The young Irish woman waved her hand airily and nearly stabbed Violetta with the butterfly knife she’d conjured out of thin air. It looked real! Well—until you noticed it was slightly transparent. But from far away or if you were surprised?

“Aaah! Oh—it’s just a—why did you conjure that?”

Violetta leapt back from the knife and nearly slammed into the wall of their room. She pointed at Cara accusingly. The [Singer] threw up her hands, and the knife tumbled from her grasp like it actually had weight.

“I don’t know! It was just thinking I could pretend to have a weapon and—this is amazing. It’s a hologram! It’s an illusion! It’s magic!”

Idelt opened the door to their room to see Cara running about and Violetta laughing. He stared at the fallen knife—which was, in fact, hovering in the air where Cara had dropped it.

“Ah, an illusion. What is that?”

“A—butterfly knife. A balisong. It’s, uh…something I owned once.”

Or rather, a boyfriend had gifted it to her for ‘self defense’, despite it being illegal. Well…that was why she had appreciated it at the time. When she was a law-breaking little shit.

That wasn’t the point. The knife now was perfectly replicated from Cara’s memory. It was also an illusion. She reached for it gingerly, and her hand passed through.

So did Violetta’s.

“It’s fake. Well—it is lesser illusion, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. But I was holding it. I wonder if…”

Cara saw how transparent the illusion was—it failed the closer you got to it. But it was amazingly detailed. And maybe—

Violetta and Idelt jumped as the butterfly knife turned…into a butterfly. A monarch butterfly, which flapped past them. Wide-eyed, they stared at Cara as the butterfly circled the room—then froze in midair.

Cara had made it do all those things. Wide-eyed, she made it flap towards her. It was a bit…off. Like if you saw a buffering video, the butterfly didn’t flap perfectly; it was a bit too fast, and Cara realized her memory and vision of the butterfly meant it looked like just ooze on parts of the wings, not the delicate pattern the real insect had.

“It must mean I have to concentrate or…picture it perfectly. My god.”

“Dead gods.”

Violetta corrected Cara. Her eyes were round. She looked at her father.

“What kind of [Singer] gets a spell like that?”

“A rare one. But perhaps it’s what Miss Cara wants.”