This Magical Girl is Mine

The game can barely be called as such; to win, all I have to do is drink from the chalice thrice and manage to stay standing. Maenad will be drinking too, of course, but purely for her own pleasure. It is, after all, her magic that’s going to be poisoning the cup.

The magical girl has a small table brought to the center of the room, which draws a bit of attention. When she chugs from the chalice, sets it down, and gestures for me to go next, I hear a few cheers from the crowd.

My surge of mania is already fading. This might be my worst plan yet—and the last one got my heart ripped out. The hole inside my chest throbs at the reminder. Well, nothing for it.

I drink.

The alcohol in Maenad’s cup is a deep, dark red. It tastes of overripe berries, rotting meat, and a metal tang. Heat blossoms in my throat and chest as I choke down the elixir.

My world swims. The music in the air swells in volume and scatters in comprehension, becoming ear-blasting noise. Faces blur while other details sharpen. The haze sets in quickly and drowns my perceptions.

Of course, I’m a witch, and a powerful one at that. My first move is obvious: I try to burn the toxins out. I command my body to purge what I’ve just taken in.

I’m not particularly surprised when that doesn’t work; I expected as much, but I’d feel like a fool if I never tried the simplest answer. I cough and sputter as acid reflux is my only reward; my senses are still being messed with, my body still overheating.

Maenad watches my struggle and titters, covering her mouth. “Never gets old.”

I roll my eyes—which is a terrible idea, because that sets the room spinning—and say, “Laugh while you can. You’ve never met a witch like me.”

“I wonder if that’s true,” she muses. “They scooped me out of college, did you know that? I was a terror. Flirting with cute professors for the fun of it, selling ecstasy to sorority sisters, setting fire to my ex’s dorm room for cheating on me with that whore Britney. I wanted to get a finance degree so I could gamble with other people’s money. The Jovians thought I was a perfect candidate… but they didn’t make me a witch. I always questioned that decision.”

I hesitate and try to steady myself. This is a social game, and I play to win those. “You sound proud of your history. You think they picked wrong, making you a magical girl.” But why are you telling that to me?

“Of course.” She laughs again. “It was fun, being the bad girl. I wanted to be a witch. I wanted the excuse to really get my hands dirty. So when Rhea gave me power and told me I was playing for the good team, I mean, c’mon—I didn’t believe it for a second. I knew it all had to be bullshit. So I did what any girl in my shoes would do: I started climbing the ladder. And now I’m here, third priestess to a ‘rising goddess.’ And here you are, the girl on everyone’s lips.”

She drinks, wipes her face, and passes me the cup. I take it.

This girl… she reminds me of Mordacity. I don’t like that. I raise the chalice and stare into its contents. I reach inside myself, grasping for Prometheus. Hey again, mantle. I’ve got a new puzzle for you.

My superpower purrs to life. The flame inside me is curious. I bring it out to meet our quarry, letting the green fire of transformation lick against the chalice and taste the wine within.

Can you change it? I ask. Can you neuter its bite?

Prometheus expresses hesitance. I’m shown a familiar vision: a woman’s hand slapping away my flame. The hand is singed, but it seems to flicker in and out of burning, its state uncertain. That’s interesting; I’ve transformed the property of magical girls before, sometimes without consent, but Prometheus seems to think that Dionysus will resist my attack on the chalice. Is it just particularly potent, or is there a metaphysical interaction I’m missing?

Do it anyway.

Flame pours and flows into the chalice. The dark liquid shimmers green, the cup growing warmer. I drink.

Maenad’s intoxicating magic floods my body and turns the world upside down. I hear the song of revelry pounding in my eardrums, calling me to the bacchanal. In the meadow, the nymphs and satyrs are dancing. Familiar faces twist in lust and stupor and pain. Their laughter makes the chorus. Above, the eyes of the goddess watch and wait. Below and around, the grapevines ensnare. Within, my blood boils. My chest is a cavern, its core removed, my heart pulsing in wicked hands. The goddess squeezes and something scrapes against my soul.

Mortals and mages, glassy-eyed and hungry. Sacrifices and knives. The ceremony has already begun. Worship shall be given. Bodies are made for use. How could I not see it before? The naked, tangled limbs. The faces blank with rapture. The ties binding all. I feel the urge to strip my clothes and drink from the well and join them in the revel—to find someone to taste and twine and ride and kill and eat. My place is among them, another maenad in the menagerie, laughing with my sisters and giving praise to the one who made us.

And then it’s gone, banished with a shake of my head. I clutch at myself, vision still swimming, scouring the chamber for signs of what I’ve seen. Bombshell laughs with Mako. Radiance watches from above. Vain Narcissa, charming Sonata, the crowds that swirl around them. Are the humans exceptionally dazed, or is that just the atmosphere of the party? Are they drunk or drugged? Can anyone here tell the difference?

For a fleeting moment, I wonder if the right thing to do would be leaving this game behind and scattering the masses. Could I save anyone? Maybe. It doesn’t matter; Striga wants me here. All these lives are acceptable losses if it improves our chances of stopping Venus and keeping Jupiter trapped inside those seals. To drive the knife into her heart, we must allow her to expose it.

“In vino veritas, slut,” says Maenad. She’s perched on the table now, looking down at me smugly, smile twisted. She licks her teeth. Her eyes are cruel and deep and hungry. “You know a little more about meeeeeeee, but I still can’t make sense of you. So, like, who are you, really? How did you get here? How did a nobody from nowhere get handed an absurd mantle she doesn’t even know how to use right and wind up a claimant to the throne that should have been mine? Do you understand how crazy that is? I’ve slaved myself to monsters for years and you just show up and make it the Archon show! Who are you!?”

Laughter bubbles up from deep in my chest. “I’m even more of a nobody than you think. I’m a dropout. A burnout. I was an internet grifter on someone else’s couch. I’ve watched most of my adult life go by in a haze of mindless consumption and cowardly yearning. I was less than nothing—the negative of a person. And the King in Yellow still chose me instead, so how pathetic does that make you?”

The words spill from my lips unbidden, forced out by the bile in my blood. The toxic elixir compels me to truth, but it doesn’t stop me from shaping that truth into a knife.

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Maenad sucker punches my stomach and I double over in pain, coughing up red that might be wine or might be blood. I shudder and stumble, catching myself against the table, head pounding, gasping for breath.

She drinks from the chalice for a third and final time. She lets the red drip down her chin. Her eyes blaze with fury, her smile all but gone. “Why?” she demands. “Why were you chosen? Why do you matter to anyone?”

I don’t know. I don’t know how this happened. I don’t know why she loves me. I don’t know what we did for the King in Yellow to place us in these roles. I don’t know when it started. I don’t know what Mordacity knows that we don’t. I don’t know anything at all. But I can guess.

“The Jovians,” I choke out as soon as my lungs allow, “chose me to get in Striga’s way. An irritant or a dagger. And the King… answered my claim… because I earned it. Understand? I made myself into the claimant she chose.” The haze swirls around me. The melody pounds in my ears. “She chose me for the love I feel. Love, love, love. Does anyone love you?”

“Love is a lie,” Maenad scorns. “The Lady told me that herself. Now drink up.”

The who? But the priestess raises her chalice to my lips and I can’t back down now. I have one last trick up my sleeve. I drink from the chalice, imbibing the befouled nectar of Dionysus, and I set my soul on fire.

Maenad was right about one thing: I haven’t been using my mantle properly. I’d started thinking about more creative applications, sure, thanks to Mordacity, but all this time I’ve been ignoring the most obvious use of my power. It was a mental block I didn’t even know I had, but it’s so clear in hindsight.

When I was first granted magic, I complained that I couldn’t burn things. I figured out how to make familiars that could burn things later, but I just accepted that I could never wield that power directly. Why? This whole time, I’ve been entirely focused on feeding new tools to the furnace. I’ve only ever considered external targets for transformation—that weapon, that minion, that ally. Why?

If I can empower Agatha and Phoebe to break their limits, what’s stopping me from doing the same to myself?

For seven years I let myself stagnate. I was miserable, but I was close to the girl that made me happy, so I put up with the storm clouds for fear of losing those momentary rays of sunshine. Even when I became a witch, even when I learned of the conspiracy, even when I was given every possible reason to confess my feelings and end the uncertainty that lay between us, I held my tongue for months. I was so scared of negative change that I couldn’t bring myself to take the action that might lead to positive change—that did, when I finally said what I should have said months ago.

Sophia Lane loves me. She adores me. She’s chased me for whole decades of repeated days, working herself to the bone trying to save me, trying to be with me. I have nothing to be afraid of anymore. There is no peace to break, no stasis to threaten.

Finally, finally, things can change.

I reach for my power and Prometheus answers me with joy. My liberation is its liberation, and when I give it my new request it is elated to comply. We breach the barrier together, shattering my subconscious, self-imposed limit. And then, for the first time, I transform me.

Maenad’s brew courses through my veins, and her power is strong enough to resist mine. So instead of trying to change the wine, I change my body. When I will it to happen, it’s as easy as flipping a switch. I’ve simply decided that Archon is not affected by drunkenness or being drugged, immune to all toxins and intoxicants—and Prometheus makes that the new truth of my form. I could describe it as a change to the physical receptors affected by chemical influence, but it’s something deeper and more primal. The truth of my soul is that this power cannot touch me, protection etched in emerald.

I self-immolate in the center of the party, wreathed in green. Flame pours from me and pours into me, swirling around my body like it did the very first time I ever donned the mantle. All the other times I’ve used my flame, I’ve felt my internal stores dwindling, my temperature dropping, but now the flame is permeating every inch of me. I am the furnace and the workshop, the immortal living kiln. What is spent is absorbed, not extruded.

My senses were dulled by the previous drinks, so I sharpen them with flame. My tongue was made heavy with a curse of truth, so I lighten it. Motor function, stability, endurance, all of these are enhanced at the speed of thought. Everything Maenad has done to me is reversed, every negative parameter countered with a positive.

When my work is done and the emerald vortex ceases to churn, I set the golden chalice aside and stand there, gaze locked with Maenad’s. Green fire glows beneath my skin and flickers around the edges of my vision. The poisoned wine sloshes uselessly inside me.

“I believe you owe me some ambrosia,” I say with only the faintest trace of smugness.

Maenad stares at me in raw, radiant disbelief. She’s still perched there on the table, the chalice beside her, and she’s looking at me like I shouldn’t exist. “No way. You can’t just—a nothing like you? Really? Over me?”

“Give me the ambrosia,” I say again, voice hardening. Nothing else matters to me right now. The party is noise that I’m tuning out, utterly focused on my prize. My worship.

Maenad clutches the wafer of divinity in one hand. Her muscles tense, her fist closing around the ambrosia. It’s mine by right, but she doesn’t want to give it up. “There has to be a mistake. You couldn’t have—”

In a flash of purple flame I conjure a knife and stab it into her wrist.

Maenad screams, but I don’t care. Let the whole room hear. Let the world. The endgame is upon us and I refuse to relinquish my prize. I pry the wafer from her spasming fingers and pop it in my mouth before she can even think to fight back. It’s mine. It’s mine. It’s MINE!

And it is glorious.

Divinity touches my tongue and melts into my soul, the warm glow of stolen worship suffusing my entire being. A thousand prayers nourish me. I drink in the hopes and dreams of all the lonely souls who found themselves drawn to the image of a magical girl. Every soul that sought company in admiration of Radiance and Narcissa and Memento and Maenad and all the rest, and me, and more. Every wish for love, for beauty, for adoration. Every wish to be like the girl flying overhead, or to be with her.

I want to be loved. I want to be seen. I want sex. I want attention. I want money. I want power. I want to be beautiful and desirable and never alone again. I want, I want, I want, I want.

All the wants of all the humans whose hearts sing in time with the Spire, poured into a little pastry puck and devoured whole. The worship of petitioners who don’t know the name of the goddess they pray to. The worship of the masses that will soon be mine.

The laughter spilling from my lips is almost unrecognizable. Since when did I sound so megalomaniacal when I was just having fun? Ah, no matter. My supplicants will praise me regardless once I’ve usurped that pitiful imitator.

Maenad stumbles away from me, still clutching her wounded arm, and she disappears into the crowd. And now, with divine eyes, oh, the wonders I can see.

My vision of madness was a flash of insight; the revelers here are mad, truly, cursed by Maenad’s poison and Glamour’s weave. With the scales peeled from my eyes, I see a raucous mass of sex and violence. Dawn leaves behind a body without a face—Dusk at her heels—in search of another victim, their eyes glazed over and bloodshot. Narcissa moans in ecstasy as a dozen mouths grace her flesh. Mortals bleed from the ears as they listen raptly to Sonata’s song, Memento presenting each victim with a contract to sign in blood. Green Thumb, Riddlemaster, Kira, Sweet, all drawn into an orgy beneath the sightless gaze of the golden Venus statue that towers over the chamber. From the balcony, Pearl Princess watches, smiling, conducting the revelry with a swirl of her finger.

The barriers between worlds shiver and crack, one reality bleeding into the next. The ceremony has almost reached its crescendo. Soon, very soon, the goddess will make her entrance and the two chambers above the two Spires shall become one.

Let her come. Let her false divinity feed my ascension. Let her—

Amid the madness, a familiar face steps forward. Agatha Cain—my first supplicant, the first prayer I ever answered—approaches me with need in her eyes and rapture on her face. She comes to me in worship, answering the call of my burning soul. I can feel the bond between us: a chain of emerald flame made golden by ambrosia. She is mine, and she wishes to be mine, and she will make herself mine.

“I love you,” she says. “I love you, I love you, I love you. I need you. Please.”

And then, as my sanity catches up to my mania and I realize how wrong this picture is, Agatha Cain tackles me to the floor and kisses me on the mouth.