A White Rabbit in Summer

The Emerald Warrior

We still got another hour until Finn arrives. I don't know why he thinks he knows more than me. I'm the one who stayed close to the Magicals, while he's been ignoring them. It's kind of like Rude Boy to pull something like this. One more stunt, one last prank before he helps me get my wand and key back. On the phone he made it sound like I didn't have a clue about what was really going on.

I went on a walk with Aily early on. After the night we had, I was glad to get out of here. I don't think I slept for more than thirty minutes. She wanted to talk about lies and trust. She'd never known that I was keeping something that big from her. As Aily put it, there was no way that she could've figured out that I was a childhood superhero, but she should've at least put together that I was keeping something big from her.

"I always thought there was some trauma with your friends, but never something like this. How can I trust you after this? You're clearly an accomplished liar."

"I didn't have a choice, Lily. I never did any of this to hurt you."

"I know. I want to trust you, Holly. I want to forgive you for what you did, but I don't know how. How could you just leave us like that?"

It was a hard question to answer. I knew from talking to Bily, world B Lily, that there was a good chance that things could turn into a big fight where we're both screaming at each other. There had to be some way to tilt the truth to make her understand where I'm coming from. Some lie that satisfied her outrage. She basically told me that she couldn't tell a truth from a lie, so I didn't need to tell the truth.

But that was kind of the point, wasn't it? Aily had suffered because I didn't care enough about them to stick around. Now that I could be honest, shouldn't I? If we were going to be friends after this, she needed to know the truth. So I told her.

"I gave up on Earth a long time ago, Lily.

"I was eleven when I first thought about going to the Magical Castle and never coming back. We'd found another one of Wikella's strongholds. Most of her lairs were sinister, gloomy, and a fight from the moment we stepped inside. This place was different. It looked normal, like a really big house that people get married in. But it felt wrong. The walls looked like there were ants moving just under the paint, the carpet would squeak and bleed when we stepped on it, and the whole place smelled like spoiled meat.

"The monsters were coming from the bedrooms. We usually fought dumb aggressive monsters like ogres, snapdragons, banshees, and spider ladies. That was the first time we met what we called Brains. Their heads were about twice as large as they should be, and their heads would wobble and shake when they moved. We could hear them crying and yipping at the walls. They scratched at their bodies like people and they fought to occupy the same space. When they came at us they attacked with coordination, yelling wordless orders at each other to regroup and probe for weaknesses.

"Before then, we'd always been able to beat the smaller monsters without using our special attacks. Our regular attacks were missing. We were freaking out and running scared. Finally, Finn went aggro and lit the whole place on fire. Something about the sight of burning walls spurred us to action. We regrouped and took them out.

"The Brains were gone, but we still needed to get the Twisted. It wasn't even the scariest thing we'd seen by that point, he was just a beetle with his own head. He made the monsters by laying eggs, but he was fast and he could break through our armor. That was the first Twisted we'd met that could do that. All of our old tricks were useless on him.

"Sasha saved us. She'd already used her special and her water attacks weren't doing anything to him anyway. So she used herself as bait. She just ran out into the middle of the room and threw her arms out. He pinned her down to sting her and that gave us the opening to work out a combined special. We had to use three at once to take down the beetle bane.