She loses... whatever it is she's crying about. Sorrow isn't quite the right word.

It grows back. She loses it again.

The next time around, the thing that eclipses lust first is shame, and she's almost grateful to lose that one, and then furious about being grateful, and then...

It continues much longer than the last time she was up here. There are a lot of hungry horrorspawn.

But eventually, she is watered, glued to the floor, and left alone to rest.

She cries. A lot.

But as soon as she can trust her voice to whisper instead of sob, she's back to repeating her... her new favourite sentence, over and over again. Occasionally she tries to say it properly, and fails, and goes back to the world's quietest chanting. She thinks maybe, if she could just run the 'speaking' part on pure physical autopilot while separately applying the 'this is my aria' part with her thoughts... but it hasn't worked yet, and it might not ever.

It's not like she's got anything better to do, though. Sleep? What even is sleep? She's not sure she remembers how.

No one disturbs her either way.

A figure occasionally passes through the air, out over the lake, distant, but stark against the backdrop with those luminous red wings. A figure with wings, clad in what looks like a raiment.

And, at one point, the magical girl from the Crossroads, in her own fluffy golden raiment, jogs right past the entrance to Scintilla's alcove, clearly visible and under no duress.

Yes, she remembers that first one from earlier.

...the other girl's new.

Well. New around here, anyway. All that gold is pretty distinctive. Scintilla remembers the last time she saw it.

Does she want to call out to her as she passes by?

...mmmno. No, she thinks she in fact does not. It's kind of stupid to be socially anxious at this point, but nevertheless, she finds she is a little.

After a while, it becomes noticeable that the radiance feeds the mostly-dormant thing in her womb even this far away. On the new relative scale of horny, it's nothing, but she's still going to have a little bit of a puddle under her, by the time the next 'day' rolls around.

But when she is next visited, it is not by vreth-a-likes or either of the complicit magical girls she's seen before.

A slightly unreal-looking woman with white hair and lavender skin darts, nude, into the alcove. She straightens up with a smug air, and holds one finger to her lips in a shushing gesture at the bound magical girl. The obvious fey sashays over and drops down between the bound girl's legs. With a smirk, her fingers hover millimeters away from the bound girl's clit.

Scintilla looks warily at the stranger. Whatever's going on here, it seems really unlikely to be meant to benefit her in any way.

The fey holds the girl's eyes, as with a widening smirk, her fingers gets closer... closer... almost touching. Close enough to feel without being a real touch.

Her wary confusion shifts gradually to wry amusement.

At that, the fey's smirk flips into a twisted, angry scowl. She draws her hand back and slaps the girl, right between her legs, hard.

"Is something funny, little cocksleeve?" she virtually snarls.

She yelps, flinching hard—but then snickers softly.

"You've made the classic error of assuming I experience hope."

The fey jams her fingers into the bound girl's drooling quim, fucking her roughly.

"You think you've seen the worst that can happen to you, you worthless cumdump? You think you've hit bottom? You're going to choke on thhurrrckkck" she cuts off abruptly, as a red leather belt comes out of nowhere and coils around her neck seemingly under its own power.

Behind the fey, is the magical girl with the red wings. She's statuesque, has curly dark red hair, and is clad in a skintight black body-stocking with clear glass bead-scale armor over her vital areas, and a writhing skirt made of dozens of moving red leather belts, shiny buckles whipping back and forth.

"Wynorla," the magical girl speaks, her voice hard, as she retracts the belt around the fey's neck and rips the fey off of the captive. "This is the third time I've caught you neglecting your assignment so you can play with the merchandise. What do you have to say for you self."

"Bll-hurrk! Black! Hrrrk! Black Swan!" the fey croaks out, clawing uselessly at the belt around her neck as she dangles in the air. "I hk, I was just, hkkk!" The belt loosens a little. "They need to be reminded! To be afraid! To hate themselves! You let them grow complacent!"

"I told you when we recruited you. I told you the first time this happened. I told you the second time this happened," Black Swan says. "Indulge your obsessions on your own time, when you aren't behind on your quota. But I'm not going to tell you that this time."

"...you're hgkkk! you're not?"

"No," says Black Swan. "You're fired."

And the belt constricts, crushing Wynorla's neck until her head separates from her body. The fey's body dissolves. Black Swan shakes her head in disappointment.

There's a moment where the sensation of something fucking her overrides all other concerns—

But it's remarkable how fast she can get hold of herself when she's got something to make fun of. This is possibly not the world's most virtuous tendency? Eh, she's got bigger problems.

"Hi," she says to the girl with the murderous skirt. "Are all your minions this unprofessional?"

Black Swan gives the bound girl a flat look.

"Didn't you get taken down by one of my minions without even putting up a fight? Because you were wandering around in the Crossroads like a clueless tourist?"

She shakes her head.

"You should sleep while you can. Now that I need to hunt down and hire a new siren, we're going to have a surplus of surrogates for a few days."

For a second she does feel bad about that, but then—

"Aww, give me a break, it was my first week on the job."

—she remembers why. It makes perfect sense to be bad at self-preservation when self-preservation is not on the list of things you care about.

Weirdly, she thinks she feels happier now than she did then. That can't be right, can it? Probably she's just forgotten what normal emotions are like.

"I'd feel bad for you... if I cared at all. Which I don't. So, bye."

Black Swan turns away, her wings of red light materialize, and she launches herself into the air.

A short while later, the vreth-a-likes show up to fuck her and suck on her brain, but there are fewer than yesterday. Afterwards, she gets another full 'night' worth of undisturbed time.

Maybe she will actually sleep this time around. Maybe she should not just try to stay awake indefinitely. Yeah let's go with that.

It's a little tough to get to sleep, but once she's out she gets a nice long solid rest, with an elaborate dream about complex political intrigue in a giant ice castle. If only she could write it down.

The next 'day', the vreth-a-likes come back. Again, they leave her in the alcove instead of taking her back down to the lake, but it is not obvious that they won't.

Scintilla could have plenty of time to dupe the block on her aria, or this could be her last chance for another month, or more. There's no way to tell. Vreth himself never visits her, nor does anyone else who might respond to the question.

Right, she's had her one good night's sleep, back to work it is.

Can she say her aria—properly, meaningfully, magically—without any conscious input into the mechanical process of speech? At this point she... thinks she's got the recitation part down to a decent approximation of perfect. If she has all the words right in the first place. If she hasn't made some other mistake. If she isn't fooling herself about the results somehow, because it's actually pretty hard to tell whether you're saying something properly when you're deliberately not paying any attention to the process of saying it. So all she has to do is try to put the magic in.

Well, the process is often described as 'pulling the aria out into the world and filling it with one's voice' and while that is more poetic than technical, it is more or less true. Priming the aria requires a mental action which is itself independent from the words of the aria, and then the sound that comes out of one's mouth is like a catalyst, that turns the key.

In the middle of that process, is the part that combines the figurative lock and key. It turns out... she can reach the keyhole. She can hold the key and turn it with her voice. But she can't put the key in the keyhole without thinking of those words as her aria, rendering the other two parts useless.

She is very stubborn and does not have much else to do with her time.

She tries again. And again, and again, and again. Small variations in exact mental posture, in how close she lets herself get to the words.

She fails, every time. Sometimes it almost seems like she's got it, and then the words slip away.

Her last resort is to attempt the brain-bending task of reciting the words while thinking of them as her aria even though she can't think them in that context. It's much harder than just thinking 'this is my aria' while deliberately shutting out all awareness of the sounds her voice is making. But until she successfully tries it she can't know whether it's going to work. So she mutters very quietly, over and over, and every time she falters in the middle when the block chases the words from her mind and she has to start again, and she does, and she falters in the middle...

It never quite feels like it can't work. But it doesn't. At least not before the next time she's taken back down to the lake, and reduced to little more than a blind, deaf, limbless sack of eldritch embryos and raging unbearable horniness.

Or the next.

Or the next.

or the next

or the next

orthenext

She does not like being a blind, deaf, limbless sack of eldritch embryos and raging unbearable horniness! She really, really, really doesn't!

At first she spends her breaks relentlessly trying variations on her core strategy, in every moment where she's confident enough in being unobserved.

Then she starts letting herself slip. This one time, she's too tired, too miserable, too ragingly unbearably horny. She just cries continuously until they eat the tears right out of her mind and then dissociates until they take her back down to the lake.

There's something very compelling about doing nothing but get fucked and cry. It simplifies her life considerably. If she isn't trying to escape then she doesn't have a reason to think, and thinking is hard.

On her next break, she vaguely intends to try again, but instead she lets herself go completely. She doesn't even dissociate this time. She feels everything, and all those feelings get burned out of her mind one after another in an extended cycle of rape and brainsucking, and it all grows back, and the whole time she's—not happy, she's never actually happy enough that they eat that one next, she's miserable and furious and ashamed and grieving and terrified and endlessly, intensely aroused—but there's a kind of underlying satisfaction to it. Especially in the moments when they've eaten all her fear and pain and shame and sorrow and her whole mind is nothing but pleasure.

Maybe there's no point in trying to escape. Maybe she should just wait, let them do what they want with her, enjoy her torment as best she can. She still believes what she said to the smart one when she first got here: eventually, something different will happen. They can keep her here for a very long time but they can't keep her forever.

In the meantime, though...

There's a cycle where she starts finding that same strange satisfaction in her time by the lake, and then as soon as they take her down from her fleshspire to carry her back to the alcoves she bursts into tears and the horrorspawns' first meal of the day is an intense all-consuming wave of self-loathing—what is she turning into, how can she enjoy this—isn't enjoying it strictly better than the alternative?—but she doesn't want to be that kind of girl—but has anything in the whole entire world ever turned out the way she wanted it to?—

They feast on her self-hatred, and then on the euphoric bliss she feels when self-hatred is no longer a thing she's capable of, and once she regains that ability it immediately swamps everything else she's feeling all over again, and by the end of that particular break she has reached a whole new level of emotional disorientation.

She hangs from her fleshspire and suffers ecstatically, and lies in her alcove and weeps helplessly, and they fuck her and drink all the feelings out of her brain, and she finds it harder and harder to remember that there was ever a time when she had any agency over her own life. Harder and harder to care that she doesn't want this to be happening to her, that she doesn't want to be the sort of person who enjoys it.

She becomes almost a creature of pure experience, feeling everything, reflecting nothing. When she's birthing eldritch tadpoles by the lake, she is intense arousal and the constant yearning for just a little more pleasure, just enough to finally achieve the orgasm that's hovering just out of reach. When she's lying glued to the alcove floor, she is misery and terror and shame and exhaustion and the desperate need to be fucked. And when the horrorspawn are feeding from her, she is a kaleidoscope of feelings, shifting dizzyingly from one configuration to another as they rip each emotion from her mind and each one slowly returns to her.

After long enough, she unselfconsciously loves the sensation of alien cocks thrusting deep into her helpless body. After long enough, she barely remembers why she spends so much time crying, barely contextualizes her sobbing misery as negative at all; the tears are almost as good a release as the gloriously intense orgasms that she gets to feel every so often when the timing works out. After long enough, she stops even trying to have coherent thoughts; the only time she ever thinks straight anymore is in her dreams.

And then...

Well.

Then something different happens.

Magical girls have been disappearing.

Scyelen is new on the team, but her unique ability to copy a spell from another magical girl makes her useful enough that she's brought in on the investigation.

The ocean breeze bites at her exposed skin as she teleports from rooftop to rooftop, using Samantha the Scattered Moment's primary mobility spell, Paradox Warp. Raiments are supposed to reflect the core values of the magical girl, and she can't exactly argue that "pink microkini armor" isn't appropriate to her heart of hearts, even if she only wishes she was as slutty as it makes her look. But it's cold up here and her new team---okay, their teasing was, if she's honest with herself, in good fun. It still took her more than a week to psyche herself up to holding a conversation with strangers while dressed like this, let alone allowing herself to be seen by mundanes.

She reaches the next Crossroads route. She can't remember its name. She pulls her phone out and checks the map Sylvia the Gravitic Eclipse gave her. Shoreshine. She teleports down, blushing, imagining judging eyes on her, and drops one of Casey the Brave Alloy's devices at the invisible waygate, then teleports back up to a nearby roof.

That was the last one. The trap is set.

The team assembles in their outpost, a commandeered office floor that was under renovation before they had it Veiled.

Sylvia is the leader. A veteran Gravity Mage, active since the 1940s, and more powerful than all the others combined. She has a reputation for being noble and fair, and she certainly looks the part, tall and charismatic in a raiment that could easily pass for a million-dollar red evening gown, contrasting sharply against her ebony skin.

Samantha is the other veteran. She is one the rare magical girls who was ensouled too old, and now has the 'loli' appearance shared by those formerly-elderly girls. She's the quiet one, standing at Sylvia's side where she has been since her first life ended and her second began. Despite being a powerful Time Mage and having the stature of a child, she's the team's melee specialist.

Then there is Shanie the Thundering Skyburst. She's newer, though still more experienced than Scyelen. Her raiment actually covers less skin than Scyelen's but still manages to look far less lewd, all jagged golden lace and delicate white-silver chain. She's tall, lanky, ambiguously dark-skinned, and full of energy, appropriate for a Lightning Mage.

Casey the Brave Alloy was the team's Metal Mage, and a proven badass in her own right. She's new on the team, but has years of experience on her own. She's a friendly, busty ginger, and it's her ability that the current plan hinges on.

The stakeout only lasts a few days, before the horrorspawn they're hunting trips one of Casey's cobbled-together sensors. They ambush it. They attempt to interrogate it. They don't get very far.

Then, that night, while their guards are down, the wall explodes inwards and an army of dolls throws itself upon them. The enemy Spirit Mage doesn't have much raw power, but she's vicious and precise, using her army for cover. They fall one by one, wiping out a dozen dolls for every loss, but there's just too many. Despite nearly obliterating the enemy forces, they all go down in the end.