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Lup’s life has been pretty monotonous as of late. She spends most of her time in a suspended state of meditation, attempting to feel any sort of physical sensation at all. Being stuck inside her magic umbrella deep in a cave doesn’t offer much, however. Really all she can perceive at any given time is the bones of her own skeleton cradling the umbrella, and the weight of the robe that envelops it. She’d give anything for a light breeze or a squeaking rat. She used to spend her energy looking out around her, but grey stone gets pretty old pretty fast. So she lets her consciousness float. She tries not to think about the black curtains surrounding her or the immeasurable amount of time that’s passed without her.
When she hears Taako’s voice, her eyes snap open. She pushes her senses through the curtains to see him. Finally. He’s found her. He’s going to free her and take her home.
He’s with Merle and Magnus. All three of them look older, and like they’ve seen better days. Taako’s too skinny. She’ll have to chastise him for not eating enough. Just because she’s gone missing doesn’t mean he can skip meals. Asshole.
He spots her, and her heart swells. She wants to grab him and shake him and ask him what took so fucking long. Then she wants to cry and hug him and apologise for being so fucking stupid.
But Taako doesn’t come running over to her like he should. He bickers with Merle and ushers him towards her, which is strange, but also just won’t do. She feels the warmth of his hand wrap around the handle of the umbrella and she casts her first proper spell in ages, sending him flying across the room. There’s a beat of silence between them, and Taako says, “let me give it a whirl!”
He picks her up and she waits. And waits. All she gets from him is, “...so now I have an umbrella.”
She screams, unheard, “it’s MY umbrella, dipshit! Use your stupid head!”
Her view changes as Taako carries her, and she sees the dwarf with them. Her nonexistent heart stutters. He looks just like his father. “No,” she whispers to herself. “No, no, no, no, no.” She tries to protest, but it’s been too long since she's tried to affect the outside world. She doesn’t have the energy to cast anything or even shift the umbrella in Taako’s hand. All she can do is watch as another hand takes up the gauntlet.
The race back to town is a blur, and then she sees Barry. Amidst the chaos of smoke and fire and people trying to evacuate, he’s crystal clear. Surely, he’ll recognise the umbrella. Surely he’ll piece together what happened to her the moment he sees her.
But instead he dies. Gundren obliterates him in half a second, and he starts showing the telltale signs of his imminent fiery finale. Taako runs, and she’s exhausted. She pulls her vision back inwards. She knows what happens next, she doesn’t need to see it. For a little while, she lets their voices swirl together. She can feel Taako’s movement. Upwards, then walking around, and shifting from one foot to the other. Then she’s in his hands, maybe across his lap. He twists the fabric nervously. When he starts walking again, more consistently, she comes back. She has no fucking idea where they are. Not that she knows much of anything about this world in the first place, but wherever they are almost looks like home.
The few places she saw in Faerun in the short time she was corporeal looked older by Twosun standards. Towns surrounded by wilderness, carts rolling through on dirt or cobblestone roads, and rustic buildings of wood and stone. This place is modern. Paved pathways cut through manicured lawns with carefully placed trees, leading to dome-shaped buildings made of metal and glass. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think they’d been transported to some bougie-ass university back home.
People mill about in blue uniforms and cast glances at them as they’re led somewhere by an orcish woman with a large crossbow over one shoulder. They’re taken to an elevator, which is for sure too modern for this world, and ushered in. They poke fun at the bard that rides down with them, but none of it sits right with her. They’re not acting like themselves. Not entirely. It’s weird, and she doesn’t like it at all.
It gets worse when the elevator doors open and they’re met with a massive iridescent jellyfish in an equally massive tank. Lup’s jaw would drop, if she had one. Could Fisher always get that big? Were they stunting their growth with the little tank they shoved in the corner of Lucretia’s room? Is this even Fisher? Who’s to say this world doesn’t have its own Fisher-like creature?
“Boys,” a voice says from the base of the tank. Lup’s gaze is guided down and things get so much worse. Lucretia, too old and too wrinkled, spreads her arms and Lup can’t hear the rest of the conversation through the ringing in her ears. She knows humans age quickly, but this just isn’t right. Magnus doesn’t look that old, and he’s older than Lucretia. And why is she here? And introducing herself?
Then Davenport comes out, and he’s wearing a fucking bowtie. The captain she knows would rather die than put on a bowtie and act out a stupid little gnome routine. It happened once. She saw it.
The boys are handed vials of a dark liquid and drink. Lucretia welcomes them to the Bureau of Balance and gives them a half-true spiel on the relics. Things they should already know far too well. They’re led out of the chamber, and Lup turns her gaze backwards. Fisher bobs elegantly in their tank, and Lucretia tries to keep her expression neutral, but she can’t. Not when Lup’s the one looking. Her hope and relief are palpable. Her grief and guilt are tenfold. Something has gone deeply wrong, and she’s responsible. Nobody remembers anything about their journey except for her. And Lup. And Barry, now that he’s dead too. Such an ironic shame that he lost his final corporeal form to her relic.
A moment before the elevator doors shut, Lucretia’s gaze flicks down and she notices the umbrella for the first time. Her eyes widen, and Lup begs her to do something. To forget her whole Madam Director thing and come running. She wants her to rip her out of Taako’s hands and snap the damn thing in half. She doesn’t care about the time she spent making it anymore. She’d burn it to a crisp herself if she could.
But nothing happens, and she’s whisked away as the boys get onboarded to Lucretia’s secret society, knowing nothing about what’s really going on.
It’s late. At least, she assumes it’s late, the lights are out and Magnus is snoring. She doesn’t bother keeping her external sight going, it’s a waste of energy, but she keeps her hearing on. She never thought she’d see the day that she missed Magnus’s jet engine lungs, but it brings her back to simpler times. Happier times, all things considered.
She meditates, focusing on Magnus, and then Merle’s lighter snoring, and Taako’s gentle breathing further underneath that. She syncs up with him, and knows in her soul that their hearts are beating together again at last, even if he doesn’t know she’s there. She sits in that for a long while, finding a deep comfort that she’s lacked for so long. She remembers the performance he put on for her the night she left. How the only thing he ever seemed to want was her smile. She’d cry, if she could.
Her peace is interrupted as she’s suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling of an intruder. She opens her eyes to the interior of her prison. The curtains flutter, moving for the first time ever. It starts like a gentle breeze, but picks up quickly, until a red wind blows through them and surrounds her. She tenses, not sure if she should panic or fight back or let it happen.
Then she hears his voice.
Barry’s calling to her. Not by name, but he’s chanting. His voice is deep and rhythmic as he casts a spell to seek her out. The swirl of red magic closes in on her tighter, warm and solid like he’s wrapping her up in his arms. She reaches for him, and she’s lifted up, and up, and up to the imperceivable top of the chamber. Her vision goes completely red as her metaphysical form breaks down and he whisks her away.
Then she’s back. She has a proper ghostly form, and she’s floating in the middle of a ritual circle in a dark cave lit only by candles burned down low and her own dim ambient light. “Bear?!” She spins around, looking for him. Ready to hold him and be held. But he’s not here. The cave reeks of him, though. The ritual circle is drawn with a careful precision only he could muster, there’s some fucked up green pod in the corner that she can’t wait for him to tell her about, and his glasses are sitting on a table amongst a pile of books and other trinkets.
There’s an open book on the ground just inside the circle with some scattered gemstone dust around it. She picks it up and whistles when she sees the ritual he was using to summon her. “Decided to go real old school necromancy on this one, eh, Bear?”
There’s no response, and she frowns. All this work, and he’s not even here to greet her? Rude.
She takes the book over to his table with the intent to study the ritual further, and spots her old note. It’s tacked to the wall at the bottom corner of a map with countless annotations. Areas are circled and crossed out. Others have notes written next to them - “Not here. Too easy.” “Maybe? Caved in.” “Will need a guide.”
She looks down at the ritual. Meant to summon the undead, force them from one place to another, even through magical barriers. She sighs. “Shit.”
Barry’s senses come back to him slowly. It’s pleasant, almost. Especially after spending a decade repeatedly having a century’s worth of memories flood his consciousness every few months. The ritual took more out of him than he expected, but it was working. He knows it was working. He could feel her. For the first time since she disappeared, he could sense her. She was reaching out to him.
He can hear voices. Familiar ones. Lup always worked so fast, maybe she already rounded up Taako, Magnus, and Merle from under Lucretia’s thumb. Their memories are probably still a problem, but they can deal with that later.
His form feels… solid, almost? It shouldn’t, he’s still dead. Maybe having Lup nearby and safe has made him more stable than he’s been in years. He’s forgotten what it’s like to not fight for his sanity.
He blinks his eyes open, and instead of his wife’s beautiful fiery lich face, he sees curtains of a never ending height. He looks down at himself and is shocked to see his body. No heartbeat, still, but a full corporeal human body. He stands carefully. “Lup?” His voice is muted by the thick curtains surrounding this chamber. He grabs one and tries to pull it aside, only to find more of the same behind it. He tugs on it, hard, and it falls, but vanishes as it piles at his feet. He does the same to the one behind it, and the same thing happens. He rips curtains down until he’s sweating and heaving for breath. He drops to the floor of the chamber and puts his head in his hands. He fucked something up. He doesn’t know where he is. He still doesn’t know where Lup is.
He swallows hard and takes a steadying breath. His years of keeping himself sane have made it a habit to avoid these kinds of emotions. He runs through all his good memories until he’s calmer and feels a little more human. He keeps his hands pressed against his eyes and lets the darkness behind them dance.
Those familiar voices float back to him, and he looks up to the top of the chamber. It’s definitely Taako. Then it’s gotta be Merle and Magnus, there’s a lot of gruffness happening out there.
He takes another long breath and then tries to reach his senses out. It takes a lot more effort than he’d like, but eventually their voices get clearer, and he gets a hazy visual.
It looks like a large, white room with lots of people whose shapes and colours blur together into one big blob. There’s the dull background hum of clinking cutlery and lots of people talking at once. Taako sighs, “well I think I should’ve been able to take the robe, but it done went turned to dust.”
“Ehhh,” Magnus cringes, “probably best we didn’t bring a red robe into the organization actively working against a group called The Red Robes.”
“I’m just saying that you didn’t even want to touch the umbrella,” Merle says. “Since I was brave enough to go first and take a hundred damage–”
“It was like three,” Magnus says.
“-then I should get a turn with it!”
“Then you should’ve rolled better, my man,” Taako says.
Barry’s senses snap back inward as he smacks himself in the forehead. “Fucking– duh! Duh! An umbrella that fucking eats magic, I can’t believe–” he drags his hands down his face. His panic and grief and anger clouded his judgement, he never even considered it. It’s so obvious now. She never came home because she was trapped inside her own creation. And now he’s here too.
“Lup?” He calls for her again. Still no response. He is well and truly alone. He fucked up his ritual somewhere, but that’s fine. It’s fine. For the first time since his nightmare began, something’s different. Something’s changed. They can work with that. He’ll do what he can from here, but Lup’s the smartest, most resilient and resourceful person he knows. She’ll figure something out.
She starts with Lucretia. The first issue of finding her secret society hideout is quickly solved when she leaves Barry’s cave and looks up to see two moons in the sky, when she’s sure she only remembers one. She floats up, high over the terrain of Faerun, until she hovers above the modern campus of the Bureau. The second issue is finding the woman herself. She circles the perimeter, looking for the most grandiose dome that Madame Director would surely inhabit. Instead, she comes across Lucretia sitting in the grass behind a small maintenance dome in an area that appears hardly trafficked by potential onlookers. Her staff lies next to her. Lup descends, and is thrown backwards as she hits an invisible barrier. She shudders as holy magic ripples through her. Enough to hurt, but not enough to do any real damage.
It passes, and she looks back to see Lucretia staring at her wide-eyed. She gets to her feet, needing more leverage from her staff than Lup would like to see from her young human friend, and approaches the edge of the false moon. “Lup?” Her voice is light and hesitant. “Where– is it really you?”
“Sure is.” She gets as close as she dares, avoiding another shock from whatever protections surround this place. “Sooo… what the fuck?”
She grips her staff with both hands, “you know just as well as I do that we couldn’t keep going the way we were.”
“So you just–” she waves her hand around, gesturing at all of the everything.
“I did. I erased everything except their lives before the mission, and…” she trails off and avoids looking at her. Lup waits. She can assume, but she wants to hear it. The silence stretches long, and Lucretia sighs. “It was awful, Lup. They didn’t sleep, didn’t eat. I couldn’t send them out into the world like that. It was easier this way.”
“Did you talk to anybody before you did this?”
“Did you?” Lup’s form flickers in response. They both know the answer to that. She wants to be angry about what Lucretia did. Maybe if they’d kept their memories, they would’ve found her sooner. But they wouldn’t have had to find her if she’d just told them what she was doing. “Where were you?”
She could tell her. She would get the umbrella off of Taako and free Barry in an instant, she’s sure of it. But… there’s a holy ward around the Bureau. She wouldn’t have put it up for no reason. Barry wouldn’t be hiding out in a cave for no reason. It’ll be better if she frees him herself. She needs to get a proper rundown of the situation. She shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter now.” She starts floating backwards, “I should go.”
“No!” Lucretia reaches out for her, “you could stay. I’ll take the ward down. You could help–”
“I will. I’ll help them as best I can. But think about this, Luce. Maybe this reality would be better off if we weren’t here.”
It occurs to her a few days later that she should’ve asked Lucretia how many relics she has already. Or how much time they have left before the Hunger shows up. But no matter, she has to make do without. She spends her time sorting through all of Barry’s things. Spellbooks, mostly. Lots of earmarks on tracking and communication spells. None of which she ever received. Something starts growing in the pod. She takes notes for him. Whatever experiment he was doing, she’ll be damned if he doesn’t get his observations.
She keeps an eye on the fake moon, and spends some nights hovering invisibly above it, hoping for a glimpse of Taako. Keeping up the invisibility is exhausting, more so than it should be, but she keeps it up to be safe.
The first time the boys leave the base, she completely misses it. She sees a glass orb rising up from the horizon that disappears into the surface of the moon. She casts scry on Taako and finds him climbing out of it into a sleek hangar. The fire of her lich form dims as she holds the concentration, but she watches as he’s greeted by people in Bureau blue and brought to a dome with Lucretia waiting. Davenport walks over with a metal sphere on a cart and Taako drops the Oculus into it. She waits through the rest of the conversation, but nobody says how many they’ve got left to find. She dismisses the spell and vows to keep a closer eye out. She will not miss them again.
She hovers high above the moon daily. Her strength comes back to her at a snail's pace, she can only manage short bursts of invisibility, but they get minutely longer day by day. She's there during the midsummer festival when the sky darkens and all too familiar white eyes open up above them. Everyone down below collapses except the boys and Lucretia, who drops to the ground before they can realise it. It's official. They have one year left to figure this out.
The thing in the pod grows, and looks almost like an embryo. She wonders what the fuck Barry was up to.
The second time, she’s ready. She sees the orb leave the moon, and with a quick spell to confirm that Taako’s inside, she sets out.
She would love to just teleport straight to them, but she doesn’t know where they’re going and even if she did, she’s not familiar enough with anywhere in this world for teleport to be a guaranteed success. She follows them the old fashioned way, with a little help from being able to float and cover more ground. By the time she gets to Goldcliff and finds them, they’re in the midst of a race. They win, sure, but the Gaia Sash takes over its poor victim and is unleashed to its full potential. She watches them drive headfirst off a cliff and into a tornado of vines and thorns. It feels like an eternity before a wave of powerful magic emanates outwards and the entire tornado wilts and dies. Her undead heart stutters.
I’m coming, Bear. Sit tight.
She goes over the side of the cliff and finds them in a reflecting pool in front of a cherry blossom tree. She gears up to do her cool lich entrance and get her umbrella back, but the militia pulls up moments later. She grumbles and follows as the captain leads them away.
In his office, it’s immediately clear what he’s doing when he offers them a drink. She can see the glaze in his eyes that comes with the thrall of the relics. She dives into his body and has to fight more than she’d like for control. But she wins, and smacks the glass out of Taako’s hand. She grabs the one Magnus is holding and forces whoever this guy is to drink it. His body falls away, leaving her behind. The three boys stare at her, dumbfounded. Merle is still holding his glass.
“I wouldn’t drink that if I were you,” she says.
“Yeah! Nope! Agreed!” He puts it back on the desk and leans far away like it’ll bite him.
She looks at her brother, holding her umbrella. “Taako–” her form flickers as Magnus’s fist swipes through it. “Hey–” he tries again, and again, then pulls out his axe and swings straight through her, twisting himself around with the momentum. She floats a few feet up. “Taako,” she says again, putting on a raspy affect, “give me the umbrella.”
“Hm?” Taako examines his nails like he wasn’t paying attention.
She extends her fiery skeletal hand. “The umbrella.”
“Oh,” he laughs, “I don’t think so, kemosabe. This is, like, my wand now? And it just one shot a whole bunch of sentient vines, so…”
“It belongs to me… it must be returned.” She might be putting on a bit of a show, but that’s half the fun of being a lich.
He shrugs. “Shouldn’t have left it rotting in a cave. Finders keepers.”
“It is crucial that you return it to me.” She wants to kiss her husband and also get his side of this whole mess.
“I don’t even know you, homie.”
It’s like an arrow straight to her heart. She can’t even come up with anything clever to say. She could cast something. Make him drop it and scoop it up first. But she’s still so far from her full strength, and she needs the energy to teleport back to her hideout. “Please,” she says, forgetting the voice she was putting on.
Magnus leans over his chair and stage whispers to Taako, “aren’t we working against Red Robes?”
“Hey, yeah!” Merle says. “You’re evil! We shouldn’t trust shit about what you think is crucial!”
Her form flickers as the reality of their missing memories really washes over her for the first time. Licks of flame shoot off into the room, making the boys duck to avoid them. She wants to cry and wail and scream.
She can’t fall apart, especially not in front of them. Without another word, she vanishes in a burst of flame, leaving Barry behind.
She tries to teleport, but only ends up in the wilderness somewhere. She clutches her head and squeezes her eyes shut, sinking to the ground. “Best day ever,” she whispers to herself, “best day ever.” She rifles through her memories of Taako, of that day, but it almost hurts more, knowing he doesn’t know her. Her flames shudder violently. “Fuck, come on.” Barry. Days spent with Barry. Nights spent with Barry. Sightseeing trips for two. Hours in the lab. A duet and the point of inevitability.
She steadies enough to not be an immediate threat, but stays put. She keeps breathing. It’s not necessary, but it helps. It makes her feel normal. “You’re fine,” she whispers. “Everything’s fine.”
“Well, well, well,” a cockney voice says from above her, “lookie what we have here.”
She raises her head and sees a skeletal figure in a black robe standing above her. He has a large tome floating open in front of him and a scythe in one hand. “Lup Taaco,” he says, “I’ve been looking for you for quite a while.”
She raises up off the ground. “You and everybody else. What do you want?”
He dismisses his tome. “Justice.”
“Cool story, Batman. Anyway–” She tries to move past him, but he puts his scythe out in front of her.
“Not so fast. You are a death criminal. A highly wanted one, at that. You’re not going anywhere but the Eternal Stockade.”
She shoots finger guns at him. “Don’t even know what that is, so I'm gonna bounce, actually.” She teleports again, despite her lack of energy and still fluctuating stability. She begs the universe to let it work. The universe plunks her smack in the middle of a disk of black glass. “Son of a bitch,” she hisses under her breath, before setting out to find her proper way home.
The thing in the pod starts looking like a person, and she finds Barry's small stash of blood vials. Her freak of a husband was growing himself a new body to inhabit. God, she loves him. She wishes he was here.
She almost misses the third mission, too. She clues in to the moon base being out of its normal orbit a little too late. She gets to the crystallised lab just in time for some loser nerd to go on an unsanctioned TED talk about the planes of existence. She lets him get pretty far, farther than he deserves, when she decides that it’s time for the real expert to jump in. She freezes anybody unimportant in place and says, “what’s bigger than this?”
Magnus whirls around and swings his axe through her twice. Taako points the umbrella at her and Merle holds his hands up like he’s about to karate chop her.
“Hello, Taako.”
Magnus steps into her space so they’re overlapping. “Oh ho ho, look at me, I’m a Red Robe!”
She ignores him and floats up. “I’d still like my umbrella back.”
Taako lowers it and leans against it. “Not a chance.”
“Then let’s talk about the planes.” She floats over them to the cosmoscope. “This is an impressive device, but Lucas hasn’t seen as much as he thinks he has.” She turns back to them. “There is something bigger than this. Something you can not remember. It’s coming, and it's hungry. It will devour this world, as it devoured countless before it.”
“Who are you?” Magnus asks.
She shakes her head. “I can’t tell you that yet. But I can help you. I can be effective in the fight against this Hunger,” she extends her hand, “I simply need my staff.”
“Nah, I’m good,” Taako says.
“I think you’re still supposed to be evil, aren’t you?” Merle asks.
“I’m not–” She growls. Why did Lucretia have to say she was evil? Wouldn’t misguided have been enough? It’s closer to the truth. “Just give it back.” She dives towards him and he dodges out of the way, dextrous asshole. Magnus swipes her uselessly with his axe again, and Merle hits her with some holy spell that sends shocks of pain through her.
“Holy shit, it’s a fucking Red Robe!” An unfamiliar voice says.
The other people around them have unfrozen. The two Bureau employees spring into action, the small dragonborn jumping towards her with two knives drawn. She falls straight through Lup’s form with no damage, and Lup disappears before anyone can attack her in any way that matters
The fresh Barry body is starting to look fully grown. She needs to get him back so they can make use of it. It wouldn’t be any fun to possess him without him in there right alongside her.
When they recover the Chalice, she doesn’t even say anything. She appears, and Taako says, “don’t even try, homie. We just died, like, a gazillion times. I don’t need this right now.”
She deflates. “Taako, please. I need you to trust me. I need that back.”
“Trust you?! You tried to kill him last time!” Merle says.
“I didn’t. I would never.”
“You did!” Magnus exclaims, “I saw it! With my own eyes!”
She shakes her head, tries to find the right combination of words to fix this. Nothing comes. She sinks to the ground, her form flickering. “I’m trying,” she says, hoping that Barry can hear her. “I don’t know what to do. I need you. Please, Bear. Come back to me.”
She steadies herself, looks up at the confounded faces of her friends and rises. “We’ll try again next time. Be safe, boys.”
She finds out about Wonderland by accident. She was scoping out a black market for anything that might be interesting or useful, when she heard some schmuck going on and on and on about this place. He stunk of necromantic energy and the whole thing sounded just fucked up enough to be worth checking out. She delves into the Felicity Wild and wanders around until she finds it. The circus tent is surrounded by dirt paths lined with billboards. They’re blank at the moment, but she’s sure that they can render whatever their victims' hearts desire.
She does laps around the perimeter for days, waiting. If her calculations are correct, all that's left is Barry's relic, and if it's anywhere, it's here.
Eventually, the boys show up. They’ve got a few extras in tow, but they split off to different entrances. Lup follows invisibly.
The game starts, and she hangs back, biding her time. As much as she wants to intervene and help, she needs to do this right. She can’t be rash. She notices the suffering coming out of their mouths early on, and as they get more and more miserable, she starts siphoning off small, unnoticeable portions of it. Her strength has been returning to her slowly over the last few months, but the suffering, as much as she hates to admit it, offers her a boost that she’s been needing.
Taako gets crushed under a piece of machinery, and it takes all her restraint to keep from blowing this whole place up. There's no telling how many other victims are in here, and these liches have to be smart enough to protect their death trap from big magic. She clenches her fists and stays put. Her time will come.
During the dating show, she doesn’t even notice Taako cast the spell, but suddenly Magnus is looking straight at her. She tenses up. He can’t blow her cover now. She raises a single finger to her lips, and he moves stiffly to look back at Edward and Lydia.
The games move on. She wants to talk to Magnus so badly, now that he knows she’s there, but there’s nothing to say. She keeps her distance and tries to sense the true nature of this place. How can they get to the bell? These liches will never give it up, no matter how many rounds they survive.
This is all an illusion, surely. The tent isn’t big enough for all these rooms. It’s magic. They just need to get off the rails.
While the liches seem distracted with other victims, and the boys are distracted with a fight, she starts fucking with the magical smoke that forms this place. A few botched attempts later, and she manages a door into the cavernous maw she can feel at the core of it all. They all crash through it, and come face to face with Edward and Lydia. Lup readies herself. The first shot these freaks try to take at her friends, she's going to be there and blast them to smithereens.
But no attack comes. No flash of lightning or ray of death that she can intercept. Instead, a bell rings, and Magnus almost keels over. Then he stands up straight with a strange look in his eye, and starts singing the praises of Wonderland.
She didn't think she was too out of practice in a fight, but the rest happens so fast, she can't even react.
Taako collapses, Merle casts a spell of some description, Taako gets up, and a mannequin with Magnus's voice comes out of the darkness. Lydia heals Magnus's body with Edward inside, and he gears up to take a swing on real Magnus. Lup appears between them in a burst of flame.
“Oh,” Lydia laughs, “well isn't this interesting.”
Bright flames licks up over her whole form. “You've hurt my brother and my friends enough.”
“Wha- brother?” Magnus says behind her. She ignores him.
“Did you hear static too, or was that just me?” Merle mutters to Taako. She ignores them too.
“And what are you going to do about it, dear?” Edward says, leaning against Magnus's lance.
“I've been saving my spell slots for this.” She reaches a hand out and casts Power Word Kill. Magnus's body drops unceremoniously to the floor, leaving Edward behind.
He tuts. “Come now, hun. You're a lich yourself, you have to know better than-”
He's interrupted by the umbrastaff inverting. It drags him towards it. He scrambles for a grip on the floor, Magnus, anything, but he's gone in a moment. There's silence, and Taako drops the staff as it shakes violently. Then it inverts again, and spits Edward back out. He slides and lands in front of Lup. There are deep cracks in his skeletal hands, and his form shudders for a moment before he turns to ash. Lydia screams and falls to his side. Lup backs up, urging Magnus back with her. It's painful to watch her fall apart, but she stands by and waits. Black lightning crackles violently off her disintegrating form, just narrowly avoiding them. Her scream echoes off the illusory walls of Wonderland, and then she's gone, taking Magnus's body with her.
The bell sits on their ashes, and Lup approaches it. Taako runs up ahead of her and holds his arms out, “I don't think so. You may have just saved our asses, but I'm still not trusting you with a relic.”
She holds her hands up, “okay, whatever. Have at it.”
He frowns. “Magnus,” he gestures back at the bell with his head, “have at it.”
“Huh?” He doesn't have a face to emote, and yet he still looks lost.
“The bell,” Taako says slowly.
“Right. Yeah. Sure.” He walks past them and collects the bell and his surviving belongings. Wonderland disintegrates around them. He turns to her. “Hey, so, what the fuck?”
“I know. I'll explain as soon as I can, I just need-”
“The fucking umbrella, I know! I don't think it matters right now when I don't have a body, Merle can't talk to his god, and– augh!” He clutches his head as he grunts. Merle and Taako rush to his side.
Merle says, “you okay, Mags?”
“Uh. Yeah, sure. I guess.” He looks up at her, “am I supposed to know you?”
“Holy shit.” Her form flares with excitement. “You're dead! You can remember! Yes, yes you are! We-”
“Hey!” Taako shouts as the umbrastaff flies out of his hand and lands where her feet would be. He starts towards her, “don't you dare.”
She smiles sheepishly. “Sorry, Koko.” She blasts it, and a wave of necromantic energy radiates outward. There's a black scorch mark left on the ground, and Barry floats above it. She crashes into him, wrapping her arms tightly around him.
He returns the hug and says, “you can't tell him anything.”
She doesn’t dare pull away from him. “Why not?”
“It's too much at once.”
“But-”
“Listen.” He pulls back and grabs hold of her shoulders. “I forgot and remembered over and over and over again. The amount of information Lucretia erased is painful if it comes back uninhibited, and in his current physical state, it could do some real damage. We don't have time to guide him through it properly. We need to wait.”
She looks up at the sky, grey and unmoving. They have a day, maybe, before the Hunger touches down. They need to move.