What Little Remains Of Terpsichore Ironheart

Cassandra Ironheart woke up at five in the morning to the sharp bark of a gunshot, followed by her older brother screaming in agony about his penis. She sighed wearily, wondered whether she could just go back to sleep, and then decided that there was no way in hell she'd hear the end of this anytime soon.

"Goddammit, Eli..." Cass muttered as she got out of bed.

Cassandra moved slowly and carefully, grabbing her cane with one hand as she carefully levered herself out of bed. She moved slowly, carefully, with measured motions, knowing that one wrong move would send her into a coughing fit, or falling to the floor, or any other number of indignities and inconveniences. By the time she managed to struggle into a robe and reach the door, her father and other brother had already gotten up and come to investigate.

"He shot my dick off!" Elijah yelled, as Napoleon and Lysander gathered around his prone form before Cass' door.

"Silas," Napoleon began, "care to explain why you mutilated your brother at five in the morning?"

Cass sighed, ignoring her father's use of her deadname. She wasn't out to these people, and would likely never be out to them- they'd burn in Hell if she got her druthers.

"I believe I told you," Cassandra "Silas" Ironheart said, addressing Eli with the countenance of a woman who was not remotely sorry you got shot, "to stop coming into my room without permission. And that if you kept doing that anyways, I would find a way to make you regret it."

"You shot my dick off!" Elijah repeated, as though that were a rebuttal.

"Do you need me to shoot off something else?" Cass asked.

"Enough," Lysander said. "Elijah, you are a grown man, and this behavior is downright shameful. Father, would you mind handling-?"

"I'll reattach his dick," Napoleon said, nodding. "C'mon, Eli, let's get you fixed up. Silas, can you find a quieter way of making him regret his actions next time?"

"Silas," Lysander said quietly, turning to address Cass. "We will talk about this later. For now... go back to bed."

Cass shut her bedroom door, locking it once more, and, for good measure, reset her gun trap. Elijah may have learned to pick locks, but Cass was a wizard, and it was simplicity itself for her to add a pair of charms to the lock and her key that would disarm the gun trap- which would remain armed and ready to perforate one's dangly bits if the lock was simply picked.

Cass hobbled back over to her bed, grumbling wordlessly as she did so.

"He was trying to steal or destroy your enchanting supplies," Volex told her, telepathically. "It's concern about your health and disapproval of your studies, but... there's something wrapped up under there I can't quiter make out. Wizards are always hard to read, especially without burning magicka on it."

"I don't care terribly much about his motivations, honestly," Cass said, as she got back into bed. "That prick is lucky all I'm doing at this point is stockpiling magicka; if he actually managed to set me back any further, I would be shooting him again right now."

Cassandra Ironheart was, on the surface, tremendously lucky- she was a High Elf, born into ageless immortality, among a community of other immortals who endlessly accumulated skill and knowledge in the magical arts, and she was immune to the magics of others- a tremendous boon for the child of the legendary mage-knight Napoleon Ironheart, who would surely raise his children to be similarly-gifted warriors.

The true depths of her predicament required additional context.

One, the High Elves had been conquered, about three centuries ago. For all that Napoleon Ironheart was a man of prestige and means, he still lived in a ghetto with the rest of Redwater's High Elven population, and a young High Elf, who didn't have decades or centuries of experience and training in the arts magical and martial, was the ideal victim for hate mobs. Cassandra's cane, a gift from her twin brother who was no longer around to protect her, had a concealed pistol within it, and she'd been forced to use it a few times. This was while she presented as Silas Ironheart, mind you; if she were to publicly admit to being a transgender woman, she would not feel safe even within her own home.

Two, immunity to the magic of others was immunity to the magic of others. Cassandra was no more able to turn off her magic immunity than anyone else was able to turn off their tangibility, and there was likewise no exception for harmless or even helpful magics.

Even in this day and age, being born with an immunity to magic in the Hikaano Imperium was a coin flip of a death sentence; Hikaano medicine was such that, without the ability for a druid or cleric to do magic at the problem, there was very little that could be done to effectively treat serious disease and injury. Less than half of all magic-immune children survived to adulthood.

Which brought us back to Cassandra Ironheart, chronically ill and unable to walk unassisted. A childhood illness had ravaged her body, but she did survive, and now, she studied the arcane science of organic transmutation in the hopes of restoring her body to full functionality; after all, while she was immune to everone else's magic, she could still be affected by her own. She just had to learn sufficient amounts of wizardry to perform complex healing magic with arcane magic rather than divine or primal, which was infamously one of the hardest things one could do with wizardry.

The sooner Cass did that, the sooner she could finally move on with her life.

---

"Silas," Lysander said, a few hours later, as the family sat down for breakfast. "Why did you feel the need to trap your bedroom door like that?"

Cass sighed. Lysander liked to pretend that he was the only sane, responsible adult in the whole family, and therefore he was in charge and his word was law- something that Cass had learned to only openly disagree with when he wasn't present to beat her for her temerity.

If Cass ever regained enough health to physically assert herself with her family, Lysander would be the first to die.

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"Because when I asked you to keep Eli out of my private space, you told me to deal with it myself," Cass said, before stopping to cough. Ugh. She hated trying to talk this early in the morning. Her lungs were not cooperating... "Ugh. And... I felt the need to keep him out of my private space, because the last time he got into my bedroom, he vandalized my belongings."

"I'm trying to protect you, dammit!" Eli protested. "You shouldn't be doing that kind of experimental magic on yourself without anyone to watch over you!"

"There's a few problems with that," Cass said. "One: I don't fucking believe you. Two: I don't fucking believe you. Three: I don't fucking believe you, Eli! And fourth: you don't own me and have no say over what I do with my body."

"Dad, back me up here," Eli demanded.

"You're both grown men," Napoleon said. "Sort yourselves out. I don't care."

Cass grunted in acknowledgement.

"So, excited to go back to university, see your girlfriend again?" Napoleon asked, trying valiantly to bring the conversation around to something a bit less hostile. "I bet she'll be excited to see you again."

"You're going to have to clarify who you mean," Cass said. "I don't have a girlfriend."

"He means your fiancee, rather than your mistress- who your fiance complains bitterly about," Lysander said.

"I am going to object to both of those terms," Cass said. "One: Yoko is not my mistress, she's just my friend, and I'm allowed to have those. Two: Veronica is not my 'fiancee,' she is my wife. We exchanged rings, signed the ketubah, had that big ceremony, and consummated the relationship. We are married, and the Hikaano can fuck off with that stupid half-married 'engaged' horseshit."

"...So, excited to see your wife again?" Eli asked.

"No, we don't exactly get along," Cass said bluntly. "I'm more interested in seeing my mentor about fresh copies of those books you burned. You fucking asshole."

"Maybe she can cast the spells for-" Eli began.

"She cannot, because I am immune to the magic of others," Cass interrupted. "I also cannot ask her to enchant the health talismans for me, because again, I am immune to the magic of others. And this is why, Eli, the next time you force me to shoot you, I will be aiming for the head, and letting Dad take his sweet time putting you back together and resurrecting you."

"...Mmn."

"Now, unless I am mysteriously the only person in the room who is doing anything interesting this week, I would appreciate it if you talked about someone else. I'm trying to eat, and the food goes in where the words come out. Lysander, don't you own a factory? Talk about that, or something."

"He thinks we're boring," Napoleon lamented, but thankfully, that was the end of that.

---

Cassandra stepped carefully out of the Ironheart family's enchanted carriage and onto the sidewalk in front of the train station, leaning heavily on her cane as she did so. She had exchanged her house robe for her traveling clothes- loose trousers of sturdy black canvas, cinched at the waist with a belt, with a pale blue button-down shirt tucked into them. To complete the ensemble, she wore a pair of tightly-laced leather boots, and a long, dark grey duster of waxed canvas, whose many interior pockets had been heavily enchanted to give them astronomical amounts of storage space that would weigh nothing.

Her mother may not have been able to secure custody over Cass in the divorce, and Joseph had left Cass behind when he ran away from home to go live with their mother, but she was still able to send gifts, every now and then. The duster had arrived shortly after her acceptance letter from the University of Barracuda Bay, and it had been an absolute godsend for helping Cass transport her belongings to the University.

"I hate this place," Napoleon said from the driver's seat. "This place used to be a nice, dense cityscape, just like everywhere else. But then they tore it down to build a giant train station and all these fucking, ugh, parking lots. Fucking humans, ruining everything."

Cass did not respond, choosing to simply ignore her father's deranged ramblings.

"Take care, son!" Napoleon called. "Have fun at college!"

"If you don't get your act together with Veronica, I swear upon all that is holy-" Lysander began.

Cass shut the door mid-sentence, and Napoleon took that as his cue to drive off. That was Napoleon for you- your brothers could bully you all they wanted, and he'd only step in to help if he felt like it. Unfortunately for Lysander, and all his vaunted social skills, Cass knew their father's sense of humor better than he did, and had finally figured out how to reliably get Napoleon on her side.

It was a bit late for that, but oh well. She'd live.

"Ugh, fuck me running," Cass muttered, reaching around to rub her knuckles along her spine.

"Thought we'd never get rid of those assholes," Eli remarked. He was 22, and three years older than Cass; unfortunately for Cass, Eli went to the same university as her, and she'd likely see him in passing for the rest of the year. She wished she hadn't been railroaded into attending the University of Barracuda Bay by her family, but... well, she just had to put up with it for a few more years. Once she had a degree and enough magic to un-fuck her body, she could disappear and never have to see them again. "Oh hey, recruiter up ahead. Wanna mess with the boot boy together?"

"We are not friends," Cass said, hobbling off with her cane. She hated that Eli had done so poorly in his first year at the University, because that meant he had to attend for a fifth year, and therefore Cass had to put up with him for that much longer.

Their mother was Ariel Silver, for fuck's sake. How the hell did he bomb his Arcane Sciences major so bad he had to switch over to Business Administration?

"Excuse me, young man!" a human in military fatigues said as Cass approached the entrance to the train station. "Care to join the war effort against those savage orcs?"

Cass couldn't help herself; she'd been getting increasingly pissy all morning, and now, here was a perfect outlet.

Besides. Just because she didn't want to fuck with the recruiter with Eli didn't mean she didn't want to fuck with the recruiter. She just didn't want to do that, or anything, with Eli.

"They must be better at fighting than we thought if the Army's so desperate they try to recruit cripples, now," Cass said blandly.

"Ah, er, well," the recruiter began, stumbling. "Ah, well... We have plenty of positions in logistics and clerical work that could suit you quite well?"

Cass grunted, and shook her head. "Save it, jackass. I'm a High Elf; if the Grigians kill you all, I'd thank them for the favor and invite them home for dinner. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a train to catch."

Cass didn't wait for a response, and simply continued on her way. She had another half hour before her train was scheduled to depart, but that was plenty of time to get to the right platform. A bit of a walk, ten minutes of light reading to kill time- and telling Eli once again to fuck all the way off- and then she just had to find the right compartment with a little charmed compass she'd been given at the end of the previous semester...

"Fancy meeting you here," Yoko said, grinning, as Cass stepped into her compartment.

Cass smirked back, closing the door behind her, and sat down on the opposite bench. Last year, she'd had to share a compartment with Eli, which had been utterly miserable. This year, though, the hours-long ride to Barracuda Bay was about to get a lot more tolerable.