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That night, she had another dream.
Undine was drifting through the water. Black as night, it stretched on all sides; her legs were above her head. If there had been space for her tears to be distinct, they would have, but instead her eyes merely twinged, imperceptibly expanding the thassalic void.
That’s new, she thought. Below her, coloured lights were rising through the silt.
How do I know that’s new?
It wasn’t the only thing.
One science class, at least a year ago now, they had learnt about air pressure. The barrier, in keeping monsters out,, had the side-effect of regulating the cities atmosphere – when magical girls who could fly went as high as they could, or sewer and maintenance workers descended into the deepest tunnels, the findings they came back with were the same; the pressure wasn’t what it should be. Even if the magical girls headaches said otherwise.
It was probably from pushing themselves too hard.
Apparently, whilst the barrier was up, the atmosphere of the city was the same no matter what. It was why weather forecasts were so unreliable – they could only collect the right data at night, and whilst monsters prioritized getting at people over disrupting infrastructure, there was always a chance to be caught in the crossfire , especially when they were so spindly the barrier couldn’t properly coat them.
That lesson had then diverged into another minimise property damage lecture, and that had gotten Sally and Gwen doing their usual eye rolling, and back then that had been just another ordinary experience.
Which, in roundabout way, was just a way of saying that thanks to her and Sylvia’s powers Undine was probably one of the few people to recognise what she was feeling right now.
Pressure.
It crept up on her, forcing its fingers into her tear ducts, squeezing its palms through her hair. Just enough to be uncomfortable.
The jellyfish rose. Coloured lanterns in the dark. Moving on their own journeys.
Blocking up her ears.
She couldn’t wonder in the same way at the colours.
Pressing at her nose.
It’s not using the air!
Undine shook. The jellyfish billowed around her, avoiding her convulsions, the movement doing nothing to stop the feeling tightening around her.
Its heavy…
She was falling. She was falling. There was no freedom in it, only control, bound by something not her own.
Their gone.
Bubble escaped Undine’s lips.
Their gone.
She wouldn’t need to breathe, would she. She wouldn’t…
Their gone their gone their gone their gone their gone their gone their gone their
It was a vice constricting her brow, a needle trepanning into her brain, her mind hurt, it yearned to be free, to cry, they were dead they were gone it hurt why couldn’t they still be here why couldn’t…
“I’m sorry.”
Undine surfaced.
Undersided?
The pressure was gone. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t upside down anymore – she looked down at a sky of white, buffeted lightly by the waves. And the voice…
She turned.
Standing on the waves was a girl.
“This is even harder on you than it could have been.”
“You…” Only hearing her own voice made Undine realize how strange the girl’s was. She didn’t speak. Rather, it was a creamy absence of sound, light through shutters, half-melting ice cream. “I remember you.”
“That makes me happy.” Where her feet fell, the waves calmed.
“This is the dream, isn’t it.” She could remember it now, or was beginning to. Drifting. Words exchanged. “But last time…”
Things had been calm.
Salt stung at her.
“A nightmare?”
“Yes. We all have them.” There wasn’t much the girls face could do but smile, soft and sad. “I’m afraid you won’t wake for a little while yet.”
Words exchanged, and after…
“But this was where it ended.” Undine said. A dark thought seeped into her head. “Your not going to…”
“Oh Undine.” Something new tightened around her. This time, it didn’t feel so bad.
Between the mix of gravities and Undine being submerged from the shoulders down, it was a very awkward hug. The girl knelt, almost curling around her head, almost making her feel like a child. Yet it wasn’t demeaning. Somehow, it did make her feel better.
“If you wish to blame anyone, blame me.”
Beneath the bedsheet glow, cream curdled and whipped.
“What!?” Undine protested. The image of the girl was a spirit in her head, refusing to resolve, but she couldn’t mesh it with the bifurcated face of that monster. “Why would I do that?”
“Because if it would make you feel better, I would gladly take on your hate.”
But it wasn’t you who killed them.
“Why am I here?” Undine said. Thinking was slippery in the dream, and even if it wasn’t what reply could you compose to that. “This – it isn’t normal.”
“No. Your heart called out, and something found its way to you. A kindred spirt. I’m here to show you the way – permission to touch you?”
“Sure?”
“Brace yourself. You may feel some nausea.”
Because of what you are? Magical girls were obviously stronger than ordinary girls their age, but it was still a shock when the girl reached under the water and tugged Undine out by her shoulders. The world twisted, and she found herself standing beneath an ocean, the girl looking down at her, hands still on her shoulders as if she were holding her up. Her hair bapped back into place.
When she’d been underwater, she realized, she hadn’t been transformed. Now she was. The glow of the floor mingled with the horizon.
“Go any way.” Said the girl. “Don’t let her words get to you. But don’t think too poorly of her either – she cannot help who she is.”
“And Undine? I’m so sorry for what happened.”
“I’ve been hearing that a lot recently.” She said. This was the first time someone sounded like they meant it in a while.
Any direction. She didn’t know how long it would be. The upside down ocean blorbled, as Undine called down a bowling ball-sized mass of water. She stepped into it, and with a kick was off, skating along her own personal rapid.
It could have been seconds. It could have been days. Dream logic was in full swing, so it felt a bit like both, the journey easy as an instant but gradual as a millenia, long enough for her surroundings to change.
Leaking down the horizon, the ocean became darker, deeper. The light of jellyfish still glowed beneath the surface, but most of their candy colours vanished. Like taking weather readings, the barrier also interfered with the night’s visibility. If you wanted to be safe, only magical girls could watch the stars.
She was no astronomer, but she couldn’t recognise any of those azure constellations.
The ground too darkened. Becoming oily, until it reflected the night like a polished river. Growing teeth, buildings that looked more grand than practical extended from the ground, their bulk promising that one night they would collapse, rendering all their efforts naught.
Soon, Undine heard crying.
When she rounded a building, she saw her. Another magical girl, from the style of her clothing, a fine deep blue dress. Or maybe a magical woman? That didn’t seem right, but this was a dream – even if it’s different – and kneeling, bent over from grief, the girl was still several inches above Undine. Hair the same colour as the dress shook with every sob.
“Hello? Miss?”
Undine was starting to get a bad feeling about what the woman was in relation to herself. Three swords were scattered around the square, each thrust in deep enough cracks radiated around them in a way she tried to distract herself from.
“Leave me be.”
Another unvoice, but at least this one had sound. Even if it was like every sad person who ever was was speaking simultaneously.
“But I was told someone wanted to talk to me.”
The other girl turned her head; Undine took a step back.
This was not a magical girl, but a monster pretending to be one, and not necessarily well – though she’d never say that out loud! Its face was split – black and white not red and blue – but the porcelain half was at least more human than the purple girl who’d been there that night. The black lay minisculely below the white, like any semblance of humanity was a shattered mask, horns splitting from its side.
“That reaction – yes, my nature is true to see. So you shall leave me? Let me drown myself in my misery.”
“I…”
The purple girl. Rising out of the pavement. Her oozing grin splitting his face.
I hate you.
Was she like her? Was this woman and that girl the same creatures, things, monsters…
A soft cream glow.
No.
Undine caught herself before she could stumble back. She steeled herself. Breathes.
The human body is made of roughly sixty-percent water. When she’d first got her powers, Sal- She’d been peppered with questions about whether she could do some things with that. Become Magical Girl Blood Andguts. Of course she’d said no, she couldn’t.
That had been a white lie. A cream lie. They say healing’s the hardest form of magic – and one of the reasons for that was because of the same reason Undine couldn’t explode someone’s head if for some founder forsaken reason she wanted to. Other people’s bodies were off-limits outside of occasional edge-cases like sense sharing or Magical Girl Hair Stylist.
Your own body?
The only reason Undine had lived so long was she could be Magical Girl Blood Inme.
The ground of the blue-starred place roughened under her feet. Cracks webbed through obsidian. Impact sites flowered.
Undine had lain there, commanding her blood to go against the flow. Feeling the iron chaff it left each time. Knowing her friends were already gone, that Sally couldn’t stoke the fire in her lungs, Gwen the earth in her bones, Sylvia the air in her lungs. Hoping, praying that someone would come, so she could reach out, so one of them could say for all “It’s okay.”
“We did the best we could.”
“I’m sorry.”
Someone had come.
Now she was whole. And so she took stock of every bead of moisture in her eyes, every litre of blood flowing where it should be, every atom that saturated her muscles, and she said to all of it step forward. Used the moisture in her throat to work her voice box. The spit in her mouth to lift her tongue.
“I think I’m drowning too.”
The lone, closed eye looked pityingly at her. “You too seek to disappear? To be erased, and know pain no more?”
“No.” Undine said. “No. I’m going to keep fighting.”
“You are still treading then.” The girl turned away once more. Around them the swords staking rattled like an adult disparaging a child. “You flounder… To think, that one day a child like you may find herself in my depths…”
“I’m not a child. I’m a magical girl.”
“Such a cruel world, that our youths must take up blades and know pain.”
“Hey!” She snapped. “Stop that!”
“That I could end, and know this pain no more.”
Naturally, Undine wasn’t an angry person. Anger wasn’t something she liked; whenever people disagreed, it made her uncomfortable. But this self-flagellating?
“Just because your hurting, doesn’t mean others aren’t too!”
Sodden gunpowder was slowly starting to spark. Warming, she bunched her fists at what the woman said next.
“There’s nobody left.”
That was wrong.
“Their families. Their friends. Their loved ones. Me” Her voice was rising in pitch as she cried out the words, a different sort of crying. Spit, not tears. “I’m left – I thought you wanted to talk to me? Why would you do that if I wasn’t left!”
The sheer misery of the woman was cutting at her – but then a thought struck Undine.
“I’m sorry.” She said, dialling herself back. Be diplomatic.
You’re feeling the same, or near enough. Would you want someone to get mad at you?
Maybe. If she needed snapping out of a funk.
“Who did you lose?” She asked.
“I tried to protect them. I tried. I tried. But I always lose them.”
Were they like…
A second passed.
The woman’s voice became chalky. “Once, I was a knight of a kingdom far, far away. My fellows and I ranged far and wide, fighting the wicked arcana wherever they’d strike. But one day all that changed.”
“The servant rages. The king hungers. The queen despises with every inch of her being. I should have saved them all. I should have. But what place is there for this broken knight?”
“Were you…” Undine paused. The flowery language made her speech difficult to parse. “Friends?”
The woman’s head shifted. Quiet, what her unvoice said almost sounded like it was she alone who was speaking.
“Yes.”
Undine looked down. The floor hadn’t become any more comfortable looking.
She knelt alongside the knight. Once more, she was reminded of just how tall she was. Nervously she stretched out a hand up, to where the knight’s arms were still poised, ready to cover her face.
“May I?”
Her skin was like a monsters’ too. Cold and inorganic to the touch.
No matter how hard she squeezed, Undine wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to warm it.
The purpose of an anchor wasn’t to warm a ship. The embrace of chains was never comforting.
“Thank you – would you like to tell me about them?”
“Why should I remind myself of what I lost! Why should I let the grief rise ever higher!”
Okay, wrong track.
What an anchor did was anchor; hold firm. Provide stability. Not a warm comfort but comfort all the same, the comfort of not floating adrift, of having direction, purpose, agency to choose where and when you would move. All things Undine was struggling with.
I hate you.
Yet she couldn’t ever see a world where she’d put aside those memories. Even if that’s what they were now…
That’s what they were now.
Memories.
And she thought the woman knew that. Her protests were just a way of pretending that she couldn’t remember, and so had no reason to hurt, even though it was obvious that she did. She probably didn’t even believe her own words.
It was so clear.
“You’re hurting.” Undine stated. “I am too.”
“That’s okay, I think. It’s okay to hurt. It’s even okay to mope. I…” Her tongue fumbled with the words, as she tried to express them in a way that made sense. “I really want to stay in my room all day. I really want to not exist. But I have a duty. Not as a magical girl, not as a daughter or a friend, but to myself. I think I have to exist. Because if I weren’t to, who would?”
“Me being sad makes my mom and dad sad. That’s natural. But if I were to stay in my room all day, that would just make it worse. It’s like…” A film came to mind, but she wasn’t going to make a comparison to a movie at a time like this! “I don’t want people to hurt any more. If I can make them hurt less? Even better. And if I stayed in my room all day, I wouldn’t just make everyone around me hurt more, because people care about me, but I’d be denying myself a chance to be better.”
“The foundationists think we’re some great divine warriors. Even if I did believe them, what I’m feeling now, it isn’t holy. But they do get something right – if I don’t do this, who will? Other magical girls, but if I’m out there, we’re doing more than if we weren’t. I’m… I’ll be stopping more tragedies.”
“Maybe I’ll even find out why?”
Her voice trickled off.
“I am never going to forget them.”
This time, the woman looked at her again. And there, twinkling like the lone star a traveller may see as they set out on a journey, a blue ember burnt in the obsidian.
She stood.
“Ah!”
Undine was yoinked upwards as the woman did so, her arm dragged by the motion. At her full height the woman felt at least twice of Undine, a monument against the azure twilight. Her horns held the sky.
“Truly, you would soldier on despite this?”
“No. Not despite. I accept I’m sad. I’m just going to continue on. You said grief rises. But a boat is always carried by the surface of the ocean. It never forgets its there, but it continues on regardless, appreciating the majesty of the waves.”
(Undine had never seen a real boat.)
(But it wasn’t the words that mattered.)
“Grief may rise, but the world isn’t flooded. Everyone had their own boat to sail on the waves. Even you. Your sad because your friends meant a lot to you. But do you think they’d want you to be sad forever?”
“Huhh!”
It was a heavy, airy sound that escaped the woman’s mask, halfway between a sob and a laugh as she threw up her head. Something about it sounded wrong to Undine’s ears, like there were no lungs in the woman’s chest to breathe the noise. The air changed with the sound – in the distance, clouds of dust blew rapidly across the dreamscape
“That you have the misfortune to be a kindred star.”
“Okay?” Whatever energy had spurred Undine on was lost in this strange new alloy of grief the woman was displaying. She was still sad. Yet there was something firm in her voice. A bitter iron, tempered not in misery but by something more melancholic.
Justice, remembering happier times.
“You have my blessings, squire, for what little good it will do you.” intoned the woman. The clouds obscured the sky, the strange buildings, drawing a veil across Undine’s vision. The last thing she could see was a single teardrop, running down the other magical girl’s face.
“How I hope that your journey is kinder than mine.”
And then Undine woke up.
The funeral was tomorrow.
There was a protocol for it, apparently. Undine was lucky enough that she hadn’t had a grandparent die before now, though she’d had rather them than – No, that was an awful thought, what sort of monster was she?
Her nails dug into her palms.
What she did remember was a classmate, vaguely, back at regular school. His nan had died, and it had taken at least a month before they held a ceremony for her. Part of her was saying that the ceremony was unusual somehow, that he had been part of some subculture or religion that had notable practises, but she couldn’t remember what it had been through the grey fog.
The government had already arranged plots by the memorial. They had asked her friends families what their favourite flowers had been, so they could be potted with them. It had seemed fast to Undine – they had never said it, but from the way they acted about her she could tell they were factoring her in, saving her a place by their sides.
She’d wanted to ask about if they were saving a place for Tessa too. She didn’t know if they had a protocol for that.
Undine felt like she had said something to someone about how it was okay to mope. That was another thing she was having difficulty remembering, because the memory felt both very recent and very faint. She had said something, and she would stand by that something. But she also wanted to do something.
And so that was what she was about to do.
For no reason other than she could.
It was the first time she’d transformed since last night. Not a game changer, but something. A milestone.
There were no real words to describe what transformation felt like. One of the exercises Founder’s Promise did in language was getting girls to try and make ones, to introduce etymology.
This felt different.
The power rose, colder than before, and it was as if something clicked into place. Undine stood, blinking, her clothes feeling different on her frame.
“Gaah!”
Stumbling backwards was a perfectly understandable reaction to a finding a sword in your face.
Undine’s boots scratched against the floor. No, she corrected herself. Three swords. Each bobbing on invisible currents.
One red. One green. One yellow.
All at once, Undine began to cry.