From the Ashes of Victory: The Complete Series, page 98
part #0 of From the Ashes of Victory Series
Victoria sought out the last gun, a tiny revolver.
More panic, more movement, she hurled herself at the lump of metal with the full force she was able to summon. But at the scale she was operating in, something so big moving felt like it was racing away from her at the speed of light. Her sense of time and distance was completely haywire, but she threw her mind after it anyway in a desperate bid to keep up as it crossed a distance that might as well have been to the next solar system.
Though she managed to keep up, doing so left it hard to focus. Then her quarry moved again, and the iron became empty space.
Shouts erupted from somewhere in the crowd, and Katya could feel the stampede that began shaking the floor under her as she sat with Vita's head in her lap. A wall of black surged towards them as bedlam spread through the crowd like wildfire, and bodies began rushing in every direction at once to get as far away from it as possible.
Katya threw herself between the crowd and her sisters, keeping them between her and the wall. As she chanced a look out between flashing legs and swinging arms, her attention was immediately arrested by the one thing she shouldn't be seeing: a man standing still and all alone.
He thrust his hand into his jacket.
The instant Katya saw the glint of metal, her power surged within her and burst from her mind without needing to be guided.
The gun was out and cocked when its wielder suddenly began to scream.
Light bloomed brighter than all the candles above him and he dropped the gun to throw his hands onto the fire that was consuming his hair, the pomade in it lighting it up like a torch.
It was a high-pitched, piercing shriek that reached Katya's ears the moment it reached his scalp.
"Vita, the gun!" Katya cried, unwilling to let the man go until he could no longer pose a threat.
"Yes," Vita said, her voice a distant echo, even though her mouth was only a foot from Katya's ear.
Taking that as confirmation that Vita had disabled it, and no longer able to stand the hideous sound she was extracting from the would-be assassins' lungs, Katya snatched her fire back and slammed her control over it again.
She lost sight of him as he fell to the ground under a scrum of men already generous with both fists and canes, beating him senseless in a hail of decidedly un-diplomatic curses.
Dark. Adrift.
The roar of the world was distant and unimportant. Background noise; thunder on a summer afternoon.
She sat with her prize as it lay still. She had caught it, and it was hers.
Iron. So much iron, but others, as well.
Fascinating.
Down she went, and as the world grew darker, her quarry grew larger.
Down and down.
Atoms.
So small and yet so large. Simple, yet complex.
Iron. She knew iron. Twenty-six protons, twenty-six neutrons, twenty-six electrons. Perfect in symmetry, she was arrested by the presence of so much, of so many combinations and connections between it and the other elements. Long chains of molecules went ignored, however, as she went deeper, drawn inexorably downward. She had been enchanted not by beautiful complexity, but by simplicity. By the beating heart that lay at the centre of a single atom: the nucleus.
All those protons and neutrons packed so tightly together, yet not. She could shrink that distance with ease now, but only to a point. The energy that always resisted kept her attention this time.
Why do you resist me?
Between those basic structural parts was energy. So much energy. The bonds between them were so strong…
She looked closer.
There was a tension there that took her breath away. For all her experimenting, she'd never simply looked before.
She could do so now. She'd caught her prey. It was hers to with as she wished.
She looked closer.
She felt it. She had spent so much time compressing, shrinking… what if she did the opposite? What if she released the tension, rather than increasing it?
How?
What if she tried to cut off a proton? Turn iron into manganese? Could she do that? What if she cut it in half, to make aluminium?
Then she would be an alchemist.
And dead.
No, she couldn't do that, the tension holding it together wouldn't just release, it would snap. Violently. Splitting the heart of an atom would unleash all of that tremendous energy all at once.
My God…
She flew away. From her terrible realisation, from the atoms themselves, from everything, she flew.
Flew into nothing.
Tearing her attention away from the chaos, Katya looked to see the gold begin to fade from Sveta's eyes.
In a single rush, Sveta seemed to come back to herself, and she looked about in confusion and disorientation.
"It's all right, I'm here," Katya said, throwing out a hand to steady Sveta's shoulder.
"Thank you," Sveta said, immediately turning her attention to Vita.
"Vita? Vita!" Svetlana cried, seeing something Katya couldn't.
"She is very far away," Sveta said. "She is having trouble finding her way back."
At that, Elise began to tremble, tearing off her shawl to press it to Vita's forehead.
Helpless and colourless, the only movement was the rise and fall of Vita's chest as she breathed. Below her closed eyelids, her eyes were still.
Katya felt useless. All she could do was hold Vita's head in her lap and fret. Sveta was doing something, going by the feel of her Manifest and the look in her eyes, while Elise was keeping track of Vita's every heartbeat. What could Katya do? What good was fire here, when the person most important to her could very well be dying in her lap? Literally losing her mind amidst the chaos that had erupted at the second-most important thing they were doing on this trip.
A place of peace, an end to the war, yet someone had needed to dole out one last act of violence. One more death in a conflict that had seen too many, and Katya was sitting. Worrying, rocking back and forth trying to keep from screaming.
Vita had saved them, and this was to be her reward? A brilliant mind lost in the aether, leaving the body an empty husk. Katya had made the mistake of looking into her eyes before she'd closed them; the beautiful blue had been dim and vacant.
Lifeless.
Around them, men were shouting and moving, seemingly as lost as Vita as to where they should go. One of them drove his knee square into Katya's back before stumbling away and towards the door. She felt tugs as several shoes trampled her dress pooled behind her, the breeze created by frightened men running past.
She looked down into Vita's face as it twitched with every jostle of Katya's body, and something within her snapped.
"Get back!" she bellowed as twin lines of arcane fire arced along her spine, racing from her neck to her waist. In an instant, the lines flared blinding white, raw magical energy boiling out from them in two great sheets that unfurled into the faces of everyone within a dozen feet.
The crowd immediately scattered, shying away from the great wings of flame as they curled out and away, creating a buffer of empty space around the four huddled witches.
But the spectacle lasted only a moment before the wings deformed, slithering away in twin ropes that spun about the four of them into a solid wall, cutting them off from the rest of the room. The heat that roiled off of it created an even larger buffer, parting the crowd around them in a sundered forest of yelps and shocked gasps.
Sveta's face was taut with concern. Lit in the flickering light of arcane fire, she spared Katya's construct no attention. "What is it?" she asked Elise, who never took her hand off of Vita's wrist.
"I think she has never used her Manifest like this before," Elise said softly.
"She's not bleeding," Katya said in relief. As the heat of her fire wall licked the bare nape of her neck, she locked off the shape and size of it. All she had to do now was feed it energy to keep it up, freeing her mind enough to talk.
"It was not power this time, but intense focus. I could feel her mind racing around the room."
"That's what that was," Sveta said. "I felt her… everywhere. Not her colours, but her thoughts. Her concentration was… moving."
"But she cannot find her way back," Elise said. "Where is she?"
Svetlana looked out, but her Manifest was swamped by the magical energy of the wall of fire that hemmed them in.
"I felt her near the one I set alight," Katya said. "With the gun."
"No," Elise corrected. Whatever her connection to Vita, it was letting her power past Katya's magic the more she let her concentration move from Vita's physical body. "She is more… adrift. And alone."
A single tear spattered onto Vita's cheek.
The space that was between the stars was nothing to that which existed between galaxies. To be trapped between either would be a crushing isolation that the human mind was not at all equipped to deal with.
Victoria was no different.
She didn't know where she was. Everything was so big it might as well not exist. She couldn't focus on atoms and molecules anymore, she was too far away. The sense she normally had for them was gone, and she was detached from everything, floating freely in an abyss that had no end and no beginning.
There was, thankfully, still colour. She was not in a black void, but a colourful nightmare that flitted between painfully bright and terrifyingly dim.
Were those… light waves? But there were pieces, as well. Pieces of… light? Was that what she was seeing? But why were there waves, too?
Where was she? The she that was her physical form, where was it? Did she still have one?
Witch. That word was important. That's what she was, wasn't it?
The colours. All of the colours in existence rained down on her, and through her. She was colour. And shadow.
Alone. She was alone. There was nothing else here.
Katya ran her fingers along Vita's cheek, willing her to hear her mental pleas to return. She knew it was pointless, they didn't share the same kind of bond Elise did. Wait…
"Elise, use your Manifest on her!" Katya said suddenly.
"But there is no damage. I cannot do anything."
"Yes, you can. You have a type of bond, right? She has access to your Manifest."
"In a small way."
"It will have to be enough. If she can still use her Manifest, she might be able to use yours. Your healing reaches out to the patient in a way, doesn't it? If she can sense life, then couldn't she sense her own body?"
"I… perhaps," Elise said, determination hardening in her eyes. "Yes. Yes, I will try."
"Do it," Katya said. She stared down into Vita's slack, expressionless face as she cradled her head. "Bring her back. Please."
Something.
Where there had been nothing, there was now something.
A beacon made of darkness, beckoning to her.
Suddenly she was moving. Yanked backwards, she hurtled through space, through the colour-filled nothing toward the something. Something enormous. Looming in her direction of travel, there was a darkness at complete odds with the colours, a void into which she was being inextricably drawn.
At terrific speed, it felt like she was outpacing light, and all colours began to dim and fade as the dark place grew to become all there was.
Then it was gone.
With a terrifying gasp, Vita's eyes flew open as her entire body spasmed at once, jerking her head off of Katya's lap to thud onto the cold wooden floor.
"Where!?" Vita shouted, her eyes wide with incomprehension and an almost elemental-level fear. Her hands flew up and began frantically batting her her chest, arms and face. "Who!?"
"You are in Versailles. You are safe now. Be calm," Elise said slowly.
"This!" Vita exclaimed, staring up at her twitching fingers like she'd never seen them before. "What!?"
Keeping her fingers pressed to Vita's forehead, Elise took a badly shaking hand in the other and made the same soothing noises she would have to a frightened child. "You have come back to us, Victoria."
Whatever was passing between them other than touch and words, Katya couldn't have said. There was some kind of magic happening but she couldn't discern what it was, which was normal, except now it was terrifying. It was a kind of magic Katya had never experienced before. It was healing, of a sort, but it was as though Elise was sewing Vita's soul back into her body, and that filled Katya with a kind of horror even her nightmares had never been brave enough to conjure.
"Look at me, Vita," Sveta said. "Breathe. Just breathe. Feel your body again."
Thankfully, Vita's breathing began to slow, and the terror was fading from her eyes, leaving behind an exhausted confusion. "Svetlana? Elise." Her dazed eyes swung up. "Katya."
"Yes. How do you feel?" Elise asked.
"Heavy." Vita watched as she slowly raised her free arm, her hand hanging limply off of her wrist. "Very heavy." It thumped back on the ground and she closed her eyes.
Seeing her eyes shut again, panic seized Katya's heart once more. "Elise?"
"She has merely passed out, Yekaterina. Please take down your wall so I can fetch help."
"Help? Who can help her better than you?" Katya demanded, only reluctantly cutting off her energy to let the wall dissipate into a roiling mirage of hot air.
To her relief, Elise smiled. "I cannot carry her back to Paris alone."
The dressmaker's shop was not a place Millie was overly fond of. It had its purpose, of course, and had so far been successful in keeping the residents of Longstown from having to run around naked everywhere, but she had never understood the appeal of wanting to come here. Even the look on Elise's face when she brought home something new wasn't enough to change Millie's mind about wanting to do the same herself any more than was practically necessary. She'd already put in her order for more shirts, having been assured that they would arrive at her door before Elise did. She'd gone for colours that Elise might like, having no real intention of wearing them outside herself, unless it was under a heavy coat and a scarf. Lavender did Millie no favours.
That left her to fully dedicate herself to the day's work: getting Pretoria her own clothes. As the only one close to her age that was on speaking terms with her, 'the tentacle one' had volunteered her services as an escort and tour guide, but certainly not as anyone who could give constructive input into the new witch's fashion choices.
It hadn't been a difficult decision. Pretoria needed clothes, so there was no getting around being here, but hearing about her reaction to The Shed and the look of being utterly overwhelmed by where she was left Millie sympathetic to the new arrival and less inclined to believe that what truly lie in her heart was hate.
Because Millie had been Pretoria once.
Alone; far from home, by choice in that staying would have been worse; arriving in a place that seemed insane and incomprehensibly different. Both the munitions factory in Nottingham and ADAM both had knocked Millie back on her heels, and it was in both places that she had needed someone like Vickie to help her adjust and not run screaming back to Scotland.
Millie remembered being terrified of Ivy the first time she'd met her, so strange in her mannerisms and appearance, to say nothing of having Hekabe at her side all the time. Selene even more so. She still had an ethereal otherworldliness about her that made her intimidating, but it was only having Vickie at Millie's side that had calmed her nerves enough to keep her in place long enough to get used to it. Had she not been so fortunate, Millie would have nothing of what she had now. She would have never uncovered her Talent, never met Elise, never been able to count herself among the sisterhood she had become so protective of.
They had all been Pretoria at one time, and they were only who they were because they had each other.
And on top of that, no matter what kind of person Pretoria was, going back to Cumbria would put her life in danger. Millie would do everything she could to prevent that from happening, regardless of how Pretoria might feel about them. That meant being there for her. She was a witch, and deserved that much.
But as Pretoria stood on a pedestal being poked and prodded, reduced down to a string of numbers, Millie didn't really know what to do with herself. She'd cleaned her fingernails, played with her hair. She'd even surreptitiously nicked a pin to test against her witchscale. When it had immediately bent in half, she'd shoved it into her pocket, and now she had to remember it was in there to avoid stabbing herself.
Patience had never been her strong suit, and now she was going spare.
"'Scuse me, Miss Brown," said the voice of Eliza Stone from a foot below Millie's ears as she pushed past with an armload of fabrics.
Between her high voice, round spectacles and perpetually-tousled hair, Millie had always thought of her as mousy, but it was the height difference that sealed it. Millie was tall for a woman, yes, but there was something about Miss Stone that made her seem even smaller. Maybe it's that she was always buzzing around, darting from doorway to doorway.
But as she approached Pretoria, Millie watched the young witch's eyes in the mirrors she stood before. If she was going to cause trouble for Eliza, Millie had a few choice words already lit in the back of her throat, ready to blister Pretoria's ears.
She needn't have bothered.
Those odd amber eyes weren't looking for trouble at all. They followed Eliza's every move, watching as the seamstress' assistant held up different colours and patterns, widening every time she had to pull out her tape measure again. Every time it came near her hips, Pretoria would stiffen like a board, and Millie would have sworn she could see how hard her heart would start beating.
Millie had wet her lips to keep her smile from tearing them open. She's never done this before.
It made sense, of course. From what Niamh had said, Pretoria's home would have had to undergo a population boom to even rise to the description of 'village.' Elise was from somewhere similar, and had spoken about having to make her own clothes or trade with the neighbour's daughter, who was only a year older. Neither she nor Pretoria had sisters, so at least they'd been spared having to wear hand-me-downs. Although Millie had no sisters either, her size and gangly limbs had left her vulnerable to the curse—sometimes being the fourth one to inhabit certain articles of clothing, only slightly altered to account for the fact she was the only girl to ever wear them.
