Maidens of the Fall

A waking mote alone and unprotected, storm-tossed on tempestuous dreams, drowned in the heart of a Nightmare.

Mundane homo sapiens generally do not survive direct exposure. Ten feet of concrete and lead will blunt the worst of the psychological effects; a stout steel door will shield the fragile human corpus from interruption by debris, as it sobs and screams and struggles not to soil itself. A properly built shelter, preferably underground, is by far the safest place to ride out the shock-wave of a passing Dreamland visitor — no matter how you might watch the faces of your family seem to melt and run and dribble from their skulls, or how badly you will weep and wail in a voice you never knew you had, or the crawling of strange subconscious thoughts dredged from their deeps and brought to the fore. Ignore the urge to claw at your own face and peel off your skin. Resist the penned-in need to bite through your tongue or pull out your own fingernails. Transient, those feelings are not you, and they will soon pass.

Such things happen in shelters. Mercifully rare.

Those who cannot reach a shelter in time are advised to stay indoors, get down into a cellar if you have one, the lowest part of your home otherwise, preferably an inner room, no exterior walls. Make sure the windows are barred and the doors are locked; some debris knows how to break glass and turn handles. Close any curtains if you can, don’t look outside. Plug your ears and shut your eyes. Lock yourself in the bathroom and climb into the tub.

You may soil yourself, or scream until you can’t, or go briefly blind and deaf, or think yourself dead, or forget your name. You will likely see things on the inside of your own eyelids that you will not remember later, but it’s best not to try. You will be at increased long-term risk of certain mental illnesses. You will probably be on a Dream Control watchlist, but then again you were probably on those already.

But you’ll live. You’ll be human when it’s over. You’ll remember yourself. Waking life returns.

If you’re caught in the open, can’t even duck into an abandoned house or crawl beneath a car, then you’re probably going to die, or worse.

When the wave-front hits, disorientation will shake you inside-out. Up is down and black is white. You don’t exist, you’ve been dead for years, and your body is rotting. Your hands are hammers and the world must be demolished — or at least as much of it as you can reach until your tools wear out. Everyone you’ve ever known is peering over your shoulders, urging you onward to some great secret only you can reach. The impossible colours in the sky speak a hidden language and you must record every word by writing it into your own skin with a knife. You are paralysed, face down, in religious awe. You took a weapon with you as you fled to the shelter and now you turn it on yourself, though you have never felt suicidal in your life. You eat your own fingers; you eat the person next to you. You strip naked and parade through the streets with a dozen others who were caught outdoors in the Nightmare, howling a song in a language never heard before in the waking world.

If the Nightmare itself doesn’t get you, sometimes the debris will.

So go the horrors reported by those few survivors, quick enough to throw themselves into a shop doorway and curl into a ball, or lucky enough not to bleed out from self-mutilation. None are ever the same again, crippled by tremors and twitches, haunted by post-traumatic stress, lost in unquiet spiritual contemplation, unable to communicate, stuck speaking in tongues.

It is an open secret that most end up as permanent residents of I&O, or else wander off into the dream.

The government uses the ones it doesn’t censor, parades them on television, the consequences of disregarding official advice. But only when their stories of survival are comfortably adjacent to waking sanity.

We all politely pretend the more metaphysical casualties aren’t real. Survivors speak of strange things deep inside Nightmares — alien slave-auctions run by sapient colours, century-long tea-parties attended by carnivorous fairies, fields of clocks that count down to universal transition, crusts of ice that self-propagate through the void of space all the way to the galactic edge. But they’re disturbed and unwell, who knows what they really saw, and there’s never any evidence of such impossible sights when the Nightmare has passed. Raw footage persists online — people turned into statues of living coral, shambling mummified amalgams of flesh and cloth, figures melted into brick and concrete, streets filled with disembodied mouths debating philosophy. But all that is easily dismissed as foreign lies or clever fakes.

Magical girls are, of course, immune. Officially.

Willow’s proximity — the neutron-star soul-gravity of a mature Lucid Dreamer — forces a brief pocket of low pressure in the Nightmare’s airborne substrate. An eye in the storm, clear from the thickest press of radiant miasma, the sheets of falling un-light, the unnatural colours, and the choking, pounding waves of Dreamland whale-song. Willow’s mere presence parts the roiling sea, so that she and I may lock eyes across twenty feet of Oxford street.

She withdraws. The Nightmare rushes back in to fill the void. Stormy sea unparts, rejoins itself, with me at the bottom.

Prismatic white-out crashes down, whirling and tumbling beyond my newfound shell of red-black steel.

Can’t see more than five feet, not even from inside the protection of my helmet; the air shudders with oily miasma, tar poured across sheets of falling light, staining the world with a veil of paradoxical negative illumination, shadow-as-substance, colour-in-shadow, an offensive impossibility that hurts the eyes and churns the gut. Phantasmal wind whips against my suit of armour, sliding off the plates, seeking seams by which to invade. Inhuman shapes race past in the murk, half-glimpsed forms that might be only the bulk of parked cars and the shaking trunks of roadside trees, if not for trailing tips of ragged tentacles, wafting membranes of torn flesh, and the click of diamond-hard claws on asphalt and concrete.

The vast crown of thorns in the bruise-wracked sky is swallowed up behind a thousand layers of dream-stuff, muffling the distant sounds of magical girls, gunshots and explosions reduced to whispered suggestions, choked out, gone.

The song from Nightmare’s heart still throbs on in tangible silence, worming into my ears, compounding the pressure behind my eyes.

I should crown myself. Dig holes in my skull and anchor a wreath in my flesh. Assert my right to rule with thorn and thistle.

Throw a parade in my honour. March at the head and proclaim knights and barons on every side.

Crown thyself, weakling! Crown and rule!

Nightmare nonsense; nothing by comparison with the compulsions I endured from Willow’s dream-parasite. A hard blink keeps the alien thoughts at bay, but cannot banish them completely.

Magical girls are perhaps not so immune as everyone prefers to believe.

That’s what I am now; Magical girl, transformed in full, protected and cradled inside a suit of iron-hard black-steel armour. Yet still instantly lost in the middle of a Nightmare. A moment ago I was in a street; when I blunder forward to find the spot where Willow hit the pavement and crashed through a brick wall, I stagger into the glass walls of an office building. Step away and I’m in the centre of a road again, light-washed murk churning thick on every side. The ground warps and shivers and bucks beneath my feet. Buildings twist into living spirals, helices stretching to the sky. Asphalt ripples like water, contorts into waves, tries to throw me from my feet. Faces leer in my peripheral vision, snapping sharp teeth inches from my helmet, weeping for me to save them from hell, mouthing insults worse than anything the waking mind could compose.

The Nightmare is nothing like I imagined. I am not insensible to this, even if I am protected; the Octavia Carter of an hour ago would have curled up in a ball and screamed until her throat burst. Fear comes creeping back. I can still die down here. Magical girls die all the time.

But the euphoria of freedom will not bow before fear; and besides, I have matters to settle.

“Willow!”

I bellow her name, a cocktail of outrage, mad laughter, desperate desire. The press of Nightmare-storm throbs outward, overwhelmed by anger.

“Willow! Willow!” I whip left and right, but all ways are the same. “You coward, Willow!”

She’s afraid I’ll punch her again, because next time I won’t stop, and she is so very right to be afraid. I will crack her skull with my armoured right fist and peel back her living brains until I can haul out the little girl she subsumed, the Willow I met in the dream. I will beat her to death and bring her back to life as what she should always have been.

“You chased me when I was helpless,” I roar. “And now you run from me when I can fight back!? You coward! You rotten fucking bitch! You— you’re— you’re—”

You’re mine, Willow.

Mine?

Have I gone mad? Was that whole dream a trick, a clever play to bend me in this new direction? Since when do I wish to lay claim to Willow? I would be happy if I never had to see her again, content to forget her face and the sound of her voice and the feel of her hands in mine. But that’s impossible, isn’t it? Willow will haunt me until my death, maybe even beyond. These thoughts are mine, no parasite in the back of my head, I’m clean now, all myself.

I want to kill Willow, and save her, and make her submit, make her grovel and beg and admit what she did. I want the Willow from that dream back. I want to break her bones and find the truth on the inside. I want the Willow of the present day on a leash, the Willow of ten years ago set free. I want her. I always wanted her.

And now I’m the one with all the power.

“Willow!”

A pucker forms in the oil-dark morass, perhaps a hundred feet to my right.

Willow’s face. A simple oval framed by storm-tossed halo. Pale, no expression, unblemished.

I hurl myself at her, standing start to maximum sprint in the blink of an eye, metal-shod boots slamming sparks from asphalt and cracking the concrete. My right leg is a hydraulic piston yoked to an inexhaustible engine. My armour — my body! — is a battering ram, shattering a hundred sheets of false light against my shoulders and helm. My right arm is a jackhammer, my fist a black diamond drill bit, aimed to crack Willow’s skull and chew up her innards.

No time to marvel at what transformation has wrought from my dried-out old corpse. Later, later. Now, Willow.

She retreats through the Nightmare, a floating fog-wrapped oval, face always toward me. Across broken concrete, past looming cliffs that might still be houses, through open junctions like oil-choked lagoons. Lungs pound inside my chest, breath rasping in my helmet, limbs heating like overworked engines. But Willow cannot escape, because I am a perfect machine, and machines never tire.

“Willow!” I roar. “Stop running, you coward, you—”

A mass of writhing flesh spins out of the murk, spewing gasses and dribbling thin mucus. A Volans polypus — flying polyp, one of the most common wanderers from the dream, whipped along by the Nightmare — slams into me like a bus, knocks me off my feet, trumpeting a surprised sound like a dozen peat-clogged bagpipes.

Down I go, clatter and clang, black armour a collection of metal dustbins against the road, crashing chest-first into a kerb, rattling my teeth, jarring my bones.

Shock keeps me down, counting the heartbeats, breath loud inside my helmet.

“Ah … ahhhhh … ”

Bruised and battered but no broken bones, I haul myself back to my feet. The polyp is long gone, carried off into Nightmare’s whirl, probably with no idea where it is or what’s happening to it. Pure accident. Debris.

Willow’s gone too. No more floating face.

Can’t see anything, no buildings, no far side of the street, lost deep in shuddering un-light and cloying gloom. Impossible colours fall and flutter like broken glass in a hurricane, a swirl of sea-bottom chaos. The only landmark is my own black steel gauntlets flexing with frustration. Familiar pains creep back, hips complaining like old grumblers, truncated thigh chafed and raw. My prosthetic arm feels oddly loose inside the armour, but my fingers work fine.

“Shit,” I hiss. “She wasn’t running away.”

Willow has led me by my own rage and triumph. She has drawn me away from the exit-point of my translocation.

“Grimmy!” Shout as loud as I can, but the Nightmare does not twitch this time; did it ever, or was that only Willow’s trick? “Grimgrave! Grimgrave! Bright! Signal! … Anybody?”

Euphoria dribbles out. Anger dials down to background. I’ve been had.

Was this the reason for that final dream we shared? To press my rage into a new shape, bait me with a phantom prospect of rescuing Willow’s ten-year-old self?

Maybe. But that lost child felt so real; thinking about her now makes my eyes hot and my chest tight with sorrow. I gave her a tiny piece of myself, a plush toy I barely recall, and she helped me reach transformation. The Willow of the present would not have done that, would she? Willow wants me crippled, desperate, dependent, in the dark.

And Willow, in the here and now, in the year 2025, is a Lucid Dreamer of incredible power. I am only one magical girl, newly transformed, lost and alone in the middle of a Nightmare.

“Grimgrave!” I howl one more time, then hiss. “Oh, fuck it. Scarlet!”

Roil and ruck, boil and break, air like a soup of broken glass and coruscating headache-colour. No replying call, no Grimmy translocating to my side. No still-hungover Scarlet Edge descending from the sky.

“Great,” I whisper. “Great. Okay. Come on, come on, you’re a magical girl now, you can … move. Move!”

Pick a direction and push against the Nightmare. Intangible pressure drags on my soul, inaudible song scratching holes in my scalp, urging me to do unthinkable things to a ring of naked skull. Two dozen paces and a wall of corrugated metal looms into the air, a thousand feet tall. The side of a warehouse? Where am I?

Abominations careen out of the murk overhead, screaming like dying horses, to slam into the side of the building high above, setting off a deep reverberation. Spirals of torn skin flutter down through the air as they rip and rend at themselves, crowns of gleaming bronze bone sprouting from nubs of naked flesh. Vast stilt-walking figures waver in the near-distance, wrapped in cloaks and crowned with dripping metal, stepping over buildings and vanishing back into the gloom. Something starts to chatter and whisper from my left, writhing a few paces away in the murk, whispering royal secrets in exchange for unspeakable favours.

I back away, head right, hurry my footsteps. A street-corner explodes from the fog, signposts and traffic-lights twisted into helices, shifting like fleshy vines as they fight for dominance. Something massive and dark and dripping waits down the right-hand street, looks up from a meal of mashed red and smeared grey. It wears a stolen cape and crunches circlet-crowns between teeth like swords. On the left the Nightmare turns into a kaleidoscope of impossible colours, scouring and stealing all pigment from the world on either side, a glowing centre offering to place a ring on my brow if only I step closer.

Straight on ahead through the junction, breathing too hard. Eyes watering, ears muffled, mouth dry. Limbs heavy. Bad sign.

Willow already led me too far from where I landed. Grimgrave could be twenty feet away and she wouldn’t see me. Besides, no magical girl would be down on the ground in a Nightmare. Everyone else is probably halfway to the clouds, or at least on the rooftops.

I almost laugh with relief as I realise my mistake. Octavia Carter, missing the obvious.

Only been a proper magical girl for less than ten minutes. Let me get my bearings, be with you in just a moment.

I stumble to a halt, metal boots scraping on concrete pavement, surrounded by buildings that look like rotten meat through the Nightmare-murk. The end of the street warps and wavers, stroking the sky with tongues of heat-haze, stinging my eyes.

“Okay, okay, you’re a real magical girl now,” I hiss. “You should be able to do this, they all do this, you can do this too, you can!”

A kick at the pavement, a bounce on my heels, but nothing happens. An awkward, heavy-limbed, lopsided hop fails to launch me upward. Visualising myself soaring into the sky does not free me from gravity’s bondage. I debase myself, throw away my dignity, stick both fists skyward like an old-timey 1950’s ‘superhero’. Punch the air. Grunt and growl and lose my temper.

Can’t fly.

“Fuck! Why didn’t anybody teach me, dammit—”

Sheets of negative light and sucking fog-like illusion swirl and pucker far to my right; can’t tell if that’s across a street or down a road, distance and direction rendered meaningless.

Willow’s face peers from the centre of a disturbance. A pale oval devoid of expression, haloed by storm-tossed hair, clean as a mask.

She vanishes just as sudden, one with the Nightmare.

“Willow! Willow, you lying whore!” I scream, take three solid steps toward her. “Come out and fight me! You wanted me to face you, look you in the eye, huh!? I’m looking at you now, you coward bitch! You liar, you cheating fucking—”

“lyyyYYYIIIng whoooRRREEeeee?”

A warbling echo shakes the Nightmare substrate. Light flexes, bends, breaks, panes of false illumination shattering, ruins falling to earth as snowflakes of sharpened glass.

“CooMMEEE OUT and fiiigghhtttttt meeeEEEEEEE—”

Willow’s face wavers from the gloom once again, blank, vacant, empty.

A chance parting of prismatic iridescence reveals a towering stick-figure behind that face, a collection of emaciated limbs like burnt branches bound in jagged bunches, peering out from around the side of a tower block, a featureless head of scratched-out black, crowned with a mass of steel thorns that dig through dream-flesh and into whatever it uses for a brain. Sixty, seventy, eighty feet tall, wrapped in rotting regal robes. Willow’s face flutters to nothing, low down on the hem of those ragged robes.

I’ve not been following Willow; I have been baited by some dreamland anglerfish, a bottom-feeder in Nightmare’s wake.

Whatever it is, it hasn’t spotted me, though it howls my own words in parody. Perhaps it requires a response, hunts by sound, or emotion. Anger urges me to roar at the top of my lungs and throw myself at the thing; I have two strong fists now, robust as a tank, armour unbreakable. I could punch clean through a block of tungsten if I cared to. Nothing can stand in my way, Dreamer or Nightmare or the most predatory debris. How dare this displaced thing challenge me? How dare it mock me in my own voice? How dare it use Willow’s face?

Anger falls to prudence, self-preservation, cold fear. Magical girls are not invincible, and I’m already faltering, blinking tears from my eyes, heaving with effort against the Nightmare-song in my head. Can’t fight an eighty-foot Dreamland thing all by myself. I am out of breath and rattling inside. And this thing probably doesn’t want to be here anyway, as confused as I am.

Close my mouth, back away on quiet footsteps. Layers of falling unlight swallow the monster, suck me deeper into miasma, drown me in a dreamlike sea.

A minute or two of stumbling through sucking sheets of paradoxical light-fog, I hit what might be a high street. A canyon of reflective glass and high walls, hints of bright displays on all sides, the glitter of bioluminescent coral through an oil spill. Robed and cowled figures lead a capering procession through a road junction, so I steer clear, wait for them to pass, try not to listen to their high, tortured, broken voices. They’re not shaped like humans anyway. Nobody there to rescue.

Euphoria’s all gone. The Nightmare-song, the paradoxical murk, the disorientation, all of it grinds away at my senses, corrodes the outer layers of my thoughts. Bronze-brown silt accumulates in the angles of my armour, hardening to a crust here and there, like wind-blown clotted blood. Tessellated shapes and fractal explosions creep and crawl in my peripheral vision. My nose feels thick, my throat raw, my eyes heavy.

Willow’s gone. Can’t link up with Grimgrave and the others. Can’t even fly to get above the worst of this.

Am I bleeding girl-juice — magical energy — just being here? Even magical girls have limits.

“Time to leave?” I whisper.

Raise my right hand, curl my black gauntlet into a fist. Think of Luna, Plato Base, Nerys and Tissy and the zoogs. I’ve made my point, driven Willow out, achieved transformation. Retreat is no humiliation, or so I tell myself.

Don’t even have to throw the punch to know it won’t work. The sense of tilting forward stutters out, ripped away on Nightmare’s tide. I slam my fist forward anyway, just to see my knuckles break through the light-fog, but nothing happens. Translocation can’t even start inside a Nightmare, at least not down here in the heart of the debris cloud choking the ignition.

“Shit,” I hiss inside my helmet. Shake my fingers, as if I’ve just punched a brick wall. “Shit. I don’t—”

Crack.

Crack-crack-crack.

Gunfire. Muffled by murk, but clean and clear as a breath of fresh air in an abattoir. Not the crunchy clack-boom of Grimgrave’s favoured shotgun, nor the smokey bang-bang of Dawn’s ‘antique’ muskets. This gunfire is the mundane rattle of automatic weapons. Survivors, exposed to the Nightmare? Doesn’t seem possible. Anybody outdoors should be catatonic or dead, swept up in the song, going mad, going Dreamer.

I push on toward the gunfire, whirling shapes flapping and flailing in the roiling chaos all around. The noise trails off, then returns, intensifies, dies away a second time as I stagger down the glass-walled high street.

Tiny buzzing machines race low overhead, once, twice, three times, turning through tight mechanical angles, lenses flickering, rotors blurring.

Drones? Too fast to be certain.

At the end of the high street, where the pavement transitions into cosmetic cobbles, I almost stumble over a dead thing — a hulking be-robed regal beast, riddled with bullet holes, bleeding a stream of bubbling blood across the open road. More corpses litter the ground further on, one polyp, two more unrecognisable.

“What— what the— what—”

A grey furry lump is still moving, huddled in the pitiful shelter of an upturned traffic cone. At first I take it for a piece of one of the dead debris, but then I recognise.

A zoog. Half-catatonic with fear, wedged into the cone, teeth and claws pointed outward in silent threat.

No need to think. I upend the cone and scoop the zoog into my arms. It goes wild, biting and clawing and lashing and hissing, flailing against imperishable armour.

“Calm down!” I hiss. “Calm down, I’m not going to hurt you, but I’m not going to leave you there. Calm. Calm. I’m a friend, okay? Friend to zoogs, at least. I think.”

Whether the zoog understands or not, it stops fighting, goes still in the crook of my left arm, panting at high speed, little black eyes darting in every direction. After a moment it wraps its tail around my forearm, clings on tight.

“Better. Let me carry you out of this, okay? I thought you things were Dreamland creatures in the first place. How are you so affected by this?”

The zoog emits a tiny rasp, peering around my arm, shivering hard. Ragged shapes move beyond sight. Hooting laughter echoes from the mid-distance. A few desultory gunshots might be nothing but my imagination. The Nightmare song permeates all, drilling holes in my skull where a crown of thorns will fit snug against my brain.

Shake it off, pick a direction, a straight line. If I can’t fly then perhaps I can just walk to the edge of the Nightmare. Can’t save ten-year-old Willow, but at least I can save a zoog.

Buzz-buzz—

I flinch. The zoog jumps so hard it almost scrambles free.

“It’s my phone, my phone!” I tut. “In the middle of this?”

The prospect of contact from Grimmy or Signal diverts my feet to the edge of the street; murk parts, buildings and shop-fronts loom, wavering as if seen through distorted glass. I find a doorway with six inches of brickwork overhang, the meanest possible shelter. Slap at my side, at where my pocket should be, gauntlet clicking against black metal. My mobile phone slides into my hand, extruded through my armour, as if spat out by a layer of ferro-magnetic fluid. As I raise it to my face my helmet peels back, segments clicking free and folding downward, revealing my face, my head, my hair. I take a sharp, surprised breath of cold air, thick with choking spices and the scent of burning, red wine and old dust and rancid oil.

A glimpse of myself flashes in the glass of the shop window. Pale skin, black hair, not pure machine beneath the armour.

My left eye is a solid ball of red-black; my right, a similar narrow slit. The jagged ruin of my facial scar is lit from within, glowing like a premonition of pyroclastic flow.

Buzz-buzz—

The phone snaps me from self-fascination. Don’t recognise the number on the screen. Could be Willow, but that’s no threat anymore. Accept call, phone to my ear.

“Yes?”

A long pause. Distant howling far from the phone. A hint of high-pitched clicks and oscillating whistles.

“Miss Carter.” A woman’s voice, smooth and deep. Vaguely familiar.

“Speaking, it’s me, yes. Who—”

“We have little time for pleasantries, do we not? I have been trying to contact you for quite a while, but it seems you’ve gotten yourself lost in the mire.”

“ … Winter?”

The ‘occultist’ I met in front of my parents’ grave, the last time I was down in Oxford. An unmistakable voice, a strange southern accent I’ve heard nowhere else before.

“If you would consent to follow my directions,” Winter says, “I can bring you to me directly.”

“I don’t even know where I am,” I snap, looking out into the swirl of iridescent colour, burning my eyes and tickling my brain stem with the urge to vomit. “I’m lost in the middle of the Nightmare over Oxford, and I can’t translocate. Unless you have some route out of here on foot—”

“Step forward, turn to your right, follow the road to the nearest junction, keep your hand on the wall so you do not lose the thread. Turn right, then ninety degrees to the left, across the road in a straight line, then left again, then right, again keep your hand on the nearest wall, do not let it out of sight. Walk forward to a t-junction, then left again. Cross the road in the same manner as before, the far side should be visible for perhaps another ten minutes, perhaps less. I will be there, directly on your left.”

“Oh-kay, what—”

“Don’t dawdle.”

The call goes dead.

Winter, or some obscure bait? Somebody had tried to call me twice, up in Plato Base. How did she get my phone number? Not worth asking, not of an occultist on her scale.

I slap my phone to my hip; it vanishes beneath the metal. My helmet automatically redeploys, sealing me back inside. The zoog curled in the crook of my left arm watches with frozen breath.

“Guess we’ve got a destination,” I whisper, and step back out into the street. “Hang on tight, okay?”

“Hannnggggg,” rasps the zoog.

Winter’s directions prove reliable, leading me further from the landmark of the coral-lights in the high street, down into deep murk and dark canyons of rearing rock that might be houses in the mist, or could be ancient cliffs either side of a forgotten rift. Rattle-belled shapes caper and leer just beyond my vision; carpets of illusory red silk roll off in every direction except the one I intend, trying to tempt me from the path; giant crowned faces lurk far-off in the miasma, mouths open wide, hoping for unwary girls.

After perhaps five minutes of obedience, I cross a final road, flagging heavily, feet filled with lead, my inner engines chugging to a crawl. A low brick wall wafts forward from the darkness, marking the boundary of what might be a park. I almost trip on the edge of a kerb, stumble onto a wide pavement. My breath pounds like thirsty bellows, struggling to filter the Nightmare, my fires guttering low.

I am about to go out. Will my transformation unwind? What happens to an untransformed magical girl in the middle of a Nightmare?

A bus shelter huddles against the lash and roil, barely visible through the maelstrom of negative light and swirling colours, advertisement posters rendered down to gurning monsters and bright smears of mangled text.

A hazy figure waits within. On the left, right where Winter said.

I blunder through the intangible winds and sheets of clinging oil, dragging against rising pressure, squinting to keep from closing my eyes and surrendering to the song. Raise my right fist, clutch the zoog tight in my left arm, just in case. Step beneath the shelter’s roof, ready for an ambush, ready to swing a punch and protect this little scrap of flesh.

The Nightmare cuts out.

Like stepping indoors as a rainstorm rages outside. The area beneath the roof of the bus shelter is normal, mundane, becalmed. Grey concrete pavement spotted with dried gum. Air clear and breathable, a lingering hint of cigarette smoke. Little slanted plastic bench, stained and scored. Transparent back wall, scratched and dented.

Beyond the bus shelter the Nightmare bucks and boils, inches from my shoulder, a sheet of churning dark oil lit from within by flashes of eye-burning un-light.

The song lifts from my mind, held at bay by thin air.

Winter raises an eyebrow.

She stands at the opposite end of the narrow bus shelter, unhurried and unconcerned, almost exactly as I remember from our first meeting. Nun’s habit, hands concealed inside black gloves, neck swaddled in clean white bandages. Heavy-lidded eyes, such a dark brown they are almost red. Pale face, colourless hair, long and loose. Sadistic amusement plays on her lips, age impossible to place. Six and a half feet, possibly the tallest woman I’ve ever met.

Her only concession to the Nightmare is an umbrella, bone dry and folded up, metal tip against the pavement.

“You might be who I assume you to be,” Winter says, as mild as discussing the weather. “But you best introduce yourself quickly, lest we fall into mutual misunderstanding. No?”

I lower my fist. My helmet complies, folding itself back the same as before, to show my face.

Winter nods a greeting. “Miss Carter. I see you’ve discovered yourself. Rest here a while, recover your stamina.”

“H-how are you doing this?” I gesture at the bus shelter, the Nightmare penned outside; her offer is not for nothing, I’m already feeling my strength return, the weight of Nightmare lifting from mind and body, engines shaking off rust, furnaces taking in fresh fuel. “You told me you’re no Dreamer, but I’m finding that very hard to believe right now. You get hold of my phone number, you know exactly where I was, you lead me through this, unerring. How?”

Winter tilts her head ever so slightly. “How do you think?”

A shrug. “Magic?”

“An imprecise term. But best we leave it at that, don’t you think?”

“And you swear you’re not a Dreamer?” I ask. “Don’t lie about this, not right now. Not now.”

Winter waits, as if I’ve forgotten some important clarification. “Mm.” She refolds her gloved hands over the handle of her umbrella. “If I were a Dreamer, would it matter? Is this not the second time I have assisted you in some hour of need? Do you judge others by their natures, or by their actions?” She waits a beat. “Those are not rhetorical questions, though you do not have to answer them. As if I have any way to compel you, as you are now.” Her eyes travel up and down my body, my black steel armour, the imperishable surface of this machine.

“I … ” Grit my teeth. “Look, Winter. I’ve just discovered … I mean, if she was even telling me the truth … I’ve learned, or been told, or … there’s a whole cabal of Dreamers, ‘Lucid’ Dreamers, operating in the UK, possibly working behind DC, maybe for decades.”

“Mmhmm.” Winter nods.

“ … and this isn’t new information to you.” Not a question, it’s on her face.

Winter unfolds a hand, the smallest possible shrug.

“Are you a Dreamer?” I press. “I don’t see how else— there’s no way a mere occultist could—”

Winter holds up one black-gloved hand. Smiles. Silence.

“Wizard, witch, whatever you are,” I mutter. “Right. Whatever that means.”

Winter smiles wider, pained and indulgent. “As I said the last time we met, all very poor words to encapsulate anything, certainly not myself. But they will have to suffice.” She gestures at the Nightmare. “We are not in any condition to debate semantics right now, are we?”

“I suppose … wait. Wait.” Heart in my throat. “You know who I am.”

Winter raises her eyebrows, mild as milk. “Yes?”

“But I’m transformed. Only one person has seen me transform, and that only happened less than an hour ago. You shouldn’t be able to remember me, shouldn’t be able to connect me with … well, with this, not unless you saw it happen too, you—”

Winter almost laughs, a harsh puff of breath through her nose, a slight bob of her head. “You won’t last long as a magical girl if you assume everything and everyone plays by the same rules. There are always exceptions. If you live widely, eventually you may learn enough wisdom to know that the rules are made of exceptions. Rules are an illusion. Very pretty, very clean, which is pleasing to the senses. But lethal to follow a clean map into a sinkhole, is it not?”

Winter waits for a response. Either she is who and what she says she is, or she’s Willow in disguise. No other options.

“Perhaps,” she adds slowly, “you are the one breaking the rules. Have you considered that?”

“Either I believe you, or I kill you,” I mutter.

Winter shrugs. “Such is life, no?”

Deep breath. Let it out slow. Straighten my spine, raise my chin. Paranoia has run wild, preying on my thinned-out energy, too much time wading through Nightmare soup.

“Alright,” I say. “Sorry. I … I thought you might be somebody else, in disguise.”

“Often,” says Winter. “But not at present. Who needs disguise in a Nightmare?”

“Thank you. For the phone call, I mean. I was starting to … to tire, out there, something, I don’t know how to put it. And thank you for before as well, with the drug and the cats and everything, back in the graveyard. I don’t understand why you would want to help me, or even who you really are, but thank—”

Crack-crack-crack-pop-poppopopopopopopopop—rrrrrrrrrt—

Sustained gunfire rattles through the Nightmare, only a few streets from the bus shelter. Winter looks up, cocks an ear. The zoog huddled in the crook of my left arm lets out a hiss of alarm, tries to burrow deeper.

Gunfire trails off. Pop. Crack. Gone.

“What was that?” I whisper, as if the shooters might hear us. As if bullets wouldn’t bounce off my armour.

Winter shrugs again, as if this should be obvious. “Certain matters may be settled beneath cover of a storm. Certain experiments attempted. Boundaries tested or violated. We are not the only ones conversant with the underside of this event.”

I boggle at her. “You mean there’s people out there? Unprotected?”

“Are we not people?”

“You know what I mean! Mundane people.”

“Among others. None who would want a rescue from the likes of a magical girl. No need to go rushing off.”

Shake my head. “I never heard gunfire while I was inside a shelter. Never, not once, my whole life. Nobody has, it’s never mentioned. Even in uncensored stuff, from abroad.”

“Perhaps it has never happened before.” Winter examines me, a teacher deciding the level of detail a student can handle. “Every Nightmare is different, unique. This one has pretensions of regality.”

“Yeah,” I mutter. “I noticed.”

“Did you notice anything else?”

“Like what? I wasn’t exactly taking notes out there. And what about you, Winter? Okay, so you’re a big deal magician or whatever, but I’m a magical girl, and I could barely wade through that. How are you out here, how … how … ”

Winter waits, eyebrows raised. Infuriating. Can’t even finish my question, what’s the point?

“You noticed nothing at all?” she asks.

A sigh. “I was baited by some kind of dream-anglerfish thing. I was chasing a Dreamer — long story — and it wore her face, used that as bait, I think. I got lost, alright? Because I’m a rookie and an idiot and shouldn’t be down here. Is that what you were digging for?”

“Not particularly.” Winter looks at the zoog nestled against my chest. “I see you’ve picked up a passenger. Rare enough to rescue anybody from the sump of a Nightmare, bravo. But you won’t be able to operate at your best carrying baggage.” She holds out a gloved hand. “Would you like me to take him for you? I can set him down somewhere safe.”

The zoog reacts with curiosity, uncurls from within my arms, stretches his snout toward Winter’s hand. I step forward, let him sniff, but he recoils sharply, clings to my side, lets out a little rasp. “Stinky stink smelllllll.”

I step back, try not to bristle in sympathy. “Sorry, he doesn’t seem to like you. I’ll hold onto him, he’s no burden.”

Winter shrugs, no hard feelings. “So. Miss Carter. Should I be calling you by a new name?”

My mouth opens to tell her no, I’m still just plain old Octavia Carter; but something falters to a halt inside me, caught on a whirring gear-chain of loosely linked concepts. I am Octavia, that is my name. But I am also now This Machine, I have always been This Machine, this Black Knight, this Engine-in-Waiting. I am a Maiden made from Iron, the Nemesis in Red-and-Black, an Imperishable Mechanism.

My lips hesitate. Winter waits politely.

“I don’t know,” I say eventually. “I don’t … I haven’t exactly had much time to think about this. I’ve been transformed for all of … I don’t know that either, maybe half an hour? What time is it?”

“Just past seven in the morning.”

Another shake. No idea how long I’ve been down in Oxford, don’t know exactly when Willow ambushed me on Luna. My eyes slide outward, to the vertical sheet of Nightmare churning beyond this impossible shelter.

“How does it feel?” Winter asks, crisp and clinical.

“What? Sorry?”

She nods at my body, my black metal armour. “How does it feel?” She raises a hand before I can complain. “Take a moment. Couple said moment with a deep breath or three. By your own admission you have been preoccupied by the present circumstances, no?” A slight smile, curling with sadistic amusement. “Take a moment with yourself, magical girl. Or you may never have another.”

Deep breath. Swallow, dry mouth. A nod, to acknowledge her point.

My armour is a field of smooth interlocked black, subtle curves of steel-beyond-steel. A hint of paradoxical red-black lurks beneath the surface when viewed up close, like lava-light glowing through inches of metal and bone and meat. The brown crust from the Nightmare’s depths has flaked off and fallen away, leaving my surfaces untouched, not even scuffed from my earlier tumble. Tiny machine sounds trickle from inside me, furnaces ticking over, engines humming, machinery waiting for the urge into greater motion. Just listening to those sounds soothes me, slows my heart rate, lowers my blood pressure.

I raise my right arm, try to feel the prosthetic inside, try to feel anything of myself other than the armour.

I’m still there, a weight slightly different to my left, a looseness where something has jogged parts of me out of position. But my fingers still work, I can still sketch a punch. My heart beats, my blood pumps, my lungs inflate with each breath; I’ve not transformed into a robot. My flesh has not transmuted to metal — though my prosthetic limbs feel like living pistons, their meat-and-bone counterparts reinforced by carbon fibre and steel, packed in layers of compressed foam, cushioned against the world beyond.

I’ve never felt so safe, so completely myself. My armour is hard outside, like the shell of a turtle, but soft as liquid metal against my skin, softer even as it penetrates me and becomes me, wrapped around my organs, cradling the engine of my heart, threaded alongside my bones, feeding my cells with electric current.

All the old pains are still present — hips, stump-sockets, weight of scars — but now they’re integrated parts of a whole, compensated for by the machine.

This Machine is me, and I’ve always been This Machine. An involuntary smile tugs at my lips, the edge of cackling mania.

Hadn’t thought about it until Winter asked, not only because I’m in the middle of a Nightmare, but because it just feels like me.

I reach out to the side with my right hand, wrap my black metal gauntlet around one of the upright supports of the bus shelter, and squeeze. The thin metal bends and buckles in my grip. I transfer the zoog to the crook of my right arm, repeat the experiment with my left hand. Not quite as successful; the metal still deforms, but I can’t crush it all the way.

“Strong,” I say, not really speaking to Winter. “I feel strong, like I could punch through solid concrete. I feel like this … this is me.” The smile comes back, chased by a laugh, high and weird. “This was always me. Look at me, I’m … ”

Beautiful? What a strange thought.

“Go on,” Winter murmurs.

“I feel pure. The purity of a machine. But not a machine like a mobile phone or a … a … no, more like a steam engine. A little slice of a mechanical god.” I almost laugh again, stunned at my own words, a swirling vortex behind my eyes. “Is this how the others feel, all the time? Is this how it feels?”

“Hmmmm,” Winter purrs, noncommittal, doubtful.

The Nightmare steals my attention from my transformed self; a pulse of motion passes through the swirling sheets of oil-dark light, a distant shock wave in the murk. The air thickens and grows dimmer, like the bus shelter is a submersible passing further from the sun, down into inky deeps.

Winter raises a gloved finger to her lips, tapping in thought. “Curious.”

“What’s happening?” I hiss.

“You must inform me if you ever discover the answer to such a universal question.” Winter sees my glare and smiles wider with sudden sadistic glee. “Which is a clever way of saying I do not quite know.”

“Quite?” I echo.

“The innards of any Nightmare are beyond waking minds. Despite what you may suspect of me, I am very much awake.”

I hiss with frustration. The Nightmare’s cloud of effluent has grown so thickly dark that the street is almost impossible to make out now, let alone the looming wall of buildings on the far side.

“Why were you trying to contact me?” I whisper, as if something might hear us. “Earlier, I mean.”

“I’ve grown fond of you,” Winter answers, distracted by something beyond the shelter, her eyes narrowing in a squint. “You do not tend to last long, you magical girls. You batter yourselves to pieces in a few short years, or even shorter. Bright candles that burn too hot, always for the ends of others. I thought you deserved a warning.”

“About Willow? You knew Willow was coming after me? How? If you know about Willow, I have to know, I have to—”

A sidelong glance. “One sees a wasp nest stir, one does not know why. Willow?”

“A Dreamer.”

A tiny tut, almost impressed. “Such a nemesis.”

“She’s a Lucid Dreamer, whatever that means. And you know something, don’t you? Winter, if you want to help me—”

Winter raises a hand, eyes outward into the Nightmare murk. “Hold your blows, magical girl.”

She warns me just in time, but not early enough to save me from a full-body flinch; a low dark shape scuttles up right beside the bus shelter, hidden by the swirling oily miasma, then slides clear of the churning Nightmare, into the calm air of our refuge.

First, nothing: a heap of greasy brown fabric blown in by the wind. In one heartbeat the lump straightens up, unfolds long rubbery limbs concealed so cleverly, rises to the height of a person, all suggestions hidden inside loose layers of hanging cloth. Glimpses of flesh the colour of sunless mushrooms, lithe-muscled and narrow-bodied, coated in thick layers of banded tattoo, dusted with fur like thin patchy moss; a flash of quasi-canine jawline, a hint of cadaverous face.

A pair of all-black eyes stare out from the deep shadow of a makeshift hood.

Those shapes trigger brain-stem reflexes; I am in the presence of something dangerous, something that might pluck me from a Pleistocene cave-mouth and drag me off into the dark. My arm twitches, my hand makes a fist, lips peel back from my teeth.

Winter raises her umbrella, interposes it between us. “Play nice,” she says.

“I … uh … right.” Unmake my fist. Swallow ancient instinct.

A ghoul. I am standing less than six feet from a ghoul, in the middle of an Oxford street. Beneath cover of a Nightmare, to be fair. But still.

Can’t see much beneath the makeshift urban ghillie suit, but already it’s nothing like I expected, nothing like the propaganda. No slavering jaw, no reek of rotten carrion, no blood-mad eyes, not howling like a rabid dog. I always doubted the propaganda, but the shock comes all the same, mixed with instinctive revulsion.

Even the scent is a surprise. Winter’s new visitor is heralded by a subtle odour like moss and lichen, fungal and chewy.

The ghoul ignores me, turns to Winter. Pale hands emerge like fat grave-worms from inside the makeshift robes, each finger tipped with a great flat claw, blunt and heavy and filthy with old dirt. It offers Winter two objects — a submachine gun held at an awkward angle, and a strange helmet made of heavy glass faceted like a geodesic dome. The helmet has been partially shattered, blood all over the glass, machinery and eyepieces and re-breather equipment visible on the inside.

Winter takes the helmet, eyebrows raised.

The ghoul speaks in a headlong rush from under its hood, clicking, purring, whistling. Can’t make out a word. Never heard it before.

Winter nods, replies in the same click-talk, lips moving back and forth with considerable effort to make the sounds. The ghoul offers her the submachine gun, but Winter almost laughs, adds something else in ghoul-tongue, tone dismissive. The ghoul tosses the weapon away, back into the Nightmare.

Then the ghoul glances at me. Clicks and purrs.

“What?” I snap. Can’t help myself. “What— what is it saying?”

“She likes your armour,” Winter says, handing the broken helmet back to the ghoul, who makes it vanish inside her greasy disguise.

The ghoul clicks and whistles, seemingly more agitated. A clawed hand gestures at me, a coiling motion.

Winter sighs, replies with a short click-stream, then says to me: “She would like me to be more specific, but ghoul poetry does not translate well into English, and I am not very good at either. Do you speak any Welsh, Miss Carter?”

“Uh … no, sorry.”

The ghoul regards me for a moment, then clicks twice at Winter, and steps back out into the Nightmare. It is only then that I realise she wasn’t alone; two more shrouded lumps were waiting just beyond the bus shelter, invisible until they moved. In half a heartbeat the three ghouls are gone.

Nightmare silence returns, a background churn of invisible winds and distant cries and the ever-present strange song of the thing up in the sky.

“That was a ghoul,” I say. Obvious, stupid. “You consort with ghouls?”

“Consort,” Winter echoes. “Interesting choice of word.”

“You know what I mean. What was that all about? The helmet and the gun, and … ghouls?”

Winter gives me a slow, amused look. “Some questions are better left unasked. I already told you, under cover of storms, many things may happen that are impossible otherwise.”

We stare each other down. Winter is right; I have enough problems of my own without concerning myself over her shadow-war, whatever it is she’s up to out there, via ghoulish proxies.

“Who are you fighting?” I ask.

Winter shrugs.

“Alright,” I say slowly, then take another deep breath, try to calm myself. “So, what now? You’re just going to wait here?”

“I think it is high time I moved on,” Winter replies. “My business here is not quite concluded, but … I suspect that our continued association may prove a danger to both of us. At current, you understand. Not in the future, one may hope.”

“What? Why?” I glance out into the Nightmare again. “I don’t know where to go, and I can’t just wait here. I don’t even know where here is!”

Winter points down the street, into the thickly shifting murk. “A public shelter lies not five hundred feet that way. Hug the wall behind us, stay to the right, then turn right at the first street. It’s on the corner, part of an underground station, you cannot miss it. You should be safe inside the airlock chamber, no need to disturb the public too much. There you will be close enough to mundane reality to … well.” She smiles, thin and bloodless. “Put up a fight, shall we say?”

“I thought you said I could stay here to recover? Now you’re turfing me out?”

“Are you not recovered?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Then I must move on. You will find no safety at my side, I’m sorry to say. You need a larger arena, space enough to swing those exquisite new fists. I would not want to catch a stray, would I?”

A cold chill crawls up my spine. “ … what?”

Winter gestures with her umbrella. “You said you fell for the trickery of an anglerfish. Perhaps you did, I do not know. But there is a Dreamer following you, Miss Carter. She is, in fact, right here.”

“What? Where—”

Winter raises a hand, points at the opposite side of the street. For a moment I can’t see a thing, just the prismatic oil-swirl of the Nightmare, flowing down the road in a tsunami of black-light through tainted water.

A face resolves in distant murk.

Willow, tearful and angry, the mark of my fist a livid bruise around one eye, hair whipped aside like the trailing tail of a comet.

The anglerfish-thing showed her face unbruised, too perfect. This is the genuine article. Mine.

I jerk forward, open my mouth, legs already kicking off. “Will—”

Winter taps my side with the tip of her umbrella, metal on metal; somehow that stops me cold, makes me jerk and reset.

Willow’s eyes scrunch up with wounded pride. She blinks out, torn away on the tide.

I round on Winter, anger misdirected. “That was her!” I snap. “That was her, I have to go after— how did you do that— what do you think you’re—”

“I would not chase her further, if I were you,” Winter says. “That is a Dreamer, as you surmised.”

“Yes, I know!” I almost shout. “It’s Willow, my— my—” My ex? The girl I need to save from herself? What am I doing? Winter is right, I should be fleeing for the public shelter to ride out the rest of the Nightmare. “I— I need to—”

“You need to run, magical girl.”

“Yes, I— I know, but—”

“You are alone,” Winter says. “She is a Dreamer. If you have run this far, it is only because she is allowing you to do so. I suggest you reach the shelter quickly, get inside the airlock, somewhere you can fight without being blinded by the Nightmare. Before her temper turns or her tastes change.”

“But she’s the one running!” I snap. “She’s the one who should be afraid of me! I’m going to rescue— I mean— I want— I—”

“You feel strong, but you are still fragile. A Dreamer can snuff one of you out without too much difficulty. Three or four of you together is a different matter, but you are alone. Best never to fight alone, no?”

“She wouldn’t kill me. She wants me—”

“Are you certain of that?” Winter asks. “If she cannot have you, perhaps nobody can?”

“ … no, no, I don’t … I don’t think … ”

Winter opens her umbrella and eyes the Nightmare, a woman about to step out into a storm. “She will brook no source of jealousy. I should not remain nearby.”

“You don’t know her,” I hiss.

“I know her type well. I think it would be better for both of us if I were away, Miss Carter, before she decides that I am speaking with you too much, that I am another obstacle to her … ownership?” Winter smiles her sadistic little smile. “Ah, yes, I see I have guessed correctly. I wouldn’t want to risk victory against a Dreamer, it is far too early for that. Head for the shelter. Ready your fists. Do not hesitate.”

“I’ve had enough of running from her.” I turn outward, into the nightmare. “You hear me, Willow!? I’ve had enough running! You hear me!?”

Panting, throat raw, no reply. The zoog huddled in the crook of my left arm tries to make itself as small as possible, hiding face against my armour.

Winter shakes her head, sighs softly. “A terrible waste.”

Winter steps out into the Nightmare. For a second she is the outline of a woman carrying an umbrella, then a figure swallowed by the sucking prismatic darkness. Three steps and she’s gone.

The clear air beneath the bus shelter begins to erode inwards, a cliff-face before acidic waves. I plant my feet; no more running. But a few seconds longer reveals my words as hollow, as the Nightmare washes inward, forces my back against the transparent plastic, draws rasping fear from the zoog I have tried to save.

Can’t stay out here and let my strength get sapped again. A humiliating retreat, for a foolish girl, still a cripple who can’t even look after herself.

I turn away and flee into the Nightmare-choked street, in the direction Winter instructed.

And I hope that’s not Willow’s eyes I feel, boring into my back.