An anxious hand gripped tightly the pommel of the sword, even now more comfortable in strife than at peace. How many generations would one have to look back in order to find someone who called Loclain home but did not know war throughout one’s life? Stelmaria was touched by it from birth, her father buried in a mass grave at a hallow’s field, to safeguard the eternal rest of those who died feltouched, playthings of diabolists. Some pox took her mother, or so she was told. There was no way to know. This blade I must take to Loclain, she thought with urgency, wishing to rush towards her homeland just as she had wished after her Efflorescence.

She restrained her impatience once again, knowing that alone she would not suffice even to replenish the losses the Rose suffered there. If she could, she would have petitioned every single Blossom with a modicum of authority to back her intentions for Loclain, but Stelmaria Cleirn was hardly the only girl afeared and thinking about home. They all had something - someone - they wished to protect. Why else would they have come this far?

Eagerly waiting, Stelmaria found herself by Cecilia’s side again, on the far side of the armory and closer to the ritual chambers. With so many initiates gathered here, it almost made her forget the earlier sight of the Tower deserted, a place of empty spaces and haunted by the traces of all the life that was suddenly snuffed-out. There ought to be thousands of Blossoms here, coordinating the complex operations and affairs of the Red Rose, as it had always been. Though every Blossom was a soldier in her own way, it was not only in the field of battle that they waged war, nor only against abyssal incursions and forces of darkness. All these armaments made available to them did not emerge from nothing, but were the work of the Rose’s own artificers. When she grasped her sword, Stelmaria thought she could feel the weight of centuries upon it. How much effort had been put in its make, how much mastery? Ordinary steel did not properly imbibe the complex enchantments woven by the rune-rister’s craft, so even the metal was the product of an elaborate, toilsome process. It was an odd sensation, that of bearing an item of such power.

Even if, in the end, it is a sword, and all swords serve the same singular purpose.

Soon enough, they were summoned to one of the Tower’s many chambers of runic resonance, where more complex spells were woven, an intricate ritual formed by the arrangement of lines aglow all along the pure white floor. Stelmaria made certain that she’d be one of the first to arrive, while many of her peers lingered in the armory, still undecided over their arms and armor, their reborn, blossomed selves. But Stelmaria was already a soldier, a warrior long before starlight made its way into her soul, binding her to ancestral magics both above and below, star-patterns and leylines united in their sacred covenant that birthed a magical girl. Most Blossoms had seen their fair share of danger, for darkness lurked everywhere in the world, but Loclain was direr still, assailed by cultists seeking to purchase in blood the favor of demons. Though all the heresies were condemned by the Red Rose, demon worship was an ancestral scourge deserving only of death.

She tightened her grip on the sword, just once, before letting go.

“Come in, come in,” urged Margalit Zariesh, on her knees reinforcing the runes inscribed on the floor, deft fingers filling all the frayed spots with the drops of a golden, luminous substance and mending the glyphs back to perfection. Vita Lucis, perhaps? These magical essences usually were studied only during the last year of a Blossom’s instruction, so Stelmaria couldn’t recognize these glyphics, or tell them apart. “I shall be finished with the preparations in a moment, so please wait.”

“I’ll show you to your positions,” a dainty girl extended her hand, her voice bereft of warmth and eyes that avoided the Blossoms before her. When questioned by Triella of her identity, she responded in a voice that was little more than a whisper, “I’m Professor Almicar. Your Ruby Blossom requested I lend my assistance in preparing your rites of pallium. Each of you, stand on a spot like this, if you please.”

She guided them to a set of a dozen identical glyphs, and Stelmaria stood upon the center of the circle. The inscriptions were far too small for Stelmaria to make sense of the runic incantations, and the sigils seemed infinitely elaborate, splitting, spiraling and growing in complexity the smaller they became, coiling around themselves in golden lines glowing softly, so softly.

“The spells will require only a minute,” she explained. “While Margalit channels the energies through the runic circuit, please keep your movement to a minimum to ensure stability. Do not leave your circle until instructed.”

“What happens if we leave the circle?” Erika Chantesse asked. Stelmaria almost didn’t recognize her in this armor. “I ask purely out of curiosity.”

“Your pallium may become malformed,” Professor Almicar said calmly. “When you transform, your armor might lack some pieces, or its steel might be unusually brittle. Your chosen pallium might meld with your clothing underneath. If luck disfavors you, the fabric or metal could fuse with your flesh. Separation would be quite painful.”

“How does the process work?” Cecilia asked. “We have not finished our magical studies at the Academy, so these advanced sorceries are beyond our grasp,” though she said this, Stelmaria had a suspicion that Cecilia might have tried to study glyphics on her own, as the girl always studied all topics in advance, as if insisting on, every time, being able to show others how much she already knew.

“I am aware of your circumstances. It is not possible to reduce a complex topic to simple terms, so I cannot give you a perfect explanation, but these complex runic patterns are fashioned so as to emulate the language of creation and the hidden forces beneath our perception, allowing us to rewrite some such laws. Reality settles into defined, stable forms, and through magic we attempt to revert it to a more malleable state. Think of writing on a page, its ink dry. To a limited degree, magic reshapes the laws writ in that ink. Glyphics simply allow us a greater level of complexity in such rites.”

“They seem exceedingly complex indeed,” Stelmaria remarked. It hurt her head to try and follow the lines and their patterns.

“By that principle, you can recognize the mundane as a realm of thresholds and of dualities. Is, is-not. As Blossoms, that is pertinent to you. A seed can sprout into a flower, but the flower shan’t return to that seed. Yet you cross the boundary between the human and the magical, able to shift between them as needed. Transformation. Pallium is an extension of those notions. The armor you have clad yourselves in is you. In transforming, a magical girl does not do something as crude as conjuring her armaments from a hidden dimension, but she reveals and manifests the unseen, the is-not, not “pulling” it from elsewhere but converting it into is.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“So it is always with us?” Triella asked, right as Margalit finished her work and rose to her feet.

“A flawed, improper description. It is not with you because it is not. But it can be, and thus it becomes in contradiction of reality’s antipodal decrees. The runes rewrite this law, that a thing inhabits either the category of extant or nihil. When dealing with such abstractions of reality, we rely upon the abstraction of language to interact with such forces. But as you can surely discern, such rites impose their own limitations. Your Tower was constructed upon ground which is favorable for weaving of deep magics, but even so these complex glyphics lack the ease of less restrained spells.”

“I understand,” said Erika, who did not seem to understand it at all. “How very… Strange, and most curious.”

“Such is magic,” said Margalit, standing before the new Blossoms. “Heh, most of the others who went through the rites of pallium weren’t half as curious as you girls. I don’t know what to expect from the near future, but should any of you wish to further your magical studies, please reach out to me. Your remaining education will have to be more practical than expected, but we’ll need new talent to continue our proper operations. I’d rather not imagine what could happen if all the myriad spells within the Tower were left unmaintained for long.”

“That will not come to pass,” Cecilia said with such certainty that Stelmaria almost believed she had reason to be so confident. “Our foresisters mended the world long ago in lesser numbers and without our Tower and assets. Let their example inspire us and drive us ever forward.”

“Well said, well said,” Margalit covered her smile with a hand. “All is ready, so we may begin. Has Professor Almicar explained to you that you are to stand as still as possible, taking soft, slow breaths?” The Blossoms nodded, to Margalit’s satisfaction. Stelmaria took one last lengthy breath as the woman stood before them, and Almicar turned her back to look elsewhere, uninterested in the girls before her.

Margalit’s staff touched the floor, a deep red light blooming from the blood diamond and making its way down the twisted white wood of the staff, painting it with its colors before the line reached the runes at Margalit’s feet and illuminated them, rendering the chamber aglow in pale scarlets. Quickly, far too suddenly, the runic circles were all alight, afire, alive, and kept on burning brighter, revealing glyphics along the walls, lines that reached the ceilings and coiled down the pillars of white now suddenly reddened. Stelmaria did not move, nor did she breathe, nor did she blink or look away. She could not tell how much time had passed, nor how much time it would take, and Margalit before her remained so perfectly still, the blue and white fabrics of her dress frozen in the midst of their sway, those colors unblemished by the reds shining everywhere, made all the more vivid by contrast.

The lights died down all at once, no trace left behind of their gleam, the red seeping back into that great diamond, the whole chamber made a perfect white again. Stelmaria felt nothing, no magic, no warmth or touch within. And yet she was changed, she could tell that much, the same as she could tell after her Efflorescence. With a thought, her blade concealed itself, then the silk-made-steel of her rosen regalia. When they faded, she could not see a hint of magic, of light or mist, but when the other Blossoms with her recalled their trappings then transformed them again, they were, for a brief moment, cocooned in lights so bright they were the purest colors imaginable, yet they did no harm upon her eyes. She opened and closed her fist, and though the pommel of her blade was no longer there, she felt the same comfort she did whenever she held it.

Born in armor, blade in hands, beneath bleeding star and the sign of the Sword. The lullabies of Loclain were thought grim in other lands, but they’d always been a comfort to Stelmaria. Far gone were the years when the glint of starsigns would decree one’s fate, but for a warrior the Sword was an auspicious sign nonetheless. She wanted it to be, at least.

“How much time has passed?” Asked Triella. Each of the girls nearby had a different answer. A second, a minute, a single lingering breath. Margalit consulted her pocket watch, giving the glass a gentle tap with a manicured fingernail.

“Some ten minutes, it would appear,” she said, with little certainty. It could not be true, as certainly Stelmaria could not hold her breath for so long. Her peers expressed doubts among themselves, too. “Discrepancies in one’s perception of time are inevitable when meddling with fundamentals of reality. Rest assured that it is only perception which has been altered. This chamber is perfectly isolated from any leylines or starpaths, so time has not been affected at all.”

“Has this been a problem in the past?” Cecilia questioned. Margalit awkwardly looked away to avoid answering.

“Let us not dally here,” Erika called on her fellow Blossoms to leave, just as soon as Margalit turned to inspect the tears upon the runes, preparing for necessary repairs. “We should not keep our sisters waiting needlessly.”

That was true enough. Their curiosity could scarcely be sated, and any explanation was sure to be beyond their understanding. Understanding, too, was a generous word, as the truth was that while it was possible to discern cause and consequence and learn how to produce specific results, explaining precisely how magic operated was regarded as a fool’s errand, as though trying to describe each note of a symphony in words. They were different languages entirely.

Stelmaria noticed then that her fist was clenched again. I understand the blade’s language well enough, she thought. This was no different from metal being put to the test by fire and hammer, molded and beaten into shape. She thought of her earliest days, before even the most distant memories she still held on to; a child given to the Rose after the passing of her parents, relinquished to an orphanage helmed by Blossoms of Loclain. It mattered not to her what the truth might be. She might as well have been born there, on a bed of flowers, amidst petals scattered everywhere. The governess she knew as a child was a Blossom, she recalled, and almost certainly dead now. Miss Ardialle, always generous with treats but rarely with time and affection. The other ladies at the orphanage would surely suffice in keeping its doors open and the children fed, but Stelmaria recalled only a few of them, and even those memories now seemed to belong to another girl she scarcely recognized, bright-eyed chanteuse that she had been, before she learned her true calling was the blade.

A past to feed the worms, she thought. Dead with her parents, with her governess, her lost prince, her demon-haunted home. Briefly she unsheathed her sword, fed it drops of her own blood, her index finger ascertaining its sharpness, promising it more exquisite blood in the future. A weapon forged by the Rose, wielded by a weapon forged by the Rose.

Her homeland beckoned, and there she would find rivers of red to spill.