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“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle .”
Sun Tzu: The Art of War
It was raining.
Mami stared at the book in her hands, thumbs rushing over the cover and brushing over the words etched into the surface. Like it was done with a knife, or some other bladed tool. The words were hardly legible, but if she titled her head and stared hard enough, she could see what the etchings spelt.
It was in Homura’s room sat on her bed, waiting almost expectedly for Mami to lift it up and pry it open. As though Homura knew the outcome of their battle from the beginning and understood just how to finish her ‘teaching’.
If it would have kept Homura alive, Mami would have told her she could never finish teaching her. Homura was a font of knowledge both mundane and magical, she knew the world around her inside and out, and Mami had no idea how the younger girl could come off as dozens of years older. She was brutal and blunt in her teachings, but they were effective in a way that being self-taught could never come close to.
Her lessons were filled with what Mami suspects are things Homura had to teach herself, lest she fail and die as most Puella Magi are wont to do. The lessons themselves were summarised in rather telling ways, too, with each lesson being given a name, number, and in some cases a description. If she was lucky.
Her thumb padded over the etchings one more time before she opened the book, staring hard at the first words she saw.
My name is Homura Akemi.
Mami paused her reading and tried to take in just what that could mean in any way. Just why Homura felt the need to remind herself of her own name. she pushed down the foreboding feeling and moved on.
I…I am Homura Akemi. I forget that a lot. This page is necessary.
I exist. I don’t want to, but I have to for her sake if no one else’s.
I can’t stop until Madoka is safe. I physically can’t. I don’t know anything else anymore.
Mami frowns, shuffling until she seated herself on the edge of Homura’s bed. She sees Kyouko staring at her, leaning against the doorway, face deceptively blank and red eyes taking in the book in her hands.
“That’s Homura’s?”
“Hm. Before I…” She flutters her golden eyes closed and sighs, looking back down at the words written in scratchy writing at the top of the first page – I am Homura Akemi. “…Her last wish was for me to find and read this.”
“She give a reason?”
“Not really, but I got the feeling it would…she told me her last lesson was that ‘she’s never lied to me’, and I get the feeling this –” She lifts the journal slightly, still open with her thumb keeping the pages apart “– is supposed to clear that up.”
“Huh.” Kyouko hops over and slumps next to her blonde friend, taking the book out of her hands and staring hard at the first words written in. “Well ain’t that jus’ forebodin’.”
“Indeed.” Kyouko ignored the dry inflection to Mami’s voice, so the blonde sighed and took the book back. “Let’s see…”
Kyouko settled in and had a bad feeling that this diary would answer some questions she didn’t even know she had.
Mami clears her voice and begins to read out the first paragraph.
“‘My name is Homura Akemi. I am fourteen years old and a Puella Magi. I refuse to call what we are as Magical Girls; there’s nothing magical about anything we do or what we hunt’. That is a bit much, isn’t it?”
Kyouko leaned back on her hands and blew a sigh out of her parted lips. “Eh, I’d say she nailed it’n one; Wraiths in Mitakihara’re pretty docile compared ta th’ ones in Kazamino.”
“True…” Mami looked back down and continued, her voice getting sombre and her eyes taking in the words at the same speed her mind did. “‘Witches are vicious creatures, soulless isn’t quite close, but monstrous would do. I cannot hate them though; they quite literally cannot help themselves after all’. Wait, Witches?”
“Not Wraiths?”
Mami shook her head in confusion, an emotion shared equally by Kyouko. “No. maybe she called them Witches before she learned what they were called?”
“I mean,” Kyouko shrugged and leaned backwards until she was lying down and staring at the bland, white ceiling of Homura’s room. “I guess? I’ve ‘eard ‘em called all sorts, so…”
“Hm. ‘I started hunting Witches partly because it was the right thing to do, and mostly out of sheer survival; Grief Seeds are what sustain a Puella Magi, and of course the only way to gain said Grief Seeds is to slay a Witch’.” Mami palmed her chin with her other hand. “Maybe she called Grief Cubes Grief Seeds, too?”
“…I dunno…”
“‘Witches come in all shapes, sizes and dimensions imaginable, but most, if not all, are easily dealt with using either innate magic, mundane weaponry, or excessive firepower. Their largest threat, however, is what they…come…from.’”
Kyouko perked up and looked at her blonde friend to see her with a distant look, brain whirring and clicking things together like a child with a puzzle. “Mami?”
The blonde swallowed harshly. “Kyouko, you remember when Homura described a ‘Before’ and told us about Madoka?”
“Yep. Never could figure that one out…”
“Well…” She looked back down at the book, her hand shaking as the sheer weight of what she was reading finally began to press down on her. “Well, I think-I think…I don’t think she was making it up.”
Her golden eyes took in the words written just underneath.
“‘The worst thing about Puella Magi and Witches is just how interconnected the two are. When a Puella Magi loses their magic somehow, or becomes overcome with Despair, they transform into Witches to keep the cycle of Despair and Hope prolonged’.”
Mami finally, finally began to realise just why Homura was so desperate to die before, supposedly, The Law of Cycles came to claim her. But if this was right then no Law was coming to save her, and she would have turned had…had Mami not pulled the trigger.
She looked below, and froze entirely, Kyouko sighing and taking the book to keep reading.
“‘The worst, however, is why I made my Wish in the first place; to save Madoka from the End, and beat, destroy, kill…’”
She dropped the book, both of their eyes staring with dark foreboding pressing down on them, taking in the single word written with such malice and anger that it bled through to a few pages after that.
‘…Walpurgisnacht.’
Unseen by any, glowing eyes peered through the shadows.
With every step the being took, space and time rippled like water and settled like stone.
Glowing eyes closed, and a huff escaped pale lips. A hand brushed long hair back to remind itself it still had hair. A tenuous grip on its humanity at most, a link to its past more than anything else.
Another being came into existence with a slight twist of space, a blinding white light following its approach into the mortal realm.
The first being had vanished before the second could even take note of their surroundings.
“Damn, to think this is…” The second being closed her blue eyes and sighed in recrimination. “Time to save you like you saved me.” The being sighed again and looked down at clenched hands. “I got a lotta makin’ up to do, after all.”