"Elara!" Aria gasped, instinctively stepping in front of Emily, though she was no longer made of nigh-indestructible stone.
"You!" Talyndra snarled, drawing her twin swords in a flash of steel.
Dorian grabbed several instruments from the floor and kicked a heavy table onto its side to create a barrier, already muttering the words of his most trusted spellbreaks.
Elara ignored them all, her gaze fixed on Emily. "You should be more careful, my dear," she said. "Intervening in alleyway squabbles, throwing fireballs around, even signing autographs! I would keep a low profile if my face and bosom were on a wanted poster!"
She reached into a pouch at her belt and pulled out a roll of brown parchment, letting it unfurl. It was a copy of Emily's wanted poster. A signed copy.
Dorian's face went pale. "The merchant... that wretch!"
"A cunning little weasel, tried to get much more out of me than his information was worth," Elara sneered, letting the poster drop to the floor. "But it was a help. I knew you were in the city, and all I had to do was watch the skyline for a bit of smoke. "And then you attempted to burn this hovel down! Not that it wouldn't be an improvement."
She took a step forward, her armored boots crunching on broken glass, holding her staff ahead of her. It was carved to look like two intertwining green snakes. "But perhaps I have underestimated you," she said. "That is the mistake I made in our last meeting. You have found a way to unlock the full power of the Stoneshell, and that was no simple task. Quite impressive for a girl who cannot even dress herself."
"Don't come any closer," Talyndra threatened, drawing her twin swords.
Elara didn't even look at her, keeping her eyes focused on Emily. "On second thought, I don't think I've underestimated you at all. The symbols on your skin are containment wards. You're afraid of the power you've unleashed, aren't you?"
Emily made no reply, but knew that Elara could read her face like a book.
"Oh Emily, you've suffered so needlessly," Elara said. "All this time, you could have been living a life of comfort and pleasure by my side, without the terrible burden of the Stoneshell, the most powerful magical artifact in all of Thessolan. I have offered, so many times, to relieve you of that burden, have I not?"
"She'll never let you have it, witch!" Dorian snarled.
Elara twisted the staff in her hand, regarding the heads of the intertwined snakes. "No, I suppose not. She's not the forgiving type, are you, Emily? What's a little magic slavery between friends?" She cackled at her own joke and took another step forward.
Talyndra's sword glowed brighter, and there was a loud crack from the hearth as several segments of stone began to levitate under Aria's direction. A large fireball blazed in Emily's palms.
"Very spirited, I like that," Elara said. She glanced at Aria, who had dropped the dress without ever putting it on. "Taking fashion advice from Emily, I see. Weren't you a statue? I'm not sure skin suits you, dear."
Elara ducked just in time to avoid having her head taken off by a square mass of stone. "Four against one is hardly a fair fight," she said. "For you."
She flicked the head of her snake staff, barely moving her hand. No visible light shone from the snake's heads, but instantly Aria screamed and fell to the ground, clutching her head. Talyndra rushed to her side.
"Aria!" Emily shouted, her eyes wide with fear and anger.
A blast of Stoneshell fire caught Elara in the armored chest, causing her to stumble back. Aiming her staff at Aria and Talyndra, she flicked it again, but this time a wall of white light sprang up across the room, separating Elara from the others.
"I just needed a sample," Dorian said, peeking up from behind the table. "And a bit of help from an old master." Olenius, who had found his way to Dorian's side, made a thumbs-up gesture.
"Spellbreakers," Elara spat, her armor still smouldering from the Stoneshell fire. "I never liked spellbreakers." She muttered a few words below her breath, and her staff changed from green to purple. She pointed it at the table, and a purple bolt shot from the snakes' eyes, vaporizing it instantly. Olenius's spectacles nearly jumped off his head.
"Leave them," Emily said, preparing a second fireball. "It's me you want."
Elara looked her up and down. "Oh, how right you are!" She spoke another series of words, and the staff in her hand turned gold. The snakes began to move, writhing against each other and hissing. "Since the last time we've met, I've learned a lot about the Nightmoss, and the Stoneshell, and its bearer." She took a step forward, easily dodging Emily's fireball. "They're all intertwined, you see. Quite closely."
"We know," Emily snarled.
"Then perhaps you'll anticipate my next move."
Before anyone could react, Elara thrust her staff forward. The snakes hissed viciously, and two lengths of golden light shot from their mouths. The light twisted into a chain, whipping through the air and wrapping around the Stoneshell pendant. There was a coldness against Emily's chest, like nothing she'd ever known before.
The Nightmoss reacted instantly. Black tendrils erupted from the Stoneshell, meeting the golden chain, fighting it. Emily screamed, falling to her knees, caught between two overwhelming, parasitic forces.
"Emily!" Aria cried. Columns of stone burst from beneath the floorboards around Elara's feet.
Elara sneered, her armored boots glowing as she levitated a few inches higher to avoid them. "Pathetic," she spat, her focus never leaving Emily. The golden chain tightened, and Emily cried out again, her body convulsing. The protective blue lines over her skin were fading fast.
The moss began to spread rapidly down the golden chain, swiftly reaching the heads of the snakes. Elara seemed unconcerned at this, watching dispassionately as her staff was consumed by Nightmoss. She didn't see Talyndra sneak up behind her.
Leaping over a stack of books, Talyndra brought her twin swords down in a deadly arc aimed at Elara's unprotected back. But Elara was too fast. She spun in mid-air, blocking Talyndra's swords with the butt of her staff. Steel met enchanted wood with a percussive boom that shook the small garret, sending Talyndra staggering back, her arms numb from the impact.
"I'll have no further interruptions, if you please," Elara snarled. The Nightmoss had spread from her staff and was now rapidly moving up her arm. Beneath the black moss, the golden chain of light pulsed, shining out of the gaps.
The familiar, comforting whispers of the Nightmoss filled Emily's mind, but there was something else as well. She heard Elara's voice, taunting her. Not from the room outside, but inside her very mind.
The Nightmoss told her to relax into its embrace. Elara told her that the Stoneshell was useless on its own, that it required a bearer to direct it. The Nightmoss told her it would always protect her. Elara told her that she was weak, incapable of controlling the Nightmoss. The Nightmoss told her that everyone would be happy once they too felt its warm embrace.
The world outside was growing more distant. Emily saw Talyndra attempt another attack on Elara, swinging wide and missing. She saw Elara stamp an armored foot viciously on the floorboards, sending a shockwave that slammed Aria and Dorian into the wall, winding them. She knew she should help them, but it all seemed so far away. She raised a hand to throw a fireball at Elara, but what erupted from her palm was not fire, but a stream of black Nightmoss. It shot across the room, missing Elara and striking the wall, sticking and beginning to spread across it.
The Nightmoss told her that she would have no enemies once it covered everything. It was taking care of Elara, and soon it would take care of Aria, of Talyndra, of Dorian, and Olenius. Soon, it would take care of all of Lirethel. She felt herself sink to her knees, felt the Nightmoss wrap itself around her body.
The Nightmoss had fully covered Elara and seemed to be digesting her armor. There was a pained expression on her face, warring with a triumphant smile. In her psychic voice, she told Emily to rest, to let go. She would take things from here, would control the body and mind of the Stoneshell Bearer directly. All Emily needed to do was lie back and let it happen.
By possessing the body of the Stoneshell Bearer, Elara would finally gain control over the Stoneshell and the Nightmoss. With her mastery of magic, she would direct both to her own ends. All Emily had to do was let her in. And if she didn't, well, Elara assured her that the process would be painful for them both. But mostly for Emily.
A searing pain ripped through Emily's mind, the worst headache she'd ever had. She screamed and collapsed to the floor, convulsing, desperately fighting the foreign presence in her mind, along with the one that had become all too familar.
She knew that even Elara would be no match for the Nightmoss's power. That it would use her, just as it had used Emily. Her friends were down. She was down, trapped between Elara and the Nightmoss. Whatever she chose, the Nightmoss would win. It already had.
In her mind's eye, she saw a vision of creeping darkness, stretching out from the decrepit tenement and spreading across Lirethel, covering its buildings, roads, and people. She saw the darkness stretch further out, overwhelming the city walls and spreading out across the plains and forests, the farms and villages.
She saw it cover her friends, saw it crawl across the faces of Aria, Talyndra, and Dorian. She saw it reach further out, saw it conquer even Sigrid, her wild axe swings futile against its overwhelming mass. She saw it devour them all, just as it had devoured Richard Stoneheart.
And at the center of it all, she saw herself. Not Emily the Stoneshell Bearer, or Emily the Painted Lady, or even Emily Corlett, but Emily, Queen of Shadows, sitting on a throne of writhing moss, the Stoneshell a vortex of black energy on her chest, the blackened bodies of her friends standing at either side of her throne, silent as the dead. She felt a strange elation at this, a sense of great power and potential—the ability to remake the world in her own image. This was the power that Elara saw in the Stoneshell, in the Nightmoss, in its Bearer. The power she sought for her own use.
Perhaps the vision she had seen was Elara, Queen of Shadows—it would make no difference. The Nightmoss would cover the world, and there would be a great stillness, a final, restful peace.
Another jolt of pain shot through Emily's mind, and she felt her foot kick against the floorboards. It had not been her doing—Elara was gaining control of her body. An awful triumphant cackle filled her mind.
But then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the gold light at the end of Elara's staff spark and die, followed by a shout of triumph from Dorian. She heard a cry of surprise from Elara, not in her mind, but through her ears. "You think that cantrip will stop me! A mere temporary annoyance! Try it again and I'll end you!"
The voice of the Nightmoss remained. But the haze of magical mental assault had cleared just enough for the outside world to become clear again. Emily's eyes to fell on something small and dark on the floor near her hand, knocked loose in the chaos. Her hair tie.
Emily heard the scream with her ears and felt the pressure in her mind release. It was the only opening she needed. She looked back at her friends.
The portal.
Home.
She had known this was coming. Ever since she arrived in Thessolan, she had been on a journey to return home. A long, winding journey, full of distractions and detours, that had now reached its end. She missed her home, her friends, and her family, but she would also miss Thessolan. She thought of her long sessions under Aria's patient tutelage, of the jokes she shared with Talyndra, of Dorian's gentle touch as he applied the Azure Essence to her body. She thought also of the Nightmoss that threatened to consume them all.
Fighting against the crushing pressure in her mind, Emily reached for the hair tie with both hands. Her trembling fingers closed around around it, even while Elara's voice told her that she would have time to do her hair later, and the Nightmoss told her that she wouldn't need to.
She looked up, not at Elara, but past her, at the faces of her friends. At Talyndra, struggling to rise, sword still in hand. At Aria, pushing herself up, her face a mask of defiance. At Dorian, whose eyes met hers and were filled with the terrible realization of what she was about to do—what his latest spellbreak had enabled.
There was no time for a proper goodbye. But they understood what she needed to do.
"I'm sorry!" Emily shouted. "I love you all!"
Emily began to pull the hair tie, stretching it far beyond breaking point. It held, and continued to stretch. When it was bigger than her head, it began to expand under its own power. The air within it seemed to ripple like water.
Emily focused on memories of home—the smell of chlorine in her apartment building's pool, the worn texture of her favorite reading chair, the annoying hum of the ancient refrigerator she shared with her roommate. "Earth," she whispered.
The hair tie expanded to the size of a doorway, hovering unsupported in the air. In this ring of impossibly stretchy elastic, there shimmered a vision of another world, faint but growing clearer by the second. Emily recognized it at once—the white tiled wall of her own bathroom, the chipped porcelain of her bathtub, and the faint light of a streetlamp filtering through the frosted window.
"What is this?!" Elara screamed. The heads of the golden snakes began to glow as she rushed toward Emily, Nightmoss oozing down her body. Her armor had already been completely disintegrated.
Talyndra screamed Emily's name, a cry of desperate protest. Aria reached a hand out, her face a mask of anguish. Dorian met Emily's gaze, a torrent of unspoken words passing between them. Placing his hands on Talyndra and Aria's shoulders, he gave Emily a single, firm nod.
Tears falling from her eyes, Emily turned and threw herself through the shimmering tear in the world. The surface of the portal was impossibly cold, and she felt a strange, wrenching sensation as she passed through it, as though she were being pulled through the eye of a needle. Something grasped at her ankle.
With the sound of a rubber band breaking, the portal snapped shut. An inhuman scream tore through Emily's mind, and then all was silent.
Emily landed with a jarring splash in the lukewarm water of her porcelain bathtub. Her book—the one about the pirate and the heiress—floated beside her, its pages a swollen, pulpy mess. For a dizzying second, she was just a girl who had fallen asleep in the tub.
Then a second body crashed into the room, landing hard on the cheap bathmat. Elara scrambled to her feet, still wielding the golden snake staff, which had ceased to move. She was naked and filthy, with patches of black dirt smeared across her skin. But more than that, she was furious. Raising the staff above her head, she spoke a litany of harsh words in a guttural language, then thrust the snakes' heads at Emily.
Nothing happened.
She tried again, her face contorting with confusion, then panic. As if it were mocking her, a crack sounded from the middle of the staff and it broke in two, the top part landing on the tiled floor. Under the dim light from the streetlamp, it looked like a particularly cheap and tacky ornament.
Emily looked down at her chest. Black muck dripped from the Stoneshell pendant, discoloring the water in her bathtub. The voice in her head had gone quiet. She tried to summon a flicker of fire to her fingertips. Nothing.
"What is this place?" Elara whispered, her voice stripped of its power, small and afraid.
"Welcome to Earth," Emily said, a weary, hollow feeling in her chest. She stood up, water sluicing from her body. "I don't think you'll like it here."
Elara lunged at Emily with a clumsy tackle. A pathetic, non-magical scuffle ensued on the tiled floor. Stripped of her power, Elara was just a frantic, panicked woman. Emily was younger and stronger than Elara, hardened by months in the wilderness, and possessed the body awareness that comes with constant nudity. She easily ducked Elara's panicked swings, grabbed her arm, and used her momentum to spin her towards the open bathroom window.
Elara stumbled, lost her footing, and with a cry of alarm, tumbled out of the low, ground-floor window, crashing into the damp bushes outside. She scrambled to her feet. With a single, fearful backward glance at Emily, she ran off into the night, a filthy streaker from another world.
Emily stood on the tiles, dripping and shivering. She examined the Stoneshell. The black spot in the middle, which had symbolized the Nightmoss's infestation, was gone. The Nightmoss itself seemed to have been reduced to a black residue around the rim of her rapidly emptying bathtub. Inert, harmless.
The bathroom was dark and silent. Emily felt along the wall for the light switch. She flicked it a few times, but nothing happened. It seemed that the electricity really had gone out after all.
Emily grabbed a towel from the rail and wrapped it around her body. When it neither slid off nor caught on fire, she let out a deep sigh of relief. She padded out of the bathroom, the layout of her small apartment both achingly familiar and strangely foreign. She found the fuse box inside the hallway closet and reached up on her tiptoes to flip the main breaker.
The lights hummed back to life, and Emily felt the towel start to slip.
At that exact moment, the front door of the apartment opened.
"Hey, we're back early!" a familiar voice called out. "There's a storm coming in, so we decided to turn back. Nothing worse than being cold and wet all weekend."
Emily turned to see her roommate, Chloe, stop dead in the doorway. Beside her, Chloe's boyfriend, Mark, stared, his jaw slack.
"What the hell, Emily?!" Chloe snapped, covering her boyfriend's eyes. "We have company! And what's with the ugly necklace?"
Comprehension slowly dawned on Emily that her towel was lying pooled at her feet, and she was standing naked in the middle of the hallway. A slow blush crept up her neck, and she squatted to retrieve the towel. "S-sorry," she stammered. "The power went out while I was in the bath."
Chloe clucked her tongue, unimpressed. Mark smiled sheepishly, averting his gaze as Emily secured her towel.
She had not, as she had feared, been missing for months. It seemed that no time had passed at all since her disappearance. But for the stone necklace around her neck, she might have come to believe her time in Thessolan had been nothing but a long, strange dream.
Over the weeks that followed, Emily settled into the familiar but distant motions of her job and her life. The world was exactly as she had left it, yet everything was different, because she was different.
Chloe treated her with suspicion for a while, somehow suspecting that the towel incident had been a deliberate pass at Mark. It didn't help that Emily forgot to put on clothes after her shower for the next few days.
"You're so absent-minded these days," Chloe told her. "At least, I hope it's that."
A list of ten house rules soon found its way onto the old refrigerator—number five read "No nudity in shared spaces." Mark seemed slightly disappointed at this, but he didn't say anything about it, fearing reprisal.
For her part, Emily was only too happy to embrace normality again. That was what she had traveled to Lirethel for, after all—a way to defeat the Nightmoss, so she could wear clothes again. But normality, she was discovering, felt surprisingly strange.
She put on a bra, the first one she'd worn since before her adventures began, and the underwire felt like a cage, the straps a harness. After months of unbound freedom or, at most, the simplicity of rough-spun tunics and hareskin, the confinement was almost suffocating. She spent half the day unconsciously adjusting the straps, trying to get comfortable. Underwear was even worse. The synthetic lace of a pair she'd once considered cute now felt scratchy and foreign against skin accustomed to nothing but air, water, and Azure Essence.
"Are you going through a minimalist phase?" Chloe asked one afternoon, watching Emily fold a stack of plain, gray t-shirts. "You used to love sequins."
Emily just shrugged. How could she even begin to explain? She still wore the Stoneshell, hidden beneath her tops and sweaters. It was heavy and cold against her skin, an inert lump of matter, but taking it off felt wrong. She could be wrapped up from head to toe, but, ironically, she still felt naked without the necklace.
Sometimes, in the early mornings and late evenings, she'd stare wistfully at her naked body in the mirror, adorned only by the Stoneshell, and imagine that her friends were standing behind her. A couple of times, she even applied a few lines of blue makeup to her face and fiddled with a lighter. The tiny flame produced by several seconds of effort almost made her cry.
During her bathroom cleaning shift, Emily found a broken hair tie under the bathtub. This was the same hair tie that had followed her all across Thessolan and had acted as a portal for her to return home. She attempted to fix it by tying the ends together in a misshapen knot, but it was now nothing more than a simple elastic band. No more portals were forthcoming.
One rainy Tuesday, Emily sat in a small, cozy coffee shop, drinking an iced latte and scrolling through the news on her phone. There was a strange headline near the bottom of the homepage, which read, "Unidentified Woman Transferred to Psychiatric Facility."
The article described a middle-aged woman, found wandering naked in a nearby park, muttering incoherently about magic spells. There was no accompanying photo, but Emily could envision the scenario well enough. Elara, naked, filthy and quite out of her mind, being led away by policemen. She felt a strange pang of something that might have been pity, but quickly closed the tab.
Elara had tried to possess her, and very nearly succeeded—any pity for her was misplaced. If anything, Emily felt relief that she could not longer terrorize Thessolan, could no longer hurt her friends. It seemed a fitting punishment, after all she had put Emily through, that Elara was now the naked woman lost in another world. And as far as she knew, Earth didn't have any magic necklaces.
The coffee shop was crowded with people sheltering from the rain, but there was an open seat next to her, against the long counter by the window. A man came in from the rain and asked her if it was free. She looked up from her phone at his cautious smile and unruly dark hair and immediately dropped her plastic cup.
Emily screamed as the lid of the cup burst off, spilling iced coffee on her sweater.
"I'm sorry I startled you," said the man. "Can I help?" He was the spitting image of Dorian.
Blushing furiously, Emily pulled her sweater off and started wringing it out. It appeared to have saved her blouse from the worst of the ice coffee. She glanced around, spotted a stack of napkins on the counter, and quickly grabbed one, dabbing at the dark, spreading stain on her sweater. "I've... got it," she stammered, knowing it was probably hopeless but feeling the need to do something. She sighed, abandoning the effort and placing the damp sweater on her lap. If she were still in Thessolan, the sweater would probably be on fire by now... along with the rest of her outfit.
"I'll leave you be, then," said the man, looking sheepish and turning to go.
"Wait!" Emily called after him, her mouth making the words before her mind could catch up.
The man glanced back.
"This seat is free," she said, motioning at the chair next to her. "You didn't do anything wrong. I was just... startled."
"Thank you," he said, taking his seat. "That's an interesting-looking necklace, by the way."
Emily smiled.
"Let me buy you another iced coffee," the man said. "As an apology for startling you."
"Thank you," she replied. "I'd like that very much."