“Now!” Clea yelled.
In response, several things happened at once.
A sickly yellow shaft of energy burst forth from the Guardian’s eye. At the same time, Margali slammed her staff into the ground and a ray of pure golden light shot out from its gem to meet the Guardian’s beam. Elizabeth’s eyes began to glow brightly as a ruby red lance of light sprang from her coronet to join Margali’s ray, turning it carnelian. Purple nimbuses formed around Clea’s hands, and then amethyst bolts joined the red-orange beam, deepening it to more garnet tones. Finally, a stream of improbable hot pink bubbles exploded from Holly’s free hand to mix with the magical energies of the other women, forming a swirling, shining, pulsing stream the color of blood.
“I guess we’re crossing the streams,” Holly muttered, but no one had any energy left to respond even if they did know what she was talking about.
Sallow ray battled scarlet for preeminence, one beating the other back, then being beaten back itself in turn. Long moments passed, and it seemed like the sorceresses could do no better than a stalemate with the gargantuan Guardian, though each of them was showing signs of strain. Holly’s teeth were bared, Elizabeth’s brow was furrowed in deep lines, and Margali was sweating. Even Clea was struggling, a less-than-unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. They needed something more.
This isn’t working, and we’re running out of time! Clea sent to them all telepathically. It’s not enough for us to combine our magics. Our magics must be as one if we are to defeat the Guardian. Open your minds to me, your power. She could sense the hesitancy, the distrust, especially from Margali. As you open to me, so I open to you.
It was the most she could offer, to let them into her mind and heart in exchange for access to theirs. Because, ultimately, no matter the source of their magic, their tradition, or their training, its use all came down to what was inside them. Their desire and their will.
Clea wasn’t at all sure they would do it, but she did as she said she would, opening herself to them. She let them see her uncertainty, her fear. Fear that she wasn’t up to this task, or the larger tasks of leading the rebellion and ruling the Dark Dimension, no matter that she had done both handily before. That was then. This was now. Fear that even if they did triumph, she wasn’t worthy to lead her people. After all, she had failed them in the past, hadn’t she? And more than once.
She let them see the conflicting wants and needs that drove her. Freedom for her people, and for herself. Freedom from her people. Love for her people, and for Stephen. Wanting a relationship with Stephen but not sure it would ever really work, with her swamped with responsibility in one dimension and he likewise drowning in duty in another. Wanting an end to all the hurt his broken promises had caused.
She even let them see the parts she often tried to keep hidden from herself. The longing for someone who could love her without reservation. Rahl’s face flashed in her mind, and Nobel’s. The longing for the parents she’d never truly had. Her father Orini had been a disciple first of Dormammu, and then of Umar. His loyalty had ultimately gotten him blasted into bits by the Dread One whose favor he had so curried. And then there was Umar, who was just… Umar. That was a tangle of emotions she couldn’t unravel for the others, because she had never yet been able to unsnarl it for herself.
As Clea endured the touch of the other women’s minds upon hers, some rougher than others, she also caught glimpses of theirs, though she tried to go no deeper than necessary to access their power for this one specific thing.
Still, she couldn’t escape Elizabeth’s resentment and guilt when she thought of her father. Her feeling of being unmoored, caught between the magical world and the mundane, the Indigenous world and the settler one. Her longing to find her place in those worlds – one she chose for herself, not one thrust upon her.
And as Clea accepted these parts of Elizabeth without judgment, she felt the red thread of the Talisman’s power connect to her own. A surge of strength and resolution washed through her.
Clea could likewise not avoid the complicated love-hate pull Holly felt when she thought of Agatha, her mentor and her judge. Her resentment of Agatha’s favoritism toward Wanda, and of Wanda’s abandonment of her in favor of her own children, especially considering all the trouble those so-called children had wound up causing. Her desire to learn, and know, and uncover all the mysteries there were, all warring with her deep-seated fears that she was not smart, talented, or dedicated enough to do so. Her regret at how her chosen lifestyle had isolated her from her family and friends, and her longing to connect with others who could understand and accept the magic in her life. Not only accept it, but add to it. Elizabeth’s image was large in her mind, along with Clea’s, and even Margali’s.
Clea caught hold of the thread of Holly’s power, which was, surprisingly, a bright, shining blue instead of pink. But its color was only a construct and of no consequence. Only the power mattered. It pulsed with creativity, passion, and hope.
And then there were Margali’s thoughts. Guarded, surface thoughts, they let Clea in just deep enough to access what she needed, and no further. Even so, Clea still got a taste of Margali’s need for power, not just for power’s sake, but because she had given up so much in pursuit of it. The sunk cost of her relationships with her children, and maybe even her own humanity. If she didn’t become the most powerful, the Sorceress Supreme of the Winding Way and who knew what after that, then of what worth were those most painful of sacrifices? The question haunted the green-skinned sorceress, and she could not keep it from her mind now, regardless of how much she might want to.
But Clea thought she sensed an undercurrent of relief, too. Margali had likely never shared her fears with anyone before now. Being forced to open herself up in this manner allowed her to do so while maintaining the pretense of not wanting to.
And then she had hold of the fiery emerald thread of Margali’s power, a flaming pillar of arrogance and envy that burned Clea when she touched it, construct or not. But she did not waver.
Braiding their threads together with the soft lavender strand of her own was harder than she expected, the colored lines twisting and bucking, pushing away from each other like magnets of the same polarity. None of them had ever worked together this way, ever let anyone touch their power, let alone manipulate it, and none of them truly trusted the process, deep down.
Clea understood. The vulnerability made her uncomfortable, as well. But she didn’t have time to coax each thread gently into place. Instead, she reached out and grabbed them, yanking them into line through sheer force of will. For a moment, they fought her, but she gritted her teeth and pulled harder. She could feel sweat beading on her forehead and trickling down her back, taste the salt of it on her upper lip. Her muscles strained with the effort of her concentration. Still, she pulled.
Suddenly, like dominoes tapped with the lightest of touches, the colored threads fell into line. First blue, then red, and finally green. Clea heaved a sigh of relief.
Then, not stopping to celebrate this small victory, she gathered their combined might into herself until she felt as if she might burst into a galaxy of rainbow stars. And when she could not hold even a breath more of power, she released it, channeling all that energy into the single, stronger cord of braided magic the sorceresses had already created.
Prismatic fire raced up through the blood-colored ray that had been their combined but separate magics, hit the interface with the pale yellow light of the Guardian’s beam, and then kept going. Clea thought it might travel all the way back into the creature’s cyclopean eye.
But G’uran the Great, like all ancient Mhuruuks, had been a powerful sorcerer in his own right, one of the mightiest the Dark Dimension had ever seen. And he had imbued his guardian with much of that power.
The jaundiced beam from the G’uranthic Guardian’s eye began repulsing their polychromatic ray, pushing it back toward the sorceresses. In her mind, Clea could see it pushing back against each of the individual-colored strands, looking for a weakness.
It found one.
Surprisingly, it was the green thread that snapped, and Margali staggered from the backlash. The abrupt separation of mind and power left Clea momentarily bereft and paralyzed, as if a part of her soul had been forcibly excised, but the other women redoubled their efforts to make up for Margali’s absence, and the feeling faded as quickly as it had appeared.
If Clea had been a betting woman, she would have put money on Holly’s strand going first, for while the girl had both innate power and top-notch training, she simply lacked the experience of using magic in combat or in a team environment. Then again, Margali was perhaps the strongest willed among them, and the least likely to play well with others. If there was going to be a weak thread in their braid of synergy, she was the obvious candidate.
But Clea had anticipated that one or even more of the sorceresses’ strands might fray under the pressure of the Guardian’s gaze. There was a fifth thread she had not yet woven into their braid. Like all who wore the Flames of Regency, Clea was able to draw strength from the very essence of the Dark Dimension itself. She did so now, calling up a sparkling black strand of energy from the ground at their feet to join and bolster the others. As it wound itself over and through the existing-colored threads, they, too, began to sparkle. And when the newly braided beam of power reached the interface with the sallow light of the Guardian’s ray, this time it was not push it back, as the women’s combined power had been before.
It absorbed and transformed it, traveling all the way back to the Guardian’s eye, until what was once a lemony light, the last pale remnants of G’uran the Great’s power, became the same sparkling sable essence that marked the rest of the Dark Dimension.
The G’uranthic Guardian blinked.
And then its now-black eye exploded in a violent shower of ebon sparks, and Clea released her hold on the other sorceresses’ power as the Guardian’s gaze went dead. Her desire to collapse with relief and fatigue was eclipsed by a rush of triumph.
The way into the palace was open. This was it. They had done it.
Clea looked at her companions and smiled wolfishly.
“Showtime.”