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overture.
Once upon a time, an evil witch kidnapped the light of the world and was cast down into the darkness. But did you know? Even witches get bored. No princesses to threaten! No more princes to gobble up! So, every so often, the witch uttered a magic spell that bent the world just a little bit, and the blackness cracked open, and a sliver of light that wasn’t hers poured in...
Who? What? It was—
“...er, Himemiya, I think it’s your line?”
“I’m sorry, Utena-sama. I forgot.”
Really?
Oh, well, the show must go on. Enter, stage right: the princess of power! Or is it the prince, in this case?
Quiet, now, quiet. She’s coming.
scene one.
She stumbles into Anthy’s domain quite by accident, poor thing. Trips coming down, knock knees and scrabbling hands, her body in that awkward stage of growing in and furiously mashing itself down. She holds her oversized sword like only a young person can.
“—uh, Bow? Glimmer? I think the castle did something weird again!”
She glances around, gripping her sword tighter. Her steps are practiced, the light, measured movement of a soldier, but—yes. She is a child, still. Anthy can’t decide whether to be annoyed—an intrusion from a stranger, one as horrendously young as all the rest at Ohtori and gawping at things she does not know—or faintly...amused. After all, eons have passed since anyone was this far down.
“Guys, seriously, this place is freaking me out—I swear, Catra, if you had anything to do with this, I’ll...”
The child swallows, unable to finish her line. Idly, Anthy wonders what she would be like as a Duelist. It would be so easy, this child with her too-big sword and her desires like trying to bite back a laid-open wound.
While Anthy is busy wondering, the child notices her. “What—oh my god,” she breathes, and Anthy blinks at the sight of the horror in those blue eyes. There is something there, some long-forgotten memory, like a ghost at the edges of her body...
No. Ruthlessly, Anthy quashes it. She is too old to hope for things that can never be.
“Don’t worry, I can—!” The child shakes her head in frustration, raises the sword above her head. “FOR THE HONOR OF GRAYSKULL!” she shouts. Grant me the power to revolutionize the world! It’s all the same story, underneath.
Light flashes over her body, the light of heroes and princes, replacing her soldier’s uniform with something as shiny and ill-fitting as her sword. Anthy almost sighs. All these children, playing dress up. Her golden hair unfurls, bright, bold, untarnished—so much she could choke on it.
She firms her shoulders and takes a stance, driving up the ornate aisle toward Anthy and the swords. It’s foolish, of course: her weapon clangs off the Swords of Hate in the sound of disquieting bells, like the shattering of princes’ blades on the Rose Gate. But it does make Anthy mildly curious.
“Who are you?” she asks dully. “How did you get in here?”
The child continues hacking futilely at the blades. “I’m She-Ra. Hold on, I can save you.”
Despite herself, Anthy feels a brief—flicker. She glances through her lashes, over the steel of another sword sliding into her gut, at the reckless girl hero. For a moment, she can see the white cape billowing behind, the fierce turn of pink lips, I’m going to be a prince! It’s more than a memory, but she doesn’t know what to call it...
...and then, as the child lowers her sword, crestfallen and heaving, the flicker dies. In another world, a cat is haunted by sparks of red lightning, claws turned inward at her own heart. She is laughing with sharp teeth, the kind of love that scars at a touch. “Come on,” the child whispers brokenly to someone too far away to listen, “I can save you.”
And Anthy bites back the rage, and the laugh, and the little, dying sigh. She knows this; it is no different after all. “If that’s what you want,” she says pleasantly. Ever the Rose Bride—ever the replacement.
The child’s brow furrows. “Uh...well, it is kind of my job. Saving people, I mean.”
“Oh?” Anthy hums. “Thank you very much,” she says with calculated blandness, and stays exactly where she is.
The child tilts her head, and after a moment, her face falls.
A door blooms into existence back in the darkness—through the crack Anthy can sense stars, and round planets sucked dry, and the faintest hum of wild magic.
Her sword trembling at her side, the child blinks. Extends her hand, as if she could reach through the million shards of steel and pull Anthy out whole. “Come with me,” she tries one last time.
When Anthy doesn’t reach back, the child closes her eyes and draws herself up, brittle and weighted, as though she expected it all along.
“I’ll come back for you,” the child pleads with every bit of her foolish, youthful certainty. “I promise.”
She may be no different than the rest of them, caught up in her own illusions, but she has been amusing. And she has made Anthy remember some fondness for Dios, that old worn-down ghost. Anthy doesn’t know whether that makes her want to help the girl or hurt her, or whether pain and pity are too bitterly intertwined for it to matter.
For whichever reason, Anthy turns her head and pretends she doesn’t hear.
“Did she ever come back?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well, she should’ve kept her promise. But...I’m glad someone tried to help that girl. Hey, she was sort of like the prince, you know?”
“...yes, Utena-sama.”
Hush now, no talking in the audience! Save all applause for after the show! Concessions are available in the back: tea, cake, cheese, and cherry tomatoes! Get them before they rot.
And now, for our next visitor: the magical girl traveling through time till she reaches eternity! Hang on, is it that she’s traveling, or stuck in it?
Jeez, get on with it already.
scene two.
She doesn’t even blink when she lands on the bridge between worlds; calmly surveys the shadowed archways and the aging castle and the looming maw of the rose as though it’s second nature. How refreshing. Anthy stares down the barrel of this traveler’s Berretta and finds violet eyes, flat as a mirror, as dead as a brother’s.
“You are new,” the traveler remarks with a monotone curiosity. “I have never seen your labyrinth before.”
She cocks the gun, but with another sigh she buries deep within her, Anthy knows she won’t shoot. This traveler is too cautious, thinking that she can control everything if she picks the right steps and dances carefully to the right tune. A pity, really. Anthy can’t die any more than hate can, but a bullet to the head might be a good distraction right about now.
Maybe if she needles her a bit. “I’m sorry, I don’t receive visitors that often.”
Violet eyes narrow in surprise. The barrel dips. “You can talk?”
“Yes.”
“I have never known a Witch who could talk.”
If Anthy could be surprised, perhaps she would be. Or maybe not at all. Every girl is doomed to become a princess or a witch, no matter what world. Still, the cold acceptance with which this traveler accepts her predicament is unusual. “You are an expert on witches, then?”
The traveler lowers the gun and flips her hair, somewhere between Nanami’s intractable teenage posturing and the coolness of armor sliding on. Embedded in her hand is a diamond. The light ricochets off its sides and edges just as it does the blades in Anthy’s chest—sharply, scathing, twinkling. “I suppose I am an expert, of a sort. Are you going to attack me?”
So candid! Only the truly arrogant could ever be so candid and hope to live. Which is it, then: arrogance or death wish?
Anthy chooses the smile with the least edge, all innocence and pretty pain. “Do you think I could attack you, miss? My place is here, as the Bride.”
The gun comes up again, the traveler’s face wavering and then shuttering off. Oh, poor dear—you were once a hero, weren’t you? “Do not take me for a fool,” she says.
“I endure this pain under the rules of my world. I could not hurt you even if I wanted to.”
“Is that so?” Higher, higher. “Do you really feel pain?”
The part of her not focused on acquiring the hot relief of a bullet finds that question interesting. Anthy is at once ever-present and never there; the body she inhabits is a cage, a weapon, a bartering chip, always offered in supplication to someone else. Does she feel pain in this body, or has that feeling, like everything else, been stripped from her?
That thought is genuinely frightening. The pain has gone on for so long Anthy cannot imagine herself without it, her oldest friend.
“I knew it,” says the traveler with a grimace. “It is always the most innocent-looking you cannot trust.”
Honeyed smile. “Well, the most innocent would have to be the one you protect...no?”
And Anthy has her, this traveler who has stepped oh-so-carefully into her trap.
Her finger snaps on the trigger—now they’re getting somewhere. Some ancient, dead part of her feels vaguely sorry for it; if she just asked her to shoot, perhaps this traveler in all her bluntness would have obliged. But weaving traps, setting poisoned thorns in the dirt, carefully igniting words to flicker and burn it all down to ash—it is as second nature to Anthy as her visitor’s finger on the trigger. Yes, whispers Dios from the past, this is who you are. This is what you chose to be.
“You will not threaten Madoka,” says the traveler. Her hands shake with emotion; Anthy hopes it won’t ruin her aim. “I do not care what you are, I won’t let you touch her. Ever.”
“My, you’re trying very hard, aren’t you?”
“I will!” the traveler screams, all her caution evaporated into flame. “No matter how many times it takes, I will save her!”
Time seems to stutter, as though the long eternity hanging over the world has blinked. For a second that might be eons, Anthy sees her brother stretched in that half-state between Dios and Akio, when the cocoon broke and Anthy had hoped he might crawl out of it instead of rotting twisted inside. And in another world, a young girl is hemming and hawing over the ribbons in her hair. She brushes away thoughts of fallen knights and flooded cities as the dust of dreams, skipping off to pick tomatoes in the garden. She is unaware that her hero, too, is crawling, twisting, beating against eternity for her sake.
Which way will this traveler go? Probably the way of the prince. It is always the way of the prince.
Stutter-start, and the world continues on. “No matter what you do, you can’t save her,” Anthy says. It’s the most truthful she has been, and maybe the old wisdom has the right of it: her truth is rewarded. A spray of bullets riddles her like fresh rain.
Oh, yes—there is the pain.
In the silence, the traveler’s wild gaze softens into something like pity. She stares at the body hanging from the swords, opens her mouth as if to attempt comfort, then shakes her head and thinks better of it. With a burst of purple light, a shield appears on her arm. She tucks the gun inside it, then turns it a quarter of the way.
A door blooms into existence back in the darkness—through the crack Anthy can sense hourglass sand, and stale tea, and arrows that smell of roses and rainwater.
“I think,” the traveler says quietly, “if you are like the Witches I know in my world—you were someone else, once. I will not apologize for protecting Madoka, but...I don’t blame you. I—hope someone is coming for you. And I am sorry that I was too late for you, I truly am.”
She bows shortly, then turns on her heel and walks through the door, leaving that bare truth in her wake like a putrid weed. Anthy would have preferred another bullet.
The traveler exits, stage right! And now: intermission!
Intermission? Wasn’t this one act?
Oh, really? I guess we’re just moving on, then.
“Well, I guess it makes sense that a person like that wouldn’t be able to save her. It’s not right to be so cold to someone in pain! Do you think the next one will save her, though? Ah...I hope so...”
“Utena-sama, do you even know what kind of story this is?”
“Ehhh?”
Alright, alright, our next contestant: a knight from a faraway crystalline land, going to war for her lady’s love. Oh, wait, scratch that—for her lady’s approval. Or...no, it was her lady’s orders? Aah! We’ll just say it was for her lady, it’s much simpler that way.
Is it?
scene three.
She alights on the aisle, made of light and delicacy and steel. “Oh, dear,” is all her new visitor says. Anthy knows immediately, in the deep way she knows each rose that pushes its fingers up through the dirt of Ohtori, that this one is not human. Her feet don’t touch the stone; her blue skirt, so much like a dancer’s, shimmers with an ethereal glow. Eyes as luminous as the pearl in the center of her forehead blink at double-time, then not at all, as though her new visitor is unused to regulating the rhythms of humanity.
If Anthy were a Duelist, she might call this being a miracle—that which shines—eternal. Then again, if Anthy were a Duelist, she’d probably impale herself on her sword.
“Oh, dear,” the being repeats, fluttering like a nervous bird. “Erm, I don’t believe humans can withstand this kind of treatment—do you require...assistance?”
“I am not human,” Anthy says, dully intrigued. She has rarely had an opportunity to speak to someone as old as she is—except of course for her beloved brother. It is...nice, to shed the thin façade she puts up for the oblivious and tempestuous youth around her. “And neither are you. You are a trick of the light, aren’t you?”
The being looks very pleased. “Yes, I have tried to explain that. But no one really pays attention.”
“They rarely do.”
The being cocks her head and examines Anthy, eyes calculating. “Are you a Gem, then? But there’s no way your physical form could undergo this much stress without poofing.”
“No, I am not a Gem.” Perhaps that’s somewhat of a lie, though. After all, Anthy is an exquisite object, just as beautiful and brilliant and unfeeling as the hard facets of a jewel.
“But...my, this is unprecedented! A new species! Rose will be so excited—”
“Rose?”
“Ah—” The being blinks exaggeratedly, then sticks her hand between the sword in Anthy’s stomach and the one in her clavicle. It takes her a moment—an instant, an eon, years—to realize the very human action she is attempting. It amuses Anthy, a little. Very few have been so uncouth as to offer a handshake to the Bride; it is a man’s greeting, after all, one for a recognition of equals. “I should have introduced myself first! It’s all the rage down here, you know, names and—and hands touching. I am Pearl, in the service of—”
She quickly yanks her hand back and clasps it against her mouth. When she lowers it again nervous, chattery laughter pours out. “Er—I am Pearl. Just Pearl.”
Anthy doesn’t believe her, but then, there is very little she does believe these days. She especially does not believe this, though: one Rose Bride can always recognize another, and this being is one in soul. It’s there in how she holds herself just to one side, as if to support someone who still looms even in their absence; the way she draws herself to all her fragile, quivering height but remains, instinctively, posed and on display. “I am the Rose Bride.”
A faint, luminescent glow tinges the being’s cheeks. “So then marriage is—well, it seemed like a silly thing those humans dreamt up, but...”
“It is. Humans dream up many silly things.”
The being frowns. “Is marriage very bad?”
“It is what I am made for.”
Now that strikes a chord in her visitor; she squawks and bristles, all ruffled feathers. Her eyes shine with the fevered intensity of Anthy’s dear Duelists, and Anthy sighs deep within the punctured hollow of her gut. This one has probably spent too long among humans. Inherited all their illusions.
“Excuse me,” the being is saying—a lesson, as though Anthy hasn’t learned all the cruelties of the world intimately—“we decide our own destinies! It doesn’t matter what we were made for; we can choose to be different! That’s the beauty of Earth! You don’t have to be a bride—you can be a soldier, or a blacksmith, or...one of those people who make rings of tasteless dough for human consumption!”
Anthy smiles blankly. “And what have you decided to be?” she asks.
The being puffs up again. “Well, I am part of the Crystal Gems. We fight alongside Rose Quartz in the glorious struggle to protect humanity.”
“So you serve this Rose Quartz.”
The being flushes again; this time, her whole body radiates an unearthly blue glow. Her expression warps to something between love and pain and unbearable pride, and Anthy stares at her bright, sharp figure, and understands.
“No,” the being finally says, cutting and brittle. “I belong to no one.”
“Do you?”
The being’s voice is very sharp. “She respects me.”
Anthy sighs aloud now, quiet, whispering. It is rather like staring in a mirror, or in the shard of a bright sword, and seeing what might have been Before: someone much younger, more stubborn, railing against the need to accept the total, overwhelming power of the World.
It is the same in that other world, Anthy knows. On the saccharine shores of a small town, a ruler is falling in love with a musician under the stars. She dances and giggles and touches him gently, unaware of the awesome power she wields against another—or aware, but uncaring, since it is all the same to her if her knightly Rose Bride smiles or suffers.
If Anthy tells her visitor this, she will not believe her. But strangely, some lingering vestige of pity compels her—or maybe it’s that, after all this time, Anthy has seen something close to herself. “People say what they have to when they need you. You must know this. It will hurt less if you stop lying to yourself.”
The being gasps. With an affronted flounce of her skirts, she turns on her heel toward the doorway, her nose sticking high up in the air. “Well!” she cries. “I am not lying, and I think I’m done here.”
She draws herself up, stretches herself tall and thin and hard, as fragile as all the shattered swords at the gate.
A door blooms into existence back in the darkness—through the crack Anthy can sense ocean spray, and glittering gemstones, and the last, fading notes of a soft refrain.
“When you’re ready,” the being huffs in her prickly way, “the Crystal Gems will welcome you.”
“Goodbye,” says Anthy, knowing that to be a lie. She will never leave the coffin. And if she did, she would sooner find this being used up and fractured on the ground than welcoming her into the light. Such is the fate of Rose Brides, whether they know it or not.
Anthy still watches, though, as the being retreats to her world. From a distance, glowing her radiant blue, she almost looks like the knight from a child’s dreams. Shining. Noble. Illusory.
A pain pierces Anthy’s empty chest, and she looks down. Another sword, of course.
When she looks back up, her visitor is gone, and the coffin is again miserably, safely dark.
“I don’t know why she thought the being was a bride. She seemed like a knight to me.”
“Some people are different under the surface, Utena-sama.”
“Oh...but how did the girl know?”
"You mean how did the witch know?"
“I—”
No talking, no talking! The big finale is here! The audience must be completely engaged.
Completely!
For this tale is still being told today—the tale of the witch and the last prince...
finale.
She comes like all of the others: stumbling like a child, landing like a warrior, alighting like a thing of light. But there is something different about her, too. Something in Anthy’s long-dead soul stirs at the sight of her, whispers, as it hasn’t whispered in many years, maybe this one...
The hope is so joyous, so new, that it feels like pain. Anthy shrinks from it.
But the girl still staggers forward, arm outstretched desperately, tears running from her blue, blue eyes... “Himemiya!” she shouts. “Himemiya!”
And for a moment Anthy feels the pain of the swords as if it is fresh, as if she has been called back into her body by the sound of her name—and this girl is the culprit. This girl, with her ragged pink hair, her prince’s costume slashed and bloody at the side, her hand not made of light but of flesh and bone: callouses from kendo swords, burns from bad cooking. This girl, who Anthy remembers. She remembers her as a child, foolishly crying at her fate. She remembers her every moment after, just as foolish—but gentle, and good, and so painfully innocent in the dark.
Anthy hates Utena. Anthy loves Utena.
Why is Utena here?
“Anthy,” Utena says, her voice strained. Her open hand does not falter. “I came all this way to meet you.”
You can’t! Anthy wants to scream. Get out of here! You can’t! But the words get stuck in her throat, overtaken by a flood that feels like inevitability, a locked door creaking open. She hates Utena. She loves Utena, she loves her, she loves her—and Utena has to go.
“No! Get out of here! The swords—!”
“Himemiya, give me your hand!”
In another world...but in this world, Utena is reaching for her through the dark. Her eyes lock onto the shriveled, wounded thing that is Anthy, that has been Anthy all this time, and the seeing hurts worse than anything. Utena’s gaze is desperate and tender and angry and for Anthy alone—nothing like a fairy tale.
Perhaps, if Anthy is remembering correctly, everything like love.
“Give me your hand! Please!”
And in the trembling of Utena’s open palm, Anthy can sense pain, and broken things, and the terrible burst of a flower’s roots splitting the pot. She can sense the gentleness of a scarred hand asking her to stay, the relief of a kind heart easing her burden, the slow, quiet healing that comes after an eternity. She can sense Utena.
What is eternal?
Nothing. Not stories. Not heroes. Not true love.
Not pain.
Anthy rises to meet it all.
And everything—doors, darkness, coffins, worlds—smashes open, leading up to light.