And away she flew, into the misting moorland, past the bank of a violent stream. She stopped on the wooden bridge. Unnoticed and unwanted. Never loved. Her parents had five years prior disowned her for wanting kisses from girls, and the physician had this morning fired her for sneaking ether to patients, and two suited men in a broken bricked alley had yester-hour forced themselves into her. Garbs torn as lightning bolts, face porcelain desert, stones burrowed in both pockets, the weight of crush dissipating from her narrow neck; Elizabeth went over, went down, went through the surface of the water and sank under nature’s venomous philter, the current too vigorous for England’s courtesies. The sun, falling, broke its cold horizon.

But down plunged another into the crisp flaps of water, yellow of tight dress and bronze of shriveled skin. This ancient matron pulled Elizabeth out, and on the more foreign bank they breathed, aged savior cradling callow saved among blooming purple heathers. The stranger was Virgilena, and her voice spooled spider’s silk. It swept up the rough wind across the sage-bled hills and knolls, swallowed every wisp, and transmitted their enormity into her gaze. “You’ll work for me, a doctor on my estate: Manchester’s Resting Home for the Mentally Insane. No matter if you’ve no professional education and only but a spot of impromptu training. I deem any hefty prerequisites to the field of health gratuitous.”

Elizabeth beamed assuredly at this entreaty, this great abyss, and in its farthest depths, and those too of her own dark soul, she smelled the lurid roses and furnaces of a nameless spirit. Be this my true and sacred heaven? Or have I the devil herself?

Virgilena, despite her every bone’s singular frailty, guided Elizabeth to a dual-footed balance and into a walk, drawing up that languid compliance so natural to the addled mind and aiming it with acutely fine attraction. So, in the horse-drawn carriage, they journeyed a starlit dominion, where at last—the obsidian mansion. Its chipped and miry stone bleakly glistened, for against it did perpetually wage three dozens of burning candles melted on the tines of dead alder tree branches. Their hosting trunks knew only impious past, and here they rotted in the only graves they would know for all eternity, chained without shackles, free without wings, silhouettes bearing the light of human darkness: fire.

The estate inflicted upon each attendant eye its conspicuous ghost, rustling one’s capacity for modest disconcertment, as it stretched on through a millennia of the eyes’ space, and with it the primeval years of Man, while promising such nearness that one could think to never again be alone under the morbid presence hooking to the gut, even if one wished it. The house invaded, procured, understood—from high above, the brewing and the prowess of its territory. Four wings sprawled the dirt, and a craggy tower punctured the hovering spaces. Shadow among shadows, Elizabeth thought, absent of all sense, begotten by, though never breaching, the edge of insanity.

With the carriage parked, the fang-white horses stabled, Virgilena led her companion into the somber house. Echoes scarcely sourced to physical sound…this and dusty air, like neither enterer had ever left the outdoors, but only succumbed to a more civilized arena, still primitive, untamed. Purples and blacks; these populated the time-blued velveteen staircase, the icicle chandelier made miniature in distance, the statues—leviathans and soldiers of less barbarous wars than those stealthily awakening through the corridors, a decade with each footstep.

The left passage, wide as the esophagus of Jonah’s whale, contained their destination’s hood: a dark-wood door layered in feathers, no two the same, colors of brown and black and grey. Each inch was vacant, no stirring of air too stout to blow askew the plumages, quills crucified by the silver pins puncturing, scarring the masked and stained plank underneath. On the other side, as the young woman discovered, the floor and circular walls were coated in mirrors, reflecting infinity around and around itself, itself, this ballroom (is that what this is?); high above, the glass dome, sparkling and portentous. I’ve stepped out of Earth, Elizabeth mused, the pulsating dots, so far from her reach, intruding these creaseless panes.

Virgilena undressed herself, the discarded dress a motionless apparition atop its suffocating double within the floor, and went to Elizabeth for her cloak. In the gaze of warm and cruelly distant constellations, the pair made love before the younger so soon grew faint. Eventually, she collapsed altogether, into the blue mists of magic. Virgilena’s trap had succeeded, it seemed, and as she went to work, the sky did mourn.

***

Elizabeth woke, all ripeness pilfered, her body grown by sixty years. White robe, cold bed, locked door. The octogenarian wept, and Virgilena, restored to twenty years of age, listened from the hall. For the first time in over a century of stealing mortality’s nectar, she felt regret. To rid it, the witch invaded the bedroom, placed her dupe into a wheelchair, and presented to the battered doll her garden behind the mansion. Lanes of the apothecary’s roses, fading bluebells, summer honeysuckle; these bred butterflies and perfumes and the grace of Virgilena’s fingers, which brushed petals in the stoic sun.

“Every month, for three days, I return from my explorations around the rainbow’d planet prone to blunt neglect. One day to find a poor, helpless creature; one to capture it and abstract its youth; one to habituate it here, my new patient. I found you on my first day. You struck me. You still do.” In her hand hung, tilting to the point of discharge, a silver watering pot filled with birds’ blood. Onto the moistening apple tree fertilizer it poured and splattered, catching at the wheelchair’s iron circles. Elizabeth mustered no vocal expression and little of psyche; thus, solace knew her not. She refused to glance at the vivacious red fruit, whose skins so shiny made for swollen reflections.

“My grandmother, Flora, taught me to hunt. The feathers guard my Room of Mirrors, part of the magic there, while the blood nourishes my apples—a gardening chore I take up when I’m here, as it’s one of the more enjoyable. I have my Nurses eat the juicy ornaments nightly at 11:30, maintaining hypnosis for twenty-four and a half hours, those last thirty minutes for overlap, in case their snacking time is delayed.” Virgilena’s adoration for Elizabeth made her impetuous. She typically never revealed such rife notes. In easing this foul ramble, the beauty sought to comfort her capture. “I won’t kill you. If I did, your youth would slip right out of me. You couldn’t be safer than here in my embrace.” Elizabeth felt no relief, only the way of ponds in drought.

“Every patient is hidden here, in plain sight. That’s the most efficient way of going about this…preserving my fertility. Our biannual inspector thinks they’re all crazy, as the estate’s name suggests. Little does he know, like the rest of them out in those scholarly libraries and judiciary councils. Crazy is what you call it when your mind consumes you. If you ask me, those urban folk have been crazy since the day they smirked at the homeless. Age ten, that’s about the time.”

Virgilena could not push her feelings aside, and Elizabeth thought, Why does she look down at me so tenderly?

An hour later, in the dining hall for breakfast, Elizabeth sat next to the handsome, loquacious Pan. Kidnapped at fourteen, he now was only three quarters a century: the youngest patient. Of all the strangers, he looked most amiable, for he was closest the adolescence in her heart. They ate among the rest, at a long oaken table stretching the thin chamber. Sun saturated the space, for the left wall was completely glass, crystal and clean—the alders positioned like bayonets in the frontline. Elizabeth admired the Trojan men, Italian sculptures, who posed on platforms dug into the walls; the angelic plasterwork of the heights; the golden candelabras on the spreading; the pearly columns marching up and down the vastness. And in the center of it, the stale humans were mumbling, coughing, drooling, fidgeting.

“Normally, we Elders eat under the watchful eyes of at least ten Nurses. When the witch visits, however, they hold meetings with her throughout the day to reaffirm estate functions. That’s why there’s only one Nurse over there,” Pan said, pointing to a darkened corner. With his warm presence, Elizabeth felt comfortable enough to share her backstory. She even told him of the garden outside, and the apple trees. However, not a word was spoken of the stream, of her intentions there, the splendor she’d once foreseen in its rage.

“We aren’t dumb,” he assured her with earnest. “The same thoughts went through my head when I first arrived. Needed a Nurse to walk with me around the moors to calm me down. Every day, for weeks. The one with auburn hair, if you see her around. Always thought she was nice. But you never know. The Nurses have their humanness locked within, everything wild bottled up—and that’s the thing with us humans: we can be as wild as a polecat if opened up. Those Nurses are bound to burst, if you ask me.

“And sure, not all patients are Newton; some of us are stuck on opium like Chinese dogs. But the rest of us, those who still care, meet each night. We’re the Midnight Parliament, and we hold our business in this very spot when the Nurses have gone to sleep. Orange, named after his skin, is our leader.” Elizabeth followed Pan’s gesture and saw him far off, lifting his goblet toward a woman three seats away in some variant of celebration.

“The Nurses give us magic valerian petals before we go to bed so that we sleep, don’t give them any trouble. But Orange collects the petals, and that’s how we stay awake. Hides them in his pillow. The man used to be a politician—the only educated Elder, in fact. Ninety-six years old. Doesn’t look it, no?” Elizabeth squinted at the company and asked about the one with a most striking appearance.

“That’s Blue, another leader, named after her eyes, a birth defect. The whole orb. Makes her blind. Third Eye guides her around. She was stabbed as a girl. Only has her right eye left. Smart, them and Orange. Quite admirable. Readers, too. The witch lets them go to the library once a week and pick out a few. Special place, I’ve heard. Something magical up there; down here it’s just art and hallways. She likes her books, I guess.”

The flame-skinned man down the table gained everyone’s attention then, dumping a bowl of sugar cubes onto the marble floor, dispersing hollow crackles and fracturing the transferware. “Now the Nurse can’t monitor us until it’s all cleaned up. You just watch. Orange knows how to trick them, knows how they work, the witch’s mindless automatons.” As the fashion went, the Elders all rose after Orange’s lead and made their groggy way to the sofas at the room’s extreme, leaving the male Nurse, grey of plain uniform, to gather sugar alone on the floor, unseeing.

A fine setup, Elizabeth thought. It’s not so doomed a fellowship.

“Listen,” Orange said, whilst standing on a tea table, to the mostly sober crowd—for some were prostrated in hazes, as if stacked on top of one another, dreams of deserts and oceans, neither satiating them, impatient for their herbs to roll in on the noontime cart of clouds. “We must welcome our newest inmate.” Elizabeth enacted insecure stoicism as Pan held her hand, the window’s rays on her back. She nodded to them with Orange’s introductory monologue concluding.

“Ever since I arrived,” he afterwards went on, “we have been forming a rebellion. Of what use can you be?” She was too shy to speak, qualmy in the panicking silence. Her friend, in reaching for serenity, blurted out the tale she’d provided him, of the wheelchair and garden and apples.

“Foolish Virgilena, so loose of tongue she’s become!” the pumpkin tyrant chided, putting together his thoughts before making his announcement. The only sound in the dining hall came from far off: tinkles of sugar cubes hitting china.

Finally, Orange spoke. “We shall destroy the apples to free the Nurses, those who constrain us. Then, free ourselves, we’ll topple the witch and kill her. Finally, we will depart this Eden of Hades. But first, before all that, I have decided what our neophyte’s name shall be: Divine, for she has provided us the final stone to tip these unjust scales.” While Pan had verbalized the secret of the apples, Orange gave credit where credit was due. Adolf, the only Elder who kept his true name, in his pride and glory, led rowdy applause for the newest member of the rebellion. It was a sincere but garbled excitement.

A second Elder stood, hushing the mass. “Let us not kill the witch; only run away.” It was Blue. “What is the use?” Half of those listening cheered, at first nodding heads and next raising arms.

Orange demanded Virgilena meet her justice. “We have suffered the perils of corruption and poverty. God cries to make the world right, and in anger we oblige. Slaughter the witch! Hang her, burn her, rip her to shreds!” His half of the mass cheered, that alt-red hue mysteriously driving them heinous—he shone as their beacon for righteousness, wrath. Blue could not see this; she could see too little. Elizabeth dared not intervene, lest she be hurt in any form. The others weren’t quite keen enough to decipher the madness.

“Your name is now Nasty,” Orange told Blue, working on the euphoria. “When you were in your mother’s womb, she slept with donkeys, the farm’s filthiest assets. I saw it when I was a boy, traveling back from London on business with my father. The sight was obscene, wretched, diseased. Your eyes confirm your mother’s sins. They are the products of monstrosity.” Infectious cheering arose, and in it Orange proclaimed, “Call me Oxford, Supreme Ruler. Loyal Adolf shall be my First Lieutenant.”

“Deplorable trumpeters,” Nasty said worriedly to the bitter half, feeling them overpower her. “Hatred is the ugliest sign of weakness. We must spare the witch; her death serves no good.” Her supporters clapped, faithful in these generous, safer ideals.

The meeting’s end arose when the Nurse walked over, in his arms the bowl of sweet, cotton blocks. So, the Elders’ plan met no finality. They were divided, water and flame.

In the span of the afternoon, Pan took Elizabeth down every main corridor of the mansion, a glimmer in his face when he looked at her, a Nurse immediately behind, and he told her stories of the life he used to live, starving and cold in the gutter. Elizabeth fancied she couldn’t be happier in the presence of someone as talkative as he, as she could simply stroll along, listening and calm. In their hours together, the two became dearest of friends, partners against the chaos surrounding them. They perused the artwork of the estate, portraits and ceramics and murals, and soaked in the August heat coming in through the windows. Elizabeth could have called herself satisfied, to be in this retirement, if but for her every whining organ or tooth hole red with onerous lament. The palest energies within her dissipated by the second, accelerating.

That night, under a full moon, the Midnight Parliament failed to meet, for their silent discordance deflected any chance of even momentary unity. Meanwhile, Virgilena pulled Elizabeth from bed, undoing her valerian petal’s charms, and carried her to the library at the estate tower’s peak, above spiraling stairs. In this room, all the books flew carefully about like snow in a heavenly sphere, the witch’s trick a demonstration of her appreciation for literature. Elizabeth, rubbing her eyes, sat on a violet sofa with the witch. Here the sorceress initiated her narrative. Both looked up, watching the texts dance and fall and rise and spin. The walls were studious amber without shelves, only an occasional lamp and narrow window. So this, a titanic cylinder for tomes, is the tower.

Virgin began. “A descendent of the wizard Aristotle, I was born near Yorkshire one hundred and eighty four years ago…if it’s 1850 now. Is that correct?” Elizabeth began to figure the birthdate, providing no answer, and came to a scolding pause once the calculation was complete. Virgilena saw this and spoke to stop it from overcoming their placid chemistry. “My father was a proper Englishman. His wife did not bear me, but rather an Arabian mistress. She was hanged. On the night of my birth, the wife tried to drown me in a basket of thorns—unaware I was a witch; imagine my sentence had she known! Impure was enough for termination, I suppose. My mother’s mother, whom I’ve mentioned before, Flora, knocked the wife dead and took me into the woods, where we lived happily until, when I was 16, she went to town for a job. The goods she’d stolen from my father had run out. In the smoggy market square, my grandmother’s crimes were recalled, her body burned, the mob led by my father’s sons, ancestors to a politician now imprisoned here, the sole Elder (beside yourself) who I captured out of passion over reason.

“I ran to the moorlands and, a year later, found the Third Half, a nomadic band of outcasts: same-sex lovers, trans-sex mutants, incestuous folk, the physically distorted, the insane, even some foreigners. Each was gorgeous, exceptionally bright. But I the only witch. We lived for life, not honor or riches. Our education came from the dirt and the trees. It was paradise…soon to be lost, I’d realize. When I was twenty, they found my powers too threatening. I woke alone at a river one wintry noon, abandoned. The outcasts of outcasts was I. Little did their display of caution prove; I’ve learned just recently that the Third Half was slaughtered in the northernmost Pennines. So much for paradise. I sometimes think about them, when the night is quiet and the air rolls by like autumn waves. The laughter we shared—for we did laugh, and cry, and feel true.

“When they left me, my heart died. I built this place. Magic allowed me the easy forging of paperwork and such. I enslaved the Nurses all at once; most are homeless, unmissed by society. So, too, are the patients. I steal one monthly, profiting sixty years each time. My body absorbs a month an hours, demanding that cyclical maintenance. We have thirty-two current residents. Most die within the first three years of their arrival.” At once, the settee beneath the pair took off and soared among the literature, Virgilena’s passion steepening. Elizabeth could reach out and tickle a fluttering of pages, black lines of print, leather spines. They circled her, lifting up her frosty hair in kicks, and nearly erected a smile from her lips.

“Through these miserable years, I have collected my philosophies,” Virgilena said, beaming, luminously empowered, in the flight of the volumes. “To begin, my grandmother taught me that life is precisely what we ourselves create. The best and worst thing she ever told me: people change. I believe it, or death would have me. Flora’s wisdom has driven my pursuit of immortality, for mortals will live out their brief, beautiful lives and pass into nothingness, but I will remain. Most people only find happiness in delusions—I refuse such tragedy. I want reality; I see it clearly; I know people. Society banishes our fears, fears what we fail to understand. Everyone thirsts for their villain. I wish they knew there is no good or bad, just healthy and destructive. What is goodness, right, should, true? What, if not malformed by bias and circumstance? People think the wicked can’t feel pain, or that if they do it’s not the same as what they feel. Have you ever seen a mad pup beaten until its whimpers fade, bloodstream spent, limbs crushed? Have you felt a man push into you, relieve himself there, then cast you aside? You have, Elizabeth. I know; I see. The fact remains that we are everlastingly unaware of the misfortune around us, within us, of us. Your capacity to feel others’ pain has bound you all your life. They don’t deserve it, all caught up in hypocrisy, violence, addiction. Power and justice! Life bears no rules, Elizabeth. There is only one useful goal: be happy. I don’t believe in destiny; existence alone. Nurture conquers nature, what nature?, and fate is a matter of remorseless, fluttering butterfly wings. Infinite lives we could be living if but the angle of air were changed, or the twitch of a muscle subdued. Every moment, our course is born as it is—to think our paths preconceived is detrimental to our notions of reality.

“Yet—yet—no control! We have not either hand on the wheel. If not we, and not fate, then who? That which surrounds, fact itself. No one wants to admit that our successes are owed to our environment—our equable mothers and university coats. A ‘credential’ is but the tasteful pseudonym for privilege.”

What happened to life being what we make of it? Elizabeth wondered sadly. Does Virgilena understand herself? Maybe no one can make anything of it, life.

“Infinite potential is universal; no one’s born more capable than another. Humans won’t realize they’re just meat, bone, chemical reaction. Downfall, I perceive, for the heart of Man. The death of the earth was born from those smoking machines out in Manchester; I know how they turn living things black and clog the sky. The fall. My dear, the descent of the sun is merely an illusion. We are the ones, in the spinning of the globe, falling away from that celestial light. All descent is ours.”

And what of the ascent? For spinning lends to that circular promise of return. The words never materialized in her mouth.

“My mind expands in my immortality, enough to know the apocalypse. The search for intellect inside my head feels greater strife than the hellish crumbling of mountains outside of it. I’ve learned that mortals are evanescent embers fading in the cinders of mortality, footprints in the sand at tide’s reluctant turn. Time breaks everything, heals everything, moves everything; our enemy, our friend. Time, known by all, knows only itself. When I built this estate, I decided I didn’t want to be just another blink of the eye in the endless universe. History books gave me the past; those readings make you feel so small. I longed for freedom; I wanted the future, too. While our bodies are momentary, our minds are undying. In this house I’ve constructed, my loneliness confines me. The patients wouldn’t ever hurt me, but what fun is life without lust? I almost desire they put up a fight. The primitive needs dwell even in my midst.”

Elizabeth could not speak, caught on the ends of rope between adversarial bulls. She could not uphold the revolution because of her concern for the witch, could not protect Virgilena because of her pity for the Elders (and by extension herself). It left her in displacement, absent of real distance or speed, suspended into nonexistence.

“I’ve here laid out my own soul, the purpose of which I swear to soon explicate. My soul! Yours is pure; you’ve faced pain and never thrown it back; much goodness bound within. So few are genuine; they say only what it takes to make them famous. Not you; you’ve spoken barely a thing to me. Somehow, I love you. Let me unlock your power. Never before have I felt this way. Let me love you.

“Here is my proposal. Tomorrow night, I’ll leave at eight to capture from Manchester a futile being, bring it to the Room of Mirrors around midnight, return your youth, fill myself from the new prisoner, and then we will have each other—and the world. I’ll provide us ceaseless adolescence. We’ll see everything, learn everything, be everything. Infinity ours.” And there in the crowning of the witch’s joy were black seeds and roofed pits.

Elizabeth, slowly waking from the shock of the last day, thought, Virgilena is selfish, a pessimist. Yet…exquisite, inspiring. And how she cares for me. Have I reacted appropriately? I think I love her. Is that what this feeling is? The earth below us spins so quickly. I cannot manage. I need to think. And in her age, the brain did not know haste, though the sparks of another’s adoration did pulse beneath the membrane.

Even as the pair landed on the hardwood and left the tower, taking the stairs as in swimming, plan set in motion, Elizabeth was unsure of life itself. Worlds within worlds, rebellion and romance. I’m afraid they cannot last. Where will I be in the moment of their impact?

***

At breakfast, the same routine of sugar cubes allowed all Elders a meeting by the sofas, sides strict in separation. Oxford laid out the plan. Nasty and her followers, Elizabeth among them, agreed with every step save killing the witch. “You will concede or die with her,” Adolf said. Elizabeth wanted to speak in defense, but rendered nothing. So did Nasty.

She again toured the building with Pan in the hotness of beloved daylight. His presence is more tender than hers. Something in it lacks a bite. Yet…might I live without teeth? I can’t imagine it. However, Virgilena’s canines may just be too sharp. They were accompanied by Nasty and Third Eye. Everyone craved a discussion of Orange’s expectations, but no word of such could be made in the presence of the two Nurses following behind them. Nasty managed to talk about life as a child on her family farm. The rumor of her mother may have been true, she noted. “I’ve never received any explanation for my eyes beside Orange’s. If only the hills were distinct to me, I could be piece this mess together. Without my dearest Veronica, I would have nothing.” Pan nodded to Third Eye in an explanation for Elizabeth.

Some of them do value their original names, she realized, and ached to know more of these people. The clicking heels of the Nurses’ shoes put her back to practicality, and a fear entered her. I may never get the chance to fully grasp the Elders. The sensuous lines beneath their skin, the histories and folklore of their times. Every delicate detail. I’ll miss out on all of it, as blind in this surveillance as Nasty is—no, Blue. I will respect her and call her the more proper of her aliases; she deserves that, I think.

At eight, the day thinning to a chill, Virgilena departed. Oxford’s men wished she would return soon, while Blue’s prayed she wouldn’t until they had all escaped. Elizabeth, who hadn’t spilled any of the witch’s plans, was unravelling, anxious and slightly confused.

At nine, the Nurses gave each Elder a valerian petal, all of which were hidden under blankets. Oxford and five others snuck from their windows to the garden and trampled the apples, which spurt foul blood, and threw them to the menacing fields.

At half past eleven, the Nurses went to eat their nightly fruit and found only ruin. They roused all Elders from bed, then, shouting and stomping about, collecting them in the dining hall for interrogation. How ghoulish this place is in the dark, Elizabeth thought where she stood, in the crowd of whining bodies. Last until midnight, when the spell lifts. Then she saw the guns.

Oxford told them, palms up in defense, that animals had wrecked the apples. “We know absolutely nothing of the matter. Let us return to our slumber. Give us your petals, and we shall.”

And here struck an absurd cord. One Nurse called out, “This is odd. How did we wake them if they should have been under the valerian’s spell? Has anyone else noticed this?” The rest of the Nurses humphed and hmmed under the wan light of the alder candles.

Then the colossal commander, whose uniform bore a red cross at its right shoulder, sent twelve of his own to the bedrooms in search for the flowers. “If they have foiled their routine, refused Virgilena’s orders, we will find the petals shortly. They won’t have vanished. Nothing does.”

Before Orange could gather an excuse or distraction, a crooked-nosed woman returned carrying a pillow stuffed with hundreds of white, withered flowers. Had she sniffed them out?

The commanding Nurse announced that executions were to begin if no one spoke up and told the truth, a tricky thing. “From which patient’s room was this article recovered?”

“Grab her!” Oxford quickly shouted, pointing before the subordinate Nurse could reply. “She’s behind it all. She took everyone’s valerian doses. Kill her, and the problem is solved.” Everyone looked at his target.

The Nurses acted quickly, seizing it, blind and stiff. Third Eye grabbed for her friend, causing the authorities to topple her, sending out shrieks as if they’d busted a possessed vase. The Nurse holding the pillow couldn’t argue over the fracas, couldn’t say where the evidence had actually come from.

Third Eye cried and begged as the commander whipped her with a worn belt, and Oxford roared in encouragement. Elizabeth, agonizingly stationary, watched the clock strike midnight. Bells clamored, a crack of gunfire went off, and the Elders screamed.

Blue collapsed, the scapegoat dead. She’d lost. Her opponent chortled, the bully spared. He’d won. The Nurses fell under spasms, dropping their guns. Oxford’s men, and some others, took them up before the disenchanted were steady. Elizabeth yearned to help; she kicked the gun by Blue’s bleeding head to Third Eye, who hid it behind her back. Now the witch’s spell was undone, the Nurses free, the true persons within rising to the surface, along with their wildernesses.

Rage, they felt, looking around. Oxford tried to tell them of his plans to kill the witch, but they refused. The commander said, “She’s too strong. It’s no use. We  have to burn this place down and leave.”

“A fire will only scare her off in the return journey, and we’ll never get the chance to...” The Nurses did not listen.

“Ready your arms, then,” the Elder said, his soldiers so old they could have been the estate’s statues coming to life and taking on the years their paralysis had denied them. In preparation, the Nurses opened squares in the wall of glass and through those openings grappled with the candles of the alder trees, sucking in the light, leaving the branches indistinguishable within a newfound realm of shadow undefined, uncharted. The pandemonium commenced, triggers and wicks, both playing the offensive.

Elizabeth ran to Pan, where he held her, moved with her to the exit, shielding her from behind. But with a flash of light, Pan fell, his attacker initially unfound, his arms around Elizabeth, slipping down her torso before dropping to the floor. She looked around, jumping with gasps and tears of hopeless deflection, before spying out the culprit: the nurse with auburn hair, slipping away in the crowd.

The weakening Elder crumbled, kneeling to the old man. From under his robe he revealed a gun, black as seas in winter, and whilst the blood emptied from his mouth, he aimed for Oxford off on the other end of the hall, standing on the arms of a chair, and jolted in the squeeze of his index finger. A gash through Oxford’s throat, and the orange man fell onto the dining table, shattering tomorrow’s dishes. Adolf, next to him, turned and in a second shot at Pan, through the chest, narrowly missing Elizabeth. “Run away from here,” the youngest Elder said, choking. “I’ve had my moment of beauty, being with you.” Adolf stood watching from afar, grinning.

And as she laid a kiss to his cheek, staining her lips in his final pulsing spout of scarlet vanquish, the First Lieutenant put his gun in his mouth and smiled, shouting over the barrel, “Rage will overcome. It is the fuel in all of us, stronger than anything else.”

Suddenly, Third Eye took Elizabeth’s hand and pulled her away from the dead man, and they exited the dining hall as a gunshot louder than the rest sounded across the lethal expanse; Adolf’s body smacked the waxed wood, and the crimson smirk looked as if it were melting down onto it.

Third Eye spoke clearly, hurriedly. “I’m going to make sure this cycle of evil ends, Divine. Trust in me.” Elizabeth followed, failing to grasp the woman’s intent, unable to let go of her friend growing small behind them, the dining hall growing silent in their flight. “I should have known Blue wasn’t strong enough to carry us. She had her heart in the right place. She just couldn’t get across to people. That was the real blindness. Who can compete with orange skin? It drives people mad. Absolutely wild, like a mating call for acrimonious souls. The whole world could turn orange one day. Hot mouths and mean eyes. Blue’s were the gentlest. I would get lost in them for days at a time.”

The pair reached the feather door, and Third Eye went inside. “Don’t follow me! You’ll soon understand.” As Elizabeth realized the truth, it was too late. She watched the gunshots shatter the mirrors, floor and circular walls crying for their swift oblivion. “If we can’t make this a house of love, we must make it not a house at all, but rubble. I’ll see to that, Divine.” Third Eye, failing to make out Elizabeth’s quaking, raised her weapon for one last aim, to the sky. “We break this glass ceiling—at long last. It will destroy me in its destruction, but my sacrifice will carve a new way for the future. It will kill the witch.” A pop of light. Thousands of shards raining down. The one-eyed Elder sliced to scarlet shreds. The Room of Mirrors destroyed.

Just when Elizabeth thought she might let out a shriek in these deaths, of her friends and her chances at youth, a gas explosion from the kitchen at the side of the mansion, through seven turns and down a flight of stairs, sailed up the passage on her right like Noah’s flood made demonly. The searing stampede tore past Elizabeth, catching a thin strip of skin in her calf, too shallow to kill. A Nurse or Elder has done it; this whole place will be demolished. She sprang from the estate, limping into the unkempt grasses, leaving the house behind her to its defeat. Lines of windows and pairs of doors burst outward above and behind Elizabeth, all across the stretch of the mansion’s width, smoke and stardust drifting up from them in exhaust, like hydra heads spewing the breath of dragons onto holier things: the night air, its back turned in shame.

And there, a few yards out, the witch on her knees, almost lost in the vegetation, just as she’d been since the war had launched, holding her woeful face, watching her stone palace disintegrate, the tycoon in its inevitable plummet. Elizabeth thought, looking at her sorceress and knowing without seeing that flames were spreading to every corner of the black structure, So much turmoil in this small spot. The immensity of an atom. It is fatal. She went to Virgilena and fell into her arms. They did not see the tower then ignite, a torch of paper trapped in rock, the omniscient, upright tendril of a beast aware its demise had come. When the panes soon broke, river-like puffs of dissolved pages paraded out and up to the scorched atmosphere awaiting them.

“Your leg. We must get you to a doctor. We must save you.” And the falsities in Virgilena’s words stung both sets of ears. “We will try.” Elizabeth remembered the sounds of the mirrors splintering, the dome plunging in respect to gravity’s constitution.

They boarded the carriage, and the four striding horses rolled them on. Eventually, when all the estate was soot and dusty rock and everyone within had perished by bullet or fire, the vehicle had ventured far. Virgilena looked every so often out the coach to check on that spark in the horizon, between the hills. She never saw it fade, though it ultimately did. She knew it would.

Next to them, the teenage boy lay slumbering. Elizabeth could not look at him. “He may go free after all,” the witch told her, trying to make things easier.

When the carriage was crossing a familiar stream, the prisoner woke, nonetheless, and threw both women from their seats, the short-living clangor puncturing the night. Virgilena hit her head on a rock as she met the ground and fell unconscious. The boy took the reins, once hers, and with the horses sped off until their hoof-claps could not be heard. Elizabeth, too weak to carry even herself, held Virgilena and, heathers blowing languidly in the forlorn wind, fell to dreams of kinder things, that which she had never known. The blood on her leg began to clot in the stillness.

***

Thunder struck. Elizabeth opened her eyes and saw the witch, in dirtied yellow dress, indeed still yellow, though no longer as bright, standing at the water’s edge. “I have found less love in my truncated immortality than most mortals have in barely a century. Maybe this love is enough. The Room of Mirrors is gone. No other way for...Yes, this love is enough. For once, I can give, not take. For once, I can try to expel from me just one, erratic morsel of that which I have for far too long absorbed. You and my grandmother, the only two who ever deserved full lives. I couldn’t save her—oh! the monster I was. But I can save you—though the monster I am.”

Virgilena jumped into the stream as the storm erupted and the sun, rising, broke its heated horizon. Through the rain and lightning, Elizabeth crawled into the torrents and swam. A golden miasma illuminated the dirt below, where the witch hung. Elizabeth felt her wrinkles falling away, the forearm there, the thigh there, eyes lifting up, muscles regaining. Strengthened, she found Virgilena’s decrepit body at the ground and lifted it out of the rapids. On the bank nearer Manchester, they lay. Both still transforming, one dying, each enamored by the other. Words cannot convey the sounds of a breaking heart, Elizabeth thought. But my lips shall make the attempt.

“I love you, too.” It was the last sound Virgilena ever heard, and in the next instant: beetles and flies swarming, blue skin bloating, brown juices pouring, maggots festering, flesh melting into dust. Skeleton. The product of restored time fell to pieces in Elizabeth’s embrace, and she kissed the skull hooked to her fingers by the temporal lobe, crying for the loss of this love, the only one she’d ever known, and for the descent of the sun, a pure and unseen light finally meeting its end. 

Then she set the skull down among the other bones and the heathers, perfectly purple, and stood. Her leg was still injured, but she could make it to town with this newborn youth (though shy of five years its previous point). Worlds within worlds, she remembered. Lament, love, revolt—these three worlds have clashed, and have become undone, as absent now as before I knew them, possibly as if I had never known them at all. But…can there be, I do dream, a fourth?

Elizabeth staggered; bracing, hoping; toward the menacing towers of smoke floating up into thundering sky beneath rising sun. I want life, to reach out to it, the beauty and pain. To feel it; to know it; to love it. I might make the attempt to love even myself. This she thought, and her new world began.