Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“It’s just the way of it, son. We all sell our souls sooner or later.”

As far as myths showing up on your doorstep went, the back of one of the biggest dualistic faiths in the world wasn’t a bad one. Morgana glared imperiously down at Jinx, who gave the angelic sister her best Darkin-may-care grin while Lux goldfished beside her in shock, and that was probably only the third most suicidal thing Jinx had ever done.

“Jinx Constantine,” the Lady of Shadows drawled. “Why am I not surprised?”

“Oh, y’know, just uh, takin’ in the sights,” Jinx replied casually. “Also, the next best thing to starvin’ to death, among other things. Any chance me and Blondie here can get some’a that mercy and succour you’re so famous for?”

“Jinx!” Lux hissed.

Morgana rolled her eyes, made a lazy flick of her fingers, and there was a clatter of plastic and metal onto the floors as a small pile of gray-green bags dropped in front of Jinx and Lux, along with a pair of heavy canteens of water.

Grabbing one of them, Jinx’s mouth twisted in disgust as she looked back up and said, “MREs? Seriously?”

“I can take them back,” Morgana replied.

Jinx responded by tearing hers open and grabbing at the plastic spoon provided to start scooping what might have been someone’s interpretation of lasagna into her mouth. Lux hadn’t even waited and was already halfway through hers between gulps of tepid water from the canteen. It was a struggle not to just cram every bite in, but that would have been a quick road to an encore performance of this dinner that would delight and please absolutely nobody.

“So tell me, Constantine.” Morgana’s voice was a tremble in the air that left Jinx’s joints aching and a funny taste in the back of her mouth. “What brings you back to Hell, hm? I confess it’s a bit irritating to find you at my doorstep again, especially after I went to so much trouble to get you out after that last particularly ill-advised visit.”

Jinx shook her head in between bites. “Not here for a backdoor, Morg,” she said, then swallowed another bite before adding, “Which I paid for fair and square that time, by the way. I just wanna know what the fuck is goin’ on out there.”

She jerked a thumb toward the door.

Morgana paused at the pulpit, her hand resting where the holy text would be if mass were in progress. She turned to look up and out one of the vaulted stained-glass windows, her wings flexing idly, while the noise of Jinx and Lux both scarfing down their first bag of food before moving on to second helpings tapered off.

“What did you think would happen,” Morgana said after a long moment, “when you cracked the prison of the crownless king, hm? The First of the Fallen may be mighty, but even he is no match for the Ur-Demon.”

Jinx’s shoulders sagged. “What happened?”

“Hell is starving,” Morgana replied grimly. “As is Heaven. There are few fears greater than the fear of death, and ever since the Lord of Fear stirred, the cycle has stagnated. Those dead and dying souls, terrified of the hereafter, now orbit him, held just out of his reach by the combined efforts of my sister and the First, for they know if he were to start eating, he would never stop.”

“I’m sorry, did you just say the Protector and the Devil are working together?” Lux blurted out, her spoon falling to the floor.

Morgana turned to fix her with a glare, and Lux’s expression turned ashen. “Yes, child,” she said darkly. “In this instance, neither Heaven nor Hell would survive the onslaught of the First of Ten should he be allowed to glut himself. Perhaps”—she turned to eye Jinx narrowly—“if he had not been allowed to consume one of the greatest of his lesser shadows freely, we would have had more time, but alas.”

“Oops.”

“You and your father.” Morgana's voice was hard as wrath. “His ambition would have shaken the heavens if not for his blatant mediocrity, but you, Constantine, are just talented enough to bring the ruin his plans would have wrought while reaping none of the benefit.” She shook her head dolefully. 

With every word, Jinx shrank deeper and deeper in on herself. It was like acid eating at the core of her, devouring her from the inside out. Did Morgana think that she didn’t know exactly how worthless she was? Really, that should have been pretty fucking obvious. Anyone with working eyes could see that she had the opposite of a golden touch, turning even the most precious things to fucking lead.

“You are a curse upon this world.” Morgana shook her head dolefully. “Never has a child carried so apt a name.”

“STOP THAT!” Lux was suddenly up and between the two of them, eyes blazing gold and tattoos alight as she stared down the Lady of Shadows. “She made a mistake!” Lux snarled. “And yes, it was a big one! People died! But…But she was trying to save lives, not end them! That’s a damn sight better than pretty much any of the fucking crusades fought in your sister’s name!”

Morgana’s eyes widened in something like shock, and even Jinx’s jaw dropped.

“You dare—”

Lux took a hard step forward and got in Morgana’s face, inasmuch as she could, since the dark angel was nearly seven feet tall. “YES!” she snapped. “I do! Because if we’re all gonna die anyway, then why the fuck shouldn’t I? You don’t get to rake Jinx over the coals when you and your sister have probably filled more mass graves in the name of saving souls than any ten wars combined! And unlike you, it’s not too late for Jinx to fix her mistake! So maybe you could help her do that instead of spending time lording over her about how fucking righteous you are! Because I don’t know if you noticed, BUT WE’RE KIND OF ON A CLOCK!”

For several seconds, Morgana just stared at Lux, as if trying to grasp the reality of this mere mortal practically spitting in her face. The tension in the air was so thick Jinx was practically choking on it. Despite the insanity of it, Jinx couldn’t help but fall for Lux all over again at the gorgeous sight of her gorgeous defiance.

Morgana, unfortunately, didn’t seem quite as amused.

“Is that so?” Morgana snapped a finger, and a half dozen smoking black chains erupted from the shadows to slam into Lux’s chest, shoulders, and gut, ripping her from her feet.

The chains carried her from the pulpit, down the aisle of the nave, to crush Lux against the great doors of the cathedral, lashing her to them and pinning her there. Jinx let out a wordless cry, bolting up, but she barely managed to start moving before another set of chains erupted from her own shadow to fasten about her and slam her to the ground.

Morgana moved like a bird of prey, and with a single flap of her wings was in Lux’s face. Jinx struggled, but she was still so weak from their long trek across the blasted landscape of Hell that she could barely move the chains an inch.

It would almost be funny if, after everything, this was where they died.

Across the cathedral, Lux strained against the chains, her teeth bared in a snarl as the so-called ‘Domina Umbra’ appeared almost nose to nose with her in all her self-righteous glory. Lux couldn’t honestly say if she’d ever been this mad. Maybe it was the exhaustion and hunger fraying her temper, but she simply no longer had the patience.

“Go ahead!” Lux felt like a rapid dog as she bared her teeth at the angel, as she strained against the chains, and she swore they creaked. “Smite me!”

Morgana just shook her head in seeming disbelief. “The sheer arrogance,” she muttered as she brought a hand that was wreathed in living smoke up, one finger extended and stopping barely a hair’s-breadth from Lux’s lips. “I could snuff you out like a candlewick in a windstorm, do you know that? Do you have any idea who I am? What I’ve seen?”

“I. Don’t. Care.” Lux hissed the words through her teeth. “Because for all of that, you’re still in hell, hiding from a fucking SCARECROW!”

“BLONDIE! NO!”

That black-wreathed hand slammed over Lux’s mouth like a vise, and her claws dug hard into Lux’s cheeks. She could feel blood well up, only to cook off and fill the air with an acrid, coppery smoke. Lux could also feel something else—a wrenching, pulling sensation coming from deep inside her chest.

No, it was deeper than that.

“You know,” Morgana said in a low, humorless voice. “I was really considering giving you and that jackal hog-tied to the floor a little nudge, but maybe my sister was right all along. Maybe you mortals are just too far gone.”

She dug her fingers in deeper, and Lux let out a muffled cry of pain. 

“For millennia, I have harbored the weak and the unwanted from even my own sister’s wrath. For centuries, I have watched more and more of you mortals fall into self-afflicted ruin. You are dogs eating dogs! And now you dare come into MY HOUSE—!” Her roar shook the cathedral— “and tell me! That I am not saving enough of you?! Give me one good reason not to rip your soul out of your body and hurl it out onto the street for that starving fog decomposing hate to devour!” Morgana leaned in until her lips were nearly brushing Lux’s ear. “Well? I’m waiting.”

“Please.” All the way back at the pulpit, Jinx was straining against her chains. “Sh-She’s just scared! D-Don’t—!”

But Lux was barely hearing Jinx’s words. She was barely even hearing Morgana’s. Her blood was thundering in her ears like a war drum, and the sight of Jinx not just being treated like garbage but begging Morgana for Lux’s life only served to make Lux see nothing but red! It was like her very soul was boiling, and that awful dislodging sensation that had been jarring something loose inside of her suddenly vanished, and she saw the change on Morgana’s face even as the Lady of Shadows began lowering her hand to allow Lux the privilege of begging for her own sorry ass.

Lux wasn’t sure what Morgana felt, but Lux sure as shit knew what she felt, and that was power. Pure and undiluted power.

With an almighty heave, Lux’s whole body effervesced gold, and the chains binding her snapped with a scream of tortured metal as she smashed her searing gold fist into the side of Morgana’s face so hard that her face distorted comically around Lux’s knuckles just before she went flying into a nearby pillar.

As one, the remaining chains dissolved into so much smoke, and Lux dropped to the ground, fiery gold rolling off of her like heatwaves as she rose and began stalking toward where Morgana was pushing herself gracelessly up from the floor of her own temple. In her periphery, Lux caught sight of herself in reflections from stained glass and polished silver votives, and they showed a woman wreathed in a vortex of gold flame. From her back and waist, golden wings shimmered, flapping in ethereal winds, and her arms—from her fingers to her elbows—were brazen fists of pure, migraine-bright light.

And upon her brow, a crown was just barely suggested by the outline of coronal radiance.

Morgana looked up in slack-jawed shock, one pale hand cradling the left side of her face, which bore a smoking imprint of knuckles. She slashed her free arm at Lux, sending another wave of chains at her that Lux bashed out of the air. A flick of Morgana's wrist and a bark of something almost like a word sent a coruscating bolt of darkness at Lux, but she met it with a fist that blew it apart like a soap bubble filled with mist.

As Lux closed the space, Morgana opened her mouth—maybe to say something, or probably just to spit another spell. Whatever it was, Lux didn’t let her.

For an angel, she sure was slow.

Lux’s light-forged fist cracked between Morgana’s eyes, throwing her down onto her back, and Lux moved over to straddle her.

“W-Wait…I know your face…” Her words were tinged with real, genuine fear, and it ignited a surge of triumph in Lux.

She had been so sure of herself. So self-righteous. This was an angel? This petty thing was what she’d gone to church to worship for literal years as a child? This was what she had addressed bedside prayers to, sung hymns to, and, later, begged before falling into miserable sleep that she might wake up as a girl?

This was it?

“How,” Lux breathed, “disappointing.”

Morgana rolled onto her back to stare murderously up at Lux, face twisted into a divine rictus of fear and anger as she spat, “Sister…you hypocrite.”

Lux flexed her fingers and, with the barest effort of will, conjured a burning orb of pure light between them. It was a sun in miniature, gleaming and hot. It was life and death condensed into a microcosm of brilliance, and Lux knew it would carve straight through Morgana. Lux’s lip twitched into half a smile as she angled the burning pinprick inches from Morgana’s face.

“You shouldn’t have touched her. She’s not yours.” Lux had never felt such righteous hatred before. It was like a drug pumping directly into her heart and brain, only to flood through the rest of her body like fire. “She’s mine, do you hear me? MINE!”

That tightly contained energy between her fingers flashed as she made to release it, but before she could muster that flicker of will, a voice slammed into the back of her head with the force of a sledgehammer. It was a familiar voice. She knew that voice!

Jinx!

Lux turned her head to stare in betrayal at Jinx ,who was approaching her from down the aisle, her arms held up and out to her sides, palms up as if beckoning. She walked at a slow, measured pace as she chanted something that Lux couldn’t understand in a strange, sing-song cadence. With every syllable, the light between Lux’s fingers sputtered and flickered, snuffing out as she was abruptly lightheaded. Below her, even Morgana was writhing in agony, clutching her head as the divine shadows that graced her body became gossamer thin and ragged. Even Lux’s light was fading and flickering as she staggered back and dropped to her knees.

Those words. That voice. That song. What was it? It was familiar, yet Lux couldn’t parse even one of the words. She couldn’t even name the language it was being sung-spoken in. She only knew that it hurt and that Jinx was doing it to her, but why?!

“Why?!” Lux cried as Jinx stopped in front of her, those bright eyes of her tight with sorrow. “I-I’m trying to protect you! To protect us! W-Why are you hurting me!?”

But Jinx just kept moving her lips around those sing-song words as she brought her hands slowly together to cup Lux’s face. The smell of burning flesh hit Lux’s nose, and she tried to jerk away, but couldn’t. She couldn’t move! Jinx was hurting herself! She was hurting! Lux needed to protect her! But she couldn’t move!

Jinx’s jaw was clenched in pain as she moved her fingers in patterns around Lux’s cheeks, the searing, hissing sound filling the room horribly as she worked.

“Stop! STOP IT!” Lux begged. “Just let me protect you! I can save us both! I CAN SAVE EVERYONE!”

Jinx didn’t stop. Despite what must have been utter agony, she kept chanting until finally, she brought both hands up to seize Lux by the temples and pressed her thumbs hard into Lux's brow. There was a sound like a branding iron touching meat, and this time it was Lux who felt the burn! She howled in agony, and the whole cathedral shook with the force of it. Stained glass cracked, votive offerings tumbled to the floor, and the dim lights filling the great hall flickered ominously to the sound of her voice until finally, finally, the pain faded and with it, all of the light.

It was like molten glass was being sluiced out of her body as Lux collapsed to the floor, panting. Her head was pounding, her skin felt paper-thin, and even her bones hurt. But despite all of that, Lux felt almost painfully clearheaded, and she balked as what she’d almost done hit her full force in the chest.

The realization hit her with a wave of nausea, and she pushed herself up onto her elbows and knees just in time to be violently sick. Jinx just knelt by her side and calmly collected her hair back into a tail, holding it there while Lux sobbed and vomited. She wasn’t sure she’d ever felt this bad in her life.

“That’s it, Blondie,” Jinx rasped, her voice sounded ragged and torn. “Better out than in. Just take some deep breaths, okay?”

Lux had no words. All she felt like she could do was sob and nod miserably. Jinx just held her hair back as she got it out, until finally she felt like she’d been emptied of everything, good and bad, and left hollow.

Rocking back on her heels, Lux collapsed into Jinx’s arms, who wrapped both around her and held her tight from behind as she buried her face into Lux’s soft blonde hair. She wasn’t sure how long they sat there, only that they were clinging to each other the whole time, until finally, Lux dared to crack her eyes open more than a millimeter and forced herself to take Jinx’s hands in hers and turn them over.

The skin was burned black.

“O-Oh…” Lux sobbed, suddenly sick again as she let go and turned away. If there’d been anything left in her stomach, she would have thrown up again.

“S’okay, Blondie,” Jinx said, despite how much it must have hurt. “It was worth it. You were worth it.”

“W-What happened?” Lux cried. “I didn’t even feel like myself!”

A rustle of skirts came from the corner of the cathedral, and Lux looked up to find Morgana rising shakily to her feet. She seemed somehow…reduced. She was smaller now. The size of a normal human. But that wasn’t the crux of it. There was something less of her that had nothing to do with her height.

“You,” Morgana said in a thin, exhausted voice, “are too dangerous to allow to live…”

“You even try it, birdbrain,” Jinx said darkly. “And I’ll finish that spell.”

“Where did you even learn that?” Morgana asked through her teeth.

Jinx just laughed bitterly. “Remember that mediocre mage? Yeah. My pops found all kinds of stuff you and your sister buried, including some Enochian spells from before that big flood. You called my dad mediocre, but he was the one who taught me how’ta bind angels. So maybe show’im some respect.”

“What about me?” Lux whispered, finally forcing the words out. “What did you do to me?”

“Same thing I did to her,” Jinx replied, nodding toward Morgana. “Except I hit you with the full whammy, while Morg over there just got caught on the fringe.”

“But you said that was for binding angels,” Lux said.

“It is.” Morgana glared down at Lux furiously. “And it works on you, because you’re a hybrid. A nephelim. An abomination. We wiped your kind from the face of this world when we flooded it! And now, my own sister has violated our sacred compact and produced another one.”

“W-What?” Lux stared at Morgana in shock. “Your…sister?”

Morgana smiled thinly. “I can hazard a guess as to why my sister might have done this, but for now, I suppose I’ll have to…what’s the mortal aphorism? Live and let live? For now, at least, niece.”

Lux’s jaw dropped, and Jinx just hugged her tighter. “We’ll figure it out, okay?” she whispered before looking up at Morgana. “So, Morg, given that I just stopped Blondie here from turning you into feathered smear on the walls of your own cathedral, maybe we can call everything a wash and start from scratch? Because I still kinda need your help.”

Rolling her eyes, Morgana strode forward, some of the strength having come back to her as she reached out and took Jinx’s hands in hers. Jinx winced, hissing as the angel stroked her thumbs over the scorched flesh, and where she touched, clean, pale skin rippled back into existence. It wasn’t even healing. It was more like…rewriting.

“There.” Morgana rose and stepped back. “A miracle, just for you, Constantine.”

“Uh, th-thanks, but uh, I actually wanted to get something else from ya,” Jinx said sheepishly. “See, I was thinkin’, since Blondie here is carryin’ your sister’s light in’er, I had an idea, but uh…unless you wanna tag along, I was wondering if you’d let me hang onto one of your shadows.”

Morgana’s eyes widened, then, to Lux’s surprise, she scoffed and then actually chuckled. “Your hubris knows no bounds, does it, Jinx Constantine?”

“What can I say?” Jinx smirked. “Gotta shoot my shot.”

Sighing, Morgana flexed one of her wings and curled it around, reached into it, and plucked out a single, long black feather. She held it out and Jinx, who reached for it, but at the last moment, Morgana pulled it away and said, “This is temporary, understand?”

“Totally,” Jinx agreed.

“Good.” Morgana held it out. “Consider this repayment for showing me my sister’s little…” she eyed Lux darkly. “Indiscretion.”

“Right.” Jinx took the feather and tucked it into her shirt. “So, uh, sorry about the whole Enochian binding thing, by the way. Don’t suppose you would mind not mentioning that to your sister? Last I heard, she went to some uh…pretty extreme lengths to scrub that spell outta existence.”

Morgana scoffed again. “My sister never met a problem she couldn’t crusade away. And, no, I won’t speak of it. As you just aptly demonstrated, there are some…fringe uses for that spell that I can appreciate. I had never considered applying it to a nephelim, but then, you mortals always did have a knack for creativity that my own kind lack.”

“Careful, Morgs, that was dangerously close to a compliment.”

“Perish the thought.” Morgana narrowed her eyes at Jinx, then looked down at Lux and said, “You are an abomination, girl. You carry a spark of the infinite in your finite body. If not for Constantine’s intervention, you would have slain me, and then promptly combusted. The power of the heavens is not for mortal hands. Remember that.”

“I…I’m sorry,” Lux mumbled.

“Do not,” Morgana said as she flared her wings and began rising into the air, “give me a reason to come find you again, Luxanna Crownguard. I would hate to have to bring the waters to this world once more on your account.”

And then the shadows swallowed her, and she was gone, and Lux felt only terror and emptiness as she curled up against Jinx, who held her close. Tears tracked down her cheeks as horror settled like tar in her gut and chest, and suddenly she couldn’t help but think back on her mother’s insistence that she was a boy. That she obey. That she do as she was ‘meant to do’.

All her life, Lux had thought her mother had just meant going into the family business, getting a wife, starting a family, and just repeating the same Crownguard bullshit that had been going on for the past twelve bloody generations, all the way back to when they were landed nobility. Now, though, seeing her own light reflected in the eyes of a dark angel, Lux couldn’t help but wonder if her mother had had other plans for her.

“Hey, Jinx,” Lux mumbled.

“Yeah?”

“I think I need to have a conversation with my mom.”

“Yeah.” Jinx sighed, then looked over at the door. “And I’m gonna get us there.”

Lux stirred and looked up at the rakish woman she’d fallen so hard for. “Yeah?” she chuckled thinly. “How are you gonna do that?”

“By callin’ in a favor.”

Jinx rose, pulling Lux up with her, squared her shoulders, and suddenly she was Jinx Constantine again. She was the warlock who banished demons and bound angels. She was the rakehell mage who could ensnare fear itself. She stormed up to the double doors of the cathedral and threw them open with a deafening boom, and Lux followed her out, eyes wide and heart pounding in anticipation.

Outside, and all around the Cathedral, was that wall of hungry fog, hedged out only by the blessings laid into the stones of this barely-hallowed place.

And Jinx showed no fear.

She faced it all—faced hell itself—bared her teeth in a mongrel grin, and bellowed, “HEY, KENCH! TIME TO PAY UP!”

Chapter Text

The hellscape mockery of Silvermere trembled as Jinx stood defiant on the steps of Morgana’s Cathedral with Lux at her side. She was mad. She was more than mad, actually, she was furious. Jinx had suspected something was hinky with Lux, because unless she was the luckiest—or possibly unluckiest—girl on the fucking planet, nobody was just born with that kind of power.

Technically, it was possible, but the odds were goddamn fuckin’ astronomical, which was why Jinx hadn’t brought it up or said anything about it. She didn’t have any proof one way or the other, or anything more than a bad feeling in her guts about the matter. But even ignoring the fact that Morgana was probably weaker than she’s been since she and Kayle drowned the world thanks to Heaven using up its strength to hold back Ol’ Fiddlesticks, no mortal mage shoulda been able to just dogwalk her like that.

Not unless she was wielding more’a the same.

“KENCH!” Jinx bellowed again. “GET YOUR FAT ASS OUT HERE! YOU OWE ME!”

Lux laid a hand on the small of her back, but gingerly, as if she were afraid to touch, and Jinx looked up to meet Lux’s eyes evenly. There was worry there, and fear, but there was trust, too. Her whole world had just been shaken to its foundations, but despite that, she still trusted Jinx to see her through it all.

No pressure.

The city trembled again, and suddenly a fissure began tearing open in the concrete just beyond the fog. It ripped through the ground, spilling geysers of brackish water as it split the earth and stone like a spear headed straight for the two of them. Something was moving beneath the ground, and it was burrowing through the city, casting up gouts of dirt, asphalt, stone dust, and sewer water until it zeroed in on them and sped up. The fissure ripped through the asphalt parking lot, the dead lawn of the cathedral, and up to the very foot of the stairs before ending in a detonation of stone and dirt.

Tahm Kench rose, filth-streaked and inhuman, from that hole in the earth, and Jinx squared her shoulders, staring up into his true, demonic face. He was like if someone had bloated up a behemoth catfish and dressed it in a patchwork suit—his head was the size of both of them standing abreast, and then even bigger than that. His two-fingered claws fixed like anchors on the ground, heaving his bulk up while his eyes glowed like lanterns in the night, beckoning unwary drifters on the bayou to his table. His whisker-like barbels twitched and wavered above his gaping maw as he glared down at Jinx with hateful fury.

Then, slowly, the hate receded. “You dare invade my table, Miss Constantine?” he drawled.

“Don’t want anything from your table, Kench,” Jinx said flatly. “I want that favor you promised me when I saved your miserable life.”

“Your misery had such a delectable taste, but I’ll admit that your arrogance has a certain je ne sais quoi I may savor,” he said thinly, baring his maw and its rows of wedge-shaped fangs. “But let it not be said that I’m not a demon’a my word, a’course, Miss Constantine. Let us pass on these past indiscretions and begin anew, shall we?”

Jinx clicked her tongue, arms crossed and eyes narrowed as she said, “Yeah, sure. Water under the bridge once you get me’n Blondie here to hell’s version of the Crownguard Estate.”

Kench’s blunt features crumpled. “That’s clear across town, and this place is already dry of souls. I would run my river to the stones gettin’ ya there.”

“Funny,” Jinx replied. “I don’t recall setting a mileage limit on that favor, Kench. You owe me, and now I’m cashing in.”

The demon’s glower deepened as he loomed over Jinx, his eyes glowing with remorseless hate while drool dribbled from around his maw. For a moment, Jinx wondered if he was going to do it; if he was going to renege on his deal and suffer the backlash, all for the immediate gratification of petty revenge. But in the end, Kench’s survival instinct won out, and he drew sullenly back.

“When your time comes,” Kench said in a low, rumbling tone like a distant, underground river, “I will be there to suck your soul down personally.”

“Guess I’ll see you then,” Jinx replied. “But until then, Kench, you’ll make good.”

He replied by settling into his hole like a squatting toad, leaning back, and unhinging his maw til it was split so wide that his whole body seemed about to come apart. Jinx wrinkled her nose at the smell that wafted out, then nodded at it.

Lux just stared at her in disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”

“Just try not to think too hard about it, Blondie,” Jinx replied with a thin smile as she planted a foot between two of Kench’s teeth and held out a hand to Lux. “This ain’t the first time I’ve taken the Kench Express. No in-flight movie, and the lumbar support is shit, but we’ll get there. Trust me.”

Lux chuckled, shook her head, then said, “Y’know, I put a guy away once. Not a…not an evil man, but he was violent. Sometimes I still think he had the right idea. His name was Sylas, and he told me the most dangerous thing anyone can ever say to someone else is ‘trust me’.”

“What if I mean it?”

“Especially if they mean it,” Lux replied as she took Jinx’s hand.

“Well,” Jinx remarked as she tipped backward, dragging Lux with her. “I can’t argue with that.”

And they both fell into the endless maw of the River King.

It was like dropping into rushing rapids that stank of day-old sewage. The moment they were in, they were swept away by the current. Jinx pulled Lux to her, holding her tight as the unseen waters abruptly picked up speed, spinning and throwing them about. If this were a real river, rocks and all, they both would have had their brains bashed out, but as it was, it was merely fucking uncomfortable. Every twist and turn Kench made, they felt, and Jinx was unfortunately acquainted with the vertigo that followed. It was motion sickness turned up to eleven, and after a few minutes of being treated like an untethered pinball in a stink machine, Jinx was about to hurl.

Traversing Hell from the Cathedral to the Silver Heights on the outskirts of the city limits proved to be simultaneously the fastest and longest journey of Jinx’s miserable life. So when Kench finally burst from beneath the sod of a browning but manicured lawn to vomit Lux and Jinx out onto their backs. Brackish dripped from their limbs as they pushed themselves up, only for a two-fingered claw and seize hold of Jinx’s collar and drag her upright.

Kench looked bad. Even for a demon. His rubbery skin was sunken and dry, and his eyes were set deep into his skull and covered in grotesque cataracts. When he snarled at her, it revealed withered gums and yellowing teeth.

“When your time comes, Constantine,” Kench rasped. “I’ll be there. And mark my words, you’re goin’ all the way down th’river on that day.”

“If,” Jinx sneered, slapping his claw away as she stumbled back.

Kench narrowed his eyes. “What?”

“I said, if that day comes,” Jinx replied with a reedy laugh. “Then, maybe.”

“Everyone dies, Constantine.”

“Not everyone,” Jinx replied gamely. “Haven’t you heard? Assholes live forever.”

Then she brought up her hand, middle finger extended in salute, and Kench trembled with rage for a moment before sinking back down into the swampy hole he’d crawled out of.

“Do you really think taunting him was a good idea?” Lux asked as she stumbled up behind Jinx to lean against her.

“Probably not,” Jinx admitted, then turned the smile up at Lux. “But it was funny, huh?”

Lux burst out laughing at that, shaking her head in what was either awe or pity. The smile on her face lasted about five seconds, though, as she turned, looked up, and her whole expression fell. Jinx didn’t need to turn around to know what she was looking at. She could see it in Lux’s eyes. It was that odd, child-like fear of something you knew was going to hurt you because it had hurt you before and regularly, just like you knew that nothing could stop it and no one would care.

But Jinx turned around anyway and looked up at a mansion that could have a hundred families from Zaun comfortably. She’d always thought places like this oughta be illegal. It just made no sense. No one needed that much space. No one family needed that much space. It was all just showing off money and power for no other reason than to flex on the other rich fucks who drive past.

Some people just can’t get it up unless they know someone’s watching in envy, apparently.

“Alright, Blondie,” Jinx said as she reached out and took Lux’s hand, and their fingers threaded together naturally. “From here on, you lead the way.”

Lux was surprised to realize she still remembered the code to the door, and even more surprised when she remembered that this was a facsimile of her family’s home in Hell, rather than the real thing.  Apparently, everything was copied over. Maybe some people were traumatized latch-key kids. Had to be at least a few in the world, right?

Just putting her hand on the ornate doorknob put a flutter of apprehension in her guts, and that was how she knew that this was the right place. Home is where the trauma is. Even though she knew that this wasn’t the childhood home that her great-great-something grandfather had built after pulling himself up by his bootstraps, with a little leverage from about three hundred indentured serfs. She wondered if Fossian Crownguard knew that he had been laying the foundations for Demacia’s military industrial complex when he opened his first steel mills. He certainly must have had a clue when, in his eighties, he approved some of their conversions into munitions factories.

“Hate to push ya, but you said it yourself.” Jinx laid a hand on the small of her back as she moved alongside her. “We’re on a clock, Blondie.”

Lux nodded shakily, then forced herself to turn the knob and pull the door open. She half-expected to be greeted by a kitschy kind of haunted house version of her old home, with the walls splattered with blood and her parents hanging from the rafters, eyes open and fingers pointing in recrimination at their wayward daughter.

Instead, it just looked like it hadn’t been lived in for a while. Dust coated every piece of furniture in a fine patina, and as Lux stepped inside, all she could think was that her mother would have had an absolute conniption at the sight. If Augatha Crownguard had walked into her home after vacationing on some private Ixtali island chain or something else equally expensive and exploitative to this sight, Lux was certain heads would roll. Maybe literally. Certainly, the entire house staff would be fired on the spot and probably sued and blackballed from ever working again.

Her footsteps echoed unpleasantly as she stepped into the enormous foyer. The mansion was almost three centuries old and refurbished at the turn of the century. Overhead was a gleaming chandelier that, in Lux’s childhood, had gleamed like starlight and now hung dull, faded, and covered in cobwebs.

“Holy shit, are those real diamonds?” Jinx muttered, staring upward.

“I think so,” Lux said quietly. For some reason, she felt like raising her voice here was the wrong thing to do. “Honestly, I…I never asked. Knowing my family, I wouldn’t put it past them.”

She looked back down at Jinx, who was just shaking her head. “Fuckin’...and I thought Pilties spent money on wild stuff. I ain’t ever seen a whole ass diamond chandelier, though. I thought that shit was made up for movies.”

Lux shook her head, then let out a small, bitter laugh as she said, “There was nothing my family wouldn’t spend money on if it was ostentatious enough. Gold, diamonds, or silver if they were feeling modest.” She walked up to the bannister of the curving staircase that went to the second-floor mezzanine. “See? Gold filigree in the wood. It goes all the way up the stairs and lines the whole railing. It’s everywhere. Gold and gold and gold. Diamonds and opals and lots of other precious gems. Someone could’ve walked into the parlor, opened a drawer that hasn’t cracked in ten years, pocketed a random piece of junk, and probably sell it for north of two hundred at a pawn shop.”

She looked over to Jinx, who was just looking around, eyes wide like she couldn’t believe this place was real. Maybe if Lux hadn’t grown up here, she might have been able to convince herself that Hell had just exaggerated the dimensions for effect, but standing here now, Lux was certain that if she took a tape measure to this place, it would line up perfectly with the place she’d been raised in for all of her formative years.

“This room,” Jinx said quietly, “is like, ten times the size of the whole house I grew up in. You could fit the whole Last Drop—my uh, first foster dad, Vander’s, bar—in this room alone.”

“Probably,” Lux agreed as she stepped away from the stairs and wrapped her arms around herself. “It’s cold…”

Jinx turned to her, bright eyes soft and lips pressed to a thin line. She walked to Lux’s side and gripped both of her arms tight below the shoulders. “Let’s just get outta here, Blondie. This place ain’t gonna do you any good. Where do you think…?”

Lux just shrugged. “I honestly don’t know for sure. Maybe my bedroom? Or…there’s a library on the third floor I used to hide in and read. Or the uhm…right, the music room.”

“What about it?”

“I was tutored on every classical subject.” Lux pulled her lips back in a sneer as she said the words. “No public school for a Crownguard. It was private tutors til age fourteen, and then a private school, and then it was off to the Royal Academy of Silvermere.” She chuckled wanly. “Except, I had a nervous breakdown when I was fourteen. I’m pretty sure I would have ended up in an institution if it weren’t for my Aunt Tianna standing up for me wanting to be a girl.”

“You are a girl,” Jinx said firmly. “Nothing ‘wanting’ about it. Y’just are.”

Coming from anyone else, Lux might have thought the words were just words, but coming from Jinx, they meant something more than that. She could see, in those unnaturally bright eyes, that Jinx meant every word that she said. Lux just nodded shakily as tears threatened the corners of her eyes. She didn’t necessarily consider herself to be someone who cried easily, but here she felt…raw.

“Let’s try my room first, I guess,” Lux said as she turned to start climbing the stairs.

Then, from the east parlor adjoining the foyer: “Lucius, come here.”

Lux froze with one foot on the first step, her spine rigid and her fingers digging into the wooden bannister so hard that it hurt. She wanted to vomit. She suddenly wanted to crawl out of her own skin and away from this horrible place. Jinx looked at her strangely, brow furrowed and worry in her eyes. “You good, Blondie?”

“D-Did you…” She looked to Jinx, swallowed shakily, then said, “Did you not hear that?”

“Lucius, that was not a request.”

Jinx just shook her head slowly before saying, “Whatever it is, ignore it, okay? It’s not real. Just this place trying to fuck with ya.”

“It sounds just like her,” Lux said through her teeth.

“It ain’t.”

“It knows my name!”

Jinx took two steps up the stairs, whipped around, and grabbed Lux’s face in both hands, filling her vision with those springberry eyes. “Whatever that name is, it ain’t yours! Got it?! That’s just some string of gobbledegook your parents saddled you with til you figured out they were wrong! Period!”

“Tell that my fucking birth certificate!” Lux snapped, knocking Jinx’s hands away as she backed up. “Tell that to the judges and the courts and all the fucking hoops I had to jump through to get my name changed with my mother and father sticking their feet out to trip me every step of the way!”

“LUCIUS!”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP, MOM!” Lux bellowed before whirling on Jinx. “And don’t you—!” She jabbed Jinx in the chest—“fucking patronize me!”

Jinx put her hands up and took a step back. “Alright, alright, I-I’m sorry,” she said, then grimaced before saying, “Look, you want me to make sure it’s not your name? I mean for real and forever? I can do that. Just say the word, Blondie, and I’ll do it.”

Lux stared at her for several long moments before finally saying, “H-How?”

“Magic, love,” Jinx replied with a smile. “What else?”

“You can just…take a name?”

Jinx shrugged. “More like, uh, stripping it off. It can be useful. If a demon learns your full name, kick it to the curb, get a new one.” Then she smirked, and that stupid smile made Lux’s heart flip. “It’s kinda like stealing a license plate or uh, filing the serials off a gun.”

“Lucius…Lucius!”

“Do it!”

Jinx clapped her hands together, rubbing her palms against one another as she muttered under her breath. Her whole body was tensed, as if she were filling with some powerful energy, then she abruptly snapped a hand out and seized Lux by the brow, the heat of her palm almost burning as Jinx said, “Hoc nomen, quod tibi alligatum est! Hoc nomen ego te absolvam!”

A shiver went down Lux’s spine at the tremor in Jinx’s voice. Sweat was beading at the shorter woman’s brow, and tremors were rolling through her as her eyes rolled back.

“Say the name.”

“L-Lucius Crownguard.”

“Hoc nomen in ventum iacio! Hoc nomen in arenam iacio! Te libero! NON EST HOC NOMEN TUUM!” Jinx thrust her other hand hard into Lux’s chest just beneath her neck, nearly bowling her over, and in that moment, she swore she felt something slough off of her.

Like a moth shedding its cocoon.

Lux took in long, deep breath, tasting the old, tepid air, and the dust of ages, and despite that she thought it was the sweetest breath she’d ever taken. In the distance, far, far from her, she thought she could still hear that voice that sounded like her mother calling a name, but that name wasn’t hers. It was someone elses. A dead man’s name, maybe.

“Ready to go, Blondie?” Jinx asked,holding out her hand again.

“Yeah,” Lux said softly as she took the proffered limb. “I’m ready.”

Chapter Text

Lux climbed to the top of the foyer stairs and to the landing of the third floor, where her room and the rooms of each of her family members had been since time immemorial—or so it sometimes felt—with Jinx at her back. It was a little surreal, being there but not really. A younger Lux had once daydreamed of bringing a girlfriend home to meet her family—well, ‘her’ back before her egg cracked, anyway—and have that family moment of approval.

Even later, after the fallout of coming out and her transition, a part of her still wanted that. She would, on occasion, idly think of meeting some handsome young woman and bringing her home to meet her brother, at least, despite a darker part also wanting to see that rare, approving nod from Augatha Crownguard. Something Lux had only rarely seen in her youth, even when she’d been good and obedient and done as she was told.

A piece of her still craved her mother’s approval.

Her validation.

Lux squeezed Jinx’s hand tighter as they paused at the landing, and Lux looked this way and that, grimacing as she second-guessed herself. There were so many bad memories in this house. There were so many ghosts here that had nothing to do with the fact that it might be literally haunted and, oh yeah, in Hell.

“Deep breaths, Blondie,” Jinx said softly before turning and holding out her other hand. In it, her lighter rested like a silvery weight.

Lux frowned down at it. “How did you bring that with you into Hell?”

“Don’t ask questions y’don’t want the answer to,” Jinx said flatly before offering it again. “Just take it. You look lost, so practice some magic, yeah? We’re tryin’ to find the thin place to break through, and I’d wager we’ve got less than five or six hours on this side to do that. So…”

Lux took the lighter and turned it over in her palm. Over the course of their journey, Jinx had taught her a lot of magic. Mostly it was theory, but there was plenty of time for practical stuff during their lengthy pauses between crossing city blocks.

But this was the first time she’d really done it under duress.

“You can do it, Blondie,” Jinx said.

Nodding, Lux knelt and set the lighter on the carpet, closed her eyes, and hovered her hand over it. “Axis mundi,” she whispered the opening to the incantation and immediately felt a magnetic tug on her solar plexus. “Produco tuus vires.”

Golden light flashed around her and around the lighter, and almost immediately it began to rotate in place, first slowly, then faster and faster and faster as it rose into the air. In spite of everything—in spite of being in hell, confronting this dormant caldera of trauma, and hearing that name spoken like a curse into her ears by something not even Jinx could hear—seeing that lighter rise at her command made Lux’s heart soar.

Lux held her hand beneath as she stared at the spinning lighter, mesmerized until she recalled Jinx’s lessons. Focus, Blondie. Focus was always the key. She focused on herself. Focused on her heart. Lux focused on the core of pain she carried with her in every single step she took, every single moment of every single day. Then cast it out. And Lux seized that pain, held it tight despite the way it cut and burned, and— slowly, Blondie. Don’t rush it— imagined it trickling into the spinning lighter.

And the lighter abruptly came to a dead stop.

Looking up, she saw a hallway that stretched long and dark into the east wing of the mansion. “That’s where my room is,” she said quietly. “Or…was, I guess.”

Technically, she still had a room at the Crownguard Estate if she so wished it, but things would have had to have gone horribly wrong for her to move back there. At best, she might use it to hide from relatives if she ever actually had to attend one of her family’s many holiday parties, galas, soirees, or whatever else they might be called.

But on the heels of that came another thought.

Lux looked down at the lighter, still suspended in the air above her palm, and grinned. “It worked…”

“Sure did,” Jinx said, laying a hand on her shoulder. “You’re a mage now, Blondie. A real, bona fide mage.”

“Just like Jinx Constantine,” Lux said with a smile as she snatched the lighter out of the air and held it out to its owner.

Jinx gave a pained smile back as she took the lighter. “Shit, I fuckin’ hope not,” she said grimly.

Lux’s good humor faltered a little at that as Jinx moved past her, her usual cocksure expression folding into something more somber. Together, they advanced into the dark. The mansion had never been a welcoming place to Lux, not even as a child, even if she hadn’t realized it at the time, but now it felt downright hostile. It was as if every fear, irrational and otherwise, she’d ever had in the place had become a cloying reality that was hovering just out of sight.

Only the light emitting from Lux’s own body broke the monotone dark, and even that felt like an intrusion. The deeper they went, the more she felt like the house itself was eating away at the edges of her light.

“Here.” Lux stopped them as she paused to rest her hand on a closed door. There was nothing in particular that made it stand out, only the instinctive knowledge that she had walked far enough down the hall to reach her room the same way she had a thousand times before.

“All you, Blondie,” Jinx said.

Bracing herself, Lux pushed the door open and—

A wave of fog burst from behind the door, slamming into Lux and knocking her back. Briefly, she heard Jinx’s voice cry out her name, but it was cut off as if a door had been slammed between them. Lux swore as she brought her fists up, focusing on the light beneath her skin and calling it forth in a brilliant eruption of radiance. The fog seemed to recoil, as if pained, and it moved around her like a living thing, extending tendrils of gray only to flinch back as the light pouring off of Lux’s tattoos and from her eyes turned it away.

“Jinx!” Lux called, tamping down the rising panic at suddenly being alone in Hell itself. “JINX!”

“Lucius, will you stop shouting? You’re making a fool of yourself.” The voice was clipped, imperious, and familiar, and Lux turned on her heel to find herself looking out of her room at the hallway she’d been in moments ago.

And there, standing in front of her, was her mother. Augatha Crownguard, dressed as she usually was in a designer dress and blouse of navy blue, with a shawl of something sheer and expensive draped over her shoulders. Her fingers glittered with rings, the diamond of her wedding ring being the most prominent, of course. Her flaxen blonde hair—some shades paler than Lux’s own—fell in straight sheets and curled slightly at the ends around her face. Lux happened to know that Augatha’s hair was naturally quite curly, and that she straightened it regularly, while Lux and her Aunt Tianna’s had always been naturally straight.

It was something Lux always suspected her mother of being jealous of.

“M-Moth—” Lux stopped herself and turned away. “No, you’re not real. This isn’t real.”

“Lucius, that’s rude.” Her mother entered her room with three clipped footsteps, then stopped. “I’ve come to inform you that you’ve been accepted into the Royal Academy of Silvermere in spite of your…eccentricities. You can’t imagine the strings your father and I had to pull to secure your admittance, so I don’t care what your aunt says, this”—Augatha’s hand seized Lux’s shoulder in a vise grip—“nonsense you’ve been indulging in stops today, is that quite clear?”

Lux closed her eyes, focusing on the memory of Jinx’s voice. That wasn’t her name. That had never been her name. Jinx had enspelled it away. She had banished it. It had no more power over her than if her mother called her any other string of nonsense syllables. It wasn’t a name, it was just noise.

She focused.

This wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.

“Lucius, are you listening to me?!”

Lux opened her eyes, ignoring the hand that was digging into her shoulder, which was feeling less and less like a human hand and more like something distinctly in human. She remembered this day. She remembered this argument. It was the day she’d left the Crownguard Estate for good. She’d been nineteen years old, and her mother had tried to strongarm her into giving up on her transition and going to the academy like a good little Crownguard. Instead, they’d gotten into a screaming match, and Lux had stormed out, only to end up on her Aunt’s doorstep six hours later, shivering like a wet cat.

That day still rested like a stone in Lux’s gut. Her relationship with her mother had never recovered. The same was true of her father, really.

But that didn’t matter. It was past. It was over.

FOCUS.

Her eyes fell on a vase that carried three wild sunflowers. One of Lux’s favorite flowers, in fact. Forcing herself not to scream, Lux took a deep breath and said, “Yes, mother, I understand you. I hear you loud and clear.”

The vise grip began to relax, and Lux took a step toward the vase and laid her hands on it as her mother followed to loom behind her.

“Good,” she said darkly. “And you’ll keep on your real medications, yes? I would hate to have a repeat of freshman year.”

Moving slowly, never turning to look the entity in the eye—that was an important thing Jinx had drummed into her. Never look them in the eye if you can help it—Lux brought her thumb to her mouth as she said, “Yes, mother, of course I will.”

And she bit into the flesh of her thumb until she tasted blood.

Lux could practically feel the smile stretch across her not-mother’s face. Despite not looking, she somehow knew that it was not filled with teeth, but with needles, just like she knew that if she turned now, she would see eyes that were and were very much not the eyes of Augatha Crownguard. It was trying to weaken her. To make her spirit fragile so she could be more easily cracked open like a femur, rich in marrow.

Carefully, she leaned forward as if to smell the flowers, and as she did, she brought the hand with her bleeding thumb up. Hidden in that motion, she swept smears of blood over her eyelids, then took a deep breath of the flowers. There was something sickly under the sweet, floral scent, but she ignored it as she let a few drops of her blood fall into the vase.

The moment the blood hit the water within, Lux whispered, “Pelako ameso yobe Naga imbone ukuchila panshita.”

“What was that?” Augatha asked, her voice suddenly sharp and sounding very unlike Lux’s mother. 

But it was too late.

Gripping the vase, Lux ripped the flowers out, threw them aside, and in the same moment turned and upended the vase over her own head. Through the veil of spelled water, she saw the room as it was—rotting and falling apart—just as she saw the thing in its fullness. She saw the twisting, contorted aberration that was wearing her mother’s skin like an ill-fitting suit, and in that moment of being perceived, the demon staggered away.

“I see you!” Lux roared, casting the vase aside to shatter on the floor. The water continued to drip over her eyes, shielding her from its enchantments and showing her that it was a wretched, starving thing, weak from whatever Fiddlesticks had been doing that was emptying hell itself of souls. “I see you, and know you! And you are only of deceit! In nomine Domina iuberis!” She advanced with every word, her body effervescing with gold like the dawn, and driving the demon back. “ IN NOMINE SORORA IUBERIS! I COMMAND YOU! BEGONE!”

There was a flash and a howling scream, and Lux staggered back, throwing her arms up to shield herself in case her haphazard spell had backfired and the demon attacked her while she was dazzled by the flare. Instead, she heard the most welcome voice of all.

“BLONDIE!” Lux dropped her arms to find Jinx had shoulder-barged her way into the room, wearing an expression of sheer panic. It was the most blatant worry Lux had ever seen on the woman as Jinx barreled into her, grabbing her by the hands and looking her over in a panic. “You alright?! What happened?!”

“I…I’m fine,” Lux said, laughing weakly. “I think I…I think I just banished a demon!”

Jinx stared at her, eyes wide, then her face split into that charming, too-wide smile of hers, and Lux fell all over again. “No shit?” She looked around and spotted a greasy black smear where the thing had been and said, “That there?”

Lux nodded.

Letting go of her, Jinx moved over to crouch over the smear, held out a hand, and then grinned wide. “Good news, Blondie. Not only did you give a dybbuk the holy shotgun, you got it two for two. This is the spot! Thin as tissue paper!”

The air left Lux in a rush of relief as she collapsed to her knees and laughed shakily before asking, “Are you sure?”

“Sure as Hell.” Jinx winked at her. “Dybbuk are strong, but they’re also like uh, like termites. They’re skinriders, so they gravitate to thin spots and make’em weaker. They usually try to possess stuff on the other side, but in this case, it was probably trying to use your soul to springboard into your body.”

“And we can get through?” Lux asked quietly. Barely willing to believe that this nightmare—at least this part of it—was nearly over.

“Yeah.” Jinx held out a hand. “C’mere, let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

Lux stumbled over to Jinx’s side and knelt down to lay her hand against the smear she’d made of that demon. In the distance, she heard that fogbank of dissolving souls howl its nameless hunger into the winds. Informing them in no uncertain terms that it was getting closer to the Estate. They didn’t have a lot of time, but Mother of Justice willing, they had enough.

Moving quickly, Jinx sat in the lotus position directly across from Lux, who mirrored her by instinct. The smear of oily black remains lay between them, but Lux could see it starting to flake away. Now that Jinx had pointed it out, even Lux could tell that her banishment had weakened the already thin walls. The oppressive, cloying despair and fear weren’t so strong here. It was like she’d been stuck in a cave for weeks and was only just now getting a breath of fresh, outside air.

Holding out her hands to Jinx, Lux smiled at her and said, “The Shuriman soul journey spell, you think?”

“Damn, Blondie,” Jinx said with a grin, “at this rate, you’ll be a better mage than me in a year.”

“Doubtful,” Lux said as they joined hands, then she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and began to chant. “Duat Aken, Ka, Ren, Ba, Ib, Sheut. Duat Aken Ma'at.”

Jinx’s voice joined hers in unison.

“Duat Aken, Ka, Ren, Ba, Ib, Sheut. Duat Aken Ma'at.”

Unlike the first time Jinx had shown her this spell, this time, Lux could feel the change as it happened. She could feel the trembling walls of reality parting like a veil before her. The first time, she had been divorcing her spirit from her body to float mere feet above herself. This time, she was seeking that same body, grasping the silvery thread that bound herself to herself, and following it back home.

“Duat Aken, Ka, Ren, Ba, Ib, Sheut. Duat Aken Ma'at.”

It was so easy. She had always been both stumped and awed by the ease with which Jinx manipulated the world around her, but now Lux could see it with eyes unclouded by doubt. She could see how fragile the world was. Everything moved in a delicate dance of atoms and molecules and other, smaller, darker things. And it took so little to move them. Everyone moved them every moment of every day; they just couldn’t see it. People the world over were forging and reforging fate and causality itself without ever knowing what they were doing.

“Duat Aken, Ka, Ren, Ba, Ib, Sheut. Duat Aken Ma'at.”

The only difference between them and Jinx was that Jinx had been doing it with intent. She had seen past the curtain and was tweaking the celestial mechanisms on purpose instead of just flailing around and hoping for the best!

And now, so was Lux!

“Duat Aken, Ka, Ren, Ba, Ib, Sheut! Duat Aken Ma'at!”

And hell dissolved away.

Jinx smacked her lips and blinked gummy eyes open. Her whole body ached. Everything hurt. But honestly? Just not being starving, exhausted, and parched all the time was bliss unto itself, and Jinx sat up in the stiff, uncomfortable electrocution chair of Stillwater prison to stretch and crack her back. Beside her, Lux was doing the same, stirring in place and groaning, as she cracked her neck one way, then the other.

“Well, well, I suppose I lost that bet, hm?” Maman Midnite was sitting across from them. “How was Hell? My eyes in that place have been closed ever since the First Fear started hunting in earnest.”

“It’s pretty bad down there, Midnite, I’m not gonna lie,” Jinx said as she leaned forward, elbows on knees, and rubbed at her face. “Fiddle’s tryin’ to gobble up every soul that was ever scared of dyin’, and every day, his reach gets longer. Heaven and Hell are holding the souls back from his craw, but they’re also starvin’, and it’s only a matter’a time before they lose their grip.”

From her side, Lux sat up and loudly smacked her lips before saying, “Ugh, why do I taste peanut butter? I hate peanut butter.”

“For the sake of our burgeoning love, I’m gonna ignore that,” Jinx said flatly without turning around, then looked Midnite in the eye. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure my Blondie is about as ready as she’s gonna get, given the uh, time constraints. Now we just gotta figure out how to lure Old Man Fear into one place.”

“True enough.” Maman Midnite rose to her full height and stalked around to stand over Lux, and Jinx turned to watch as the Buhru woman reached out to cup Lux’s chin. “Constantine is right about one thing, Miss Crownguard. You are certainly more in motion than you ever were before. Hold onto that, you’ll need it when the Lonely Man comes calling. But with that said, color me impressed that you survived the depredations of Hell. Few could have managed to let go of their fears and pains enough to escape its claws.”

“What do you mean?” Lux asked.

She let Lux’s chin go. “We are the wardens of our own prisons, Miss Cornwguard. We forge our own chains out of guilt, self-hatred, and aimless misery. When you walked in, I could see the ghost of a man weighing you down. Now, that ghost is…gone.”

“Oh.” Lux chuckled and nodded while Jinx suddenly stiffened and started slashing a hand over her throat at Midnite from behind. “That wasn’t all me, exactly. I uhm, transitioned a while ago, but I guess I was still holding on to…to that other person that I never was. Jinx cast a spell that stripped that old name from me, though. Afterward, things in that place that tried to use that name against me lost a lot of their oomph.”

One eyebrow went up on Midnite’s broad face as she turned to look pointedly over Lux’s shoulder at Jinx before saying, “Is that so? Odd. I don’t recall a spell of that nature existing at all. Perhaps I could purchase this new sorcery from you, hm?”

Jinx rubbed the back of her neck awkwardly as Lux looked back at her with a soft frown. One that flickered, shifted, and Lux seemed to go through the five stages of grief in the space of about two seconds as she very clearly read the look on Jinx’s face.

“J-Jinx…?”

“It’s uh…look, Blondie, th-they were messin’ with ya.” Jinx stood and wrung her hands. “It really was in your head, y’know? I just…I just gave you a reason to see it, that’s a—”

She barely saw Lux move before she was out of the chair. Her fist connected with Jinx’s face, and the whole room spun as she was suddenly on the ground with Lux standing over her, hands curled into white-knuckled fists as she stood over Jinx with fury painting her features. It wasn’t just her tattoos that were glowing now. Her eyes had gone from blue to a shimmering opalescent and beneath her skin, veins of gold were running like liquid gold.

“YOU LIED TO ME?!”

“I-In my defense,” Jinx mumbled as she massaged her bruising face, “I’m a liar.”

“I…I cannot believe you just—! FUCK!” Lux turned and stormed out, leaving Jinx on the floor with an aching jaw and an aching heart.

“You,” Illaoi said flatly, “deserved that one.”

Jinx sighed and nodded. “Yeah, yeah…I know.”

Chapter Text

Lux didn’t stop until she was well outside of the warehouse that held Maman Midnite’s club and sanctum, standing on the sidewalk, and breathing hard enough that she had begun feeling lightheaded. Warmth misted from between her lips as she struggled with the surging rage that was threatening to boil over. She could literally see it as her tattoos shone a shade of gold that Lux could only call angry. And she was just so angry. She was furious! Jinx had lied to her! Not just about any little thing, either, but about something so important—so intimate— that all Lux wanted to do was pound that stupid smirk of her into paste.

Except she didn’t. Not really. She did and she didn’t. One moment, she was fantasizing about dragging Jinx to the top of the real Argent Park Plaza and pitching her off the top of it in a fit of pique, and the next, she wanted to curl up in the corner of a room and either vomit or die of shame. She hadn’t actually wanted to hit Jinx. Her temper had come out so fast and so fiercely, though, that before Lux had realized it, she was standing over the woman with bloody knuckles, getting ready to pound Jinx into next week.

Maybe it was her frayed nerves. Maybe it was because she’d just spent what felt like a week in actual Hell being chased around by a sentient fog made of pureed souls and hate. Maybe it was just…maybe Morgana was right.

Maybe there was something wrong with her.

There was a creak of a door, and Lux looked over her shoulder to find Jinx standing despondently in the shadows of the threshold, her eyes downcast and expression jarringly blank.

And there was an angry bruise forming on the left side of her face.

“Hey,” Jinx said tonelessly. “I uh, I can go if you want. Just uh, this is the only way out.”

Lux turned away from her as she went to the curb and collapsed down onto it before burying her face in her hands. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted…fuck, she didn’t know what she wanted.

No, that wasn’t exactly true.

Dropping her hands, she said, “You…you lied to me. And not just about—I…I could have forgiven a lot of lies, Jinx, but…” She hung her head and gestured gamely at the spot to her right.

She wasn’t entirely sure if she was thankful that Jinx took the offer. Her head was a mess, and it was, in no small part, Jinx’s fault. The upsetting part was that Jinx’s explanation was right on the dot; in her defense, she was a liar. This was something that Lux had known from the start. Jinx Constantine was a liar. She had lied to a lot of people, and even to herself. Maybe mostly to herself, in fact.

Not that that mattered.

Jinx sat miserably beside her, the coat she wore like armor now hanging around her like an ill-fitting cloak. Lux tried to muster up the energy to feel bad for her, but she just couldn’t. She was just… mad. She was hurt and betrayed and…

“You really took me for a ride, you know that?” Lux said quietly, lips tugging into a thin, mirthless smile. “You laid hands on me like a revival preacher, and I just ate it up. I never even questioned if it was real, I just believed.”

“Kinda the point,” Jinx said.

“But it was a lie!” Lux hissed that last word through her teeth as she turned to glare at Jinx bitterly. “You lied to me. You could have lied to me about almost anything else, Miss Constantine, but…you…you just—! I trusted you!”

Jinx nodded, and her expression cracked briefly, showing a glimpse of the real, wounded young woman beneath all the bluster and smirks. “What do you want me to do, Blondie? Apologize? I’ll spend the rest of my life sayin’ sorry if it’d help.” She looked over to meet Lux’s gaze. “Wanna hit me some more? Sisters know I deserve it. I’d let ya beat me black’n blue if I thought you’d get anything outta it.”

“But…?” Lux said flatly, somehow knowing what was coming.

“But I’d also do it again,” Jinx admitted, never looking away. “Because if I hadn’t, you’d probably’ve died. Worse than died, actually. Way worse. I don’t care if you hate me for that. S’long as you're alive to hate me, that’s good enough for me.”

“Did you ever consider just being honest?” Lux asked. “Or just…talking to me about it? Did it have to be a lie?”

“Do I look like a therapist, Blondie?” Jinx asked, showing the full force of that cracked mask finally as tears began spilling down her cheeks. “I don’t know how to help you, okay? I don’t know how to heal that kinda hurt! Fuck, I don’t know if anyone does! But…But I swear to you, Blondie, on the graves of all my fathers, that there ain’t no one in this world, be it mage, demon, or shitty mom, who can tell you who you are or aren’t, alright? My spells can’t make you ‘Lux’, because you’ve always been ‘Lux’. Even before you knew it, you were always Lux! I just…I just wanted you to believe it! The way I do!” She turned away and buried her face in her hands, shuddered, then sobbed out, “I’m sorry…”

Lux looked away, too. Tears were burning their way down her cheeks, blurring her vision as they fell like rain onto the asphalt between her legs. The truth was that Lux had never had particularly fantastic control over her temper. It was something she’d worked on for a long time. She even went to anger management courses for a full year to develop coping mechanisms for just that issue, and at that moment, it was taking everything she had not to just lash out.

In part because Jinx had a point.

“I really am sorry I lied to you,” Jinx repeated shakily. “And I’m really fuckin’ sorry I hurt you. I didn’t…I didn’t mean to. I know that means fuck-all after what I did, and if, after we handle all this shit with Old Man Fear, you never wanna see me again, I get it…”

Lux took in a deep breath through her teeth, then looked up to glare at Jinx as she said, “But—?”

For a moment, there was just silence.

The expression on Jinx’s face was glass-fragile, and in that instant, Lux thought she could see the girl underneath it all. A girl with no real friends—only enemies who were on her side that day—and no family who would speak to her. A girl who was completely alone in the world, and who had turned herself over to a demon-infested insane asylum just so she could find a way to live with herself after the last person who loved her died. Lux saw the girl who was still trying despite all that.

“But,” Jinx said slowly, “I love you, Blondie. Every Aspect and spirit as my witness, I love you!” She grit her teeth, then added, “And I lied again. I said that s’long as you're alive to hate me, that’s good enough for me, but it’s not, because nothin’ll ever be good enough for me again except you.” 

She looked up at Lux, eyes red and face tense with grief.

“I love you so much that it hurts,” Jinx cried. “And I’d give anything to take away the fact that I hurt you, okay? Anything but your life! But I love you too much for that, and that’s the Aspect’s honest, I swear! If you never believe another word outta my mouth, at least believe that! Please!”

And Lux wanted to believe her. She really, truly did.

But she didn’t. But she wanted to.

So that was why she said, “Prove it.”

“Tell me how,” Jinx said firmly, her eyes still red and teary.

“You said,” Lux started, “that there’s no spell or anything that can change who I am because I was always me, right? How can I believe that? For all I know, the only reason that dybbuk didn’t get into my meat suit is because I wasn’t doubting myself as much, and my soul is apparently half- angel.” She spat that last word like a curse. “So how can I believe that I get to decide who I am when my whole fucking life suggests otherwise?!”

Jinx looked away, lips pressed to a thin line as she visibly worked through that conundrum. If there was one thing that Lux could say she still admired about Jinx Constantine, it was that the woman truly didn’t believe in the word ‘impossible’. Everything, no matter how insane-sounding, was just a problem to be solved.

And to Lux’s surprise, Jinx looked back up at her as if she’d solved it.

“You said it the day we met,” Jinx began with a startling thread of confidence in her voice. “You said my name the day we met, remember?”

“Jinx?”

“The other name.”

Lux’s eyes widened, then, from memory, recited, “Powder ‘Jinx’ Constantine. Age, Twenty-Eight. Born in Zaun to Felicia and Connol Whately…” then she shook her head before asking, “But what does that prove?”

“It proves magic doesn’t care what name you were given when you were born,” Jinx said as she pulled her soapstone pendant from around her neck and held it out between them. “It cares about how much power is invested in the name!” She raised it, closed her eyes, and said, “I, Jinx Constantine, do hereby transfer all wards and protections upon myself to this idol. Ego maledicta constantinus, omnes fores resero et omnia sigilla solvo!”

There was a brief flash of light, then, before Lux could say a word, Jinx lunged forward and threw the thin copper chain over Lux’s head. She slapped her palm against the soapstone pendant, pressing it hard against Lux’s sternum, and in that moment, Lux realized what was going to happen. 

“I,” Jinx barked, “Jinx Constantine, do hereby transfer all wards and protections upon this idol to she who bears it! EGO MALEDICTA CONSTANTINUS, OMNES MUROS ERIGO ET OMNES DAEMONAS ABNEGO!”

It was like suddenly being surrounded by a fortress. Lux had never known what it would be like to be protected on such a scale, but now, with her eyes opened to magic, she could see it. She could see every single ward and seal ever crafted by the brilliant mage called Jinx Constantine for her own personal use as they were suddenly thrown up around her. Sigils and wards, gods of aversion and shuriman veils. They surrounded her in a network of unimaginable artistry, and, in every single line of every spell, she could see Jinx. She could see her power and creativity. She could see the blood, sweat, and tears that went into each spell.

She could see her love, all writ in the power of a chosen name.

Jinx Constantine.

Lux turned to her, her heart aching at the sight of them as they slowly faded into the background of her vision. They were still there, and Lux knew that if she just let her eyes fall into soft focus, she would be able to see them again, but even now, carved into the background of her own personal reality as they were, Lux knew they were there.

“See?” Jinx smiled desperately. “Whatever you put in is what you get out! That’s how magic works! The meaning and the power you invest in a name is the one that matters, and it’s all that matters unless you say otherwise!”

With shaky fingers, Lux touched the idol hanging from her neck. It was smooth and almost soft.

And it was warm.

Warmer…no, it was hot.

A bolt of panic shot through Lux’s heart as she looked up at Jinx in horror and said, “Wait, if all of your protections are on me, now, then what’s protecting you?”

Jinx opened her mouth to say something, then her eyes went wide, her jaw dropped, and terror sank into them both as a chilly fog descended upon them.

“Con…stan…tine…”

“Oh no,” Jinx muttered.

The city had gone silent, save for their breathing. The world had gone cold, save for the searing heat of the idol resting against Lux’s chest. They both stood sharply, moving back to back as the fog closed in around them like a claw. Lux could hear a faint, rhythmic ticking like a dog’s claws on metal floors, and a grotesque rattle that somehow contrived to sound both gristly and dry at the same time.

“Don’t leave my side, Blondie,” Jinx hissed as she reached down and grabbed Lux’s hand, and Lux squeezed back hard.

“Don’t you fucking leave mine, either, Miss Constantine.”

“Still mad at me, huh?”

“You’re damn right, I am.”

Lux looked left and right, trying to pick out shapes from the fog, but it was impossible. Everything seemed to be moving within it, and yet there was only that infernal ticking, moving slow and steady like it was advancing on them without ever actually showing itself!

“Just…” a rasping, flanged voice whispered as burning scarlet eyes appeared in the fog, “…a scarecrow…”

“BULL- SHIT,” Lux snarled.

“Don’t talk to it!” Jinx snapped. “Don’t acknowledge it! Remember?!”

Lux swore at herself and nodded. “To see is to be seen, to perceive is to be perceived.”

“To acknowledge,” Jinx said slowly, “is to be acknowledged.”

“Click and clatter.” It was getting louder. Getting closer.

Jinx was praying. Her voice was a low, chanting murmur that rose and fell in a complex cadence. Lux tried to focus on it, but she couldn’t! Fear was eating at her soul. Even if she couldn’t see it, she could feel it! She could feel the wrongness of it, violating the word with every step and every word and every breath! It was wrong, wrong, wrong!

“Scrap…and…crow.”

Folding her hands together, Lux forced her mind to narrow onto the lessons Jinx had drummed into her in hell. “Domina umbra,” she chanted. “Protect your wayward servants. Forget not the names of your faithful, but recall them in their darkest hour. Lead not the innocent unto danger, but deliver us from the begetting of demons!”

“King of Rags will eat you WHOLE!”

The fog shattered, and something immense burst from within it. It was huge and contorted, its limbs hung thick with ragged cloth patched to within an inch of its life. Where it moved, it brought not fog but pure darkness within it, its gangly, snapping limbs crashing against the dome of pure, golden light that Lux willed into existence around them.

In its wan illumination, Lux saw glimpses of it! She saw eyes upon eyes upon eyes, trapped in a writhing dark that itself was wrapped in a cage. She heard the jangle of scrap metal as claws with too many fingers and too many joints, all of which seemed to be made from rusted scrap metal, carved furrows into her shield.

“It won’t-die!” Voices screamed from within it, all coming from the same place and yet none sounding alike, and Lux’s soul recoiled from it. “Wh-y won’t it-die?!”

“FUCK!” Lux dropped to a knee, suddenly soaked in sweat as the End of Men pressed down on her. “JINX!”

“Buy me a little more time, Blondie!” Jinx barked.

Gritting her teeth, Lux nodded frantically as it cackled and hissed and screeched at it, grinding the asphalt and concrete to dust beneath its clawed feet. She could see eyes peering out at her, but none of them were in the right places. Its head, if she could even call it that, was a sloped beak-like shape draped in sackcloth with two holes punched into places where eyes conceivably ought to be, but were they even there?!

“The…The Sacred Sword commands you!” Lux thrust her left palm out. “The Veil of Sh-Shadows commands you! The Trickster…the Traveler…a-and the Warrior command you! Flee this pla—AAHH!”

One of its claws punched straight through the shield to stop inches from her face, scraping along searing blue and pink barriers of light that were forged from the will of one Jinx Constantine.

“GET DOWN, BLONDIE!”

Lux dropped, only to stare in horror as Jinx threw herself over the top of her and directly into Fiddlestick’s mutant arms. Her face and hands looked to be smeared with blood in strange symbols that hurt to look at. Lux only got the briefest glimpse of them before Fiddlesticks speared her through her chest and ribs.

But somehow, Jinx wasn’t dead.

Somehow, she was still chanting.

“S-Sanguinem, cor, mens, anima, s-spiritu illustrabimus!” Jinx spoke through a welter of blood pouring from between her lips. “A-Audi me servum tuum, v-vim tenetur ad h-hoc vase! Suppliciter precor, ut custo-d-diam mandata t-tua!”

Suddenly, Fiddlesticks stopped thrashing, and its body trembled as it stared at Jinx. Lux scrabbled away, jaw hanging open as the Ur-Demon lifted Jinx higher, several of its claws cored through her.

And yet, she was still casting.

Jinx reached out a shaking hand, cut with bloody sigils, that Lux only belatedly realized she must have carved  into her own body, and laid it on Fiddlesticks’ facsimile of a face.

“I breach thy bindings,” Jinx rasped, “and shroud this radiance to g-grant this darkness…p-passage.” Her arm fell limp as her lifeblood poured in a stream down from her to pool below her, and Lux could only watch in despair as Jinx spoke the last words through numbing lips. “I…offer thee…f-freedom…and my…humble soul…as thy…vessel…”

The marks on Jinx’s body began to glow like fiery brands for the briefest of moments, then abruptly turned black as pitch as, at the same instant, Fiddlesticks’ claptrap shape began to collapse and shatter. Dark smoke and pale fog alike poured from deep within it and into Jinx’s eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, and Jinx spasmed violently and horribly on the ends of its claws.

Those awful, rusted blades were the last things to fall away, and they brought Jinx down with them to strike the fractured concrete in a messy pile of flesh and metal limbs as, slowly, the fog began to abate.

Lux stared for several agonizingly long seconds, waiting and praying. Her stupor only broke when the door to the warehouse slammed open, revealing Maman Midnite, who wore a contemptuous, raging expression on her face. It was the purest form of rage Lux had ever seen, and it was almost alien on the larger woman’s broad face.

“Jinx Constantine,” Illaoi hissed. “You absolute fool!”

Jinx twitched, then coughed, and Lux let out a sob of relief as she scrabbled over and rolled Jinx onto her back. A switchblade fell from her fingers, and the scarification marks she’d made had seared themselves into twisting vines around her face and hands, and to Lux’s horror, they seemed to writhing.

And growing.

With a wet crunch, Jinx pulled the deformed claw from her chest and threw it aside, Lux goggled as she watched Jinx’s flesh close around the mortal wounds like soft clay.

“What…Jinx?” Lux looked at her terror. “What did you do?!”

“What I had to, Blondie,” Jinx said wearily, her eyes already going bloodshot, and laid her hand on Lux’s forearm tattoos. “Ol’ Fiddle’s mean and strong, but not really all that smart when ya get right down to it. He couldn’t resist the offer of a real, living host. Now, you just gotta finish the job.” She dragged Lux’s hand over to lay across her heart. “Shine that light one more time and burn this sucker outta the world once and for all.”

Lux sobbed, then looked up to Illaoi, who just turned away and grimaced. Looking back to Jinx, she asked, “A-And you? What happens to you?!”

Jinx just shrugged. “It’s the way it is, Blondie. We all sell our souls sooner’r later. And y’know what?” She reached up to stroke Lux’s cheek. “I think I got a pretty good deal for this raggedy old thing.”

Lowering her head, she pressed it to Jinx's chest.

She stayed there for what might have been hours, but was probably just a couple of minutes at most. Then, she raised her head and glared at Jinx and said, “No.” She looked up Illaoi. “Midnite. How long do we have?”

Illaoi raised an eyebrow. “For the End of Men to overcome Jinx fully? A day, I’d say. Then, she becomes the vessel for the apocalypse, and the world as we know it ends as the Ur-Demon is allowed to freely wield his power on the plane of mortals.”

“A day,” Lux repeated quietly.

“Thirty-six hours on the outside,” Illaoi amended.

Lux nodded, then looked down at Jinx, who was frowning and shaking her head. “N-No, Blondie, just—!”

“Shut. Up.” Lux spoke as flat and hard as she ever had, and Jinx pinned her mouth shut while Lux stood, carrying Jinx in her arms as she glared down at her. “You don’t get a say in this, understand? You don’t get to tell me any more lies or give me any more orders. From now on, I say what goes, and I say that this time, you live. And do you know why?!”

“Uh…no?”

“Because”—Lux leaned in until they were almost nose to nose—“I’m still mad at you.” Then she looked up at Illaoi and asked, “Do you have a car hiding around here somewhere?”

Illaoi nodded to the left. “Around back, why?”

“I need you to get me and my dipshit here to the Silver Heights.”

“And I should do this, why?”

There was an unsubtle pulse of power, and the air abruptly grew at least five degrees hotter as Lux felt waves of gold flame begin rolling off of her. She took one step, then two, then three, until she was squared up against Illaoi, eyes blazing, with Jinx cradled in her arms.

“Ask me that again,” Lux said, her voice echoing strangely in the open air. “I fucking dare you.”

For a moment, she really thought Illaoi was about to do just that. Then the woman’s broad face split into a wide smile, and she said, “Ah, now you are finally and truly in motion. Nagakabouros accepts this test of your spirit. We shall see who pays the price, though. Where in the Heights are we going, hm?”

“The Crownguard Estate,” Lux said. “I need to speak to my mother.”

Chapter Text

It took absolutely everything Lux had to ignore Jinx’s screams as she writhed in agony on a mat on the floor of Maman Midnite’s warehouse, as she armed herself for what she was becoming increasingly certain would be her last battle. Not only that, her plan—if one could call it that—hinged entirely on what could generously be called a fucking guess.

Jinx would be so proud.

“Do you even know how to perform an exorcism?” Illaoi asked from where she was leaning against the wall, watching in faint amusement.

“Technically, yeah,” Lux said. “Jinx taught me everything while we were in Hell.”

“And you remember it all?”

Lux looked up at her and smiled thinly. “I have a perfect memory. I always have. I can look at a photo and recall it flawlessly. Read a textbook page and then, later, close my eyes and see it as if it were right in front of me. So yes, I remember.”

“A rare gift,” Illaoi admitted. “And a dangerous one for a mage to possess. But I remind you, you are unordained, and you are intending to conduct an unsanctioned ritual.”

But Lux shook her head. “You’re right, I’m no priestess of the Protector or the Lady, but there’s an exception to that rule,” she said. “There are historical records of people performing just such rituals unordained and outside church sanction. People who have experienced divine revelations.” Her smile hardened. “If going to Hell, meeting the Lady of Shadows herself, and then finding out I’m descended from one of the Holy Sisters doesn’t count, then I’ll eat my fucking badge.”

Illaoi let out a bark of a laugh. “Luxanna Crownguard, you are a ferocious woman,” she said, grinning wide as she straightened and walked over to a shelf. She sifted through it, then opened a box and pulled out an amulet of enfolding wings covering a downthrust sword suspended from a fine gold chain, and held it out. “This is the Icon of Saint Lumina the Wise, an ecstatic who was burned at the stake for claiming visions of the Winged Protector. She was canonized after onlookers claimed a golden figure wrapped her in its wings and carried away her soul. It contains one of her fingerbones, and has been known to be able to bless any and all commonly occurring water—even rain—in the hands of the unordained.”

She tossed it to Lux, who caught it and turned it over in her hand. It felt almost warm to the touch, and there was something about it that resonated with her. The fragment of her soul that came from her divine parent, Lux guessed. Or maybe it was something else. Aspects only knew.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!”

Jinx’s scream echoed horribly, and Lux clenched her jaw before stuffing the icon into her pocket. She grabbed a sack and began throwing in anything else that she could think of that she might need from Illaoi’s stores; containers of sanctified salt from Shurima. Water from an Ionian spirit pool. Seeds of an Ixtali mother tree. She wasn’t even sure how much of it she would use, but another rule Jinx had drummed into her was something she called ‘the condom rule’. 

That is: better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.

“Miss Crownguard, take this, too.” Illaoi held out a long, knee-length coat of dark blue wool. “It belonged to a prolific exorcist of the Protector named Father Karras. Supposedly, he blessed it before every confrontation. It may yet hold some protection for you.”

I’ll take what I can get,” Lux said, grabbing the coat and throwing it on. It sat oddly comfortably on her shoulders, and she moved the icon from her pants pocket to the inner pocket of the coat. “Now, unless you’ve got any other ideas, let’s get moving.”

Jinx arched her back as she convulsed again, her eyes wide and unseeing as those black vines continued to crawl inexorably inward toward her heart like cancerous veins.

Scooping her up, Lux cradled her close as she stormed out of the warehouse and up toward the street level, where Maman Midnite’s personal limousine waited, idling at the curb. Jinx sobbed wordlessly as she jerked, moaned, and cried out in Lux’s arms.

“Don’t you fucking give up on me, Miss Constantine,” Lux said through her teeth as she ascended the stairs. “I haven’t forgiven you yet, and I am not letting you off the hook this easily.”

The driver was a Buhru man who was nearly as tall as Illaoi herself and dressed sharply in a suit and tie. He opened the rearmost doors for Lux, apparently unfazed by the thrashing woman in Lux’s arms. Lux just nodded at him in thanks as she slid into the back seat, which proved to be a luxuriously appointed space wide enough for both Lux and Illaoi to seat themselves comfortably spaced apart, with Jinx lying supine, her head in Lux’s lap.

Snow was still falling in light flurries over Silvermere as they departed from the warehouse, but ever since Jinx had taken Fiddlesticks into her soul, it had abruptly become far more reasonable. Lux could only wonder what the local weather reporters were making of the jarring changes in the local patterns. It would be funny if everything weren’t so god damn dire.

Lux ran her fingers gently through Jinx’s sweat-matted hair as she forced herself not to give in to the tempest of emotions that were threatening to overwhelm her in the face of what she was about to do. She hated speaking to her mother on a good day, and today was not a good day.

“Curious,” Illaoi said quietly, and Lux looked up to find Maman Midnite observing her quizzically.

“What is?”

Illaoi nodded toward Jinx. “That you are so worried for her,” she said. “Not for the world. Not for what her idiotic soul-binding has threatened our whole reality with. You are worried for her.”

“And?” Lux asked flatly.

“She betrayed you,” Illaoi replied casually. “She lied to you and hurt you to your soul. Do not think I cannot see it. Nagakabouros sees all.”

Lux sighed quietly as she continued to stroke Jinx’s hair while the woman shivered, spasmed, and occasionally thrashed. She took Jinx’s hand as it flailed, gripping it tight, and Jinx instantly squeezed for all she was worth, despite not seeming even partially cognizant.

“But was she wrong to do it?” Lux said finally, her eyes fixed on Jinx’s feverish expression as those springberry irises darted back and forth wildly. She felt awful about the thought she had in that moment, but not for love or money, Lux realized, did she want to know whatever it was Jinx was seeing. Whatever Fiddlesticks was making her see.

Illaoi clicked her tongue, then leaned forward, reached across the space between them, and her palm over Jinx’s face. “In’ako sho, Naga bouros. Tua-shak yaoto. Tua-shak, yaoto, homu."

Jinx trembled violently, then went slack, her eyes rolling back in her skull as her jaw. Lux frowned and turned a glare onto Maman Midnite. “What did you do?”

“Submerged her mind in the waters of Nagakobouros,” Illaoi replied as she relaxed back into her seat. “The Mother Serpent cares little for the lives and deaths of mortals, but she despises the Ur-Demon for his nature. It amuses her to hide his prey from him. It will buy us a little more time and ease her torment for the moment.”

Angry as she still was, Lux couldn’t help but let out a shaky breath as she nodded and whispered, “Thank you.”

“Now tell me why you are so willing to forgive her transgressions, hm?” Illaoi continued, her manner annoyingly casual considering they were on the cusp of armageddon. “Jinx Constantine, in my experience, is a difficult woman to forgive, though she makes it quite easy to look past grudges for the sake of the moment. But that is not what this is, is it?”

Lux shook her head as she ran her thumb up and down Jinx’s knuckles. Her fingers were thin and seemed oddly delicate for how much strength Lux knew they possessed. It was the same with everything about Jinx. She appeared so brittle, and yet, when the chips were down, she would prove to be completely unyielding. For however bitter or angry Lux was feeling toward Jinx, there was an air about her of something legendary.

Something heroic, but perhaps more in the Targonian sense.

Heroes in those old legends were crude and deeply flawed people. Incredible people, true, but not necessarily good. They made mistakes, hurt the ones they loved, and when they failed, they failed and spectacularly and legendarily as ever they succeeded.

That was Jinx Constantine.

“I’m going to venture a guess and say you know what my job is, is that right?” Lux began quietly, and Illaoi nodded. “Well, then you know that part of my job is being able to be in the heads of other people. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I’d say I’m probably better at that part of the job—and many others—than most of SPD’s more tenured detectives.”

“I looked into your records and your past while you were drifting amongst the shoals of hell,” Illaoi said unabashedly. “I would agree with your summation.”

Lux laughed softly before bringing Jinx’s hand to her lips to kiss the pale, scarred fingers, then lowered them and said, “Jinx, to me, is someone who is fundamentally and, perhaps crucially to her character, a failure. But she’s also someone who, in a phrase, fails forward.”

“Hm.” Illaoi smiled and let out a low chuckle. “Again, I would agree.”

“The longer I spend with her,” Lux continued, “the more I realize how much she cares, and how much caring hurts her, because she knows that caring doesn’t save the world. Actions do, and maybe you act because you care, but just caring doesn’t solve problems.” She finally looked up from Jinx to Maman Midnite. “I don’t think Jinx is a good person, and honestly, I’m still really angry at her. But I also think that I could probably spend my whole life looking, and not find someone capable of loving me more and better than Jinx Constantine. So even given how mad I am, the reason I want to save her is because I don’t want to lose her, and that’s really all there is to it. Sorry if that’s…disappointing.”

Illaoi just chuckled again as she turned to look out the window at the passing city. Lux looked, too, and realized they had passed out of the inner city and were well on their way to the Heights. There was so little traffic. Maybe because of the snow, but maybe because the animal sense that all human beings had told them that the world beyond their doors had become unaccountably hostile in a way that most of them could not understand.

“I am the furthest thing from disappointed, Miss Crownguard,” Illaoi said with a grin that showed the whites of her teeth in sharp contrast to her dark skin. “The longer you spend in the dark world that Constantine and I make our beds in, the more you understand that the simplest reasons are often the most powerful and compelling of all. Ideals are all well and good, but you cannot eat them, drink them, or make love to them. Hold to your simple reasons, Miss Crownguard. Hold them tight. Because I suspect you will need them before the day’s end.”

Lux curled her fingers tightly around Jinx’s hand, holding it steady as she watched the woman she’d fallen infuriatingly in love with fight for her life and soul against the First of All Fears. She watched and tried not to imagine what it would be like if she failed, and on the heels of that, wondered how many times Jinx must have sat somewhere, fingers laced, staring at the ground, wondering the same thing.

“I suspect you’re right, Maman,” Lux said quietly.

The rest of the drive was made in silence until they reached the Crownguard Estate. It was surrounded by high walls and manned by a PMCs worth of private security. Illaoi instructed her driver to bring them straight up to the front gate as if they belonged there.

Predictably, they were stopped, and one of the guards came out and spoke briefly to the driver, then went down to the rear doors as the Lux lowered the tinted, bulletproof windows and leaned out to meet the guard’s eyes.

“Erich, open the gates,” Lux said, and the guard immediately went ramrod straight.

“Luc—th-that is, uh m—”

“Just open the fucking gate.”

“Right.” Erich bobbed his head and scrambled back toward the guardhouse while Lux raised the window. 

She looked to Illaoi and said, “That man is former special forces. He’s led a half-dozen different combat teams on over forty missions, can dismantle and reassemble pretty much every gun I’ve ever heard of, and he still can’t get my fucking name right.”

“My condolences,” Illaoi said with a leonine smile. “But at least in this case, his embarrassment works in our favor. He will hurry us along.”

“Huzzah,” Lux said flatly.

But she was right. The gates rolled open on oiled tracks, letting the limo inside. The road up to the mansion itself was a winding thing designed to show off the Crownguard family’s vast, manicured acreage to anyone who might be visiting. It was an inconvenient power move, and one that Lux had long since stopped appreciating. There was nothing admirable about the grounds. It was all perfectly trimmed, plucked, and weeded to within an inch of its life, and about as natural as a Botox injection.

The manor house itself was exactly as Lux remembered it from its mirror in Hell, except that all the windows were intact and the lawn wasn’t dead. She thought that version of the manor and its estate grounds felt more honest. At least that version of her childhood home looked as miserable as it actually was.

They pulled up in the roundabout in front of the doors, and Lux stepped out. Jinx had started breathing hard again, her whole face was tense and contorted in fear, and every so often, she would spasm or jerk like she was in the throes of a nightmare. Whatever Illaoi had done, it was wearing off.

“Do you mind carrying her in?” Lux asked.

Illaoi just shrugged. “It won’t be the first time I’ve had to carry her unconscious ass somewhere,” she replied as she scooped Jinx up, who looked almost comically frail next to Maman Midnite’s vital and dynamic frame. “Lead the way, Miss Crownguard.”

“In and out,” Lux mumbled as she took a deep breath and circled around to the doors, punched in the code, and threw them open with a boom. The fucking diamond chandelier was still hanging from the foyer ceiling.

“Miss.” A young woman about Lux’s age, wearing a maid’s uniform, came bustling down the foyer steps in a hurry.

Lux closed the distance, feeling some of the edge of her mood wear duller as she opened her arms. “Alise, it’s good to see you.”

She pulled the woman who had once been her personal maid into her arms and hugged her tight. Alise Eddelbright was one of the few people in her mother’s employ who always named and gendered her correctly, in part because, for the longest time, Alise had been her only real friend.

Stepping back, Alise cleared her throat and straightened her skirts. She was a warm and lovely person, but also someone who very much believed in old manners and the way one should treat—and be treated by—one’s employer. “It’s good to see you again, Miss. Your mother is on her way down. Is everything alright? You…”

“I would never come here if it weren’t an emergency, I know,” Lux said with a thin smile. “You don’t have to sugarcoat it.”

“Are you alright?” Alise asked more intently, lowering her voice.

Pressing her lips to a thin line, Lux considered how to answer that question without coming off as a complete lunatic. Eventually, she settled on, “No, not really. In fact, none of us are, but I’m handling it. Let my mother know that my guests and I will be in the east parlor, and that we need to talk about some matters of my…heritage.”

Alise raised an eyebrow. “Your heritage, Miss?”

“She’ll know what I mean,” Lux said, putting a hand on Alise’s shoulder and squeezing once, then adding, “And once you send her over, you should go. And I mean go. You and everyone else should go home.”

Her former childhood maid straightened her back and frowned. “With all due respect, Miss, if something is going on, then I want to he—”

Lux moved too quickly for Alise to reach, pressing her thumb directly over Alise’s ‘third eye’ on her brow and taking a hard grip on her head as she murmured, “Somni, somni, somni et obedite!”

Alise’s jaw went slack, and her eyes fixed on nothing in particular. She looked, for all the world, as if she had fallen asleep with her eyes wide open and standing upright.

“When my mother comes down,” Lux said, still holding her thumb to Alise’s brow, “you will send her to the east parlor, then you will gather the other serving staff, send them home, and you will also go home.”

“Yes, Miss,” Alise said dully.

Lux lowered her hand, feeling sick to her stomach as she turned away from her oldest friend that she’d just brute-forced control over and went to the east parlor. She threw the doors open and made a beeline for the liquor cabinet.

Illaoi followed her in, elbowed the door closed behind her, then adjusted Jinx in her arms before saying, “That was textbook Constantine.”

Lux froze halfway through uncapping a decanter full of obscenely expensive brandy, but she didn’t reply. She just clenched her jaw, finished what she was doing, then poured herself two fingers of alcohol that most people wouldn’t be able to afford a sip of, and slugged it back like it was bottom-shelf vodka.

Setting the glass down onto the varnished counter of dark mahogany, Lux turned to take in the opulence of what was only one of her family’s sitting rooms. Not even one of the nice ones, either. It was one that was specifically meant to receive guests. The family had other, better rooms like this on the upper floors, yet it was still nicer than some people’s entire houses. The furniture was all heirloom grade and hand-crafted, made from hardwood in the case of the desks, chairs, tables, and shelves, and in the case of the couches, cushioned with down.

The shelves were filled with properly stuffy books. Mostly literary classics, but also volumes or philosophy, rhetoric, political ideology (only the ‘right kinds’ of course) as well as biographies and autobiographies mostly written by the world’s most tedious people: politicians.

No small number of them were written by members of her family tree.

Illaoi was just laying Jinx down on one of the couches when the parlor door opened, revealing the nearly-sleepwalking Alise. She stepped out of the way to permit the one person that Lux would have been happiest never seeing nor talking to again if she had her druthers.

Augatha Crownguard was a study in classical beauty, fine-boned and flaxen blonde, with bright, sharp, merciless blue eyes, and a perfectly straight nose. Jarringly, she was dressed just as the dybbuk had been in hell.

“Mother,” Lux said, nodding to her.

“Lucius,” Augatha replied as she entered, flicking her fingers to dismiss Alise, who departed without comment to execute the rest of Lux’s implanted orders. “Welcome home.”

Lux sighed, massaged her temples, as she approached her mother, getting closer to the woman than she had in almost a decade. Only once she was in arm’s reach did she drop her arm, look her mother in the eye, and then lash out to seize her by the neck and lift her, one-armed, off her feet.

“Nomen mihi est Luxanna Coronata! Et filia Protectoria!” Lux snarled, tightening her grip. Then repeated in demacian, “I am Luxanna the Crowned! Daughter of the Protector! And you”—she shook her flailing, choking mother like she was a rag doll—“are going to explain exactly why I am what I am, and if you don’t, then, hand to Mihira, I swear I will kill you!”

Augatha thrashed and clawed at her daughter’s fist, but only managed to leave a few red, bloody lines in Lux’s skin before she raised Augatha another inch up, then slammed her down to the ground, beating the breath from her lungs. Lux kept her pinned by her neck as she knelt down on one of her mother’s arms, pressing a knee to the elbow just hard enough to make it uncomfortably clear how breakable the joint was.

Then she moved her hand from her mother’s bruised neck, grabbed Augatha’s other, flailing hand by the wrist, and gripped hard enough that the bone crackled.

“Do not,” Lux snarled as she put a little more weight on the pinned elbow, “test me, mother.”

“A-Are you insane?!” Augatha rasped, eyes wide with the animal fear that came from realizing all of your money and power and threats meant nothing when someone had you by the short and curlies.

Something popped as Lux put her weight down, and at the same time, clamped a hand over her mother’s mouth, muffling her cry. “You spent my entire childhood torturing me,” Lux hissed. “You treated me like I had a mental illness any time I stepped even slightly outside of the lines you’d laid down. Any hint that I wasn’t the son you’d deluded yourself into thinking I was was met with instant backlash, and you know what? I always just thought it was because you were a horrible mother and a horrible person, but now?” She put a little more weight down, and Augatha let out a muffled keening noise. “Now, I know what I am, and I want to know how and why.”

There were tears in her mother’s eyes now, and under Lux’s grip, she was frantically and jerkily nodding. Slowly, Lux began moving her hand away, her glare and the weight of her knee informing Augatha Crownguard in no uncertain terms of what would happen if she tried to call for help.

“Talk,” Lux spat.

“I-It wasn’t my fault!” Augatha gasped desperately. “Th-The Six Families have guided the Kingdom of Demacia for over a millennium! Do you think we got this powerful by happenstance?”

Lux scowled. “Kingdom? We’re a republic, mother.”

She scoffed. “Are we?” Augatha sneered. “Think! You stupid child! How many Lightshields, Durands, Crownguards, Buvelles, Laurents, and Fortis occupy our positions of power? How many centuries worth of family dynasties collectively control our country’s wealth, power, and political landscape? Demacia has remained as it has always been, since time immemorial, and we, Crownguards, are blessed to very nearly be first among equals!

“Governors and mayors are elected with our campaign money. City council salaries are paid for from our coffers! Dauntless Corporation! Durand Architectural & Real Estate! Lightshield Law & Financial! The Buvelles own every major theatre and hold the purse strings of our best schools! Fortis has a majority share in every research and development lab worth the name! The Laurent family controls one half of the military, while we control the other half! And you still think we’re a bloody republic?!”

“Tha-that’s…” Lux shook her head, then laughed mirthlessly. “Fuck, no wonder this country is so fucking regressive.” Then she scowled. “But what the fuck does that have to do with me?! Why me?!”

“I. Don’t. Know,” Augatha snarled, finally showing some teeth as she leaned forward toward her daughter. “But our stewardship of this country has always been divinely mandated! The Protector Herself guides us! So when she descended in glory one night during our secret mass—”

“—oh, and we’re in a cult, too? Fantastic—!”

“—she came to us!” Augatha said over Lux’s commentary. “To me! She extended her hand to me! She explained how our world has descended into sin and anarchy! And while she could not defy the laws of the Holy Mother Mihira, she could give us the means to bring this world back into the light by our own power! She gave us—gave me— you!”

“I…b-but where did I come from?!”

Augatha narrowed her eyes at Lux as if she were stupid. “Has your brain become so addled by those poisons you take to distort your holy form that you forgot your own baby pictures?”

Lux stared at her dumbly, then said, “Wait, so…okay, let me get this straight.” She held a finger up. “Kayle, the Holy Protector, descended in ‘glory’ during one of you and your weird monarchy cult’s get-togethers,” she held up another finger, “told you all that the world had gone to shit and she was going to fix it.” Another finger. “Then…what? Immaculate conception?”

At that, Augatha looked away. “It wasn’t precisely…immaculate,” she said quietly.

“Not…oh.” Lux leaned back. “O…oh.” She shuddered before saying, “Well, I can’t express to you how happy I am to be the family disappointment. What was the plan? Hm? Raise me to be some kind of messiah? Make me president? Then pull a good old Targonian reacharound, fake a war, pass some emergency powers, and make me dictator for life? All while neatly tied up in your batshit cult’s puppet strings?! Was that the fucking plan!?”

“You could have saved the world,” Augatha said through her teeth. “And you still can! Kayle will still take you back!”

“Funny you should mention that,” Lux said flatly as she grabbed her mother by the jaw. “Because I want you to set up a meeting.”

Chapter Text

Lux walked alongside her mother out the back of the manor house toward the greenhouse, which Lux had rarely spent much time in. It had always been her mother’s haven, so she made a point of avoiding it. The family library had always been her sanctum, and she recalled whole days spent lost in the stories contained therein.

It was the only place in the house where frivolities like fantasy and science fiction novels were tolerated, mostly because only family members or very close friends would be allowed inside. It wouldn’t do to allow the public to see anything but a perfectly serious face, devoid of any and all humor or signs of life, after all.

“I couldn’t help but notice,” Augatha said, still massaging her bruised throat as they made their way toward the greenhouse, “a distinct lack of servants as we left the house. Your doing, I suppose?”

“Better they not be here for this,” Lux replied simply.

“Interesting. And your friends?”

Lux looked back over her shoulder at Maman Midnite, who was still following along, both amused and seemingly content to watch the interplay between mother and daughter. Her sea-green eyes had a calculating light to them, as if she were taking everything in and filing it away for future use. Jinx, as ever, was curled into a shaking ball in Illaoi’s arms, sweating and moaning.

Turning back to the path, Lux said, “Maman Midnite is an associate, and that…that’s my girlfriend.”

Augatha clicked her tongue. “She seems…unwell.”

“She’s possessed.”

Augatha came to a stuttering stop and turned to stare up at Lux, eyes wide and enraged. “You brought an unclean spirit into this house?!”

Lux turned on her mother, wrath painted across her features. “She’s possessed because she saved me from the First of All Fears, mother! It came after me to try and eat my light! You know! The one you couldn’t be arsed to tell me about! It came for me! And she”—Lux pointed sharply at Jinx’s shivering form—“used her own body to seal it away, and then told me to kill her to send it back to the dark it came from!”

Honestly, Lux was a little surprised to see her mother’s expression soften slightly as she turned to eye Jinx briefly, then looked back to Lux and said, “Then why didn’t you?”

Lux worked her jaw soundlessly for a moment, unable to countenance what had just come out of her mother’s mouth. Really, by this point, she thought she would have stopped being surprised when her mother unveiled some new and loathesome side of her personality, but some part of her kept hoping to hear or see something redeemable in the woman who had borne her. Instead, after hearing that Jinx had sacrificed herself, body and soul, to protect her daughter, Augatha’s reaction was simply to wonder why Lux hadn’t simply scrubbed her out and moved on.

“No wonder father can’t stand you,” Lux said bitterly.

Augatha scoffed. “Pieter and I have a perfectly suitable arrangement. He lives his life and I live mine.”

“Actually,” Lux said as they started walking again, “I know I said it before, but it just hit me. Pieter Crownguard really isn’t my father, is he? Aspects, no wonder he was always so cold to me. He knew I wasn’t his.”

“Pieter never approved of the organization’s plans for you,” Augatha said as they reached the greenhouse and she unlocked it. “He and his sister’s interference is the only reason you weren’t raised properly, and were permitted to do”—she cast a dark look back at Lux—“that to yourself.”

Lux stopped cold in the doorway, the slap of humid air filling the greenhouse harsh against her face compared to the snowy chill of the outside. She stared at her mother, unable to process what she had just heard.

“My—Pieter Crownguard,” Lux corrected, “never gave me the time of day! Only Auntie Tia was ever on my side!”

“Your ignorance is truly astounding,” Augatha said flatly as she led them into the greenhouse, past rows of exotic plants in riots of colors normally unseen in the depths of winter. “If not for Pieter and Tianna’s interference, I assure you, your indiscretions would never have been tolerated. You would have been forged into precisely the force of divine purity that the Holy Protector intended. But, instead, Pieter used his influence with the other families to convince them to ‘wait and see’, while his sister kept an eye on you. Apathy, in my opinion. Laziness and apathy.”

If it weren’t for Jinx suddenly crying out behind her, Lux would have pursued that line of questioning doggedly. There was so much going on behind the curtain of her life that she’d never been privy to, but now wasn’t the time to dig into it. Right now, she was on a clock, and the world—and Jinx—were counting on her not to fail.

Aspects, was this how Jinx lived her whole life?

“I don’t have time for this,” Lux said, straightening and storming into the greenhouse after her mother. “Take us to where I can speak to Kayle!”

Augatha made a small noise in the back of her throat as she gestured forward, “Follow me, then.”

The greenhouse itself was bigger than most people’s houses. It was certainly bigger than Lux’s. It was expertly kept, and of all the things Lux could say about her mother, she could never claim the woman didn’t have a green thumb. Strange that someone who was so shit at being a mother would be so good at caring for plants. Maybe because plants didn’t talk back. On the other hand, Lux could barely keep a succulent alive, which was almost impressive but for different, more depressing reasons.

Eventually, though, they reached the center. It was a fountain. Lux had visited it a few times on the rare occasions when she’d been required to speak to her mother in the greenhouse rather than anywhere else, and as much as Lux had always hated coming to her mother’s domain, she had always loved the fountain for its artistry. The whole of it was expertly carved from marble, and the base depicted beautiful scenes from the gospels of the Protector. Whether or not Lux had ever been particularly pious, she had always been able to appreciate the beauty of the work that went into things. One didn’t need to be a fanatic to appreciate the prose and poetry of a religious work.

Now, though, it carried a different meaning.

Her mother knelt to one knee, reached past the rim of the fountain and underneath the interior lip of it, and pressed something. There was a mechanical click, followed by a grinding of stone on stone, and Lux watched as the stone floor to the left of the fountain began collapsing into a stairwell.

“That isn’t a new addition, is it?” Lux asked.

“No,” Augatha replied reverently. “This holy place has been here for longer than even the foundations of the original estate, laid down in the times of the king nearly a thousand years ago. Not even I know how old it truly is.”

“Older than either of you might imagine,” Illaoi said, finally breaking her silence. “This place was not constructed by mortal hands.”

That drew a look of something between concern and offense from Augatha, maybe because it suggested that Illaoi—clearly not a worshipper of the Protector—might know more about her supposed holy grounds than even she did. Then again, that might not be a particularly high bar to clear. Augatha Crownguard was many things, but an academic had never been among them.

Lux reached out to lay a hand on Jinx’s fevered face, wincing at the alarming chill she felt beneath the trembling woman’s skin, then turned to her mother and said, “Move.”

They descended into the depths quickly and with significantly less pomp than Lux suspected those passages usually saw. What lay beneath the greenhouse and the Crownguard Estate itself was clearly some kind of shrine, and the deeper they went, the more Lux could understand what it was that Illaoi meant. There was something unsettling about the proportions of the halls and the steps they passed through, though it was so subtle that had Illaoi not mentioned it, she might not have noticed.

The size of it all was just slightly too large to be natural for human stature, though. The steps were inches too wide and broad. It wasn’t just a matter of grandiose scale, either. If that were the case, then Lux might have understood if the place was oversized. The catacombs her mother led them down into didn’t give the impression of grandiosity, though.

Rather, it seemed more like whoever had built them had simply been unnaturally large and were just building for their own comfort. It was the sheer casual nature of the size that unsettled more than anything.

Inhuman indeed.

The lowest levels had clearly been furnished by humans, though. There were tables, chairs, and comfortable sitting arrangements, all of which contrived to look almost like toy furniture in comparison to the scales of the rooms themselves. They passed those without comment, and with every step, Jinx became increasingly disturbed. Her spasming turned to thrashing, and every so often the dark and stony halls echoed with her screams, until finally…

“Here,” Augatha said, her voice still reverent and low as she guided them past a too-large archway decorated with symbols that came from nothing Demacian.

They stepped into a circular space capped by a stone dome, and the shapes carved into it made Lux’s stomach turn. She could pick out angelic figures as well as demonic ones, but there were other things, too. Things with less definite shapes and forms

The floor, though, was what really drew Lux’s attention.

Falling to her knees, she laid her hand flat against the intricate circles and sigils carved into the striated black and white marble floor. The symbols were almost impossible to make out amongst the natural coloration, but they were definitely there.

“Enochian,” Lux murmured, then looked up to her mother. “This script is Enochian! The language of the angels!”

“Color me impressed,” Augatha said, and she actually looked it for once. 

Lux scoffed. “You’d be more impressed with her.” She nodded toward Jinx. “Thanks to her, I can recognize it, but she can actually read it.”

“No one can read Enochian, Lu—” Lux drew her sidearm, flicked the safety off, and thumbed back the hammer without looking up. “Hmph. As I was saying, no one can—”

“Sure, I can.”

Lux jerked upright and whipped around to find Jinx climbing down from Illaoi’s arms. She was bloodlessly pale, with black veins criss-crossing every inch of visible skin, while her eyes had a sick, jaundiced look to them. But she was conscious! “J-Jinx?!”

“Not much time left, Blondie,” Jinx muttered drunkenly as she stumbled over to Lux’s side. “Old Man Fear’s almost got everything he wants. Guessin’ I’ve got an hour, tops, then we’re fucked.”

“A-An hour?!” Lux turned to Illaoi in horror. “You said a day!”

“It was an educated guess,” she admitted.

Jinx waved her hand dismissively. “Mighta been a day or more when this whole shit started, but Fiddle’s been eatin’ pretty good. He’s ten times stronger than he was before, and now that he’s got my meat suit, he’s not bleeding power everywhere.”

“And you are?” Augatha asked, crooking an eyebrow.

Jinx smirked at her and stuck out a hand. “Jinx Constantine, exorcist, demonologist, and shitty dabbler in the dark arts. And you must be Mama Crownguard.”

“Charmed, I’m sure,” Augatha replied with a look on her face like Jinx had just crawled out from under some particularly moist rock and vomited on her shoes.

Unsurprisingly, she ignored the proffered hand.

“Wait.” Lux flicked the safety back on, holstered her gun, and reached out to grab Jinx’s arm. “If you’ve got so little time, then how are you even conscious?”

Jinx sighed and turned back to her, rubbing the back of her neck as she did. She looked worse than bad. If Lux had come across Jinx in this state but unconscious, she might’ve assumed the woman was dead.

“Y’ever heard the term ‘terminal lucidity’ before?” Jinx asked quietly, and Lux shook her head. “It’s when someone who’s dying suddenly gets this upswing outta nowhere. They look totally normal for a bit, have plenty of energy, and are completely lucid. Lasts anywhere from a day to uh…to about an hour.”

“Dying?” Lux repeated hollowly.

“I’ve got a god in my soul, Blondie,” Jinx said flatly. “And not one’a the good ones. Dying’s the least of my worries.” Then she dropped to her knees and started looking over the symbols and sigils. “Hey, Midnite, gimme a hand with this. The apocalypse ain’t a spectator sport.”

“Says you,” Illaoi replied, but she complied all the same, moving to kneel next to her.

Lux stepped back, finding herself, by happenstance, directly beside her mother. Oddly, Augatha seemed to be watching Jinx quite closely, her eyes narrowed in that way that suggested she was looking at something she wanted. It was a look Lux had grown uncomfortably used to, as it was a manner in which her mother had often looked at her, followed by a sigh of disappointment.

“Can she really read it?” Augatha asked suddenly.

“Absolutely,” Lux said with total conviction. “She can cast in it, too. The language is beautiful. Like…song. I don’t know how else to describe.”

“I know what you mean,” Augatha admitted. “I heard it often that night when Kayle chose me. Her voice was…powerful, but beautiful. Speaking and singing seemed to be one and same; like a choir layered over a commanding tone that I cannot fully describe.”

Then she turned to Lux and looked her up and down, and what shocked Lux the most was that, for the first time she could recall, her mother really seemed to be looking at her. Not Lucius Crownguard, nor the son she wished she’d had, nor the child she expected to enact some psychotic, messianic prophecy. For what might have been the first time in both of their lives, Augatha was looking at her.

“You…You look just like her,” Augatha said shakily.

Lux shook her head. “Who?”

“The Holy Protector.” Augatha breathed the title like a prayer. “She was beautiful, handsome, striking. She had many masculine features, yet was undeniably a woman. Perhaps I did judge…hastily.”

“I’m sorry, but did you just…apologize for treating me like a dumpster fire for practically my entire life?” Lux asked hollowly. “Because if so, that was the shittiest apology I’ve ever heard.

Looking away from her daughter, Augatha grimaced—a genuine show of emotion that seemed almost alien to the woman. “I only mean that perhaps you were meant to resemble her in other ways. Ways that do not easily conform to the…mortal body.”

“Guess Kayle can lay some serious pipe,” Jinx said from the floor.

Augatha turned to glare down at Jinx. “If you think to shock me with your casual blasphemy, you’ll have to do better than that,” she said.

“Just sayin’,” Jinx replied without turning around. 

“My fervor,” Augatha began, looking back to Lux, “Is not so crude. And given our apparent dire circumstances, I’ll admit to you that the truth of why Pieter and I are so distant is because the day I met Her was the day no mortal would ever be enough for me. I have served Her faithfully and with ardor all my life since that night, and I continue to serve Her now.”

“By bringing me to her doorstep,” Lux filled in bitterly.

Augatha nodded. “It was always meant to happen,” she said with a faintly superior smile. “Irritating as it is, it seems Pieter and his sister’s plan worked. For all you believe you are defying your destiny, here you are”—she gestured out and around them—“casually wielding your birthright and standing at your true mother and father’s doorstep, asking to be let in.”

“Eh, two outta three ain’t bad,” Jinx said, suddenly standing and clapping her hands together. “You got your side, Midnite?”

“Waiting on you, Conjob,” she replied airily.

Jinx smirked at that, and spite of everything, Lux’s heart still did little flip at the sight of that cock-eyed smile. “Conjob…ain’t heard that one since ‘Vika took off. Alright, let’s yoke us an angel.”

“I beg your pardon?” Augatha said more than asked.

But Jinx wasn’t paying attention. Augatha moved to interrupt them, but Lux seized her by the scruff of the neck and dragged her back into a headlock while Jinx and Midnight stepped just outside the intricate circle laid into the marble, held out their hands, and began to chant.

Just like back in Hell, the words were impossible to fully describe. Jinx and Midnite’s voices rose and fell in harmony with one another, but beneath every word, it was like there were three, four, or even more voices speaking in tune with them. And likewise, with every word, each sigil carved into the ground, walls, and ceiling began to glow gold.

And there were so many more than Lux had thought.

It was like someone had inscribed the contents of an entire codex into the marble and stone of the sanctum. They may as well have been standing inside of a book, and every passing second made the whole of the world around them feel more. More real, more powerful, more meaningful; it was all just more. Even Lux’s mother had stopped struggling against her to just stare at the impossible invocation of power happening in front of them, and Lux knew without a doubt that she was witnessing something that the world had not seen in the passing of an age.

Jinx and Illaoi’s voices joined in bass tones and tenor rasp, turning the air around them into a spoken song that reverberated through more than just one layer of reality, and Lux could feel it in her soul! Every syllable made something in her lurch forward, as if trying to respond. Every completed word seemed to create a stronger magnetic pull toward the center of that circle. 

That was how she knew it was working.

If even the fragment of Kayle’s divinity that was housed inside of Lux was responding so viscerally, then it was only a matter of time before—

KRAK-THOOM!

In a stroke of auric lightning, Jinx and Illaoi were thrown from their feet, and even Lux was nearly bowled over despite being much further back. The whole chamber suddenly smelled thickly of olibanum and myrrh, and beneath that was the metal tang of ozone.

There, hanging suspended amidst a pillar of light, was the one Lux had actually come all this way to speak to. She towered nine feet tall, if she was an inch, and was clad in armor that glowed like forge-fresh bronze. Pale hair the white of hottest flame spilled from her head, and her eyes blazed like the sunlight out of a face too perfect to have ever truly been mortal.

And from her back, six great, silver-white wings were folded out, carrying streamers of light with them, and casting the entirety of the underground complex in the light of the noonday sun.

Kayle, Daughter of Mihira, and the Holy Protector of Demacia, rose in glory before the four of them, her expression a hard edifice of wrath as she bellowed, “WHO DARES TO BIND JUSTICE ITSELF?!”

Lux turned to look down at Jinx, who was barely pushing herself upright, and Illaoi was staying back, her eyes fixed on the angel before her with something like hatred. At Lux’s side, Augatha Crownguard threw herself to the floor, sobbing as she murmured prayers.

The angel took each of them in before her gaze fell on Lux, and her eyes narrowed, and so Lux stepped forward and said, “So you’re Kayle? The Holy Protector?”

“I KNOW YOUR FACE.” Kayle’s voice shook the air, but Lux grit her teeth and bore it.

“I should fuckin’ hope so,” Jinx said as she stumbled up next to Lux, gave Kayle the up and down, then turned to Lux and said, “Damn, guess it’s true what they say; any guy can be a piece’a shit father, but it takes a real woman to be a deadbeat dad.”

And in spite of everything, Lux burst out laughing.

Chapter Text

Kayle’s blade erupted like a solar flare, only to rebound off of something luminous that sat between them and the angel. Despite feeling sicker than she’d ever been in her life, she was thoroughly enjoying the looks she was getting from everyone around her. Lux was doubled over in hysterics, her shit-ass mom was staring up at them both in horror, and Illaoi was edging away from her as if she was about to become ground zero, but she was smiling ever-so-slightly while doing it.

And Kayle?

Oh yeah, Kayle was pissed.

“Thrash all ya want, Big K,” Jinx said, then gestured down at the floor with a thin smirk. “But this is a bona fide Enochian angel lock. This shit was built for one reason and one reason only, to hold things like you.”

Kayle’s angelic face was contorted into a rictus of hate as she drove the tip of her blade harder into the columnar veil surrounding her, but she may as well have been trying to shove a butter knife into a steel wall for all the good it was doing.

“Y’just wasting your energy,” Jinx added.

“WHEN I FREE MYSELF, ” Kayle intoned mercilessly, “I WILL SMITE YOU UPON THE BONES OF THIS WORLD!”

Jinx shrugged. “Sure thing, but y’know?” She smirked. “I do think it’s kinda funny that for all the cathedrals, churches, chapels dedicated to you, the only place where the walls are thin enough for you to come through proper-like is in a fuckin’ prison cell made for you and your sister by the people you genocided.”

Kayle snarled at her as she pulled the silvery blade away from the barrier and sheathed it, apparently done with bashing her head against that particular wall for the moment. “I WILL NOT JUSTIFY MYSELF TO YOU, MORTAL! I AM JUSTICE ITSELF!”

Nausea suddenly rocked through Jinx, dropping her to one knee, and with barely a moment’s warning, she retched. Even Kayle paused along with everyone else as Jinx proceeded to throw up roughly half a crow’s worth of black feathers along with what looked like a mass of gristle and bone, and when she looked back up, Kayle was actually smiling.

“OR RATHER, IT SEEMS,” Kayle said smugly. “THAT I NEED MERELY WAIT, AND I WILL BE FREED FORTHWITH.”

“Sure,” Lux said, her humor vanished. “Assuming you want Fiddlesticks to feed you your own wings. But we all know that you can’t beat him as he is! Otherwise, you already would have!”

“AND WHERE AND WITH WHOM, DO YOU IMAGINE, THE FAULT FOR THAT LAY?”

“I DON’T CARE!” Lux’s voice very nearly matched Kayle’s, shaking the room around them. “I don’t care that you’re the golden sister! I don’t care that you’re ‘justice itself’, because right now, the woman I love is being eaten alive from the inside out by fucking Fiddlesticks! So with all due respect, father, either step up, or so help me, I will make sure you stay in this marble box for eternity!”

Jinx looked up at Lux, eyes wide. The truth was, she had banked on a lot of things happening after she passed out, assuming Lux didn’t just do as Jinx instructed and burn both her and Fiddlesticks out of this world. She’d drifted in and out of lucidity throughout all of Lux’s preparations as well as the car ride, and had the basic gist of what was going on by the time Fiddlesticks got his claws deep enough that she was able to wake up while he finished the job.

But despite all of that, a part of her still wondered if it was just a matter of saving the world. Seeing the look on Lux’s face, and maybe for the first time in Jinx’s life, she saw someone who was fighting for her.

“Now, I am giving you one”—Lux held up a single finger—“chance to make things right. I am not your messiah. I am not your fucking tool. And I sure as Hell am not going to help you plunge this world into bright and shiny tyranny. But I will help you save it from darkness, assuming you’re willing to uncork your head from your ass, step off your pedestal, and put this jumped-up scarecrow back where he came from!”

“Luc—” Augatha started, only to choke as Lux turned to glare at her with eyes that were burning prismatic.

“Not. Now. Mother,” Lux said darkly before turning back to Kayle.

Honestly, seeing Lux shout down an angel was just about the hottest thing Jinx had ever seen in her life, and she’d once gotten a strip-tease from a lust demon. Kayle seemed somewhat less impressed, although she also looked like she was thinking about it.

Unfortunately, thinking took time, and time was the one thing Jinx was shortest on.

Jinx doubled over as agony rocked through, and she collapsed onto her side with a pained groan. It felt like something was trying to claw its way out of her guts from the inside, and immediately, Lux was on her knees next to her, pulling her into an embrace as she glared up at Kayle.

“WELL?!” Lux shouted.

“YOU DON’T NEED MY HELP, CHILD,” Kayle replied after a moment. “YOU ARE PERFECTLY CAPABLE OF SENDING IT BACK ON YOUR OWN. YOU KNOW THIS.”

“Sure,” Lux said angrily. “Only that would involve killing Jinx, and doing fuck only knows what else to her soul! So, no!”

“THEN YOU WOULD DAMN THIS WORLD AND EVERYONE ON IT FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR TAINTED LOVE?” Aspects, but Kayle sounded smug as she spoke those words, and if Jinx had been able to speak at that point—or even think straight through the pain—she would probably have had something to say about it.

Fortunately, Jinx reflected, there was a good reason she’d fallen for Lux as the woman said, “Considering I just found out that my mom fucked a genocidal angel to make me, a cult of regressive monarchists runs my whole country, and my destiny is to be an apocalyptic messiah?” She raised an eyebrow at Kayle. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”

In spite of the agony she was in, Jinx couldn’t help but start cackling. She’d picked a winner. More than just a winner, actually. Lux was everything! Lux was perfect. Maybe it was the pain and delirium talking, but Jinx thought, in that moment, that if everything was really going to go to shit, then there was no one she’d rather be holding onto than Luxanna fucking Crownguard.

“HA!” Jinx barked as she shoved her hand into her jacket pocket, pulled out a slim, leatherbound journal tied with twine and bookmarked with a feather, and held it out. “H-Hey, Blondie! I just had a really fuckin’ stupid idea! Wanna do it?”

Lux looked down at her in surprise, then her face split into a grin and asked, “Is it completely crazy?”

“Batshit fuckin’ loco, baby. Check the bookmark.”

Lux grabbed the journal while Kayle looked on with feigned disinterest. She was trapped and putting on a good show, but even Jinx could tell she was suddenly…concerned. All the while, Lux scanned the journal—Jinx’s father’s journal, originally—and with every page her eyes widened, until she lowered it, looked Jinx in the eyes, and said, “Are you sure?”

“C-Could be fun,” Jinx said with a shrug.

“Will you survive?”

Another shrug. “Maybe,” Jinx replied. “But this”—she gestured at herself—“is definitely gonna kill me. So, between definitely and maybe, whaddya think?”

Lux clenched her jaw, then looked back at Illaoi, who was watching from the shadows with a broad grin as if she knew exactly what the pair of them were thinking despite everything. “Midnite,” Lux said. “Get my mother out of here and give us the room. If this goes wrong, you’ll know it.”

“I have no doubt about that,” Illaoi replied as she strode over to Augatha Crownguard, scooped her up by the middle, prompting a startled squawk of alarm from the older woman, and began heading toward the exit. “I’ll be awaiting good news, Miss Constantine. And Miss Crownguard?”

Lux looked over to her.

“If you survive this,” Illaoi said, “see about membership at my club.”

“I’ll consider it,” Lux replied gamely as Illaoi left the room, then she looked down at Jinx and asked, “So, do you still fill your lighter with Shuriman holy oil?”

Jinx just grinned.

Maman Midnite was smiling widely as she carried the matriarch of House Crownguard up and out of the angelic prison. Apocalypse or not, just seeing that place had been more than enough payment for her. She had spent the past ten years searching for the last prison of the nephilim. She’d known it was somewhere in central Demacia, but that was a lot of space to cover. Who could have guessed it was sitting right beneath the guarded estate of the Crownguards, though?

Honestly, she would have assumed it was the Durands or the Lightshields, had she had her guess.

“Release me, you—!” Augatha’s words were cut off as Illaoi threw her to the floor of the greenhouse, knelt, and grabbed her by the chin.

“Listen and listen well, Madam Crownguard,” Illaoi said, still grinning, though it was more a predatory baring of teeth. “I wager we’ve less than thirty minutes before the world either ends, or your daughter and Miss Constantine emerge victorious, and in that time you are going to show me everything your family has collected about these Enochian ruins and their builders.”

Augatha was shaking. Fortitude was clearly not this woman’s virtue, assuming she had one. “W-Why should I?”

“Because if you do not,” Illaoi said calmly, “then the only thing left for me to do before leaving is to subject you to the Test of Spirit, and allow Nagakabouros to determine if you are truly in motion.” She leaned in until their noses were touching. “And you, Madam Crownguard, do not strike me as a particularly strong swimmer.”

Augatha Crownguard swallowed thickly, then nodded and said, “Th-The library. The family library.”

“See?” Illaoi’s smile widened. “That was not so hard.”

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” Kayle’s bass, thunderous voice was becoming more tedious the longer Lux endured it, and she wondered idly if angels had some kind of volume control, or if Mihira had just opted to leave that little quality of life adjustment out.

Or maybe the Mother of Justice was hard of hearing.

That made a little too much sense.

“What must be done,” Lux said casually as she picked up Jinx, carried her to the apex of the circle binding Kayle, and laid her down perfectly aligned with the axis point.

“WHATEVER YOU ARE PLANNING, IT WILL COME TO NAUGHT,” Kayle said pointedly. “I AM JUSTICE—”

“—itself, yes, so I’ve heard,” Lux spoke over her as she moved to straddle Jinx, opened the journal one last time and double-checked the preparations, then tucked it away before sticking a hand into Jinx’s inner jacket pocket and pulling out her cigarettes and lighter.

Flicking the top of the pack open, Lux tugged a silk cut out with her teeth, then tossed the rest of the pack into the corner of the room. She snapped open the lighter, sniffed at it, and nodded at the faintly incensed smell before lighting it—and the cigarette—before flicking it closed. She took a deep drag as she began dismantling the old clockwork mechanism and pulled out the small reservoir.

“THIS IS POINTLESS, CHILD, SIMPLY DO AS I SAY AND THIS WORLD CAN BE SAVED!”

“If this was actually pointless,” Lux replied as she wet the fingertips of first her right hand, then her left, with the holy oils, “then I doubt you would be trying so hard to convince me of it.”

Then, before her heavenly ‘father’ could protest again, Lux began. She narrowed her focus, hedging out all extraneous sounds and images as she pressed the tips of her fingers, wet with holy oils, to Jinx’s forehead. Her right hand fingers she pressed to her own brow in the same way. Then she brought her hands together, palms pressed in prayer, bowed her head, and spat the spent cigarette out and to the side.

“Annointed in the fires of absolution,” Lux murmured, “born from the flames of sin, I make ready this vessel for thy use.”

“STOP! STOP THIS! CEASE!”

Drawing her hands apart, she held her arms out, palms up, just as Jinx had back in the cathedral. Eyes closed, she called into her mind the first page of the spell scribed into that journal by the hand of what Morgana had called a ‘mediocre mage’. They were words not meant for mortal tongue, but Lux’s voice was more than mortal, even if it had taken her longer than she would have liked to find it.

The first Enochian syllables came out shakily, their song thready and uncertain, but Lux quickly found the cadence. With every ‘word’, her voice became stronger, more resonant, and more powerful, while behind her, Kayle thrashed impotently.

Unlike before, when Jinx had been invoking this spell, it had felt like someone throwing a blackout curtain over her light. This time, it was as if the words were coming from the light itself. There was a kinship to it. Her light and these words shared a source; that same source that saturated every inch of Kayle’s body, only now, kin had become unkind, and Kayle had fallen to her knees, her light guttering with every word that passed Lux’s lips.

At Jinx’s brow, the dots of holy oil that Lux had anointed her with now burned like brands in the shape of fingerprints, and she began to thrash violently. Her skin was ghost-pale, with the only color being the black veins carving across her face, arms, and neck like furrows in fallow earth. Only the whites of her eyes were visible, bloodshot red-and-black, but she howled like a beast on fire.

Yet she didn’t move. It was like something was chaining her in place.

Something, Lux thought, or someone.

Many things could be said about the woman Lux had fallen in love with, and she was well aware of how painfully few of them were complimentary, but one thing that could not be said was that Jinx Constantine was weak of will. Whatever was left in her, she used it to hold down the First of All Fears, and Lux refused to let that chance go unheeded.

Bringing her thumbs to her mouth, she bit hard, spilling droplets of blood, then leaned forward and gripped Jinx’s face in her hands. Calling up the next part of the ritual in her mind, Lux saw, in her mind’s eye, the image that Jinx had drawn on Lux’s face at the cost of her hands. This was not a spell for mortals, though. That was why it had nearly killed Jinx to cast it and tamp down Lux’s light until she could control it.

No, this was a spell that was created for, with the intent to be used by, a nephilim.

Lux sang the ritual cadence, the Enochian coming to her lips as if it were her mother tongue, now, as she drew the sigils of binding and sealing across Jinx’s brow, cheeks, nose, and chin. With each pass of her thumbs, Lux’s blood cooked onto Jinx’s pale skin, and Lux gave a feral grin as, in each of those places, those horrible veins of Fiddlestick’s influence were driven back.

“STOP! STOP THIS!” Kayle roared. “IF YOU CONTINUE THIS MADNESS, YOU RISK DESTROYING BOTH HER AND ME!”

But Lux knew that. Of course she knew that. This wouldn’t be one of Jinx’s plans if it didn’t involve potentially apocalyptic levels of self-destruction. So Lux ignored Kayle’s pleas, even as they continued to grow weaker and more frantic. There was something almost soothing about listening to an angel beg for her life while Lux completely ignored her, actually.

She would probably have to unpack that later.

For the moment, she had more important things to worry about.

Lux pulled her hands away from Jinx’s face, raised them in supplication, and, in Enochian, said, “O’ creators who art destroyers. O’ makers who unmake thy greatest works! Thou who art not flesh, I make of thee, this flesh! Thou who art not mortal, I make of thee, this mortal! Let these flames of sin thou rise aboveth on airy wings, rise forth to catch thee in flight! O’ Host of the Firmament, I command thee! BURN!”

From behind her, Kayle screamed, while beneath her, Jinx arched her back as her mouth opened, and released a metal-flanged howl that could only have come from the throat of the Ur-Demon itself. Lux’s body burned gold as she tore Kayle’s manifested avatar apart and dragged her bodiless spirit from the binding circle, and crammed it inside of Jinx.

If Lux had thought Jinx was contorting in agony before, now, her movements were becoming outright inhuman. Bones, joints, and ligaments snapped and cracked as the soul of Kayle, the Holy Protector, was suddenly forced into the same space as the Ancient Fear. Flesh tore and mended. Bones shattered and sealed. Neither could move or fight without destroying some part of Jinx’s body, but neither of them could afford for Jinx to die, either, or else they were both fucked.

But now, the real madness of Jinx’s plan was in play.

See, the one thing Lux had been iffy on was whether or not it was even possible for a mere mortal to exorcise a being as old and powerful as Fiddlesticks. Especially someone unordained, and whose knowledge of exorcisms had come second-hand and was taught by the priestly equivalent of a back-alley sawbones.

But that was if Fiddlesticks was able to put his full attention on resisting and trying to kill the person who was trying to exorcise him, and right now?

Right now, he was in the middle of a shin-kicking contest with an angel.

From her coat pockets, Lux pulled a vial of holy water in one hand, and the icon of Saint Lumina in the other, closed her eyes, and recalled the days spent in Hell learning at Jinx’s feet. Every word of the prayers of exorcism flooded her mind, hedging out the awful shrieks, screams, and howls, as well as the snapping of bone and ripping of flesh.

"Come closer. Closer—!” Jinx’s eyes bled pitch for a moment before flashing gold, and then— “NO MERCY!”

“Jinx, I swear, you had better be right about this,” Lux muttered before opening her eyes, throwing the holy water into Jinx’s face, where it hissed like acid. “In the name of the Trickster, the Traveler, the Warrior, and the Mother! Glorious Aspects of the Heavens, I invoke thee! Defend us in our battle against the rulers of darkness! Against the spirits of wickedness in the highest of places!"

Lux brandished the icon of Saint Lumina, and Jinx recoiled, and that flanged scream tore from her throat along with a welter of blood. Where teeth ought to have been, there were needle-like fangs, and a crow crawled grotesquely from her throat to fly at Lux and peck at her eyes.

Catching the demonic familiar by its greasy, feathered body, Lux spat on it, her saliva carrying some tinge of her own nature as she had hoped it would. It melted away part of the creature’s face, leaving behind a bony skull that continued to peck until Lux crushed it in her fist.

"Fid-dle-sticks. End of Men! Fid-dle-sticks. First of Ten!"

“THE UNRIGHTEOUS WILL BURN!”

One-handed, Lux shoved the winged icon against the side of Jinx’s face and bellowed, “Aurelion Sol! Forge of the Stars! Open the heavens to us and lay bare the majesty of creation! Golden Sister! Star of Daylight! Clad in flame, I invoke thee! Burn this darkness from the body of Jinx Constantine, humble servant of the stars! Silver Sister! Star of the Evening! Robed in silver, I invoke thee! Soothe this torment and cast this unclean spirit back from whence it came!”

"Little...light..."

Lux shut her eyes and turned away. He was still alive! Still alive! As far as she knew, anyway. Still on the run, and still—

“I AM SALVATION!”

"Jinx! All your fault! All your fault!"

“LONELY MAN, BEGONE! KING OF RAGS, BEGONE! END OF MEN, BEGONE!” Lux bellowed, throwing the icon over Jinx’s neck, fastening it there, then seizing her by the face—palm over her eyes—and pinning her to the floor of the angelic prison. “THE SACRED SWORD COMMANDS YOU! THE VEIL OF SHADOWS COMMANDS YOU!”

“DROWN IN HOLY FIRE!”

“High above the rot-ten rows!”

“THE WICKED—!”

“Cloth and met-al!”

“—SHALL BURN!”

“Teeth-and Crows!”

“THE TRICKSTER, THE TRAVELER, AND THE WARRIOR COMMAND YOU!” Lux shouted over the pandaemoniac cacophony. The whole prison was shaking, stone dust was falling like rain over Lux’s face and back, matting her golden hair to her head with filthy sweat.

“FLAME PURIFIES!”

“Once upon a time—! Once-upon a time!”

“GUILTY! GUILTY!”

“Mama?! MAMA!”

Lux gripped Jinx’s skull tight and cast her other hand, soaked in holy water and blessed oils, skyward, and roared, “FLEE THIS PLACE! DISPERGES IN VENTUM! BY THE BLOOD OF MAN, I COMMAND YOU! BE NOT! AND BE GONE!”

A shockwave cracked the walls, floors, and ceiling of the prison, sending another torrent of dust across them as Jinx jackknifed backward, her spine bending at an impossible angle as her jaw unhinged and a torrent of crows, pitch, and cloying gray fog geysered forth from her throat.

Lux threw herself to the side, rolling away from the thrashing form of Jinx Constantine as Fiddlesticks, the First of Ten, Ur-Demon of Fear, was ripped from her body. Weakened from strife and battle with the Holy Protector, Lux watched as he tried to pull together a body from stone dust and debris, but every attempt failed.

And in the center of it all was that mass. Caged in dark metal, writhing like a squamous fear from the beginning of time. That, Lux knew, was the true shape of fear. A wretched thing, if ever there was one.

Then, like a nightmare in daylight, it simply began to dissolve, and with a sigh of ragged breath, it whispered, “It’s still out there…”

“And if you ever come back,” Lux said, rising to her feet, “I’ll still be here.”

“Reap. And. Sow. Reap…and…sow…”

Lux watched as it faded like dust in the wind, and everything grew quiet. She felt spent in a way that she hadn’t even realized was possible. Every inch of muscle in her body felt like it had been pumped full of molten lead that was only now cooling, and, Aspects, all she wanted to do was sleep.

But she couldn’t.

There was one last thing to do.

From the other side of the circle, Jinx stood upright, her posture too straight and too rigid to be natural to the mongrel woman Lux loved. And when she opened her eyes, it wasn’t the bright, springberry pink that Lux adored. It was the harsh and merciless gold.

“DADDY’S. HOME,” Kayle snarled, all decorum fled from her in the throes of her exhausted hatred.

“Yeah, well,” Lux muttered as she pulled out Jinx’s journal and flicked it back open to the bookmarked page, “don’t get used to it.”

Kayle laughed raggedly. “YOU THINK YOU CAN EXORCISE ME?”

“Don’t need to,” Lux replied. Then she let the journal fall away, grabbed the long black feather that Jinx had been using as a bookmark, held it up, and said, “Domina umbra, sacre Morgana, te invoco!”

“WAIT, WHA—”

The feather dissolved away, and black chains tore out of the ground to lash around Kayle’s stolen left arm, then retracted as if on a winch, dragging her to her knees. Kayle lunged to try and pull away, but another chain burst out and seized her right arm, pulling her back down. More chains erupted, snaking around Kayle in Jinx’s body like living things as the shadows in the room bled together, pooling before the trapped daughter of Mihira, and from that pool rose Kayle’s darker twin.

Black wings unfolded, filling the room with soothing shadows as Morgana stared down at Jinx’s possessed body, and Lux stood back and silently prayed to whatever would listen that this idiot gambit worked.

Jinx’s throat bobbed, and in a much smaller voice than before, Kayle said, “M-Morgana, wait. I can explain.”

“Sister,” Morgana said coolly. Then she turned and arched an eyebrow at Lux. “For now, niece, I will ignore your existence. I advise you not give me a reason to change my mind.”

“Thank you…Auntie,” Lux said weakly.

Morgana turned back to her sister, and with one hand seized Jinx by the jaw and wrenched it open. The other, shadow-wreathed hand, was jammed down her throat, and Lux looked away, wincing as Jinx thrashed in the Veiled Lady’s chains for what felt like minutes until, finally, Morgana jerked her hand free of Jinx’s mouth.

Clutched in her fist was a little glowing ember not much brighter than a firefly. “You, me, and mother need to have a little talk. I’m sure she’ll be fascinated to learn what you’ve been up to since last she looked upon the mortal world. I highly doubt she approved of you…dipping your wick, so to speak. Especially after what happened the last time you let your loins do your thinking.”

Lux bit her lip as she forced herself not to laugh at the way that little ember visibly trembled while Morgana slowly sank back down into darkness.

As her torso submerged, followed by her shoulders, Morgana cast a look over at Lux and said, “Keep that nose clean, niece.” And then she was gone, 

Lux collapsed onto her knees, breathing shakily as she slowly crawled over to where Jinx was now lying sprawled on the floor. The chains that had been binding her had dissolved once their summoner had returned to the heavenly realms.

Unable to do anything else, Lux slumped over to lie down across from JInx, whose eyes were fixed on nothing in particular. Only when Lux entered her field of view did Jinx stir and slowly orient onto Lux’s face. Finally, her eyes were back to normal. Her body, too, by the looks of it. Kayle must have sealed up the rest of the damage to keep what she had expected to be her new host intact.

“Heya…Blondie…” Jinx mumbled.

“Hey,” Lux said.

“Still mad at me?”

Lux sighed and rolled onto her back to stare up at the cracked ceiling. Then, she sighed again and said, “Yeah, a little.”

“Sorry.”

“I know.” Lux pressed her palms to her face and groaned, then rolled back onto her side to look Jinx in the eye. “I get why you did it, and I don’t even think you were wrong. I’m just…hurt. But…” She reached out and laid a hand on Jinx’s cheek. “But I forgive you, okay?”

“Really?” Jinx’s expression twitched into a hopeful smile.

Lux nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “So long as you talk to me, and you’re really sorry, and you…you give me time to just be mad. I’ll eventually let it go. Just…just don’t leave me in the dark again, okay? Don’t just pretend it didn’t happen and hope no one notices. If you fuck up, at least respect me enough to say sorry.”

“I will,” Jinx sobbed. “I promise.”

“Will you still stay with me?” Lux asked.

“Will ya still have me?”

Lux laughed softly and nodded. “Yeah,” she said, smiling. “Yes, Miss Constantine, I’ll still have you.”

Jinx wiggled closer and pulled Lux into a kiss that tasted slightly of blood and stone dust. It didn’t last nearly long enough, considering what they’d just been through, but for now, it was enough.

They would have plenty of time when they got home.

Pulling away, Jinx pressed her forehead to Lux’s and whispered, “I love you, Blondie. More than magic. Even more than silk cuts.”

“I love you, too, Jinx,” Lux murmured, closing her eyes as she breathed in the scent that surrounded Jinx. “More than all that is golden.”

There would definitely be knock-on effects from this. There would certainly be more battles. But for once, Lux wasn’t afraid of them. After all, she had Jinx Constantine at her side. The one who drove demons away. Who kicked them in the balls, and spit on them while they were down, and left with a nod, a wink, and a wisecrack. Til now, she’d always walked her path alone, because, after all?

Who would be crazy enough to walk it with her?