by May Peterson
As the words left my mouth, a sensation rushed through me. The water touched the sides of my arms and legs, and the contact was like a liquid shriek. I bucked involuntarily, straining against the chains. This was it. I had just said I understood, but then heard myself speak in the clarity of pain.
You keep looking at the truth and not seeing it.
I had promised Violetta I would come back. This was my old refrain to her, that she could count on me, even as I’d spent a lifetime showing her that she could not. It took a dream to change who I was to her. The dream of a life never lived, only felt because we had no more chances left.
I was abandoning her again. Because I still hoped I could save Mamma.
No. Not save. Mamma’s problem wasn’t weakness. She’d never needed saving and knew it with the certainty of a prophet. What she needed was to let go of strength, let other minds have the answers, let other hands lead the fight. She needed to not burn the world down so she could be the only hero left.
I cried out to her one more time. “Mamma. You described how this can go. Give up on Casilio. Let’s live our last day together. If I leave this cellar, you come with me. I’m begging you.” I felt like I’d been begging her for my whole life. “Give up the fight.”
The water was rising over my limbs now, gathering at alarming speed. When had it started coming so fast? Like the startling descent of a life gone wrong, submersion in pain was abruptly taking over. It may have always been here, gnawing my nerves away while I sat in my dream and avoided the hurt. The only time the hurt had actually stopped was the moment I had died.
I was back there, in the void of death, seeing myself dissipate into emptiness. Who was I without Mamma, without Mio and Papa, my hope to finally be made whole again?
Who would I be if I saved Mamma, but abandoned Violetta again?
Casilio’s focus was on Mamma. “This is a peculiar turn of events, Serafina. Your own child now speaks wisdom, and still you do not hear. Why come to me, only to hold back now? Use your sorcery on him to force him to retreat to safety—or do what you came to do. Show me the truth.”
The truth?
Violetta’s locket was still around my neck. No one had tried to take it from me. And as if my thoughts had called out to her, I could swear I heard her breathing. In the next instant, ambiguity was gone. A commotion across the room disturbed the silence of the men. Two bodies hit the ground, and a familiar glow spilled over the cold stone.
I pushed against my bonds, the pain becoming excruciating, as if the chains would saw through me. But the light drew closer, and they were in view.
As if they had appeared in thin air, two people stood now in the cellar.
Violetta strode forward from the open lift, like an incarnate miracle. Holding her hand was someone I’d never expected to see again.
Liliana Benedetti. Dressed in masculine attire, face full of proud emotion—and throbbing with violet light.
“No,” Mamma gasped. “Why did you bring her here?”
Casilio had all the animation of stone, but his voice was a hiss of shock. “You.”
Liliana turned to her former husband slowly, a smile charging her lips. It ripened into something like fire. “Me.”
“Kill her.” Casilio whirled, his composure eroding. “Shoot her.”
A rain of bullet fire eclipsed the air. Over a dozen weapons turned on the Lady Benedetti, smoke and noise confusing my senses. The water was eating into me, its sacred burn all but peeling off my skin and destroying the boundary between me and the rest of the world. I could barely see whether Violetta moved.
The sounds quieted, the smoke clearing, but the light did not fade. She was closer now, Violetta tucked behind her. Liliana was practically over top of me, the radiance of her presence mingling with the glass and water to transform the cellar into a plane of lambent crystal. Men continued to fire in bursts, and she did not move. Comprehension lurched through me.
They were hitting her. And the bullets did nothing.
She reached out one hand, catching a bullet midflight. Laughing under her breath, she opened her hand again. An inert bullet sat in it, her hand unharmed.
The calyx charm was with her.
Violetta tumbled down into the basin, the hem of her gown splashing the water. “Where’s the fucking latch? Damn him to hell. Tibario? Are you with me?”
She was slapping my cheek—I must have been in more of a daze than I could feel. “Vi. I’m sorry, Vi. I’m doing it again. I wanted something better for Mamma. For me. For the life I tried to live. I was...”
I was refusing to give up the fight.
She must have found a way to open the latches, because as if without transition, she was pulling me up to the lip of the basin. The pain was receding. Thank god, clarity was coming back to my senses.
Blinking, I looked into Violetta’s face. Tears shone on her cheeks, the pink glow of her own calyx charm, washing off her mother, illuminating her face.
Why was she here?
Mamma was on her feet now, eyes wide with alarm. Casilio was staring at Liliana, saturated with an emotion like terror. Then it hit me.
They both had it. Violetta’s power was gone because it had gone into them. She had given all of herself to serve her parents and their war for dominance, for freedom, so much that Liliana herself had attained epithets of horror in the mouths of the Colombi. It was as if the calyx charm had not died, but been invested so fully into them that it could not be taken back now.
Liliana, sleek with her suit and gleaming hair, extended a pistol outward at the circle of men around them. But her gaze never left Casilio.
“I have to say, Fina.” She spoke softly, almost gently, but without looking at Mamma. “It pains me to admit, but I agree with Casilio. You came here for a reason. You and I both know what it is. I also know why you are afraid to realize it. But it doesn’t suit you to hold back, after all this. You have done things for which I cannot forgive you, my girl. I wish I could. I would gnaw off my right arm if it would give me the capacity to forgive you. You violated my daughter. You lied to her; you controlled her mind. Nothing you did to me is important compared to that. I will love you forever, Fina. But I cannot forgive you. You have already come as far as you are able to go. Show us what that has made of you.”
Violetta clung to me, her face hidden in my shoulder. Casilio’s men circled, but their attention wasn’t on me or Weifan. It was all held between Liliana and Serafina, as if they were performers building to their finale.
Mamma put one hand on the glass. Hopelessness pulsed softly from her brow. “You shouldn’t forgive me. And you were the one to caution me from this path. You blame me now for finally agreeing with you? I’ve tried, Lily, and I haven’t lost. I’ve held it where it is for a long time, because I haven’t lost hope. Perhaps all is doomed forever, and nothing we do now can turn aside destruction. But it won’t be because I failed. I can do this for eternity. That was why I came. So Casilio would see that I can.”
“How the fuck are you doing this? How do you have the charm?” Casilio surged forward, lunging at Liliana’s gun. She pivoted, struck him in the back with it. It pushed him aside but appeared to do no harm. He cocked his own weapon and fired at her, once, twice, three times, while his men watched in confusion. Each bullet struck Liliana impotently, clinking to the floor. She shed her infinite gaze over him and was silent, as if he were beneath her now.
“Mother.” Violetta held me in her arms, turning upward so I was leaning into her lap. “What is she talking about?”
But the connection between Liliana and Mamma seemed to utterly consume them. Finally, Liliana faced Mamma directly. Such kindness and affection burned there that it broke my heart.
“I know you can do it for eternity, my burning girl.” As confident as her words of unforgiveness had been, her entire being now communicated tenderness. As if she were
telling Mamma it would always be all right, that some part of her would always be loved, even if only the part of her once shared and now taken away. That moment in time was eternal. Time could not truly take away who we had all been, no matter what we became. “You can bear it long enough to do what you have always been better than anyone else at doing. If the circumstances were any different, I wouldn’t be saying this. But we only have a handful of dice now, and all we can do is throw them. The house is already burning, and you can finish the job, or go down with it. I will still be here when only ashes are left. Don’t you see? Casilio can’t beat me. If he survives, so do I. I can protect them. My child, your children, Weifan and the others. The calyx charm is stronger with me than it is with him. I know you won’t act unless there’s a chance left for them. I am that chance. So do it. Burn it down.”
I studied Mamma, the emotions playing across her face as her former lover spoke. Liliana’s words were a mystery to me, but not to Mamma. This had the feel of an old conversation, perhaps as old as their once vibrant love.
I pressed myself to Violetta and heard her mother saying the same truth I had found myself. Everything else had been a game—the only way to make it real was to be willing to try again with no more chances left.
Mamma touched her forehead to the glass, the flame of her eye mounting brilliance. She held herself and shook as if the pain of her life were converging into a transformation.
Then, without force, she sighed. Her arms sagged to her sides.
Violetta spoke into the silence. “There is nowhere to run to.” She stroked my hair, and then turned her face to Mamma. “The future, if it comes at all, is being forged in this place right now. I no longer have any desire to control fate. But this is the end, for good or for ill.”
Mamma nodded, too many times, lower lip trembling. But when she stood up, something had changed. Her eyes fell on me. The pain and anger were gone. All that remained was grief, and joy, the two forces of her life resolving themselves into mystery before our eyes.
She smiled so softly I might not have seen it. Then, she said, “Tibario. Your Papa has always loved you, v—” Her voice broke, and she had to pause. “Very, very much. As do I.”
I didn’t have a chance to ask what that meant, why she spoke of him now of all times. Her back straightened, some of that ardor and will returning to her. Casilio was glaring bitterly, looking between Serafina and me.
“No more entertainment.” He etched a signal in the air to his men. “If she breaks out of the glass, shoot her. She has no calyx charm. I care not for whatever secret she represents now. Kill her.”
This didn’t appear to faze Mamma. The energy of her occhiorosso was escalating, becoming so bright it cast a corona of ruby around her head. She touched her own belly, perhaps feeling the place from which the magic within her truly arose.
Then the light turned inward, gathering into her body, draining down from her head to her abdomen. Moment by moment, the glow of the occhiorosso spread from head to arm, arm to toe, intensifying toward the core of her being.
“This isn’t how I wanted it to be.” Her voice vibrated through the room with unnerving resonance, as if her magic was amplifying it, giving it harmony. At first, I thought she was speaking to me, or to Liliana, but the movement of her gaze showed differently: she was speaking to Violetta. “I kept trying to make it work as I envisioned. I wish I had trusted you. Perhaps I could have lived a better life, if I had. So I am trusting you now. Find a way out for them, if you can. If you can’t, you don’t need my forgiveness. It is practically nothing in the way of recompense, but I hope I can give you this small reassurance at last. Proof that you aren’t the cause of the world’s doom.”
Violetta was fixed on her, frowning, comprehension dawning in her widening eyes.
Mamma lifted the hand on her belly to the air, red the color of flowers lighting her movements. “I am.”
The ground rocked, throwing Violetta and Weifan and me to our backs. Casilio stumbled but stayed on his feet, and his men scrambled into formation, tripping over each other as the quake rose in force. Liliana maintained her poised stillness, weapon outstretched, looking up at Mamma as if watching the sun rise.
As if struck by lightning, Mamma burst into flame. Not flame like an object being consumed, but like a tree sprouting its true fullness. Flame like the inside of her mind, the mind I was once part of, thrumming ruby and radiation. The light encompassed her, no longer concentrated in her witch’s eye, and as she peered out over the shimmering water, it became plain: both her eyes blazed red.
The earth shook again, a child of thunder rising from below to greet us, and Mamma touched her lambent fingers to the glass.
In an instant, the glass disappeared. Not shattered, not cracked. It evaporated, as if touched with the furnace of stars, and dissipated into the cloud of light.
Violetta called out over the din, her voice dwarfed by the quake. “I know this feeling. She’s—she’s becoming a dragon.”
Mamma’s face was effuse with glory. Her feet rose gently off the floor, the fume of vaporized glass curling around her like a cloak. Casilio’s men raised their weapons and fired, tides of destruction meeting across the distance.
The game was coming to a close.
Chapter Eighteen
Violetta
The air burned with the scent of dreams decaying. All the dreams I had tried to preserve as long as possible, fragile caterpillars inching toward chrysalis. My love for Tibario. Rekindling a life with Mother. Rosalina and Weifan and the love they represented. Our days would be full of butterflies, if only they could survive the transformation.
But Serafina ascended, the feverish avatar of ruin, come to blight my caterpillars before their chrysalises could be woven.
Mother was a dark smear between me and Serafina’s brilliance, an inverse lighthouse shedding darkness. Shouts and bullet-song echoed off the stone. Trails of gunsmoke shot toward Serafina, so many volleys that surely not even a moon-soul could have evaded them.
She didn’t so much as bother to blast the missiles aside. She opened her arms as if embracing death, but death did not touch her. The bullets caught in her orbit, changing direction to circle furiously around her. In seconds, the bullets became molten darts of metal like liquid moons circling a sun. She laughed down on us, but it was not a human laugh. It was like nothing I’d ever heard, discordant and harmonious at once, a dozen alien voices springing from her body. Her dragon-soul sang with hot exaltation and malice. She sounded like a god.
The future was becoming one long note of nausea. It wailed at me that the end was here, the noble dragon was come. It was come and would rain down forever, brimming with endless superhuman laughter, immortal slayer of hopes.
Serafina splayed one shimmering hand, and the molten metal streaked outward. Like bolts of lightning, they struck her assailants, sending handfuls of men careening into the stone walls. Some of them howled, rolled away with burning marks in their legs or sides. Others twitched briefly and lay still.
Her laughter boiled into a multifarious voice, impossibly deep and high. “Tremble for me, Casilio, there’s a lad. Show me that you know your death when you see it.”
A stroke of pale lightning slashed the distance between her and Casilio. For a moment, even I believed surely such a force would kill him. But when the sparks cleared, he was whole and on his feet. The pulse of calyx charm swelled gently around him.
“Was that death?” He folded arms across his chest like a defiant child. He hadn’t been lying about his fearlessness. He seemed to believe the calyx charm belonged to him now.
New volleys ruptured the brief quiet, Casilio’s men becoming raucous with terror and rage. Serafina only sparkled with fiery delight, searing a hole in the air.
I found my wits, pushed toward Mother to grab her sleeve. “Why did you do this?” My voice sounded hoarse. “We were trying to pre
vent a dragon-soul, not jump headlong into one.” I stopped to pant, suddenly wavering with the weight of what this meant. “Why on earth would you want this?”
As soon as the question left my mouth, it felt wrong, as if it were a line from a play I was no longer performing in. Reality was unbinding with each breath, the world inside me and the world in front of my eyes not matching up. This felt like the dragon-soul I had foreseen. Its aura, the crisp fragrance of doom. Serafina could be the force I had seen sweeping over Vermagna, swallowing everything in its intensity.
But I hadn’t seen her doing it. Everything in me said the dragon-soul I had prophesied was me. I felt her coming still. The sense of my own mind, purified by time and wild magic, reaching out from the future.
Serafina wasn’t the end. Her failure may only be the condition that brought my dragon-soul into being.
Mother looked down at me ruefully, the pink gleam of my magic making her look strangely ethereal. “Because Serafina as a dragon-soul may be able to break the calyx charm.”
I stared, my confusing intuitions and the violence around me making it impossible to think. “You’ll die without it. We may all die tonight anyway, but I wanted there to be one thing that could actually protect you.”
Serafina’s wrath split the air, but she wasn’t focused on us. She billowed like a smoke cloud over the water, fire in her arms and red magic spinning through the atmosphere. None of the blows against her had any effect; with lavish ease she struck down attackers like chaff. She was toying with them, levitating men in the air, bands of crimson force snaring them, twisting their bodies and tossing them back to the stone. She squeezed out screams of panic before letting them go, showing that she could afford patience. It was a peculiar mirror to Father’s own arrogance, but all the more chilling because of what was plain to me: she didn’t have time. No one would have time ever again.
