The Magicians: Attack the Beast

We shouldn't have trusted Jane. The recent years of the timeline we were now in hadn't been kind to her. They'd made her ... emotional. No, they'd driven her a bit mad to be completely honest. So we shouldn't have trusted her, the famous Watcher Woman, but we did, and Penny died a miserable death because we did.

So the battle:

We really didn't believe that we had a shot at killing the Beast, of ending him completely, when we went into it, but we felt we had to give it a try because of what Jane had told us, which was that, ready or not, the Beast was coming for Professor Mayakovsky, the most powerful of us in this timeline—even more powerful than the Beast despite being gravely sick at the time—and that he, the Beast, would be doing this the moment he finished his latest recuperation.

Fogg was dubious. "Do you really think that's true?" he asked Jane. "Do you think he really has a way to take Mayakovsky's magic now?"

Jane was positive her brother did.

"So then we have to bring in Mayakovsky," said Quentin, who stood beside me.

"No, your teacher is not coming along, Quentin," Fogg said. "Despite his enhanced strength, he's in no condition to fight. That strength, his augmented power: he hasn't acclimated to it yet, and that's made him very ill. It's made him weak. So this is entirely up to us. I'm sorry."

"Henry, do you really think we can kill the Beast without Professor Mayakovsky's participation?" Jane asked Fogg. "Perhaps we should delay this until he's better, until he can fight with us."

I interrupted. I just couldn't even imagine going after the Beast in the Beast's own territory without our Russian teacher. That sounded like suicide to me.

"How can we attack Chatwin's estate without Mayakovsky?" I asked.

Chatwin's estate, mind you, wasn't precisely his family's home. It was a re-creation of that home that the Beast had conjured in a mystical plane far beyond the Neitherlands, a plane in which time, space, and magic were the Beast's to play with like silly putty. It was the seat of his power.

This was insane, as was the idea that Mayakovsky would allow us to confront the Beast in his own kingdom on our own.

"He's going to find out about it," I said. "Even if he's sick, he's going to join us. He'll insist, and we won't be able to stop him."

But Fogg said, "no, he's not, Reginald, because we're doing this right now. We're leaving as soon as we can. We leave now, we do what we have to, and we get back before word gets through to Mayakovsky."

"So it's just gonna be us all alone against the Beast?" Penny came in. "Yo, Dean, I just don't see that as a good idea."

"I didn't say we're going alone," Fogg interrupted, "Alice is coming, too."

And now Quentin was incensed. "Alice ... after what happened in the last timeline, after the Beast killed her?! She's still recovering from that!"

I calmly supported our friend, saying, "She can't take part in any attack on Chatwin, Dean. Not right now. She still hasn't recovered from her death."

"No," Fogg disagreed, "she's more powerful than she's ever been. Her weakness is all in her head, which Jane and I have managed to set straight."

"No, no," Penny jumped in. "Alice or no Alice, we can't go after the Beast now. We're not ready for that. None of us are."

Fogg responded with a slight twinge of anger in his voice. "If the Beast has grown as powerful in his recuperation as we think he has, and in such little time, then his growth rate is off the chart—faster than Mayakovsky's—which means have to strike now before he becomes omnipotent."