To Your New Era

"I know I promised you this, but I don't see how it'll help you."

"It's a matter of principle," Crestana argued Alis's tired grumble as she threw another well-formed punch. Slowly, over the course of the past week, one straight punch was turning into two in quick succession, then three from varying angles. Knowing to spar with a sword certainly helped; Iris could faintly see the same practiced, by-the-book movements from her sword fighting.

"And it's fun," she said, not a hint of atonement for turning their small corner of the Great library into a gymnasium. Her brand-new shutters were spryly ducking and rising over her eyes; nary a single squeak Iris had grown accustomed to with the now broken ones.

"I can't argue with that," Alis muttered as he lightly pressed against her shoulders, correcting her posture. "But I'd rather you take shooting lessons from Iris."

"Please don't give her ideas," Iris grumbled, digging her face further into her textbook. "I already told her I'd ask mum first."

"And now Mrs Hardridge can't dodge the question so easily," Crestana explained with a puffed chest, as though having accomplished something.

"What does your aunt have to say about all this, anyway?"

Alis's question put a stop to Crestana's shadowboxing. Her arms fell to her side as though all the built-up fatigue hit her at once. She slid into a seat next to Iris, slumping onto her shoulder.

"I haven't given her the details yet. She's still busy with the company, anyway. I'll tell her when things calm down."

"Thank the gods you didn't come back with an injury last time," Alis said, taking a seat himself. "Broken shutters you can pass off. Broken bones would be harder."

"I don't think I have bones…"

Iris kept her eyes on the pages even as the letters turned to soup. She was there to do homework; the other two had simply tagged along. Crestana rolled her head over Iris's shoulder, peering into the book's pages.

"When were you so studious?" she teased. "I don't think I've ever seen you study."

"Dad asked me to."

"How come?"

"…because mum can't scold me for not doing it right now."

"So it's back to the normal schedule once she's discharged from hospital?"

Iris nodded furiously; Crestana didn't seem impressed.

"Well, you do you," Crestana sighed, standing up this time shouldering her school bag. "Alis and I are going."

"Moira?" Iris asked, nose leaving the pages for the first time that afternoon. Crestana nodded as Alis rounded the table and headed for the far wall, parting the bookshelves into a doorway.

"It's her last day here. She's going to a foster home somewhere in the city."

"So you can still visit her, then?"

Alis shook his head. "Maybe Crestana, but it's best we don't. A clean start would do her good."

Iris looked back and forth between the two, and when it was clear Crestana had nothing to say on the matter, she figured there was a silent agreement between the two. She respected the decision.

"Then don't hold back. Say goodbye properly."

Alis flashed her a weary smile; Crestana's down-turned shutters showed little confidence. Iris smiled, making up for their lacking courage with her own.

The bookshelf slid closed behind them, and Iris, alone with her thoughts and the textbook open before her, now truly had no excuses.

The grid-like layout of the refugee village was like no other space in the library. Orderly and concrete, as though the bookshelves were laid on foundation, their wood as thick and insulating as brick.

Cubicle after cubicle, entire families living in one space. Much to Crestana's relief, the once town-sized community had shrunken to barely a hamlet's worth of people. Yet that only meant the truly desperate remained. Those with their houses destroyed entirely, every salvageable piece swallowed by the roots of Excala's new icon.

"Death toll rose again," Crestana whispered. "The police found some more remains."

"What is it at now?" Alis asked.

"Five hundred and sixty deceased, one thousand five hundred and twenty unaccounted for."

She tugged on the straps of her school bag teetering on the edge of her shoulder. The volume gauge in her voice box clicked several notches down. "Everybody knows they're dead."

Alis kept walking in silence, disciplined eyes trained on the path ahead. He wouldn't speak, not unless there was something worthwhile saying, and cheap sympathy wasn't.

"I would've never visited if Moira wasn't here," she admitted. "Two thousand people…I can imagine it: it's half my school, but…it never felt quite real until I came here."

Mere centimetres from plain view were a fraction of the lucky few, a fraction of a fraction of those worst affected.

"Coming here after a regular school day, knowing I have a home to go back to—"

"Makes you realise the world isn't fair?"

"Yes, but more than that…I wonder if this is how Iris feels."

To know that nothing is fair, and that you aren't the victim.

"I think it's a point of privilege, what I'm about to say," Crestana continued. "And I know that…what Mrs Hardridge says, what Iris believes, what…I accused you of being is probably right."

But being the villain in someone else's story didn't mean being the villain in everybody's. The way Moira pleaded with her eyes whenever Alis entered the room, as though he were the messiah himself, was proof of that. Shaky proof at best, but proof.

"I just don't want to believe that there's truly nothing else to it."

Hazy and vague. There were words to distill that feeling into something more refined, more convincing, but those words only came with experience she didn't have yet.

Optimistic or naïve, depending on the observer's own proclivity. Could be both; could be neither.

"It's a nice theory," Alis muttered. "I wouldn't want to be the one to test it, though."

"It's what the bright-eyed and hopeful are for," she said through a playful sigh. It was a theory riddled with jinxes, perhaps even hypocritical to its core. Well-intentioned, but at an unknown cost. Barely a theory at all.

But amongst all the unknowns, one certainty stood out: she would lose an irredeemable portion of herself were she to give up on it.

Muscle memory brought them to room five-oh-nine, said number inscribed on a small plaque nailed into the bookshelf, the only thing distinguishing it from the other room. Crestana took the initiative as she always did, wrapping her knuckles against the plaque.

Tony kept close eyes on Moira's room, so the bookshelf slid ajar by itself, and the little girl inside greeted them with a smile that seemed to bookend the long stretch of boredom between their current and last visit.

Nobody but doctors and aetherologists had visited in the days since, and the latter had soon stopped once they'd decided against returning her memory as an act of mercy. She had run the pattern reader in the corner of her room ragged, Tony's automatons strewn across the floor, but the lifestyle would only last another day.

"Hello," Crestana started, "how are you today?"

Ever the insistent caretaker, she'd made significant progress with the little girl.

"Hello," Moira replied. The shyness was written across her face, but it far from crippled her. Still, the rounded eyes found Alis's presence more reassuring, and Crestana once again felt a now familiar pang of jealousy, although now it was nothing more than a playful, one-sided rivalry.

Moira stood up from her waist-high table and walked up to Alis, eyes trained on him as they were at the beginning of every visit.

"Do you know where I'm going?" she asked, small hands making Alis's slender frame look gargantuan in comparison. "I'm leaving tomorrow."

Alis crouched before her, his height coming in line with hers.

"I don't know," he said, ever earnest. "But I know that you'll like it there as long as you behave and do what your caretakers tell you to."

"Why can't I live with you?"

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Because I'll be going far away soon."

Crestana's ears perked up. That was the first she was hearing of it.

"Where?"

Alis flashed a weary smile. "Somewhere you shouldn't go to."

"Why not?"

"I'll tell you later," he said. "What have you been listening to today?"

Pointing at the pattern reader, he redirected the girl's attention for just enough time to delay the question. Crestana wasn't so easy, but she wasn't one to levy accusations during such precious and dwindling time. It was a conversation for later, one with Iris present.

She dropped her school bag and walked over, joining the other two in their shared, fleeting daily ritual.

"I'm sorry I couldn't figure out who you were in time," Alis muttered, loading a card into the reader. Moira shook her head in a show of forgiveness.

"It's okay. If I forgot it, it must have not been important."

Moira continued with the task, recorded words soon after echoing from the small box. Alis traced a hand over his still bandaged arm, damage hidden under the sleeve of his shirt.

Truly the last proof such a man with such a desire once existed, once fought until his last breath.

Neither was back by the time Iris finished her homework. She hadn't expected their visit to end so quickly, nor did she want it to.

The muscles in her back were knotted around her bones, and her spine popped as she arched it. Rolling her head from side to side, she checked the time.

Evalyn's hospital was generous with their visiting hours, but it was her mother that would kick her out by six thirty. Iris tried her best to take the constant nagging about everything from breakfast to dinners as a sign of good health, but it was a tall ask. How she made a week or two of living alone sound more dire than a bullet wound to the stomach was the true miracle.

Iris packed her things and headed for the front door, the route to the hospital now a series of turns she knew by heart, traceable even with her head in a textbook.

A tram ride, a transfer, and another tram ride that put her directly in front of Burring Road Royal Hospital. The nurses at the front desk were soon used to the head of silver hair and its regular visits, and in a matter of days, they streamlined the process down to a single signature and a gentle smile.

Into the elevator, up to the tenth floor, out to the right, third room down. She knocked on the door.

"Come in."

Iris tucked the book underneath her arm and tugged on the sliding door.

Dressed in a white gown, her hair splayed out on her white pillow like a blooming flower was her mother, the warm smile she greeted Iris with growing brighter by the day.

"I thought it would be one or the other," she said.

"Has dad been here today?"

"No, he's got work until the weekend. Is there still food in the Frostbox?"

"Mhm," Iris said, closing the door behind her and taking a seat beside the bed. "Enough to get to Saturday."

"I hope so," Evalyn mumbled, grasping Iris's hand. She did so whenever Iris entered the room, holding it as though she weren't the one telling her to leave. Stroke it, massage it, play with her fingers; something about her hands seemed to enamour Evalyn recently.

"And you're okay?"

Iris shook her head. "I'm not hungry."

"I don't mean that," Evalyn chuckled, pointing at her temple. "In here."

Iris shook her head again. "No concussions."

"God, you're insufferable," Evalyn laughed, squeezing Iris's hand tighter. "Have you thought about that night since?" she reiterated, pursing her lips and forming an arch with her brow. "Like…when you're in your bed trying to fall asleep."

Not only then, but when class would drag, during lulls in conversation, on the tram ride to the library. Even with a preoccupied mind, the rain of that night, the weight of it, was always close by.

"Yes," Iris said, distilling the constant swirling into one word.

Evalyn smiled, seemingly reassured in a way as she sank into her mattress, the pristine covers crinkling in a way her own bed never did.

"Do you think about how you could have done things differently?"

"No."

Apparently, that was an answer her mother hadn't been expecting.

"Really?" she asked, her grip on Iris's hand changing. "Not at all?"

Iris shook her head. "They shot you. It had to happen."

"What do you think about, then?"

The hallway, the puppet strings, the final door. All at her beck and call, a mind that was—for the first time—completely of her own, which she could exert on the real world at any moment. It had fallen silent of late, the second voice obliterated, or at least too timid to talk.

"Just…about it. I remember what happened and…I keep remembering it."

No particular feeling towards it, but it refused to leave her mind. Evalyn didn't seem to have a lean to her thoughts either, but the look on her face betrayed her deep confliction.

"It had to happen," Evalyn echoed in a wispy mutter.

"The Wizard wouldn't stop unless I killed him," Iris said. "He would've hurt you more. He would've hurt dad, and Marie too. It didn't matter what I needed to do…I just needed to do it."

Evalyn tightened her grasp on Iris's hand.

"Let me hug you."

Iris leaned in closer, and Evalyn's arms came around her torso. Suddenly, with a tug too strong for a hospital patient, she ensnared Iris in her arms. Iris sprawled across the covers as Evalyn pressed their two bodies together.

"I love you, Iris."

"I love you too, mum—"

Evalyn squeezed off her sentence, gripping her as though the edge of the bed was the gateway to a thousand-foot drop.

"I love it when you wear your school uniform, Iris. You look…so adorable in it."

"Mum what are you—"

"And one day, one day soon, I'm going to dress you up in a ball gown and I'm…I'm."

Tears marred her words and drowned her throat. The onset was so sudden, Iris's heart skipped a beat. She tried to get a look at her mother's face, but Evalyn pressed her deeper into her chest.

"I'm going to watch you go to formal. Elly and I are going to watch you graduate."

Evalyn stroked Iris's hair, running her calloused fingers through the strands, over her scalp and down to her nape.

"And after that…and after that, even when you're an adult, when you get married, when you have…god."

The stroking stopped. Evalyn's hand fell still, resting cold against Iris's collar, a deathly grip digging fingernails into the fabric.

Iris finally met Evalyn's eyes. Behind a translucent curtain of tears, her auburn irises were aflame with all the wrong emotions.

Regret. Deep, fundamental regret she thought her mother was immune to. Despite all the things she'd done, the lives she'd taken, the ones she'd destroyed, even as she solemnly regaled the stories, not once had even a flash of regret passed over her eyes.

And yet.

"I wish I was stronger for you."

Carry the burden, both of their burdens on the broader back. Cheat reality, the law of the land, the life set out for them. Double the burden of one, eliminate the burden of the other: a parent's ultimate wish, the Wishbearer's ultimate desire.

"I wish you didn't have to be like me."

Not an 'I'm proud of you' or a 'you finally understand', but a full recognition of the monster she already was, the monster Iris had all but turned into.

Monsters. The lot of them. Every single one.

"I could have done something."

"You couldn't have."

"I could have."

"You did everything you could, mum," Iris whispered, her turn to reach out and stroke her mother's hair. "And now I'm ready, thanks to you."

They were monsters because they had to be; a fact immune to the Wishbearer's strength. If that was their world's baseline, then what Evalyn had shared with her was a world of unimaginable luxury, leniency, love.

Iris hadn't considered how her words would reflect, only that they were the truth Iris had decided on. How her mother would see them; the truth Iris saw, or words that confirmed her failures, was out of her control.

Semantics, as most things were.

Either way, the dam of tears finally burst.

Her mother was a beautiful crier.

Evalyn eventually calmed down once her eyes were flushed red, and she was on the verge of losing her voice. Still, that didn't weaken the iron grasp, and eventually Iris fell into a position she considered comfortable.

There, they rested as the sun dipped under the horizon, colouring the sterile, white room a rich orange.

"Marie came the other day," Evalyn mumbled. "She said Nair's stable. They kept asking him how they got the office's address, but he doesn't know."

"Doesn't know?"

"Vesmos gave it to him. Told him Evalyn Hardridge has a way to contact the Wishbearer."

Iris crinkled her nose. "Contact?"

Evalyn shrugged, as confused as she was. "Must have been some botched information, but that doesn't change the fact that Vesmos has interest in my name now."

In other words, it was compromised. Going publicly by 'Evalyn Hardridge' now carried with it risk.

"Are you going to change your name?" Iris asked. She had long since calling Evalyn by anything other than 'mum', but the thought still made her skin crawl. But her mother smiled and pulled on her cheek, sparing no credence to the idea.

"You are insufferable, you know that? Of course not."

The smile quickly faded, and her attention drifted to the last vestiges of the setting sun dipping under the city's skyline.

"But it means closing down the business."

"What?"

Iris's quiet outburst seemed to reel her mother's attention back.

"What do you expect?" she said. "I can't keep going now that Vesmos has marked it."

The afternoons spent pouring over missing pets and cheating spouses; the moments shared when filing closed cases into the archive, the frantic panic that loomed during tax time.

All of it, every single facet had become deeply ingrained parts of Iris's life. In one go, it was all gone.

A blow that she had never anticipated, yet that hurt the most.

"Special Operations will register a few fake businesses under my name and scatter them across the country."

"So if your name is the problem, then—"

"No," Evalyn whispered pre-emptively. "I don't think I'll continue being a P.I."

Iris lifted herself off her mother's body, slipping through Evalyn's fingers as though they'd suddenly lost all their strength.

"Why?" she asked.

Evalyn pursed her lips, her eyes no longer able to meet Iris's.

"Can you…call your father? I want him to tell you."

She turned away, back to where the sunset had been only moments prior, and reached for a night-lamp poised on a bedside table. The room was suddenly awash with a mellow warmth, but the new light brought no change to Evalyn's expression. Nothing more was coming from her mouth.

Iris got up from the bed and walked to the door, where a wall-mounted telephone hung beside the frame. She dialled the number for the Steel Whale, and after several handovers, Elliot's voice broke through the static.

"Senior Captain Elliot Maxwell speaking."

"Dad?"

"Iris? Are you with mum?"

"Yeah," Iris whispered, turning back to see Evalyn, eyes still turned to the window as though there was still sunlight left. But the lamp's glare was too powerful; all she could see was her own reflection.

"Mum said she's going to stop being a P.I."

"…she did, did she?"

"But she won't tell me why."

A small sigh whispered through the phone line, from his nostrils to her ear, as though he were steeling himself to say whatever words came next.

"It's partly my fault," he said. "I don't think I should be a pilot anymore."

"A…pilot…but—"

"I'm not as sharp as I used to be, Iris. I can't look at you and honestly promise you I'll come home safe and sound anymore. I just…don't think that's worth it."

Iris gripped the folds of her skirt. Her chest heaved, injecting her useless words with desperation.

"But you love flying."

"I love you and mum more than flying. I can do a lot more for you two if I move up the chain."

"But you're a…pilot…dad…"

For that, Elliot had no response, for Iris could not think of anything she could say worthy of one.

"When I told your mum, she said she doesn't think she can be a Witch forever. With what happened recently…I'm sure you know what I mean."

Her first bullet wound in years, and to someone Vesmos had the potential to mass produce.

"So she told me she'd consider retiring once you're ready to take jobs by yourself. The Wishing Whale can only stay for as long as she wants it to. That's the nature of their agreement."

Evalyn still wouldn't face her. Even the reflection in the mirror desperately averted Iris's gaze as she bit her lips, trying not to restart when she had finally stopped.

"You and Evalyn make a good team, but someday soon she won't be able to keep up with you, the same way Colte eventually couldn't. It was always going to happen…it's just happening sooner than we thought."

"I don't want to be alone," Iris said, her voice weaker than she imagined it would be.

"And you won't be, Iris. We'll be here for you. We want to make sure we'll always be here for you."

"I don't want to—"

Evalyn's arms wrapped around her shoulders, and once again she was pulled into her mother's embrace. No matter how much Iris complained or argued against it, how terrified of being a Witch by herself she was, she could accept it all at the drop of a hat if it meant she could feel her mother's warmth and hear her father's voice for years and years to come.

"We love you more than anything," Evalyn whispered, squeezing her tighter as Iris watched her tears splash on her shoes. "Forgive me."