Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Epigraph:

I’m the phoenix

And the ash.

Red eyes shining in a camera flash.

My secret

Is I don’t keep none.

See something, go ahead and say something

I ain’t afraid of it. 

I don’t drown,

Won’t stay down,

Heat finds a way to rise somehow. 

Scan the crowd as I’m

Coming out, and I

Don’t see too many rivals now. 

                                                                        -Dessa, “5 Out Of 6”

Act 1: I don’t drown

The sun was bright, the air was cool, and the wind smelled like petrichor and decaying leaves, with just the slightest hint of opium. 

Margo and Eliot were in Fillory. Three-hundred-years-in-the-future-Fillory, to be exact, and they were trying to figure out what the fuck to do next. 

Hundreds of years had passed in an eyeblink and some unknown asshole was on the throne.  Margo’s throne.  Her kingdom had been taken and two more of the people she loved were almost certainly dead.  It was bullshit.  There’d been a lot of bullshit going around lately. 

The two magicians made their way through the orange wood.  Margo was seething.  She was always seething, but she tried not to let it show, wrapping her feelings up in stiletto heels and a magenta jacket thick enough to keep the whole bullshit world at bay.  Eliot was quiet and distant, an apparition in black silk.  She had fought so hard for so long to get him back, but it was like he wasn’t back at all.  Quentin’s death had hit him hard.  Probably the hardest of any of them.  He’d grown quiet and withdrawn, and she’d catch him staring at nothing from time to time and have to snap him back to reality.  Literally.  She’d snap her fingers right in his face, saying, “Hey.  El.  Where’d you go?” and he’d give his head a small shake and slowly come back to her.  Margo knew that Eliot and Quentin had been close, so she was trying to give him the time and space he needed to grieve, even though it frustrated her.  Grief looked and felt different for everyone.  Eliot’s grief looked like dark clothes and a tattered copy of the persona he’d always used to hide his pain.  It wasn’t hiding much, this time.  Either the mask had grown thin with disuse or the pain was just too strong to conceal. 

For Margo, grief felt an awful lot like being pissed off.  It was a low sting, a buzzing pain in her chest that never fully went away, offset by a simmer of anger deep in her belly, always churning, always railing, raging at the sheer injustice that her friend was gone far too soon.   It looked like suave confidence and raunchy jokes.  It looked like carrying the team, being the strong one, always being the strong one, holding El’s head above water long enough for him to heal.  Pushing down the anger and locking it away behind forced cheer and a convincing smile. 

That had been the dynamic for days, her holding shit together (trying desperately to hold shit together), while he drifted through life like a sable-clad balloon.  And she had kept holding her shit together even after they’d found out that the Fillory they were wandering was wrong, that everything she’d known was gone.  She kept smiling and kept moving, putting one foot in front of the other until she could figure out how to get her kingdom back, a tall, black shadow trailing at her designer heels. 

She’d thought the farm-stand off the dirt trail would have been a good place to grab lunch, maybe stop and rest a while.  Little did she fucking know. 

They were still at least fifty feet away when Eliot froze in his tracks.  He muttered a long, drawn out, “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuk…” before swallowing, clenching his teeth, then pivoting on his heel and fleeing in the opposite direction, his long legs moving faster than they had since he’d gotten out of the hospital (faster, honestly, than was probably safe for his injured body). 

Today kept getting better.  A runaway, injured goth-boy was exactly what she needed. 

“Shit,” said Margo and started after him. 

She found him several minutes later, slumped against a wide Fillorian tree trunk, attempting, unsuccessfully, to light a cigarette with shaking hands.  “El?” she said.  “El!  What’s going on?” She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him smoke.  Where had he even gotten a cigarette from, anyway?

She crouched in front of him, putting their faces on the same level.  His eyes darted around the forest, anywhere but at her.  “Jesus.  Are you ok?”

That question elicited the bitter scoff it deserved.  Fair enough.  He put the unlit cigarette to his lips, taking a drag of smoke that wasn’t there.  He shook his head.  And kept shaking it.  The mask was well-broken now.  “I…” he said.  “I can’t do this.  I can’t do this, Margo.  I can’t.  I can’t do this…”  The cigarette wedged between his fingers moved back and forth from his mouth like a caffeinated hummingbird, never still. 

This was getting ridiculous.  She shifted forward and grabbed both his wrists, bringing her face close to his.  “El?  Eliot!  I need you to look at me.  Look at me, m’kay?” 

His head and body shied as far away from her as the tree and her grip on his wrists allowed, but, to his credit, he stopped fidgeting and met her eyes.  His wrists were shaking.

“Look, I know there are things you haven’t been telling me, and I haven’t asked because I’m your friend and I respect your boundaries,” she said. “But if you’re gonna lose your shit every time we get near produce, it’s gonna be a problem.  So I think that now would be a real good time to start telling me exactly what the fuck is going on with you.  Spill.” 

He wilted, head and body sagging against the tree.  He looked down and muttered something she didn’t catch.  She waited, tilting her head and raising an eyebrow. 

“It’s not all produce,” he said, like he’d just been caught with his hand in a cookie jar.  He sighed.  “The smell.  I’d forgotten what Fillorian peaches smelled like.  It’s…”  His eyebrows drew up in the center in that way that felt like a knife to her chest.  “It’s not the same as the ones we have on Earth.  It’s not even the same as my memories.  Just…too much, too real, too…” he trailed off, breaking eye-contact again. 

Peaches.  Fuck.   “So this has to do with…” Was there a tactful way of putting this?  Screw it, euphemisms were easier.  “…The peach you threw in the fire?”  She frowned.  “You know, you never told me why you chose a peach.  I figured it was personal and you’d tell me when you were ready, but this is obviously a problem and I don’t have the fucking time to wait for you to be ready.  So you’re going to tell me.  Right now.”  The High King wasn’t used to being disobeyed. 

He leaned his head back against the tree trunk, squeezing his eyes shut.  “Do you remember,” he began in the quick, tight singsong that came out when he was nervous, “getting a basket of fruit with a note in it as a wedding present when you married Fomar?” 

She gave him a level look.  “…Yes,” she said.  A little hard to forget, that: finding out that two of your best friends are suddenly dead.  Dead.  She felt a shiver of déjà vu thinking of that day.  How many times would she have to bury them?

Eliot swallowed.  “Well, about that…”

And then he told her.  He told her everything.  The mosaic and the throne room and the Happy Place and the never getting to say goodbye, never getting to say ‘I’m sorry.’ 

Margo was horrified.  Not at the story itself, but at the fact that she hadn’t known.  She listened in a state of mute shock, eventually letting go of her friend’s arms and joining him to sit against the tree, her shoulder against his, maintaining a physical connection as he exposed his soul.  By the time he got to the end, the waking up, the finding out, their heads were leaning together, each supporting the other.  Neither would have been able to hold up on its own. 

How could she have missed it?  Her best friend hiding something the size of an entire lifetime. For months!  The signs were there, now that she knew what to look for: the subtle changes in the way that Eliot and Quentin had interacted after the wedding.  The way that Q had stayed at the monster’s side, enduring who-knows-what to keep Eliot’s body safe.  And she hadn’t known.  She’d been so caught up in her own shit that she never even thought to ask.  The anger always-present in her belly flared, partly at Eliot for not telling her, but mostly at herself.  She could have been there.  She should have been there to smack Eliot upside the head for doing something so monumentally stupid as walking away from that chance at happiness.  Should have been there for Quentin when Eliot was possessed, so that neither of them would have had to go through it alone. 

The sheer weight of the injustice, the unfairness, of the entire situation was only starting to penetrate her armor when Eliot sighed and said, “And the worst part… is that he’d be alive right now if it weren’t for me.”

The fuck?  Margo whipped her head around so fast it left Eliot off-balance, suddenly missing his support.  She hadn’t headbutted him in the face, though that might have been appropriate, under the circumstances.  “What,” she said, “the fuck are you talking about, Waugh?”

“I’m the reason he’s dead,” he said, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world.  A wincing half-smile and a tight, humorless laugh.  “I basically killed him myself.” 

Great.  “Okay,” she said, authority creeping into her voice, “you’re gonna have to back up because I don’t follow.” 

“Fifty years, Margo.  I know-- I knew him.  He talked to me…told me…things.   Not at first, but…later.”

He looked her dead in the eye.  “He told me how much he thought about dying.  About the ways he’d imagined killing himself.  About how--“ bitterness, “—maybe he wouldn’t even need to.  How he sometimes wished that he could just die, maybe in an accident or some heroic self-sacrifice.  He didn’t talk like that all the time, or even often, but it was often enough to scare the crap out of me.  Did you know that back on Earth he had days where he’d cross the street without looking?  He told me he wasn’t afraid of the cars because he didn’t give a shit about his own life.  Even in Fillory, I’d catch him sometimes, staring at a cliff edge or the lakeside with this look.  And I would take his hand and bring him back.  Back to me. 

“Sometimes at night,” he took a ragged breath, “he’d tell me about how he wouldn’t mind dying.  When he said things like that, I’d take him in my arms, kiss him on that beautiful little head of his, and say, as sweetly as I could, ‘I’d mind.  I would miss you.’  I could feel his body relax every time I said it.  We’d stay that way, me holding him, until we both fell asleep.  It felt like I was holding him to reality, like if I let go he’d slip away and be gone forever.  In the mornings he’d be back to normal, and we’d just…get on with our lives, nothing to show for it but a few salt-stains on the pillows. 

“We did this for years, so long and so often that eventually, when he was having a rough time he’d just say, ‘Tell me you’d miss me,’ and I would, because I knew how much he needed to hear it.  He needed someone to hold on for.” 

He’d been playing with the cigarette, turning it over and over in his fingers, for several minutes, but at this point he stopped and tucked it carefully into his vest pocket.  He swallowed.  “I took that away from him.”  He took a deep breath and let it out.   “I never asked how long he stuck around, after I… But I don’t think it was long.” 

“Eliot,” Margo began, “you can’t—” but he cut her off with a wave of his hand. 

“No, Bambi,” he said, “I’m not done.    I wasn’t there.  They told me what happened in the Mirror Realm, how he could have gotten away, how he wasn’t moving fast enough.  Like someone who didn’t give a shit about his own life.  And I.  Wasn’t.  There.” 

“You can’t possibly blame yourself for being unconscious in the hospital-“

“No.”  He oriented toward her, emphatic now.  “You don’t get it.  From what I can tell, he’d been like that for months.  And I wasn’t there.  All he had was a monster who looked like me, making everything worse.  And before you even start, no, that was my fault too.  If I hadn’t shot Charlton it would never have happened.”  The pitch of his voice was rising now, becoming more strained.  “…And I only did that because he was going to stay in fucking Blackspire.  Because he didn’t give a shit about his own life even then. Because some asshole, some absolute fucking asshole, had told him that he wasn’t enough. That what we had, our life, our family, wasn’t good enough to want back.” 

He stared at her for several seconds, the whites of his eyes making bloodshot circles around his irises as the lower lids filled with water.  Then he threw himself back against the tree trunk, pressing his eyes closed, pushing the tears out to run down his cheeks. 

Margo didn’t have a goddamned thing to say.  This was a bigger clusterfuck than she could have possibly imagined. 

“I’m beginning to believe,” said Eliot, in a tone of forced cheer that made Margo’s blood run cold, “that it’s me.  That this is my life now.  First Mike, now Q.  I am…” he drew himself up, back straight, a sarcastic nod to ‘unearned imperiousness,’ “…fated to forever kill the men I love.” 

Okay, that was just about enough of that.  The anger simmering in Margo’s belly roared to a boil.  It filled her up, burning through her chest like a shot of whisky.  Because she remembered.  She remembered the weeks after Mike had died, what it had felt like: the stone of chilly fear that sat in her chest cavity while she watched her best friend slowly self-destruct.  The knowledge, beyond a doubt, that one of those days he would OD and die on her and leave her all alone, and that there was nothing she could do to fix it.  She never wanted to feel that way again.  And she knew that this time, this time, there would be no crown and blood test to save him from drowning.  There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it.  Eliot and I are both dead.  How many times would she have to fucking bury them? 

She wanted to scream.  She wanted to strangle someone.  She wanted to set this entire fucking forest on fire and then hike up Mount Olympus and stab any surviving gods she found there in the chest.  Repeatedly.  But more than anything, she wanted someone to fucking fix it.  To un-fuck the world.  To take the garbage fire that the universe had become and turn it into something better, a place where people could love each other and carve out some small sliver of happiness without everything turning to violence and pain.  She wanted the spiral of chaos to change into something she could deal with: something she could control. 

Margo Hanson was a goddamned king.  Not a princess.  Not a damsel in need of rescue.  If the world needed saving, she’d do it her damned self. 

She stood, rising in a single, graceful motion.  She regarded her disheveled friend, chin raised, hands on her hips.  “Fuck.  Fate,” she said. 

Eliot blinked up at her, a small frown fluttering across his features. 

She squared her shoulders.  “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that destiny is bullshit?  We’re writing our own goddamned story.” 

Months before (lifetimes before), Margo had received a letter in a basket of fruit.  It had started with death, but that wasn’t how it ended.  We took the quest as far as we could, and now there’s something we need you to do. 

She’d fixed this once before and she was damn well going to do it again. 

Chapter Text

And all of Olympus is laughing

Until we go and split the atom

                -Dessa, “The Grand Experiment”

----

                The Clock Barrens were a pocket of reality that existed outside of time.  Well, they were a real place in Fillory and a pocket of reality outside of time.  Margo was pretty sure the same name referred to two different places, but the time-fucked pocket dimension was the one she was concerned with at the moment.  Apparently it was, “A spot where all moments exist at the same time, overlapping.” Margo had no idea what that meant in practical terms.  When she’d brought it up with Eliot, who had once taken an elective in horomancy, he had said, “Do you have any peyote?  Because I can only explain time-travel when I’m on peyote.”  She hadn’t had any peyote so they were going to have to wing it. 

                He’d been skeptical when she’d told him what she was planning.  He was still in a daze, curled against the trunk of the tree as a cool breeze rustled its leaves, but she was up and moving, pacing, energized.  It felt good to have a plan. 

                “Well, it worked the last time I had to bring your boy-toy back from the dead.  Not to mention your gay ass.” 

                “Right,” he’d said in response.  He extended one elegant forefinger.  “About that.  You used the third key to alter the timeline, that…” he paused, looking for a different word before giving up, “…time.  The keys don’t exist anymore.  They were all destroyed, remember?” 

                “That’s what you think.” said Margo.  She smiled mischievously.  For a half-second Eliot had sounded like Eliot, not like the ‘Sad Eliot’ who had been her companion since the Monster.  “But I know where to find one.” 

                Eliot waved his head from side to side, indicating confusion, but something in his eyes changed, very slightly.  Margo thought it looked like a heartbreaking glimmer of hope.  She hoped to hell that this plan was going to work.  She didn’t want to be the one to give him hope then take it away, but she would if that’s what it took.  Anything to keep him going, to keep him anchored to the world a little longer. 

                “Well, as you may recall, I acquired that key from Jane Chatwin-“

                “—‘s corpse,” Eliot interrupted.  “I seem to remember you saying something about robbing the cradle and a grave…”

                Margo rolled her eyes.  “It took me weeks to get the smell of grave dirt out of my hair.  What you don’t know is that Jane told me to get the key off her dead body.  She was weirdly calm about it, too.” 

                “Wait, you talked to Jane?” 

                “What, like it’s hard?”  Eliot looked pained.  So, not the time for movie references, then.  Or jokes about talking to the dead.  Fuck.  She sighed.  “Sorry, too soon.  But yea, I did.  She was in a place called the Clock Barrens.” 

                “Sorry, did you just say the Cock Barrens?” Eliot asked.

                Margo snorted.  “Don’t get all excited.  They’d be a lot more fun and a hell of a lot easier to get to.  No.  The Clock Barrens. Apparently, it’s some kind of bubble that exists outside of time.” 

                “How does that even work?”

                “How should I know?  You’re the one who took a class on it.  You know more about time-magic than I do.” 

                “Considering how little I know about time-magic, that’s unfortunate,” he muttered to the air. 

                I’ll tell you exactly where you can shove that attitude, mister, thought Margo, but didn’t say it.  He was entitled to negativity, if anyone was.  Her eternal anger had burned down to hot coals, now that it had something to latch onto. She would make sure it kept pointing far away from Eliot. 

                “But listen.” she leaned in, smiling conspiratorially.  “The thing is, she had the key.”

                Eliot needed a few seconds to process this information.  She watched realization slowly spread across his face, culminating in, again, the faintest spark of hope. 

“Wait.”  He leaned forward, frowning.  “What are you saying?” 

                “She had the key.  Bitch wouldn’t give it to me.  Told me to rob her grave instead, which she was weirdly blasé about, by the way, because it apparently ‘hadn’t happened yet,’  --fucking time travel—and sent me on my merry way.”    She felt her face break into a broad grin.  A real one.  It made her cheeks hurt.  “So… if we can get to the Clock Barrens, we can get the key.  Get the key…” she trailed off, waiting for El to finish her sentence. 

                His mouth was hanging open.  “…Change the timeline.  Holy shit, Bambi.  This could actually work.” 

                “Of course it’ll work,” I hope, “I’m a fucking genius.  One of the many reasons you love me.”  She swooped down to retrieve Eliot’s cane, lying half-buried in the autumn leaves.  She held it out to him, raising an eyebrow.  “Now get up.  We’re gonna make reality our bitch.”   

…

They were several paces down the dirt path when Eliot spoke: “So, how exactly does one get to the clock, barrens, Bambi?”

“Fucked if I know.  The first time around I just used the other key.” 

Eliot looked pained.  “If you don’t know what we’re doing then where are we going right now?”

Margo stopped walking and gave him a look. “To get lunch,” she said levelly.  “Can’t skull-fuck the timeline on an empty stomach, now can we?”  That brought up a concern, though.  She softened.  “Are you going to be ok?  Getting lunch, I mean?  You can wait here while I bring something back if the smell is going to bother you...” 

He stood there, leaning heavily on his cane, tilting his head to one side, then the other.  His mouth opened like he was about to speak but no sound came out. 

Margo chewed on the inside of her cheek.  “Thought so.  If you have to think about it, you’re staying here.  She took him by his free elbow, guided him to a nearby boulder and then helped him sit.  “Now, you wait here.  Don’t get into trouble without me.” 

He smiled weakly.  “I would never.”  He said it without enthusiasm, like he was reading from a worn out script.  Margo pressed her lips together, still not ideal, but walked away anyway.  He would be fine.  He would.  At least he wouldn’t be triggering another panic attack. 

She sauntered over to the rickety booth, where a curly-haired young woman presided over boxes of fresh vegetables and fruits.  A small, white bird perched on a zucchini, regarding Margo with beady, black eyes.  That stare was intense enough to make her uncomfortable. 

“How’s it going?” she said to the bird. 

“Oh you know,” replied the bird in a musical, feminine voice, “can’t complain.” 

Talking animals were par for the course.  Margo nodded appreciatively and went about selecting some produce for purchase.  The eggplant kept drawing her attention.  For some reason.  Poor Josh. 

“So…what brings you to this neck of the woods?” trilled the bird, conversationally. 

“Oh you know,” drawled Margo, “my friend just offed himself so now we’re trying to open a portal to a dimension outside of time so we can change the past and save him.”  She shrugged.  “So, like, the usual.” 

                “Cool,” replied the bird.  “That was, like, my last four Tuesdays.” 

                The corner of Margo’s mouth twitched upward of its own volition.  “I like you,” she said.  “I’m Margo.” 

                And then the bird introduced herself. 

                “Hair Dryer?” repeated Margo, aghast.  Fucking Fillory.  Every single time. 

                “It’s a family name.” 

                Of course it was.  “You know, where I come from, that….  You know what, just forget it.  So, Hairdryer.  How do you spell that?”

                She hopped from the zucchini to the edge of the box it was sitting in, using her small, white wings for a boost.  “I’m a fucking bird.  Does it look like I know how to spell?”  Margo tried to think of something to say to that when the bird continued, “JK, I can read.  I’m just playing with you.  It’s spelled like it sounds.  One word, though.” 

                Well, more power to Hairdryer, then.  “Fair enough.”  Margo finished her transaction with the farmer.  She bought the eggplant, a few hen’s eggs, and two apples.  The peaches were tempting, but out of the question. 

                “So…” chirped the bird.  Hairdryer.  Still not over it.  “Portals, rescue.  This sounds like quest stuff.  You a quester?” 

                “I’m a lot of things,” answered Margo.  King of fucking things up; King of letting my friend die when I could have fucking stopped it… “But that’s one of them, yeah.” 

                “I figured,” said Hairdryer.  “We get so many questers around here visiting the Seer.  That’s why Tabitha built the booth.” 

                “The what, now?”  said Margo.

                “The place where you just bought a bunch of food?  Do you seriously not know what a booth is?” 

                “I know what a fucking booth is, birdie.  Now tell me just who or what, exactly, is this ‘seer.’”

                “Seriously?  You don’t know who she is?  Then what the fuck are you doing out here?”

                “That, my friend,” said Margo as she hoisted her lunch ingredients and turned to go, “is a long, long story.”  She started walking back up the dirt path.  She wasn’t comfortable leaving Eliot alone for too long.  Not with the kind of headspace he was in. 

                “Hey, wait!  Where are you going?  I like long stories.”  The little bird alighted on a branch a few feet along the path, at Margo’s eye-level. 

                Margo snorted derisively and shook her head.  “I doubt you’d like this one.  I sure as shit don’t.”  She kept walking.  “I need to meet my friend.” 

                Hairdryer flitted ahead of Margo.  “That’s right, you said your friend died.”  She landed on another branch a few more yards down, and cocked her head.  “Wait a second…”

                Margo rolled her eyes.  “I have more than one friend.  Jesus.”  Dumbass bird.  She stopped walking and planted her feet.  “You’re following me.” 

                Margo was pretty sure she’d never seen a bird shrug before, but that was what she was looking at in that moment.  “Well, duh,” answered said bird.  “Tell me this: if you aren’t going to the Seer how to you plan to get your portaly-thing open?” She cocked he head in the other direction.  “Yeah, I thought not.”

                “We’ll figure something out.  We always do.” 

                “Yeah?  Well, has it occurred to you that maybe this is you figuring it out?”  She took one hop closer to Margo.  “It’s ok to ask for help, you know.” 

              No, it fucking isn’t.  Not for someone like me.  But she deflated, anyway, at Hairdryer’s words.  She spread her arms.  This was futile.  “Ok.  Ya got me.  I suck at asking for help. Happy?”  She started walking again. 

              A sharp snort.  “Not really.” 

              Margo sighed, stopping again.  She had made it three whole steps.  “Fine.”  She squared her shoulders and set her jaw.  “Will you, adorable woodland creature, help me on my quest to unfuck this timeline and save my friends?” 

              “Hmmm, I’lll have to think about it.”  Margo raised an eyebrow, waiting.  “JK, I always secretly wanted to be the adorable woodland creature who helps the hero on their quest!”  She hopped excitedly on the twig, making it shake.   “This is awesome!” 

              Margo narrowed her eyes for several seconds looking for signs of sarcasm, and was surprised to find none.  She shrugged and continued walking, Hairdryer fluttering from branch to branch to keep pace.  A few moments passed in blissful silence, before Margo shattered them. 

              “Listen,” she said.  “My friend.  Eliot…”  Her voice caught.  “He’s…not ok.”  She swallowed.  At once, it was back: whisky burning in her belly, rising like hot smoke through her chest and throat.  “He lost his…look, he lost someone.  He doesn’t need your birdy-bitchyness.”  He gets more than enough from me.  King of ‘the only good thing I ever did was be your friend’ and I can’t even fucking get that right.  She stalked over to where Hairdryer was perched, and leaned down to get right up in her feathery little face.  “He’s the most important person in my life.  He lost someone and he’s hurting, so you watch your beak around him, because if you make him hurt worse I swear to the triple goddess I will kill you, stuff you, and use your taxidermized carcass to trim a very fashionable hat that will be all the rage come spring.  Think Pippa Middleton, but more literal.  You get me?”

                Hairdryer stood very still.  “Crystal,” she said.  “I mean, yeah, I get you.” 

                Margo straightened, excess anger venting out through her flared nostrils.  “Good.”   

                She only noticed the tension that had been clinging to her neck and shoulders when it fled.  She felt it leave as soon as Eliot came into view, black cloth and white skin vivid against the greens and browns of the forest.  He was still there, sitting on the rock, right where she’d left him, humming something she couldn’t make out while staring into the middle distance, pale fingers tracing spirals over the silver ram’s-head on his cane.  He was still there. 

                “Miss me?”  She asked it with a bright smile, the kind that didn’t hurt her cheeks.  He looked up, his eyes meeting hers.  He didn’t smile exactly, but his face did soften. 

                “Always,” he said, still a little too slow and a little too quiet, but there were creases at the corners of his eyes that Margo took as a good sign. 

                Margo brandished the eggplant in his direction, wiggling it at his face.  “Look what I found,” she lilted.  He rolled his eyes.  Good.  “I figure neither of us is going to be eating much ‘eggplant’ until after this quest is resolved, so we oughta, you know…” She wiggled her shoulders, leering.  “…take what we can get.” 

                “Oh my gods,” chirped a high voice behind her.  “What have I gotten myself into?” 

                Eliot stretched where he sat and leaned to one side, long body tilting like a tree in heavy wind as he looked past Margo’s shoulder, eyebrows rising.  “Well, hello,” he said.  “Gonna introduce me to your friend, Bambi?” 

                Margo pursed her lips.  “Eliot,” she said ever-so-sweetly, maintaining unbroken eye contact and using those eyes to tell him, Here it comes, so you better fucking behave, “…meet my new friend.”  She took a deep breath, cradling the eggplant to her chest.  Her smile was tighter than Tick Pickwick’s asshole.  She leaned in, annunciating the next word carefully: “Hairdryer.”

                Eliot’s jaw dropped.  He blinked twice, leaning back on his rock as his eyebrows shot upward.  “Oh,” he said, voice pitched high with surprise.  “Well,” –his voice dropped back down and an almost imperceptible frown touched his brow for an instant—“Let me say that it is an absolute pleasure to meet you…” He swallowed, his eyes darting briefly to Margo’s, eyebrows convulsing to say, What the fuck?  before he finished the sentence. “…Hairdryer.” 

              The mask was back up.  Margo could still see the cracks, but that was only because she knew where to look.  Could be worse.  Baby steps. 

                The songbird’s head bobbed up and down as she appraised Eliot, taking in the clothes, the cane, the pain in his eyes.  She flew over to him, landing on his knee and actually bowed, ducking her head and spreading her wings slightly before saying, “I’m sorry for your loss.” 

                Well fuck Margo with a splintered broom handle: polite?  Charming?  She didn’t think the birdie’d had it in her.  The hat threat must really be working. 

                Eliot was surprised, too.  He took a deep breath, letting it out in a ragged sigh while his shoulders collapsed forward.  He put himself back together in less than a second, his spine lengthening and face going neutral.  He bowed his head solemnly.  “Thank you.” 

                Hairdryer shook herself.  “Oh!” she said.  “It’s a pleasure meeting you, too.  Sorry.” 

                That made Eliot’s mouth quirk and Margo’s heart sink because, in that shrill, energetic voice it had sounded exactly like something that Fen would say and Fen…

                Fen would be fine.  Everything was going to be fine.  Once they had the Key they could go anywhere in time, rescue anyone who needed it –and kick the ass of anyone who needed it, too. 

“Hairdryer’s here because she…-  shit.  I never asked your pronouns.  You’re a chick, right?"

Hairdryer puffed herself up, lifting her beak haughtily from her perch on Eliot’s knee.   “Excuse me,” she said.  ”I am a grown-ass bird.” 

“Great.  So what are your grown-ass pronouns?” 

That was how they learned that Hairdryer used she/her.  They also learned that she was exclusively attracted to human women, and was, apparently, a butt-bird.  This was way more information than either of the humans needed, but Margo respected it, and could relate. 

“You’re one of those people who talks a lot when you’re nervous, aren’t you,” asked Eliot at one point.  He shrank slightly, shifting his weight to cover the reaction.  “I used to know someone like that”

Time for a change of subject.  “Are you nervous because my ass won’t quit?”

She flitted from Eliot’s knee to the leaf-covered ground and, holy shit, looked up in Margo’s direction.  “Uh, maybe a little…”  She turned her head this way and that.  It took Margo a second or two to realize this was the avian equivalent of a shifty-eye gesture.  “Mostly, I’m excited that I get to help with the quest.” This turned into a detailed explanation of her childhood dreams and life-goals, which Margo mostly tuned out, checking her nails for chips and that her axes were well-concealed.  She re-upped the invisibility charm on them, just in case. 

                The little feather-brain was still talking.  “…anyway, I’ma go catch some bugs.  You guys enjoy your human-food.” 

                Margo set her things on the ground and began moving through a familiar set of tuts.  As she did, she felt the buzzing in her heart, the heat in her belly, diffuse down her arms and into her fingertips, where they flew out into the world, coalescing into arcs and lines of glowing amber.   A small, round table appeared in the clearing, complete with chairs, a fine china tea set, and place settings for two.  It was a little thing, amid the chaos, but it felt good.  It wouldn’t bring her friends back, but it eased the pressure.  The feelings had found somewhere to go.  They had found a way to make the world just a little bit better. 

                She turned to Eliot.  “You want to cook?” 

                He hesitated for a moment, then nodded.  His fingers danced a different set of tuts.  His form was flawless, but the lights that began to form stuttered and dimmed.  He tried again.  Two more times, then he let his hands fall into his lap. 

                “Actually, I think I’ll cook today,” said Margo.  She executed the second spell and food appeared on the table: breaded eggplant, omelets, and an apple tart.  Her food wouldn’t be as good as Eliot’s but it was good enough, and she had plenty of magic to spare. 

                They sat across from one another, Eliot’s cane resting against the curved edge of the table.  The meal passed mostly in companionable silence, broken by occasional chirps of “Get back here you wiggly little mutherfucker!”  from the trees.  Silence was like home for Margo and Eliot.  They knew each other so well that they didn’t have to speak.  At least, that’s what Margo had thought.  She was used to being the keeper of Eliot’s secrets; it hadn’t occurred to her that he could be keeping one from her.  Now, she knew that there was a side of him that she knew nothing about: he’d had an entire life that hadn’t included her at all.  The silence warped into something strange and unpleasant as she bit back questions.  What was your son like?  How did it feel to grow old together?  When did you know he was your true love?  She swallowed them down with each bite of bland food, and they soured in her belly, mixing with everything else that was wrong: slicing her open along with all the other fucked up things she didn’t know how to change. 

                Breathe. 

                Eat. 

                Keep the screaming on the inside. 

                She was saved from having to come up with another eggplant pun, just for something innocuous to say, by a feathered body landing on the table between them. 

                “Well, that was refreshing!  Nothing like chasing maggots to get the blood pumping.  So crunchy, too.  Mmmmm.  What are you eating?” 

                Margo’s fork stopped on its way to her mouth.  She carefully returned it to her plate, having suddenly lost her appetite. 

                “Okay,” said Eliot.  “Lunch is officially over.  Margo?” 

                She nodded rapidly and answered “Mmm-hmm.”  It came out higher in pitch than she’d been intending. 

                Hairdryer shrugged her wings.  “Works for me,” she said.  “Ready to go?” 

                Eliot was already starting to stand, but Margo checked in with him anyway before responding.

What have we got to lose? said an incremental movement of his left eyebrow.  Good.  She moved her hands, dismissing the table and its contents.  The cane stayed upright, unsupported, for a second or two before Eliot grabbed and leaned on it.  He didn’t seem to notice the suspension of physics. 

Then off they went, chasing a flash of white through the sea of orange and brown and deep pine-green.  Margo wanted to run: release the wolf within and lope across the forest floor, leaping over rocks and tree-roots, dashing toward what came next, human worries all but forgotten.  But she wasn’t alone.  She walked slowly, Eliot’s arm in hers, and helped him navigate the uneven ground while Hairdryer waited in the trees.  And that was right too.  She could be the King of Being Eliot’s Friend And Not Actually Fucking It Up This Time.  Would be a welcome change of pace. 

The journey led them up, up into the foothills as the suns drooped toward the horizon.  The glare that peeked over the hillside and through the trees was enough to irritate her left eye, and was painful to the more-sensitive right.  She kept both her eyes on her feet, falling one in front of the other, or on Eliot, watching for signs of fatigue.  He moved slowly, but wouldn’t break, not matter how tightly his eyes were bunched in pain.  Margo was the one who had to set limits, insisting on resting every fifteen minutes or so (her shoes were murder, didn’t you know?), or whenever Eliot looked like he’d had too much. 

She didn’t see the house until they were almost on top of it.  The aroma of wood-smoke had been getting stronger for at least two pit-stops, but the house still seemed to come out of nowhere.  It grew from the cliffside like a barnacle, an organic thing built of moss-covered stones and thatch.  They were in the shadow of the mountain by then, both suns tucked well behind the cliff.  That was the only reason Margo could tell that the cottage was glowing.  Each stone pulsed faintly with a white light; more spilled out around the greying wood of the door. 

Margo had a sudden desire to kick the door in, but it swung open, saving her the trouble but denying her the stress-relief.  A woman stood in the doorway.  She was wearing grey homespun, with a cloak of long, white feathers wrapped around her shoulders.  Her hair was white and windblown and her skin, where Margo could look at it, was the color of bone.  She didn’t look directly at the woman’s face, because her left eye was glowing brightly with the same cool light as the stones of the house. 

The woman spoke, her voice gravely and shaking with age.  “Well, well, well,” she said.  “If it isn’t the One-Eyed Tyrant…and The Champaign King.  You might as well come in.” 

Hairdryer squeaked in surprise. “The fuck?” she said at the same time as Eliot whispered “It stuck, Bambi!  “The Champaign King” stuck!”

Well, at least someone was receiving happy news.  And that someone was Eliot, who both deserved and needed it.  It was enough to make Margo take pity on the bird. 

She glanced up at Hairdryer. “I may have forgotten to mention that we used to be High Kings,”  she said with an apologetic shrug.  

The bird was stunned for a moment, then did one of those birdy head-tilts and said, “Both of you?  At the same time?  Wait, that came out way dirtier than I meant it.” 

“Consecutively,” said Margo, “though we do enjoy doing…things…at the same time.”  She winked, just in case her meaning wasn’t clear.  The woman in the doorway sighed as if she’d heard all this before and cracked the door wider, gesturing for the three of them to come inside.

Margo paused to fish a pair of D&G shades out of her purse.  Eliot gave her a confused look.  “What?” she said.  “This was going to a pain in the ass if I can’t even look at the creepy lady’s face.” 

“Margo…” said Eliot, suddenly cautious.  “What do you see?” 

Well, shit.  She squinted her right eye closed, and the glow disappeared.   She could see the Seer’s face, then: pale and lined, framing two perfectly-normal blue eyes. 

“Okay.  I’m apparently not the only bitch around here with a magic-fucking-eyeball.”  She unfolded the glasses and put them on her face.  Like hell was she going through whatever was happening next with one eye screwed shut. 

When she opened her fairy eye the glare was diminished, but the woman’s face was still difficult to look at.  Margo closed her left eye.  Squinting against the glare she saw a woman her own age, with smooth white skin.  Hair that had appeared gray was dishwater blonde.  The cloak and robes remained unchanged. 

Margo leaned over to Eliot.  “She’s wearing an illusion,” she murmured. 

His brow furrowed.  “And she chose to look like that?”   

“I don’t get it either.” 

                Nothing felt right about the house or the woman, but then, nothing felt right about fucking anything anymore, so what choice did they have?  What could they possibly have left to lose?  Hairdryer perched on Margo’s shoulder and the three of them followed the Seer inside, Eliot ducking to fit through the low doorway.  The inside of the hut was cozy and disorganized.  There was a table in the center of the single room and a fireplace against the back wall, beside an unmade bed.  Most of glowing walls were covered with laden bookshelves.  The table was littered with books of all types.  A barn owl perched on a rafter, pale feathers flickering in the lamplight, because apparently the décor wasn’t creepy enough already.  Its head turned as they moved into the room.  Hairdryer inched closer to the shelter of Margo’s neck and hair. 

The woman --the young woman—walked over to the fireplace.  She took a dipper off a hook in the stone wall and used it to gently pour water over the low flames, banking the fire and releasing a cloud of steam into the room. 

“Sit down,” she said, gesturing at the chairs surrounding the cluttered table.  “I know why you’re here.  It won’t work.” 

Things were clearly off to a great fucking start.  She took her seat in one of the old, wooden chairs, setting her jaw and placing her interlaced fingers on her crossed knees.  Eliot lowered himself carefully into another, using his cane and the edge of the table for support.  The tabletop was practically buried under the books.  There were notebooks, leather bound grimoires, and one extremely thick volume with the word ‘Dictionary’ embossed on the spine in gold. 

Margo got her King voice out. “Excuse me?”

The Seer continued pouring water over the coals until the last flickering flame died away.  She straightened, making a big show of holding her back and moving like an old person, though it was clearly an affect if you knew what to look for. 

You can cut the crap.  I can see you, thought Margo, but bit her cheek, saying nothing.  One thing at a time. 

“You want to turn back time, restore your dead friend.  It won’t work.”  She hung up the dipper and hobbled over to the table with an exaggerated slowness that made Margo want to tear her own skin off. 

“Ok,” she said, the human avatar of patience.  “Elaborate.”

“I can tell you how to make the portal, but I can’t guarantee it’ll get you the key.  Even if you somehow manage to, it won’t be enough to bring your friend back.” 

Margo glanced at Eliot.  His knuckles were white where he gripped the cane.  Almost as white as his face. 

The other woman continued.  “He’s gone, you know.  Passed on.  His spirit isn’t even in the underworld.  It isn’t anywhere.” 

“I don’t give a shit about where his spirit is now.  We’re going to unfuck the fucking timeline.  He won’t die to begin with.” 

“Oh my sweet child,” said the Seer, which, what the fuck?  They were the same age. “He was always going to die.”  Her voice was honey and arsenic, and Margo’s scalp tingled as her hair stood on end.  “He wanted to die.”  Her glowing gaze slithered to Eliot.  “You know that.  And the heart always gets what it wants, in the end.  Destiny will always be fulfilled.” 

Eliot’s eyes were locked on the table, on an open notebook and the pen resting between its pages.  “Destiny is bullshit,” he whispered, barely audible.  Attaboy. 

But the fucking Seer wasn’t done yet: oh no.  She hunched toward Eliot, the owl feathers of her cloak separating into a mantle of spikes as her spine curled inward.  Above her, the barn owl shifted from foot to foot.  “The grave will always take that which it desires.  Your friend finally got what he wanted.  He finally found peace.  Would you really take that away from him?”  Margo didn’t like the subtle emphasis the Seer put on the word ‘friend.’  Not even remotely.  She ground her teeth.  The temperature in the room dropped half a degree. 

“Listen.”  Margo stood, sliding the chair back with her legs and falling into a power pose with both her hands flat on the table.  “We’re here for a spell.  Not your fucking judgement.” 

The Seer withdrew, hands raised.  Her pale hair glimmered in the flickering lamplight.  “Fine.  But you’re wasting your Gods-damned time.”  Eliot’s mouth tightened at that and, for once, Margo had no idea what he was thinking. 

The light-skinned woman shuffled to one of the bookshelves, tilting down a volume with one long-nailed finger.  Margo watched, braced at the table, statue-still except for her eyes, as the book fell into the Seer’s hands. 

“You seek the Watcher Woman in her Clock Barrens.  Her realm exists outside of time.  You will need powerful magic to reach it.” 

“I guess it’s a good thing we’re powerful fucking magicians, then.”    

The seer chuckled, condescending as fuck.  “You think you have power.  You think your magic gives you the ability to change fate.  You know nothing.”

And you think you know fucking everything, don’t you? Margo bit her tongue to keep from saying it aloud.  See?  She could do restraint.  Sometimes. 

“Oh, we know things, lady, we just don’t give a shit,” chirped Hairdryer.  Then, softly into Margo’s ear, “I don’t even know what that meant but it sounded cool and she needed to shut up.” 

God bless that downy disaster.  “The portal,” growled Margo, pushing off the table and setting her hands on her hips. 

The Seer rolled her eyes, pulled out a chair, and sat down heavily at the table, corner to Eliot.  She opened the grimoire, laying it carelessly atop the books already scattered on the table. 

“The spell you need is a portal, but a powerful one.  It will require…” she smiled in that sickeningly knowing way, “a few special components.” 

“Just get to the goddamned point.” 
                “You will need a focus, an anchor, and a catalyst. 

“The focus is the magical item the spell will latch onto and form itself around.  It must be not only magical, but valuable as well.  It will be consumed in by the spell, becoming the portal.  Sacrifice is the only way to create a portal powerful to get to a pocket dimension, if you’re actually willing to make one.”

“And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Well, it’s not as if you cared overmuch for your moderately-maladjusted “best friend” before he died.  If you’d actually cared you would have done something to stop it.  You were there while his spirit sank into despair and you did nothing: too absorbed with your own needs to say anything kinder than, ‘Grow a pair of tits.’  You had your quest, your little romance.  What would you be willing to sacrifice? You, who barely spared him a thought?” 

The accusation was a gut-punch: right in the solar plexus.  Margo rocked back on her heels as she absorbed the blow.  She opened her eyes, and found them meeting Eliot’s.  His amber gaze was pain and steel.  She knew he loved her, but that he blamed her, too.  He was right to.  Her mouth fell open as she silently plead his forgiveness, the ghosts of all the things she should have said whispering past her lips. 

“We fucked up,” said Margo to the Seer.  “I fucked up.”  She looked back at Eliot.  “But I am here to make it right, and there is nothing I wouldn’t give to fix this.”  His eyes softened.  He knew her.  He knew she was telling the truth. 

The Seer scoffed.  “Really?”

Margo lifted an eyebrow.  “Fucking try me, Bitch.”

The Seer smiled like she’d just won a game of chess.  “Your eye.” 

Yeah, that had been about how this day’d been going.  Motherfucking Fillory.  Why the fuck not?

“Fine,” said Margo.  The Seer blinked.  “What, are you surprised?  To be honest, I figured it would be something like that.  It makes sense.  My fairy eye is magical.  It’s valuable.  Certainly, to me.  A sacrifice.  So, yeah.  Sure.  I’ll give my eye to get Quentin back.  I’ve been a cyclops before; you get used to it.  Next?”

“Uhhh…” The Seer’s mouth flapped a few times. I guess you really don’t know everything, do you?  She looked back down at the book, a quivering finger tracing the lines of text.  “Next you’ll need something to anchor the portal to its destination.  Something connected with the realm you want to go to.  Soil is traditional.”  She leered at Eliot.  Margo wondered if the mention of soil was meant to upset him by reminding him of his pastoral childhood.  She wouldn’t put it past her.  The Seer seemed to delight in other people’s suffering.  But if that was her intention, the remark wasn’t having much of an effect. 

“So,” said Eliot, “in order to get to the place we can’t get to, we need soil from the place we can’t get to...” 

“Nobody said raising the dead was going to be easy.”

Margo was fuming.  “Nobody said it was going to be fucking impossible, either!”

Eliot was oddly calm.  “We’ve done the impossible before.”  His eyes were distant, and it looked like he almost smiled.  “It just might take a while.”  He locked eyes with Margo.  “And once we have the Key we’ll have all the time in the world.” 

“So, what?  We’re going to spend fifty fucking years looking for some dirt?”

The Seer raised a finger.  “Magic requires--“

“Yeah, sacrifice, I fucking get it,” Margo finished for her.  She couldn’t keep her lip from curling.  She didn’t really want to.  “And what have you ever sacrificed?” Margo’s torso swayed forward incrementally.  “You sit up here in your little house on your little hill telling everybody what to do, when you don’t do shit.  You’re Fillory’s testicles: weak, superfluous, and over-hyped.”  She looked the Seer up and down with her human eye.  “No wonder you choose to look like one.” 

                The Seer stood, taking a step back from the table.  Margo stared her down.  The other woman drew herself up to her full height, which…wasn’t that much.  Not that Margo could talk. 

“And you’re…what?  The High King of Saving the World?”  The Seer took a step toward her, and Margo had to stop herself from flinching back.  “I’ve Seen you.  You, with your quests and your crowns and those friends you care so much about.”  She advanced as she spoke, emphasizing each list-item with another step in Margo’s direction, until she was within the ring of her personal space.  The so-called ‘blood circle.’  “Well, I know your secret.  You don’t fit.  You never will.”  They were eye-to eye, not three feet apart.  The Seer sneered at her.  “You are too much.  Too loud.  Too angry--in a package that is too small, too brown, too female.”  Every word was an indictment.  Every word was one that Margo had said to herself every day since adolescence. 

The Seer’s eyes narrowed, scanning over Margo’s face, looking past her, through her.  “Every time you think you find somewhere to belong, someone who understands you, you’re wrong.” She raised on arm, pointing to Eliot, keeping her uncanny eyes on Margo the entire time.    “You think he knows?  What it’s like to live with that fire inside?  To spend every day holding it down?  You think your fish-boy knows?  No.  They would weep with fear if they knew who you really are--that is, assuming that you somehow manage to keep from destroying everything and everyone around you.  Everything you touch will burn.  Everything you love, dissolved in a shower of golden sparks, until the only thing left is you, angry and alone.  You will never know peace…except one way.  The way he found it.”  She was no longer pointing at Eliot.  “The only way people like you,” she swept an arm around the room, encompassing all three of her visitors, “…people like any of you, ever will.” 

[needs a beat, here]

“Excuse me?” Margo was actually glad the Seer was all up in her face.  She was ready to get up in the Seer’s face.  “People like us?”  They were practically nose to nose.  “And what the fuck does that mean?  Queer?  Crazy?”  Margo widened her eyes to emphasize the point.  “Or just anybody who isn’t you?”

The Seer’s lip curled, and it looked like she was about to speak again, but Margo cut her off.  “What’s the third thing?” 

The Seer’s mouth snapped shut.  “The third…?”

Margo grabbed the front of her dingy robes.  Veins of frost grew from her touch.  “You said we’d need three things to open the portal.”  Her voice was low, measured.  Dangerous.  Across the room, Eliot’s eyes widened.  “Just tell me the third thing so that we can get the mother loving fuck out of here.”

The Seer moved her arm in a circle, sweeping Margo’s hand from her chest and wrapping a bony hand around her wrist. 

“And do what?” she said.  “Rewrite the ending to his Book?   Sounds to me like your friend got what he wanted.  He finally found peace.  Would you really take that away from him?  Just because you are too selfish and short-sighted to accept reality?”

“No.”  His voice was soft, barely above a whisper. 

The Seer’s head whipped around, though her talon still gripped Margo’s wrist.  “No?” 

He shook his head, kept shaking it even as he spoke.  “I watched him fight.  For fifty-three years I watched him fight for his life.  And you’re saying he’s at peace, just because he’s not fighting anymore?  That’s not peace.  That’s just… It’s just…”

“Defeat.”  Margo raised her chin.  “Peace ain’t worth shit if it’s paved with corpses.” 

“Paved with… ew.  The smell alone wouldn’t be worth it.”

“Not the time, H. D.  I’ve been a King, and a Queen, and a queen bee, and you know what I learned in all that time dealing with people?  Calls for peace are usually just candy-coated calls for submission.  Obedience.”  She leaned in, practically hissing the word.  “But guess what?  That’s not me.  If you want submission, you’ve got the wrong bitch.  Fuck you.  Fuck fate, fuck peace, and fuck you. When you have something you love, you fucking fight for it.” 

She had moved as she spoke, rounding the table until she stood beside Eliot, trembling with barely contained violence.  He put his arm around her, strong and solid.  She leaned into him, momentarily taking strength from his solidity, until she felt him buckle.  Goddamnit.  He was too busted up to support her.  She centered herself back over her own feet, evening out her weight, making ready to move suddenly in any direction. 
                “That’s right,” said Eliot.  “Quentin fought.  For decades.  For us.  For love.” 

The Seer sneered.  “Love?” she said.  “Oh, he loved you.  Loved you enough to die for you, yes.  Kill for you too.  But he didn’t love you enough to live for you.  What makes you think he ever loved you in the first place?  He watched you at the bonfire.  He saw how you felt and he left anyway.  He never really loved you at all.  Never, when there was a choice.” 

She spat the final syllable at Eliot, a dart laden with venom. 

It hit its target.  Margo felt the breath leave Eliot’s body.  She felt him sag, chest and shoulders caving inward, heard him make the same sound the Monster had when she’d disemboweled him.  He was surprisingly heavy given his frame, his height making up for lost mass.  All that weight suddenly rested on Margo’s slender shoulders. 

[insert transition sentence?]

Margo lost her mind.  She stopped thinking in sentences, becoming a creature of instinct: all images and emotions, violence and rage.  She would have strangled the Seer right then and there, but her arms were full of Eliot, and he was her first priority.  He was always her first priority. 

Margo was fucking speechless but Hairdryer…Hairdryer and her irreverent little beak came through. 

“What the actual fuck!” she yelled, swooping wildly around the dark cottage.  The candles had gone out when Eliot’s breath left his body.  Margo didn’t know or care why.  Hairdryer had been dislodged from Margo’s shoulder when he fell, and was careening around the room in search of a safe place to perch.  She wound up on top of Margo’s head, tiny talons gripping her hair as she lowered Eliot to a sitting position.
              HD caught her balance and screamed.  “What the hell is wrong with you?  I don’t know the full story but I saw you hurt them.  On purpose!  I’ve only known Margo and Eliot a couple hours but I already consider them my friends, and I know them well enough to know they DESERVE TO BE TREATED BETTER!” 

The Seer was weaving a spell.  A cool witchlight grew between her dancing fingers, illuminating the room in an eerie, bluegreen glow.  “Oh they deserve better?  Because a songbird said so?  Are you the arbiter of cosmic justice, little birdie?  With your big words and your fluttering heartbeat?  You’re nothing.”  The seer stood in front of the dormant fireplace.  “You have no titles.  No magic.  You don’t even have hands.” 

“You’re right,” said Hairdryer.  “I don’t have hands.  But I have wings!”  She launched herself at the Seer. 

The fireplace poker was already in the human woman’s hands, ice crystals glittering blue on the cold iron.  It swung unerringly at Hairdryer, who yelled “Oh shit!” and turned in the air, diving down and to the side.  A cloud of pale feathers swooped silently after her.  Fuck.  Margo had forgotten about the fucking owl. 

Margot was already reaching for her axes, curling her fingers through the tuts that would release them from their invisible holsters.  The cottage was full of darkness and the frantic flutter of feathers, but Margo focused on the Seer.  She was done.  Done entertaining that bitch and beyond done listening to her hurt her friends.  The featherbrain had the right idea.  Margo flipped the Sorrow in her right hand in a circle, warming up her wrist, then lunged at the Seer, baring her teeth and hacking downward, intending to split open the other woman’s clavicle. 

She missed.  The Seer was already spinning out of the way, poker sweeping around to hit Margo in the lower back.  A soft grunt left Margo’s lungs along with her breath.  She had to take a few steps to get back on balance, but she did not fall.  After a decade of walking, dancing, and kicking ass in heels, Margo wasn’t easy to topple.  She took the momentum of her stumble and channeled it into a left-handed strike, slashing outward at what should have been the Seer’s abdomen, but she danced backward, off balance.  The pale-skinned woman wasn’t as graceful as Margo, but goddamn if she wasn’t fast. 

Margo hadn’t been packing axes for very long, technically speaking, but they were already part of her.  The second the hafts touched her palms they had claimed each other, woman and weapons combining to form something new and frightening.  When she swung them, they were extensions of her body.  She could make them go where she wanted (even the belly of her best friend).  And yet.  And yet somehow the Seer, clumsily gripping a fireplace poker too tightly and at the wrong spot, was never there. 

It was as if she…
                Oh, fucking hell.  It was as if she could see what was coming. 

The white woman chuckled.   “You cannot fight me, any more than you can fight death.  Or destiny.”  Margo kicked, aiming to jam a pointed heel into the meat of her calf.  The Seer stepped back at just the right moment to avoid it.  “oh wait. I forgot.  Destiny is bullshit.”  She sneered.  Or maybe her face was just like that.  Tough to tell. 

Hairdryer zipped past with the owl, the two of them fighting in mid-air.  Margo tried to wipe the smug grin off the Seer’s face, with axes.  It didn’t work.  Wherever the axes swung, the seer managed to be somewhere else.  She seemed to know, even before Margo did, where she was going to strike.  Margo kept attacking anyway.  She had held back her rage for so long, and now that it was unbottled she couldn’t put it back.  Flashing axes filled the room like smoke from a clogged chimney, and still the seer dodged, sidestepped, ducked.  Always just in the nick of time, even if her dodges were awkward and increasingly clumsy. 

She was getting tired: reaction time still supernaturally fast, but slowing all the same.  Margo was in better shape, and the better fighter.  She’d fought, in one way or another, every day of every year of her life.  But sometimes that wasn’t enough.  The poker’s tip drew a hot line of pain across her calf.  Margo hissed.  Witchlight glinted off the Seer’s teeth as she grinned, delighting, as ever, in causing pain.  Margo screamed, hacking to wipe that grin from the face of Fillory, and failing yet again.  And again.  And again.  Margo was slowing down too, now, arms and legs beginning to burn with fatigue. 

She couldn’t see the way out.  Margo knew that the Seer was fallible: she’d been able to surprise her when they were talking, in part by using her own assumptions against her.  If she could be surprised, she could be killed.  But how?  With each strike Margo’s Sorrows grew heavier.  She was running out of time. 

Margo attacked more viciously, now, with the weapons in her hands and the spikes on her feet, trying to herd the Seer into a corner so she wouldn’t have space to dodge.  She struck a low kick at the psychopath’s legs, aiming, again, to puncture a calf, and her foot hit iron.  The Seer had caught her shoe on the poker, immobilizing the leg.  Before Margo had a chance to react, she twisted her wrist, rotating the poker in her hand and levering Margo to the flagstone floor. 

She landed badly.  Twisting with the fall had saved the ankle, but she hit the ground hard on her right upper arm.  Her shoulder screamed and failed to support her weight.  The Seer howled triumphantly, gripping the poker like a baseball bat, winding up for a strike to Margo’s head that would knock her out if not kill her outright. 

Time slowed.  Margo could feel the cold creeping into her body from the icy stone floor.  She saw the poker in the Seer’s hands, every detail, from the nicks and scratches on the beveled point to the elaborate filigree of rust and ice that decorated its shaft, sharp and clear to her enhanced vision.  She wouldn’t have been able to move out of the way fast enough, even without the Seer anticipating every move.  Margo braced for pain –or worse. 

                Only the Seer’s frustrated screech told her that something had changed.  Time wasn’t the only thing that had stopped.  The Seer wasn’t swinging her poker because she couldn’t.  Margo gaped as she shuddered and howled but her limbs failed to move further. 

                She didn’t understand what was happening, at first.  Then she saw him.  Eliot was still seated at the table, face paler than ever, ghostly in the gloom.   His chin was down, jaw clenched, and his eyes…

                His eyes were so intense that, for a second, she thought she was back with the Monster.  They burned in the sickly blue dimness, whites glowing crescents below irises that glittered like black diamonds.  Everything in Margo’s body told her to drop her weapons and run.  But then that face changed.  The expression flickered with strain and agony and a bone-deep sorrow that the child-like Monster could never have comprehended.  And, suddenly, she read the message in those eyes, those dark suns nestled in bloodshot upturned moons:

“Now”

She plunged her Sorrow into the Seer’s gut. 

The smell of hot metal and earthy decay.  The wet sucking sound of Sorrow leaving a body.  The shock of impact vibrating up her arm: wrist, elbow, shoulder.  Right, then left, then right again.  The splash of something hot on her cheek, thrillingly intimate.  The primal scream clawing its way out of her throat, burning her larynx and filling the room, the house, the whole damned forest --coarse and shredded, barely human. 

The Seer’s body hung upright in the air, suspended by telekinesis.  Her abdomen looked like roadkill: a crushed mess of gore that was once guts and meat.  Her hands were empty, the poker frozen to the floor where it had fallen.  The arms floated in the air askew, knocked apart and battered by the dozens of small objects that flew at her body: books, crockery, animal skulls.  But her mismatched eyes were open and tracking and her lips split apart in something that could have been a gruesome grin, revealing teeth darkened with blood. 

And from deep in her chest there came a low, pulsating, gurgling noise that could have been laughter. 

The way to a woman’s heart was through her stomach.  Margot wound up like an Olympic softball pitcher, building momentum for a powerful underhand strike.  Sorrow’s tip punctured the Seer’s abdomen just below the ribcage, hooking up into the chest cavity with a flick of Margot’s wrist. 

The laughter stopped.  A fraction of a second before a huge book hit her on the side of the head, sending it sideways with a sickening crack. 

The axe hilt grew heavy as the Seer sagged forward and down, until Margo was supporting her entire weight.  Her false eye dimmed to black, fading into the tenebrae that wrapped the room.  Margo stood there in the darkness, face to face with the dead woman, for several heartbeats until her slender wrist ached and the blood on her hands began to cool.  Then, finally, Margo let her Sorrow go.   

The body sank to its knees then fell sideways, axe still protruding from its torso.  Her head landed next to the massive dictionary which [in the stupidest version] lay open on the floor.  The word “subversive” was underlined.  Margo gathered up the heavy tome and hit the apparently-dead Seer with it several times, just for good measure.  She had extra adrenaline that needed an outlet, and it never hurt to double-tap.  Especially in motherfucking Fillory where death was often more of a suggestion (often, but not quite often enough). 

She tossed the book to the side, slumped a little, and turned to look at Eliot.  He was sitting on the floor, long legs akimbo, head resting against a bookcase.  He was breathing fast, skin shinier than it should have been.  His eyes were closed against the near-total darkness. 

Margo cast Light. 

The yellow sphere that appeared at her fingertips lit the room, painting the rafters gold.  Eliot squinted and blinked his eyes open.  He took in Margo, in all her gory glory, and smiled like he was looking at a work of art.  You’re beautiful when you’re covered in blood, said the crinkles around his eyes. 

Don’t I fucking know it. 

“Well,” said Eliot after a silent moment that was not quite long enough to be awkward, “that was cathartic.”

Margo couldn’t help barking out a laugh. 

“More cathartic than feeding your dad to cannibals?”  Manic giggles bubbled from her chest.  It was over and they were both still alive. 

“Wait, you did what?” said Hairdryer, pausing from cleaning blood droplets from her feathers.  She was missing a few but otherwise appeared uninjured. 

“About the same, I’d say.”  He wasn’t laughing, but he looked lighter, less strained.  And, to Hairdryer, “Long story.” 

“Umber’s balls,” she replied.  “You fucking people.”  And, for a second, things were –almost—okay. 

Then there was only one thing left to do. 

Margot peeled off her gloves. Magenta acrylics sank into flesh, scraped against bone, encircled a treasure.  It was smooth and hard like stone or glass, completely different from the soft but firm, fluid-filled orb she knew as if it had always been a part of her own body. 

It left the skull with a quiet pop, which Margo felt more than heard over a songbird’s protests and a man’s groan of disgust.  She stared at her hand, brown fingers painted red, dark rivulets forming on the surface of the sphere, glossy and black as obsidian. 

And as the blood began to drain away, dripping to the cold floor of the cottage, so did the darkness.  The blackness of the orb faded, disappearing like mist burned away by the sun.  What was left in her hand felt lighter, hollow, clear and iridescent as a soap bubble, but hard as stone. 

“Woah, Margo, what the fuck?” said Eliot, his voice a mix of disgusted indignation and a bone-deep weariness that mirrored her own. 

“Magic requires sacrifice,” she said, gazing into the glass orb.  “But maybe, just this once, the sacrifice doesn’t have to be mine.”

She got to her feet, lifting her chin and squaring her shoulders as the cool, poppy scented wind ran its fingers through her hair. “We have our focus.  Let’s go.”