Leopold found Willow in the house’s small kitchen the next day with a knife. She wasn’t staring at it, not exactly, but she was running her finger over the blade. He rushed to her before memories of what she was, of what she could do, reasserted themselves.

Willow looked up and gave a little chuckle.

“My mom always told me not to play with this when I was a child,” she said. “I was too weak, it was too sharp. Now look at me, it can’t even cut me anymore.”

“You’re very different than when you left,” Leopold said, and took the knife gently and laid it on the counter. “We both are.”

Willow shook her head. “You’re still…”

“Human,” Leopold asked. “What do you mean by that? You keep saying it, but—”

“How can I explain it? I can’t explain it. Everything that’s happened to me, it’s all tried to pry me away from this,” she said, and patted her chest. “This body, this humanity. It wants to separate me from the physical.”

“You mean Andrew,” Leopold said. “Just because he thought he could make you into some kind of weapon—”

“Not just him,” Willow said. “The Watcher. When I saw it, when I saw eternity, it made everything here feel so small. It made me feel… insignificant.”

“We’re all insignificant to that thing,” Leopold said. “We’re all human. There’s nothing wrong with that. You don’t need to fight giants, Willow. For everything else, you’re just one person. You deserve to be happy too.”

“Do I,” she asked. “After everything I’ve done.”

“Stop,” Leopold said and grabbed her hands. “Just stop. You have to stop blaming yourself. So many things were out of your control. How could you have known… any of it? You couldn’t have, that’s how. You aren’t responsible.”

Willow shook her head. “I can’t help but feel I should pay some penance.”

“You don’t need to pay a gods damned thing,” Leopold said. “Listen to me Willow. Really listen. You don’t need to fight this. The pneumavores, the Watchers, you said you saw the future. Then let it play out. They’re in the mountains; I don’t know what’s going to happen when they break through to the plains and beyond, but that’s not your problem. Let the cities figure it out. They’ve got the cannons, they’ve got the walls. You don’t think they can hold against them?”

“I know they can’t,” Willow said. “They’re going to fall.”

“Why can’t we just be happy,” Leopold whispered, and Willow really looked at him for the first time that morning. His eyes were red-rimmed like he’d been crying. He couldn’t quite help the corners of his mouth crooking down in a suppressed sob.

She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him in close.

“Why can’t I save you,” Leopold asked. “Why are you so far away?”

“You did save me,” Willow whispered.

🜛

They stood in the field just outside town, the two of them. Willow had to talk her father down from coming with them. It was too dangerous, she’d said. He still wanted to go, he still couldn’t believe his sickly daughter could wrest with monsters and worse. What could he do to protect her against this new foe?

Alone in the chill breeze, Willow opened her first portal since returning to Bridgewater. It was a flawless thing, yawning open at the mere suggestion of her will, but even so she saw the thin line of darkness in the ellipsoid border. The in-between space that waited so patiently to twist her portal into a doorway in the night. It was quiet now because the distance wasn’t so vast, but it would strike when it could.

Willow and Leopold stepped through the portal onto Raly’s cobbled streets. The morning was still early and there weren’t that many people out, but a few stopped dead and scurried backward at the sight of the hole in space. Willow canceled the portal as soon as they were through, but that wasn’t enough to keep from sending a few bystanders running.

“It looks different,” Leopold said, and sniffed the air. “It smells different.”

“It’s a different city,” Willow said. “I suppose it would be different.”

“I thought they would mostly be the same,” Leopold said. “Where’s the pinnacle with their Arcanum?”

“Maybe it’s somewhere else in the city,” Willow said and looked around. Unlike Durum, Raly wasn’t built around a large central hill. There wasn’t an Arcanum that shone in the morning light to proclaim its might. There were just houses, shops, and the thin slits of sky visible between rooftops.

“I’m sure we can ask someone,” Willow said, and they began walking down the street. Whether toward the wall or the center, they had no idea. For a few moments it felt good to just walk and pretend that they were back in Durum. Back in the city that now stood as a ruined corpse just a dozen miles to the west.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

They found a market square setting up in the sleepy morning and after a couple of false-starts, they finally found a vendor willing to point them in the general direction of the Arcanum. Willow gave him a smile and they started off on their trek through the city.

It took a good half-hour before they reached the inner-walls which surrounded this Arcanum, so much like their own, and she recognized the same fused stone that made up their own school’s defensive ring. They passed through easily—nobody was on the lookout for them, nobody thought that a pair of warbeasts could just walk through the city unnoticed—which was exactly why they were here.

“Now this is strangely familiar,” Leopold said as they entered the main hall. “Do all of the Arcana use the same blueprints or something?”

“Maybe they do,” Willow said. Students flocked from hall to hall as the first bell of the morning rang overhead. They passed by with not a worry in the world save their homework and essays. If they thought much of the fact that a walled city had been destroyed only a dozen miles away, they didn’t show it. Maybe it was too much to think about for the average person. What could they even do about it?

Willow and Leopold turned left and made their way down the administrative hall. At the end, just as she’d expected, was a door stamped with ‘Dean’s Office’.

“Well, that was easy,” Leopold said as they opened the door to the atrium. A young woman looked up from her desk and barely suppressed a yawn.

“Can I help you,” she asked.

“We’re here to see the dean,” Leopold said as they strode across the room.

“Do you have an appointment,” she called as they passed her desk. “Hey, you can’t just—”

Willow opened the door to the dean’s office and saw… Corinth Weatherby… sitting behind the desk. The sight took her aback for a second, but that was nothing compared to Leopold’s reaction.

“What… what…,” he stammered at the dead dean’s appearance. The dean smiled behind his desk and motioned them closer.

They took a step into the room and that’s when the trap closed.

Dean Weatherby melted away in a cascade of rainbow light as the desk warped into a bank of high-capacity essence tanks. A series of sharp cracks settled down to a low-pitched hum as a net of glowing fibers appeared around them. Leopold looked back and saw that the receptionist was scrambling from behind her desk to flee through the door, which was being held open by a troop of mages in full battle-robe.

The mages swept into the room and demolished the wall around the door Willow and Leopold had just entered to surround the cage of light. Each had a staff and they were all pointed at the pair of them.

Then, as if trying to make as dramatic an appearance as possible, a final mage walked in. But this one wasn’t in battle robe—he was dressed more as a professor than anything else. Even less ostentatious than Dean Weatherby had been.

“The dean, I presume,” Willow asked.

“You would be correct. Willow Tremont?”

Willow nodded.

“And… I’m afraid I don’t know who your companion is.”

“Leopold,” he choked out. His face had gone white with shock at seeing the deceased dean, but his color was rapidly coming back with a vengeance. His hands were shaking with rage.

“You made that… thing?”

“To throw you off for a split second. To keep you from sensing the essence tanks dumping their contents into this cage. It looks like it worked splendidly.”

“You son of a bitch,” Leopold growled, surprising Willow with his rage. “You dare show me that man’s face.”

“He was a hero. He’s the reason we knew about your friend. About the danger she posed. He gave his life to warn the Arcana.”

“He used me to get to her!” Leopold roared and in an instant he was gone. A loud crack sounded and one of the essence beams snapped.

“No!” Willow screamed and she pulsed her psychokinesis. Leopold was fast, impossibly fast, and even with psychokinesis she could barely sense him as he flitted around the cage, pouring damage into the beams, causing them to chime dischordantly.

Another beam snapped and the dean stepped back.

“We’re not here to hurt you,” Willow pleaded, and another beam snapped.

“Clearly we underestimated your friend,” the dean said and took another step back. The mages pushed inward with their staves.

“He’s my husband,” Willow growled. Another beam snapped and she saw a sizable gap open in the cage. Just large enough for someone to wriggle through.

She caught him as he tried. He spent a fraction of a second too-long squirming through the hole and she caught hold of him with fifty psychokinetic spells and gently pulled him back through. He had that same feral fury on his face that she’d seen before, like he’d lost his mind. Like he’d been threatened existentially.

“Containment is down to forty percent,” one of the mages shouted out.

“Shit, that’s all the essence we have,” the dean said, then seemed to make a hard decision.

“Destroy them.”

The staves glowed white in a starburst pattern around Leopold and Willow. She brought him back to her and touched the side of his face. His wild eyes stopped swiveling, then calmed, focusing on hers.

“He’s not real,” she said. “He’s not back. We’re here. I love you.”

“Willow,” he said, and she dropped her psychokinetic embrace.

They were cheek to cheek when the barrage of attacks exploded upon them.

🜛

Something enormous and stone shifted in the surrounding Arcanum structure, but that wasn’t really all that surprising given the forces that had just been unleashed in what had once been the dean’s office. The battle mage robes protected his strike-force from any magical blowback, but they might want to evacuate the school until its structural integrity could be reassessed.

They were surrounded by smoke and stone dust and the remains of the two mages. How the second had been powerful enough to break the essence cage he had no idea, and would now have no way of finding out. He’d really been excited about interrogating them both, but that had been before their entire emergency store of essence had been depleted by one high-speed attack.

“Insane,” the dean said, then wiped his brow. “Everybody, evacuate the school. We need to—”

The smoke thinned and what became apparent was that in the center of the circle of battle mages were two figures standing together, cheek to cheek. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. He hadn’t seen any defensive barrier go up before the attacks rained down.

One of the figures looked up and over the shoulder of the other one. She spoke.

“We really need to speak with you, dean,” she said. “If you’re quite done with this charade.”