Archive of Our Own

___________
As It Began

“-AAAAAAA!”

Thalia cries as she brings her mace down, striking true into the familiar’s head. The momentum is enough to bring it down, hard, to the floor. She winds up again. “And one more for the road!” This time, the mace is stopped not by the resistance of the creature’s body, but by the ground beneath it. There is a moment of quiet, a relief after the minutes of fighting the flighty creatures before. Pinched beyond criticality under Thalia’s mace, the skin of the familiar shatters the silence and suddenly bursts like a balloon, complete with the wild whistling of air escaping. It shimmers and disappears a few seconds later, as familiars normally do when defeated. They don’t, Thalia thinks to herself, typically have that level of theatrics involved, though.

She turns around to her compatriot, who gives her an exhausted thumbs-up. She then flairs her rapier outwards, wipes the blade as if it’d had blood on it, and sheathes it without a word. When had she stopped attacking? Perhaps maintaining that final illusion long enough to distract the familiar took it out of her. She looks rather calm, though. Moments pass- locked eyes, a deep breath of relief. Thalia decides to break the silence, even if it’s with a discussion of something that quite literally just happened. “Didya see? That thing exploded!”

“Yes, Tali, I did see. I was right here, you know.” Mila smiles at her, but Thalia feels a bit put off by it, somehow. It isn’t her usual smile, the delicate little thing that complimented perfectly her fair features, blue eyes, matching blue gemstone on a hairpin nestled in her impossibly light hair- the sum of which could light up a room like sunlight- it feels somehow forced. Or, at least, pained. Upset? Something Thalia wasn’t used to seeing. Something that kind of reminds her of last month’s fiasco, reminded her of secrets Mila shouldn’t be keeping to herself.

Thalia points at her, arm loose. “You’re not hiding a serious wound behind your back again, are ya?”

“No, of course I’m not.” Her thin smile remains.

“You said you wouldn’t pull that one again, after last month-”

Mila interrupts. “I said I wasn’t!”

“Alright, alright, sorry.” She chuckles a bit to herself as a pout crept over Mila’s face. That’s what Thalia had wanted to see- an expression she was used to. The expression of someone who was a bit peeved, but not truly angry at you. Sorry, Mila, but you’re just too fun to tease. “Well, come on then. Let’s get outta here.”

Mila’s pout dissolves into her typical reserved neutrality, described by others behind her back as, well, not a nice term. Resting beauty face- that’s how Thalia tried to spin it to her, as a joke. “Shall we, Tali?”

Thalia tosses her mace to the side, and replies, “I guess we shall.” It dematerializes as she transforms back into her plain clothes, before it hits the street it presumably would have cratered upon landing.

Thalia’s been home from their foray for quite a few minutes already, but she still hasn’t moved from her bed. She’s not scrolling social media apps or watching videos, though, she’s doing… what looks like nothing. The stillness of her body does not do justice to the rapidly flowing stream of thoughts in her mind.

It’d started with the way she felt earlier. When they were fighting that familiar, there was something about the way Mila moved, or was it what she’d said? Ah, there is no use in trying to pinpoint it, she thinks to herself, because the thought has been bouncing around for almost an hour now. Regardless of when it actually started, she was certainly aware of it by the end of the fight. She felt an attraction to Mila. Something she thought, and had been told, she’d feel eventually for some pretty boy. It’d never happened, though. Even when people confessed, even when there was no doubt it was an attractive person… nothing. But this time, with Mila, a friend she already held dear, there was that feeling, the thing she could only assume was what everyone else had warned her about. Love.

So goes her thought process. But that inevitably raises more questions. Thalia, having gotten to this point six times tonight, jumps to her feet in frustration and voices her chief concern out loud. “What the hell am I supposed to do now?!”

The air whistles as her fists displace it, punctuating her syllables. The release of pent up energy satisfies, and she collapses back down onto her bed again. Her forearm comes to rest on her forehead as she looks at the ceiling, rather than the wall as she had been. A plan, she thinks. I’ll wait it out a few days, make sure I’m not wrong. Her eyes fall to the wall next to her. And if I’m right, then I’ll just have to come clean to her. Ain’t gonna keep running away forever, that much is for sure.

She tosses back and forth in her bed, contemplating what this is going to mean for her social life. Only then does she notice her heart is racing at the mere prospect of telling Mila the truth. They weren’t kidding, she muses to herself, this can make someone do some crazy stuff. A crooked smile creeps across her face. I learned what this felt like not even two hours ago and I’m already ready to completely ruin everything just to tell her. She rolls over again, and it takes quite a while for her mind to settle enough for her to fall asleep.

Days pass, and Thalia proves her suspicion right. Her feelings don’t stop, and every moment she spends with Mila is increasingly precious. Weeks pass, and she decides she can’t run away anymore. This feeling isn’t going away, and she wasn’t one to suffer her own delusions. It is time to set the record straight.

________

“Hey… Mila, listen.” Her heart begins to race at a mere three words- some warrior I am!- she thinks. It’s getting hard to think over the sound of her own pulse in her ears- or more accurately, the feel of it in her whole body. She feels sure that if she pushes herself further, her heart will pump her blood straight out of her body like a firehose- but she persists. There wouldn’t be a better time than this, and she had learned fast to strike when given the opportunity. Besides, the roof of the mall, with a wonderful, cloudless sunset… the scene was something from a romance drama, or better. She had to get on with it, now or never. “For a long time… well, at least since earlier this year, I was sure of it… ah, you know what, I’m just gonna go straight to it.” She takes a deep breath in, almost choking on it as it staggers in her chest. “I think… I’m in love with you, Mila. Really.”

She’d really done it. Nights and days and weeks of planning for this moment, and it's gone not much worse than she’d rehearsed in her head. Her chest feels like a mule had kicked it- not that she knew what that felt like, exactly- she’s quite sure her heart had quite literally skipped a few beats. Like she’d been running at full speed, and then her heart stopped cold for a few moments. She shivers a bit, despite the radiating heat of her body. The milliseconds feel like hours. What is she going to say? What is she waiting for-

“I know, Tali.”

Her heart felt frozen a few moments longer. Was that it? Was that seriously all Mila had to say? She opened her mouth as if to say more, but Mila beat her to the punch.

“No, you don’t have to say any more. I - alright, can I be honest with you?” Thalia nods her head, uncharacteristically bashful. “I like you too, okay? But- nope, don’t say anything yet, there’s more.” She had raised a finger to Thalia’s lips, silencing either a joyous yelp or jumbled words of love, Thalia hadn’t decided before her mouth started to move. “There’s something else I have to tell you, and you have to promise you’ll trust me.”

“Of course,” Thalia says. Not much else to say in a situation like this. At least, she can’t think of anything. Can’t think of anything much at all, at the moment, actually. Mila stands up with a huff and starts pacing. Thalia starts, “If it’s something wrong with me, I-” but Mila silences her with the same shushing finger as before, this time at range.

“I’m still not sure what the best way to broach this with you, despite having done it a few times now. Thalia, we’ve had this conversation before.”

Thalia tilts her head in confusion as she racks her brain. Done this before? When? Had she confessed in the past and forgotten somehow? No, there was no way, she’d been practicing for this moment for weeks now. She can remember the first day she identified these feelings. There’s no way that this had happened before, right? Was it some kind of prank?

Mila interrupts her thoughts before they run too wild. “This is the part I made you promise about. I mean that, we’ve literally had this conversation before.” Her gesticulation at the rooftop around the two of them does little to elucidate what she meant. She can tell Thalia is having a hard time understanding, again, and sighs. “What I mean to say is that, Thalia, time is repeating itself. It’s going in circles and we’ve been through your confession already.”

Thalia’s head recoils in utter bafflement at the response, and then she smirks and looks away a few seconds later. “Mila, you don’t gotta make all this up. If you’re not into me-” Mila takes a big stride towards Thalia, now standing nearly above her. The violence of the motion makes Thalia freeze again.

“I told you, it’s not that. You promised to trust me, remember?”

Thalia nods after a moment. “I did, but-”

“I made you promise because I know how stupid this sounds, and I know you usually have a hard time believing me when this happens, but I really can’t think of a better time to bring it up and make sure you know I’m not just teasing you.” Mila gently sits down straddling Thalia’s lap. Thalia’s heart tries to decide whether flight or freeze is the proper response to the situation. She instinctively swallows, as if it’d keep her nerves down somehow. Mila’s face is close to hers, and her gaze is fixed on Thalia. It’s a bit much to handle.

Thalia averts her eyes out of necessity. “If… you’re being for real right now, and this is really happening, then like… how many times have you heard me say all this?”

Mila looks off to the side for a moment, and her lip wavers a few times as she counts in her head. “I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t counting at first. I believe it's, about, fourteen or-”

“Fourteen times?!” Thalia cannot help but cry out and throw up her arms in despair at the sheer magnitude of embarrassment she- or past iterations of her, or whatever- have suffered. Once is life-threateningly embarrassing, fourteen times is just lethal. Overkill, even. Even without directly feeling the humiliation of fourteen confessions, she can’t bear the idea of it. Mila, however, lightly grasps her cheeks to keep her from thrashing her head in shame.

“I think this is the worst you’ve ever taken the news, Tali.” Mila sighs. “Which sucks, because otherwise, this is actually the best attempt so far. I mean, you even managed to say it all at once!”

Thalia’s shame twists into a misplaced pride in a matter of milliseconds. “Really? I’m the best one so far?” Mila’s affirmative nod somehow converts the remnants of shame wholly to pride for her endeavour. At least I’m still the best of- uh, the best of my selves? She takes a deep breath, remembers her previous state of curious confusion, and resumes interrogating her companion, “But wait, if this is a time loop, how did we get stuck in here?”

“Don’t you remember your wish?”

Thalia resumes her eye contact with an indiscriminate point to the side. She mumbles, “I mean, yeah, but how do you know about it?”

“Time loop, Thalia.”

Thalia sighs. “Right. Of course.” A few seconds pass, as Mila looks into her eyes, expecting an epiphany to come to Thalia. She suddenly receives it as she returns her gaze. Thalia’s hand meets her own forehead fractions of a second later. “Oh, for the love of… seriously?!”

“Yes, seriously. I warned you about wishing for something like that. I told you a wish like that would doom the wisher to some kind of tragic backstory, and now here we are. Look what you’ve done.”

Thalia scoffs. “What I’ve done? How is any of this my fault? Like I was supposed to know I was gonna get scammed into fighting witches and getting stuck in time loops! I just said what was on my mind that night when I thought nobody would know!” Of course she’d wish for their fun days together to not end. It was on her mind back then, and it was on her mind still. Mila was her first true friend, who understood who she really was. She didn’t regret it for a second until now, when she found out she’d looped Mila through fourteen or however many school exams, heat waves, and confessions directed at her.

Thalia realizes she doesn’t know how much she’d actually forced Mila to repeat. “Hey, how long is the loopy thing, anyway? I mean, like, from when it starts over to when it goes back again. Or I guess, better question, when does it start and end at?”

Mila shifts her weight back a bit, but retains her position atop Thalia’s lap. The sudden reminder of their position sends yet another wave of heat through Thalia’s face. Mila starts, “I think the end point is variable, but it has a common theme. The start point, though, is pretty predictable.”

“A common theme,” Thalia says, “like what? You ain’t gonna tell me it’s when I die, right?”

Mila smiles in response. “No, not quite. But I can’t tell you, or I think it’ll happen anyway. It did once before, anyway.”

Thalia can only sigh. “Fine. But when does it start?”

Mila shifts her weight again. “Always three months, twenty-two days, seventeen hours, four minutes and fifty-two-ish seconds before the time it ends.”
It’s Thalia’s turn to shuffle a bit in place. “What the hell… how arbitrary is that, huh? Did Kyubey roll dice for it or something?” She racked her brain for some significance behind the number, but couldn’t think of anything. She finds it rather hard to think, given her current situation, and shrugs.

“Oh, so you don’t remember.” Mila pouts, but exaggerated enough that it’s obviously just for show. Obvious to Thalia, anyway. “And there you were talking about how much you loved me, but I guess you didn’t mean it, boo hoo…”

Thalia bursts into a fit of several combined passions at the accusation, suddenly very concerned that it was not for show. “W-Wha?! I mean, of course I meant it, come on! Do you need me to say it a second time?!” She stops only at Mila’s smirk, and its accompaniment of just-barely-unsuppressed laughter.

“Aww, come on. I know you meant it. You’ve pushed through it all however-many-teen-times I’ve seen you do this.” She takes a deep breath to steady herself. “Sorry, Thalia, but you’re just too fun to tease.”

Thalia whines in response, but Mila continues, “Anyway, I’m not one-hundred percent on this myself, but I believe that it might be the gap in time between when you made that wish and the time I initially met you that night, when you caught me patrolling. It’d be around that time, anyway. I can’t think of any other reason it’d be such an arbitrary length of time, and it does pertain to your wish.” Mila chuckles as her companion flushes red again, warmer than ever. She’s probably embarrassed. I can’t blame her, but somehow it makes her even cuter, Mila muses.

“Wait, I’ve got a question,” says Thalia. She might be able to swallow the shame better with more conversation to pad the memory out. “What happens if it loops all the way back before I made the wish in the first place? Wouldn’t that kinda break things?”

“I’m not sure,” Mila sighs. “It hasn’t happened yet, and I’m gonna try and make sure it doesn’t. I’d rather not get looped out of existence, thank you very much.”

“Can’t argue with you there.” A pause. “Hey, another one, what if-”

“Tali, if I answered every single question you can come up with, we’d be here all night.”

Thalia can’t help but defend herself with a strong offense. “Well, excuse me! I’m just trying to figure this mess out. I’ve never dated a time traveller before, you know!” She realizes then she’s made a critical leap in semantics that she may never recover from. They weren’t dating. Not yet, anyway. Not in this timeline? Whatever. This might be the end. She prepares for emotional death.

Mila smiles in response, leaning in close. “Yes, Thalia, you have.” She leans in closer, and Thalia closes her eyes as their lips meet.

________

Days, weeks, and a couple of months pass by so fast that Thalia can hardly keep track of them. From the rapid onset of her relationship (calling it that still makes her blush) with Mila until now, nearly every day has been bliss. Thalia prefers discretion in these matters, she found; the prospect of merely holding hands with Mila on campus or out on the town left her at a heart rate commonly prescribed to active heart attack victims. Mila, perhaps fortunately or perhaps unfortunately, is gifted in visual deception. At Mila’s direction, they are presently holding hands as they walk to their next class, while everyone else around them sees only them walking astride one another, no salacious contact. Thalia’s heart, too, compromises, ticking at a mere “moderate-to-heavy exertion” pace, rather than one that might kill her.

“I think we’re gonna be late, Mila…” Thalia checks the time and laments. Perhaps they’d spent too long out getting coffee again.

“We will make it, Tali. Don’t worry.” Mila pulls ahead a bit, tugging Thalia’s arm in the crowd. It was really amazing to Thalia how they apparently couldn’t see or feel the chain that her and Mila’s interlinked hands and outstretched arms made, right there in plain view. To think you could do so much by altering perception- but then she loses her train of thought by fixating on their joined hands.

A few seconds later, Mila’s arm goes slack as Thalia catches up to her. She’s stopped cold in the hallway, somehow standing firm amidst the bustle around her. Thalia’s a bit worried for her. “Mila, you okay?” She lets go of her hand, to wave it in front of her face. “Yo, Earth to Mila-”

“Hush, and concentrate. Do you feel it too?” Thalia falls silent, a small part of her brain wanting to petulantly pout at being silenced. But she remains composed, and steps in front of Mila, trying to see her face. Her head is turned to the ground slightly, and Thalia can see her eyes closed. Is she getting a reaction? Thalia tries it too, and- surely enough- the moment her heart rate finally settles to its normal level, she feels it. Faint, but certain. The reaction of a Witch’s magic against her own. Being late to class was now the least of her concerns. Mila would find a way to alter perceptions and cover for them again, she thinks. Even if she couldn’t do that, Thalia would gladly take punishment for her absence. People’s lives were on the line, here.

It takes them only thirty-seven minutes, Mila notes, to find the Witch’s lair. It’s across town from their school, and she considers herself lucky to have found it early in the Witch’s development. The entrance through the barrier and into its Labyrinth is concealed in the rotting cab of a pickup truck in the back of a junkyard, its front end bent into nearly an M-shape. Broken glass still lines its floormats, and the drivers’ seat has a splotch of who-knows-what across it. She wonders, for just a moment, why it had to be this one- her brain instantly races to the conclusion that it must have been sentimentally important to the girl who- never mind, she thinks. Thinking about this before fighting a Witch can only ever hurt her feelings and cause hesitation when she can’t hesitate. She found that out the hard way, courtesy of a prior Witch hunt, and got hit hard for it. Duty comes first. She can brood about it later.

“This way, Tali.” She gestures into the rotting frame of the car with the needle-tip of her sword. Thalia grimaces in response.

“If I get tetanus in there, you’re gonna pay for the shots.” Mila’s sly smile makes her chuckle in response. “Fine, fine. I’m going.” The world fades away as she climbs through the space a car door used to be, and Mila follows close behind.

The interior of a Labyrinth always surprises Mila. She’d only seen three unique ones now, to be fair, but with each of them so surreal and different from both one another and reality, this one manages to astonish her. The path before her is a road- or more accurately, a two-lane street. It is the only thing her brain can instantly recognize. That, and her adorable Thalia, who stands a few feet ahead of her, similarly bewildered. Mila follows the painted yellow line down the center of the road, and joins Thalia in looking around. The street they stand on seems to float alone, enclosed in what looks like a sphere. Mila estimates that it’s about three hundred meters in any direction to the walls of the enclosure, but it’s quite hard to tell with the shifting, shimmering, iridescent patterns on the wall. It’s a bit interesting that longer distances are easier to measure in meters, despite us never using them for much in school. Mila shakes her head to dispel her thoughts of the virtues of the metric system- this is not the time for it.

“Only one way to go, I guess.” Thalia gestures with her mace.

Sure enough, Mila looks behind her, and the road abruptly ends. Beyond it, on the edge of the sphere those hundreds of meters away, she can see a shimmering image of the junkyard at midday on the wall. “Not so fast,” she cautions. She tries walking back to the entrance, and the entire sphere seems to shrink and contort to bring the wall closer to her, making those few hundred meters back into the few feet she’d walked away from that point- it makes her nauseous. She stops and turns back around to Thalia, who remains the same distance that she expects. “There’s something wrong with the space in here. It’s… lensing, or something? It doesn’t make sense.” She walks to the side of the road, and that far wall of the sphere doesn’t get any closer. If it were logically consistent, it should have bent space again to take me closer, Mila thinks. She looks down and feels a pang of vertigo as the bottom of the sphere shimmers and shifts below her. She pulls herself back from the edge. Mila doubles over to steady herself, then raises her head back to look at Thalia. “Just don’t think too much about it and let’s get rid of this thing.”

Thalia puts her mace over her shoulder and smirks. “Finally, you’re speaking my language.”

The two walk briskly in the only direction the road seems to go. The walls of the sphere never get closer on any side, despite the wide, meandering twists and turns of the road and their progress along it. The path behind them proceeds as expected away from them, and slowly the distance grows. Even as they’ve walked at least a mile, maybe one-point-four miles, Mila thinks, and the road behind them should’ve been through the wall, it seems to approach it but never reach. None of it makes sense. It makes her hate Labyrinths even more than she already does.

“I figure I should say this in case it isn’t obvious, Tali,” Her compatriot’s ears perk up and she turns her head to listen as they walk. “I- sorry, we have never been here before. This is the furthest we’ve ever been in one of the loops, by… well, about a month, actually.”

Thalia turns her head back forward, hiding her face, but her voice is loud enough to be heard from behind her. “And you’re only saying this now because-?”

“No need to get snippy, you.” Mila sighs. “I was worried that telling you might cause the loop to swing around again, somehow. Like- jinxing it, right? I’m telling you now because Witches are serious business and I am a bit worried that it’ll happen.”

Thalia’s mace arm falls to her side and she twirls the weight around a bit, occupying herself. She sighs. “I don’t get why you don’t trust me enough to tell me, but…”

“It’s when you stop enjoying our time together, for any reason, I think.” Mila blurts it out before her sentence can get any further along. “And I’m sorry to cut you off, but I was worried that you were about to do it right there. Sometimes it’s immediate. One time, it happened mid-conversation, half a sentence after I told you that’s what caused it. Sometimes it’s longer. One time we broke up, and it didn’t-”

“We’ve broken up before? Seriously?” Thalia pouts.

“Yes. It was my fault, though.” Mila sighs. “I was trying to- no, that’s not important right now. The point is, that iteration continued for days afterwards. I don’t know if there’s some sort of emotional threshold that actually causes the shift, or anything, because I’m not the one feeling it. But it’s always after you get upset about something relating to me. So based on what you told me your wish was, this is my best guess of the rule.”

Thalia falls silent for a few moments, flicking the mace around with her wrist. She then slings it back to her shoulder and starts laughing, her head downcast. She then looks to the sky, or rather, to the shimmering sphere above her, and then laughs with an uproar. “Hahaha, what kind of idiot makes a wish to always have fun with someone? This really is my fault.”

“It is your fault, but I can’t blame you.” Mila smirks and chuckles a bit herself. “Besides, it’s not like I’m not having fun too. I get to hang out with you more, and…”

“And?” As she turns her head to prompt the rest of the sentence, Thalia gasps with surprise as Mila embraces her from behind, their pace slowed to a halt for a few moments.

“And I get to do all this over and over again, learn from mistakes, and do it the best way, to make sure it lasts.” Both of them consider themselves lucky that the other can’t see their blushing faces at the moment.

“Well… when you put it like that… maybe… it ain’t so bad… or something…”

“Hmm, easy for you to say.” Mila’s tone shifts back to normal as she releases her embrace and gives Thalia a light shove on her back, spurring her to keep walking. “You don’t even remember when it starts over. For you, you’re just getting extremely lucky around the girl of your dreams.”

Thalia bemoans the assassination of her tough-girl persona. “Girl of my dreams?! I’d never say something that tacky, come on!”

“Do you think I’m making this up? You’re the one who said it. One time, you even-”

Thalia can’t take much more of this. “Alright, alright, I get it.” She turns around to walk backwards, so she can face Mila as she says this. “I know you-” she freezes and then interrupts herself. “Woah, wait a sec.” She gestures with a nod to behind Mila. “How long’s that been there?”

Mila turns to see a garage door approximately fifty feet down the road, in the direction from whence they came. There was no way it’d been there before. Aside from a large rectangle of shiny, segmented metal being extremely visible-

“No way. We came from that way. It would’ve totally blocked us,” Thalia claims. “You think it appeared behind us? Pretty good timing we turned around right after that, yeah?”

“I worry,” Mila responds, “that it might’ve been behind us for quite a while. We could’ve been walking like on a treadmill and I’d never have noticed. This road goes on forever, it seems like, and we left the entrance a long time ago.”

Thalia shrugs. “Don’t care. Worst case, I spent a half hour walking with you. It’s a good day for me.” She catches the start of an embarrassed smirk from Mila before the normally dignified girl turns back to face the garage door.

Mila doesn’t even bother retorting about the magic they’ve wasted to the Witch’s siphon inside of its Labyrinth. Thalia’s comment was slick enough to get a pass. A few moments later, they’re upon the garage door.

Thalia steps up to it and claps her hands once. “I have a feeling this is the right way. Ready, Mila?”

“I am.”

Thalia squats down and grabs a small metal handle at the bottom of the door. “Then, here goes-”

The moment the door slides up, a permanent gust of wind seems to emanate from within it. Thalia fights the door to slide up into its invisible track, revealing the road beyond. The path they had apparently walked in on is now racing towards them, merging seamlessly with the stationary ground on the other side of the threshold. Thalia swallows nervously. “Do you think we have to-”

“Yes, probably. But I’m willing to bet that it’s not as it seems. Labyrinths usually aren’t.” Mila looks through the door and notices that the background of the sphere is seamless between the two, aside from the shade. And, as a matter of fact, the lower light on the other side causes the rainbow sheen of it to wane significantly.

“Yeah, usually. But if I jump through there and drop like a wannabe stunt double, I’m gonna be pissed.”

“I suppose we don’t have a choice, do we?”

Thalia sighs. “No, guess not. I’ll go first and you follow right after, ‘kay?”

Mila sheathes her thin sword and prepares. “I will.”

Thalia takes a few quick breaths, and then jumps through the threshold.

The sudden shift from apparent day to apparent night is the first thing that strikes Thalia. The next thing that strikes her is the ground, as it slides out from under her feet. She rolls over more than a few times, scraping everything but her face as she does so. She is thankful, for another time of many, for the superior resilience of both her person and her outfit, as the ground accelerates her to its own speed. Or decelerates her? Who knows. Either way, it hurts even with her enhanced capabilities. She rolls off the road to a soft bank- another new development- of loose sand. It helps to arrest her momentum, and a few tumbles later she stops. The moment she can stand, she does so and turns to see Mila rolling in a similar manner. She comes to rest a few paces back from where Thalia is standing, and Thalia trudges over to help her up.

“Ugh,” groans Mila, her carefully maintained hair in complete disarray and her stark white outfit covered in sand, but otherwise physically intact. “That was miserable. I’m sorry I convinced you to do that. It was exactly how it seemed.”

“Don’t be. You did it too. We both had to.” She extends a hand to help Mila up. “Now c’mon, there’s more road.”

Mila gets to her feet with a grunt and an assist from Thalia. “But which way? The way the road was going, or the way we were sort-of going?” She looks both ways on the road, before commenting on the fact that she’s off it. “Thank goodness this side had ground out here, I suppose. Couldn’t see that from the door.”

Thalia nods in agreement and looks both ways as well. “If I had to guess, I’d probably go the opposite direction of the road. Think like we were driving. I think I know where this is going.”

Mila finishes looking both ways, and shrugs. “It’s slightly better than a guess. Let’s just do it.” She lets Thalia take the lead as they walk back to the road and continue the direction the road was coming at them from.

A few minutes pass before Thalia comes to a stop. “Up there, off the road. Uh, one-o’-clock?”

Mila moves abreast to her and sees it suddenly then as well, as if it’d only popped into existence as they crossed an invisible threshold. On the side of the road, a blur of light, red and white. Almost like-

“A car. And I think-”

“A power pole, it looks like.” Mila sighs after interrupting her partner. “Is it really going to be that on the nose?”

Thalia shrugs. “I guess it’s different for each of them. This is definitely going to be it, though. I can feel its reaction. It’s close.”

Mila nods in response. She could feel it too. If there was a place for the Witch to be, this certainly looked the part. She felt a bit stiff. On edge. Her breaths narrow a bit as her heart rate increases and she approaches the car, a few paces behind Thalia.

“Looks like that pickup we climbed into back in the real world. All crumpled up in front, same thing. It’s, uh… fresh, though.” Thalia’s feet crackle over broken glass scattered on the road as she surveys the wreck, the sound subsiding as she steps off the road and onto the loose sand. She puts a hand on the door handle, and turns back to face Mila, who had stopped a few feet back. She cocks her head, a bit dismayed at Mila’s hesitance. “C’mon. You ready?”

The thoughts of what might’ve caused the Labyrinth to take this shape drip poison onto Mila’s mind, but she pushes them aside. “Yes. I’m just… getting distracted, is all.”

Thalia understands what she means, but suffers not from the same affliction. “It’s a bit gruesome this time, yeah. But this is our duty, and we gotta get it done for everyone, okay?” She reaches her other hand out to Mila.

Mila nods. “Yeah. Let’s do it.” She takes her comrade’s hand and squeezes.

Thalia nods and tries to swing open the car door, but the moment the latch is opened, the scene changes again. They stand suddenly in the bed of the same truck, in the empty parking lot of a highway waystation. The sky- or rather, the firmament enclosing them- has become yet darker, a pristine, unnatural, starless black. No moon hangs overhead, but their immediate surroundings are lit by the soft glow of a single lightbulb atop a lamp post in the lot. The road, one on-ramp away, seems to stretch out into infinity once more, but they cannot see much past the lights clearly. It’s dark like the two of them have never seen before.

Mila immediately feels the Witch’s resonance on her soul, like a cold draft against bare skin. She shivers. It’s close, and she knows it. Thalia seems to know as well, as she takes up a battle stance as she hops down from the truck.

“Yo, if you’re out there, let’s just get this over with!” Thalia yells to her dark surroundings. “I don’t wanna waste my time with-” She sucks a breath in through her teeth as she throws her body to the side as fast as she can. A needle-thin blade nearly misses her torso and flies off into the dark beyond her.

“Tali!” Mila scrambles to her side and stands beside her girlfriend. They both face the direction the assault came from, but there’s nothing to see. Mila faces the other way to cover Thalia’s back, and that’s when a form drifts into the fringe of her view; a nearly featureless, irregular lump, almost like a bedsheet ghost with iridescent, oily coloring, covered in a handful of needle-thin spines, like some kind of greasy balding porcupine. The form contracts, and she braces as she anticipates spines to shoot out. Contrary to her preparation, she instead feels Thalia’s shoulders move against hers as Thalia swings and knocks one of the needles out of mid-air opposite it, spiriting Mila to the side with her other hand. The creature- no, the Witch lets out a cry at this, and a few spines slowly leave its body and hover off into the dark.

Thalia’s heart is racing, but she tries to keep a clear head. “Mila, just stay like we were before, and if you see one of the things just smack it out of the air or dodge, yeah?”

Mila nods. “Yeah, got it.” She shakes her head to clear her mind- she was supposed to be the tactician. Thalia’s plan was a good one, for now. “One comin-” Before she can finish her sentence, the needle has gone from barely visible to nearly upon her. She swipes with her rapier and it clips the projectile, which seems to immediately lose momentum and clatters to the floor. The Witch howls again. “Thalia, I think this hurts it, somehow. And it doesn’t seem to be growing more spines.”

“Then, we just gotta deal with all its ammo first, then we can give it a beatdown, right?” Her grip tightens on her mace as her eyes scan the darkness.

“I would think so.”

“Then let’s get it do- woah!” Thalia steps aside and tries to swat another one out of midair. She misses and the spine flies back to its host, its trajectory curving in an arc. “Damn it, missed one! And stop cutting me off when I talk, you freak!”

Seconds lapse until another spine flies at Thalia from her right. She ducks under it just barely in time, and in one motion a downwards swing in her right hand became an uppercut swing with her left. It hardly touches the tail end of the spine and knocks it off course. It falls to the floor, and the Witch cries out again. “Another one down!”

“Which makes… six, seven, eight, eight more to go.”

“That’s nothin’! Come on, ugly, shoot some more!” Thalia continues to taunt the Witch as if it can understand her words anymore. It ejects another quill, which floats into the dark.

Mila effortlessly dodges it as it shoots from her ten-o’-clock, maintaining her stance as she parries it like a professional. It sinks back into its host, its trajectory straight past her and back to it. She then sees all eight of the remaining spines leave the mass, which seems to deflate and whine as its quills abandon it. “Thalia, I think it’s gonna do a big one!” She pushes her magic to the limit, and uses her ultimate technique- her Magia. “Iugales Duorum!”

From her previous position, three of her split, forming a perfect triangle. Each of them then raises their sword and braces for impact. The Witch whines and recalls all of its spines, each of them targeting one Mila or another. Three of them pass through open air as they fly through illusion. Another two beset the Mila closest to the Witch; one from above, one from behind. The one from above passes through the illusion and embeds itself into the ground. The three on the remaining Mila, the real one, miss their mark as she deftly weaves her way between them with a flourish, knocking one off-balance and onto the ground with her rapier.

Thalia doesn’t mean to take her eyes off of the target, but it is impossible not to focus on Mila in that moment, from her gallant posture to her radiant platinum-blonde hair waving in the shockwave of nearly-missed projectiles. She quickly gets her head back in the game before further rumination on her beloved can occur, just in time to see the remaining six spines once again float off into the dark. She keeps her head on a swivel, but is unable to react to all of them when they come simultaneously flying out of the dark at assorted angles. One of them- off to Mila’s left side, but definitely aiming at Thalia- is swatted out of the air by Mila. Two come from above, as well as one each from Thalia’s eleven-o-clock low, two, and three-o-clock high. She barely has time to step aside, but manages to hit one and nearly miss another above her as she swings a vicious uppercut. The Witch no longer cries, but sighs, as another needle falls to the ground. Five to go. Four of five immediately shower down on the girls from above- and one directly at Mila, laterally. Was the Witch learning their weakness? How can they counter this many-

Before she can formulate a response, Thalia has pushed them both over with a shoulder charge. Four spines swerve before they hit the ground and track back towards their origin. Mila quickly sits up to the sight of Thalia partially impaled on one of the spines- straight through her hips, diagonally. She doesn’t seem to have fully grasped that fact herself, as she gets back to her knees and attempts to stand up. She only notices when her body initially refuses to stand, and she falls back to one knee.

“Huh? Oh, shit… uh…” Thalia tries to pull it out and only ends up cursing and yelling in the process. On the edge of her vision, four spines begin to float out into darkness again. Realizing she has precious little time, she puts her full effort into snapping the protruding end of the spine, causing herself considerable pain and yelping in the process. She glances up from her wound to Mila, who looks more shaken than she is. But their job isn’t done; they need to focus. “Mila, just a little more! Four left!”

Thalia’s words seem to bring Mila back to the moment, who nods and gets back in her defensive stance just quick enough to evade and attempt to smack one of the four attacks from above aside . It misses, but with its momentum it flies to the ground and partially penetrates the sand-swept asphalt.

Thalia is unable to avoid this wave of projectiles, due to her hampered mobility. One hits her in the shoulder and sticks. The other runs her clean through the abdomen and continues out the other side, returning to its master. She cries out again with a pained wail, followed by, “Stupid bitch! You’re gonna pay for that!” Her body begins to radiate a soft light, and she yells like an anime character as she pours magic into her physical body. She should’ve used this sooner, but hadn’t for concerns of magic efficiency. But now this is dire enough to warrant it, and besides, she is angry. “Infinitus!” She suddenly stands tall, her wounds no longer causing her any pain, and with enhanced speed manages to run and catch up to the needle that had run her through. She clenches it in a fist, and throws it to the ground, shattering it like a porcelain pot.

Mila’s full of rage too, now, as if it were infectious. How dare it hurt Thalia like this? The final needle floats off again, but Mila’s prepared for it. It comes diagonally at her from above, but she swats it aside and crushes it underfoot. That was the last of them. The Witch had nothing left. She looked over in its direction, and there it remained, pulsating slowly and generating some low, gurgling noise.

Thalia’s glow fades as she walks over to it, and she begins to limp as she makes her way closer to the Witch’s body. She switches her mace into her off-hand. Her right arm soon after falls limp as the glow fades from her completely.
“Thalia! Don’t move, you’re in really bad shape!” Mila jogs to catch her.

Thalia continues her trudge, her eyes fixated on the Witch. “I’ve had worse.” She groans as she accidentally nudges one of the spines still embedded in her.

“You have not.”

“Heh, yeah, you’re right. But I can take it. Besides, even if it takes me a while, it’s still gonna heal. Probably won’t even scar.” Thalia definitely needs rest, and she was about to earn it.
Mila only sighs in response, and they approach the Witch together.

A dry wind picks up the moment they step off the parking lot onto the desert sand. “You’re probably gonna have to finish this thing off, Mila.” Thalia speaks to her through gritted teeth as Mila supports her. “I’m pretty well spent. Probably should’ve saved my special move. But I’ll do what I can.”

“I had to use mine, too, Tali. Don’t worry. I’ll do it. Let’s just get this over with.” The Witch makes another noise as they look at it. They face one another, on either side of what appears to be its head, as Mila raises her sword and begins charging her blade with magic for the fatal strike.

The nerve Mila had worked up over the course of this miserable experience to slay the monster seems to leave her at this range. The pathetic figure seemed to be… panting, or wheezing, or sobbing… something like that. It was defenseless. It used to be one of them- it just as easily could’ve been her- and she thinks she understands the pain this former comrade had gone through, and how she met her fate, and-

The split second of hesitation before she brings down her blade is all the Witch needs to recall the blades lying scattered on the floor. They race toward Thalia, and before she even knows what she’s doing Mila is already diving to throw her out of the way. Her breath seems to exit her body all at once as she’s stuck by several spines. One of them, previously destined for Thalia’s throat, now skims past Mila’s head, grazing the glimmering blue gemstone which contains her soul.

“NO! Mila! Fucking- DIE, you!” Thalia raises her mace with her weaker arm and smashes the Witch’s misshapen body over and over and over until it’s far more misshapen and the Labyrinth dissolves with a shimmer. All that remains is herself, with a few unexplained and now-vacant penetrations through her soft tissue, and her compatriot with those and more, in a different corner of the junkyard from where they had entered the Labyrinth. “Mila, are you okay?” Thalia races over to care for her girlfriend, but she’s already lost a lot of blood. The magic wasn’t working fast enough- and if her human body was unable to function and died like this, who even knows if her soul would still be able to pilot it?

Mila locks eyes with Thalia, but is evidently unable to speak. Tears begin to well up in Thalia’s eyes as she looks down on her dying partner. “Mila… I… I’m sorry I couldn’t…”

But Mila shakes her head and smiles. She takes deep breaths, which despite her efforts are ineffective due to the perforations in her lungs. Asphyxiation wouldn’t kill her, but the blood loss probably would, she reckoned. What is strange, she thinks, is that even her magic can’t seem to fix her up in time. Or maybe she’s fresh out. She pulls out her soul gem to find it a murky black. A spiderweb of cracks covers the side of the gem facing her. Her breath catches in her throat.

Thalia sobs at the sight of it. Three seconds is all she allows herself to grieve. She realizes what she can do, what she must do, stands as fast as she can manage and fights vertigo and failing muscles alike as she scrambles to where the Witch once was. She finds a small black trinket- roughly the shape of a cherry with a needle through it, and jet black. It’s cold to her touch- Grief Seeds usually are. She closes it in her palm and races back to Mila. She drops to her knees and gingerly reaches for Mila’s hand, and her soul which rests precariously within. She touches the Grief Seed to the gemstone ever-so-gently, even lighter than the care she normally takes when touching something to her very life essence, but nothing happens. She tries again, and again, but the darkness doesn’t leave Mila’s soul gem. Thalia’s tears, paused by determined action, resume in force.

The last of Mila’s hopes fail with the inaction of the Grief Seed. Perhaps due to the cracks on the gem itself, she thinks, or maybe it’s damage to the actual soul. Her own soul, damaged directly. She’d laugh at such a ridiculous concept, if it hadn’t happened to her, before her own eyes. She closes her eyes to try and think for a moment, the stimulus of the world around her suddenly proving overwhelming. The Grief Seed isn’t working, so it’s just a matter of time, anyway. She tries to calculate her odds, but fails. It doesn’t matter, anyway. Even if I survive this, how long would I last if- Mila’s eyes shoot open with sudden realization. She utters to her compatriot, weakly demonstrating a crude shape with her hand, “Thalia… time… circles.”

It takes Thalia a few seconds to process, but she nods her head. She takes a deep breath and tries to stop crying long enough to speak coherently. “Next time, make sure we break all the spines. And tell me to use my Infinitus to start with so we can clear them before I get hit.”
Mila nods softly in response. She could feel her body begin to fail, as her magic reserves fully deplete and her now-average-human body continues to rapidly expire. Her soul, too, is about to burst, and she doesn’t know which would be worse. She wasn’t sure why the loop hadn’t taken over already, but she hoped it’d come soon. She’s afraid. She’d been incapacitated in a previous loop, but it hadn’t gone this far before she was freed from the pain. You’re getting very close to dying, her animal instincts are telling her. You don’t have much longer at all.

Thalia is not having fun anymore. She hadn’t been having fun for quite a while now, actually, but it wasn’t looping like Mila had promised it would. She said it’d been easy to trigger before, right? Mid-sentence, right? So why not now? She closes her eyes, unable to watch as Mila exsanguinates before her, but she can’t keep them closed for long. She needs to see this, even if it’s killing her soul right now. Even if it’s an image she’ll never be able to forget. Even though it’s a nightmare before her eyes. The only thing she can hope for is that this version of herself is about to cease to exist altogether, and that her tears are those of a figment of someone’s imagination in a dream. But it doesn’t happen. It’s not happening. All she can do is sit and watch as her girlfriend’s body dies, her own soul gem starts to burst, and her vision begins to blur.

“MILAAAAAAAAAAAAA-”

As It Began