She is aware of the sick crawling through Ruan’s veins the very moment her brother-mage breathes life back into her cold, empty body. It hits her like a blow to her chest, and she can feel the fissures spreading outwards despite her best effort to not care so deeply. About him or anyone, save the beautiful boy she had left behind. But it seems to not make a difference how her mind feels, what those strands of self-preserving logic keep beating into her.
Her heart feels what her heart feels.
And it feels for the family that had been built around her by forces greater than even herself.
Her family.
So the mountain is the first place she returns to, knowing that the magic inside her body is not yet strong enough to carve the plague from Ruan’s weary bones. That she alone does not yet possess the resources to heal him, make him whole again. She will add her strengths to those who heed the call of the fairies, who mean to find this last ingredient in the hopes of making their families well again, of making homes safe and returning to places that had been made unliveable.
There is a part of her that still feels wary even as she stands with the others and listens to the words of this fourth and final fairy, so blue and beautiful and in a shade that rivals even the gem-tones of Bright’s own amethyst skin. She can see that others feel calmed by the woman, but it is far from her nature to be soothed by a stranger, even one as gifted as this in her manners of tranquility.
She is quiet and steady while the mare speaks, only looking around once to see the faces of those who have gathered. It is unsurprising to a few of her own blood, distant but still hers, and she feels a flicker of wariness for their well-being. It comes from a place in her rationality though, not from the heart. She is well aware of the toll it takes on her when any of her own blood is spilled, when death comes to claim someone that belongs in her intricately woven web.
She will be careful to keep an eye on them, help them if she must.
The journey to the Island is more tedious than she is used to as she struggles to conserve her magic where normally she would not be so concerned. But the tasks these fairies have sent others on have been anything but easy and she is not so foolish as to think this, despite the serenity of the gem-blue fairy, would be any different. All of her instincts warn her to conserve her magic, conserve her energy. To allow the journey to be simple until it decides it is ready to be otherwise.
And when her hooves finally settle and pause beneath the water of the shore, she finds her wariness confirmed.
There is deep magic here, she can feel it in her blood and her bones, in the very essence of who she is. As a mage she revels in it, wants to close her eyes and bask in such power. Let it find her and wash over her, mingle with what she is and create something more. But that is not the kind of magic this is. It does not crave to be joined with, it only seeks to destroy. If it had a shape, she can only guess it would be that of teeth. Something powerful and dangerous, meant for destroying. For ripping and rending.
But the instruction of the fairy had been clear - to go into the water, to swim to the opposite shore.
She steps into the ocean until the ground disappears from beneath her heels and there is only the soft twining of seaweed at her legs, but then even that is gone and she finds that having so much nothingness stretched below her is unsettling. It was better to feel the plants and know they were rooted nearby, near enough that there could be nothing lurking where she cannot see it. Now there is only sky above, only a world of dark and treachery below, and she feels the smallest she has ever felt in her whole life. Even death had been bigger than this. Fuller. For a while she swims and there is nothing ominous in her way, no spark of magic pinging at her senses, warning her to be wary. It is just she alone and the promise of something to come. Deliberate, she supposes, meant to lull her into complacency.
But she is not complacent.
She feels the magic flare and throb inside her skin, feels the all too mortal ache of desperation the moment the beast awakes and settles its sights on her. It is had to get a sense of, hard to know its shape or its mind, hard to know what it wants until the water starts to shift around her in a slow turn, an easy, drowning spiral.
Charybdis.
The name it gives itself is a grinding, guttural hiss in her mind. Like clawed fingers digging a den inside her where it can live and nest and roost. It does not belong there, not inside her, not within this ocean.
She swims harder, fighting fear because it is a useless, unproductive emotion. Thoughtless and reactive, a prey-emotion, and she is not prey. She tries to portal herself further, past the reaches of the whirlpool now churning lazily around her, but it is so strong and so vast, and beast below simply follows her. Simply waits because it can, because the only way she can go now is down with this current, with the pull of this unnatural tide.
The water is pulling her under now, splashing over her burning amethyst eyes and winding like a snake down her throat, an element come alive with the fury of its master. She tries to portal again, but there must be some magic keeping her here, some force that even she cannot understand, because when reappears it is only to be in a different place in the wall of the whirlpool. Her legs kick hard to keep her afloat, to keep anything below from reaching for her. But the not-knowing is too much for her, having no idea of this beast below. So she draws her magic into herself, too much of it because she can feel a mage-wound open up like a slice across her chest, and buries the magic inside her eyes.
What she sees below makes her wish she had not, makes her wonder if she would have been better off not knowing. For the beast is massive, its open mouth as wide as its tubular body. An open mouth ringed with teeth the size of a pegasus’ horn, just rows and rows of them leading down into what must be it’s gaping, sucking throat. She realizes that is where this whirlpool comes from, those gulping swallows of ocean water as it drains her towards it. Clever beast.
But now she knows what it is she needs to do, knows the anatomy of the beast and how best to neuter its manic strength.
She stops fighting immediately, takes a huge breath and plummets as the beast grabs her with tentacles she had not noticed in the periphery of the spiraling whirlpool. She gasps, cries out as the barbed limbs bite into her skin, losing all the air she had trapped inside her. It pulls her down, down, and though it had not been what she intended, a new idea forms in her head.
With the mouth of the gaping beast gnashing like a tooth-ringed hole in the bottom of the whirlpool directly beneath her, she shifts. In an instant she is iron, smooth and solid and beautiful, marked permanently in the deep furrowed wounds ripped across her body - falling, falling until she is inside the belly of the beast and the world is dark and wretched, stinking of death and rot and brine.
There is exactly one second of silence, one instant of false-peace in the face of death, and then she explodes.
She is living shrapnel inside the beast, murdering it from the inside out as it bellows and screams and writhes to spit out whatever pieces of her hadn’t already been ejected through his thick skin. It feels strange to be so many, to be innumerable and and falling through the dark water as the beast disentangles, bleeding and shrieking and swimming away to nurse such fatal wounds.
She falls to the bottom of the ocean, chunks and slivers and slabs of metal all coming back together so that by the time her hooves hit the sand and stone and ocean-floor debri, she is mostly whole again. Mostly, but not completely. It is enough though, nothing vital missing, nothing she can’t live without. Perhaps in time, it will all come back to her again, but if it does not, she will heal.
With one final drag on the last of her magic reserves, she finds that her magic is no longer restricted and portals the short distance to the shores of Island Resort, collapsing in a heap on the sand as herself again. As skin and bone and bleeding flesh.
My touch is black and poisonous and nothing like my punch-drunk kiss
bright encountered the mythological charybdis and defeated it by letting it swallow her as metal and then turning herself into shrapnel by exploding inside it