The foggy dawn air was fresh and pleasant. More pleasant, however, was the fact that there was nobody else around to pollute it.

Sure, there were those ever-present mainstays of city life – milkmen, mailmen, and paperboys, but aside from these silent few, the streets were empty. And those weren’t people, not really. They felt more matter-of-fact and impersonal, like furniture, or vegetation. Part of the scenery.

With the tall buildings all around blocking out the sun like great colossi with stone skin and metal bones, and all the great flat barrenness of the streets, it seemed as if they were passing through the strange wilderness of another world, and these few native denizens were the wildlife endemic to that habitat, going about their normal business with no awareness of the alien spectators.

Or perhaps not.

Perhaps it wasn’t so strange, and these streets only felt queer because they were unpopulated and it seemed so normal for the opposite to be true.

Gregor’s staff tapped stone as the pair walked. They were heading for the train station. Not rushing, but very certainly and deliberately not being slow, which was different. The city would soon rise, and they planned to be on the upswell of that tide.

They each drooped slightly, though differently, for neither had slept, and the exhaustion of fighting and rushing and then maintaining some level of readiness should another fight arrive in the night hours had built into a physical force. It burdened the both of them with leaden legs and anchored ankles, but Gregor most of all.

While Mildred had merely stayed awake, Gregor had been proactive in his exhaustion, working all night to finish as much of the eye as couldn’t be completed elsewhere.

Her stubborn refusal to sleep had been to no benefit, and she rather regretted it. She had exhausted herself for no reason, doing nothing special, contributing only distraction, which was probably true to the nature of their engagement – Gregor did the special things, and she watched, seemingly only ever suffering as a token to mark that she was also a participant in the affair.

She understood that this was the way it was meant to be, that he was her wizard, and that it was his job to act and her job to benefit. She knew this, she understood it, and she was endlessly grateful to be able to continue enjoying it, but it didn’t sit right that she spectated while Gregor suffered. Not just in relation to the magic of the night, because she could realistically contribute nothing there, but in regard to her part in the whole of their arrangement.

It was… insufficient. Unsatisfying.

Mildred felt like luggage.

She remembered contentment at the idea of being a passenger here, but that notion now radiated a foul odour which curdled her appetite for good emotions. She didn’t want to feel grateful, because what Gregor did for her was strictly unfair to him. Mildred gained, he suffered. It was a guilty thing to appreciate. One could argue that she owed him her entire self, because he was certainly the only reason that it was still in a single pretty piece. That was the magnitude of his service.

He willingly suffered pain, and endured the risk of far worse without complaint. When weighed against that, Mildred couldn’t help but feel that her own passive inaction was an embarrassment. She wasn’t useless, yet she didn’t put herself to use. She hated it.

Her dissatisfaction crystallised into the notion that she ought to be doing more, both because Gregor was owed some help, whether he wanted it or not, and because she knew that living her life under the umbrella of another would very soon begin to chafe.

Mildred had come to realise that this discomfort with passive protection was the entire reason she’d departed her father’s sanctuary.

Perhaps it would chafe less if she helped to hold the umbrella.

Thinking back more than a few restless hours, she recalled obtaining directions to the enchantment chamber while Gregor was still in a mage-murdering mood. She had taken on the role of the mouthpiece.

However small of a thing it had been, it was still something that she could do – a duty she could take up when it was useful to have a people person. Gregor couldn’t do it, and even if he could, he wouldn’t.

He was undiplomatic, to say the least. And though he might be endlessly talented and versatile in the tasteful application of violence, it is sometimes more optimal to solve problems with words.

Mildred could do words. She could be the spokeswoman, whenever the situation called for one.

That way, she could be an asset to the partnership, or rather, it could become a partnership, rather than whatever exploitative thing it was now. Additionally, it was the opportunity to feel pride at her part in this business after their eventual triumph, rather than preserving the prevailing sense of guilt that she currently suffered.

Particularly, she felt she could be of use in situations like the current one, when Gregor the Very Crippled Wizard was exhausted from efforts made in the furtherance of their shared cause.

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All of a sudden, Mildred felt… good. Eager, even. The possibility of a meaningful and proactive role in these major affairs of her life spurred some deep excitement within her – a strange impetus to live adventurously, and to do and be and think and feel exciting things.

She was participating in a rather grand journey, not originally of her own volition, granted, but now she found herself more than willing to participate in earnest, all reluctance having vanished.

This must be what an epiphany feels like, Mildred supposed. A new lens to enhance her restricted view of the world. Perhaps there were also other things she could do; other forms of proactive participation.

And so, when the first early-bird conveyance rattled around the corner before them, Mildred took the initiative to hail it, and off they went, station-bound.

***

The train boarded there was better than the last. Not quite luxurious, but better. It had private booths with little cot-berths and proper upholstery, and was quartered with footmen who would carry luggage and ferry food and drink from the service car without asking for a tip. It was also much more expensive, but that was obviously not an object of consideration. It was a train outfitted for journeys, rather than trips.

In one such booth, Gregor sat opposite Mildred with a smart little fold-out table between them. Atop it, he was attempting to read his grimoire for the first time in a while, but distraction made itself a nuisance, as was unfortunately becoming usual. The distraction was Mildred.

She ought to be sleeping, as should he, but she was awake and active. Not in rapturous wonder of trains or for fear of attack, as might both be reasonable, but in some strange new fervour. Almost as soon as the train began moving, Mildred had appropriated from Gregor a large glass beaker and asked for a vial each of weak aqua fortis and oil of vitriol, which he had supplied after introducing them by their newer names.

Thus, it came to be that Gregor was trying to read through the wind and noise of an open window on a moving train – opened for the fumes, which were relatively light – while Mildred was contending with the shaking of the vehicle as she fed pieces of cloth and paper into a mixture of nitric acid and sulphuric acid. She was nitrating cellulose, and he had no clue why. It wasn’t for guncotton – the acid was too strong. It was more of a slurry.

Eventually, the solution refused to eat any more, and Mildred corked it.

“Would it be… safe for your hat to hold on to this?”

Gregor’s mind was numb, and he found that he enjoyed watching Mildred use her body while his head was empty. Holding things, moving, blinking. It was odd. “Hmm? Oh. Perfectly.” He said, and accepted the beaker without asking any obvious questions. Wizards do not ask obvious questions. It is injurious to maintaining an air of mystery.

Mildred then sprawled undaintilly into the too-small sleeping nook, succumbing at last to exhaustion. She was changing. Metamorphosing. Her hair was longer now than when they had first met, and she was a little rougher around the edges, but more than that, Mildred was losing her normality.

As Gregor saw it, the most meaningful distinction that could be made between the types of people in the world was dichotomous. There were the normal people, who were the body and soul of civilisation, and there were the abnormal people, who had no regard at all for whether or not they were civilised.

The normal saw reasonableness as a virtue, and consequently lived happy lives of modest fulfilment under the protective grace of establishments and systems who existed to enforce reasonableness, though these entities might themselves use unreasonable means.

The abnormal, who were more often unreasonable than not, participated in these systems only as the fire that fought fire, or as the fire that was fought. Other than that, they abstained, finding it impossible to enjoy simple lives lived according to the niceties of civilisation. Common existence was not enough for them.

Gregor was obviously abnormal, but Mildred existed on the edge. Given the circumstances of her early life, she’d probably never been exactly square. However, it was clear that her father had gone to great lengths to ensure that she was normal enough at heart. But now, her normal perspectives and sensibilities were being eroded by the extremity of her situation.

To normal people, normality was a vital asset. It was security and virtue and belonging, and if Mildred lost it, she’d never get it back. She’d be tainted – doomed forevermore to think and feel things that set her apart from the comfortable crowd. It was a life that could be enjoyed, but which often was not.

Gregor was forced to consider that this might be another avenue for failure. His burden of protection extended to all of Mildred, not just her body, but also her mind. If the cruelty of the world stripped away her normality, her quality of life might suffer. Personally, he thought that she’d be fine either way, that she’d deal with abnormality rather remarkably, but there was no way to be certain.

The world might start demanding duties of her, leveraging her abnormality to get things done. The Norn probably did this, picking abnormal champions to cut through normal problems. In fact, Gregor was quite sure that it was currently happening to him, and he had no doubt that the other true powers in the world did the same – gods and such, or things that might be called gods and which couldn’t really act all that freely, being as the case may be that reality was too fragile to hold them, or that they only really existed as eidola or phantasmagorical mind-stuff, so they were stuck using pawns to resolve mortal dilemmas, not that Gregor considered himself a pawn.

This would be a cruel burden for him to bestow through negligence. He’d count it as his loss if Mildred became an unwilling pawn of the powerful at some point in the future.

He knew for certain that the Golden Queen, to whom they were bound, made a habit of putting the abnormal to use. Her empire was built on the concept. If Mildred were to arrive with her mechanical genius intact, ready to gorge itself upon the all knowledge of modernity, but with her mind usefully abnormal, would the Queen use her, or protect her from misuse, or some variation of either or both?

Hmm.

Gregor then had a moment of inspiration. Could it be that the Worldeater wanted Mildred for exactly that reason? Might she be useful in some huge way, and that was why the Norn had him acting as ferryman across the breadth of the world? It was food for thought.

By this point, he had entirely forgotten that he was trying to read his grimoire. Slowly, sleep claimed him, and for the first time in quite a while, both Mildred and Gregor were asleep at the same time.