A crash, the tearing of sheet metal and smashing of glass. An explosion of magic invaded her nostrils and peeled her eyes open. She knew the feeling; she knew the feeling all too well. Wesper's onslaught stopped, and Iris’s puppet unravelled itself as she got to her knees.

She couldn’t help but smile as an aureate figure stood before her, lending her its back. She was safe now.

“For fuck’s sake Wishbearer! You show up when you aren’t needed anymore!”

“And when have you deserved my courtesy?” Evalyn said, her voice soft. “All you deserve is a death sentence.”

Wesper raised his hands in the air, smirking. “You’d need more than the executioner for that.”

“Luckily, the judge and jury already gave me their permission,” Evalyn seethed, her aura growing in magnitudes.

“Evalyn,” Iris managed to say, her voice croaking out. Evalyn’s helmet turned to look back at her.

“I’ll deal with you later.”

Evalyn raised a hand forward as the deafening cry of a train horn pierced Iris’s ears. Headlight beams raced up Evalyn's body for a time-freezing split-second as Iris barely registered what was coming. A discordant crash forced Iris's body to flinch as Evalyn's armour shrugged off the full brunt of a subway train. The jagged edges of her figure tore each carriage apart down their centrelines, each half flying past Iris.

The grating ended, and Evalyn lowered her stance, unfazed. By barely moving a muscle, she had given Wesper a glimpse of her superiority. Unbreakable defence followed by a single, fatal blow. Iris only then remembered the logic her guardian fought by.

“Don’t kill him!” Iris cried. “Please, try!”

The adults ignored her cry as Wesper’s domain began to spin like a roulette wheel, each number a different reality. The ever-changing lighting was nauseating while the floor beneath her feet threatened to swallow her whole with each new iteration: a hospital, a subway station, a high school. Her head began to spin with the roulette wheel, and her vision meshed together into a soup of sensory overload.

Then it stopped, sending her senses into whiplash.

Evalyn had raised her right hand and caught the porcelain wall of an indoor swimming pool, single-handedly stopping the motion. Poorly lit, as though it were closed for the day, the gentle waves cast dancing reflections across their faces. They stood at the water's edge while Wesper floated above it. With the wave of a hand, the water began to boil and steam before surging from its container and into the cold air.

“Act IV: Climax.”

A translucent golden barrier—its opacity a trait she had never seen from Evalyn's magic—sprung from the floor, stopping the tidal wave dead in its tracks. Tree roots sprung from Evalyn’s outstretched hand, winding themselves across the walls and down to the tiled floors below. They gained ground rapidly, invading Wesper's landscape at a disturbing pace. Wesper was spooked judging by the contorted look on his face, and so he changed the setting once more.

Yet the roots kept on coming. Clinging to any and every surface, each root sprouted golden leaves from off-shooting branches. A forest was growing before Iris's eyes like a divine infection, a welcome plight.

Wesper began another barrage of weaponry. Fire from unseen gun emplacements, mortar rounds, and artillery shells rained down on Evalyn's unyielding defence. Each setting change Wesper tried failed at ridding him of the roots as they invaded every one of his realities.

The roots wrapped around parking lot pillars, train cars, farmhouses, ancient temples and pitch-black catacombs. Evalyn’s feet did not shift, and not once did her body yield ground. She did not lash out at Wesper once, knowing that doing so was futile. Wesper's desperate attempts at even scratching her armour failed over and over as the roots kept spreading.

The thunderous cacophany grew, forcing Iris to plug Alis's ears with makeshift earplugs. She watched as Evalyn instinctively parried every assault with an individual barrier, providing a golden answer to every challenge as easily as shrugging a shoulder.

Evalyn’s palm slowly turned into a fist, each finger curling as if crushing something between them. In tandem came the sound of metal bending, snapping and crunching as the artillery, mortars, and gunfire deadened. Even if Wesper had a bottomless supply of weaponry, one clench of her fist showed him it was futile.

Evalyn’s hand dropped, and the ceaseless march of the roots stopped with it. They were in a temple now, the one Iris had found herself in when she first entered the warehouse. The walls still shifted, and the figures on the stained glass seemed to be eyeing Evalyn from every angle Wesper couldn’t. Evalyn took the silence as an opportunity to raise her voice.

“I’ve reached it all, Wesper. I’ve found your true Mind Palace.”

Wesper stayed behind the lectern, cowering. His black gown had turned white once more, perhaps a sign his faith in something greater had been restored.

“All I need to do is destroy the warehouse from the inside. We both know that without a tether, your Mind Palace won’t hold up against mine.”

Wesper stepped forward, slowly raising a bony finger at Iris. The sunglasses were gone, and Iris was left to stare at the fleshy organ-like substitutes for eyes.

“You...you don’t know what you’re dealing with. Wishbearer.”

Evalyn stayed silent, listening as if obligated to hear his last words rather than out of interest or respect. Yet, even as he addressed Evalyn, his finger pointed at Iris. The lone, bony finger accused her of something she could not know, nor could he fully explain.

“They’ve been waiting for someone like her. They’ve been waiting for centuries, and they’ll tear down the world to get her.”

“Who is 'they'?” Evalyn asked.

“You’re going to relegate her to another servant of some temporary regime, huh? Some set of lines in the sand?”

Wesper rounded the lectern and drew nearer, prompting Evlayn to keep on guard. He trodded forward, each step resoundingly painful to his psyche rather than his body.

“You are more significant than anything of man’s creation, child. You do not belong to any society, people or even species.”

“Don’t get closer,” Evalyn shouted.

“And yet you’re going to let yourself be controlled again? Didn’t the first time tell you that no one is worthy of your help? Nothing has changed since then! Nothing!”

Crazed mutterings turned into maniacal shouting, and Evalyn decided that enough was enough. She raised a hand to the sky and kept the other to her side as a torrent of Aether rushed towards her body. Magic erupted from her armour in an intensity Iris had never fathomed, let alone experienced.

“For the desires you could not fulfil or the wishes no one could grant you, I am sorry,” Evalyn began as the magic pulled her off the ground. Her armour glowed like a lighthouse, its luminosity rivalling the sun as it bathed every possible surface with its divine, golden light.

Wesper ignored Evalyn’s incanting as his breakdown continued. “They will eat you alive, Iris! For all the good you do for them, they will scramble to eat you alive!”

“For the desires your destruction will fulfil and the wishes your demise will grant, I am sorry,” Evalyn continued as sparks flew like meteors and the release of magic boomed like the shockwaves of megaton blasts.

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“You’re going to let them feed you into the infinite cycle of meaningless nothing while you squander your last chance at changing it!”

“In this world without gods or divinity, the one closest to such titles has taken your opposite side. That is all there is, and that is all there ever will be,” Evalyn concluded as the golden aura shrank into her body like the implosion of a star.

“I can see the puppet strings on you already!”

“Act VI: Epilogue.”

Silence seemed to follow Evalyn’s final sentence, yet it was the exact opposite. An overstimulation of sound, the antithesis of silence screamed through Iris’s ears as the blinding light returned. Yet this time, it had a shape.

A whale.

Iris had never seen one before besides the occasional illustration. Its smooth contours, outlined with billions of golden maple leaves stood hundreds of metres high as it entered the pinnacle of its dive. Six fins, three on each side, and a tail with three thin flukes instead of two. Darminjun’s visage glittered like a constellation against the black void around it, eating away at it with its golden aura how only a god could.

A single whale song rode atop the wall of noise. A single, delicate melody that reverberated itself into Iris’s core memories. She would never forget that sound, and it would always haunt her.

How many people did the image before her haunt? How many had found themselves under the body of the god, the song lulling them to their death?

It was awesome and sublime, terrible yet terrific. Beautiful, in the same sense death might be. Beautiful in the sense that one’s ideals were beautiful simply because they were ideals. Beautiful, yet wrong to think it so. Sublime desire; a simple urge that both blessed and cursed every being to ever live to reach the greatest of highs and darkest of lows. A magnet to skew any moral compass. A beautiful, terrifying thing that Iris did not want to contemplate, even consider

Before this god, all ideals were equal. From saving millions to killing millions, all were a fact of nature; a terrible, cruel, gutwrenching, wrong fact of nature that reminded her of just how base, insignificant and truly immoral creatures were.

It was the symbol of someone who knew how cruel the world could be and had accepted every bit of it to stay afloat. Wesper was right: there was no meaning, order or fairness, and Evalyn’s shimmering whale was the ultimate testament to that. Her ideal had won over his, in both beauty and power.

The whale began to fall back-first into Wesper, yet his wide eyes were forever glued to Iris. Utterly fixated as though he had witnessed both a miracle and a curse all at once. The light overpowered her, and she closed her eyes.

Iris’s vision was hazy when she came to. Her pupils were still too constricted to grasp anything, yet her sense of touch remained intact. Amidst the chaos, her armour had dissipated, and her bare skin now felt a warming breeze caressing her. She still felt the boy she clung to for dear life, warm and breathing regularly. The steady rhythm eased her heart, and her whole body slumped. The exhaustion that had until then been kept back by adrenaline flooded her body like a broken dam.

Her vision slowly adjusted, and the ringing in her ears lessened. She looked around her and recognised the setting almost instantly. A single dirt path ran through a forest of maple trees amidst an Elysian autumn. An elderly man sat on a bench beside her, softly smiling without a crinkle on his pristine suit.

“Hullo, Iris. It has been too long.”

“H-hello,” Iris mustered, staring at Darminjun. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “These people began to appear in the branches of my trees. Then, Evalyn, yourself, and two others I don’t recognise came after.”

Iris looked around at the mention of anyone else. She looked at the trees first and finally noticed the anomaly. The more she looked, the more apparent it was and the more there were. The same dull uniforms, the same patches, the same thousand-yard stares now unconscious. The roots had found Wesper’s true Mind Palace and had rescued the people from it.

“And then Evalyn destroyed the warehouse from the inside.” Just like she had said. The moment there was no longer a real-world tether, Evalyn, at that moment, had overpowered him.

Evalyn.

Iris turned her head dead centre, straight down the dirt road and found the back of her mother turned at her. Someone was on the ground before her, yet she did not need to see a face to know who it was.

The rifle was not slung across her back, but her pistol was holstered in the same position as always, on her left shoulder. Iris watched Evalyn draw the gun as the limping man used a last spur of energy to crawl away.

Iris heard the gun cock, then the unmistakable sound of a gunshot. She could see Darminjun flinch out of the corner of her eye as Evalyn remained motionless. The body, now a corpse, collapsed lifeless to the dirt. Yet Evalyn did not stop firing.

Two, three, four, five, six, seven times the trigger was pulled. Each time, the pool of blood around the body grew larger and larger. Iris only then noticed the absence of an arm as the final remnants of that war-torn soldier she had sat beside faded away.

Iris did not flinch once while she watched the execution. Neither hatred nor happiness seemed to fill her as the former likely filled Evalyn. She simply watched as though it was normal, and that worried her ever so slightly.

Then Evalyn’s face turned to her; the demeanour that could make a boulder cry was unshakable.

“You have done it this time, Miss,” Darminjun whispered to Iris.

Evalyn’s lips tremored as though every insult she had ever learnt in her life was fighting to get out. In the end, a hissing ‘you…’ was all that managed to escape.

“Evalyn—”

“Are you serious?! I mean genuinely, what the absolute f—…argh!”

She stormed over.

“Just have a rebellious phase! Just wait three more years and smoke cigarettes in secret until I catch you and chew you out for it! But this?! You went out of your way to run after a goddamn Wizard and fight on his terms?! You are a child! Did you forget that!”

“I’m sorry—”

“I don’t care! If I hadn’t paid our Aetherologist to make a copy of the ring, I would be waking up to your dead body right now!”

“I needed to—”

“You didn’t need to do anything! You should’ve kept yourself planted at home while we took care of things! You’re a child, Iris! Before anything, you’re a child.”

“I can’t be a child.”

Evalyn’s expression faltered, and the accusatory finger began to waver. The sentence had even caught Iris off-guard, but she could not stop it now.

“I can’t be a child, mum. You know that.”

Iris’s tears began to spill over as no matter how hard she tried, her eyes could not look at Evalyn.

“I didn’t like the way you were going to do things. I thought you were going to kill Wesper and all the people in his head,” she said through choking breath. “I thought…if things didn’t work out…you’d kill Alis.”

Evalyn’s fountain of scoldings ceased, insecurity quickly replacing her anger.

“No…Iris. I wouldn’t kill Alis.”

“You would! And all the people in Wesper’s head…”

“But I saved them, didn’t I? They’re all here, I made sure.”

“How was I supposed to know that?!” Iris shouted, finally finding the courage to look at Evalyn directly, yet she immediately regretted it. Her idol looked heartbroken, eyes searching for an answer in Iris’s and unable to find one. She gripped Alis tighter, holding him closer as she averted her eyes again.

“Iris—”

“I asked her to help me, Mrs Hardridge,” said a croaking voice. Iris looked down at Alis, yet his eyes remained shut. His mouth moved with the little strength he had left, determined to set the story straight.

“Before I knew who he was, I thought Wesper could get me into the resistance. I’d leave...the ships would leave, and things would go back to normal.”

His eyes slowly peeled open, still bloodshot. He turned towards Evalyn, his manners still dictating that he look directly in the eye of whoever he was speaking to.

“When I found out, I panicked. I didn’t want to do that to Iris. Nothing was worth it.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me?” Iris whispered.

“He could see me…I could tell. If he saw me tell you, he’d destroy the resistance, make ships...fire on the city. I didn’t want to take a chance. I thought I could take him while he was outside his building, Mrs Hardridge…but. I’m sorry.”

“Hey,” Evalyn cooed. “We’ll figure this out later. Rest.”

Alis took the invitation gratefully as though it were an order and closed his eyes.

Iris slowly looked up at Evalyn, whose composure was barely holding together. She smiled, although it trembled immensely.

“Your armour looks pretty cool,” she said as tears welled up in the corner of her eyes. Iris nodded, unsure of what to say.

“And the puppet-looking thing. Did you make that too?” Iris shook her head meekly. A long pause followed as neither knew which step to take first.

“I’m sorry,” Evalyn started. “I didn’t realise that’s how you saw me. It’s…it’s true. A lot of it. I can’t help it. I didn’t have a mum like you, and my dad wasn’t as good as Elly was. You two and Marie mean everything to me.”

Iris hung her head, knowing it was futile to try to reason with someone so set in their ways. Then she felt a kiss on her forehead as Evalyn brushed aside her fringe.

“But you mean everything to me. If you don’t want me to do something, I won’t do it.”

Iris looked up to her, their faces only a few centimetres apart. Her mother’s face was pulled into a desperate, apologetic smile that did everything it could to illicit something similar out of Iris. But Iris had to be honest with herself, she could not show the same gesture. But she was happy.

“I’ll tell you what I want to do then,” Iris said. “Promise you’ll listen.”

Evalyn bit her lips and wiped another tear from her face. “God kids grow up so fast. I promise.”

Iris held out for one more second, the scenery of her last formative moment flashing back before her. She had cried then too, wept into the early hours of the morning over things she had done, things she could no longer change.

She wept this time too, just as hard and for what felt like just as long. In the same warm embrace, watched over by the same woman with the strange marking on her cheek.

But it was different the second time around. She may have done irreparable damage to countless people, and the future may look back on her actions deplorably.

But she was alive, and at that moment, the embrace of her mother and the warmth of her friend felt better than anything else.