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People without soulmarks were cursed.
Lucretia knew that, and she tried to make her peace with it, but it didn’t stop her from checking her arms nearly every morning, hoping to find something she’d overlooked, perhaps only one letter that was so innocuous that it had hidden itself against her skin. But when all she ever found was another confirmation of Istus frowning upon her, she covered her arms with long sleeves and wrapped them around her books which she held to her chest. Being a ghostwriter meant she was hidden behind a wall, meant she didn’t get the questions about soulmates that all authors received at book signings. She was more than happy being a wallflower, quiet and unassuming, best at observing others instead of worrying about herself and the future fate clearly had no plan for.
Joining the IPRE was one of the first things she did beyond sitting quietly. Even if fate didn’t find her worthy of a soulmate, she found pride in the books she’d ghostwritten, and that pride fueled some amount of ambition. The stories of others needed to be told, especially if they were like her, if they weren’t part of Istus’s knitting, because how else would their existence be recorded if not for her chronicling?
She hadn’t met anybody like her until she joined the IPRE and saw across the quad a burly human man lifting weights with blank muscled arms and chatting cheerily with a thin elf with no words across his own freckled skin. She dropped her pencils, for once not minding how the points landed wrong on each of her notebooks and created dots and lines across the paper, and stared at them until they wandered off. But the Institute was a large organization, and although she did some subtle research on the sides and found out that they were Magnus Burnsides in the Security division and Taako Taaco in the Arcana division, she found it very unlikely that she would bump into them ever again.
So, as luck would have it, she literally bumped into one of them one day. The impact of a simple shoulder check sent her books flying and she dropped to her knees, panicking silently as the infamous Taaco twins smirked identical smiles down at her. They watched her gather her things in silence, arms crossed but clearly distinguishable from each other by the words wrapping around one’s forearm and the lack thereof on the other.
“Sorry,” she choked out as she stood back up, face on fire and eyes still caught on Taako’s arms. She moved to take a step around them, but his sister Lup sidestepped to block her, and her knuckles went white where she was grasping her things too tightly.
“No need to rush, bubbeleh,” Taako said, amusement in his voice, and she dared to look at his face, meeting his blue eyes dancing with mirth.
“What’s your name, babe?” Lup chimed in, and their expressions were so perfectly synced in false innocence that it was no wonder people couldn’t tell them apart.
“Lucretia,” she managed to say, glad not for the first time in her life that her arms were covered and her secret kept literally under wraps.
She yelped as the twins moved swiftly and each laced an arm through hers, grinning at her from both sides. “You’re hanging with us now, Lucy,” Taako proclaimed, and Lup confirmed with a nod and grin.
They didn’t leave her much room to protest or even get a word in, ignoring introducing themselves since they accurately assumed that their reputation preceded them. Kidnapping random people seemed almost to be a pastime of theirs, sweeping her away with remarkable ease. They escorted her to the quad where she’d first seen them, climbing up onto a picnic table with their feet resting on the bench while she seated herself awkwardly on the ground. She tried not to panic again when Magnus Burnsides walked up barely a moment later and plopped down on the nearby bench press.
“Hey, twins!” he greeted with a big smile and a wave, then turned his blinding grin on Lucretia. “I don’t know you.” He stretched a large hand toward her, giving her a valid reason to stare at his arms and marvel at their blankness.
“Lucretia,” she introduced herself again, shaking his hand.
“Magnus.”
She kept her sleeves long even when she gained friends and applied for the big mission at their insistence, and then her sleeves changed only in color when she earned the red robe that came with being accepted. She brushed off Lup’s playful nudges about her soulmark, even when the elf met her own soulmate the first day the crew was all in one room together. She tried to ignore the stabbing feeling of loss in her heart when Barry J. Bluejeans’s face turned red and he started stuttering when Lup’s teasing matched his mark. She had a mask she’d maintained for years, and even when she had friends, real friends, she kept it up, faking interest when Taako leaned over to whisper about the handwriting on Merle’s arm and how it matched the packets of information they’d received from their captain.
When their planar system was consumed, Lucretia screamed for all those they’d left behind, for all the death there was in their wake, and, though she would never admit it, for her own selfishness of knowing that all chances of having a soulmate had just disappeared. Even the Celestial Plane was no match for the beast descending on their world. Istus would die hating her.
The first death they experienced was Magnus, and although the team grieved for the moment before he was pulled back together by strings of white light, the pain of losing him wasn’t as literal as when somebody with a mark lost their soulmate. Barry felt it first, when Lup was out recovering the Light and all of a sudden he cried out, grabbing his arm on instinct and going pale when he felt scar tissue over where his mark was. Taako didn’t come out of his room much that cycle.
Whenever Lucretia had a moment to slip away at the beginning of a year, she would disappear to her room on the ship, checking and double checking her arms like how she did before she joined the IPRE. Nothing ever appeared, just like Taako’s and Magnus’s arms stayed resolutely blank. But she had reached and gone beyond the point of no return, and her sleeves stayed long even as the crew grew close enough to be family. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t want to show any of them, but she justified it to herself with little things - she’d always worn long sleeves on a world with two suns, so she was cold anywhere else, so it was fine.
At least, she used that excuse until cycle 21. A mental health cycle, Davenport declared, a year to relax on the beach and let their hair down.
She was worrying her lip and tapping her cheek with her pencil, her hair twisted into a loose topknot as she figured out what to write next, and the sun was just so hot and the breeze across the sand just not cool enough to help with the intense heat and she was wearing a swimsuit for a reason, after all, and before she knew it, she’d slipped off her robe.
Lup gasped from where she was waist-deep in the ocean, pointing. “Are we finally gonna see Lucy’s mark?” she yelled, and the acoustics of the sand that carried sound much too easily meant that everybody else perked up and looked over, eyes scouring Lucretia’s bare arms, making her scramble to pull her robe back over them, cursing herself for letting herself slip for that brief moment. Lup’s face fell when she realized, and she started to open her mouth to say something -
“It’s fine,” Lucretia snapped, clutching her robe closed with one hand to ensure it didn’t fall off and expose her arms again as she stood shakily, racing off to the ship, uncaring that the beach had fallen silent behind her.
When she reached the ship, she didn’t waste time in getting to her room and making sure the door was locked before sitting heavily on the floor, burying her face in her hands. They were bound to find out eventually, and it was honestly a miracle that she’d lasted two decades without question, but she knew the only reason they hadn’t asked was because they assumed her mark belonged to somebody who had been consumed by the Hunger. Lup didn’t mean anything by her teasing anyway; she knew that the twins never put much stock into soulmates, and if Lucretia had been mourning someone from their home plane, she would have had ample time to get over it. Nobody on the Starblaster had even considered that she was just another of Istus’s accursed.
There was a knock at her door, a heavy sound that meant it was Magnus, and that deduction was quickly confirmed when he called “Creesh? Can I come in?”
“Go away,” she yelled back, unable to hide the crack in her voice.
The lock on her door clicked anyway, and she didn’t have time to be offended by the use of Knock on her privacy before Taako and Magnus were inside, bare arms glaringly blank, and she snapped her gaze away, clenching her jaw resolutely.
“Forgot your book, Luce,” Taako said, tone carefully blank, and he tossed it into her lap.
“Thanks,” she muttered, clutching it to her chest, and though she was determinedly not looking at them, she caught the glance they shared with each other in her periphery. “I’m fine,” she said, trying to deter their questions. “You can leave now.”
Magnus plopped himself down next to her, arms open, and she sighed before leaning slightly into his embrace. Taako grumbled something about the hardness of the floor before he sat gracefully on her other side, placing a hesitant but genuinely caring hand on her shoulder.
“How do you two do it?” she mumbled eventually, looking up at Magnus. “We’re cursed.”
Magnus frowned, eyes flicking over her head, and on her other side, Taako groaned. “This is really gonna be my emotional advice cycle, huh?” he griped, taking his hand off her shoulder. “Whatever. I rolled an eleven anyway.” He shifted positions, kneeling in front of her, and took one of her hands in his. “Listen, Luce. Soulmates are dumb anyway. Overrated. Me ‘n’ Lulu...we didn’t have much, as kids. Makes it worse trying to get a job when you don’t have a soulmark. But - and I’ll kill you if you tell anyone I said this - it doesn’t matter when you’ve got family.” He squeezed her hand.
Magnus smiled at her, arms sturdy and still warm from the heat outside. “You have us, Creesh.”
She smiled back.
Lup made apology brownies that evening. They were fantastic, as usual, and unnecessary, since it wasn’t her fault, but Lucretia accepted the unspoken “I’m sorry” anyway. Nobody commented on the fact that she was chatting mostly with Taako and Magnus that night, and they sent her smiles when she came down to the sand the next day without her IPRE uniform.
It still bugged her, of course. Why had she, and Taako and Magnus, been chosen to be excluded from the weaving of fate? But she became more comfortable with it, learned from Taako to ignore the people on more superstitious planes, learned from Magnus to have hope for the future regardless.
It wasn’t until Cycle 65 that it became a big problem.
“I made it,” she breathed when her friends reformed, the strings of white light blinding, but she didn’t mind, already sliding down the wall, clutching her head in her hands. “I fucking made it.”
Lup’s hand was on her shoulder first, but then Magnus was scooping her up into a hug, and fuck she’d missed his hugs, had gone a whole year without them.
“They, uh,” he said, while she buried her face in his shoulder, “they didn’t like people without soulmarks.”
She huffed a vague attempt at a laugh. “Yeah, I fucking noticed.” She sighed, melting into his hug. “They kill you two first, then?”
Magnus chuckled. “Basically.”
The others gradually added onto the cuddle pile, making her more than grateful that she had survived long enough to get to hug them all again. Once Davenport had gotten the ship into a safe enough spot for him to put on autopilot, he joined the group. “You alright, Lucretia?” he asked, using his captainly voice despite being engulfed in a giant hug.
She laughed bitterly. “No.”
She almost wished, some cycles, that scars stayed as they crossed between planar systems. It felt so wrong to be reset at the end of every cycle. She had outlived a normal human’s years and still was stuck at nineteen. She knew the realization of her youth was still a stumbling block for the older races; even after almost seven decades, she was told Taako was unnerved at the inexplicable wrongness in the air whenever she died. She hated just as much as him how little her appearance changed. It was too much like her days before the IPRE, searching fruitlessly for a difference on her arms.
On bad days, she couldn’t convince herself that her family was real, certain she was on her own in a world that hated her and forced her to fight for her survival every day. On those days, she traced letters on her arms aimlessly, and when she was more aware of her surroundings, she knew her family noticed the word she kept writing there, the word that those who caught her carved into every inch of her arms with knives. “CURSED.” It wasn’t a scar she necessarily wanted, but it was one that she didn’t feel deserving of losing.
When they landed in Cycle 99, Magnus screamed, making everyone scramble to his side immediately because he never screamed like that, no matter how he was dying, but then he was sobbing, blubbering with one of the biggest smiles Lucretia had ever seen on him, and he was extending his right arm proudly, displaying the words “Calm down, big guy. You wanna tell me your name?” in loopy cursive on his wrist. Then Taako shrieked, and everyone crowded around him next, seeing the scar tissue covering “Well, this is hardly fair” in tight letters, and he brushed off concern for his clearly dead soulmate by saying he’d always been without one anyway.
And when Lucretia checked her own arms, she found them still blank, and she tried to hide her disappointment, but she was surrounded by her family who knew better after living with her for a century, and Barry wrapped an arm around her shoulders and Lup grabbed her hand and Merle patted her thigh in an attempt to give her comfort.
The Light fell practically on top of them. It seemed that with now six of the seven birds in Istus’s favor, she would finally grant them more leniency.
Lucretia hated the Bulwark Staff. Hated its unassuming white surface. Hated the way it hummed under her hands when Barry carefully portioned a seventh of the Light into it. Hated that she’d put so much thought and work into crafting it, only for it to undoubtedly become a weapon of mass destruction. She could tell that her family all had similar feelings about their own relics, especially when the time came to put them out into the world and they began to see the effects. Black circles on the ground drove Lup to her room. A peppermint town and Taako started snapping at everyone. The manifestation of a black hole and Davenport threw himself into his work, even if there was nothing left for him to do. Magnus was panicking silently, unable to tell what was happening with his Temporal Chalice, an almost worse fate. Merle acted aloof, perhaps so wildly desensitized by his talks with John that he didn’t so much mind the typhoons drowning towns. Barry was more silent than ever, using research as a way to avoid seeing what happened with the Animus Bell. And Lucretia continued to chronicle, torturing herself with casualties, committing each and every town to memory, because why else had she come on this mission a hundred years ago but to make sure nothing on their journey was forgotten?
But she would do anything to ease her friends’ pain. And that gave her an idea.
Lup disappeared. A few days later, Barry cried out as his mark scarred over, and he met Taako’s eyes with panic.
“What did it feel like?” Davenport asked brusquely, though he couldn’t hide his trembling hands, which Merle clasped to give him some comfort. He was the one who’d first become acquainted with the different feelings of his soulmate’s death, since Merle’s death in Fungsten felt like his mark was being ripped apart, and then his deaths in Parlay were like a severe burn that kept the scar tissue red and angry for days.
Barry squeezed his eyes shut, trying to regain control of his breathing. “S-stabbing. A knife, maybe? Then...cold.” He shivered. “We have to find her.”
Taako looped an easy arm through his, much like when he first met Lucretia. “My lichy sister’ll be fine, Barold. We’ll find her, week tops.”
It wasn’t a week.
Lucretia doubled down on her idea, which was quickly escalating into a plan. It was the exact opposite of her job as a chronicler, but she was certain it would work, and then she could fix everything.
Four months after Lup disappeared, Lucretia fed her journals to Fisher and heard a small gasp behind her. She spun, fear in her eyes, and found Magnus, who dropped a wooden duck and raced to the tank with a shout, his eyes wide, but she could see confusion start to cloud out his horror. “No,” he mumbled.
“Gods, Magnus, you weren’t supposed to see this,” she said, tears already streaking down her cheeks. “I’m so sorry.”
“What is…”
“I’m going to fix this, what we did to this world,” she said, moving to hold his shoulders, and his eyes were foggy when he met her gaze.
“Who are you?”
She choked back a sob. “I’m so sorry. I love you, I love all of you. I’m going to make this right, I promise.”
He wavered on his feet, and she gently guided him to the ground, eyes falling to his beautiful new mark, the one he’d been so happy to finally receive. “I’m going to help you find them, Magnus,” she promised. “I’ll help you find your soulmate. I promise.”
He just smiled at her even though he was so blank, and she wanted to vomit and scream and cry all at once because she’d done this to him and her whole family, because it was all her fault he didn’t know who she was and wouldn’t know anything until she got him far away from this ship that held only static for him now.
She left him, aware now of how silent the ship was. She found Davenport and Merle in the same room, though seemingly unaware of each other’s company, the gnome with his hands tangled in his hair, rocking back and forth muttering his name to himself over and over and over. Merle was sitting with a contented smile on his face, eyes vacant. She left the room, trying to stay strong, trying to ignore that she’d essentially just killed her parents.
Taako was on his knees on the deck of the Starblaster, tears falling down his cheeks as he stared at the metal floor, fingers still wrapped around his wand. His ear flicked toward her when she stepped through the doorway, and his grip on his wand tightened as he curled in further on himself. But Barry wasn’t there, so she approached warily, not daring to touch the elf but crouching in front of him.
“Taako?” she whispered, watching as his eyes snapped up to her distrustfully, and she hoped her face wasn’t a block of static. “There was a human man here, do you know where he is?”
Taako narrowed his eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Cha’boy’s always been alone.”
She stumbled backward, breathing heavily, pressing a hand to her heart as Taako’s gaze returned to the floor and he appeared to forget she was there. When she erased Lup from his memory, she hoped she’d be taking away his grief of losing her. She hadn’t completely considered what it would do.
Barry wasn’t anywhere on the deck, and she hoped he’d wandered somewhere else on the ship, because if he had fallen over the railing - she couldn’t let herself think about that now.
She kept determinedly not thinking about it, even while she arranged a way for Merle to slip into life on the beach without causing too much suspicion and nicked enough gold to buy Taako a stagecoach for the cooking show he’d always wanted. She pushed it to the back of her mind guiltily when she found Raven’s Roost, a town on natural stilts and filled to the brim with brilliant craftsmen. She kept ignoring it in favor of walking Magnus into a woodworking shop called the Hammer and Tongs, casting Greater Invisibility on herself so she could wait around to see if he would really be happy there.
It didn’t take long for her to hear Magnus spluttering, apologizing profusely to a woman he’d bumped into as she came out from a door that led further into the workshop. “Sorry! I - Sorry. So sorry. It’s nice to meet you. Sorry.”
The woman cocked an eyebrow, a smile playing across her lips already. “Calm down, big guy. You wanna tell me your name?”
Lucretia slipped out the door, the pit in her stomach finally loosened a bit by having fulfilled one of the promises she’d made. Not the biggest one, yet, but she’d get there. She would fix everything.
With a bit of manipulation, she had a job set up for Davenport in Rockport, hoping he would take to trains as well as he did to the Starblaster, but she quickly found out he didn’t have the mental faculties to take it anymore, thanks to her. Thanks to what she’d done.
“Davenport?” he asked, eyes full of concern, and she clutched the kitchen counter harder, Taako and Lup’s kitchen counter, gods, what had she done
“Shit,” she muttered. “Shit shit shit shit.”
This was one of the times that she wished she still carried her scars from the world of the Judges, only this time she knew they were wrong. She wasn’t cursed. She was a curse to others.
But she couldn’t take it back. There was too much at stake, and she refused to break her promise. So she wiped her eyes furiously, straightening up, and walked briskly from the room, leaving Davenport behind, in order to find the first relic.
She recovered the Bulwark Staff with ease, not leaving Davenport alone for more than a day. She couldn’t in good conscience let any but her own be the first to be collected. It was the least she could do for releasing it into the world in the first place.
Barry’s would be next. Even if it hurt, she would force herself to ponder his fate. Had he died, and in that case did he remember everything as a lich? Was he somewhere out there, holes punched into his brain, injured and confused where she just hadn’t found him yet? Had she lost him already to the insanity that occurred when liches couldn’t anchor themselves properly? She owed it to him to recover his relic.
Wonderland was hell.
She stumbled back into the Felicity Wilds without her bodyguard, having doubled her age in ten seconds, arm wrapped around her stomach as if she could keep the blood inside, and cursing herself because she failed, she didn’t get the bell, she lost when she expected to gain and she was paying for her recklessness and -
She needed a team.
The next years were filled with negotiation, with planning and building and structuring and recruiting. She found time to check on her family when need be, and the glimpses of Merle calm on the beach and Taako smiling at the audience and Magnus kissing his wife at his wedding gave her the strength to keep going. They were safe. They were happy.
She wasn’t there to see the moment when that disappeared.
But she was there when Fisher had a child, when she realized she could finally bring them together. She was there to receive them after they’d been inoculated to only the barest bones of information she’d taken from them.
She was there to see with her own eyes the scarred over mark on Magnus’s arm and the way Taako’s expression was carefully guarded and the way Merle snapped at others easier.
She offered them their bracers, noting how they all snapped it onto their left arm, none obscuring their soulmarks. Taako’s was up on his bicep anyway, even if he wanted to cover it, but she wondered if Merle could even read his, if the words “What the hell are you doing here, Highchurch?” were general enough or if they’d been so integral to the mission that they were obscured by static. She wondered what Davenport saw on his own arm, if he had the ability to read at all.
The sleeves of her Bureau uniform were long, to avoid unnecessary questions from her family. Taako and Magnus couldn’t understand her now, not with their own marks in this plane and no memory of ever having blank arms.
She let her walls down a bit, though, when Merle invited her on a spa trip. When she settled into the mud bath, trying not to be unnerved by the soulwood arm in a pot and the fact that Merle’s mark had been chopped off, he raised an eyebrow at her arms.
“Cursed, huh?” he said.
“Yup,” she said bluntly, taking a gulp of her wine. “Frowned upon by Istus, or however you want to put it.”
“Rough gig.”
“You could say that again.”
She almost cried in relief when Taako and Merle and Barry appeared in her office and inoculated themselves, if she wasn’t so panicked about the Hunger and so determined to finish her plan and finally save them. She felt herself finally smile, the first in almost twelve years, when Magnus appeared, alive again, until it vanished and Taako was pointing Lup’s umbra staff at her, shaking with pain and rage and so much grief she’d torn from him.
“We leave this plane, and Lup comes back,” Davenport told Barry and Taako, and Lucretia was shaking her head, they didn’t understand, they needed to end this, they couldn’t leave because the Hunger needed to be stopped once and for all, because if they left then she did this to them for nothing. (She didn’t even realize how bad her tunnel vision had gotten.)
Magnus shook his head. “We can’t, Cap. Not this plane. I can’t...I won’t leave Julia.”
Taako’s hand dropped, the umbrella dangling loosely in his grip. “You know what,” he said, voice quiet, looking down at his mark. “Do whatever you want. I don’t care anymore.”
Magnus looked panicked. “Taako, no. You can’t just give up! We have to stay and fight! I know you lost Lup, but you found her, right? In Wave Echo Cave? And you weren’t even looking for her! And you found him too! We...you can’t just leave your soulmate, not after finding him.”
Taako looked up, and Lucretia gasped at how empty his eyes looked. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Mags,” he said, “and I’m on board for whatever the plan is. But understand this. I have nothing. And I don’t give a shit. The world is ending and I. Don’t. Care.”
But then the Hunger was there, and they were fighting, and Lucretia was trying so damn hard to pull the Light out of Barry’s relic and channel it into her own to put it all back together so she could cast her barrier and save them all, and then there was an explosion and fire was filling the dome but weaving expertly around them. And then there was Lup, and her family was finally together again, and she’d fulfilled part of another promise, but not the biggest one yet.
“Not yet,” she and Magnus said when Davenport gestured apologetically to the Starblaster. “Please. I just need some more time.”
“We don’t have time,” Davenport snapped at her, and she winced, knowing he had more right than anybody to be angry with her.
“I can make this right,” she said. “Just let me fix this. Let me protect us from the Hunger.”
Taako cleared his throat. “Uh. There’s a third option.”
And when it was over, when she cast her barrier not around the prime material plane but around the Hunger itself, severing all its bonds and finally subjecting it to the laws of the universe John had tried so hard to run from, she found herself in a temple.
She was still standing, still holding her staff in front of her, but the gentle hum of power it housed was gone, and it was just a piece of wood.
Then somebody cleared their throat, and she gasped and fell to a knee in reverence at the sight of the goddess Istus, the embodiment of fate, the one who had hated her from birth.
Istus chuckled, a warm sound that felt like a blanket, and paused her knitting. “You may rise, Lucretia, dear. I believe I owe more to you than you to me. Perhaps I should be the one kneeling?”
Lucretia hurriedly stood, mind racing. “Lady Istus,” she breathed, eyes tracing the goddess’s enormous form that had manifested on the dais, taking in her soft features that were oddly blurry and her hair that didn’t seem to have an end (and trying to find it hurt her brain). “I-I wish to thank you for what you did for my friends - my family.”
Istus smiled. “And thank you for saving the world and worlds that came before.” She quirked an eyebrow. “However, I believe you have a question for me?”
Lucretia shook her head. “None, My Lady.”
Istus sighed quietly. “Lucretia. Please, do not be afraid to say what you wish.” She laid down her impossibly long tapestry. “Whatever you have to ask will not offend me.”
Lucretia was wearing short sleeves because of course she was, of course the time she had to meet the goddess who controlled soulmarks she was displaying her own lack of one. She hated Murphy’s Law.
Regardless, she’d just defeated the Hunger. What was one question to a goddess?
“Lady Istus, why did you curse me?” Though it was unneeded, she extended her arms. “It is widely known that if you don’t have a soulmate, Fate herself has frowned upon you. And I know it is selfish to ask ‘why me,’ but I wish to know. Why me?”
Istus frowned in pity, and then she wasn’t some gigantic hard-to-perceive figure upon a dais, but a regular human-sized woman in front of her, still glowing and ethereal, but much more real. “I’m sorry you ever felt that way,” she said, voice quiet but still emanating around the temple, and she reached out a hand, caressing Lucretia’s cheek. “You do not have a soulmark because you do not have a romantic soulmate,” she said plainly, and Lucretia flinched, but Istus smiled. “Platonic and familial relationships are less tangible. You know this. It is why people say they are ‘just’ friends, as if a friendship is in itself weaker. That assumption is incorrect.”
Istus gently placed her hands on Lucretia’s shoulders, running them down her arms, and Lucretia gasped as words covered them as if Istus was just erasing a layer and revealing what she had searched for for over a century. “No need to rush, bubbeleh,” and “What’s your name, babe?” and “I don’t know you,” and “Lucretia. Please take a seat,” and “That’s an old family name, call me Barry” and “You’re joking, right, kid?” shone up at her as if they’d been there her whole life, and tears pricked her eyes.
“You can keep them, if you want,” Istus offered, and Lucretia nodded fervently, unable to speak, still taking in the way Taako’s handwriting differed from Lup’s and how the scar tissue over Lup’s was okay because she was a lich, reading Magnus’s words in his big blocky letters and wondering if Julia got to see that handwriting every day of her life, seeing Davenport’s pristine printing and Barry’s tight letters and Merle’s almost unintelligible scribble.
“I never hated you,” Istus said, and Lucretia looked up, saw the goddess with a sad look in her eyes, eyes that had seen centuries pass by. “I know I owe more to you than I will be able to repay, but if I may request a favor of you, I ask you let others know that I do not hate them. That they are not cursed, but that they will find bonds as strong as any who have marks. That theirs are just below the surface.”
“Thank you,” Lucretia breathed, when her mouth could form words again, and Istus smiled.
“Side note,” she said brightly as she began to walk back to her dais, and her form flickered and then her scale was impossible to figure out, “I am very glad that touching you did not make you explode. I had my worries, but Magnus gave me a double high five about ten minutes ago, so I figured you would be fine.” Then she winked, and Lucretia was standing, holding her empty staff, in the middle of a field, alongside her family, and Angus was atop Magnus’s shoulders, and far away people were roaring with cheers.
“We won,” Taako said, face pulling into a wild grin, one she hadn’t seen in the past twelve years, and then he was laughing, and even the sight of her wasn’t enough to erase his smile.
“We won,” Barry confirmed, looking at Lup, and the lich cast Disguise Self to make herself look like a slightly see-through version of her living self so he could see her own grin, matching her twin.
“We won,” Merle repeated, looking dazed, and Davenport grasped his hand, and the two smiled at each other like the old lovers they were.
Magnus turned, turning Angus with him, and gasped. “Creesh! Your arms!”
She grinned, pretended she hadn’t been Madame Director for a decade, and held them in the air, feeling thirty instead of fifty. “Recognize them?”
Lup squealed, casting Mage Hand to grab her wrist and inspect it closer. “Is that the first thing I said to you?”
“Istus and I had a little chat,” she said, grin still ear to ear. She met Magnus’s eyes, which were filled with proud tears, and sought out Taako’s gaze which was on her arms, his mouth gaping. “We were never cursed. She never hated us.”
“Well, natch,” Taako said, though his ear flicked in a way that she recognized. “Nobody hates Taako.”
Magnus lurched forward to give her a hug, making the other five panic as Angus’s position was endangered and at least four Mage Hands lifted him from the fighter’s shoulders and set him carefully back on the ground.
“Welcome to the club,” he whispered in her ear, and she melted into his embrace the same way she always had.