Re-entering the modern era and my waiting body was easy. Vier acknowledged my presence and blipped my Astral Ward enough to re-enter myself with ease. I blinked my eyes, and sat up slowly.

The thrumming internal power of le Fey’s sorcery was spinning inside me, anchored and integrated unwittingly into my Pact via my bioelectrical power, making it truly my own.

It was a lot of power. Given this universe was much friendlier to magic than Aelryinth’s, my pure magical power likely surpassed his... especially since I had Underweb Valence Casting to use with it, and on top of it.

Spells that I was simply unable to use before were now glowing and ready for usage, eager to be put to the test. I was half-tempted to start calling on some of the entities and beings that the Vishanti sorcerers used, just to see if they would answer and I could wield their power.

But, no.

First, it was off to Stonehenge to receive my inheritance, where nobody should be at this time of the morning on a moonless night. It should be rejoining the mortal world in about ten minutes.

I walked back over to the mirror, looked at myself. There was a slight something that was different, a touch of fey to my features that wasn’t there before, even if nothing had really changed.

I turned around and hitched up my blouse.

The Preincarnation Fixture Array I’d Tatted onto my lower back, beneath and connected to the lower legs of my Totem Tat, was fading away, as it had done its job and sent Morgan le Fey into my pre-life. I couldn’t see the head of the spider, but I imagined it was looking a little smug right now.

After all, it had just turned its Totemist into an archsorceress. Moar Powah it!

After this, I was going to have to figure out what else I was going to do. Nobody needed to know I was the reborn le Fey, after all...

----------

He was waiting for me at Stonehenge, his ghostly form already starting to fade away as his mission was fulfilled.

“You actually killed her,” he murmured in his sepulchral voice, the relief there, and the longing of a quest long unfulfilled, a burden upon his immortal soul removed.

“Yes, Magnus. Your noble quest is over. Morgan le Fey is dead in the past and in the present, her spirit sent into the hereafter or the cycles of reincarnation, such as is her fate.” I smiled at him, and with only a little bit of magic, clasped his shoulder. “Faithful cleric, it is time for you to go with God.”

He smiled widely, as a gentle light shone down from above, something no mortal eyes could see. “Thank you, Dynamo! The blessing of Heaven be upon you!”

“Alleluia!” I called back, giving him a warrior’s salute as the ghost of the ancient monk finally ascended to his glory and final reward, his duty done.

Fifteen hundred freaking years, condemned to wander the Earth, just so he could thwart Morgan le Fey. Feh. What sort of power did that to a soul? Not the Heavens I was familiar with, but there was no accounting for the grimness of some of Terra’s religions...

He was scarcely gone when the henge of stones about me hummed with chronal magic, and a spell woven a moment fifteen centuries ago arrived in the present day. I promptly slaved it to my Masspack, and prepared to Teleport away, when I found myself turning around.

Ah, right. This is England...

The le Fey power in me was thrumming with both familiarity and a kind of anguish. After all, it had just jumped the intervening centuries without acclimating to the changes in the landscape. Even if le Fey had been jumping forward in time to see what was going to become of the world, that didn’t mean her magic changed with her.

I could see her Lived-Lines...

She had been to Stonehenge multiple times, of course. She was a Gaia worshipper, and this was a holy site for druids and worship of the Earth Mother in her various forms. I could see her appearing here, by magic, by foot, and by horse; see her wandering and swirling around the stones in dance and rituals of worship, sometimes clean, sometimes bloody, and there seemed to have been more stones in different positions back then.

I saw her recede back beyond visible sight in many directions as her life took her away from this location time and again.

The Lived-line was resonating with my own. I quirked an ironic smile at the sensation that it was me walking up there, performing those rituals, and then departing.

The sense of alienation, the way the very ley lines of the island had changed, the flow of power, and the sense that things like those houses there, that parking lot, and those roads, did not belong and should be removed, were all so tangible and real I could literally taste them.

Huh. If le Fey had arrived here, she would have hated this modern world. Having to massively adjust to the civilized world might have actually severely impacted her power. She probably would have much preferred reverting it to an older state where her power could flourish freely.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

That probably would have involved wiping out a lot of people and progress.

Be that as it may, my own powers were very different from hers. That’s not to say there wasn’t overlap, but my magic came straight up out of the Underweb, and was closer to cosmic energy than just magic. So, I was very free with what I could do with it, and not bound by the same limitations and feelings as hers had been.

With a sigh, I Cast a Commune with Nature, and Sudden Widened it for maximum range.

The impact on my inherited awareness and powers was immediate and harsh, blood spurting out my nose as the changes hammered into my head, feeling like rending rips and axes hacking at my magic and power. The reins of power le Fey had once held in her hand and attuned herself to here were all chopped up, rerouted, or even gone, messed up and submerged beneath the wall of science and civilization that had slowly built up over decades, centuries, and millennia, driving the ancient power down beneath the dominating power of human progress.

London was right over there to the east, and although I couldn’t feel the heart of it, the suburbs splaying about it for miles were like someone had just hammered an iron nail into the side of my head. Just, ugh!

Magic, after all, catered to the powerful individual. Science catered to the plentiful weak, and in the end, it was the many who had won the fight.

I mapped everything into my Visual File, of course. For a good eighty miles around, I tracked all her Lived-Lines, I impressed the current landscape into play and all my magical awareness of it... and the nearly real impressions of how it had once been.

Le Fey’s life wandered along paths that were no more, in and out of buildings and settlements that no longer existed, strode across battlefields now reduced to farms and empty hills.

I could sense the power of the Land, what others termed the Earth-Mother, powerful and vast, and this small section of it was somewhat startled to recognize a somewhat familiar hand and touch.

And yet, even the Spirit of this Land was different than in centuries past, changed by the perception and wills of the humans who lived upon it. Britannia was no longer as le Fey remembered Her, either, and indeed, the Land here was rather concerned about what I might do... and also wondering what service it could get out of me.

Which, since I was here, it immediately elected to test.

The Commune focused on the south, beyond the visual horizon as Britannia hooked into my le Fey power with casual ease and fed me Her perceptions from down that way, out beyond Her shores, diving into the immensity of Father Atlantic.

There was a storm slamming into the south of England, its clouds gusting and blowing above Stonehenge now. It was a literal hurricane of nearly unprecedented proportions for England. The coastal communities were being slammed by waves higher than they’d ever seen, powerful enough to carry ships ashore, flooding coastal communities that thought they’d seen it all over the last thousand years, capsizing ships as hurricane winds tore at the shores.

Oddly enough, it tapered out extremely quickly after it cleared the shores. The rain and winds were stiff but not dangerous at Stonehenge.

It was very late for hurricane season, and I would have been very suspicious of such a storm surviving all the way to hit England and France, especially with this much force, even if I hadn’t also been able to feel an unnatural hand behind it.

Someone was artfully commanding the weather and feeding the storm. It should have died away long before now, and instead it had risen in power as if fresh from the temperature differentials of the Caribbean. It was roaring with nigh-supernatural fury, laying waste to the coast and shipping here.

I sighed, postponed my return home, and flitted south.

Because the Land didn’t want the link broken, the Commune didn’t fade as I Teleported to the edge of the lived-line I could sense with one step, burning remarkably little energy as I shunted along a past life to the shore by Plymouth.

The Commune naturally recentered with me, and I spat blood again as my magic churned at the changes of fifteen centuries about the edges, cracks, and splits on the edge of my awareness.

The English Channel was full of ancient hulks and rotting ships, the junk and detritus of centuries of abuse, wars, and lack of care. The Channels to the north and west weren’t any better, of course, and the landscape was now crisscrossed with the cold and dark trails of science and iron and the trash of humanity’s wake, turning what was wild and vital into something tamed and trapped by the power of progress, save for tiny little echoes here and there that had remained untouched, or somehow survived to the present day.

My awareness also extended across the Channel. My power wasn’t nearly so acclimated to the lands of France, although le Fey had definitely been there in the past, and Europa was also startled to feel me touch Her.

The hurricane was pounding both island and continent, and it was clearly not the work of Nature.

As a matter of fact, I could clearly see the center of what was going on. There was a massive web of power that had been slowly and carefully built up, turning the hurricane into a self-sustaining engine that only required it be maintained, rather than pushed into action. This massive storm could literally last until the person keeping it in force tired out and let the heart of it fade.

I wove a Control Winds around me, nullifying the power of the storm; centered my gaze on the heart of the storm fifty miles that way out over the ocean, and I Rode the Lightning there.

------

The crackling boom and discharge of the lightning announced my arrival. I looked down a mere hundred feet away as the architect of this monstrous storm looked up sharply, clearly able to sense that the lightning that had brought me here wasn’t natural. She gaped in shock as she met my eyes, and stared at the Four Suits reverberating with Elemental Magic in front of me.

A Card formed, a Queen of Clubs, and Silver Magic flared before she could respond to my very sudden and unexpected presence.

It reached out into her control of the storm, and promptly severed all her connections to the Element of Air around us.

She screamed in shock and horror as her perceptions of the world around her went dead silent. From being at the heart of an immense engine of elemental power that bowed to her will, she was now just a normal human sitting here three miles above the ground at the mercy of the winds.

The great engine she had woven together and held steady, probably spending days at the task shepherding this cyclone across the Atlantic, immediately began to break apart.

Tornado-force winds exploded in every direction as warring pressure bands began to equalize harshly, the storm starting to implode on itself as the artificial heart on it went away. Bereft of the impetus of her power keeping it intact, it began to break up with fantastic speed, all the energy sucked out of the environment starting to return to whence it came with breathtaking haste.