Later that night, Adah finally received another text message from Elise.
Although the governor had yet to finalize his decision, Elise was confident that tomorrow would be the tipping point. It was in his interest to appoint a replacement as fast as possible, so as to appear like he had known about Thibault’s resignation before it happened. That was probably another coercive trick Elise had thought up ahead of time. Adah had been so focused on applying pressure to Thibault, but this woman seemed to have a plan to corner everyone involved in appointing a new Secretary.
However, her plans could only accomplish so much. Apparently the governor had the same concerns about Elise’s connection to Thibault, albeit for a different reason than Adah. He was interested in protecting his own reputation. If he appointed two Secretaries in a row who ended up resigning in shame, he’d be the one to take the most heat from such a scandal. That was why he wanted to tread carefully when it came to Elise.
Considering he was the one who appointed Thibault in the first place, maybe he deserved all that heat anyway. Adah kept that thought to herself, though.
If Elise was correct in her prediction, then the only thing for Adah to do tonight was sleep. After a good night’s rest, she might wake to find herself in a whole new world. Or, at least, one with a new Secretary of Magic.
When she lay her head down on her pillow, the tendrils of sleep immediately swarmed all around her. Gone were the nights of that buzzing in her brain that forced her to pace around the agency lobby. She had plans still to concoct—perhaps more than ever before—but now that so much of what she had been working toward was coming to fruition, she could sleep soundly most nights. Rather than filling up with new ideas, her mind tended to empty itself out as soon as her body hit her mattress.
Tonight, though, she felt an echo in her head. It was that same spark from earlier, like a flash of inspiration. Yet, it wasn’t her mind that had thought of something. This flash was like a passerby, like headlights from a car driving past her window at night. Once again, the feeling left as suddenly as it arrived. As it vanished, so did Adah’s consciousness. Sleep embraced her.
This was an odd sleep.
Adah knew she was dreaming from the start. She stepped out of the darkness of sleep and into this dreamworld much like walking into daylight after sitting in a dark movie theater. Despite knowing everything she saw before her was a dream, the illusion didn’t break.
A lucid dream, was it?
Adah was in the woods. The Brume Forest, not far from Ketzia’s cabin. She had no way of knowing for sure, being that all the trees around her looked identical, but her dream told her that was where she was. Thus, it must be so.
And if she was here, she must be meant to reach the cabin. So, she began to walk.
Adah looked up at the sky, hoping to spot the sun and help herself navigate the woods. Though, it wasn’t like knew what direction Ketzia’s cabin would be in from her current position, and she wasn’t sure she knew how to orient herself based on the sun’s position anyway.
Not that it mattered.
The sky was a pale blue, which must have meant it was daytime, but it was filled with black stars. They speckled the sky like a dash of pepper and in a greater quantity than Adah had seen on even the clearest of nights. The sun, however, was nowhere to be found.
Without any means to even pretend like she knew where she was going, Adah continued to walk in the direction she had faced when she first arrived in this dream. Perhaps there was some meaning behind how she’d entered this world, so why not see where her feet led her?
More likely than not, she’d forget everything that happened here the moment her alarm woke her up in the morning.
Adah’s legs moved without effort, and the trees surrounding her seemed to pass by her on their own, like one of those endlessly looping backdrops from an old TV show. She could detect no difference in one segment of the forest to the next. She saw the same trees over and over, stepped over the same exposed root over and over, and made no progress no matter how far she traveled.
Thinking perhaps that was a sign she had chosen the wrong direction to travel, Adah turned to her left and proceeded down a different path. This time, she did not walk for very long before encountering a new scene.
Another person was in these woods.
The person walked toward Adah and, as they came closer, she recognized them clearly. This person wore an old, frilly dress, the skirt of which was tattered to shreds. Though its color had turned to gray and its fabric was torn, Adah knew this to be the classic outfit of Magical Pureheart Chu. If Adah had any doubt, the figure’s oversized twintails confirmed her identity. This was her idol, the magical girl who had sent her down her own path in life.
Pureheart made no gesture or noise as she approached. With the surprise of seeing her idol in such an odd dream, Adah came to a halt. She waited for Pureheart to walk closer on her own. As she waited, she noticed something else strange about the magical girl’s appearance.
A crown grew out of Pureheart’s head. At least, something that looked like a crown did. A half dozen spikes poked out from the magical girl’s head, looking like the crenelations of the tiara Adah had worn for Lina’s costume. With each step Pureheart took forward, another spike revealed itself until soon the protrusions didn’t resemble a crown at all. Her head had turned into something like a pufferfish, and those spikes jutted out farther and farther like the pufferfish’s spines.
Pureheart opened her mouth, then an echoing shriek pierced Adah’s ears. The sound bounced between the trees and seemed to attack Adah from all directions. She wanted to cover her ears, but sensed a greater danger required her attention first.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Upon seeing the spikes protruding from Pureheart’s skull glow, Adah dove to the forest floor. She had no time for a graceful dodge, so her forearms ended up digging into the dirt and scraping against the rocks and roots buried within the ground. Even though she knew this to be a dream, she felt every bite of pain as her skin broke apart.
If she could feel pain, dodging had been a wise decision.
A volley of spikes shot out from Pureheart’s head. From what Adah could see from her spot on the ground, the projectiles took the form of the radiant arrows Pureheart usually fired from her bow. They each traveled with a shriek of their own, which was only silenced once they stabbed into the bark of the trees all around.
Adah had saved herself from this first volley, but the gray Pureheart showed no signs of stopping her assault. More arrows poked through the magical girl’s scalp to replace those she had fired, and the remaining fully grown arrows glowed once more. Pureheart looked directly at Adah, who scrambled to push herself upright and find better cover.
Adah’s reactions were slow. Maybe it was the lethargy of existing in a dreamworld, or maybe her mind had been so preoccupied by this strange corruption of Pureheart’s image. Whatever the reason, she could not dodge the magical girl’s next strike.
But a second figure—or pair of figures—entered Adah’s view. Another familiar face, Ekki’s this time, had shown up in this dream. The handsome knight rode toward Adah atop a winged horse, weaving between trees at a blistering pace. He swooped in, putting himself between Adah and Pureheart, and held out his right arm as if it was a shield.
In this dream, Ekki’s human arm was still missing. Yet, it was replaced not by the foggy prosthetic he had conjured in real life, but by a thick serpent’s neck and head. The serpent was nearly as thick as the nearby trees, and might provide a reasonable defense against Pureheart’s arrows.
Pureheart shrieked again, putting that theory to the test.
The first couple of arrows that struck Ekki’s arm stuck in the serpent’s flesh and ended their flight there, but the subsequent attacks that pierced his arm damaged it more and more. The final arrow from this volley sliced clean through the weakened serpent, severing it entirely and piercing into Ekki’s shoulder. The boy grimaced, but held himself steady atop his steed.
While blood leaked from the fresh wound in his shoulder with no sign of stopping, his severed serpent arm was already regenerating. Two new heads slithered out from the stump, but these heads looked different from the snake that had been there before. Far different—they were human heads. The first to coagulate into a recognizable shape from the slimy chunks of serpent flesh had the appearance of Iris, and the second took on the form of Clair. Their heads extended out attached to the ends of two scaly snake bodies.
Ekki must have been emboldened by the arrival of his allies, for he grunted through the pain in his shoulder and urged his steed toward Pureheart. The magical girl primed another volley of attacks, but could not launch it before Ekki landed an attack of his own.
More specifically, the two heads growing from his arm attacked. The heads of Iris and Clair bit into Pureheart’s arms, holding each between their teeth and using them as levers with which to pin Pureheart to the forest floor. Ekki and his allies had subdued Pureheart in part, but could not stop her from finally firing off her arrows once more. From this grounded angle, however, the projectiles were largely ineffective, with most thumping against trees or shooting pointlessly into the sky.
Now that Pureheart had been pinned down, Adah suddenly found herself standing over her idol. She didn’t remember moving away from the tree she had used for cover, but then again, this was a dream.
Adah also didn’t remember conjuring her scythe. The weapon’s blade had already extended from its handle, just as it always did when it was time to feed on a Cruelty’s core.
Adah looked down at Pureheart. There was no light in her eyes, and the arrowhead protrusions from her scalp—still sheathed in stretchy skin—were grotesque, but she was obviously a human.
Still, Adah knew what she had to do. Her dream told her so. Thus, it must be so.
Adah swung her scythe’s blade into Pureheart’s chest. The smoky blade made a slick metallic sound as it cut into the magical girl’s body, and Pureheart unleashed another deafening shriek. Red blood gushed out of the wound Adah had carved into the woman’s body. Instead of draining the essence from Pureheart like it would for any Cruelty, the scythe’s blade acted as any normal weapon would. It cut and sliced and stabbed, and that was the extent of its power. There was no magic at Adah’s disposal here.
On reaction, Adah swung into Pureheart’s chest again. She just wanted to stop the shrieking, to put the magical girl out of her misery. To end this nightmare. She swung over and over, as if digging a hole through Pureheart’s chest, but the shrieks would not stop. They echoed all around Adah. Inside of her. Adah’s hands were covered in Pureheart’s blood, and some had even splattered into her mouth. She felt it foam up as she pressed her tongue against her teeth.
Finally, in desperation, Adah swung for Pureheart’s neck. The scythe’s blade sliced through without resistance. Pureheart’s head rolled off somewhere behind Adah.
For a moment, there was silence.
Then the shrieking returned.
Louder than ever, and multiplied. The screams came not from one mouth, but from hundreds. Adah looked behind herself to see if, somehow, Pureheart was screeching even as her head rolled away.
It wasn’t Pureheart’s voice Adah was hearing. It was Rika’s. And Ami’s. And Emi’s. And Grace’s and Seb’s and Michel’s and both her mother’s and her father’s.
The trees all around her—what had surely been trees—had all turned to the shape of humans. Atop every trunk—every body—was the head of a human. Many of them were people she knew. Lina and her friends were there, as were all the magical girls of the coalition teams, the young boys Ami had played tag with, the fans she had taken photos with at the carnival, and dozens more faces Adah did not recognize. Some of them held up penlights like branches, while other simply stretched out their arms with tensed fingers.
All of them, though, had been pierced by Pureheart’s attacks.
The arrows that had stuck in the bark of all those trees were now lodged in the chests of all those people. They all bled, pouring out in red rivers that rushed toward Adah’s feet. In a matter of seconds, their blood had pooled up to her ankles. Pureheart’s head floated atop the scarlet pond, drifting around Adah like a grisly beach ball.
The sea of blood rose ever higher, until Adah had to crane her neck up to avoid drowning. But even that soon proved futile. The blood swallowed her and some force like a whirlpool sucked her down.
Adah could still see while submerged. The whole world was dyed in a tint of red, except for the hundreds of impaled bodies all around her. Those were pure white.
Adah squeezed her eyes tight.
When she opened them again, the world was dark. Dark like night.
She rolled her head to the side. A poster of Pureheart greeted her, pinned to her bedroom wall.
Looking around, she was back in her room. The thin shirt she’d thrown on before bed was soaked through with sweat, all down the front and under her arms, like she’d broken a fever. The top of her jaw and her thighs felt sore, as if they’d both been clenched all night.
Her dream had ended.
Adah got up and walked to the light switch near her bedroom door. She flicked it on and sat down on the floor with her back against the door.
Pureheart smiled down on her.
“Just my imagination,” Adah whispered.