“The thing is,” said Karry after they’d had a few drinks, and then had somehow relocated to her apartment and had a few more, “is that I’m not actually sure that it can be destroyed.”
“Everything can be destroyed if you try hard enough,” said Oasis with the air of a person who had watched the world be tested to its limit and had emerged the only survivor. They punctuated that statement with a sip of the dainty blue cocktail that Karry had whipped up for them both.
Karry sometimes wondered about the future they were from. How could an entire continent be destroyed, all except a single person? But then the answer came, sobering in its implications. Magic, of course. A magic that SwordBright only was immune to.
She swirled her own mug, watching the blue liquid go round and round inside the porcelain cup. She’d done the cocktails a little stronger than usual, knowing that it wouldn’t affect neither herself nor Oasis much, and it burned like liquid flames on the way down. It would have tasted even better if she’d had any blood recently, probably. Without the warmth of humanity to dispel the chill in her bones and animate her flesh body, she could barely feel the world around her. She curled the fingers of her free hand in the fabric of her skirt, bunching up the fabric over the disgustingly white and chilled skin of her thighs. She knew that some vampires liked feeling buzzed out of the world, high in the bad sense of the word, lost in the fog of their immortality. They thought that it gave them gravitas and authenticity, these old pretentious bats. But Karry herself preferred the anchor of fresh blood and the curl of fear in the air. Perhaps it made her a monster. But at least she was a monster that could touch and taste and feel.
Oasis tapped their hands on the ground, a nervous tic that she had never previously known them to have. They’d both ended up sitting on her kitchen floor, slouched on her beautiful handmade black rug and leaning back on the dark wood panelling of her cupboards. The necklace laid between them, red and gleaming on the rug like a bright star in the night sky.
“I don’t really know much about it,” she admitted. “It’s not like I was ever allowed to examine it, before. I saw it from afar, in the hands of whoever my master was at the time, and that’s it. I don’t know how it works.”
“What does the museum say about the necklace?” they asked, crossing their legs at the ankles. They’d removed their shoes at the door, and their mismatched socks were driving Karry crazy. “They must have identified it’s origin, right? Studied it or something? Maybe if we know which type of magic was used to make it, we could figure out how to un-make it… right?”
“That’s not really how it works,” she said, annoyed. “And besides, the museum didn’t even know it was magic. They wouldn’t have put it in a display with a bunch of random crap if they did. It would have gone up with the other magical exhibits.”
Oasis was silent for a beat. “But how could they have not known? Didn’t they feel it?”
She stared at them. “You felt its power? I thought you weren’t supposed to notice those things. Being a dud and all.”
“I’m not a dude!”
“I said a dud. Like magic doesn’t work on you like it should. You’re faulty.”
They gaped at her. “I take offence to that! I’m immune, not faulty. There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Well there clearly is,” she retorted, unnerved. “If you’re immune, then you’re not supposed to feel the necklace’s magic. It shouldn’t work on you.”
“And why shouldn’t I feel it?” they frowned. “The necklace isn’t supposed to do anything to me, it’s supposed to control you. If anything, it’s like a spell I can cast when I hold the necklace, and we already know that I can cast spells, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to go back in time. Maybe… Maybe I can feel its power because I can use it, and other people don’t because…” They gasped and pointed at her excitedly, the alcohol sloshing in their mug. “Because they don’t know it has magic! Maybe the necklace works the same way you do, maybe it runs on belief!”
Karry stared at them. The theory made a lot of sense, and she was a little unnerved that Oasis was the one that had come up with it. She was also still annoyed with the fact that they knew that she ran on belief. She could not reiterate enough how people weren’t supposed to know that.
“Alright,” she said, “but that still doesn’t tell us how to destroy it.”
They sank back against the cupboard, a frown on their face. “The Tyrant knew about the necklace, though. They knew enough to use it. That means the information exists out there, right? They had to have learnt about it somewhere.”
Karry ruminated on that information for a while. Thinking about the Tyrant and their use of the necklace to mind-control made her feel indescribably ill. She had spent so long not being in control of herself, followed by centuries learning to savour the taste of freedom. Her joy in being her own master had always been dimmed by the prospect of her necklace out there, but at least with each year that passed the likelihood of there still being someone left that knew how to use it had faded. But now, all of those fears and anxiety were stirred anew, turning into something worse, something certain and inescapable. She saw the future, all written out in front of her, and it made her sick to her stomach.
Incapable of taking it any longer, she stood up and went to place her cup in the sink. She leaned her hands on each side of it, head hanging low. “I’ll have to ask around,” she said, warily. “I’ll try to learn what I can. In the meantime, get out of here.”
She felt them hesitate, and curled her claws into the stone of the counter, ready to turn around and toss them out of the apartment manually if they refused to go. Oasis got to their feet and leaned around her to place their own cup in the sink, careful not to touch her, but still too close for comfort. The heat of their body cursed through her awareness like thunder cracking in the sky, and the pulse of their blood was like a siren call of sweet crimson life. She tensed, her fangs elongating despite herself, but Oasis retreated, first out of her personal space and then out of the room altogether.
Karry stood frozen at the sink, until she heard the soft click of the door and until she could no longer feel their Knowledge of herself pulsing at the edge of her awareness, feeding her powers even more potently than their blood would have fed her body. Finally, after several long minutes, she took a deep breath, and let all of the tension drain out of her body.
Behind her, she knew, that cursed necklace still glimmered red and angry on her carpet. She left it there and went to bed. No one would come and steal it in the night, and she was too exhausted to deal with it for the time being.
The morning following the heist, Karry sat down in her private office and started to plan.
One of the side effects of spending way too many centuries looking for a magical artifact was that eventually, you ended up being known as the magical artifact lady. From the very beginning, Karry had figured that it would be safer for her if no one knew that she was searching for her necklace specifically, so she had set up a small trade for any and all magical artifacts, and had used it to cover for her own more personal search.
As time had passed, her dealings had gotten more and more ambitious, and by now she had almost the entire magical community out searching for a lot of things in her name, from artifacts to spells to books to whatever. As far as anyone knew, she was basically the best source to buy, sell or identify magical objects. She had an entire network of bounty hunters turning up items for her, then sellers and buyers that handled the business in her name. She even owned a few magical stores and even warehouses, and she was expecting to purchase a small fleet of trucks soon to handle shipping in America and oversea, mostly because she was tired of having to handle the fallout when Fedex messed up handling delicate cursed items and accidentally blew up a post office.
In the magical economy of the world, she was a vitally important link between archaeologists and thieves and fences and legitimate collectors, and had even handled part of the Royal Museum’s magical collection.
It was a bit tiring, honestly, to be in charge of so many contacts and agents, and sometimes it was so much of a full time (but highly paying) job that she had to make time to go and be a super villain. But at least it hid the fact that she was looking for her necklace for so many years, because she had a full list of about 150 items that she was “very actively” searching for, that were considered impossible to find. She had, actually, found a few of them already, which had bolstered her reputation nicely and brought more business at her door. Every bounty hunter on the planet that dealt in magical objects knew about her list and hoped to be the one to bring her something from it.
The items on the list ranged from the obvious to the obscure, with such high profile objects as the Lance of Longinus (the real one, not the medieval knock-off in the museum of Vienna) as well as very obscure things like the ring of a peasant Chinese girl from 1400 BC that supposedly had a dragon soul inside of it. Her necklace fell neatly in the middle of this sliding scale of famousness vs obscurity, not to obvious as to stand out but still on the radar of her agents.
And now, it was hers, although it hadn’t come into her possession in an expected manner at all.
Katarina placed the pendant in a bronze bowl at the centre of her enormous mahogany desk and leaned back in her chair, stapling her fingers in front of her chin. When she wasn’t touching it, the ruby didn’t give off any magical vibrations at all. If Oasis was correct, then it didn’t even feel like magic to people who didn’t know what it was, and she supposed that it was only this fact which had kept her agents from finding it all this time. It was very peculiar, and it did open several interesting questions about the nature of magical items. Were there others like it in the world, unknowable to anyone who didn’t already know them? Hidden by the very fact of their secrecy? It begged for further study.
On the other hand, the necklace had to be destroyed. Oasis was right; they couldn’t run the risk of the Tyrant getting his hands on it again.
Karry booted up her desk computer and pulled up the list of her various contacts on the screen. Up until this point, her business had always only consisted in finding objects, identifying them, and then sending them on their way. She’d never bothered with learning how to manage them. Why would she neutralize or destroy an artifact? Curses had no effect on her, and whoever paid to purchase it deserved what they got. Her responsibilities ended at making her clients sign contracts indicating that whatever ghost gremlin they invited into their home through her products were their own damned fault and that she never gave money back.
She would have to reach out to new people, she supposed. She’d have to dive deep into an entirely new field of magical research that she had never considered before, and she had to admit, it was a little exciting. A side effect of the search for the necklace had been that Karry had become a connoisseur of magic throughout the centuries, knowing probably more about magical artifacts than the best wizards and historians put together. What had initially started as a quest of necessity had turned into something of a passion.
She quickly scanned the list on her computer. Perhaps she could spin the story that an item recently come into her possession had turned out to be too malevolent to manage, or that she’d gotten a weird request from one of her buyers.
There were several magical schools in Europe that might have an answer for her in their ancient libraries, as well as demon hunters and a couple of contacts in the Vatican who’s entire profession was to search and destroy items. In the past, they had shirked their duties to sent her the items they were collecting, but she was sure that they could do their actual job, for once, and tell her how to destroy something un-destroyable. As she kept scanning the list, she paused on one entry near the end of it and hummed in thought.
The cult of the Eternal Eye had a chapter in Toronto, and they’d asked her for a lot of demon worshipping related items in the past. It was a long shot, but everyone who specialized in contacting demons usually had a way to restrain them or possibly even destroy them if things turned sour. Perhaps they could tell her more about how to control a demon, and their answer might prove illuminating. After all, that’s all that her necklace was in the end. A way to control her. If she could break free of that control, there might not even be a need to destroy the ruby itself.
She sent the group a quick email, before rising up from her desk and going to get herself a cup of coffee. Some of her contacts could only be reached through un-traditional means, so in addition to emails and phone calls, she had a long morning ahead of her writing old fashioned letters, crafting magic dreams, and sending her voice to pierce the veil of distance and time. She’d have to call in her assistant, a plucky young witch from a nearby coven, if she wanted to be done by supper time.
She pulled out her phone and checked her texts on the way to the kitchen. Someone had asked a question about Pot Man in the super villain group chat, wondering about his whereabouts since it had been a while since he’d been seen in Ottawa. She sent back that he was in Toronto as far as she knew. Then she hesitated, and sent in a query of her own. She’d never considered consulting other villains on magical matters before, but she supposed there was a first time for everything.
By the time that he coffee was prepped and her assistant called, an answer was waiting for her in her inbox. She read the email carefully, then smiled to herself. It looked like she was going back to Ottawa, then.
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