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Magillanica Lou Mayvin had always wondered what kinds of interesting people she might meet in prison.
Not a regular prison, but a fucked up, malevolence-ridden dungeon prison, such as Titania. She supposed it didn’t matter, really - it’s not like she could ever be locked up. Magillanica wasn’t chained - she was the jailer. Take a pirate from his treasured sea, lock him up and throw away the key. A glorified judge.
Magillanica didnt feel a particular way about it, really. She’d thrown away her own key long ago - the one that unlocked her heart. She wasn’t even certain if she still had one; after all, a heart that can’t be broken is no heart at all.
Bah.
Her mind was wandering, probably because she was so fucking cold it was shutting down. Idly, Magillanica had one of her malakhim perform an art to warm her blood. She’d been waiting up on the peak of this godforsaken volcano for at least an hour - she wasn’t keeping track. She’d wait for them to pick their way out of molten lava to confront her, even if it took forever.
Better the cold than that roiling heat, down below. She wouldn’t say she hated either - that wouldn’t be reasonable. A person shouldn’t feel hate for the weather. Magillanica couldn’t feel hate at all.
The ragtag bunch of daemons and malakhim below could, though. Magillanica wasn’t ashamed to admit she felt a thrill run along her spine when she experienced the pure emotion running off the Crowe girl. She’d followed that thrill to Aball, forced the girl to experience what she had once endured to get to become the legate she was today.
To Artorius, it was all business - a means to release the therion’s malevolence for Innominat’s sake.
To Magillanica, it was something like envy. That this run down, uneducated country bumpkin could feel more keenly than Magillanica ever would - it was frankly unthinkable. In the back of her mind she knew she would derive some immense pleasure from severing the Crowe girl’s soul right out of her spine. It was why she’d waited half the night up on this icy peak, washed scarlet by the light of the blood moon.
Magillanica had always had a flair for the dramatic. She’d grown up in a circus troupe, after all. That was one thing Melchior never quashed out of her. Besides, at this point, it was practically a requirement to be a bit odd in order to become a legate in Artorius’ Abbey. There were only two of them. High standards.
She and Shigure didn’t have anything in common. He was like a wildfire, roaring through on a rushing gale, unstoppable. Magillanica was like ice - she could still burn, but she preferred to watch as her prey slowly turned black and blue.
Another difference was that Magillanica was alive, and Shigure was dead. She’d watched the other Rangetsu boy strike him down from a high perch, unnoticed by anyone, except perhaps the fat cat malak.
Eh. To be struck down by some dumb, arteless daemon was a pathetic way to go.
Magillanica wasn’t kidding herself, this late in the game. She was all that stood between the Crowe girl and Innominat’s armatus, now. They would be determined to remove her stain from the scroll of this world and replace it with their own symbol. They would back their fight with their entire hearts and souls. Magillanica couldn’t do that.
They were close, now. Scrambling out of the volcano, the heat off their backs melting the snow under their feet - she could almost smell it. She hadn’t had to fight this hard since her final test. She had artes under her sleeve that she had never had an excuse to even try, artes that could leave a man a broken, empty shell of himself.
Magillanica stood to gaze down at the roiling maw of the volcano. Such a long wait, and she would never let them know just how long she had waited, warming herself against the rising heat of the molten rock below.
Steel boots crunched the soft snow into hard compact ice, behind her.
“A little birdie told me you’re trying to wake the Four Empyreans.” Magillanica trilled, manifesting a Guardian above an outstretched hand. “If only you didn’t have to take my soul to do it.”
The guardian bobbed gently in her palm as she turned around.
“Cities crumbling to dust, mountains drowning in the waves, fields of flowers becoming barren deserts, all in the space of just a millenium. I’d love to see that.”
The Crowe girl stood in the lead, as always, hair whipping in the cold wind. Magillanica barely registered the rest of them, fanned out behind her like soldiers behind their general.
The red moon really added a nice flair to the scene. In another life, Magillanica might have hired someone to paint it, her lone pale figure facing against these low life daemons. The Crowe girl - Violet? Venison? - snorted and tossed her head like some kind of horse nightmare.
“I don’t much care,” her low, rumbling tone vibrating the very snow at Magillanica’s feet, but her narrowed eyes betrayed her words.
“Me either,” Magillanica smiled thinly. “I suppose Innominat will just eat that up, anyway. To care, or not to care? Innominat won’t discriminate when he wipes the slate of this world as clean as the bottom of a newborn babe.”
“Wipe the slate?” the exorcist girl, the one who failed to achieve anything, really, gasped like it was the first time it had occurred to her. At her feet, a short, vaguely familiar malak shaped like a child’s toy shook like a leaf, physically unable to speak.
“It’s the circle of life, pumpkin,” Magillanica drawled, Guardian briefly dissipating as she linked her fingers behind her head. “Humanity gets too ahead of itself, someone notices, Innominat rises to eat everyone and wash, rinse, repeat.”
“That means you’ll vanish too,” the Rangetsu boy challenged, like the thought of it would make her falter, rethink her entire life’s choices until then.
Like it mattered.
“Who can say?” she closed her eyes, the red wash of light filtering through her retinas. “It happens again, and again, and again. It has to end at some point.”
Magillanica opened her eyes, looked directly into the daemon girl’s own.
“This will be the last suppression.”
Those amber eyes, so full of feeling, like the whole world rested on her shoulders even as she shrugged it off, shattered it in favour of her own goals. Magillanica gazed into them as the others loudly came to the same realisation the Crowe girl had just minutes ago - to end the cycle, they would break Innominat, force his suppression for eternity. To end the cycle, Magillanica had stolen a precious arte from a dirty pirate, sacrificed hundreds of lives, ruined a thousand others, and a bunch of other things she didn’t care about. Blah, blah, blah.
They felt such aggravation over it all. So boring.
“Are you going to kill me, you awful creatures?” she taunted, looking directly at the moon. “Take my soul and feed it to the earth?”
“You wish it’ll be as quick,” the pirate malakhim roared, rushing her.
She’d been waiting such a long time to do this.
A name whipped from her lips, not spoken in years. A geas activated, that she had completely forgotten about until tonight.
A malakhim’s bond, severed and reattached.
Magillanica laughed as the pirate’s fist collided with the normin’s shield arte.
“Bienfu!” the redhead gasped, her malak wrenched from her. Like taking candy from a baby. They had no idea the kind of power the stupid little malak had been hiding from them. Fuschie Cass, she had once called him. He would probably die tonight, but not before she made good use of him.
Magillanica didn’t enjoy battle (it wasn’t reasonable to enjoy fighting for your life, after all; just a necessity), but she knew she excelled in the field as well as she did in the towers, researching fickle artes and authoring new tomes. Her Guardians were as effective as ever, shielding her from blows that the normin malak couldn’t block. She flitted in and out of reality and left no trace as she did, blasting the exorcist in the back with an ice arte, burning daemon man with fire, interrupting the malak boy’s healing by rending the earth below him. She knew she was unpredictable, flitting between targets, never lingering for more than a few blows.
The Crowe girl, unfortunately, was just as unpredictable. She put her whole self into the fight, her entire body - that gross arm, her sword, kicking out with her legs like they were weapons of their own. Worse, she seemed to be able to determine where Magillanica would go next - the legate would sink the ground below one of them, turn to burn someone else, and the she-daemon would be there. Magillanica would try to encase another in ice, only for that blackened, engorged hand to swallow up the arte as it was deployed, like some kind of black hole.
“If only I had time to study that thing,” she taunted wryly as she summoned a guardian to float her out of the daemon’s reach. “The things we could do with it!”
Half a year ago, anything she said might have sent the Crowe girl into a rage, spitting and gnashing like a caged hyena. Now, the woman practically rolled her eyes and pressed forward. Magillanica felt her heel brush stone where her earlier perch ended, far above the volcano.
Cornered, like a rat. The normin malak was incarcerated, held down by golden chains sprouting from the earth, and they surrounded her like a pack of hungry dogs. A normal, boring person might have quivered in fear.
Magillanica wasn’t a normal, boring person. A bright light lit her face up from below as she crafted an arte to end it all, ignoring the shouts of alarm before her.
“She’s going to armatize!” one of them cried.
Psh. Magillanica Lou Mayvin was many things, but an exorcist who relied on the power of the armatus was hardly one of them. Her hands burned with the sheer power as she whirled to fling the arte as hard as she could, directly at the girl daemon. It was a masterwork, something that could eat the daemon from the inside out. The legate had been working on it since the first time she saw that hand attack them at the Empyrean’s Throne.
Magillanica could probably say that gruesome hand was the last thing she saw. It wouldn’t be true, but it would save her spirit from the sheer embarrassment of what truly happened, that fateful night atop Mount Killaraus.
Because, as it turned out, that hand could return fire just as well as it received it, and Magillanica’s final arte was no exception. She’d designed it, perfectly, to take hold of an enemy’s failures and turn it all against them over and over again, until they could no longer fight, no longer feel. It would have broken the Crowe girl’s spirit to dust.
It hurtled towards her, threatening her very psyche with its great beam. Faced with that, Magillanica did the reasonable thing; she leapt back, allowing herself to skip off the ledge she made her final stand on, directly into the mouth of the volcano.
It couldn’t be over, of course. The daemon - Velvet, that was it, she recalled as one of the others cried it out- leapt after her, that awful hand outstretched to wrap around Magillanica’s lithe frame.
“You’re not getting away that easily,” Velvet snarled as she began to drain Magillanica’s energy, mana, life force.
A thousand things flashed through the legate’s mind - her life once lived, as a child, desperate and deprived and forced to make a show. The life she did live - the frustration she endured, the gruelling test she passed, for want of another word. The past years, devoid of any feeling other than a vague sense of emptiness.
A life she could have lead - bright tones and raucous laughter, fashioning doves out of thin air and dancing without a care and flying without anything holding her back, a mismatched family and a woman who would gaze at her with amber eyed and see everything and love her anyway.
Magillanica Lou Mayvin stared back, into eyes without love this time, and her face felt like it was cracking apart when she smiled, truly, feeling her soul tearing from her body.
“Thank you,” she breathed as it went, thrust down the lifepring by the daemon whom she meant absolutely nothing to.
She wouldn’t remember it, when she became Hyanoa. She’d wake as an Empyrean and work hard to bring her own balance to the world, to drive Innominat out of the earth pulses with everything she and her siblings had.
But her soul would rush along the grassy plains and dash above the waves and plough through mounds of snow and that soul was Magilou, not Magillanica, and it was finally free.