You belong here. You don’t belong here. You are the lord of this realm. You are a nightmarish invader from a hellworld you have longed to escape since you knew ‘escape’ existed. You are the prince of air and fire. You are a prisoner in a scholar’s cage of ink. You are the Phoenix, and you are Saffy, Sapphire, Walden, Doctor, and you are a fairly ordinary middle-aged woman in muddy boots.

You wait for Marshal Kenning. The burnt and blackened outlines of a twenty-year-old summoning array are scored into the earth. They glow dimly red through the neatly mown grass under your feet.

Here she is.

“Hello, Laura,” you say.

(Walden sees: she looks tired. She’s got her vambraces strapped on, her sword in her hand, and her swordbelt slung around her hips, but she’s not wearing her Marshal whites. She needs a haircut.

As it grows out of the short back and sides, her cropped fair hair is developing a little curl, right at the collar of her leather jacket.)

“Let’s not do this, demon,” says the Marshal. “We both know what’s happening here.”

“Actually, only one of us is really an expert,” you say. “Sorry. I don’t want to rub it in, but when it comes to serious magic, there is a substantial, meaningful difference between someone like you and someone like me.”

“She wouldn’t say that,” Laura says.

“Perhaps not. But she would think it.” You smile. “Did you know that?”

(Walden is cringing. Walden is dying. Yes, all right, so she can be a little—as Nikki pointed out all the way back in January, sometimes one’s worldview can be blinkered by—that doesn’t mean she really thinks she’s better than—well obviously she is in fact better than most people at specifically the skills she has spent her life mastering, but—)

Laura snorts. “I knew that.”

(I have enormous professional respect for you as a magical practitioner as well as considerable personal respect for you as a human being! Walden thinks as loudly as she can. She can almost see the eye roll she would earn in return, the little smile. Calm down, Saffy.)

“You’re not going to throw me off by telling me the girl I fancy is an awful nerd with a superiority complex,” Laura says. The ghost of that little smile is there, somehow, at the corner of her mouth. “Nice try.”

“Do you know what you face in me?”

“I’ve got a pretty good idea, yeah.”

“Do you really think you’re helping anyone by doing this?” you say earnestly. “Don’t throw your life away, Laura. You must know there’s no chance.”

Laura’s expression darkens. “Now that’s a bit creepy.”

You never really expected to get rid of the threat this way. Still, it seemed a kindness to try. (A kindness: you approach all such considerations with the enthusiasm and the approximate understanding of a keen amateur anthropologist.) You fall back on what you know: what works, what has always worked, the heart of power.