Midnight Magic

by Cameron Darrow

  "No. I'll live."

  In that crater there should have been a broken body, limbs askew and awash with blood. But Aurelai's limbs were as they should be, not a finger out of joint, and there wasn't a drop of blood to be seen.

  Only the glint of gold.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  AURELAI'S BEAUTIFUL BLACK eyes were staring straight up, the light shining in them dimmed by the fact that the right one was now ringed in sparkling metal. A gash had opened up from temple to jaw on that side, revealing that those perfectly-sculpted cheekbones had, in fact, been sculpted. The skin on her right arm had split open as though it had burst from the inside, leaving a ragged tear behind. But beneath it was no muscle, no fat, sinew nor tendon, only bones of bright, shining gold.

  Panic, terror, and dumb, animal incomprehension seized Vimika like a bear, choking the breath from her and pressing her into the dirt so hard she couldn't take another.

  "Wh… what?" was all she could get out. She knew what she was seeing, there was nothing else it could be, and her gorge rose in response.

  "Vimika…" Aurelai said, her voice as equally close to tears as her face.

  Her beautiful, flawless, false face.

  "You… no. No, this is an illusion! It has to be!" Vimika said, her head whirling to every part of the forest. "You said they didn't come in here! You can't… be!"

  Vimika spilled onto her backside in scrambling denial, pushing away from the crater with her heels. She plowed a track of retreat towards the trees, preferring whatever may lay be lying in wait within them to whatever was laying before her. At least if she made it, she might be allowed to see something else.

  Or maybe she already had. "I never woke up, this is still the forest!" she said, shaking her head so violently stars exploded across her vision again. Breath was coming so fast it hurt, but she still felt like she was going to pass out. The world was swimming as it faded in and out, and she had to swallow her gorge back down every few breaths to keep from being sick. "You're impossible."

  A hand emerged to grip the rim of the crater.

  "No! Stay down there!" Vimika shouted.

  A dark cloud, a pair of empty voids, polished, gleaming gold. "Please. It hurts..."

  There was pain in that voice, so much so that an answering one tore across Vimika's heart. That voice should never feel pain, she thought. Something within her screamed a primal rejection of anything that could make it come to be so.

  Her Aurelai was in pain, but the thing clambering out of the ground was... what?

  "Vimika... please."

  A hand reached out, and Vimika's began to shake at the urge to take it. She had to, it was Aurelai's. She'd held it, kissed it, let it explore her most intimate places, but the skin hanging from it wasn't skin. The bones beneath weren't bones.

  "You're not real," Vimika said. She didn't know herself how she'd meant it. Illusion, dream, artificial creature pretending to be alive... they were all true. And not.

  "Vimika..."

  The eyes. Those beautiful, infinitely deep wells were unchanged. They looked at Vimika the way they always had, the soul behind them just the same as the one that Vimika had fallen for so thoroughly.

  That she'd trusted.

  "Why didn't you tell me?" The words tore from Vimika as though she'd reached down her throat and spelled them out with her own guts. Her chest was heaving, but there wasn't enough air in the world to calm her.

  Aurelai's eyes swelled with tears, and she winced in obvious pain every time one dripped into her wound. She looked down at her hand, considering it. "I thought you knew."

  A low, mournful laugh bubbled up from within Vimika. Slow and mirthless, the laugh of the dying and the damned. It burst from her all at once, the absurdity, the sheer impossibility of what was happening geysering from her so hard she convulsed with the strain, doubling her forward. Closer to Aurelai.

  "How could I possibly have known that?! There aren't any mechamagical people!"

  It's why wizards had been purged and not exterminated. Why the practice and anyone capable of it wiped out.

  But it had happened anyway.

  To Aurelai. Why Aurelai?

  Twin streaks of liquid anguish burned down Vimika's cheeks, making Aurelai waver and dissolve before snapping back into harsh, unforgiving reality.

  Aurelai sat back on her heels, perfectly balanced. "I weigh over 400 pounds. I move like one of your clocks. I only breathe when I remember to, I'm cold to the touch. My animata is as pure and bright at Oliver's, I'm two centuries older than you, but look younger. The most powerful mage in history set in motion his second-greatest masterwork with his Last Breath to keep me hidden. How did you not?"

  "I… I didn't… think about any of it… This place is so strange, so saturated in weird, powerful magic, it could explain anything!"

  The pain on Aurelai's face was excruciating to witness, made all the worse by the fact that only a tiny fraction of it was from having her skin peeled to the bone. "You mean you denied it."

  White-hot fire tore open Vimika's heart, the pure, piercing lance of bare, polished truth. The tears returned with savage intensity, falling like scalding rain.

  The evidence had been there all along, but she'd been too short-sighted to put it together. Everything she'd experienced since waking up on the slab had felt impossible, why not one more?

  As though she had seen every thought in Vimika's head, Aurelai answered in an achingly soft voice. "Maybe I ignored what I didn't want to see, too. I thought you'd accepted what I was. It made me so happy I forgot to question it."

  Vimika couldn't bear to look at her, but couldn't bring herself to look away. "You… you should have told me as soon as I arrived."

  Aurelai shot to her feet with blinding speed to look down on Vimika with eyes of utter heartbreak, hiding the light and leaving only the darkness.

  "Why? Would you have even talked to me then? Helped me? Made love to me? Treated me like a person? Or would you have run? Abandoned me here, just like the only other person who's ever pretended to care about me?"

  Tears streamed freely from Aurelai's eyes, full of betrayal and confusion but not surprise, and that was what hurt most of all.

  "Look at me, Vimika. Look at me!" Propelled by the flexing of golden ribs, her command rang from every tree trunk and off the flat sides of the house, amplifying it ten times over. With a single sharp yank, Aurelai tore a chunk of dangling 'skin' from her forearm, revealing even more gold. Her bones were brilliant and untarnished, works of art in and of themselves, and through Sight, solid shafts of blinding white. "Here, the truth you wanted so badly: I'm a mechamagical monster. An abomination, unworthy of anything but contempt and fear. Is this what you wanted? Is this how I should have greeted you that day instead?"

  "You lied to me!" Vimika cried.

  "I showed you who I was! Me, Vimika, not my bones! Everything I've ever said to you, every kindness I've shown you, every word, every touch, every glance, every moment we've had together is the real truth! This," Aurelai shook her exposed arm, the ragged edges of her 'skin' fluttering like cloth, "isn't me. I didn't choose this. This is my father's truth, and so is this awful place! What's in here is who I am, and who I have been to you since the moment you arrived." Aurelai thumped her chest, and some kind of fluid splattered over her dress in a great red slash from shoulder to waist. Red, but the wrong red. It was the color of blood, but too thin, like wine.

  Her veins were full of wine, and you were stupid enough to drink yourself insensible from them.

  Aurelai was right. The signs were all there. Even when Vimika's magic had returned, she didn't want to see it, and in response her eyes stung to the point she could barely keep them open. Her heart was pounding against her ribs so hard it felt like someone was trying to tear it out.

  Or two someones. Aurelai with her lies, and Vimika with her own. For daring to hope that this time was different. Her time with Aurelai had been like building a castle made of crystal, brick by brick, every dr
op of mortar her own blood and tears. The gravity of her past had been pulling at it, trying to tear it down around her, but she had propped it up with belief. With hope.

  And now Aurelai had shattered it with a single blow, rendering it dust too dangerous to breathe.

  With your help.

  "I was genuine to you, Vimika. I've never had a chance to lie to anyone, how good do you think I would be at it? But I should have known. I should have been smarter than to believe you were who I'd hoped you were. Who you pretended to be."

  Vimika stared at the… woman across from her, fingers flexing without thought or intent as a knife drove itself into her heart with agonizing slowness, killing her in degrees. With every beat it sank deeper, every breath twisting it a little more until in one anguished cry, it ruptured her completely. Wordless tortured agony echoed through the clearing, a whisper compared to Aurelai's had done.

  "I should have never brought you here. Never allowed myself to hope." Aurelai looked down, dark eyes bright with tears. "It hurts so much more than I thought it would."

  Vimika looked up, clutching her chest. On that much they could agree. "The traps, the illusions… I understand why now. He had to do it."

  Brightness returned to Aurelai's eyes: the searing, chaotic fury of lightning.

  "He wouldn't have had to if he hadn't MADE ME!" She slashed her wounded arm down, slinging 'blood' in a great arc between them. "Do you think I asked for this? Do you think I want to be an immortal monster, living forever with the borrowed soul of someone else? I don't even know what to call that woman! My mother? My sister? What are your hurts to mine? You know nothing of betrayal. When your own father rejects you because you didn't come to life with the memories of the dead daughter he was trying to duplicate, but to then have to look out through her eyes, speak with her voice, wear her face and plead with him to accept you as someone else, only for him to say no, right up until he forgets what he'd done..."

  Rigid self-discipline descended with a shuddering breath. "But I helped you. I listened, I dried your tears... and it doesn't matter. You've already made up your mind."

  Vimika stared out into space. Into nothing. Into the lightless void that yawned out in front of her, all the darker for having been such a bright future only moments earlier. "I can't stay here."

  Struggling to her feet, she looked about for her door to see it mercifully still intact. She stumbled towards where it had embedded itself like a snapped saw blade, feet swishing through grass that she could no longer trust as actually existing.

  "You're going to leave me? Like he did?"

  "Do you know how dangerous it would be if you got out?" Vimika tossed over her shoulder as the door slowly rose into the air. She couldn't look back or she'd stop moving. If she stopped moving, she'd start thinking, and then she would have to consider that Aurelai might be right.

  "Dangerous to whom?"

  "Everyone. You most of all. Staying here means you're safe," Vimika said, each word dripping from her lips like the vile poison they were. That they were the truth made her swallow every drop.

  When Aurelai next spoke, it reached Vimika's heart and worked into the wound, so painful as to be blinding: "That's exactly what he said."

  Vimika settled her weight onto the door, and the two of them stared at one another long enough for a lifetime of words to pass between them in silence. A thousand insults, a thousand pleas, a thousand confessions and ten million apologies.

  The door began to move.

  "I thought you were different," they said together.

  But even as Vimika rose into the sky, she paid no attention to the fact she met no resistance; it was entirely for Aurelai as she shrank away. The house, the garden, none of it mattered save the look on her face, the one that Vimika could see perfectly even as all the other details became lost by distance: betrayal.

  Vimika couldn't bring herself to make the turn. Unable to look away, it was only the clouds that broke their gaze, and soon enough Vimika was all alone with no refuge from her thoughts but the wide-open sky.

  ~

  There was nowhere for Vimika to go.

  Above the wind, above the clouds, the sun beat down on her unimpeded as she let the air sink its teeth into her nose and cheeks, the cold gnawing at her fingertips, her ears. Only the brim of her hat spared her eyes as they stared straight down onto a world that held nothing for her anymore.

  She was well and truly alone.

  The rim of the world stretched out before her, the sky darker above than ahead, while behind her the Dragonbacks rose up from the clouds like the jaws of a slavering animal, sundering them without pity in the hopes of inviting her over to throw herself upon them.

  Snow, cloud, sky, sun. The world was unbearably bright.

  The only shadow lay beneath her hat, the darkest place in her existence.

  How could this have happened?

  She could still feel Aurelai's fingers atop her own, smell her hair, taste her lips, the brew of their combined magic to which they had each become so addicted. The warmth of her skin, the unfathomable depths within dark and open eyes. The sound of her voice, spoken and in song, about beautiful things and their even more beautiful future.

  A future Vimika had long been convinced would be spent as alone as she was now, joyless and without intrigue or challenge. Simple and pathetic. How easy it had been to lull herself into believing it could be any other way. That destiny had anything in store for Vimika but heartache.

  Tears fell into empty space, torn into mist by the scything wind.

  Aurelai.

  Impossible for one reason, and now another entirely.

  It made complete sense for Aurelai to be mechamagical. Every point she'd made was blindingly obvious now, but one could only be blinded if they could see in the first place. Couldn't she understand how dangerous it was to be anywhere else? The reaction that would be sure to happen if it were ever revealed that there was a mechamagical person in the world?

  No one would care that it had been done centuries ago by a dead man, and that the secrets had died with him. One look at those golden bones and they would be lucky if they only cut their heads off. Then it would be on to Vimika's family and every other wizard in Atvalia. It would be the end of them for good this time.

  How could she have kept that secret? How could she have… tricked me into letting her go? Vimika thought. Or was it Not-Vimika? Was there really any difference?

  Yes, what a monster, wanting to be treated like a person, another part of her responded. A victim didn't want to call attention to what she's innocent of?

  Because she wanted to be accepted for who she was, and not what? To want to not be judged for things she couldn't help?

  You're the worst kind of hypocrite, Vimikathritas. For shame.

  Vimika stared down at her hands as they trembled and shook, no longer confident it was only from the temperature.

  Aurelai was mechamagical, yes. But she didn't choose to be, did she? Aurelai hadn't always been Aurelai. She'd been made. But the only way to do that was to rip the soul out of someone else and move it.

  But who had she been before?

  Vimika had to fight the sudden urge to vomit.

  Two victims. Both innocent.

  And who knew Aurelai's father better than she had? Knew what she was better than she did? She knew the risks to herself. She could have lured anyone in to help her. Summoned any and every mechamagical animal within Calling distance, leading trails as bright as comets straight to her if she only wanted out. If the local house wizards were already being blackmailed by their presence, what difference would it make to them to follow if their masters thought the reward was big enough?

  She asked you because they would have killed her, and she knew it.

  The status quo required stability. A little blackmail afforded the four families in Durn security, put them equal with the others up north that had wizards, and kept the miners in line without needing an army. Knowledge of a mechamagical person
would have upended the order of everything overnight if the wider world found out. Uprisings from the commoners and the execution of every wizard in Atvalia, the four families destroyed for being the ones responsible.

  It was a struggle for the tears to fall now, creeping down Vimika's cheeks in halting, jerking clumps of ice.

  She listened to every wizard in Durn, and believed you were different. She needed you to be.

  And you, wizard, wanted so badly to be hurt again, you found your reason regardless of what it did to her. Of what had been done to her. Why would she lie to you? You truly were her only hope.

  And now, hundreds of years after the worst betrayal it's possible to endure, Aurelai had suffered another. Perhaps for a third time.

  Vimika doubled over so strongly she very nearly pitched off of her door. She screamed into the clouds, needing to expel enough of her shame so that she wouldn't let herself.

  Go to her. Talk, at least. She's done nothing more than you would have.

  Than she'd already done.

  With sickening speed, Vimika arrowed straight down, bursting through the clouds to find nothing but sharp Speartips pointing straight back up at her. She shot out over the treetops so close they whipped at the hem of her robe, snapping and tearing in a bid to yank her from the sky.

  But as she scanned about for the clearing, she couldn't find it. There was no break in the trees whatsoever, only dense forest all the way to the mountains.

  How could that be? She'd gone straight up and then straight down again! She boosted her altitude until her hat was cutting a trail in the belly of the clouds, but even that wasn't enough.

  Aurelai was gone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  VIMIKA CIRCLED AROUND where she thought the clearing had been several times, in wider and wider spirals until she was gliding over the edge of the forest. She made out the disturbance in the snow the door had made when it took off, the only blemish on the vast expanse of white, while the trees were darker than she remembered, already having shed a great deal of their winter burden.