Welcome to Gaia! ::

A calm center? Sure, that sounded doable. Avalon felt calm more often than she didn’t, these days, and it wasn’t hard to take her hands in his and settle into that feeling of warm contentment. “Lover,” she purred, leaning down to kiss his cheek, “I’d rather pledge my life and loyalty to you.”

Flirting had to come later, though. If she was going to pick a fight with an ancient island of mystery and who knew what else, she was going to pick it with the greatest Knight she knew at her back. With a roll of her eyes, she said, “I pledge my life and my loyalty to Earth, and to Avalon. Lend me your power, so that I in turn may give you mine.” Which felt like it oughtn’t work, but it must have, because after a moment’s portentous silence, there was a tremendous feeling of pressure and then--

Avalon dropped Babylon’s hands, and stepped up onto the piece of the dock that was still above water. Seaweed clung to her shoes and she picked it off, conscientiously, before dropping it into the water. Flotsam followed the curve of the shore as far as Avalon could see, water-logged branches and decayed brown leaves. An apple, still strongly red, floated by on the tide as it flowed in. A few trees, haggard and scarred by what looked like fire, pressed upwards into the sky from the place where pebbles faded into loamy earth. There was a chill in the air, and the leaves remaining on the trees were a riotous flame of autumnal glory--and when Avalon turned about, there were black dots on the horizon. Ships.

“Did I do this,” she asked, walking along the pier towards the beach. Nothing of Avalon answered her except the slow roil of the waves.



Inland. That seemed perfectly reasonable. Inland would probably have more clues than outland did, even though Avalon didn’t want to leave all the floating pieces of wood and organic debris. She wanted to--she wanted to clean it up, and she wanted to go home to Puerto Ayora, and she wanted to kiss Finn until her blood boiled clean away.

But she could do none of those things, and so she let Babylon take her elbow and lead her away. They passed the jagged sentinels of the tall deciduous trees, and Avalon reached up to tug down a broad orange leaf. It could not have been any more different than Babylon’s flora, the glowing petals of the hyacinths. The inside of the leaf was consumed with rot. A dull horror surged over her, rising and falling with inhaled breath. She could taste something dark and earthy on the back of her tongue.

They passed more broken trees, broken buildings--each as unfamiliar as the last. And finally they came to a throne, mysteriously intact, on a wide field of broken stone. “This must be it,” she said, staring down at shards of bone dug into the ancient wood. “All the trees and stones point here.”



“Something really exploded,” whispered Avalon, reaching out to tease a bone shard from the wood. It prickled at her fingers, cutting sharply into the pads of them. Red blood slipped down the sharp edge to streak down the back of the chair, until Avalon realized what was happening and jerked her hand away.

Not bone. A piece of steel, the same color as a star. She could see a faint shine now that there was the darkening of blood on the chip of steel. “This is it,” she said, holding her wounded hand to her chest. This was the last place Avalon had stood, when she was beautiful, proud… a General, not a page. Full grown into her power, into her capability, as opposed to the near-child she was now. The last Avalon to stand here had had memories, powers, self-knowledge… things Avalon had lost in the remaking.

The steel chips unnerved her, and she began to turn away. “Finn, I want to go,” she started, but before the word home could leave her mouth, she remembered something.

“Macha,” said her sister, dark hair pin-straight and trailing to the ground. In her hands were a pair of needles, silk-worn thread. “Have you done it? Created something to prove our worth?”

“Yes,” Avalon said, “look, it has granted me its sigil.” And she held up her left hand, the gold band on her finger glimmering in the sunlight. She was Avalon now, she who had been Macha, and though she supposed she could still answer to the name she’d had when she was simply a smith, that was no longer her true name, any more than her sister Badb could claim to be Morrigna. Macha was gone, only Avalon remained--she had done her duty as part of the Council. She would see her island protected, weave its natural magic into a barrier, and never again would a thief plague their shores. “Is all in readiness?”

Badb nodded, and set her knitting aside. “Yes, sister.”

They walked for a little time, green-clad knight and white-clad priestess, before Avalon said, “We are sisters no longer. I belong only to the island now.” She ignored the stricken look from her sister and stopped in front of the plinth that their dear sister Femora had constructed, painstakingly carved from a chunk of white granite. “This protection has a cost,” she said. “We must pay it, in allegiance to the Earth Princess, and allegiance to the knight’s Code. Do we accept it?”

Badb said, “We should wait. For the others. Morrigna and Femora will want to be here for this moment. Moirrey and Aodh will want to stand with you when you give us up forever.”

Thinking of her nine sisters pained Avalon, but she hurt most at the unspoken name. Their tiny brother, barely fourteen now. Little Myrrdin was a cambion, of no known father--and surely someday he would follow in one of his sisters’ footsteps, becoming a priest or a smith or an arbiter of dispute. Today, Avalon gave up her right to that influence. She gave up her right to simply be Macha. And she said, “No, I won’t wait. This musts needs be done, and sooner rather than later.”

Badb said something, but Avalon had already called out in her soul to the Code, demanding the piece of it she had been promised. In that state, she could feel the magic coursing through the land at her feet, burgeoning and beautiful and golden, a pale fog rising up through her bones to pool at her hands. “I pledge my life and my loyalty to Avalon,” she said, “Lend me your power, to protect what is mine.” In her right hand was the wrapped black blade, ice-cold against her palms even through her gloves. She unwrapped the length of silk and let it slide to the ground, trickles of dust like silver following behind it.

As Badb protested, Avalon placed the tip of the sword against the plinth and, with one push, sheathed it inside the stone. The gold mist around her hands clung to the sword as Avalon Knight drew away, and her awareness of the island faded to nothing more than she possessed normally. For the very last time, Avalon Knight felt… normal, alone, a single voice in a single mind.

Then it ended in a single searing burst of light, like a cataclysm, like the end of the life of a star. Avalon screamed as the power of the Code surged through her, as the island’s natural magic was sucked free of its reservoir and bound. She screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and when the memory ended she was still screaming, her hands pressed to her head as if trying to pop it.

Avalon sank to her knees, slipped sideways, and tried to catch her breath. “I want to go home,” she whimpered. “Oh, please, I want to go home.”



The names were seared into the meat of her brain, terrifying and unknowable. Badb? Femora, Morrigna, Myrddin. Something stirred in her chest at the thought of them, a terrible fondness for which she knew no name. Babylon’s cape hung over her shoulders, his arms around her, and she tried to feel safe but she didn’t. Beneath their feet hung a swirling golden maelstrom, free for the first time in years that were counted by thousands, not by hundreds. Now, made aware of it, she couldn’t ignore it. It sang to her in a language she didn’t recognize, but which resonated with something inside her, something old and cold and just now beginning to breathe again.

She hid her face in Babylon’s shoulder, and whispered to the great consciousness in the ground, whatever that awareness beneath them was: “Take me home.” Her mouth was dry. She wanted a drink. She wanted the turquoise waters of Puerto Ayora, and tropical rain--the patter of water hitting broad-leaf palms. “Please take us home.”

Something sucked them free from the island’s hold, depositing them back in the rainforest. Avalon vanished and was replaced with Arkady, whose face was wet with tears. “They made me give up my little brother,” she said. “Myrddin. I had to give him up. For Avalon.”