The Calyx Charm

by May Peterson

  Mother seized my shoulders. “Listen to me. Many things in this world are precious to me, including you. I could never throw any of it away. So you must understand why I do this. You want to protect me, and I don’t want you to anymore. For years I told myself I was your shield, but I had it wrong. It was you shielding me. Against your father, against armies, against the fear that you felt for me. I survived half a life before the calyx charm, and I can survive a good deal more. The one who needs the shield is you. I want you to let me go.”

  I blinked, staggered, trying to process what she meant. Serafina hovered above like a bloody angel. With lurid repetition, streaks of red lighting sparked from her body, honing on Casilio. The blows pushed him back, forced him to his knees, moving him gradually toward the wall. But it was like a fighter shifting against an onslaught and not yielding, none of her blasts leaving so much as a mark. His face was set with grim confidence.

  Could a dragon-soul defeat my calyx charm? The thought brought a strange lightness. Mother’s words lit up with an unnerving logic. But it was too much. In the blur of cataclysm, I was a lost child once more, overwhelmed with the knowledge that I was only going to lose my mother again.

  “I wasn’t only trying to protect you.” I ran my gaze over the cramped battlefield. Tibario was hunched nearby, intercepting any bursts of violence that approached us. Chunks of rock scattered from places Serafina struck, cluttering the floor with steaming rubble. Tibario was holding a man in a neck grip, another limp beside him. “There may not be an answer now. This wasn’t how I interpreted my prophecy, Serafina feels like the dragon I beheld. You want there to be an answer, a way to change fate, but Mother, there isn’t one. I want Rosalina, Tibario, and the others to live. Whatever this means to you, Mother, it can’t be worth it.”

  “But that’s precisely it.” Her expression softened, sadness playing on her lips. “You can protect them. But you have to stop protecting me. If I am selfish or foolhardy, let me face the consequences of my deeds without interference. You need the calyx charm back, and this may be all I can do to restore it.”

  I shook my head, drowning in the implications. I wanted to lean in, let my mother hold me one more time, hold her in return. I’d considered that I might be unconsciously protecting Father from guilt. But my hate for him was fiercer than I’d believed myself capable of. How could the same emotion, however buried, cause me to both be shielding him and Mother? They were entirely different creatures in my internal landscape.

  I looked away. There wasn’t time for this. If nothing else was true about the last ten years, it was that time was air, and we were suffocating.

  Fresh screams tore from the crowd. Father’s soldiers were muscling toward the lift door, trying to push in. They shoved around Father, who maintained his stance against Serafina’s current of fiery blasts, his arms upraised. Claws of force were snatching them by the legs or necks, dragging them unceremoniously back toward the pool over which Serafina shone with brutal grace. It was difficult to make out the lines of her body now, the magma-like radiance of magic reducing her to a smear of color and animal intent. This was like a scene from a dream of the deepest hell, being trapped below infinite ground and held in place by a demon of light.

  The screams pitched higher, became nightmarishly musical. Another tremor rocked the ground, and I rolled to my knees for balance, hitting up against Tibario and Weifan. They both looked whole, but the screech of the dragon’s ascent rent our focus. Weifan exuded a trancelike concentration on the conflict; Tibario swept me under one of his arms, panting, his tail lashing back and forth with absurd speed.

  Several of the soldiers stood from the floor, spots of ruby terror sprouting from their eyes, rendering their jerky movements surreal with meaning. Of course as a dragon, her sorcery must have been swelling past its limits, no longer needing an emotional entry point into her victims. A chill passed through me, grimly thankful that she no longer aimed her malice at us.

  It was impossible to gauge how intact Serafina’s consciousness was, but then the possessed soldiers spoke in unison with her, all unnervingly harmonious. “We play a new game, Casilio, my friend.” The sound flowing from her could no longer be called laughter; it was like song, the rapture of a beast in its glory, predatory and heavy with deadly wisdom. The men’s controlled voices were strangely mechanical and hot with cruelty. “I will take your life apart one piece at a time, and you will wait for my dragon to consume me. You know I will burn out. You will not see a ghost of me, ever, because my being will go to be with the great dragon when my body is gone. But how long will it give me, eh? A day, a few hours, to devour this city whole? Perhaps before I go through the soldiers you have in this house, my mind will be too consumed by the dragon to remember why I want to destroy you. No power on this earth, not even reason, will be able to stop me then. I don’t have to kill you. I only have to leave you with nothing left.”

  This felt luridly like a warning, urging me to remember that she hoped I would solve the riddle of the prophecy. Some dragon-souls may blaze for weeks, but we could neither count on such time nor endure for that long. Beat by beat, the panic in me was giving way to misery. She was inevitable. Father was inevitable. No thing about this doom had ever been able to be changed.

  Yet the feel of myself from the future, gazing back at me, continued on.

  The cloud of screams dissipated, and the possessed soldiers turned their weapons on Father, emptying their magazines into him. Streams of bullets clattered into futility against the calyx charm, until the men began hurling themselves bodily into him. He stood his ground, but could not fight back.

  Tibario locked himself around me, moving with me so we were on our feet, his chest and abdomen acting as a barrier. For now, we had the advantage of the violence being focused away from us, but Tibario already looked weakened. Burn marks lined his arms, the skin exposed through torn clothing. Semi-immersion in the sacred water seemed to have left him shaken. Against the backdrop of our final days, he already resembled a ghost, returning to the death he’d come back from.

  My mind wove a twistedly pleasing story out of it. Perhaps fate had meant him to die, but had brought him back for as long as we had left, so he could be the person he finally wanted to be.

  “Stay behind me.” He spoke roughly through the din. “If they turn fire on us, they’ll only scratch me up. You all know much more about witches’ dragons than I do. Any chance in hell this can be stopped?”

  His voice turned up slightly at the end, like a child asking for seconds and not expecting to get them.

  Mother strode forward, joining Tibario as a shield, her breadth covering me and Weifan. She added her own volley of rounds at Casilio, which had no greater effect. Her response was stiff, certain. “My knowledge is secondhand, but specific. Think of a dragon like a dam having burst. Magic normally flows in a particular way within a mage, only expressed in certain ways. It’s defined by who the mage is, inside and out. But when it becomes a dragon, the boundaries wear away, like rivers flooding into the sea. The magic can become nearly anything, expanding beyond what any mage without a dragon can do. But this means the mage herself starts to deteriorate in turn, her body and memories dissolving. I don’t know how long she has. Serafina and I used to lie awake planning what to do if this came to pass. Before the process is complete, as long as her body is still whole, it can be reversed. She can limit the flow again, come back to who she is.”

  Yes. It made intuitive sense. Instinct would take over as her identity, and the power expressed within it, became too vast for any singular human self to contain. So that was what it meant to return to the noble dragon. “So we don’t defeat her. We get her to want something else, something that makes it necessary to hold on to herself as Serafina.”

  “Yes.” Mother tossed her weapon into the pool, drawing another. “And until you do that, let Casilio and myself contain her. This is why we’re here. She may break the caly
x charm yet.”

  The ground trembled again, now with greater force, and ruptures burst through the stone. Tibario braced me and himself against a wall. Mother stood firm, as if inured to gravity. Cracks spreads across the floor, scarlet light stabbing through, as if the soil beneath the house was inflaming with Serafina’s fulminating power. Flakes of stone fell from the ceiling, and the cellar groaned like it was being torn apart.

  Tibario leaned into me, his face illumined by the infernal glow, looking abruptly tender and mortal. “I’m sorry, Violetta. So much of who I am has gone into trying to save Mamma. I feared her dying alone, but alone is what she wants. Maybe she always did. She doesn’t need saving. I was the one who feared how empty I am without her. My promise was to return to you, but I’ve never been a complete person with a heart of my own. My heart always came from her, the person I was for her, like I left my insides behind when our mindlink faded. I was afraid I couldn’t be anything real for you.”

  Judgment felt alien now. Hadn’t I also preferred dreams of what could be over realities that were? But the gentle agony in his eyes frightened me. Maybe this was the whole truth of our relationship, and we could go no further. “What about now? If the future was given back to us, and we had the rest of our natural lives, would you want to come back with me? Has it been real to you?”

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head, the sweetness of his laughter softening the anxiety that this answer fed in me. “But it doesn’t matter. Perhaps if she dies, I will forever be left half a person, always waiting for the identity I receive from you. Like I said: you deserve more than someone who can only be a dream. But I had the chance to live a beautiful dream with you, and it was precious to me. Whatever happens now, it will always be precious to me. If I am a dream, let me be your dream, one I can fulfill, one I can love being. I don’t care if it’s real. I want always to come back to you.”

  He tucked his face into my shoulder, the spot of cool quiet between us like a magical shell amidst the chaos. This was enough. It wasn’t what I wanted, paled in comparison to all I wanted. Perhaps this was why the future had always so frightened me: I wanted so much of it, and was aware of how little I might have.

  Taking a deep breath, I stroked his hair. Serafina hovered like a demon, adorned with swaths of sparkling steam rising from the pool. She may not even remember her son.

  I tilted his chin up, looked into his eyes. “I know what you have to do. If anything can motivate Serafina to preserve her humanity, it’s you. You are what she has left. And if you can get close to her, you can take her far away from here. Somewhere she can do less damage. She still has the ability to hear you.”

  Tibario’s pupils widened with comprehension. Mother whirled, scowling. “Wait. That would leave you here with only me and your father. He’ll turn on you then.”

  “Then we face him.” My heart settled a fraction. “Serafina said she trusted me to resolve this, so I’m doing that. Because I tell you now, if she is not the dragon-soul that resolves my prophecy, then we haven’t seen anything yet. We already planned a way to stop a dragon-soul in its tracks. Tibario only has to get close enough to her to inject her with lachrysinthe.”

  He gasped, broke contact with me and pulled the gleaming syringe into view. “Mine looks still intact. The water didn’t seep in. I can do it. With a touch, I can cat-step her. And she’ll let me near.”

  Mother looked uncertain. “What about you?”

  I patted my belt, revealing my own syringe. “I believe this is the exact moment I was waiting for. Can you make a path for Tibario?”

  Mother appeared ready to protest, but she nodded and pushed into the crowd. Tibario followed behind.

  They waded into the stream of battle, slashes of crimson magic and gunfire deflecting off Mother’s charm. Father paused at them striding forward, the men who had their wits left murmuring with confusion. Tibario was couched between their arms, placing himself in his mother’s vision. Serafina pierced them with her gaze, face unreadable, but for a moment she stopped. The entire room stopped, a brief pool of reprieve forming around Tibario.

  He lifted his voice into the quiet, that wily charming grin warming his face. “Mamma. I don’t care what you are. When the world is ending, I will not leave you. I was with you in the beginning and I will be with you at the end.”

  The quality of her attention was almost palpable, falling like rain over us. “Very noble of you.” The words were bizarre, dreamlike, emerging from so many mouths but all bearing Serafina’s character. “But as long as a rational thought remains in my head, you will obey me. You didn’t die once for it to be in vain now.”

  She gestured a trail of lightning, perhaps mounting a spell, but Tibario was ready. He teetered toward the lip of the basin, balancing on one toe. “All right, Mamma. Catch me!”

  With that he launched upward, all his immortal strength carrying him into the air. He’d fall face-first into the pool, and while not fatal the splash would be miserable for him. Serafina could have done many things: strike him aside, seize him with invisible force, produce some matter-twisting spell. Instead she did something very simple. Perhaps it was the strength of instinct taking over.

  She gasped, a queer note of surprise in the dragon’s song. Then she opened her arms, pitching forward to catch her child.

  She wouldn’t be defending herself from him. Tibario landed in her grasp, the shimmer of wild magic enclosing him. He held tight to her abdomen, a fierce affection streaming from his brow. “Got you!” he shouted.

  In the next instant, shadows billowed over them. It was like the stuff of the world had opened its mouth, swallowing them whole. The fluid virtue of the cat-step bore them away, and the apocalyptic light drained from the room.

  For a moment, the change left only the remaining intact electric lights to give definition to her absence. Miniature quakes still spidered through the ground, but the scent of doom was gone from the atmosphere.

  The cellar seemed unnaturally empty now without a dragon in it. But it had worked. Tibario had done it. It was in his hands now.

  Some of Father’s soldiers were hacking, pushing rubble off themselves, or groaning under the weight of their wounds. They’d rally soon enough, and I had my own part of this task to complete. Kneeling down against the wall, I pulled back my sleeve.

  The syringe needle was cold against my arm. It was time. This was the moment I had predicted, the moment when my hope would die and my dragon would emerge. Serafina had been thwarted too despite her cataclysmic power, like all others who had defied Father. The best we could pray for now was her neutralization.

  Mother was on her feet. The shimmer of the calyx charm grew from her, now the brightest light in the wreckage, tinging the stone pink. She could distract Father for a few moments, if nothing else.

  I readied to press the syringe plunger and let the numbness in. And then what? What would happen if this aborted my dragon before it was born?

  I became abruptly aware of the feel of the room, the dust and heat, the cracked-shell appearance of ruin seeping from the earth. It was like I was waking up and remember what real life tasted and smelled like. Father strode forward, wiping residue from his unharmed limbs. He didn’t have so much as a scorch mark on his face, but that face was cold with outrage.

  When was I supposed to lose hope?

  Mother didn’t flinch. “Just you and me now, love.”

  Father, to his credit, took a moment to scan his soldiers. Less than ten appeared to be left standing, and half of them spitting blood. Their masks were cracked or discarded, revealing bruised faces with unchanging expressions. I thought of the man with his tongue cut out, imagined what horrors Father employed to train men so focused on battle that they’d be this numbly obedient in the face of their deaths. Then he regarded Mother, an acrid pleasure in his expression.

  “I suppose it is. I wondered what would bring you back to me. S
hould have expected it would have to be revenge.”

  I had assumed I’d lose hope. Those around me had hope, hope that threatened to fray and snap as the story drew to a close. Losing hope seemed the natural inward sign of a thwarted struggle. Mother, Serafina, even Tibario and Weifan, all had ways of holding on to hope. Hope that, to me, rendered them agonizingly vulnerable. Mother had urged Serafina to become a dragon out of her hope.

  Where was mine? What had I been hoping for? Hope—the lure of it, the frailty of it—was their burden. As I sat with a needle pressed into my arm, waiting for defeat to settle in, it occurred to me that I felt no different.

  I already was the one without hope. Hadn’t this been my whole message to the others? That their desire to change the outcome was precisely what was causing their suffering? Tibario had materialized before me holding the promise of my ideal life, the life I’d longed for, and I’d told him that a dream coming true was too frightening. It ravaged me with hope. I had needed every strength within me to risk reality with him.

  No. It was never losing hope that I needed to wait for, because hope was gone years ago. The shape of my blasted hopes was standing before me, a battlefield with Father on one end and Mother on the other, drawing and quartering fate between them. Despair had visited so many times that it was in my blood, keeping my heart strong. I needed my despair. Despair let me face fear, because it gave me freedom to not cling to a better outcome.

  My dragon may have been growing softly all this time, suckling on the richness of my despair, despair that fed and protected me. Despair alone made it possible to look into the vast majesty and terror of the future and endure.