The Day The Wards Fell

Julia had always understood in theory that the world was unfair. But never having experienced the unfairness in practice, she only grasped now how superficial and flimsy that understanding had been. Brakebills falling from her grasp, the world of magic slipping away, that was real. That brought things home with finality, and though Julia was loath to engage in a battle for biggest loss and greatest unfairness with the entirety of the world's toiling and troubled, she secretly felt like a strong contender. Starving children in dire straits: sure that sucks. But had they ever tasted something better? Were they given everything only to see it dragged away and then not even given the basic respect of a clean memory wipe?

Originally, the indignity of that memory wipe had stoked her anger. She cringed whenever she thought about it, the violation and the pompousness of not just stealing her life's purpose but hiding the evidence so sloppily. To say she single mindedly focused on revenge would be too subtle. All of Julia's life, she'd planned and been successful. Hell, most of the time a plan wasn't even necessary. She showed up and got the job done. Brakebills wouldn't be dealt with so easily, the world of magic was hard to firmly grip and show who you really were. Night after night, day after day, Julia tried to find the hard edges of her anger and fold it into something useful, some sort of weapon to use against those who hurt her. But nothing about this was graspable: the fact that magic existed, the cruelty of everything being pulled away from her, the numerous indignities she'd faced living in this new world where she was utterly powerless and so much less than 2nd class. Her anger at the betrayal of the world of magic was an unscaleable wall stretching inside of her. There simply was no solution, the problem had gone and set itself up with all the power and all the privilege and gloated away in its white house. White? Was Brakebills white? Or was it pretentiously ivy covered? How infuriating that she couldn't even remember.

There was no algorithm to follow in this situation, no elegant solution hiding behind hours of thinking. So she would go with blunt force, hitting the walls of the Brakebills wards in person every day until they fell. Humans just aren't good at perfection and always: maybe mortality makes you suspicious of the infinite. A day would come, and Julia would be there. She'd pretend to be looking for Hillary in upstate New York, a glimpse of an altogether different kind of galvanizing disappointment. She wasn't entirely sure what happened next, but based on Quentin's brief description of magic it sounded like you could fuel part of it on pure rage and that she had in spades. What she really wanted was to somehow hold a mirror up to the Dean, show him all his deepest flaws and insecurities, shatter him, and take away everything he'd held as precious. She wanted fireworks, explosions, catastrophe. That seemed improbable. If there was one thing years of diligent fantasy reading had taught her though, it was that she didn't necessarily need probability. Rage, recklessness, and fierce determination were sometimes enough to slay the dragon. She wasn't ready, but she was going to do it anyway.

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The wards were down. Incredibly, unbelievably, the time had come. She wished, briefly, that it hadn't. It was action time for her nonexistent plan and her rage, always at a fairly high mark nowadays, was so fierce she wouldn't have been surprised to see some sort of red angry aura around her fingers. There wasn't any. That would have been a positive sign; some physical manifestation of magic would have lent some hope to the battle to come. Oh well. She felt strangely underdressed for this occasion; hiking in the woods and storming castles of magical knowledge don't hit a lot of the same fashion notes.

She didn't remember the campus being so eerily quiet or barren. The meticulously sculpted grounds were bare and sounds seemed muffled as she made her way slowly toward what appeared to be the center of campus. The doors of the main hall broke open and students tumbled out, not sparing her a second glance. Had her luck already turned? Was she invisible now through sheer will? A man running into her disabused her of that notion, he grunted half a sorry at her before tearing away. Maybe magic school was always disastrous and filled with strangers? He hadn't seemed shocked to see her, although the running away had probably occupied his attention. She tried to stride with purpose through the newly abandoned marbled hallways. How else can you walk on marble? Finally she found the epicenter of the chaos, a locked room surrounded by worried looking old people, all gesticulating wildly or holding on to the door as if the laying of hands could convince it to open. Filled with certainty (oh how she'd missed that), she reached for handle and smacked away the hand that reached out to stop her. She opened the door, enjoying ever so briefly the faces of the gob smacked magicians around her (whether they were stunned at some invisible feat of magic she had unknowingly performed or her stupidity she'd never know), and stepped into the room.

She saw the Dean, held unmoving by a man with a branch over his face, and her rage burst out of her. Streams of blue fire flew past her toward the Dean, sizzling across his skin in the first frames of slow motion then blistering and burning the embodiment of her rejection; all the while consuming her rage, her fierceness, her soul til only a niffin remained. The beast bemusedly watched the Dean's ashes sieve through his fingers, lightly warmed by the fire. Quentin strained his eyes toward what had been Julia and the Beast reached for his throat.