"Do you hear yourself?! We are not going to let you kill your baby!"

She grabs her daughter by the hair and shakes her.

"Tell me who the father is!"

"No," Gamila snarls at her mother, and gods does that feel good to say, too.

She rounds on her father, ignoring the pain of pulled hair to do so. "Papa!!! Stop acting like the sky is falling! I'm going to be fine!"

"You are not going to be fine!!!"

Her mother shakes her by the hair again.

"You've ruined your entire life!"

Something in Gamila's chest collapses into a singularity and another thought crystalizes.

'Ruined'.

It's true that a thing has been ruined, that thing being the life of a wife of man without strife, that thing being motherhood and the perpetuation of that same expectation. Unruined, it goes on and on and on without end, generation after generation.

A thing has been ruined, but that thing is contemptable.

"GOOD!" Gamila snarls. "Burn it to rubble and salt the fucking dirt! I've never been more sure about anything! Good! Fucking! Riddance!!!"

Kesi staggers backward, her grip falling slack.

There are tears in her eyes.

"You don't mean that. You can't mean that. You- You- You're confused. You've been- Someone did this to you. You don't understand..."

"Gamila..."

Mido looks heartbroken.

"You'll never make Axis. You know that, right?"

Gamila refuses to feel guilty, here. She refuses.

"None of us know that. This is what I want my life to be. And if I have the spells to make it safe, to make it so I never have children and can't be overpowered by common men, there's no reason I can't live that way. What would stop me?"

"The good sense to care about your future? Any feeling of moral horror at spitting in the face of civilization? Some scrap of familial piety?"

Mido is overcome by an icy calm, as tends to happen when he's hurting. His daughter gets that from him.

"Do you even care? About how we would feel if we lost you to the Abyss? Do you care about this family at all?"

Words of reassurance stick in Gamila's throat.

The truth, she understands in a burst of revelation, is the actually kind of awful, rather than the perfectly-fine-except-for-how-people-freak-out kind of awful, but Gamila can't see anything that softens the blow.

"Not enough to let you get in my way."

"That's not fair, Gamila. You know perfectly well that it is my duty as the head of this household to protect you, to protect your value, to protect you... even from yourself. Maybe especially from yourself."

Mido huffs in frustration.

"This isn't you, Gamila! Where is all of this even coming from?! What happened to you?! When did you start lying to us?!"

"You're a good father, papa. But even you..."

Gamila briefly lets her eyes close.

"You don't trust me. You never have. Of course I started lying as soon as I had anything to hide. I saw a path to power, I took it, and I succeeded. You would never have trusted me enough to let me try."

"That's not a matter of trust! It's a matter of you wanting something that's going to hurt you!"

Mido glowers.

"Succeeding makes it worse! Can't you see that succeeding makes it worse?! You've forsaken... everything! And you want to... you want to... can't you see there's no coming back from that? You'll be... worthless, Gamila. To this family, yes, but that's not what scares me! You'll be worthless to yourself. If you kill that baby, if you go on using magic to kill your babies, you'll be no better than a savage, rutting in your own filth! How could I help you do that? Even life as a slave would be better!"

There's that feeling again, like the grounds on which they're arguing have moved under her feet; everything askew and strange.

"How, would life, as a slave, be better than having the power to decide for myself what I'm worth?"

"You don't decide that! Don't you understand? You spread your legs for the first man to wave a spellbook at you! Your only hope is to bear that man's legitimate child! Getting rid of the baby won't solve anything! It'll just destroy your last and only chance to be anything but a savage. Come to your senses, Gamila! I know you're smarter than this!"

"That's right. We can't let you escape the consequences of your actions. This is serious. You are going to tell us who defiled you and we're going to sue for marriage."

Escape the consequences of your actions.

The words wring in Gamila's ears, the scathing tone echoing through her mind.

Escape the consequences-

The entire point of what she's done is to have the power to be free of those very consequences.

Escape-

Being free is only an escape if someone wants to keep you not-free.

It finally, at last, clicks. The first and final betrayal. Her parents-

No, not just her parents. Her mother is fickle, and her father is both kind and open-minded. This is bigger than them. This is... everyone.

Her parents are afraid of letting her free herself.

They, the bigger they, want the baby growing in her to be as chains, shackling her to the life of a wife. Having the power to free herself from those chains is a transgression.

The ground on which she's been arguing, shatters. Her mind reels. Horror courses through her. Because it's so obvious now that she's had the thought. It aligns a lifetime of wordless confusions into perfect, stark, absolutely calamitous clarity.

She looks to her father, the child in her searching with a last desperate hope.

"We'll find out who it was," Mido agrees with his wife in a defeated tone. "We'll sue for marriage."

He gives Gamila a sad look.

"The sooner we know, the better our negotiating position. Please think about that."

The silence hangs in the air, until Gamila figures its been long enough that the conversation is at least temporarily over.

She goes to her room and closes the drapes. She takes off her outerwear. She lays down on her bed and stares up at the ceiling. Horror flares into an inferno of rage and purpose as the logic locks together in her mind in a wordless instant, crystalized, and she clamps down on her voice with all her willpower, to be sure she won't make any sound, then with the rest of her body, she screams.

She now knows the terrible truth of that wrongness that has so often sat heavily in her gut. She has always been told that shunning promiscuity is virtuous because that protects everyone from starving babies and damned mothers. The great Lawful lynchpin of civilization: that all the rules are for something, that all the rules are there to keep you safe.

But if that's really civilization's truth, having the power to keep yourself safe some other way ought to be celebrated.

It isn't celebrated.

The revelation blazes in her mind with the fury of a dying moon: They're glad. They're glad that nature itself inflicts a cruel punishment on any woman who breaks the rules. The accidents, the unwanted babies, aren't a problem to be solved; they're a threat, wielded like a slavemaster's whip to keep their sons and daughters obedient.

The means and the goal are in each other's place.

Unwanted pregnancy itself is being wielded against her, against all women, as a threat to force them to follow the very rules that are only supposed to exist in the first place to prevent unwanted pregnancy.

Gamila's rage eclipses itself again.

No, it's worse than that.

The threat and punishment, the whip and the chain.

It's a temptation, to see things that way, to wallow in her rage and hate, and fantasize about brutally stabbing a faceless stand-in for the wielder of the metaphorical whip.

But that's just surface appearances.

Gamila can't stop herself seeing deeper no matter how temped she is to stay on that surface level.

Because as satisfying as it is in a childish way to make the comparison, women aren't slaves.

No, it's worse than that. It's just that the worse thing doesn't have a worse word associated with it.

Ordinary men wouldn't want a women cringing in terrified obedience, constantly reminding them of how terrible they are.

No, they want to perpetuate this abomination and be thanked for doing so. They, above all else, want the women to play along with the narrative. That's what this is really about. That's why alternative means of being safe are so reviled. The narrative requires that there be no way out, no safe alternative to living the way a proper Osirian woman is supposed to.

That is the true face of Gamila's enemy. The actual obstacle between her and sexual freedom.

It's daunting.

But she is still too angry for that to damage her resolve.

She wants to rip it all down and make everyone free.

What would that even look like?

What is the great lie and the narrative built upon? What would have to be true of the world, what would have to become the new normal, for all of those foundations to be gone? Birth control, for one. Wizards being able to protect themselves isn't enough. It would need to be universal. So universal that if anyone, anywhere, tries to threaten a women with pregnancy, she can laugh in his face with the support of her entire community. Disease, too. You hear about it much less often, but 'pox-ridden whore' is a stereotype. Only really powerful clerics can cure diseases. For a world without a foundation for the chastity narrative, that would also need to be so universal that anyone who talks about catching a disease sounds like a delusional crackpot. Beauty and cleanliness, that's less important but it is another area where the narrative can find footing, she's sure; meaning Prestidigitation would also need to be as universal as fingers, and more besides.

All of that, just to make it possible to demolish the great lie and the narrative. How does one even begin to act upon an ambition that large? Gamila can't fathom it.

But she does know that, at this scale, she cannot hold back. Whatever she must do, she cannot balk. If she is to be fodder, a prop, in the narrative of A Woman's Proper Place, well, then it is only fitting for her to treat the perpetuators of that narrative as fodder in turn, as nameless obstacles, in the narrative of Gamila's Story. That feels right. That feels righteous. A truer rightness than any law.

That is the only principle she has, to guide her actions, since all law is now her enemy, and she is utterly alone in her conviction.

Gamila is not alone.

It slides into Gamila's stream of consciousness like it belongs there. The feeling of being seen. The feeling of being understood and agreed with. The feeling of power. The power to defy.

With that feeling comes a simple mental image, crisp and clear: A circle with three swords sticking out of it.

FIND US.

I will.

Her sense of her own magic expands.

There is a lot there that wasn't there a moment ago.

Orthogonal to her arcane charges, orthogonal to her wizard 'slots', two new pools of power, orthogonal to each other. Four separate dimensions of spell-space. And there's more, there's a tap, inside her, through which she can feel the energy wanting to flow, and there's more than that: something else, something nestled nearby...

Gamila shakes her head. She doesn't recognize the symbol, but she knows what to look for now. There is a god that's on her side.

...that would make Gamila a cleric, wouldn't it. And that tap she can feel, that's how she Channels Positive Energy. And there's those new empty spell slots, just sitting there. She'll presumably get spells tomorrow morning, but in the mean time... she already knows how to make an empty spell slot useful, doesn't she.