The Magus Chronicles

Glory's Fall

Act I 

It was dark and damp in the grave beneath the lake. The girl in the grave had not stirred for nearly ten thousand years, since the lake had been part of the ocean, and then the lake had been a true lake, and now it was little more than an oversized pond. Water waited over her head, separated by only a thin layer of dirt.

In the grave, Glory dreamed.

She was quite good at dreaming. She could walk in and out of others peoples heads, a quiet stranger in the gardens and houses and wastelands people made of their minds. She could make things in their minds. Lovely flowers, trap doors that opened under their feet, monsters to hunt them, friends to bring them home. It amused her. It was a real-not-real world.

But she had her own dreams. They were the faithful hounds that walked in the prints she left on the surface. Dreams of cities with amber-glass walls, and burning forests. Being surrounded by an army in a blue desert. A tower of obsidian. Red blood in a marble hall. A pit that disgorged monsters and yellow smoke. Of crashing stars and screaming children. Of the edge of the universe. 

And as Glory grew older and older in dreams and memories, as she cut new paths and hidey-holes to avoid her nightmares, she forgot the name of the city with the amber towers, the forest that stained her cheeks with smoke and ash, even the faces of the children who screamed.

But ten thousand and one years after she had gone into the grave, the spell - over the grave, over the lake, over the world - snapped.

Glory opened her eyes, and the water broke through into the grave.

The water of the pond puckered. A glug resounded through the clearing. The sound scattered birds in the trees, picked up a breeze to rustle through the treetops, and made the sun fall behind the tree line. The water settled, growing still.

An arm shot through the surface, hung still, and then plunged beneath. Then half a torso, a head, face gasping came above next. The body fought its way to pebbled beach and collapsed, half in half out of the water, not breathing, not moving.

Then Glory opened her eyes again.

The twilight sky, more familiar to her than her own face, stared back. She would not have recognized herself in that moment, because her face was bloody from the abuse of the whirlpool, muddy from churned sediment. But the sky she knew. She knew she was close to home, because the familiar sky told her so. She rested against that, even as new voices in her head began asking more questions.

How long were you in that grave?

Who put you down there?

What happened what happened what happened -

Something snapped in the undergrowth behind her. She reacted with muscles she didn't have,  trying to haul her stiff and fossilized body upright. She fell, scraping her hands badly against the rocks beneath her.

No one there.

She tried to think again. She hunched over her knees, closing out reality, trying to find what had happened before sleep. But she couldn't remember the faces of her friends, nor her enemies. She had her name. Her name, and everything else was looking for snapshots fallen from a shoebox. She grubbed wildly in the dark of her mind.

Blue fire.

Dead bodies.

The edge of the world.

A broken city.

Pennants over graves.

Dead eyes.

Dust and rot in the air.

A blue house between a pine and an oak.

"Glory!"

June's anguished face stood out to Glory, a single flash of a memory. A little sister screaming for help.

Glory put her trembling fingers to her lips and felt tears on her face as memories shot back and forth across her mind, louder and louder with every second. She couldn't place faces, she couldn't put anything on a time continuum. What had happened first, second, third, tenth, hundredth - 

The sky was darker with a storm that had not existed a few minutes ago. 

"I'm Glory," she said out loud, digging her hands into her face, trying to put herself back inside her body. "I'm Glory. I'm home. Nothing can hurt me here."

She got to her feet, standing for the first time in ten thousand years, although she didn't know it had been that long. Thunder bloomed in the sky above her, the collision of worlds breaking through the atmosphere. She hobbled off the path on tender feet, towards the sound of an interstate in the distance, praying that whatever had happened, it wasn't too late to fix it.