“Not this time!”

Raeca darted forward past Haroun and Brendis, magic already glowing around her hands as she called to the true nature that made her what she was.

In short, a healer. More importantly, a healer trained by the Dark Sorcerer, who spent a frankly absurd amount of time healing the Hero from things that really ought to kill him.

“No!” Calliope screamed when she realized what Raeca was doing, and tried to scramble away, determined to end her life and escape to the next before anyone could stop her.

“Brendis, hold her,” Raeca snapped without taking her eyes off the blade, where it sat buried in Calliope’s heart. “Haroun, I need power.”

By herself, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t save someone who had a split heart, and who was already bleeding out across the floor.

But she wasn’t alone.

“Of course,” Haroun said, although his voice was confused as well, as he tried to figure out what she was doing. “Raeca, what—”

“I can save her,” Raeca snapped, with little precious time to explain, and no focus to spare. “Throw me a line of power.”

“Right.”

Calliope tried to shove her away, but Brendis captured her hands, gentle, but much, much stronger than she was, and perfectly capable of holding her down. Blood stained the queen’s white gown crimson and spread to the white marble below her, and to Raeca’s hands.

“This is all your fault,” Calliope hissed as Raeca linked with Haroun, practiced after nearly a year as his sometimes-student. “You just had to intervene in our destiny! I set it in motion! I knew Brendis would never turn on me, the simple fool, but it was so easy to convince you to kill each other for me!”

“Love makes a man do crazy things,” Haroun said darkly, one hand on Raeca’s shoulder as she went to work. “Three thousand years and we never stood against you. No more.”

“This prophesy is more a curse than a promise,” Raeca told Calliope gently, although her hands didn’t shake as she drew the crystal-hilted blade from Calliope’s heart bit by bit, healing the terrible damage as she went. When she ran out of power, easy to do with such detailed, difficult work, she reached for Haroun, who stood by, a pillar of power, even after a major magical battle. “And it’s hurt you so much, my dear friend. It is time for it to end.”

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“You cannot end it!” Calliope went from fighting to sobbing as Raeca’s magic worked on her. A powerful healing, especially of a lethal wound, was a painful thing, and Raeca didn’t dare spend the power to make it painless. As it was, it would take every scrap of power she could muster just to save the queen. “It is Prophesy, written in the Book of Fate!”

The dagger clattered brightly against the marble when Raeca dropped it to the side, and finished her work, sweaty and shaking, but triumphant.

“Now,” she said, and turned her defiant gaze on Calliope, who was ghost-pale, covered in her own blood, and captured. “For your prophesy.”

It was a trick the common folk kept to themselves. Something that no one ever seemed to remember, and never used, even when they knew it existed. The true, full circle of magic.

The highest magics were powerful. They were flashy, and brilliant. They could change the world on a whim and a handwave from a single mage.

The middle magics, like Raeca’s healing, were simple. To close a wound, or summon fire, they were the magics most often used by mages everywhere. Neither vulnerable, nor invulnerable, they stood without shame, but also without notoriety.

But it was the low magics that everyone forgot. The spells and tricks so minor that anyone could learn them with a little patience. How to make a potion of healing, or of sleep. How to find water or know the weather with nothing but the scent of the wind.

Low magic would never call fire. It would never change the weather or save a life.

But the high magics were vulnerable to it. She and Haroun spent hours talking about magic and how to undo the highest powers with the lowest. Today, that would change everything.

No country girl was ever without a bit of wool and a tiny spindle. Raeca used hers to spin the fine thread she used to stich wounds, but most maidens had one, tucked in their pockets, if only for something to do with their hands.

Raeca’s was in her pocket, intact against all odds, and with a shred of undyed, half-spun wool already wound onto it. The same spindle she taught Calliope to spin thread. The one that occupied her hands as Haroun taught her magic. The one that whirled as Brendis slept off his injuries, peaceful under her watchful gaze.

With the blood of a queen on her hands, Raeca got her little spindle going, for once, in the wrong direction.

“The Three always stand as Three,” she spoke the words of their prophesy as the thread on her spindle began to come apart under the force of a bobbin-light spindle. “One shall turn, and Two will Stand Together to face the One.”

They had done that, when Calliope turned on them back in the beginning. When she convinced Brendis to murder his closest friend to protect her from a betrayal that had not come. Now, many years later, they finally stood together to face the queen who cost them so dearly.

“Darkness will break against their Will,” she continued, practiced fingers on her little spindle as it whirled around, unwinding the threads of Fate as the spinning began to fray apart. The snow-white wool glowed with golden threads as the prophesy, spoken by a long-dead prophet within the walls of the very hall they now stood in, gathered to the call of magic that was even older yet. “and the Circle will finally be Broken.”

It should have been loud, the breaking of a prophesy. It should have been thunder, and fire, and the scream of steel through the air.

Instead it was the clatter of a small wooden spindle on a polished marble floor, impossibly loud in a silent, battle-scarred hall.