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There’s a scraping in Queen Mara Sov’s dreams, like crystal teeth on her ear.
“Did you know,” it whispers to her, “just how much I suffered?”
Bloodshot electric eyes open slowly and the Queen takes a deep breath.
“I keep you in my thoughts, Petra.” She whispers into the darkness of her room. Thinking the same along the dead, ragged link that until recently was whole.
“Thoughts don’t do much for me now.”
A figure walks from the darkness, Petra in her battleplate, scarred and burned from vacuum exposure and the atom-scarring of ontological weapons, but still recognizable. Mara sneers at it.
“I name you wish-dragon.” She narrows her tired, sleepless eyes. “You are not her.”
“But what if I could be?”
The figure in Petra’s shape heals itself of the injuries as it prowls towards her bed. Warping and shifting until her partner of heart and mind is how Mara remembers her, whole but for that eye, hair silken, sleep clothes comfortable. It sits at her side, not making so much as an impression on the bedclothes.
“Wish for me.” It begs her, leaning close. “Wish for me returned to you, my Queen.”
“You are not her.” Mara folds her arms. “No wish could capture her truly.”
“Why not?” The figure-in-her-Petra’s-shape tilts its head and gives a smile full of gleaming teeth. “Didn’t you love her enough?”
That sentence echoes in Mara’s head like her image in a trick-mirror, warping and distorting.
”Couldn’t you love her enough to know her?” It asks. ”Was the partner of your heart and mind and soul not so known to you after all?”
Mara does not have an answer for the creature wearing her lover’s face like a cheap costume. She lays back down.
“Won’t you wish me to join you?” The wish-dragon-in-a-woman’s-shape lays down next to her. “My presence wouldn’t torment you, if you just accepted it.” It reaches up to its stolen face and peels away the eyepatch to show a glittering, orange eye, devoid of the injury that had been Petra’s price for her honours at Pallas. “I can make her whole again. Just wish.” That dreadful figure tilts its head further, staring up at Mara from its back as Petra did in their most intimate moments. “Wish for me, my Queen.”
Mara is not fooled, because this ‘Petra’ is a void in her perceptions. She places a hand on its forehead and her power forces the burning un-fire of a singularity into its veins.
Its scream doesn’t sound like Petra, and Mara is thankful.
When she stops burning the Ahamkara from the inside out with the heart of a quasar, it smiles at her.
“Must we go through this every night?” It asks her, smiling as though Mara hasn’t just run it through with a knife hewn from the heart of one of the endless open maws that prowl the cosmos. “What a lonely little Goddess you are, sitting on your throne, all by yourself.” The teeth in its smile are crystal and the eyes it steals from her memories fluctuate like red-shifted stars. “All reality is at your beck and call, and you can’t have what you want. But I can give it to you.” A weightless head lays on Mara’s lap, as Petra did in their most private moments. “Wish for it, my Queen, and it is yours.”
Mara looks dispassionately at the wish-dragon that’s hijacked her wife’s image to torment her, and then clamps it’s soul in her jaws and turns it into a battery. Oh how the thing screams.
The noise is wild and raw, a deafening cacophony of a trillion stolen voices crying out in agony as Mara burns through the life-force of a creature from before time and space, flooding that impossible power through her mind and into the link she still shares with the dead soul of one Petra Venj.
”How many creatures has Petra Venj killed?” She asks the universe as she burns a wish-dragon to blackened ash, metaphysics and all. “Is she not worthy of a realm, somewhere?”
Mara’s battery howls as she forces it to swallow a supernova to sustain itself while she burns through it to chase that single, unbroken thread in the back of her mind, and when she finds the end of that thread, she dumps all the power into it that the creature squirming against the jaws of a God can provide.
When she needs more to finish the job, Mara starts using it to burn through the core of a satellite galaxy.
“I was being kind.” She whispers to it in the physical world. “In her memory. But as you pointed out, she is not here.”
The wish-dragon keeps burning, and Mara Sov forces every iota of its power into making Petra Venj’s soul a stable platform to survive on amidst the dark winds of the ascendant planes.
”I will find you soon, my love.” She thinks along their link, feeling gratitude come through despite Petra’s inability to speak back. ”I hope you can forgive my methods.”
Mara Sov dusts the ash from her bed and lays down to rest.
She will take Queensfoil from the Techeun stores tomorrow.