The vast new Master bedroom had been significantly altered by the shock wave of Kurse's
death. It had now been Jensen's well over a decade or now, along with that of his mates.
Everything from the bed to the bathroom were now scaled to their size and designed with
their autonomy.
Both Kaylee and Jensen after they had been placed in their bedroom (with Sandi and Terri
standing outside as guards for their depleted Alphas), didn't really notice any of this when
they awoke the next morning, later in the morning, they had been up well past midnight
and had fought a battle.
"Kaylee..." Jensen groaned turning over to face the reddish brown she wolf.
"Yes dear?" She replied to the black as night big bad wolf himself. Now apparently
reformed.
"It wasn't a dream was it?"
"No dear it wasn't."
"So you felt it too?"
"Yes." Kaylee shivered, but it wasn't from revulsion as you'd logically think, "All that
existed in the universe that had any meaning was you."
"The only thing that had anything meaning in the universe was you."
"We were fused together, united and whole, body, mind, spirit."
"Perpetually, constantly, never ending..."
Jensen then shivered as well making a grunt of sadness.
Kaylee blinked a tear of loss, Jensen allowed himself to cry for only his mate was here with
him, he didn't need to be Alpha Male only around her,
Kaylee lamented, "Kurse fulfilled her promise after all..."
+++++++
On the other side of the world, earlier that morning/day/night. the wolf Sasha had
peacefully kept her distance while Ulysses and Mary in the most non-threatening and
non-agressive manner possible had approached the poor passengers and crew. Sadly, due
to all sharing the experience, and the pain being very real, and the animal people before
them, they couldn't just shrug it off as a nightmare or a hallucination.
One woman looked very desperate to know where her son was and if anyone had seen
him. In fact this was shared with in fact two other sets of parents (all parents of three).
Whose children were of course at the mansion, human, but very scared and confused who
couldn't go through the mirror without being mutated by the glass pup's magic.
Their boat was magically (of course) very much intact and ultimately perfectly ready to
start up the engine on a moment's notice. But the fact seven children were missing, left
people very divided on leaving or not.
One middle aged woman with curly blond locks ran to the two cubs and knelt down and
looked into both their eyes, she shook her head in transparent disappointment.
Mary lowered her head, "I'm sorry I'm not your child... "
"WHERE IS HE?!" She demanded, she had gone from winning a boat trip with her son to
being turned into a pig monster with endless hunger driven only by base desire and then
fighting a bunch of lion people and then being switched back.
Sasha keeping her body low stepped foreword a few feet and said, "Kurse, I'm sure you all
know who that is since you were all connected to her, sent most of the children after they
were remade into monsters to kidnap parts of our family... but they failed to be as lethal
as they should have been and we were able to subdue them... I promise none of them are
hurt in anyway..."
ALL the parents clamored at this along with the two children who had remained on the
island and were human again... the fact most of them had been rendered naked by their
clothes being ruined (and their precious cellphones and credit cards being barely
recovered) left some amused, others delight, the majority humiliated or ashamed.
The woman who had stepped foreword said, "Is my son there? His name is Dennis."
Lion and wolf looked at each other, no one had a clue what glass or any of the children's
names were.
Abbey was with glass behind several out-croppings of rocks.
'Why is she asleep? We don't sleep, not in the outside world... not ever...'
But unconscious was precisely what Glass was. Or whatever her real name was. Abbey
wondered if she'd be blindly loyal and loving to the pack and Abbey's father as the original
transformation of Abbey's powers stated they would as Alice had explained.
Sasha meanwhile knew they were trapped. There was no way in Hades any parent worth
their DNA would leave this island without their child, and there was no safe way to bring
their children back to them without mutating them into glass wolves in real time. And
Glass... Sasha shuddered, knowing if it really was Abbey's powers and not an after effect of
Kurse's power, then Glass would be like they had been originally, devotion and willing
slaves to Jensen and the pack. Glass' mother would barely mean anything to her. Sasha
remembered how she had thought of her own mother as simply a new sources for new
wolves...
Sasha had never seen one of the glass wolves asleep before, but she was honestly scared
what would happen when Glass woke up... and none of this would change what had to be
done. Technically, Glass' form wasn't locked because she had never been given the special
turn, and neither would the children's as they passed through the mirrorverse... but Sasha
wouldn't wish that kind of psychological trauma on -anyone!-
All she wanted to do now was SLEEP, along with Mary and Ulysses... the sun was so sunny,
who cared what the island had looked like half an hour ago?... But Sasha resisted the urge,
she had to, Kurse had left this mess in their laps and they had to clean it up now.
++++++
Finally getting the sleep she very much needed, falling asleep on a bench in the police
station, Amy couldn't help but have one thought. The cubs had transformed Kaylee in a
way the curse had never predicted, and the triplets and Kaylee had transformed Jensen in a
way that curse could never have foreseen. It made her think of Glass and Kurse, and
couldn't but wonder one thing: if it had been another place, another time, and there had
been enough time, could have Glass transformed Kurse the way the cubs had transformed
Kaylee? Amy knew the absolute truth was... she'd never if know. Like the final scene from
citizen Kane, Amy knew she'd never know Glass could have cured Kurse and made her into
a benign force... But that was a path now doomed to be never explored.
++++++++
Kat was not the least bit surprised at see nothing on the news of many -many- people
suddenly being mutated...
Kat... was not all that surprised when her mother didn't react to her being even more cat
than a hour ago... or her mother, father, little brothers, and the mail man who happened
to be close by themselves were now cat people with garishly bright unnatural colored four
with cliche tribal tattoos, the mail man wearing a version of his uniform that couldn't be
standard issue as like Kat it was showing off a lot more of him than even those not
conservative would consider too much to show. The rest of her family was similar dressed,
her mother (her bust having shrunk down to where it was now smaller than Kat's) would
have had a heart attack if they had been dressed like this an hour ago. And to make things
more weird her little brothers were now twins and apparently had traces of -dragon- in
their heritage (she took it as being from her well meaning if somewhat spoiling step-
father).
What DID surprise Kat was some mail that hadn't been there before, mail from some
modeling agencies... All directed to her. All offering her a job as soon as she finished high
school... Offering from everything from shampoo to other conditioners to exercise
equipment, there was even one from an artist (her mother would have torn that one up
and set it on fire before Kat would have ever had a chance to read it an hour ago).
++++++++
The wolves who hadn't been mutated were the ones who had been all seriously injured,
with the exception of Lawrence who had made no attempt to leave with the rest of the
evacuation, the gem wolves, along with the others mutated during the battle, Betty,
Maxine, and Robyn among them (her twin selves had been named, were named, Roxy and
Brylee).
While the lions had left, along with their unaltered pack mates, with the exception of Alice
and Abbey, Sasha, Ulysess, and Mary, and of course Darla and Julie. Fran being at the
manor to maintain order.
The gem wolves plus the four non-gem members, all stood, sat, on lay where the crags
had been, where they had all danced, now it was just a empty sandy field.
Caroline remembered the dance, from two perspectives at once, as did nearly everyone
else there except Amethyst who had been the dance's conductor.
And Amethyst just lay on the sand, her bosom that easily surpassed that of even the
triplets pushing up her mass. Her naked body somehow feeling even more naked and
exposed with her special eyes gone as well as the marking that had unified the gem
wolves together in their own special way.
Weather it had been a branding by the three witches or not, none of them really cared.
And Amethyst felt another pang of misery... A part of her inside just felt... dead. She
admitted looking back at the person she had been was a perverted, he didn't deserve to
have his life stolen of course, but still a pervert. And she had -liked- being unbreakably
perky, she had LIKED being able to carry her own universe around her, she had liked being
able to keep her soul upbeat no matter what!! She had liked liking cute and pretty things...
they hadn't been manly, but at this point she didn't give a blank. Amethyst remembered
the saying on how ignorance was bliss... and right now she was anything -but- blissful...
she had LIKED that version of herself...
"She said that she'd make victory so terrible that we'd be pinning for defeat afterwards and
here we are now." Amethyst said.
+++++
Sitting NOT that very far away at all, lagging behind the rest of the pack on the pretense
of looking after Mary (Brian and Felicity being surprisingly trusting on the subject), were
the midnight lioness and Fox.
Fox hugged herself, rocking back and forth, "Elise, Pride-sister, you can feel it too huh?"
"I can... it feels like I'm four boats tied together in rocky seas.... clashing together and
pulling away but never whole and never free..."
Fox wondered, "Can you hear the other parts too?"
"It's more like the men who is men is the sound of four voices echoing off a ceiling. they
call each other by name. Moja. Mbili. Tatuli. Nneili."
"It's like my name is Fox, but our names are Tano, Sita, Saba, Nane."
"Right, swahili words for one through eight, or close to it... "
"Well, we're descent biologically from African lions so it makes some sense..."
"I don't get it... shouldn't we have just gone back to the way we were before?"
"I think it has something to do with Amy's promise. Like it had something over fate."
"What do you mean?" The midnight lioness asked.
"She said there would be no deaths... and the chaos.. when Kurse jump started the twins
back to consciousness... they broke off from the infinite chaos... they became
individuals... that made them alive... so they ceased to exist that would mean they would
be dead right? I think that's how fate glued us back together but..." Fox lead on.
Elise picked up, "But if the two of us really were glued back together it would mean the
eight of us would be dead."
"Right." Fox nodded.
"I, we, feel like I'm in a body a forth of the room it should have."
"Who'd have thought statues and plushies had souls..." Fox looked at the sky.
"Ask any child or artist. They get them when the artist makes them with everything they
are, and whatever."
Fox thought about it, "I think I saw that movie on DVD too at a store once.."
"Well we've gone from being male police in twenty four hours to lion people with four
souls trapped inside one body each."
Both Fox and Elise were tired, but part of them was scared of going to sleep, fearing it
would mean the four parts of themselves 'dying.'
"If it didn't have to be from that beotch again... " Fox began.
"Inaheartbeat!" Elise said, her muzzle lips quivering.
Fox said, "Like all four of us are in a locked room, unable to leave."
Many science fiction writers had theorized that god had shattered itself into all souls in
existence at the moment of realized... Fox wondered if this was such a hypothetical god
felt, you being you, but at the same time, there were parts of you that were also you, and
were a 'themself' that all their own as well.
"You think that beotch knew we'd end up feeling this way?" The four souls of Moja / Mbili /
Tatuli / Nneili collectively called Elise asked.
"Are you kidding? That sadistic beotch? OF COURSE she knew! If she got beaten and all her
damage was undone, of course she wanted to make sure that taking out the knife would
be worse than leaving it in... she had too big an ego to go down gracefully..." Fox, the
collective name for the four souls Tano, Sita, Saba, and replied. Nane.
"Her 'parting gift?' Eh?"
"The punishment was not the first transformation but the second."
"Huh?"
Fox stated, "I read a lot of fiction... story of a girl whose changed into a fey for being
disrespectful of fairies in modern times. Oberon eventually agrees to change her back,
only THEN does she realize this was his plan all along, and turning her back human had
been the real punishment."
"Happy the beotch is deader than dead?"
Fox said with some humor, "Heck yeah, wanna throw a party?"
++++++
Amethyst and the wolves who had been transformed into twins looked upon the island... it
was so... plain. Like blank paper.
Everyone was thinking the same thing and through no trick of magic.
Caroline flashed back to the dance, to an outside observer it was pure and utter madness.
Maybe it had been. But Caroline remembered, the pattern never repeated, the same path
never taken twice, wasn't that in of itself a pattern? After all, perfect chaos meant there
could be no pattern -at all-. But Caroline remembered, always being in two parts during
the dance that had no beginning or ending, which simply was.
"Sis... can't we can't some more?"
Cobalt heard the voice of herself, the sound of herself as a little girl. Sounding innocent,
sad, like she had watched her home burn down in front of her eyes.
Amethyst finally stood up and uprooted a tree with her brute strength, and began to trace,
not planning ahead or taking precise details, only doing what came naturally and letting it
flow. She then threw the tree clear of the clearing and stood in the center, not stepping on
any of the tracing lines.
The gem wolves stepped into a circle around her, Betty, Lawrence, Robyn and Maine joined
in too along with any others there. Then at an unspoken signal, they began to dance.
Amethyst stayed in the center directing the movements ever so slight so they didn't bang
into each other, Caroline carefully placed her paw on each 'tile' never stepping on the trace
lines, or stepping in the same pattern.
Infinite possibilities. Infinite paths to explore. All that could be taken, all that possible.
And in her/her base gut, Caroline/Cobalt knew she/she should be in two place at the
same time, not occupying the same space twice at once.
So much she could do, she saw them in her mind's eye as she danced, she could build a
hotel on the island with Opal... she could become a model and then the first of the pack to
become an actress... she could become a dancer and eventually teach her talents on to
others... she saw herself as an elderly gray gray wolf surrounded by olympic gold medals,
then at middle aged holding a chain walking with a limp looking at oscars thinking if only
not that for that one accident, she saw her son/daughter, named Cobalt/Coraline and --
Caroline fell to her knees, the other wolves present soon after began to do much the same.
Caroline realized she was sobbing, and she wasn't alone.
'Was this... was this what she, they -really- wanted to bring to the world?' Caroline and
Cobalt both thought.
They saw a trio of young girls doing magic tricks to earn passage on a crowded ship, each
of their parents having been taken by plagues their magic couldn't stop, to the 'New World'
not having even won it's freedom from Great Britain yet... but their great-grandmother
saying it would become 'the land of the free.'
What they found was a nation almost as bound by laws and rules as the one they had
risked their lives to travel from. They had grown older expanded on their craft, expanded
their power, even learning a trick or two from the locals who were being crowded out by
the new comers who didn't quite realize the people already here were people as well.
Caroline and Cobalt saw a messiah complex bloom from selfless intention turning to blind
ambition, they saw the 'us' and 'they' mentally form, 'they' being anyone still bound by
rules (they loathed even the harsh rules magic had to follow).
The twins saw their by now deluded goal of 'liberating' Glendale, tapping into the infinite
chaos without a filter to direct or properly control it.
Then the damage had started. Driving children insane believing they were 'liberating them'
and encouraging the dissolving of every law on the books.
No one expects the Inquisition, in particular in America. the Inquisition, born as an excuse
by royalty to seize property (much as the attack on the Knight Templars had been
centuries before), and historically known for it's ruthlessness... It also had the distinct
honor of bringing 'innocent until proven guilty' into practical use. And officially considered
witchcraft to be an absurdity ...
Unofficially there were innocent people who needed protecting from those who were not
so innocent. Five 'witch hunters' (though they never ever referred to themselves as such).
The death of the witches, the curse, people realizing how powerful calling someone a
witch was, spite turning towards land owners and the like, five voices of reason who knew
what a witch actually did... drowned out.
Cobalt and Caroline gasp.
"... before revenge... before the chaos drove them insane... before they started seeing
people with magic as mindless machines... before they saw themselves as better than
everyone else... this was what they wanted... a world were all possibilities could be
explored..."
Cobalt/Caroline wanted to step away from each other then and there and continue the
dance in their duet as they should... but they couldn't, they only had one body now...
"Monster, witch, curse, thing of evil, it said it would make us want defeat... " Cobalt and
Caroline whispered. Kurse had fulfilled her promise. Not by making the cost too high.
'What is this? We were like that for what? A few hours? But... how long have been a pack
member? A week? A few days?... We had a self enough to appreciate it for how long? A
few minutes? I knew Opal for how long before I fell in love with them? ... What difference
does time make at all? If love is for a moment or a century... '
Kurse had no comprehension of love in of itself... sadly, this had proven untrue of her wolf
twins...