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Chapter Text

“Go to wizard school, Gem!”

Wizard school sucks. They don’t actually teach you anything — they pat you on the head and send you to ‘commune with the spirits of old’ in a crumbling mountain castle. Spirits that don’t give a damn about you, and would much rather curl themselves into a bunch of crystals and sleep. 
(Gem would know. She went to wizard school, afterall.)

As it happens, it’s become more of an architectural grant. The cliff house is kind of done up, and there’s some actual pathways through the brambles at least, but the only magical thing that has happened is a cat walking in and deciding to call her bed his own. In her weekly letter home she called him a familiar, but there’s been no telepathy or any other signs that point to the supernatural. Torn between hope and irony, she names him Gandalf.
She’s not alone, at least.
She works on the houses. Calcite is aplenty around the geodes, and its easy to tell which amethysts hold spirits; cracked, budding things that grow like tumors. They're a sharp cold to the touch, like frostbite. Like the pain of being so cold you burn. She harvests them all, lets them encircle her homes, stashes them in barrels and man-made caves. And still, more grow.
It's monotonous work, like that of a painting. Building, pulling back to eye the scale, readjusting. She makes a vegetable garden — the neighbouring village make polite inquiries into her progress, the cows stare balefully at the grass she squashes underfoot. Gandalf brings her rabbit's feet, which either points to magical affinity or a taste for wild rabbit. Gem watches as a hare skitters through the roots of the forest, and assumes the latter. It's the kind of life that has her late to bed and early to rise, a routine she settles into with ease.

The man on her balcony is very unsettling. His back is turned to her, a hand braced on the railing as he leans out and looks over the land, and she feels the childish urge to shout 'boo!' and watch him fall.

"Ahem," she says instead, as loudly as she can without losing the prim tone. Its her favourite thing to say.

He whirls around, a great, gleaming smile already spreading across his jaw. He's dressed nicely, but not too nicely; his brown hair is ruffled, artful and windswept, and the circlet atop it would have all but disappeared into the curls if not for the gleam of gold. He looks excited. He looks powerful. He looks, most importantly, a little bit ridiculous.

"Aha! You're a wizard, right?"

Oh dear, she thinks.

"I know your brother!"

Oh, and she stresses this, dear.

Sausage, King Elect of Mythland, is a cheerful whirlwind. He patters questions against her ears like raindrops as she does her morning rounds. Gem shares a commiserating look with Lucy, an older cleric who had moved into the apothecary, as she tours him through their various potions. Even the sheep bleat and shake their heads as he passes. Through his various tangents and tirades, she manages to pull the outline of a story from him; how her twin, Fwhip, had turned his great forge into a hub of production worthy of a kingdom; how Sausage had befriended him as the young king of a neighbouring county. How, through his fascination with magic, he had drawn out the tidbit of her existence, and consequent location.
To be fair, it's not exactly far. On a clear day, she can track Fwhip's workpace, the smoke rising and falling from behind his mountain range as he pumps the bellows. On a windy one, she thinks she can even taste the tang of tempered metal on the air.

"Blood sheep?" she interrupts him, tuning back into the conversation.

"Hm? Oh, yes, the blood sheep! Old kingdom tradition, ya'know." He grins, lip stretching over sharp teeth. "Sacrifical lamb, and all."

They're standing at her gatehouse. It's not exactly finished, but the foundations are in, and there's a skeleton of oak framework marking the arch. There's a horse she doesn't recognise hitched to the post, which settles her a bit; even if he had scaled the cliff like some sort of gremlin, he had at least travelled here by normal means.

"Anyway!" He moves as if to hug her, but stutter-steps and claps her on the shoulder instead. His cheeks are rosy from the guileless joy in his expression, and she wonders if she maybe just mis-heard. Mis-saw. "Thank you, so much, oh great wizard Gem! You've been a great help, and I'll definitely be back, with, uh, gifts! and trade!"

'Oh great wizard Gem,' she thinks, rolling the words over in her head. Well. Fake it till you make it, I guess.

"Happy to be of help, King Sausage." She smiles, and mimics a curtsy, which makes them both giggle. "You know where to find me."

Hopping onto the horse, he laughs and waves, and, well. She's not sure what she helped him with, really, but there's a curl of warmth in her chest that she cradles all the way back into bed.

[ * ]

Of course after that, she gets a flurry of visitors. Fwhip, categorically not apologising for spoiling her peace, and Sausage again. An Overgrown druid named Katherine drops off bundles of flowers as a hello, and one time she even comes home to a box of beautifully carved ice structures, all marked with the same staghead signature and no return address.
Safe to say, the Crystal Cliffs were brimming with activity. She has her own space, her own standing and imports, her own well-garnered respect and friendships with the surrounding empires. They go End-busting, even, an old tradition for a new place.
(She spends a few seconds longer than everyone at the nesting island, watching the dragon, the slight glitter of scales the only thing differentiating her from the lightless sky. Pix has to call her twice before she can tear her eyes away.)
The elytra she gets is a gift more than a conquest, which she treasures even more. Gandalf watches as Fwhip refixes it to the nodes along her shoulder blades, nerves slinking out to attach like blind, searching fingers. He braids her hair afterwards, and Gem feels like a child again, the two of them curled in a blanket fort with their first pair of wings. He whispers gossip in her ear, grievances on grievances, so she pats his knee and swears to help. They're family, after all.
'Family' apparently means carving a ravine out of TNT.

"You're no help at all," Jimmy says afterwards, legs swinging off the edge. "Actually, I think you were a hindrance."

"Mm," she responds, lips pursed.

"I didn't want a valley of death, Gem. I just wanted my head back."

He does look odd without it. She can see the delicate cartilage of his ear fins pulsating gently, still breathing. A supporting bar of bone is visible through his eye sockets, and his teeth chatter sharply when he clenches his jaw.

"Rebellion against the bourgeoisie. Off with their heads," she says, lightening her tone to something laughable. He has no muscle for her to read if his expression changes, but his eye sockets seem to shadow further. A trick of the setting sun.

"We're all kings here, Gem," he murmurs. "Even you, good wizard."

When she returns to her empire, she decides on good old fashioned manual labour. The old armory has its windows out, and its her sole mission to fix them. Nevermind the foundations of a tower or the half-built greenhouse. Projects are best unfocused, fluid, grown like vines.
The shudder of someone leaning against the ladder she's on makes her yelp.

"Gods above, can none of you announce yourselves? Be a bit polite?" Gem steadies herself with a hand on the shelf, and glances down to-
Nothing she's ever seen before. The form of a man, made of ink that blurs and blots where his limbs intersect. She is suddenly, intimately aware of how high and rickety her perch is. She breathes in.

"And you are?"

Theres a face, somewhere in the hazy mess. Like a skull lit up red from the inside, the shine of it piercing through the empty parts. Gem casts a glance around the room, but it remains empty.

"It's impolite to stare," she adds. His head tilts consideringly.

There are no words to describe it — but he does stop staring. His eyes and mouth close, or the light inside him shuts off, and what is left is a tear in the world, the kind of darkness one looks into if you manage to open your eyes mid portal jump. A sucking, gasping tunnel of nothingess. A two-dimensional drawing of blank night in a three-dimensional space. It makes her body tilt from pure vertigo, limbs slipping from the ladder rungs.
She only feels righted when her knees slam into the floor. Gem stares at the wood between her splayed fingers, and breathes in. The birds sing. The window she was repairing lets in a sweet breeze. The not-man, the nothingness, is gone. She breathes out.

Then she gets up and finishes putting in the glass for the window.

Katherine is helping her repot tulip bulbs in her cliff-face apiary. The bees nudge against the glass, weave between the vines growing across the walls. It is quiet, repetitive work, and her hands are stained dark by the rich soil.

"Something bad is here," Katherine whispers. Her gaze never wavers from the bud in her hand, its seedling leaf waving cheerily at her. "Have you felt it?"

Gem thinks about candles being blown out. She thinks about why she brought the druid here in the first place; the patches of deadened grass on her lawn, bulging, like a grave about to be broken from.

"Something bad," she says, reaching a pinkie out and letting the growing stem curl around her finger, "is almost impossible to differentiate from something unknown."

Magic has plenty of forms; Internal (the spark, soul, body) and External (the environment, ingredients, vessels), and of those forms, there are subsystems, in which someone typically begins. A potion-master begins with extracts, a mage with core elements, and a wizard with, basically, meditation.
That's what Gem is doing when the not-man next appears. Sausage is nearby, scrawling runes on crusty paper as he hums nonsensically, and they raise their heads in the same instant, eyes immediately drawn to the figure on a distant hill.

"Don't like that," Gem says bluntly, fiddling with a piece of quartz.

"Good opportunity though," Sausage replies, a sly smile on his face. "Knowledge is power, and all."

She inclines her head towards him, refusing to lose her staring match. "Demon Q and A?"
The attuning instruments around her are already halfway to a protection circle. Sausage is tearing some runelines into charms, sticking one directly to her back and the others to the soles of his shoes. She straightens her posture, pokes the ember of warmth in her sternum to attention. She 'opens herself,' as one of her professors liked to say, 'to a new and informative experience.'

"Demon Q and A," Sausage repeats, and a voice like icefloes cracking echoes in answer.

"Ask away."

[ * ]

She's doing her daily clearing of corruption (as if it were spiderwebs or dust, and not something more sinister), vein-vines attempting to tangle in her hair when she hears a whisper, a bell note rung out to call her attention.
There's something growing in the alcove behind her Nether portal. Crystals, of course, but stretching themselves oddly, new filaments like spiderweb silk layering over each other. Gem puts her hands on her hips, and looks at the offending amethyst bud.

"You going to tell me what this is all about, then?"

Further in, an axolotl splashes back into the pond. A bat is chewing loudly on a glowberry, its ears swiveling in interest as she speaks. She reaches out a hand and flicks the extrusion in front of her with a fingernail.
It lets out a battle-cry wail, high and reedy as it rings out in the cavern. 'Oh great wizard Gem,' it seems to say, stinging her ears.

"Right," she mutters, hands back by her side. "Keep your secrets, then."

Sausage and Fwhip are in her grand dining room-turned-secret lair. Tapping their feet (Fwhip) and twirling their circlet on the table (Sausage) like a tiny cacophony of anxiety. Apparently, they have something to run by her.
Spirits of old, save her from stupid boys.

"Jimmy's still after us," the king of Mythland blurts out, like the ever-patient, dignified figure he is. Fwhip nods rapidly, hair bobbing in unison. "And he is definitely going to do something, like, nefarious to get his head now."

"You could give it back," she says coolly, pouring her brother's cup of tea.

"That won't stop him!" Sausage swings his body on his chair, rocking it from leg to leg. "There's other stuff he's mad about too." The last part is added as a sullen mumble into his flared collar.

"Uh-huh."

Fwhip drapes himself across the table, stage-whispering to Sausage as he pouts, "I don't think Gem's very impressed with us." Flattening his body even further into the wood and smushing his cheek into a placemat to garble his voice, he continues, "But she'll help us anyway, right? Because she loves us soooo much?"
She presses her lips together, restraining the dimple trying to form. Her dear, dumbass brother.

"I'll help you," she smiles into her cup, and hopes it's enough to hide it, "If you tell me you actually have a plan to help with. You tend to ask forgiveness, rather than permission."

"I can offer a half-and-half," Fwhip responds, head bouncing up like a jack-in-the-box. "Because, look, the old End portal ruins have a lot of empty rooms that us and Pearl are thinking of doing up, and no-one's going to mess with the dragon…"
Beside him, Sausage smiles wide and lazy.

A wedding is celebrated. At the Mythland Church, which is certainly a choice, but the Ocean Queen ducks magnanimously under the doorway either way, eyes only for her prince. The whole affair is wild with joy, a dozen feuding royals crammed into pews tossing flower petals and (strictly no fire-tick, enviro-safe) sparklers in the air as they cheer. Everyone leaps for the doors as soon as it's appropriate, sun gleaming on the horizon as the happy couple kiss.
In the meantime, Gem passes a note to Jimmy. In the mean-meantime, Gandalf brings a stick twice as long as her doorway is wide to the cliffhouse, and licks his paw proudly when she lifts it up. One more point in the 'maybe magical' column, then. Or, a point in the 'might actually be a dog' one.
The ember in her chest pulsates with every breath, and she feels quite like her brothers' furnaces: a billow in to flicker the flame, and a rush out to dampen.

"Do you even know what you've done?"

Elves tend to be like that. Cold, direct — sarcastic on a good day, scathing on a bad one. Today is turning out to be a very bad day.
Scott's close to tearing his hair out in frustration. The blue-white of him reflects the sun harshly, and all three of them squint.

"You don't bait a fish and not expect them to bite, Fwhip! And you!" He turns to Gem, and she jabs the end of her staff into her toe, a reminder to stay present. "I thought you'd know better! Warning Sausage off extra power, containing the corruption, talking to m- the damn demon."

(Death, destruction, and the End, a voice creaks in the back of her mind. Just keep doing as you're doing.)
(Friends, or deceivers?)

Pearl is wilting behind her, her brother rooted in place with shock, and she feels the ember sputter.

"Okay," she mutters, then louder, "Okay!" She meets Scott's eyes, sucks in a fortifying, flame-feeding breath. "We messed up. But we can stop it. We can still help."

(What are you afraid of, lonely wizard? the demon asks. She doesn't answer. Best not to reveal a weakness to a foe.)

[ * ]

The End is still beautiful. None of the urgency matters, not in the second before her soul fully lands in her body again, and all she can do is watch. The pitch dark, the glow of each crystal, the sinuous movement of the dragon as she circles the towers like a fish through reeds.
Beautiful, and ruined. The nesting island is a swarm of movement, people clashing mid-air. It takes Pearl pulling her hand to get her moving, ducking a stray arrow as they bat their wings and part. There is no battle plan. There never is, when you're going in to save something that sees you only as another intruder. Each vaporous puff the dragon lets out is spread far and wide as she flaps her wings, with no discernible target. Gem coughs through one as she climbs further upwards, slamming her ankle into the obsidian structure as she places a crystal. The stringy life-line lighting up is the only thing she looks for as she charges to the next pillar.

Below (or perhaps above, or beside), Sausage shouts so loud his voice seems to tear, a once wonderous tone mangled into something she refuses to call her friends', even if she recognises it. Joey coos, sing-songy as he tries to cut past Scott.

"Ahem," she says, prim and proper. Sausage spins to look at her, the two of them perched on the same outcrop as he aims to shoot her most recently placed crystal. "What, exactly, are you doing?"

He stares at her, blinking softly, and there's a moment where she can see him thinking. About a balcony. About lying on the grass as she meditates. About a protective sigil, placed on her back.
She stretches out a hand, the strip of paper between her fingers half-burnt and crinkled from use.

"I think you need this more than I do," she says. Quiet, sure. He tilts his head, considering.
Then he takes the shot.
Sound reconvenes on them all at once. He cackles and darts off into the fray, where she can hear Scott pleading distantly, the shattering of Katherine's potions against scales as she slams healing into the bellowing dragon.
It's called a nesting island for a reason, Gem thinks as she watches the creature contort its body around something, Joey's sword cleaving into its neck. It meets her gaze, amethyst dulling of light.

Oh dear, she thinks, even as an egg teleports to her feet, the eye of the dragon mother still trained on her as she shatters. Maybe I am just a hindrance after all.

She leaves quickly, after that. Loathe to face Scott, loathe to let the demon notice the egg she cradles. There may have been no battle plan, but there is always a post-battle routine: go home, lick your wounds, stoke the fire in your heart till it burns for revenge. All good things in due time.
Gem hobbles around her kitchen, the fireplace bouncing warmth off the walls. The egg she leaves closest to the flame, bundled in spare fabric to protect it, although you could see at one glance that it was solid as stone. Gandalf licks her ankle when she rolls up her pants to bandage it, and she pretends it makes her feel better. Together, they look at the egg.

"Which is more important, Gandalf? Trying, or succeeding?"

He meows, and leaps to curl atop the precious thing, purring up a storm.

"Yeah, yeah, you're right," she murmurs, lying back into the armchair. "It doesn't matter until you know what failing means."

Building up the great tower gives her something to do, and something to watch. Her little nest-egg, literally and otherwise. The empire, dotting further out into the forest as it grows, and the dragon egg, tucked high on its' windswept peak with as many protections she could stuff into one space.
Things have…not calmed down. Or they have, but into an uneasy certainty that someone will break, sooner or later. There are tense gatherings, hurriedly written notes, cautious glances, but nothing substantial. No calls to action, so: tower building it is.
Or, one call to action. A letter from Scott, the only word she's properly received from him since the battle in the End, tersely asking her to contribute an embassy to his cultural grounds. Gem imagines it's terse, at least, all formal wording and nigh-illegible calligraphy. She goes anyway, as always; half-hopeful and a glutton for punishment.

She gets what she wants.

Gem wakes up aching, cold stone pressed into every angle of her body. There's a persistent drip of water hitting the floor next to her. Plink. Plink. Pli-

"Finally up?"

She leans her forehead into the flagstones, hard, both to chase away the headache and give herself a little leverage to sit up. The world blurs without her glasses, which, rude. What did they think she'd do with glasses, glare them into submission? Well, it'd happened before.

"Do you just not get sleep, or did the potion get into your bloodstream or something?"

"I commune with powerful wizard spirits in my dreams," she says blandly, smacking her tongue against her teeth. "I told them to kick your ass."

The figure barks a laugh, red and blues shaking in her vision as she sits up and settles her head against a wall. Beyond the metal bars, he crouches back on his heels, smiling broadly as their gazes meet.

"Hey Gem," he says, mild as butter.

"Hey there, Joey," she replies, and hopes the words burn.

Chapter Text

It's been at least a couple hours since she woke up from her and Scott's "capturing." They've been arguing about that — the definitions of and differences between 'capturing' and 'kidnapping.' Changes nothing, of course. The walls are still damp and the bars still unmoving, and her headache still rages on, worsening with the cold. They can't even see each other.

"We could play battleship," she says, letting the words hit a literal brick wall.

"Ew," he responds, and she can hear him shifting on the stones. She rolls her eyes.

"Forgive me for having ideas."

"Have an idea on how to get out."

Gem knocks the back of her head into the wall, hard. The thump reverberates through her skull.

"I have a way out for you," a voice reaches them, slid between metal grating like a snake. Gem knocks her head again, this time on accident.
Joey and Sausage have appeared back in the room, quieter than possible. Although the reddened hue to Sausage's eyes has become off-putting in its brightness, there's something much more sinister about the Lost Emperor's totally placid, ordinary gaze. Green, a bit of brown on the edges.

"I just need some information, your sworn allegiance to Xornoth, and…" he makes a show of looking around the room, tapping a finger to his chin. "And a portion of your empire's profits!" Behind him, Sausage is bouncing on his toes, swinging the scythe to scratch against the floor with a muted, horrifying screech every other second.

"Right," Scott says. She imagines he's stretching, a lazy show of nonchalance in the face of danger. "Well, I can give you an answer: No."

Joey hasn't even glanced at him. It's still just him and Gem somehow, his wide, unblinking eyes, so kindly focused on hers. She has green eyes too. She burns from the inside out, too. There's a light in her, a flame, and she could let it out, she just has to find the right fissure, she could be bright and beautiful forever—
There's a cut on her cheek and Scott is yelling. Screaming. Joey's laughing at something, turned away, and she brings a hand to wipe at the blood on her face. It's warm. The noise of it all, the screaming, the laughter, the screech of pained metal against pained stone, the drip of water, of blood, the image of the egg dancing in her minds eye—

"What would you do to the egg? It hasn't done anything to you." The words come out a harsh whisper, brought up through her mouth like a fish on a line. Things go quiet, and Joey smiles again (as if he had ever stopped).

"If I could, I'd cook it and eat it whole." Of course, his eyes are red too. She wonders why she ever could have mistaken them for green, the lurid light making a shadow of his nose, his brow bone. Another skull, lit up from within. "Anything for my love."

"Sorry," Scott says, once they're gone. She lost a bit of time, curled on the floor. Gem blinks blindly at the pool of water.

"What for?"

"I-"

"You know we're both twins." She dips a nail in the puddle, watches the blood flake off. "Pair of pairs." Two halves split into halves, deathly silent in their cages. "Are you your brother's keeper, Scott? Am I mine?"

(Jimmy 'rescues' them, and they argue the definitions of and differences between a 'rescue' and a 'stroke of luck.' They walk away small, but united.)

[ * ]

Gem takes the egg inside. Just for a night, she tells herself, wrapping it with scarves and blankets and settling it in the middle of her bed. Just to be certain nothing's wrong. She coils herself around it too, a circle of soft, vulnerable flesh. Nothing like the End dragon, the scales as cold and callous as void.
Gandalf lies on top of the both of them, and stutters out a purr.

Wind bites at her. That's the price, she knows, of lofty towers on lofty heights, but she still shivers. The final pillars are done, the roof perfectly placed like a hat upon a head. And the view; the view is wonderous. She would say this, make some grand statement, if she weren't sat in the very centre of the tower with her arms curled around her knees and head ducked between them. The wind bites.
In the sliver of quiet made by her body, she whispers. She prays. She holds a crystal in her fist and begs something to help her. She murmurs that she is willing to do anything, heed any order, pass any trial, if only to keep the innocence and safety of the life entrusted to her. The wind gnashes at her, takes her in its teeth, and bites.
Nothing has changed. Surely, she thinks, nothing has changed. The wind whistles and blows sand over her toes.

It's a beautiful coastline. The beach rises out into a cliff face further east, water slamming into the rocks with reckless abandon. Here though, barely a step away, the tide climbs the sand like a tongue lapping at a wound. She can feel the tug of it just barely at her toes, a reminder that it will fall out further, if she waits.

"I've missed you," Gem says, standing. She wiggles her toes to bury them. She wonders if the Ocean Queen hears her, and laughs. The sea hums in perpetual motion.

"I think I need help."

There is no sudden burst of movement, of sound. She wades forwards until she's soaked to the calves, pants clinging to her skin, and brushes her fingertips through the water as it pushes her, in and out. There is no storm brewing on the horizon, at least not here. When she spots them, she thinks they're birds.
Great, wheeling things, shadowed against the glare of the clouds. The flap of their wings claps against the cliff, an echo that echoes back on itself — she cranes her neck to watch, their bodies still misty with cloud cover as they pass over. And pass over they do, until she is forced to turn and watch as they disappear across the opposite horizon, into forested mountains. The world, even the sea, seems to hold its breath in the moment after, silence following the beating of wings.

"So," she says. "Guess I'm not catching a ride?"

Her toes are going numb from the water.

"Why would I say I'd pass 'any trial?'" she mutters, kicking wet sand off her as she walks out. "First rule of deals: clear and concise. You couldn't have teleported me with shoes on? This better not be too long of a walk, or I swear…"

The three wyverns are certainly an interesting addition to her home. One of them has taken to gnawing at the larger corruption vines, while the other two play through the air and, on occasion, stare intently at the egg, snouts pressed close as possible.
She also has a hat now. Apparently, that was what the crystal-spirits were growing in her portal alcove: a soft but sturdy, beautifully purple, wizard hat. They were silent when she picked it up, not quite with reverence or pride but something of a harsher taste, like fate. It sits perfectly on her head, shading her eyes from the glare of cloud cover, but also her peripheral vision. Gem finds herself glancing around all too often, shadows darting under the brim of her hat into unseen depths. Fwhip comes by and laughs at her, flicking it off her head and shoving it over her eyes.

"I need," he talks between wheezes, gathering his breath and losing it all over again when he looks at her. She stares back stonily. "I did come here for a reason, I swear." He giggles again, and wipes his eyes, then doing a theatrical motion with his hand to mime settling his expression. "I need your most precious, powerful crystal, to forge into a mighty blade. As is my duty, being your brother and all."

She blinks, and pulls an amethyst from her pocket. He glances between it and her face, gauging her seriousness.

"That's it? You just have your most precious, powerful crystal jangling around in your pockets?"

"Well, the thing is, I am the great wizard Gem." She looks at him firmly as she says this, and he nods. "So, techinally, any crystal I hold is the most powerful and precious, because I'm the most powerful and precious gemstone of all." She waggles her eyebrows, and he rolls his eyes and snatches the shard from her waiting hand.

"Yeah, okay. I'll believe that, I guess." He grins, and bumps their shoulders together. "Most precious dumbass, more like."

She waits until they've started a completely different conversation while wandering the empire to trip him into a pond. Just desserts, and all.

[ * ]

The demon is haunting her towers. She opens doors to his ghastly face and slams them closed again. She spots him amidst her fields and blinks her eyes hard until he disperses. If Gem is good at anything, it is disregarding a danger until it becomes obsolete, and the truth is that Xornoth is not her greatest adversary right now. Instead it's Sausage, sitting on the roof of the tavern and grinning wildly. He kicks his feet like a child, leaving bloodied mud on the tiles with each slam of a heel.

"Heya, wizard!"

"Hey, Mr Myth," she replies, letting Gandalf slink out of her arms and to the balcony floor. She feels calm in this moment, flame steady and unheeding. Her chin tilts to watch as Sausage slides down beside her. The frame of him softens, stood next to her, an inadvertant relaxation of the muscles as she smiles. The wyverns writhe in the air further up the mountain, like vultures circling.

"I'm gonna need something from you soon." The straight edge of his scythe brushes against her calf where he lets it swing.

"You sure are," she agrees, and swipes her new sword at his neck.

There is a burst of movement, a short tussle against the railing, and they are off, elytra twitching to life as they tumble over the edge. It is not a delicate fight, but it is a dance — each with a staff and a sharp-edged weapon, with fire in their chests and wings at their backs. They chase each other all over the empire, through houses, over trees, so much time between strikes that she can't quite rid the feeling of being children playing in a field. It feels unreal, the burn of her shoulders and the blood spraying over her mouth when she catches him in the ankle.
Of course, they end up on top of the tower. What better place? Below her feet, the tower feels like wax, the whole empire even, all soft and molded to her will, all feeding her as the lit wick. He's babbling across the stage from her, threats and boasts scrambling out his throat as his arms tremble.

"You want to fight here?"

"You'll die, you'll never see your-" he splutters mid-sentence, hacking something through his throat as his words distort. His grip on the sceptre loosens and it falls to the side. "I can't, Gem, Gem I don't know how long-"

The fire in her is blazing, a single, focused pillar of flame.

"It's alright, Sausage," she says, advancing on him as he struggles through another fit. "I'm going to help you."

And the great wizard Gem pushes him off the tower.

She stands there for an age. The fire slows and flickers as the wind blasts through the pillars, and the whole tower shakes as a wyvern wraps itself around it, achoring with its feet and clawed wings. It peeks one great eye through the gap in the arches.
That's some serious dedication, it says, voice washing over her mind like water. Cooling, calming. Stinging, where the salt settles into the wounds.

"Was it?" she says aloud, letting the scythe she had snatched from him at last moment clatter to the floor. She can hear the other two crowing victory in the distance, as this one side-eyes her amusedly.

"I need to go see my friend," Gem whispers.
All the wyvern does is blink.

He's easy to find at least. Sat on the castle tavern steps, Bubbles' chin propped on his knee. Her tail taps a staccato on the stones, fast and fluid.
Over the bridge, Gem watches him and breathes. She's seeing another truth, in this moment, and it goes as such: he looks no different than he ever did. Sausage, King Elect of Mythland, has always had brown eyes tinged with red, and teeth a little too sharp for his mouth. He has always, and always will, have blood-scrawled rune charms falling from his pockets; it's kingdom tradition, she knows, to be a sacrificial lamb. She sits beside him and allows Bubbles to scramble over them both, licking at their hands.

They watch the sun set as he flexes his fingers, stretches out a body that had been pupeteered to death. The street lamps light themselves as it darkens, one by one.

"I cleansed the scythe," she murmurs.

"Keep it," he replies, words rushed out of his mouth. "Keep it away from me."

So they sit. And once Fwhip gets there, the trio go inside to drink around a table still set with dead and dying roses.

[*]

A wyvern comes to her with a cracked tooth. She's beginning to think they're more trouble than they're worth; a hindrance rather than a help. Oh well — birds of a feather, and all. Gem finds herself playing dentist, leaned into a mouth larger than her armspan, cafefully not flinching with every hot breath. Behind the crimson roots of corruption its been chewing, she finds a single amethyst shard, stuck like a toothpick.

"Moving to different snacks?" A rumble rolls through the giant body as she pulls it out, brandishing it proudly.

Not different, it intones in her head. She blinks as an exhalation of smoke washes over her, somehow still salty. The centre, it says, and jumps off the rock with a flap of its wings powerful enough to knock her over.

"You could say thanks!" she calls out.

You could as well, the wyvern roars, and she grins.

(Between her investigations into the corruption, an explosion happens at Fwhip's forge, and he comes over looking very pleased with himself. The plume of embers and smoke still hover in the air as he drags her down the path, a warm and ominous cloud.

"Saying 'it's safe' that many times in a row makes me believe you less, actually," she tells the back of his head. She can tell he grins by the way his hand flexes in her grip, childish.

"Lets just say, it was a really powerful Gem-gem, you know?"

He presents her with a sword that fairly glows with purple iridescence, netherite polished to such perfection that it acts as a warped mirror. They playfight in the midst of his great machines, and she feels the best she has in months.)

Two days later, the egg is stolen.
Scott and Katherine find her bowed over the nest, and they have to lever her fingers off the obsidian ledge one by one, knuckles white with tension. Her hair is tangled from the wind whipping through it, and her cheeks itch where the tears have dried. Grief, of course, but anger too.

"The library," she wheezes out, clutching Scott by his robe and Katherine by a sleeve. "There's a library, somewhere."

The mountain air sings around them, winding through the crystals until they scream. Gem's eyes flick between her friends.

"You know where it is," she says, barely a whisper. They exchange glances, disconcerted, and she shakes them. "You will know where it is. Ask your past. Ask your plants." Her back straightens slowly. "I'm going to beat this thing."

In truth, she falls asleep once they get there. Admittedly, she had been running on adrenaline and fumes, so the soft tenor of Scott's voice as he translates has her head hitting Katherine's shoulder all too soon. She did her job, gave them enough information to ask the right questions to the Overgrown, prompt the elf's memory of old mysteries.
Surrounded by books long buried and magically clean, she dreams.

(A dragon encircles her, soft as fur and bright as starlight. Are you ready for this? it asks, coiling its tail as if to strangle her. Are you a forest fire, lonely wizard? Fwhip's arms are around her shoulders as they listen to a scary story by the hearth, shadow puppets snapping their teeth across the walls that draw inwards, suffocating.
Or are you just a spark?)

Things speed up. They leave the library and find a red wolf with a call for help, Gem scours the empires for 'items significant to the land.' She goes home and meditates at the top of her tower, lets the thing in her chest choke her with smoke. She will beat this thing.

The corruption is dense around Shelby's cage. It arcs around her like tentacles, shivering and parting to let Joey through with a haughty smile. She can nearly see the puppet strings attatched at his joints, leading all the way up to Xornoth's form; so different from that first time she saw them, now solid with a gravity, rather than a crack in the world. A black hole parading as a sun.
She leaves the fighting to the others.

"And what will that do?" the demon asks, flickering in her peripheral. Still, after all this time, unable to act on their own, to land a hit more substantial than insult.

"If it works?" She places the sea lantern on a pillar, and winces at the glare. "Hurt you."

"Is that something you're sure of?" they whisper, looming over her shoulder. A soft voice, condescending and commiserating. "Are you good enough to defeat me, lonely wizard?"

The clamour of battle is converging on them — Joey's crown wrestled from his head, skeletons collapsed to empty bones, the body of a ravager already disintegrating into the earth. Scott charging forwards atop a stag, Katherine throttling the corruption with vines, Pearl cutting through monsters with a smile like the sun, even Shelby throwing her diminutive form into the fray, weak and tired and full of rage.

"Lonely?" Gem murmurs, and places her final crystal. The land hums, vibrates, pulls at its tethers like an instrument being strung.
Everything goes red, blinks out, and the world snaps its teeth around the intrusion, the evil, seals it in its mouth like glass, fossilizing like ancient bone. A tone rings out, shriveling each mote of red to dust, to fertilizer.

"I don't think I'm lonely at all." she says, holding a single, shiny stone in her palm. It beats softly.

She looks up at her friends, and smiles.