The wave divided along six paths as it met Grisaille Meridian, each current entering a different depth of gray fire and bending the spaces between the layers until Roy could see several versions of the crater through the same opening. Skelly Mom let the alterations reach the deeper flames before passing them back through one another in reverse order, pulling apart the shapes pressing toward him.
As the last current turned along the innermost layer and swept away from his body, Roy followed it across the crater toward an abandoned block at the capital's edge. It caught the buildings just below their roofs, bending stone walls at newly formed joints. Windows closed through the middle, their frames folding into the rooms behind them, while an empty tower divided into six narrow copies that tried to occupy the same foundation. The whole block collapsed before any of its new shapes could settle.
Four of the Witch's reflections broke into loose strips of shadow, leaving the fifth to pull her upward by the strand still attached to her chest. When it folded down that connection and disappeared, she tried to rebuild the pillar beneath her feet, and Roy watched through the blue-white outer ward.
"Two full percentage points," Tranquility said. "That barrier consumed two full percentage points of your total reserve. At this rate, regeneration will accomplish very little."
"Why are you yelling at me like I'm the one doing this?"
"Because she frightens me, and you occasionally listen."
When Roy lowered one hand toward the crater, the outer light peeled off Grisaille Meridian, exposing the gray fire briefly before Skelly Mom drew each layer into his palm. He felt the working narrow there until a line of lightning lay along his fingers, ready to leave.
"Put her on the ground."
The lightning branched around the Witch's first defense and struck the pillar from behind, forcing it downward faster than she could replace what broke. At the bottom of the crater, the discharge spread through the stone beneath her. Whenever she pushed away from the ground, another branch caught her and drove her back into it.
Roy needed only to picture her wrists held apart for metal bands to form over them and fasten into the rock, spreading to cover her fingers when she began another gesture. By the time she opened her mouth, a translucent lattice had enclosed her throat. The first syllable reached him as a rough, interrupted sound, and Skelly Mom closed the remaining spaces through which she might have carried a spell.
She had dragged only half a symbol through the dirt beneath her palm when lightning erased it and sealed that hand inside a second enclosure. She turned the effort inward, drawing mana through her core, and colored rings spread from her body to fracture the nearest restraint. Three narrower bands grew out of the break, followed the current to its source, and tightened there.
"She will try to move herself," Skelly Mom said.
As the Witch reached for another point in space, Roy felt locks form beneath the crater, fixing the places she could have used to escape in a geometry beyond his ability to follow. When the edges of her body began changing, a new cage of script rotated around her, forcing her back into the form already bound against the rock. Skelly Mom kept adding seals while Roy descended, answering each attempt as it occurred.
By the time he stopped on the last step above the crater, one drone had settled beside his shoulder and another was crossing behind the Witch, giving the audience her view of him against the storm she had raised. Through the lattice around her throat came the scrape of her next attempt to speak.
"Ten thousand answers," Roy said. "You were given thousands of years to study them, change them, perhaps contribute a worthwhile thought of your own. Look what you've done with the time."
Her next surge lifted her shoulders from the ground, but the current soon disappeared beneath the script multiplying around her restraints. Roy waited for the bands to draw her flat again before continuing.
"Somewhere in that inheritance, there must have been a woman you wanted to become. Imagine her watching this. All those centuries, and you still need her to save you." He let the nearest camera come closer. "I pity even what you wish you could have been."
Water climbed out of the cavern floor in thin columns and separated into threads while lightning condensed beside them, its branches holding their positions as heat gathered between them. Further workings appeared beyond anything Roy could name. He could follow the nearest spatial cut by the way it divided the crater behind it, but another formation changed the colors of everything seen through its center, and a third made him lose track of how far away the capital stood.
Every time he imagined the Witch breaking beneath one of the structures, another answered from elsewhere in the cavern, its course joining the first as Skelly Mom brought them together through him. He had to stop trying to understand the individual spells and give her the ending she had asked him to picture. Beneath the layers of restraints, the Witch forced her head back to watch the nearest current gathering above her.
Keeping both arms raised beyond the veiled portal on the Fireside Ascent, Skelly Mom fed the convergence while the white crown above her began to crack and flesh pulled away from one side of her restored jaw. Roy faced the crater with the workings ready before him and the cameras waiting for his command.
"Goodbye."
The branches had barely started inward when Skelly Mom cried out, and Roy pulled his hands back. A portal opened beside the lowest step, giving him a view of the brig's shower compartment just as the gray gown collapsed into the pink pigeon robe. Her hair vanished with the restored flesh. The crown broke above her, and the skeletal jaw beneath it hung loose along a fracture that extended through one side of her skull.
"Serenity, cameras away. Mama? What's happened?"
Catching her as she tipped sideways, Father Skeleton braced her ribs with one forearm and slipped his other hand beneath the broken jaw, taking its weight before it could pull farther from the skull. Behind them, prisoners had crowded against the far sides of their cells, leaving the corridor empty around the two skeletons.
Roy came as close to the portal as the step allowed. "Is she okay?"
"She remains with us." Father Skeleton lowered himself carefully, holding his wife across his knees while he examined the fracture. "Her body requires rest."
As the understanding that had guided Roy's hands began to leave, the workings still filling the cavern became as obscure as the diagrams on his phone had been before Tenebration. Water fell from one column and struck the floor. Nearby, a field of pressure bent out of line and pushed through the spell beside it, sending fragments of color toward the capital. The electrical steps above Roy disappeared in succession.
With Father Skeleton supporting her, Roy could spare the failing spell the few seconds it had left. He turned both palms toward the crater and tried to hold its destination in mind as the channels through his arms narrowed.
What answered came down unevenly, one current breaking the Witch's restraints before the others arrived. Two formations struck each other over the crater, scattering their force across the rim, while the remaining mass followed Roy's direction into the center. Through the glare he saw the Witch twist toward the breach in her prison. She got her chest past it as the blast reached her.
Her scream carried through his comm and across the open air as everything below her chest disappeared into the attack, leaving the upper portion of her body held against the ground by seals already losing their shape. Around the crater, the final currents separated and tore into the stone on the capital's side.
With one arm free, the Witch ripped the restraint from the other and drew a vertical doorway beside herself. Within its frame stood her whole reflection, suspended beneath a surface that moved like dark glass. She dragged herself into it, struck the reflected body, and came back out with a new lower half still forming beneath her robe. Luminous seams crossed the exposed flesh as her legs found the ground.
She climbed onto the pillar as it rebuilt beneath her in several ragged bursts, fleeing toward the capital before the seams had closed and leaving drops of flesh and mana dissolving in her wake. Roy kept one hand raised after her until he realized he was waiting for Skelly Mom to tell him what to do with it.
"That tower is the throne room," Harmony reported. "We identified it during reconnaissance. She's heading straight for it."
Still seated on the floor with his wife gathered against him, Father Skeleton spoke to her too softly for Roy to hear through the portal. The light inside her sockets flickered, steadied, and began flickering again, while her broken jaw rested in his supporting hand.
When the last step vanished, Eryndra caught Roy around the waist and carried him back to the Fireside Ascent, the remaining runes fading beneath his skin as her boots met the deck. The Witch had reached the throne tower by then, but Roy was already opening the portal again beside the railing so he could stay with Skelly Mom.