*000000*

With but a thought, the Cavaliere appears before you, and you hop onto it without putting your guns away. Instead, you manipulate the weapon purely through demonic power, revving the engine and having the machine cleave straight towards the large monster as you continue to fire to either side of you. Then, just as you reach the stampeding elephant thing, you holster your guns and take over steering with your hands, navigating a perfect path up the thing's trunk and going flying off its bone mask as though it were a ramp. Before the thing can so much as tell what you have done, you switch again, finding your fists and feet enmeshed in the metal gauntlets of Gilgamesh. The thrusters at your elbows engage, and you drive downward, slamming the beast into the ground with such force that its mass immediately dissipates into the ether.

Glancing to the side, you see your Master having already released her sword, cleaving apart large swathes of the Monsters with wild abandon and a killing intent that is usually absent from her fighting style. Her path forward is slow but methodical, and wherever she treads, Grimm fall in droves.

"I got one of the big ones!" You call to her over the din.

"That's not what the big ones look like!" She calls back, flicking her hand dismissively behind her and drawing a rune in the air that scorches the earth, and - as is common for your Master - everything else in that general direction.

"What? Lame. How many points do you think that thing is worth, then?" You ask, gesturing overhead at what you are pretty sure is some kind of flying whale monster.

It's certainly big enough to qualify. The thing practically blots out the sun with its size.

"We're doing points?! I thought this was a race!" Taylor complains.

"If you aren't counting style points, then what are you even fighting for!" You exclaim with glee, allowing Gilgamesh to vanish and withdrawing the black suitcase, Pandora.

Pandora is one of the weirdest weapons you have ever owned.

And also, one of the coolest.

So with that thinking, you flick the suitcase outward and release it, watching as its mass shifts and reorganizes into a massive spinning glaive that scythes through the monsters closing in on you in a spiralling pattern, before returning to you like a boomerang.

"How can you not love a gun like this?!" You ask your Master plaintively as you flick the glaive again and the entire cog filled apparatus comes apart and reconfigures into a spherical rocket platform with a seat at its center for you to control it. The apparatus hovers an inch above the ground, and you immediately point all its barrels at the whale monster overhead.

And then you pull the trigger.

Almost instantly, a ceaseless wave of high speed rockets explodes out of Pandora, detonating in a line across the massive whale's flank.

But not fully taking it out, or causing it to fall from the sky.

Not that you care. It isn't as though Pandora has ammunition that it can run out of.

"Very cute, but I can already do that without the suitcase!" Taylor calls to you. You roll your eyes. If you wanted to waste the energy doing so, you could do a million and one things to rip that thing out of the sky.

Buuuuut it's not strictly necessary, and you'd hate to cut short your time as this emulation, so you let the dig pass.

Although you do whistle appreciatively as your Master spawns two dozen glowing magical spiders to attack the same Monster using beams of magical energy.

"I dunno, I'd call that about even!" You call to her when it becomes evident that her attack was only about as effective as your own.

You leap out of the Pandora and pull on it, reducing it back to its suitcase form and swapping it for your sword.

Taylor shoots you a sour look, and you feel a spike of annoyance shoot across your link from her as a lock of her now white hair falls down into her face.

You just grin, brandish your weapon, and keep fighting on.

For people like you and your Master, there really was nowhere more comfortable than in the thick of things.

* * *

"Boom! I win, and I look damn fine doing it!" You cheer as the gorilla Grimm you are standing on slides the rest of the way across the ground to bump loudly into the castle's gates. As it does so, you cease playing Nevan - your electric guitar that also shoots electricity - and allow it to vanish back to wherever your Devil Arms go when you aren't using them.

"You didn't even run the last bit! That's cheating!" Taylor calls to you as she jogs up behind you, turning to fire a wave of force behind herself at the army of grimm chasing the both of you, and pausing when she realizes that they have all stopped, instead of approaching the castle.

"No teleporting, no flying. Those were the rules. Not my fault you can't surf." You say playfully, though you do turn a curious eye on the Grimm.

"Are they scared of this place, or is Salem just telling them to back off for now?" Taylor wonders aloud.

As though in answer, the entrance swings open, revealing a dark, unlit entry hall that has clearly not seen maintenance or use in a very long time.

"Guess we can always just ask." You say with a shrug, ignoring the large scorpion stinger that attempts to jam itself into your neck as you step through the doorway.

You say 'attempt' because for obvious reasons, your left hand comes up to grab it before it can reach you.

"Do you want me to…?" Taylor offers, looking past you as she steps around you and into the room, shutting the doors behind her with a wave of one hand.

"Nah, I got it. You can go on ahead if you want." You say, giving the owner of the tail a good once over.

"If you're sure." Taylor responds, skipping past you and heading further into the building.

"How dare you invade this sacred place! Do you even know where you are?!" The entire human being on the other end of the stinger you are still firmly grasping in one hand screeches at you.

"A castle?" You respond with a shrug, releasing the stinger and watching with interest as the strange guy it is attached to pulls it back to himself.

You've seen a lot of weird things, and probably more permutations of 'human with extra bits' than you are comfortable describing - but 'just a normal guy with a scale scorpion tail' is a new one for you, if you are being honest.

"A temple!" The scorpion guy yells at you with a creepy amount of pleasure in his voice.

"I dunno, looks a lot like a castle to me," You say lazily, turning to examine your surroundings and presenting your back to the man, who almost instantly capitalises on the moment by leaping at your back with his hands outstretched.

You roll your eyes without looking at him and fire a mule kick behind yourself, earning a satisfying crunching noise when the blow connects and launches your would-be attacker away from you and into the nearest wall.

"Sacrilege! Sinner! Scum! You don't have the right to even set foot in-" He starts to say but you cut him off.

"Hey, quick question, is this castle alive or anything like that? On a scale from one to ten where would you rate the sapience of this castle? My Master was curious about the castle, so we came to the castle to investigate before blowing it up. Castle." You ask, and with every repetition of the word, you can see scorpion boy's temper flaring, which earns a mean spirited smirk from you.

"You bas-" The scorpion guy - you're probably never going to get his name - starts, so you cut him off again.

"Ah, ah, ah! There are children in the audience. Mind your language, buddy." You call to him, lifting one hand and waggling an admonishing finger in his direction. You also don't bother to explain the joke - which is that you are technically the child.

'Quit screwing with him, I still have stuff to do back home.' Your Master sends to you from up ahead.

'How-' You ask, knowing she didn't, at any point, bother to check the situation from your perspective before saying that.

'I guessed. You aren't a complicated guy, right now.' She responds dryly.

"Fiiiine," You complain, forgoing your usual pastime of making fun of bad guys.

Then you don Balrog - a pair of gauntlets and greaves - and kick the guy as he makes to rush towards you.

Once.

"They just don't make bad guys like they used to." You sigh, shrugging and turning to jog after your Master.

* * *

"So, what were you doing while I was handling that guy?" You ask your Master as you jog up alongside her.

"Picking someone up." She responds absentmindedly, clearly more interested in examining the building's architecture and the traces of Grimm presence within it.

"What, hoping your Dad can solve this one? I guess the devil is an older woman here. Might work." You say jokingly, turning to eye the black, oily substance that drips down the walls in unnatural organic patterns along with your Master.

A familiar female voice states - although the sheer vehemence in it is extremely uncharacteristic of the voice's owner.

"Mem?" You ask, jerking around to locate the source of the voice to find your Master holding a cane in one hand and her sword in the other.

"Hey! Where are you learning this stuff?" Taylor cuts her off, hefting Mem's weapon form and narrowing her eyes at it.

"That's not–" Taylor starts to say, but you choose that moment to change the subject.

"Where are all the puzzles?" You ask suddenly, earning a strange look from your Master.

"What?"

"Puzzles. You know, like, there are four doors and you need to get the red key to open the red door, which leads to the green key for the green door, etc, etc. I've been in a lot of castles, and I gotta say, this one so far? Two outta ten." You drawl as you and your Master continue to wander the largely empty halls of the building.

"I'm sorry the decor isn't up to your standards." A smooth female voice calls venomously to you as you reach what - you assume - was once a throne room, and suddenly - as though a curtain being lifted - the thin black haze that has permeated the entire building lifts.

The room is - or would have once been - magnificent. It seems almost closer to a dining hall than a throne room, with multiple long stone tables filling the space leading up to the white marble throne at the far side of the room. Next to the intact throne, there remains an odd space - as though another seat was once supposed to be there. The walls and ceilings of the room are covered in stained glass murals, depicting a woman standing or otherwise acting as though there should be someone else present. It is impossible to tell, because the black gunk of the Grimm covers whatever would have been there, a consistency present across all the images.

All of this pales in comparison to the woman who just spoke to you. The woman depicted in those murals. The woman sitting on the throne on the opposite end of the hall. She has white - not pale, not fair, but pure white skin, with veins of purple and red snaking their way up her neck and towards her eyes. She might have, once upon a time, even been beautiful, if not for the obvious deterioration caused by her condition. Her hair - also white - is styled into several buns in one of the most elaborate, haphazard hair styles you've ever seen, and she stares at your Master with hateful black sclera and red pupils.

You'd call her demonic looking, but that would be insulting.

To demons.

"No, I get it. Furniture must be hard to import to this place. What you should apologize for is acting like a teenage girl whose boyfriend just dumped her. I mean, seriously?" You say mockingly.

"Silence." She spits, gesturing at you in a manner eerily similar to your Master.

You feel your head yanked to the side, hard enough that you are fairly certain your spine would have broken if you were anyone else, and suddenly you are being held against the ground by what feels like iron bands. Out of the corner of your eye you can see that rather than metal, thick black arms of wispy smoke have sprung up from the ground around you, grabbing you and wrenching your head and limbs at disturbing angles.

Taylor's head snaps towards you and she lifts a hand to respond, but you just wink at her.

"I-" you cough, but continue. "I mean–you got dumped and took an evil sharpie to all your old pictures. L-Lemme guess, you started wearing black exclusively right around then, right?" You smirk.

This time the woman - Salem - doesn't even bother to respond verbally. She just slashes her hand diagonally across you, emitting a brilliant beam of energy from it that practically cuts you in half. If it weren't for your regeneration that would have been it for you, at least temporarily.

Still, the attack definitely shuts you up.

"A girl, Ozma? Really? Was that old fool at your petty little school just a decoy, then? Did you think to challenge me face to face after all this time because you grew desperate? Because you managed to find a host with a trifle more power than–" She hisses, rising from her throne and drifting forward as though floating, her long black dress covering the movement of her feet.

"I'm not Ozma." Taylor says, a cold fury flowing off of her as she hefts Nemesis onto one shoulder, and sticks Long Memory in front of her to lean on. Her gaze flicks to you again, and her lips press together into a thin line.

'Hey, I'm fine. I mean. Not fine, but-' You send to her, your mental communication being just about the only part of you that's not paralyzed.

'I'm not worried about you, dork.' You Master sends back to you, and stopping in confusion, it takes you a few moments to realize that both her sword and cane are vibrating slightly, as though trying to squirm out of her grip.

"Oh? Ozma, you haven't even tamed this one yet! For shame. Do you know what is inside you, little girl?" Salem says, leaning away and effecting a motherly, almost concerned demeanor that is so at odds with how she was acting previously that it almost gives you whiplash.

"The heart of a dragon, an alien parasite, the spirit of a preteen sword, and the blood of a dockworker." Taylor rattles off plainly, before cocking her head and adding,

"Also your dead husband."

Salem - who seems unimpressed by that particular litany of entirely true things - merely continues to smile at her.

"Did he tell you that one day, you won't be in charge anymore? Did he tell you about all those who came before you? Perhaps you think you are the hero on a grand quest? He has lied to you, you know. He has lied to all of-" Salem croons as she draws closer, eventually ending up circling your Master with her hands behind her back.

"Do people actually buy this bit you're doing here?" Taylor interjects, her grip on Long Memory so tight you can almost imagine her knuckles turning white.

This causes Salem to jerk back in confusion, then narrow her eyes in annoyance.

"Remember this, when you are locked away for the rest of what piddling time this world has left, Ozma. I tried to give your host a chance." She responds, affecting sadness and remorse, but clearly not actually meaning it, given her disdainful expression.

"'Bout that." Taylor says, her voice deceptively calm, and with that creepy smile she gets when she definitely isn't thinking benign thoughts showing on her face.

Quite the opposite really.

"Be silent, child. I have observed your feeble attempts at culling my Grimm. You are not my match." Salem says with an absent flick of her wrist that draws more shadowy appendages forth to grasp at her.

Your Master snorts, lifting Long Memory into the air, and then banging her on the floor a single time. In response, a blue dome of energy spreads from her, dissipating the hands as they approach her and freeing you from their grip as it passes over you.

"Thanks, I coulda got myself out, but, y'know. Your way involves less armageddon." You joke as your regeneration heals you enough to stand upright.

"Please don't just let her kill you." Taylor says dryly, then sighs and says - seemingly to no one - "Fine, but only until negotiations inevitably break down."

"You think that a small mastery of magic you couldn't begin to understand is enough to force me to negotiate with you?" Salem growls, slamming a fist against the barrier she has now found herself outside of. It splinters and cracks at the impact, but a second of attention from your Master is more than enough to fix it.

Not that the barrier is where your attention is.

"Are you stupid!?" "Please do not move."

Nemesis and Long Memory demand from you simultaneously, both young women practically appearing on top of you, with Nemesis leaping into your back and gnawing on the back of your head in irritation, and Mem quickly rushing over to pull at the blood-soaked clothing covering your wound.

"I'm fine- hey, seriously! I'm fine! I couldn't die even if I wanted to, you know?" You insist, gently pushing Mem away from you and reaching up to grab Nemesis by the back of her outfit like an angry cat.

"Honestly, I'm kind of wondering what thirty percent less immortality looks like on a practical level but- look, Salem. I'm not really Ozma, and I'm not even really from this dimension. What was done to you- as far as I understand it- was pretty messed up. So, let me offer you a deal." Taylor says, frowning when it becomes obvious that Salem is going to continue trying to angrily punch a hole in the barrier, especially because with each attempt she gets closer and closer to succeeding.

When the witch doesn't respond, Taylor moves on.

"Stop trying to end the world, and I'll promise you might even get to fight those Gods you hate so much. If they ever come back, I mean." Taylor puts forth.

"Fight them? Fight them?! Is that what you think I've been doing all these years, Ozma? I don't want to fight them! I want them to end this!" She screams, causing every mural in the room to fracture and blow outward with a wave of raw, anger-fueled force.

"Aaand by 'this', I assume you mean the planet. Well, I tried." Taylor says with a shrug, before looking over her shoulder at you, Mem, and Nemesis.

"Girls." She calls, holding her hands out as though for the younger girls to take them so they might go for a walk. Once Nemesis and Long Memory do, she is left standing with weapons in both hands - and visible strain from maintaining the barrier on her face.

You take the opportunity to walk over to her, and draw your guns.

"Sooo… this is the part where we shoot her until she dies, right?" You say with a smile. Your Master glances at you, and smiles maliciously back.

Then, a burst of cerulean demonic energy explodes off of her, obscuring her form for, at best, less than a second. And when it clears, your Master is standing before you, utterly changed.

Pitch black skin and thickly corded muscles. A bone-white carapace that covers her like knightly armour. A blank, sharply angular faceplate from which two sets of pearly white draconic horns curl upwards and around her now featureless visage. From behind her, flows glowing, fluorescent blue hair that shifts into a familiar shade of red at the tips, drifting behind her as though perpetually caught in a light breeze. And around her hips, tassets made of flexible white caparace, the insides of which are lined in the same vibrant colours of her hair.

The Devil Trigger.

"So, do you just name everything after gun stuff, or-" She asks with an oddly familiar effect to her voice. A resonating, distorted, and somehow metallic sounding voice that has echoes of your Master's normal tone, but that holds a gentle menace to it, as though she is looming further over you with every word she speaks.

"Hey, guns are cool!" You reply, before the barrier abruptly drops - an eventuality you are well prepared for due to your link with your Master - and you immediately fire a barrage of ammunition towards Salem, whose head promptly explodes.

"See? I cast gun. It was super effective!" You joke, even though you are well aware that the Witch is, at best, mildly inconvenienced by the effort. You are forced to cover your face to avoid glass shards getting blasted into it, however, because despite the upper half of her head not existing, Salem screams, and every shard of glass from the broken murals lifts into the air and slams into you.

You won't lie - it actually really hurts - but you've suffered worse.

"You can't cast gun. God, you really are like the weird uncle." Taylor grumbles, lifting Long Memory into the air and pointing it at Salem, ignoring the barrage of glass as it splashes off of her to no visible effect.

<ᛗᚦᚢᛊᚲ> Mem's voice declares angrily - perhaps more angrily than you have ever actually heard from her before, and a beam of raw heat emits from the weapon, sweeping over Salem and reducing her to a charred corpse.

For exactly one second.

Then a black sludge seeps out of the corpse, and the woman's body snaps back into focus - good as new. Well past wanting to talk to any of you, she releases a savage growl and throws both her hands forward, releasing a wave of force that hurls you backwards through several walls. Your Master is likewise affected, but has a much better landing - it would seem that the tassets of her boney armour are actually folded wings, because she uses the unfamiliar appendages to stabilise herself.

"So I never asked, but is there a limit on how many times she can do that? Do we have a plan? I'm game to just blow stuff up till she gives up, if not." You say.

"I have some thoughts. Can you handle all that for a minute?" Taylor asks, gesturing around you.

You have once more found yourself outside the castle. There is just one difference, however - the small army of Grimm has grown from less of a 'small army' and into more of an 'unending horde'. This land is largely flat, and lacking in any vegetation to obscure your vision - so you are somewhat shocked to realize that the monster's black and white forms stretch well beyond the horizon.

They literally blanket the land with their sheer numbers.

Well, it's not the craziest thing you've ever been asked to do.

"Screw it, I'm down. What are you going to do?" You ask as you ponder doing something… ill-advised.

"Something stupid, probably." Taylor admits, waggling Long Memory at you, before taking to the sky.

You smile at her as she goes, but don't get more than a second to luxuriate in your shared stupidity before you are forced to roll out of the way of a charging boar monster. With a grunt, you come up on your feet and roll your shoulders.

And then you manifest all fourteen of your devil arms at once. Right onto the ground.

"Alright, jerks! Simon says it's party time!" You cheer.

You'd say all hell breaks loose as multiple archdemons burst forth into the world.

But that would be a bit cliché, now wouldn't it?

* * *

Friday, March 18th, 2011

???, Dark Continent

(Nexus)

She had a fairly limited number of ways to win this fight, she knew.

'Come on! Just a little Bankai!' She mentally demanded of her obstinate sword - which responded by vibrating a little and not much else.

Nemesis wasn't prone to speech while they were in combat.

Mem barked as Taylor raced back towards Salem. As always, as much as Taylor knew runecraft, she wasn't nearly as practiced at it as her adoptive daughter - and it showed in the way she had no idea what the hell that particular spell even was.

What it 'was', however, turned out to be 'create a small sun at the center of the castle.'

"You can never use this back home." Taylor said automatically, even as the small stellar object drew most of the castle into itself and then began to shrink down into a rapidly blackening pinprick - leaving only a large, empty, circular space in the middle of the sea of Grimm around them.

And also a single woman's rapidly regenerating corpse.

Mem dutifully answered.

Taylor had to juke to one side to avoid the talons of a massive bird Grimm, before reorienting on Salem and continuing her headlong charge.

"Honey, that wasn't an agreement!" She yelled over the raging winds as she used the furious woman to assist in her landing.

She stomped on Salem like she was an italian plumber in a fantasy world, is what she was saying.

Honestly, she was kind of glad that Salem's clothes seemed to regenerate with her. Having to fight the woman naked would have just been awkward.

"I can't stress enough how much my daughter hates you. I'd really suggest surrendering." Taylor offered once more to Salem as her body finished reconstituting itself.

To her credit, the Witch actually seemed to look around herself and ponder it for a moment. The crater Mem's spell had left was significant, and very little remained of the Castle that had once stood here.

Still, despite everything… Despite her Grimm dying in droves around her, despite the overwhelming power disparity between them, despite even the literal dragons flying around where she had left Emmy, her expression remained unrelenting.

Wait, dragons?

'What's up with the-' She fired off to her friend, only to get an immediate response.

'Can't talk, casting gun!'

She rolled her eyes. She hoped that wasn't going to be a consistent joke for this emulation, because it was already grating on her nerves - which she supposed was probably the point of this one. She'd have expected to get the weird uncle closer to thanksgiving, but she supposed her power just worked in mysterious ways.

"It doesn't matter. Even if you stop me now, you can't stop me forever. You can't kill me. You can't imprison me in any way that will outlast me. You can only wait and despair, wondering when next I will be ascendant. You cannot rid the world of all Grimm." The Witch hissed at her.

Taylor opened her mouth- or, actually did she even have a mouth right now? How was she talking? This was so weird. Regardless. She opened her mouth to rebut, but Mem got to it first.

<ᛝ/ᛞᚦᚾ> She barked, and a tombstone that literally had Salem's name on it appeared in the air above her before driving straight through her skull and into the ground.

<ᚦᛃ/ᚾᛁᚺᛚ> A blade of pure frost slashed out at the limb that was only now beginning to regenerate, preventing Salem from pulling herself free from the tombstone.

<ᛗᛚᚦ/ᚹ/ᛊ/ᛞ> A swirling storm of vaguely ectoplasmic beings swirled up out of the ground to bite and punch and scratch at the woman.

"Got it out of your system now?"Taylor eventually asked sternly, lightly tapping the cane against the ground in admonishment.

<...ᚦ/ᚲᛚ-ᛗ> Her precocious little mage muttered half heartedly once all of her previous spells had ceased their effects. The effect would have been comical if it wasn't so… unnecessarily violent, as Salem's own shadow rose off the ground to stab at her a single time.

Then it returned to normal.

<...yes.> Mem returned to her sullenly.

Taylor eyed Long Memory for a moment, before returning her attention to Salem who - despite her immortality - looked more than slightly irked at her brutal treatment.

"So, you think that because there will always be Grimm, that you can't lose?" She asked in the tone of voice Yukari Yakumo had taught her long ago to use when she was about to do something particularly spiteful.

"And all the Grimm, they come from here, right?" She continued on when Salem merely glowered at her, for all the world seeming more like an angry teenager than a world destroying threat.

Taylor didn't bother to continue explaining her point. It wouldn't mean anything to the woman until she saw it with her own eyes. So instead, she leapt upward. Not to escape - not even to launch an attack, though she did have to contend with all the flying Grimm currently obscuring the sun overhead.

No, she was seeking higher ground because it would make her spell work better.

Because while Taylor Hebert loved a good bit of ultraviolence here and there, and she was more than willing to pit her skills against the immortal as a training exercise if nothing else, she realized that Salem herself wasn't really the problem. No matter how dangerous or unstoppable Salem was, the true problem was really the Grimm.

The Grimm, which were for all intents and purposes hate elementals, spawning unendingly from the pools of pure malice left on this continent millenia ago by irresponsible Gods.

Taylor couldn't hope to ever deal with the pools, and she certainly couldn't kill every Grimm.

But she didn't have to. All she really needed to do was make sure no more Grimm could leave this place. After all, it wasn't as though the things could or would breed. They weren't truly alive, after all.

But Mem and Mun had given her an idea some time ago, and now felt like as good a time as any to test it out.

After all, for as many Grimm as there were on this continent alone- how many humans had died here? How many nations had died when their Gods exterminated humanity on this plane? How many had died once Salem had come to power, and begun to wipe them out here? In Taylor's experience, people who died that traumatically left behind a ghost.

And ghosts didn't really seem to have anywhere to go naturally.

So first, she carved a rune across the sky. Every ounce of her power went into it. Her dragon heart beat madly in her chest, her aura, demonic power, mana - all of it was funnelled towards this casting. Then she took a deep breath, and exhaled.

This rune wasn't, in and of itself, the spell she needed to cast. It was just the precursor. A simple means by which she could have Mem's awareness spread across Salem's entire realm at once.

"Ready?" She asked her adoptive daughter, hesitating before connecting Long Memory to the spell.

Was her simple, factual reply.

Through her connection with Long Memory, both as a Shikigami, and as a weapon, Taylor could feel the process taking place.

And she could hear the ravens cawing. Quietly at first, where only a few of the corvids were even visible amidst the sea of black around them.

But then louder and louder, until the ringing cry of thousands, possibly even millions of cawing cries flooded the battlefield. Like an angry black tide, the spirits of all those slain in this Land of Darkness Salem had claimed as her domain rose up and were remade.

But that was not the end of things. For as formidable as the swirling hurricane of feathers and talons was, they were only birds.

And Taylor could do better than that.

'You're probably going to have to catch me after this.' She sent to Emmy, as she once more channelled her swiftly returning power into a spell. Not a Rune, nor Onmyoudou - but rather a modified version of a spell she had used on Mun not too long ago.

Bird, to Human.

It wouldn't have taxed her to use on a single person. It probably wouldn't have taxed her to use on a dozen people.

But on this scale? On this scale, Taylor felt like she would be lucky just to wake up without a splitting headache.

'I'm going to have to what?' Emmy asked in surprise, and she could feel him moving about beneath her, already positioning himself to rush to her aid.

Taylor hesitated - but only for a moment.

Then she cast the spell.

And thus, a dead civilization - was reborn.

* * *

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