work. They were still going to have to figure out how to get out of the glorified bubble eventually in order to touch the real wish, but for the now, this could work.
“I’m going to try flying again, see if I can steer us,” Amelie said. It kind of sounded like she was talking to herself. She mounted her cane again, and sure enough the magical object shot forward under her guidance, pressing against the inside of the ball and pushing it through the mass of time wishes once more.
Amelie let out a delighted little laugh. “I’ll never get tired of that!” There was a smile on her lips, like she was witnessing a miracle.
Admittedly, it felt a little bit like a miracle. As the ball shot forward, the stray time wishes flying by bumped harmlessly against their new plastic shield, leaving them completely unaffected. Quinn watched the fond smile on Amelie’s lips grow. They listened the steady flow of magic from her cane, echoing the stronger hum that emanated from her own being, easy as breathing. A stab of jealousy hit them, falling numbly through the hole in their chest. This was the magic that their professors spoke of. Well, okay, maybe not exactly, because Quinn was pretty sure that mimicking fae magic wasn’t well received in most academic circles, but the ability itself was natural. Born out of honest talent that could be shaped to fit a mold. Sure, Amelie’s magic was a little bit strange (which, in fact, made it all the more wonderful), but this was, at the core of its being, what magic ability was supposed to be: faithful, stable, consistent. Not the wild, feral thing that Quinn plucked out of the air, barley tamed, barely focused.
Magical talent. And an object that was so sturdy, so connected to the user that it could focus that talent with barely a word. It was everything they’d ever wanted and never could have.
Quinn Foley wanted to hate Amelie. For her magic ability. For breaking the lute, even if it was their own spell that had acted at the weapon. For simply being. And yet in that moment they couldn’t help but be a little bit in awe of her.
I have to win. They thought. Not ‘I want to win’. Not ‘I can win’. Not anymore.
In that emptiness, once filled with guilt, uncertainty, and now the echoes of pain, there poured a fire that had been missing for quite some time, and Quinn felt something like excitement. Something like eagerness. Something very similar to that feeling that had moved their hand to sign a demon’s contract in the first place.
I have to win that time wish!
Outside their bubble of quiet, golden spheres danced around, flying faster and faster by as they moved towards their goal. Quinn broke the quiet with a question, one that had been bubbling up inside them for a while now.
“How did you learn fae magic?”
Amelie jumped, jerking the cane and sending the ball banking to the side before she could get it back on course. Quinn’s shoulder slammed against the barrier. That’s what I get for being social.
“What?” She asked, glancing back at them with wide eyes.
“How did you learn faery magic?” they asked again.
Amelie opened her mouth to speak, closed it again. Opened it again. Furrowed her brow. A couple of fake wishes bumped against the bubble again, and both of them were too occupied in the question to notice them pop on impact with the plastic unlike all the others before.
“That’s not…” She finally managed to say. She stopped, frowned, and tried again. “How in seven hells could you possibly know that?” She glanced through their bubble at the giant red letter ’S’ floating amongst the time wishes. “Don’t tell me there’s more personal crap floating around in this round!”
“Not that I know of.” But, gods, wouldn’t that just have been icing on the cake.
Amelie squinted at them suspiciously. When they didn’t offer any other information, she reluctantly admitted, “I…I learned from pixies and dryads. Who told you?”
‘Learned from pixies’ she says. As if fae folk didn’t target most humans for mischief or mortal peril the moment they laid eyes on them. Fascinating. Oh, right, they had been asked a question, too. “Well, you did, actually.” She gave them a confused and dirty look. “How the hell did you get pixies to teach you?” Answers for answers, Ms. Witch. Conversing wasn’t their usual cup of tea, but this was a game they could play.
“By asking nicely,” Amelie said, slowly turning to look back at where she was driving them. (Another fake wish slammed into the top of the bubble, and this time it burst with enough for that Quinn glanced up and caught a nervous glimpse.) “What do you mean I told you?”
Quinn worried their lip, considering. If I answer she might be more willing to tell me about her magic. But in return they’d be giving up their own secrets as well. It wasn’t a thought that settled well with them. But…on the other hand, the lute was gone. She already knew they could sing fire to life. Would Amelie really gain anything from the exchange?
“You sound like fae magic,” they said finally. It came out as nearly a whisper.
A beat of quiet again. Then, “Really?” she asked, sounding utterly fascinated. “I’ve never met anyone who could hear magic, before. I’d probably call you a liar just on principle, but, well, I guess it could make sense with the singing spell you pulled earlier…”
Before Quinn could think of how exactly to respond, the ball started rocking furiously as more and more fake wishes burst against it on every point of contact. Quinn noticed now. Amelie definitely did too. By some turn of luck the same thick wall of plastic that was keeping them from breaking out of the hamster ball also seemed to protect them from any physical effects.
This is bad. The fake wishes only reacted when I touched them myself before. Otherwise every strike of the grappling hook would have burst the spheres on contact. Why were they more sensitive now? Was it because they were getting closer to the real time wish?
Simple. Not easy. They somehow doubted they would be able to get away with tapping the real wish against the side of their ball and have it count.
As they both eyed the golden spheres flying by outside nervously, Amelie’s voice dropped to something softer than her suspicion from before. “What’s a kid like you doing in a demon game, anyway? One of the other opponents I faced was pretty young, too, but, well…”
“I’m not a kid.” They realized almost immediately how childish they sounded. Then, eager to deflect that knowing look it got them, they asked, “What about you?”
“I asked first,” Amelie pointed out, apparently not very eager to answer either. “Listen…I was talking with that old lady, Hilja, last round. Something’s wrong with this tournament, Quinn. Alcor has to have some sort of ulterior motive here.”
Quinn stared at the back of her head, frowning. Why was she telling them this? “Okay…like what?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But whatever it is, it can’t be good, and whoever wins this…one of us is probably going to have to deal with it–whatever it is.”
“Okay,” Quinn had a sour feeling they knew where this was going. “And?”
“And,” Amelie said, and they could practically hear the careful words being picked out of her head, “whatever Alcor’s up to, it’s probably going to be a real bitch to deal with. Especially after all of this.”
Dealing with an out of control demon. No, that didn’t sound at all appealing. And they knew…they knew objectively that this should be a big concern. They should care that the big scary demon was probably up to something…but wasn’t that what demons did? Weren’t there people who were supposed to deal with that sort of thing–magical girls and special investigators and the like? Why did that have to be their problem? They were in this to win a time wish–why was it that everyone they met lately was so eager to play hero?
“Well,” Quinn said slowly, drawing out the words every bit as carefully as Amelie had, “I bet it would be a lot easier with a time wish.”
Amelie glanced back at them again, looking like she couldn’t quite decide if they were being sarcastic. “Yeah…” she said measuredly back. “It really would.”
If the tension that had sprung between them were any more present it probably could have gained sentience and started calling Quinn names. Quinn was just starting to wonder at the wisdom of whipping out the grappling hook when the heavy rocking of the ball settled abruptly as they shot out of the thick mess of time wishes and into a clearer space.
The area was maybe the width of a football field, though it was hard to tell here. A couple of stray wishes flitted about like darting flies, but they were much fewer and farther between. There, in the center of it all floated not a single time wish as Quinn had expected. No–it was a pair, just as identical as the rest, spinning around each other in a cheerful dance while all the other countless time wishes rotated around them both.
“A binary system,” Amelie breathed. It sounded a lot like a curse.
Well, Quinn thought past their own irritated thoughts, one of his titles is the Twin Star, I guess.
For a single moment, both contestants sat perfectly still in the ball, staring at the twin wishes, wondering which one was real and which one was fake.
It was a moment too long, because in that moment one of the spare wishes darting around crashed into the back of the stupid hamster ball.
The resulting explosion was much stronger than the ones before, and it was enough to destroy the protective shell of plastic that had been allowing them to move so freely. It was enough to throw both Amelie and Quinn forward into yet another dizzying spiral.
Oh gods, gods, gods, Quinn thought, resisting the urge to retch again when they settled into stillness. Something was wrong again. Something felt off. Frantically, they looked down at themself. The vision in their left eye was still intact. There didn’t seem to be any damage or pain, and the grappling hook was still miraculously in their grip, so what…?
It took them a moment to realize how everything looked just a little bit bigger than it should. Their fingers, upon inspection, lacked the calluses built up from years of lute practice and stupid mistakes. A curious sensation, like something brushing their neck had them reaching up to feel at the stubby pig tails poking out of the back of their head.
Quinn stared down at their younger self and scowled. Oh this just keeps getting better.
From only a little further away they heard Amelie laugh, “You look like you’re twelve!”
Quinn turned to spit something irritably at the witch and their jaw dropped. “Holy shit!” Amelie’s hands, still wrapped around the cane, were wreathed in demonic blue flames.
It took her a moment to realize what they were staring at, and when she did, she yelped and started waving them to put them out. After a few heart stopping instants, she calmed though, adopting a more fascinated expression. “It doesn’t hurt.”
With that immediate crisis solved, both of them turn their attentions instead to the two wishes. The last blast had brought them conveniently close to their goal. The twin time wishes spun maybe seven meters apart. Quinn and Amelie had ended up almost exactly between the two, and now floated at the center of it all, watching the twins spin around them.
“How do we tell which is the real one, though?” Amelie wondered. She was only a couple of feet away, watching, watching, watching the time wishes–trying to figure them out.
Quinn was not watching the time wishes. Quinn was watching Amelie’s cane.
I don’t dislike her, they realized, with probably not the best timing in the world. They really wanted to hate her, and yet they couldn’t quite manage it. It was a thought that made them hesitate, just for half a second. I really don’t, but…
I have to win. It burned inside them, almost loud enough to drown out everything else. Loud enough to make everything else feel so much less important–all the echoes of ‘monster’, of ‘selfish’ and ‘cold’. If they could do it, maybe those echoes would fade away again. If they could just do this one last thing…They raised the grappling hook.
They aimed and fired. They didn’t hit a time wish. They hadn’t aimed for one.
The grappling hook hit Amelie in the side, knocking her clean off of the cane. From this close they heard the breath leave her lungs in a pained whoosh. They heard the humming of her magic. They heard the soft shink as one of the hooks miraculously caught on the hammer end of the cane on the rebound, pulling it back towards Quinn and bringing Quinn halfway forward to meet it.
Quinn took up the cane without thinking, really. It was a motion born of an instinctual want to touch the magic, to feel it vibrating through wood and metal. It felt alive.
“Stop!” Amelie’s voice rang through the space between them, wired with so much distress that it almost made them drop the cane on instinct. There was a desperate look on Amelie’s face that put a ball of ice in the pit of their stomach. She wasn’t looking at the time wishes anymore–she wasn’t sparing them a glance. When she spoke again, her voice was softer, but much more strained. “Give it back. Please!”
Quinn stared down at the cane in their hands. It’s important to her. Of course it was. In every thrum of magic coursing through the cane, they could practically hear the years of wear, the whisper of spells, the fondness, the love that had been poured into it. Reflexively, Quinn’s thoughts turned to their lute. It wasn’t really the same, they knew. The lute couldn’t carry magic, couldn’t focus it–it was the music that did that. Despite years of love, of practice, without Quinn’s guiding hand it was still just an ordinary instrument, no matter how familiar, no matter how loved. What Quinn now held in their hands was something much stronger, something maybe even more precious to its owner than the lute was to them.
Out of the corner of their eye, they saw one of the twin time wishes gliding toward them in its orbit, either real or another fake. And all the warm, nostalgic feelings in the world did not stop the awful idea that crept to their head.
This close, the fake wishes explode when anything touches them. And with how strong the last impact had been they worried about what effects touching the wrong wish here would do–both in terms of bodily harm and how far away the aftershocks would throw them. The explosive force that had broken them out of the hamster ball alone probably would have been enough to take off an arm.
“Listen,” Amelie was saying. “There are two time wishes here and two of us. If we each go for one it’s a fifty-fifty chance! That’s a fair shot!”
A fair shot. Quinn watched the nearest wish creep closer. Since when was any of this fair? ‘Fair’ was almost as bad as dumb luck. ‘Fair’ was what their teachers had called it when they’d banned them from the magic classes at school.
This was a demon tournament. It wasn’t supposed to be fair.
The wish crept closer. It was only a few feet away. They weren’t practiced enough with the grappling hook to get the timing right. They took aim.
“Quinn!” Amelie shouted, her voice several shades of panicked.
How selfish it was, to want to be more.
“I’m sorry,” they said over Amelie’s shout, over that humming middle C of magic, over the pounding of their heart. They meant it.
The cane flew from their hands. It spun through the air, hammer end coming down to strike the nearest time wish just as it passed. In the space of time it took for this to occur, Amelie reached after the cane instinctively. Quinn steeled themself.
It wasn’t a perfect shot, but it did the job: upon contact, the fake wish exploded, blowing both of them straight backwards. Quinn barely saw Amelie out of the corner of their eye, wide-eyed as she stared at where her cane had split apart on impact. They tried not to notice–didn’t give themself time to notice. As the force of the exploding fake wish hit them, they spun themself around, arms stretching out as they were blown straight towards the real time wish, which had continued happily in its orbit.
The golden sphere was warm to touch as Quinn’s hand closed over it. They dropped the grappling hook and pulled the time wish towards their chest. I did it? they thought numbly when it didn’t burst. I…really did it. Hot tears spilled over their cheeks. They weren’t quite sure if it was relief, joy, or self-loathing that had set them falling. They weren’t sure what to feel, which of the emotions warring inside of them was supposed to be the right response. They didn’t have much time to mull it over.
As the sound of the exploding fake wish faded, new sounds took its place. Curious sounds, like the small plips of thousands of fake wishes blinking back out of existence. Loud, trumpeting sounds mixed with sounds like noisemakers from every birthday party they had ever attended as a child. Awful sounds, like the quiet sobbing from where Amelie floated.
A popping sound as the Dreambender stepped into space right in front of them, a delighted gleam in golden eyes that made every hair on the back of their neck stand straight up.
“Alcor has to have some sort of ulterior motive,” Amelie had said. It hadn’t seemed very important at the time. It suddenly seemed a lot more important now.
“Congratulations!” Alcor the Dreambender said. His voice echoed through the void in multi-tones that sang of something dark and dangerous. His smile was too wide, too sharp. It looked–well, it looked outright demonic.
Quinn Foley stared up at what was quite possibly the most powerful being in all existence. The time wish in their hands pulsed warmly, leeching all of the heat from their body, all of the blood from their veins. A single thought pulsed in time with the throbbing of their head, the pounding of their heart:
This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.