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Dawn broke after the most tumultuous day and night the Isle had experienced since its earliest years.
Yesterday, the new boy king of Auradon, son to the beast who had imprisoned the denizens of the Isle on it, had been crowned.
Yesterday, the wand used to anoint him-the only thing capable of shattering the barrier-had been stolen-not by a villain, but by its owners own daughter, desperate, after years of being mocked and ridiculed, for the beauty all the princesses she went to school with seemed to be born with.
Yesterday, the young fae's untrained hands had indeed channeled magic through the wand-breaking the barrier for a single minute.
And yesterday, during that precious minute, while the inhabitants of the Isle gaped and ran around in a frenzy and fled as one toward the docks, the only way off the Isle, one person simply transformed into a dragon and flew away, right before the minute was up.
Oh yeah, some other things had happened also, like Maleficent being turned into a lizard and her daughter and her three friends closest allies publicly renounced the ways of the Isle, but the Isle wasn't concerned with all that.
Yet, anyway. They would deal with all that later. But it wasn't their concern right now. They had bigger things to deal with.
For twenty years, the Isle had been the only place in the world completely without magic. It had been like a hole in the universe.
The people of the Isle-those who had had magic, that is-had to learn how to function in everyday life without using the magic that had been as natural to them as breathing. In some cases, even their physiques had changed.
And their children, those who should have had magic but did not, those born as everyday ordinary humans? They had to grow up with their nature rebelling against the air they breathed and the water they swam in, against the sun and stars they could barely see, with the shadow of the heritage they could have had hanging over them, always feeling the pull of something just out of reach.
For one minute, the barrier had broken. No one besides Maleficent had succeeded in escaping.
But for one minute, the Isle had had magic again.
Madam Mim had spread her arms as her dark witchcraft had rushed through her as her granddaughters flailed and swayed as their magic flooded them, while the crew of the Lost Revenge had been nearly drowned by the giant waves that flooded them, flowing toward their captain like a magnet she did not know how to turn off. Freddie and Celia Facilier had been driven to their knees by the shadows that had embraced them and tried to bring them somewhere else in equal measure while their father used his shadow to ward them off, as Ginny Gothel had collapsed during the onslaught of a hundred incantations rushing through her blood at once. The three Hook children had immediately felt a tingling, a buzzing, an ache between their shoulder blades, as if something had realized for the first time that it should be there, while the grass beneath Hadie's feet had withered.
And after it was over? While the magic users recovered from feeling their magic for the first time in two decades-and, for some of them, the first time ever, the non-magic users had gone wild.
They had rampaged and rioted and looted, and those who hadn't had taken shelter indoors.
"Look, I still say we should go," Ivy de Vil stated. "We don't even have to talk to her-we could just peek in through the window or something."
Her cousin, Diego de Vil, threw his hands up in the air. "Now? Are you-are you serious? You want to run into the wrong gang and get stabbed?"
"Do I look like I want to get stabbed?" Ivy retorted.
Diego blinked. "There's no right answer to that question, is there?"
A smile twitched at the corners of Ivy's lips, only to vanish almost immediately. "No. But still-we should go check on her."
"It's not like Carlos is there or anything," Diego pointed out. They had not seen their cousin in weeks, hadn't even known he was going to Auradon until the limo showed up. To be fair, he hadn't known either. Cruella had revealed little of the conference she had had with her newfound allies, her son's friends' associates' parents, but she had rambled on about plans and revenge and making fur coats out of Dalmatian fur until Cecil had sighed, "Ella, please, not now."
And now Carlos was in Auradon, and Cruella had not been seen for as long as Maleficent had been gone.
"We should at least be able to let him know that she's alive," Ivy pointed out. "What if Maleficent killed her and the Evil Queen and Jafar? No one's seen them either."
Wouldn't be all that tragic, Diego was about to say, but just then his father sighed. Both Diego and Ivy started, having nearly forgotten he was there.
Cecil B. de Vil sat in his rickety old rocking chair, rocking slowly back and forth over and over and over, the creak of the rocking chair reverberating through the room, as it had for years.
Cecil had actually volunteered to go to the Isle, having refused to let his sister Cruella (or Ella, as he called her-he was the only one who did, anymore) go alone.
But that had been twenty years ago, and now, after the loss of his wife and his brother, Ivy's father, as well as watching his sister's slow, inexorable descent into insanity, after realizing that his son, niece, and nephew would have no future, Cecil had nearly lost the will to live.
Cecil stared blankly at the grayish-whitish wall, which still had a scorch mark in it from five years previously when Ivy had wanted to see if dried paint would burn. (It did.) His dark eyes were unseeing. His face was lined. His hair had always been black-and-white, like all de Vils, but it was almost completely white now, with only a few streaks of black, much as the white of his sister's hair was mostly silver now.
The only thing Cecil had left was the remaining members of his family.
His son, Diego.
His niece, Ivy.
And his sister, Ella.
She may have been evil, mad, obsessed. But she was his sister.
Diego exhaled. "Fine," he said. "Go to Hell Hall. But if you're not back in two hours-"
Ivy nodded, already swinging one leg over the window. "Look in the fur closet first."
(Funny, isn't it, how people can turn abominable things into ordinary ones, or even joke about them?)
One hour and fifty-eight minutes later, Ivy scrambled in through her cousin's window.
"About time!" Diego hissed, pulling her the rest of the way in. "I've been on pins and needles for twenty minutes!"
"I made it, didn't I?" Ivy asked, brushing herself off and looking around the room.
Nothing had changed. Cecil was even still in the exact same position, staring at the same spot on the wall. Ivy was willing to bet, however, that her uncle wouldn't be able to describe what the scorch mark looked like if asked.
"Well?" Diego prompted.
"She's fine," Ivy said, and then raised her voice. "Aunt Ella's fine, Uncle Cecil. She says to tell you sorry for worrying you."
For a moment, there was a dim light in Cecil's eyes. He nodded slightly. Then his face assumed its customary blank expression, and his eyes unfocused.
Cruella had said no such thing, of course, but Ivy wasn't going to tell her uncle that.
She turned back to Diego, speaking in a whisper. "She was cataloging her furs."
Diego rolled his eyes. "Again?"
Ivy nodded. "Yeah. But she was also...laughing." The memory made her wince. Cruella's laugh had been...wild. Manic. Unhinged. Villainous. "And she was saying...that the world would know the name of de Vil."
"They kind of already do," Diego pointed out.
Ivy nodded again. "But here's the thing-I think she meant Carlos."
Diego's eyes widened. "Carlos?"
Ivy shrugged. "He's in Auradon...he has a shot at life. Better than we do here, anyway."
There was silence, broken only by the creak, creak, creak of Cecil's rocking chair.
"What do you think this means?" Diego asked finally, and Ivy knew that her cousin didn't just mean this, but also the coronation, the release of people from the Isle for the first time in years, the barrier being broken momentarily, Maleficent's escape, and their cousin and his three partners in crime-oh, who were they kidding, his friends-having chosen Auradon.
"I don't know," she admitted. "I just don't know."
They looked out the window, where the stars were just visible beyond the barrier and the smoke of several fires set earlier in the day. Ivy imagined her youngest cousin looking out at those same stars.
"Good luck, Carlos," she whispered.
"Teach them that we're not all...that we're just...whatever," Diego said, imagining that Carlos could hear him.
Ivy added, "Set something on fire in Auradon for me, will you?"