#wra-rp

Maggot’s eyes filled with a molten purple and it billowed in an ethereal haze from her now-narrowed eyes. Her hands erupted in an animate purple plasma that licked into the air and dripped at her feet, sizzling against the sand and turning it into glass. Her feet dug into the sand and she braced herself, as a counterpoint to geyser of destructive power she shot into the air. Twin geysers of that profane flame screamed through the air and took two of those leathery, flapping creatures from the sky. They struggled to flap their wings as the flame seemed to have a weight to it as it sloughed skin from their bodies and burned them alive as they fell to the ground.

I pulled at my waist like a rip-chord, letting the fel cloth pouches at my side fall into the sand. They were versatile reagents, and allowed me to conjure a variety of creatures, and where before I had needed something to skulk in the shadows, now I needed something ravenous, something violent.

It was hard to go wrong with the old standards, familiar little ditties.

A legion of ghouls erupted in a violent genesis of bone, blood, and flesh, slavering with and gnashing at the air with clicking jaws they had never used before, with sharp, jagged teeth that barely fit in their own mouths. Their eyes were alight with pinpoints of brilliant purple, just as mine were, and they leapt with ferocious, feral strength, like panthers without any of the sleek beauty that nature provided, and landed teeth-and-claw-first in the flesh of the demons that surrounded us.

My impostor watched on as the whirling clock of sand behind him faded away. It was my original host, my first body. The old wizard who was all too willing to shirk the too-regulated and too-mundane teachings of the Kirin Tor to join the Cult of the Damned. I recognized much of myself in him, even if it had been several hosts ago. Though, he was older than I’d ever been in that body and there were pock marks and scars that I didn’t recognize. His hands were longer than mine, gnarled by corruption, claws sharper and more bestial, skin worn away by decay, fingertips blackened by soot. Most jarring, though, were his eyes.

His eyes were savage things, dire with violence and trauma, keen, watching the way Maggot and I worked. They were actively calculating, running through a hundred contingencies and double-checking resources he had at his disposal. It was a look I knew well, because I’m fairly certain I had the exact same look.

Two, four, six, eight felbats screeched in a spiraling nose-dive into the sand and impacted with a cloud of sand and green blood as they were dispatched, only to be replaced by four, eight, sixteen. Portals ripped open in the air as my impostor was in a trance of conjuration.

My ghouls ripped into the flesh of the felguards that marched in inexorable formation towards us. Chunks of orange were spit off into the air, sprays of demonic blood stained the sand, but every felguard that was dispatched had its spear picked up by another behind it, as portals ripped open, perpetually reinforcing the tight circle of violence that was becoming tighter and tighter around Maggot and I.

One by one, overwhelming numbers and fel-forged weapons started to skewer my legion, tearing them asunder.

A spell circle of green flame at formed under my impostor, and the beach had turned to glass and cracked beneath him from the raw power of his spell-work. He crushed handfuls of amethyst crystals, which shattered with the shriek of mortal souls, which he inhaled through his distended jaw, causing the veins in his neck to bulge with profane magic, shifting under his skin. He seemed prepared to conjure an army and a half.

I spoke in a long-dead tongue that hurt my soul to speak and slammed my staff into the ground. Corruption and decay, pure death, scarred the ground beneath me, like lightning bolts in every direction as the ground rumbled. Spiritual grasping claws, desperate hands long-forgotten in the earth attempted to hold the felguards in place, leaving hissing necrosis and bursting pustules where they touched.

The front line began to hobble, many of them starting to waste away as they fell to their knees, slowing their advance.

I had time, now, to gather my will, my ego, and reach out to anything dead that would listen to me.

I commanded, and the ocean obeyed.

There was another rumble, a bubbling of sea foam beneath the shore as the sand shifted. Bones rose with sharp teeth and large hollowed eyes, hunched over and clacking.

And there was a gurgling sound, though not one made by magic.

A chorus of gurgling, hissing, and wailing was followed by the thunderous rattle of two dozen murloc skeletons charging towards my impostor, and they leapt on him with the characteristic frenzy of a full-scale murloc raiding party.

He seemed surprised, as well as I would have been. Rows of sharp teeth sank into his flesh, small claws tore at his skin, and he roared in pain and frustration. They swarmed him, until all I saw was a mountain of bleached bones.

I turned to Maggot, and stabbed my staff into the sand between us so it stood straight up at the center of the circle, “Now! While he’s not summoning!”

Maggot’s lips were in a hateful snarl as she endured the pain of channeling the horrific magical energy she wielded, but she nodded to me, and swung one arm out above us, and the other off towards the Other “Bones” conjuring a ring of purple flame in the air and another twenty yards away.

The ring fell around us, and suddenly we were no longer in the midst of the demonic invasion, leaving my staff stuck in the ground.

I nodded to Maggot and reached out with my hand, fingers slowly curling as necrotic energy coursed up my forearm and arced around my fingers like lightning, and my staff slowly raised from the ground. My fingers closed in a tight fist, and as they did, ethereal, ghostly chains, spiked and bloody with dripping, black ectoplasm exploded from the head of my staff. Ghostly meat hooks pierced flesh, chains wrapped around necks and sank into skin and violently pulled them from their feet, to a hitching post around my staff.

Maggot took a deep breath in as she looked towards the sky and yelled with effort, a yawning maw of twilight magic opening above the cattle to be slaughtered. The air roared around it, undulated in a haze of heat, as a meteor of congealed purple plasma descended on the group of shock troops. It engulfed them, swallowed them, and left nothing but a hissing crater of glass, ash, and plasma in its wake.

She heaved with exertion, and that haze of power in her eyes faded away as she went to her knees.

I put my hand on her back, and I knelt beside her, “Not bad, hot-stuff. A bit uninspired, but not bad.”

She huffed a laugh and shoved my hand off of her, managing to shakily rise to her feet. Her voice, even breathless, managed to drip with sarcasm, “By all means… Do better, maestro.” She even flashed me a tired smile, “I’ll wait.”

My smile was interrupted by an eruption of fel fire and a light rain of smoking bone shards, as Other Me roared with anger, now free of the murloc swarm. His gaze burned with an ire I could not relate, an anger that seemed alien to my own.

I turned to Maggot, grinning as I reached out towards my staff. It flew into my hands, the old, runed wood smoking with purple miasma, “Wait no longer.”

I stepped forward.

My impostor squared himself to me and began to ponderously shuffle forward, and his voice was a rasping approximation of mine, hissing with anger. He swung his staff to either side of him, hip-high portals swirling open, twin felstalkers flanking on his haunches, “Unearned bravado.”

I squared towards him, and conjured a shrieking skull of necrotic power and launched it at him as I quickened my pace towards him.

He swatted it away with the head of his staff, the anti-magic in that felstalker skull sparking, “Middling magical power.”

Two more felstalkers appeared, flanking the first two. All of them drooling with hunger for my magic, spines bristling with anticipation for an order to kill.

I sucked at my teeth and pulled deeper on my magical reserves, ethereal locusts and mosquitoes buzzing up from the ground and hovering around me, drawn into my palm as I conjured a congealed mass of disease and entropy together.

My impostor sneered, and his arthritic fingers moved with deft precision, and beckoned with his hand towards my spell, ripping all of that conjured energy into his hands, idly dispelling it in a bolt of power off to the side, “Unrefined technique.”

His entourage of felstalkers stopped in step with him, and he eyed me with some amount of disdain, “Are these the auspices I’ve been operating under? Is this what my namesake has to offer me? Is this what the “prime” universe has to offer me? Pathetic.”

He turned his gaze towards Maggot, who watched on, still exhausted, “You can’t even protect the only person worth protecting.”

He turned back to me and gestured towards her with his hand, the two outermost beasts lumbering into a charge for her.

Felstalkers were a notoriously dangerous creature if you were a magi. The things fed on magic, and being this drained on resources and with Maggot out of commission, I wasn’t going to be able to crack this particular nut with magic.

I growled, “You forgot “decent shot”.”

I have never been one for technology. I’ve always thought it to be a cute, little fad. A crutch to help the mundane, magic-less masses keep pace with those of us with actual power and ability. Guns, however, were uniquely destructive, and perhaps the only useful thing made in technology’s era. I always kept one strapped to my thigh, in case I couldn’t trust the reliability of my magic; they were useful in a pinch.

This was a pinch.

I fired at one of the felstalkers, feeling the thunderous horse-kick of the recoil of the high caliber pistol shudder down my forearm. The bullet pierced through the air and through the creature’s neck, exiting the other side with a spray of sand and blood as the thing slumped mid-charge and toppled over itself, struggling to breathe.

The other thing continued to charge, and I levied my second shot at it, gritting my teeth and bracing for the recoil,  and fired.

Bang.

The bullet slogged, spinning out of its rifling, as if it had to excavate through the air. There was a haze of time around it, and I could hear the ephemeral ticking of clocks.

My impostor’s hand was outstretched, claws twisting counter-clockwise against an ethereal golden time piece, smirking with my particular brand of smug self-satisfaction as he watched me.

I guess I could see why some people might find it irritating.

I drew in a deep breath and narrowed my eyes, turning this time to fire at him. At me. Right at that smug grin. My smug grin. I’m sure a therapist could find layers here.

My finger squeezed tight on the trigger and I braced, only to find no recoil. Everything became warbled and distant, the borders of my vision danced and undulated like haze hitting desert sand.

I saw his other hand extended towards me, now, turning against another golden timepiece, as I heard the sound of gears unwinding, the tick-tock of time slowing down around me, to a crawl.

I heard my first shot cut through the air and hit the sand, and heard the hungry growls of the felstalker and Maggot’s pained scream.

Other Me slowly sauntered forward towards me, his claws clenching in a fist as he maintained his spell, using his now-free hand to pluck the gun from my hand and toss it aside, “The tool of a thug, not a sorcerer.”

My personal temporal cosm as it was, when he turned my head it felt like whiplash, like he had snapped my neck at a hundred miles an hour, and I could feel my spine dislocate. I could feel sinew snapping. I roared internally as I tried to keep the white light of pain at the edges of my vision at bay.

He gestured with his hand towards Maggot, reality opening up to a golden portal of swirling sand behind her as she tried and failed to conjure her magic to fight off the felstalker, that purple plasma sloughing off her hands as it lost its cohesion, falling to the sand in motes of harmless twilight.

He spoke to me, his voice harsh, disdainful, disgusted, “Arrogant. Amateurish. Weak. To know you are a reflection of me is a shameful thing. I will rectify this.”

You better believe I had a real fucking zinger to fire back at him. It was perfect, cutting, it would have wounded his ego beyond repair, but my jaw was frozen in tension and time. Oh, well.

He let go of my jaw and idly gestured with his hand, a wisp of green flame following his claws as that same fire filled the eyes of the felstalkers at his heels.

He made his way to Maggot, who held her beast’s jaws at bay with hands starved for mana, her claws digging at its flesh. The thing’s tentacles lashed and whipped at her skin, leaving necrotic, bruised flesh where it drained her power and life force. My impostor’s kick was swift to her jaw, and I saw consciousness fade from her as her eyes fluttered closed. The creature’s jaw closed around the back of her robes and dragged her through the portal, which Other Me closed behind it before turning back to me.

He walked with a purpose, no saunter in his step in victory, and patted me down, tossing away the magical bric-a-brac he found on my helpless person. I watched him study each trinket, each tool with a keen eye before he grunted in apparent satisfaction at having found nothing of note, and wrenched my head back to face the demons that he had set on me.

They were ravenous, their tentacles lashing out at me, eager to feast on me since they had been summoned. Their teeth sank into my flesh as they tore chunks away, devouring what magic and life force was present in them. There was certainly more former than the latter, and I went dizzy with pain and fatigue. What fight I had was kept restrained by temporal paralysis, and as more and more magic left me, I felt my hold on consciousness slip further and further. I watched, helpless and silent, as my limbs grew desiccated, gaunt, and gangrenous, decay settling in as the necromantic power that animated me was devoured, as the bond my soul had with its host was deteriorated.

My vision became grey and out of focus before it left me entirely, and all I experienced was a slow, dull pain as the last remnants of sensation, of being devoured alive while my impostor watched me, faded into nothing…

… and then it call came back to me.

Deserts, forests, sky, sea, wastes, and cities rushed by me in a noisy blur. Heat and cold, magic and pain, smells, sights, noises, textures. They attacked every one of my senses relentlessly in a garbled, cacophonous blast of roaring, vivid noise, as my soul was violently and inexorably pulled out of my body by my contingency spell, skirting any judgment or sojourn into the Shadowlands or the Maw, careening into my next specially prepared host.

Like a phylactery, without all the leg-loss that comes from lichdom.

I screamed in a voice I didn’t recognize. My arms and legs kicked and shot out in spasm, the corruption of my soul settling into the prepared corpse that had been in a gentle repose. Inky black power coursed through my new veins and bulged them out against my new skin, writhing underneath it. Claws burst through my finger tips in a spray of blood as I fell from the slab I’d been laid upon, and they scratched at the dank stone beneath me. My back arched in another violent, wrenching spasm as my spine crackled and adjusted itself under the skin.

I shrieked at the top of my lungs, spittle flew from my lips, and I could feel power and rage flowing through me as my soul re-settled and my new host found my magic.

I screamed her name.

The stone cracked beneath me, the walls of the cavern shook, my cadre of spirits had manifested beside me and wailed in anguish, forced to manifest by my rage. Each of the angry wraiths shrieked in pain, their noses and ears dripping with ectoplasm as they fell to their knees. Even the spirit of my father, the strongest of them, buckled and clawed at his own ears.

My throat was on fire, but I screamed until no sound came out, and I scratched at the stone and slammed my fists into it until my my bones cracked and my skin smeared the ground with green ichorous blood.

I lost.

I lost her.

Maggot… Margaret...

No.

Real rage, I have found, is not a fire that burns within you.

It is a harsh cold that freezes your veins. It’s a thing which crystallizes your blood, it makes it jagged and sharp, it makes you feel hollow and hateful.

But it motivates you.

When I stood, it was on legs I’d never walked on before. When I looked at my face in the mirror I kept beside my hosts, it was one I didn’t recognize, but that could be changed. My eyes, too, looked unfamiliar. They were dire, in a way I’d not seen myself, until just some time ago on the beach.

SIMPLE EDITS: just 5$

change of skin tone, removing small blemishes, change of eye color. Price stays the same up until you hit the next level.

ADD INS: 15$

Adding in scarring, a different background, or facial hair. Will take up to a few days longer, but I promise quality. If you want a add in WITH anything stated in the SIMPLE EDITS section, the prices combine to 20$

Maggot had always been exceptionally good at illusions and subversive magic, and subsequently, had become adept at hiding things, including herself, enough that even I had difficulty pinpointing her exact location, even as intrinsically linked as our magic was. If Maggot didn’t want something found, you weren’t going to find it.

Unless you were me. Have I mentioned before how good I am at magic?

It took me a few days, to gather the requisite reagents to track her: a few personal items of hers, a perfect, polished sphere of volcanic glass, the eye of an observer, the blood of an eagle, and an intimate knowledge of the shape of her soul. I had to move carefully, as I’d been hunkered down in one of my emergency hovels where I stored caches of resources, just in case something like this had ever happened. I made sure I was warded up to the tits, and for good measure, went over the obscuring and anti-scrying enchantments on my robes and cloak.

I made a point of watching her few a few days, just to be careful.

I had tracked her down to a small shack in the Wetlands that, almost comically, survived the flooding in the area to sit lonesomely on top of a small hill near its flooded-out farmstead. Outside, crumpled slightly against the door-frame, was a man, in what should diplomatically be described as “rags”, going for broke with a bottle of what had to be moonshine.

I approached at a walking pace, frost spreading out from each footstep as I walked over the surface of the water, crackling and crunching. The air around me shimmered, undulated, really, as if it were liquid, as I shrouded myself in magic, unseen outside of my little bubble of invisibility.

Well, unseen to the most things, I suppose. The raggedy man took notice of me almost immediately, or rather, of my spell-work, then of me. I can’t say my ego wasn’t just a little wounded to have been spotted so easily.

With my own senses heightened by a bit of subtle arcana, I saw him, as well.

He was hardly crumpled, in fact he was standing quite straight, his hands held in front of waist, letting his staff rest in the crook of his shoulder. An unadorned thing, made of solid wood, gnarled and knotted at one end, like an over-sized shillelagh, and it thrummed with a very solid-feeling arcana. It seemed a reflection of the man, himself, as he, too, was a thing seemingly made of solid oak and just as wide, a knotted and gnarled expression as he onced me over. He was dressed in rustic brown robes covered in reagent pouches that suggested not only the man traveled, but that he wanted to be prepared when he did.

I can’t imagine what sort of problem he might have had with me, hood up, shit-eating smile, dressed in my skulls and felcloth. I was wearing my most professional attire. After all, someone had tried to capture me just a few days ago.

“Name?”

It had come out more like “Noime” through his thick low-born Gilnean accent, buried by a natural gravel, and slightly muffled by a haze of auditory magic that disguised his words as drunken mumbling.

“‘Bones’.” I said, my own little illusion disguising my words as a susurrus of whispers.

“Password?” His eyes settled on me, and his shoulders squared a bit more, and he suddenly gave off the impression of being even more solid than he had been before.

Tracking Maggot down had also brought me to the attention of an idle fancy of hers. She seemed to frequent a speakeasy for illusionists and telemancers.

It was some extra-dimensional space, created by some gnomish archmage, Sprockett Weirdingway. Its entrance shifted weekly, and only by invitation did you get a location and a password. There were little clues in the area that guided you to the entrance, signs you’d miss if you weren’t looking for them, because that’s how they were designed. You couldn’t be seen entering or heard entering, and they heavily encouraged the use of pseudonyms.

Illusionists, some of them, were a… flamboyant and quirky lot.

My name, not to speak too highly of myself, has some clout in certain circles of spellcasters, and a few well-placed favors got me on the list with only a few soured expressions. It also got me a word...

“Hallucination.” I said to the bouncer.

He nodded to the door and pushed it open with the rusty squeal of old hinges, and I walked through the imperceptible veil of a disguised portal, and found myself in a small hallway, below a sign made of brilliant, animated mage-light, which wrote itself again and again that had been enchanted to be understood by anyone that read it.

“Sprockett’s Pocket.

Leave your disbelief at the door.”

Cute.

Inside, the room was smoky, but not in the way you’d expect a bar to be smoky.

Magic wafted in the air, smelling like bubblegum and sugar, like Pilgrim’s Bounty Turkey, like the Dun Morogh Mountains, like the muddy rain of Stranglethorn, and it hung like scintillating glitter on the floor and at the ceiling, occasionally even wafting its way over as if it had a mind of its own.

Hookahs puffed with impossible colors and smells, candy-colored beers and whiskeys were poured into strangely shaped glasses. It was a celebration of the truest definition of the word “weird”, open to anyone regardless of faction, so long as you had a spark of eccentricity and magic in you. It was admirable, in its way. Amusing, in a harmless, but also mildly irritating way. I could see how someone might get a kick out of it.

Confidence tricksters, illusionists, archmages, telemancers, their guests, they all enjoyed themselves, sat comfortably in their booths, at their tables. Some talked shop, academia and application and theory, hustles and cons. I don’t know why they needed a bouncer, there was enough magic in here that no one was going to start real trouble, not even me. Though, I suppose it also begs the question of how you get to be a bouncer in a place like this.

I made my way to the bar, sat myself down on a stool that could be turned to have its back to a wall and its eye on the entrance and the stage. A gnome in a clean-pressed white suit and a black silk vest and bow-tie hovered over on a shimmering cloud of magic to better reach over the bar. He idly flicked the spiral of his curled, greased mustache, not seeming to take the character of my outfit into consideration, “What can I do you for, stranger? Can I offer you our signature cocktail, the Fig-mint Julep?”

I gave him the flattest look I could, because I had never had a more annoying question asked of me, even in my years as a teacher. It was an appalling combination of words.

“Bourbon. Neat.”

He smiled, bursting with a sickening amount of cheer, his voice the matured squeak of a gnomish professional, “Rightio, boss-man! Comin’ right up.”

He poured my drink and the stage lights came up while the room lights went down, and the ambience of the room changed.

Literally.

There was a sweep of magic across the floors, walls, and ceiling, a shimmering wave, where all of the more vivid colors became more neutral and muted. The lights became warmer, the tables became dark wood and candle-lit, and the smells that hung in the air became more evocative of a nightclub. Tobacco, whiskey, cheap cologne. And there, on the previously empty stage, there was a piano.

From the wings, a woman walked out towards it, and sat down to some applause. Her dress was a deep purple, rich like midnight. A modest, but slinky affair that suited her slender, petite frame. Her skin was somewhere halfway between pallid white and ashen grey, and diamonds twinkled at her ears just under her wintry teal bob-cut.

I watched her closely, taking a sip of my drink, back to the wall.

When the applause settled, Maggot started to play, and my mind drifted.

She had come such a long way, in life, in her unlife, having been wasting away under the bland, traditionalist, institutional tutelage of the magi of the newly-reconstructed Stormwind. Learning formulaic, predictable magic from formulaic, predictable people, when she had the potential for so much more. She had within her, this incredible spark of creativity and innovation, this seed of natural power and this proclivity for magic I could only have dreamed of having when I was her age.

If you were one of the fools who believed in fate, or destiny, then you could smell it on her. It dripped off of her so tangibly, she exuded potential so effortlessly, it could breed contempt if you were so inclined to envy.

If you were one of the fools who believed in karma, then she must have done something terrible to have had the misfortune to have caught my attention. For having had the misfortune of having my love and my affection inflicted on her.

I recruited her, for the Cult of the Damned.

I had other prospects, sure, we weren’t so choosy in our infancy as an organization; if you had a spark of magic and a chip on your shoulder, we’d hand you our pamphlet in a dark alley. Sometimes over “free drinks” at the Blue Recluse, in a back corner, in hushed tones.

But she. She. She was different for me. It was more personal. I visited her often, in her tiny little boarding room in the Mage’s district, with it’s out-of-tune piano she had clearly gotten second-hand, and its stacks of thrift-shop grimoires and encyclopedias and treatises.

That piano was what first caught my attention. It was a nocturne, in C-sharp minor, exquisitely evocative of the night. I watched her play, by her own mage-light. I watched her study. I saw her frustration in such tedious magic, and so I left breadcrumbs of magic at her window sill. Carefully placed them on top of those stacks, like books she’d somehow forgotten she’d picked up. Books she would be too curious not to read, too fascinated by to put down. My own tomes, my first explorations of the alternative arcane.

After that, It was only a matter of time before she’d finally discovered me, and invited me in.

After that, it was only a matter of time before we’d fallen in a swift and poisonous love.

The former a mistake, the latter a ruinous one.

I whisked her away, to the Scholomance. Under my personal tutelage (or torture, some might say, but they’re both T-words, aren’t they?) she suffered, but she learned. Trial by fire, trial by pain, trial by blood, she was tested, and each time she survived, scraped and bruised, but alive and stronger.

I bred that sort of contemptuous, vicious, and often violent envy in her peers, so she would know to always be on guard, to always have a plan to kill everyone you meet, to always have an exit strategy.

I taught her my most personal rituals, my most innovative magics, I honed her opinions into sharp ideals. I honed her into something dangerous.

I taught her my contingency spell once I’d mastered it, what would rip her spirit from her body and inexorably infuse it into its next prepared host; lichdom by another name. I was even the one who slit her throat once she’d finally learned it, to test if she’d done it right.

Somewhere along the way, I’d pushed her too hard.

Perhaps it’s just what undeath does, even our own brand of it, but she had cracked somewhere, and a haze crept in through those cracks. Over the years, her mind slipped, her thoughts became addled and simple. And at first, it had repulsed me.

She had finally failed me, her mind collapsed under the weight of the power I offered her. She was too weak.

I tried to abandon her, but she found me. She always would. Because she had loved me, in spite of my violent affection, and I loved her, in the only way I could, and it had softened me.

We reconciled, in the only way we could. I dedicated myself to sealing up the fractures within her psyche, to undo some of that damage, in the only way I could.

And then, we parted. She wasn’t my student any longer. She wasn’t my victim any longer. She wasn’t my client any longer. She was “Maggot”, Margaret Anastaph, a spark of magic that not even I could tarnish or snuff out.

It is one of my hardest-admitted secrets, something unutterable to a single other soul other than her; that she is my greatest regret, and likewise my greatest triumph. She is a knot that exists within me, both as perverse, undying affection in my heart and a deep, burning shame in my gut that twists and tightens around both whenever I see her. She, for me, is a weakness that I spitefully and adoringly abide, and one day, she might very well be the lapse in judgment, the hesitation in thought or action that will destroy me.

But fuck me, if I wasn’t excited to see her, again. Fuck me, if I wasn’t standing there in Stormwind again, hearing her play the piano all over again.

The song was different, the playing still exquisite.

It was some goblin jazz standard. I wasn’t familiar. It wasn’t really my thing. But it is impossible to deny talent when you experience it.

My mind came back into focus on the final few notes, an effortless little lick as her voice drifted away into the outro and the applause. She offered a thank you, and introduced the next singer, some human with a magic guitar. He looked like some young, soft, bleeding heart and he sang about something tragic. I probably wasn’t wrong. It was all background noise for me as I watched Maggot at the other end of the bar.

She was getting a few attagirls and compliments, which she took with a face full of her smile. There was almost a glow. I rarely saw her so fulfilled and happy. Maybe that says something about us.

She had ordered wine, and she seemed to enjoy the sad guitar boy on the stage.

I skulked through the people, until I was next to her, approaching from her blind-side, “It’s a bit pedestrian, isn’t it? Playing that goblin noise to a smoky room?”

She snorted, in a perfunctory sort of way, and didn’t turn to face me, just shrugging a slightly bare shoulder, with just a small patch of decay, “I like it just fine. We don’t all have to bleed goats and read old books to pass the time, Bones. A little modernity wouldn’t kill you,” she turned her head to look over her shoulder at me, seemingly unamused, “And failing to embrace it just might.”

She rolled her eyes at me, and turned back to the stage, “I was wondering when you’d show up. Your scrying isn’t as subtle as you think. It’s like the magical equivalent of leering, you make a girl feel indecent.” She paused on a thought, “I hope you didn’t cause too much trouble getting in here, and I really hope you didn’t use my name to do it.”

I smirked, “Oh, babycakes, I’d never shit where you eat. I got in here using my own favors.”

I didn’t see it, but I could feel the small scrunch of her nose, “Charming as ever, love.”

She rummaged around in a small handbag that matched the midnight purple of her dress. She retrieved a slender cigarette, with the same tarry, wilted blend of herbs I used, and let it hang from her lips as she snapped the silver clasp of her handbag shut. I slithered in, an arm around her shoulder, a mote of fel fire conjured at the tip of my finger for her. Slick as slime.

“We need to talk.” I could smell her perfume, it was different than I remembered. This was subtler than what she usually wore. I distinctly smelled highland jasmines.

Her eyes went to the flicker of fel flame, and she blew it out, before conjuring a flame of her own, tenebrous and purple, lighting the end of it and taking a long pull of her cigarette, “Isn’t that what we’re doing, now?” Her shoulder pushed my arm away.

My arm found it’s place at my side, “This is important, for both of us.”

She turned her head, and breathed a plume of coal-black smoke into my face, humming slightly with a strange mixture of derision and mild amusement, “Isn’t it just like you to decide what’s important for the both of us, when that really seems like it’d be a joint decision. What is it, then?”

I huffed just slightly. My ego bristled, “Not here. Somewhere private. You have somewhere secure?”

Her eyes went wide, in a mild mockery, and took another relaxed puff of her cigarette, idly tapping away a bit of ash into an ashtray that seemingly faded into view out of nowhere, “Always so dramatic, Bonesy. Clandestine meetings, secret lairs. You really ought to just enjoy your drink, because I’m going to enjoy mine before I go anywhere. You really overestimate how many people are paying attention to you at any given time.”

I leant in, and she leant in to meet me with a feigned intrigue, my voice a harsh whisper, “I was attacked, Maggot. By someone who knew exactly where I was going to be, and exactly what I was going to throw at them.”

She laughed. It wasn’t as musical a sound as you’d expect from someone who’d just performed what she’d performed, it was a cackle, a single cackle, and she didn’t seem to share my conspiratorial tone, “Have you considered that you’re not quite as inscrutable and mysterious as you think?”

My ego bristled again, and I popped the knuckles in my hand at my side, “They used your magic to hold me. Your binding spells, your anti-magic. It reeked of your power, there. You’re involved in this, Maggot.”

She nodded slowly, humming with affirmation as she took another sip of her wine, “Mmm. Mmhm, yes, that does all seem very intriguing, quite the mystery, I can see why you might be on edge. You seem very affected, I almost feel like I should be jealous.”

My ego’s eyes dilated, its tail came up, and it pounced. My hand found her arm, and squeezed, hard, turning her to face me, “This isn’t a silly game, or a passing threat, Maggot. We need to talk.”

Her eyes slowly moved down from my eyes to my hand, and just as slowly, they returned. The murky yellow of her eyes began to bubble with molten purple fire, until a few of those flames licked over her mascara-thickened eyelashes, “Take your hand off of me, before I make it the last part of you left.”

I did.

The bartender was watching us, but Maggot seemed to alleviate his concern with an irritated head-shake and a deep breath out and a deep drink in. She finished the glass, and when she looked back at me, her eyes had returned to their usual yellow, her tone darker and more ironclad, “I am not some doe-eyed girl nor am I your eager student, Bones. I don’t need your school of hard knocks bullshit, anymore. I can assure you, I know the implications and the severity of the situation. If it helps, you should know that you have been the furthest thing from my mind since I left. If I wanted to capture you, I certainly wouldn’t hire someone else to do it.”

She looked at the bottom of her wine glass, seeming to contemplate something, before she turned to me with an exasperated sigh, “Come with me. We’ll go out the back.”

She left two gold coins on the counter and smiled pleasantly, before ushering me backstage like an embarrassing secret she wanted kept hidden.

The backstage had a few of the performers, sniffing dusts and smoking hookahs, a few magi working on the ambience and house lights, their hands glowing with illusory power. Maggot nodded to some of them, and some of them nodded back with a quiet understanding that there weren’t any questions to be asked.

The very back of the building was dark, except for a red mage-light sign that said “EXIT”, floating above a door. animated mops, brooms, buckets, and rags twitched patiently and waited in a small storage closet for closing time, to do what they’d been animated to do. Maggot took a breath in front of the door, waved her hand, and opened it wide, grey light pouring into the dark corridor along with the smell of salt and sea air.

The winds and the clouds and the white sand made me think it was somewhere on the coast of Gilneas, and as I stepped through the door with her, I could hear the cry of gulls off in the distance, as well as the tide.

As Maggot stepped through, she was no longer in that evening gown, or rather, it was as if that evening gown just wasn’t an evening gown anymore. Its fabric shifted and moved, loosened around her, until they resembled the more practical purple robes I’d known her to wear. That sickly sweet perfume I’d always known her to wear wafted into my nose. Her diamond earrings faded away, as did her make-up. Her bob-cut seemed less treated, less conditioned. She had taken off her shoes, as well, and held them in one hand, heels that had become flatter, with a heel that still seemed uncomfortable for the sand. She stood with the wind whipping her robes, watching me find my beach legs, all black robes on a bright, white beach.

“You look ridiculous. If you’re trying to be subtle and travel unnoticed, why do you insist on dressing like the poster-child for a correspondence school for evil wizards.”

I pulled back my hood, letting my mohawk spring into place, “Said the woman with sixteen pounds of shiny rocks on either ear and a dress that looked like it was made out of a coffin-lining.”

She rolled her eyes, again, and took a puff from her cigarette, the smoke of it swiftly blown away by the breeze, “We both know you wouldn’t know class even if it strangled you and shouted it’s name at you.” She had begun to idly trace a shape in the sand with her toe.

I recognized the symbol, and started tracing something similar with my own boot, the two drawings meeting together in an intricate pairing.

And then the symbols glowed, and the sound of the ocean and the gulls and the wind became dull and distant, fuzzy. An illusion, just like the bouncer had used, just like I had used, dampening the sound of our conversation.

“I assume you knew it wasn’t me, Jack.” She looked up from the glowing sigils with a soft smile at the spell-work, before the smile lessened slightly as our eyes met.

Jack. My name.

She could destroy me if she wanted to. She had every reason to. I probably wouldn’t be able to stop her.

When she used my name, It made my gut twist a little more, “I’m sorry, Margaret… for the arm.”

She idly dismissed my apology with the roll of her hand, taking another puff of her cigarette, “So, what’s your plan? You’ve always got a plan. Plans within plans within plans.” She said it dismissively, a tired line repeated ad nauseum.

I looked off towards the horizon, “I need to find out who this is. I was hoping we could work together. Share resources, since we’re in this together. If they were able to fake your magical signature and know my game-plan, than it has to be someone we both knew. Someone from the Scholomance, maybe. Blackcroft?”

Margaret shook her head, and took a step closer to me idly, “No, Percival’s not the type, he cares more about your books than he cares about you,” she eyed me up and down, “Much to your pride’s dismay, I’m sure. Mercenaries are certainly his style, though. Someone from the faculty?”

I shrugged, “I didn’t keep a lot of friends, you know that.”

She hummed, less thoughtful and more in confirmation, “You’re bad at making friends, let alone keeping them.”

She offered me her cigarette, which I took, dragging on it enough to make the purple flame flare, “I think you’re focusing too much on the negative. I’m bad at making friends, but I’m very good at making enemies.”

She chuckled slightly.

I looked down at her, taking another puff, “I think you look best like this.”

She looked up at me. There was affection, there. Love, probably (Loathe is another “L” word). But there was a sort of pity, there, too. It was a withering look, and it almost winded me when she kissed my cheek and plucked the cigarette from my lips to drag on herself, “I know you do.”

She flicked the cigarette off into the oncoming tide, and squared herself a bit, “I guess first things first, we need to get somewhere secure. I have a place.”

I grinned, “And you give me shit for secret lairs?”

She snorted, punching my chest lightly, “I have a house with wards, not a labyrinth of trapped corridors and a militia of thralls. Sorry to hear about the Dragon’s Crotch, and the mountain lair, by the way.”

I sighed. The Dragon’s Crotch was a dive bar that I had ran in the Undercity, before it had been salted, scorched, and plagued, at least. I had good memories.

We walked, together, on the beach, after breaking the temporary sigils in the sand.

I shrugged, “Lairs are never permanent. Extended use is just an upside.”

She feigned mystery with a ghoulish “Oooooh”, “Nothing is ever permanent. So you’ve said. A lot.”

I gave her a small shove with my shoulder, “Fuck off. Don’t pretend you listen to me.”

“Hm? What?” She feigned.

I put my arm around her, and this time she leaned into me.

“Did you get the package I sent you? The mirror?” I asked her, after a long moment of hesitation.

She nodded, taking a breath in, as if bracing for a conversation she didn’t want to have, “I did.”

“If you ever need my help with it, if you need anyth--”

She exhaled that breath, “I don’t, no. Need help. Need anything.”

My gut twisted, again, and I fear she felt it standing so close. Her hand went up to my chest as we walked, and she patted it affectionately, “Come. My place isn’t far from here, I can set up a port--”

We both stopped.

It was a sixth sense. Little imperceptible cues that you picked up if you were particularly sensitive. Whether it was purely magical, or some culmination of survival instinct, paranoia, and extra-sensory ability, Margaret and I had both honed ours.

The temperature seemed to increase by just a few degrees. The wind had stopped for a moment. The taste of brimstone and fel fire soured at the back of my throat. The hair at the back of my neck stood on end. The magic in my body roiled.

Swirling green portals opened all around us, as creatures made of infernal fire and corrupted sinew and muscle pulled too tightly over bone padded and rumbled from the other side. Things screeched in the air, flapping leathery wings.

And there, across the sands in front of us, another portal opened, this one shimmering with golden electricity at its border, the ethereal winding hands of a clock spinning around at its center, bronze sand blowing out from within.

A man stepped out.

He wore drab, tattered fel cloth, covered in fetishes of bone and fangs, hanging purple amethyst, and vile green emeralds. The skull and horns of a felstalker fixed on the top of his staff, that he clutched in gnarled fingers, whose tips ended in honed points.

His skin was ashen and discolored, covered in pockmarks and burns. Veins throbbed in his neck and along his arms, coursing with green, molten power, a haze of fel bleeding from parallel scars ritualistically carved into his forearms.

His hair fell to either side of his head. dreaded, matted, and tangled.

Maggot turned to me, and then to him, in disbelief.

And with a voice that grated, harsh and full of itself, without the metallic timre of Scourge magic. With a smile that was all-too-punchable.