Unwound: A Spindle Ending Fix-Fic

It was on the steps of the Council Hall that the solution crystallized in my mind, bright and pure.

 

Reader, you will no doubt have heard that my so-called solution was to walk into danger trusting in the plans of my companions and the possibility of later rescue, and to do nothing effectively in the furtherance of the plans those males had enacted than to briefly defend them; agency, as it will, entirely out of my hands.

 

My eldest daughter has demanded that I publish my account, on behalf of her own aspirations and as ammunition in same. For ultimately, while true that it was the enchanter Luck who armed me with the knowledge I needed with typically absent-minded-seeming foresight, it was my parents who orchestrated the matter, and myself out of the four of us who solved the riddle.

 

And as I write, it was on the golden steps of the Capitol Hall that the solution crystallized in my mind, when Mordion taunted me so foolishly, revealing the second-greatest error he had embraced in his plan: Luck’s presence, an act of supreme arrogance whose only purpose was gloating.

 

The initial moments and exchanges of that fateful day were accurately enough recorded in the staff annals; Onepiece seemingly shooting out magic at random, the banter between myself and Mordion after Luck passed guardianship to the Council, the cut direct which so affected pretty little Melissa. It was Mordion’s response to Luck’s declaration that he was under arrest when the truth diverges from the record; for as he drew on the contract and the magic in it, the recording spells failed and the staff, ignored and unpowered, fled, and reconstructed the remainder from hearsay.

 

Though it is nearly true, what they next wrote. The greatest of the mistakes Mordion his re-use of the old curse, which by then had broken three times over; and the second and third of those he might not have been aware of, could not possibly have encompassed in the smallness of his mind, but the first I cannot imagine why he did not realize.

 

Dear reader, I shall attempt to describe the scene for you, and bring you with me through to see.

 

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“I just kept showing her,” he said dreamily. “How impossible she was. How glorious she is. I've loved her since the first time she did the impossible, since the first time she hijacked my spells.” His smile was a thing of glory, soft and precious and powerful, and I found myself smiling back at him even as my mind tracked across the room.

 

“- did just turn Poly over to the Wizard Council’s Championship. Your signature, in your blood admixed with hers, and it’s no illusion.” Mordion was talking, and I knew I should be paying attention, but he really did have the loveliest smile.

 

“Yes. About that.” His grin sharpened, and I sighed as the softness of it vanished. “I did give her over. But the relationship goes both ways, doesn’t it? The grammar is so delightfully vague, and the blood of the leader of the Council decorates that paper as well. So explicitly ambiguous. Black Velvet, when they arrive, will be very interested in the fact that Polly can contract on your behalf.”

 

“I see.” Mordion’s voice was curious, even thoughtful. “This simplifies matters, doesn’t it.” His eyes tracked around to the increasingly-uncomfortable Wizard Council, and he opened his mouth to speak.

 

“Before you propose banding together to bind both myself and Luck,” I said with swift sharpness, to an adoring, soft, grunted huh, I didn’t think of that, “I should mention that any of you who stand down now, I shall guarantee clemency for. Luck, do remind me, what is the penalty for attempting to enforce an invalid spellpaper?”

 

“A fine, I think.” He frowned, then nodded. “No less than one month’s earnings, but it’s not exactly a criminal offense in its own right. See, the purpose is to defend the institution of the spellpaper and its apparent strength -”

 

Power was rising, had risen, from every corner of the room. Possibly a quarter of the wizards had stepped back, weaving shields around themselves or hiding, but either from greed or fear of trial for treason outweighing her words even under the edict of the Arbiter, the majority of them remained committed. Melchior was doing something elegant and surpassingly subtle, subtle enough that from a glance I could hardly tell he was doing anything, but I swept a shield of impenetrable, invisible unmagic around him all the same, trusting in Luck to be feigning distraction.

 

That turned out to be only mostly true, but true enough; he blinked twice as Melissa struck, something poisonous and fierce, and it tore against Luck’s magic as he reacted a moment later than he should have. The return strike came with a strangled half-scream as I calmly studied Mordion’s piebald pool of magic, and I dismissed her from my mind as having been dealt with.

 

He was shaping it into something, face dropping into a half sneering, half intent expression. Still arrogantly confident in his victory, then, I thought to myself, and committed the first and strongest of my cards.

 

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Four things happened extremely quickly.

 

The first was that I almost died. Had I not unwoven the magic strands my spell was backblasting down fast enough, I would have been followed very swiftly by Onepiece and then Luck and a moment later Melchior, almost as swiftly by everyone present in the room, and then some unknown but certainly large portion of the population of the city, an explosion beyond measure or containment propagating through the unmagic of my shields before progressing in the more ordinary way. Magic, antimagic, and unmagic; the three combined, my unmagic woven with my and Luck’s magic pulled through the contract and into Mordion’s spell to bypass my shields and the antimagic from the metal wrapped around my wrist, a gift of my parents disguised as a trap.

 

The second was that I found out I had underestimated Mordion, and I suppose the third was that the wizards had misestimated him. He drew mercilessly upon the web of power feeding him and wove a spell, a series of spells, with incredible speed, the assembled Council staggering or in a few cases falling heavily to the ground as he pulled power from them. The explosion racing towards him first stretched further and further through expanded space between us and then vanished as he did something surpassingly clever involving multiple convolved spatial dimensions, which I admit even these years later I’ve yet to understand, something Luck claims he never bothered trying to comprehend. (Onepiece, of course, can wield it as casually as breathing. That boy.)

 

The fourth was that I finally understood, as Luck wheeled around to deal with a barrage of spells from those wizards still standing, as the man who’d put this weapon in my hands casually ignored the death at my hands that was a split second from realization, why I loved him.

 

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The battle proceeded noisily, messily, and without committing much of itself to memory other than in fleeting glimpses. The curses and spells became more vicious and more clever but slower and fewer as wizard after wizard dropped, unable to maintain both the flow of their magic to Mordion and their own onslaught. The piebald pool had fewer, thicker threads now as he pulled more from those who remained, but as Luck’s efforts grew more strained mine grew suspiciously easier, unweaving Mordion’s spells as he constructed them. He’d committed most of his magic to a simple crushing wave of force on my and Luck’s shields, something so simple I couldn’t pick it apart, and he and I dueled in a deadly game of shifting subspells.

 

Playing with Onepiece had been better training for this than anyone could have imagined, but even so I could barely keep ahead of the lethal effects, and a steady stream of magic got past me. The marble beneath us shifted but did not break open, the air became strained and soothing for a split second before Luck diverted his attention and a stream of Forest air blew in from somewhere unseen to push the soporifics out through our now-one-way-porous shields, and even Onepiece got involved picking one spell after another apart to use them to counter other incoming ones.

 

This was the second of my cards, and I had played it to match his offense with my defense. I realized my mistake too late; I was too static, he had gotten too good a look at how I was defending us, and the air was torn from my lungs as I tried to cry out to Luck too late that the shield was falling. It slid neatly through his hands, pulled through the last drop of my blood on the now-disintegrated spellpaper, and my hair snapped out in every direction, drinking the renewed barrage of spells and curses.

 

The third card. My vision went white with pain and heat as magic coursed through me, overloading my every nerve ending, our opponents sensing their opening. Luck groped for my arm, my hand, pulling the glove off, and I desperately dropped every last piece of unmagic I still had up as the blast of antimagic scythed through the air.

 

The stillness was almost oppressive. My ears rang and my vision was speckled with afterimages, but there was space to take a breath, to notice that for all that my eyes were useless I could still see magic, to feel the magic still pulsating in my hair.

 

Luck and Mordion were talking, something halfway between banter and fighting to control the sense of the room, Luck trying to get the wizards still conscious to cut their losses. There was something funny about, it, though, and I acted on impulse as I figured it out.

 

The pin had been in my hair before it went wild, and it shot through the center of Mordion’s forehead, right between the eyes, without slowing down. The silence pooled as I seized the illusion’s thread from where the spell I’d bound to the pin had bound to it, and with a yank it dissolved into the spell underneath it, a piece of nastiness designed to poison Luck after he’d been taunted into closing into a physical contest he could readily expect to win.

 

The antimagic was still coating everyone, mixing with some sort of furry stucky magical burrs - ah, Onepiece’s spell - and I looked around for Mordion right as two of him flickered into existence, doubling and redoubling, eight identical men sprinting for eight identical holes suddenly appearing in the marble.

 

My fourth card, then, and I had no need to play it myself. I strode towards the door as Melchior stepped out of the wall, clapping his hands together firmly, the eight passageways slamming closed. The eight illusions passed through the walls and flickered out nonetheless, and I punched with everything I had, all of the resentment and anger and worry and fear.

 

Pain shot through my fist, pain enough to make me scream in Mordion’s face as he dropped to his knees, retching in front of a solid marble wall that used to be a door.

 

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My speech to the nation, for all that it never passed the doors of the halls of power, is technically part of the record. It is sealed, but not expunged; I wish you luck in finding it. I cannot repeat it word for word, but I assure you, it was thorough on the venality and corrupt horrors of the Crown and my gratitude that I had woken to see it dead, that my own parents were the executioners of the villains who had sold me to a courtier for a trifle, uncaring.

 

I gave that speech with Luck on my right hand and Melchior on my left, fingers intertwined. We would need a fair bit of time to figure out how our lives together would work, but none of us were the jealous sort at heart, and the scandal from when I kissed first the one and then the other went a long way towards rendering me a political non-entity in the eyes of every faction in Parliament.

 

They had more to worry about, regardless; much of the functioning governance of the Monarchy was now crumbled dust, since we had so forcefully asserted in magical will that the Crown was dead and gone, root and branch. Luck and I traveled together for some number of years cleaning up loose ends, while Melchior went off on his own to deal with more subtle and less magical problems; we none of us would bind the others, we’d sworn, and there was always the next reunion at the Village.

 

Nothing lasts forever. Your father will have his decades yet, even if he lacks the enchanter’s lifespan. But my dear daughter, and I am sure you will forgive my whimsies in this letter I send you, he will not permit you to bind you to him or him to yourself, for all that he and I will assist your every effort, yes, not just to run for office, but the franchise and all that you intend to bring afterwards.

 

I am and remain,

With nothing but the greatest affection and support,

Your loving mother Polyhymnia