The Witch Queen - she of the Endless Night Shift, our lady of instant coffee, the keeper of the Book of Hastily Written IOUs - knew the end was nigh.
There were various clues and omens that had led her to this conclusion:
The neon lights of her favourite late-night chicken shop had started blinking at her in morse code.
The advertising screens at bus stops had started showing her an endless parade of life insurance offers.
And she had begun to see the pattern of her own skeleton in the river, drawn out in bones of the long-abandoned shopping trolleys that emerged at low tide.
But out of all of the signs, it was the fact that someone or something had set her squat on fire that really clinched it.
Worse still - none of her wards had been triggered, which meant that whatever had done this was some combination of exceptionally powerful, terrifyingly well prepared, or lucky to the point of being *fated*.
Thus, when the firefighters finally reached her, she knew that it was already too late. She knew, too, that any countercharms, dispellings, or general magical wrigglings that she attempted would only put her would-be rescuers in danger from her killer’s inevitable redundancies.
So she simply smiled weakly as she was carried from the wreck of charred drywall, melted optimism and grubby failed anarchism (it was a squat, after all) and drew wobbly runes of blessing on the firefighters’ uniforms in ash.
And when they placed an oxygen mask over her face, she breathed out instead of in and whispered a spell with the last crisped croak of her voice to trap in place her last breath.
When they pulled *me* out of the fire, meanwhile, I lay there flopped like an upended plate of overcooked noodles until the firefighter gently placed the oxygen mask around my mouth and I slowly returned to reality.
I say ‘slowly’ here, not because it was taking me a while to recover from the smoke inhalation (although that was true too). No, I say ‘slowly returned to reality’ because on my first gasp pulled from the tank - the same tank into which the Witch Queen had stitched her last breath - *reality* was for sure not my first destination.
I experienced, at once, the birth and death of the planet. I felt my bones form out of stone and timber as the first cities rose. I was carried to oblivion as I tasted the first mildly toxic mushroom that someone ate *on purpose*. I heard the creak of bones of thousands of years of soul-calcifying labour; unrecognised, unthanked, utterly expected.
And I knew with all certainty that I had just become this city’s new Witch Prince/Princess.
Let me tell you: it was weird as hell, but after the agony of cinders and smoke ripping through my lungs? It was a real breath of fresh heir.
2087
kaledo-art
areudirty
ellievsbear
