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It’s strange, to stand before the rubbled tower. Feeling the sprinkling rain mist against her cheeks.
Her mother left her for this heap of shattered stone; and on the night it fell—
I should have known then, she thinks. She studies the jagged lines of the black rocks against the overcast sky and wonders what her father felt, if he saw their desperate leap from the roof of the tower.
Had he felt ashamed of her even then, for her wild heart, for her defiance of King Frederic’s orders? Had her sickening disappointment with him mirrored itself in her father’s mind—?
Cassandra closes her eyes.
The incantation crouches upon her tongue, frosts her mouth with its eagerness to be spoken; and here, where she was once betrayed and twice abandoned by parents who cared more for other things, is the best place she can think of to do it.
On the wreckage of her childhood she will build herself anew.
❖
“Crescent high above, evolving as you g- go…”
It is a lightning crackle inside her skin; a rumble of thunder in the sky; the shattering of winter ice and surge of black water underneath. Cassandra plummets into the grip of the incantation, and the magic roars to meet her.
“—raise what lies beneath, and let the darkness grow. Bend it to my will, c- consume the sunlight’s glow—”
(the moon races through the vacant darkness of the night, pulling the chariot of the sea; and when Cassandra spreads her fingers wide the rocks flow like water, shining white)
“—r- rise into the sky, and let—”
moonlight on the ice
“—the darkness grow.”
Let darkness—
There is…
a crack in the ice, in the airless quiet.
She has dreamed of this before. Of the heartbeat under the ground, under the stones, of the wild heart beating itself against the foundations of the world; of a silent, bleeding rage.
She feels—
(a scrape of thorns, of claws, clutching tight; hemorrhaging anger)
it isn’t enough it isn’t
With underwater slowness, Cassandra turns and casts her hand into the darkness; her grasping fingers find a slender, icy wrist; a wave bleeding back into the sea, caught in her moonlit grip.
She stares at the girl from the House of Yesterday’s Tomorrow and the girl who is not a girl gazes back with a helpless, twitching fury.
“What are you?” Cassandra whispers.
“Oh, Cassandra.” The gargoyled snarl smooths into the familiar child’s face, fangs glinting in her smile; the barbed talons tipping her fingers flake away into silken mist as she cups Cassandra’s chin. “Don’t you know?”
—grow.
❖
The incantation ends. The tower shells itself in black, and Cassandra, staggering, cries out as she falls to to her knees in the dewy grass. Aftershocks of thunder ring in her ears.
When she looks up, the spirit floats before her. Her lips are pursed; she regards Cassandra with a vague aura of displeasure.
“What?”
(There is…
something she needs to remember. A dream, spilled like water from her hands.)
“Rapunzel will come for the boy, soon,” the spirit replies. “I hope you are prepared to meet her with more than these… sentimental gestures.”
“I am.” She rises unsteadily to her feet; the spirit fades into the mist, impassive, and, scowling, Cassandra turns to Varian. He’s bedraggled; damp from the rain, his goggles askew, smudged with dirt from their hurried flight through the tunnels.
She sighs, and steps forward to grasp his elbow.
“Let’s go, kid.”