Returning to Port Cullis was always difficult. It didn’t matter whether or not Fiona would be seeing her father; just being in the familiar streets, passing familiar buildings, filled her head with intrusive memories. Even now, as she walked through Silver Park with her sisters, she saw the tree one of her bullies had pushed her out of, the hill where her father’s ill-fated attempt at a family picnic had ended with his shouting at Fiona and denying her food as punishment, the creek where she had broken down into sobs after days of pretending everything was normal after her favorite cat had died.

There were positive memories, too. Pouncing on leaves while pretending to be a cat, chasing her sisters around, but they didn’t push themselves to the surface in the same way the negative memories did. It pained her that she could no longer appreciate the beauty of what had once been one of her favorite places.

Abigail and Alice didn’t seem to have the same problem. Although they spent most of their time traveling now, they had never permanently moved away from Port Cullis. They must have found their own ways to distance themselves from their negative memories. By escaping them physically, it appeared that Fiona had created a vulnerability, a way for them to force themselves into her thoughts that her sisters had immunized themselves against. In a way, it seemed, Port Cullis was a different city for Fiona than it was for Abigail and Alice.

Despite her initial resolve, her search for Riven had hit a dead end almost immediately. She had no way to reach the Fae Realms and no idea where to start looking for a way in. She cursed herself for not asking the slimes when she had the chance. They were said to be from the Fae Realms originally, so they must have had a way back and forth. Unfortunately, when she had gone back to look for them, they were gone.

She knew that Riven had been searching for a way to the Fae Realms for years, so if she was going to find it, she had to think of something that Riven wouldn’t have thought of. Unfortunately, Riven’s brilliance and single-mindedness when it came to living out her kinks meant that there was little that Fiona could imagine she wouldn’t have already tried.

With no ideas left, she had come to Port Cullis. When she had arrived at her sisters’ cramped apartment, hidden up a set of stairs in a trash-filled alley, she had been relieved to find them home. Most of their recent work had involved shipping supplies to the southern continent for the war, which meant they were at constant risk for attacks from aquatic demons and the monsters who served them. Fiona had nightmares of receiving word that her sisters had been killed by a kraken.

Abigail and Alice had welcomed Fiona with warm hugs, then dragged her out for a walk in the park, asking her for news. Instead, she decided to ask them a question.

“When you were kids, did you really lose your ability to shapeshift?”

Abigail and Alice looked at each other; Abigail’s ears twitched slightly. “Yeah, of course,” Abigail said. “I mean, that’s how it works, isn’t it? I’m just glad I decided to become a girl before I lost my ability. I would have hated to have been trapped as a boy.”

Alice nodded in agreement. “It sucks that we couldn’t keep them. I wish I could still do it, but I’d rather be stuck as a girl than a boy.”

Fiona felt a stab of guilt. “But imagine if you still had the ability to shapeshift. Would you be a girl all the time, or would you go back and forth?”

Alice looked up at Fiona and furrowed her scale-covered brow. “Well, you have to be one or the other, don’t you? Going back and forth sounds fun, but it would make everyone really confused, wouldn’t it?”

There was a second stab of guilt. Fiona suspected that she would be feeling many more of these before this conversation was over. “Of course you don’t. I have a friend who’s nonbinary. But anyway, do you remember what it felt like losing your power? How it felt when you tried to shapeshift?”

Abigail stepped in front of Fiona and placed her hands on her shoulders forcing the larger woman to stop walking. “Fiona, what are you so worried about?”

Fiona couldn’t meet Abigail’s eyes, so she looked down at her hand. “What do you mean?”

“Whenever you feel guilty about something, you ask a bunch of vague, confusing questions like this. You know what it feels like trying to shapeshift, the same as the rest of us. You went through it before us. So just tell us what you’re trying to say.”

Fiona had to force the words out, and they still came out quieter than intended. “I think I tricked myself into thinking I’d lost my powers, and then I tricked you into thinking that you would lose yours, too.”

Abigail giggled, not the reaction Fiona had expected. “What are you talking about? We’ve all tried to shapeshift. We can’t do it.”

“Abigail, look at me,” said Fiona. “My scars are gone. The cut from my left ear is gone. So are my earrings.”

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Abigail’s eyes traced Fiona’s body. Moving from staring her in the eyes, to examining her ears, cheek, and finally her bare arms. Finally, her eyes widened with realization. “How?”

Fiona told her sisters about the encounter with the slimes. This was her excuse for coming to Port Cullis. They deserved to know, she had thought. Though in fact she had come here because she didn’t know where else to go. Lost without any clues or direction, her instincts had brought her home. It made her feel like a child when she thought of it that way, though, so she had decided to focus on talking to her sisters, even though this meant focusing on something that made her feel guilty.

When she had finished her story, Alice stared at her with hopeful eyes that gave her yet another stab of guilt. “You mean you can do it? You can change your shape like before?”

“I haven’t experimented too much, but…” Fiona stretched her arm above her and her sisters gasped as it continued to stretch much further than it should. She plucked a leaf high above their heads, then retracted her arm until it returned to its normal size.

“That’s amazing,” said Abigail. “I can’t believe you got your shapeshifting back.”

Fiona felt her chest tighten. “But you know what that means, right? I messed up your lives just so I could be a girl.”

Abigail stuck out her tongue and blew a raspberry. “You protected yourself. And so did we. Obviously none of us wanted to lose our powers, but it’s not going to do you any good to blame yourself when you only did it to keep Dad from forcing you to be someone you don’t want to be.”

There was something about Abigail’s cheerful, matter-of-fact personality that comforted those around her. She was like Andra, in a way. Always direct, straightforward and confident. When she said that Fiona had done nothing wrong, Fiona was actually inclined to believe her. Perhaps this was the same charisma that had made it easy for Abigail to convince her classmates that a boy turning into a girl was a perfectly ordinary thing that nobody would ever consider bullying someone over.

For her part, Alice responded by quietly hugging Fiona, burying her face in the larger woman’s chest. “Maybe we can shapeshift again, too, if we try hard enough,” she said, her voice muffled.

“Maybe,” said Abigail. “Assuming it wasn’t the slimes that brought it back.”

“Either way, I’m happy for you,” Alice continued. “We need to tell Melanie, too, and our newest sibling when they’re old enough.”

“And Lilian, if she ever comes back,” Fiona added.

“Knowing her, she already figured it out,” Abigail said. “But we keep it hidden from Dad. Nothing good can come from him knowing.”

The others nodded their agreement.

With that concluded, Fiona felt herself begin to relax. Tension she hadn’t been aware of seemed to leave her and she found herself finally enjoying seeing one of her favorite childhood places again.

When they finished their walk, the three returned home and Alice made dinner while Fiona and Abigail relaxed on the couch and chatted. There was little room for anything more than the couch and coffee table, but the sisters had somehow found a way to cram in a bookshelf full of knick-knacks. Fiona wondered how the three of them had all managed to live together in such a small space.

However, sitting here with the sounds of Alice putting together what would doubtless be a wonderful meal and the sight of Abigail’s ears twitching as she excitedly talked about the war’s progress, Fiona felt a comfort that she realized she hadn’t felt in a long time. She belonged with her sisters and they belonged with her. There was no question hanging in the air of when she would leave. There was no fear that she would accidentally offend them because she hadn’t picked up on some unspoken rule. Daisy and Thistle were kind people, but there would always be a tension around them that was absent when Fiona was with Alice and Abigail.

“Anyway, as good as all that news is, I don’t really see why it matters,” Abigail said. “If the only fight that matters is the one between the heroes and the Demon King, I don’t really see what the point of all these other battles is.”

“They’re part of the prophecy, too,” Alice explained from the kitchen. “They need to happen, it’s just that the fight with the Demon King is the deciding factor.”

“But why?” Abigail asked. “If that’s what’s going to decide the fate of the world, why don’t we skip everything else?”

Alice sighed. “You just don’t understand how prophecies work. We have this conversation practically every week.”

“Anyway, I’m kind of surprised you aren’t one of the four heroes, Fiona,” Abigail continued. “After all, you’re a homunculus, you have an enchanted weapon…”

“They actually looked into that,” Fiona interrupted hastily. “And they determined that I’m not.”

She hoped Abigail wouldn’t follow up with any questions about who “they” were or how they had determined that she wasn’t one of the heroes.

“It doesn’t really matter, now,” said Alice. “If the heroes don’t end the war, the fairies will.”

Fiona felt her ears twitch. “The fairies?”

“You don’t actually believe that rumor, do you?” Abigail called back.

“Everyone says it’s happening,” Alice insisted.

“What rumor?” Fiona asked.

Abigail waved a hand dismissively. “A friend of ours claims that a friend of his overheard Lady von Ekko talking with one of her advisors about a diplomat she sent to the Fae Realms.”

Alice appeared in the doorway, apparently forgetting about whatever she was cooking. “It’s not just that. He said that she was confident that the fairies would soon be joining the war.”

Abigail leaned back over the couch’s arm to look at Alice upside-down. “You can’t just send someone to the Fae Realms. It’s a place people end up by accident.”

Alice shrugged. “She must have a way to get there consistently.”

Andra had a way to consistently reach the Fae Realms.

Andra had a way to save Riven.