"Of course." Veronica fetches it for her.

"Thank you." She settles in to read. 

A house without love is already ash. Natural love is a foxglove, insistently beautiful in a garden trying to weed it out. A marriage between a mage and a man can only be a paper flower.

There are those who see fewer colors. How many could we see, if we could see them all? How much more beautiful is the world than we know?

I sleep on my gold, on my diamonds, and I am blessed to blink away the bruises every morning. To magi asking, "May I shed my ornaments at night, to sleep more comfortably?" I ask why they do not first make sure that no man sleep in his chains.

This is beautiful and fascinating. 

Although she doesn't understand all of it. 

"What does she mean about a marriage between a mage and a man?"

"Magical girls," says Veronica from where she's adding food to Paladin's bowl, "only want to marry other magical girls when we're grown up, but back when Abigail Lydia Claremont was young, they didn't use to let people do that. They used to say that women ought to marry men even if they didn't want to. That's who that man with the huge beard was in the comic book, the husband she had for a while before she realized she shouldn't have to be married to a man she didn't want and left him."

"Ohhh." She keeps reading. 

Why is nature beautiful? Why is the random scattering of the stars? Why the icy fingers of a snowflake? Not: why did God make these things to be lovely, but how is the loveliness placed in them?

There is so much of God in a house full of magic, She seems to live there entire, one of their daughters now practicing her spells with God's hand on her shoulder, one of the women now spreading her wings to better see the sunset with God in front of her to cut a path in the air.

How glorious that though we are so clearly purpose-made to protect each other from demon-creatures, there is enough magic left over for ourselves, for each other, for moments of calm, even for frivolity.

The book is really beautiful and well-named. She keeps reading until she is finished, at which point it's not quite noon. 

She closes the book and goes to find Veronica. 

Veronica is working on a sermon in her office. "Hello, Anna-Charlotte!"

"Hi! I finished the book. How do you fight swarms?"

"With magic, if we have combat magic, or with little dart guns called stardarters that are made to be very pretty and shoot hard enough to squish a swarm bug but not hard enough to really hurt a person or a building if you miss."

"I don't know what magic I have. How do I find out?"

"You'll find out when you and your outfit are pretty enough."

"Oh! Okay!" 

So her purple-and-gold dress isn't pretty enough for God. That makes sense, it's a princess dress and God's got to be way more important than a princess. She's not sure how to make it prettier, though...

Oh, wait! One of the books was a fashion dictionary! She goes and pages through it. 

The fashion dictionary has lots of pictures and explanations of what things work well together! "Your dress is pretty good for a first try," Veronica mentions, "but you probably also want to get neatened up, and do something with your hair, and make sure all your teeth are straight, that kind of thing."

Anna-Charlotte nods and goes into her starscape. 

Her teeth are straight, but they're just a little bit yellow; she fixes that. She gets rid of her bruises. She contemplates hairstyles from the fashion dictionary, and puts her hair in a pretty braid twist. 

This on top of her princess dress gets her a noticeable touch of - is that magic? It must be magic!

Magic!!!

She pushes on the touch of magic, trying to make it go--

A little raincloud appears over her head and rains on her.

"Whoah."

"- not on the carpet!" says Veronica, laughing.

She makes the rain cloud go away. "I can do weather! Sort of!"

"Maybe it will get bigger and higher up if you do it outside, or fancy yourself up a bit more!"

She nods seriously. "May I go outside?"

"Sure thing! Back yard's out that way." She points to the kitchen door.