A Curse Upon Thee 32: Epilogue 1 (Patreon)

Chapter 32

Epilogue One: Beneath

Caverns under caverns, the mines of Storybrooke were bigger than they should have been for a town this small. But none of that mattered, not for a town made to order after all.

Beneath the small town, in a cavern that shouldn’t exist carved into bedrock the people never knew about, something dead stirred. Dark scales each the size of a man’s fist dragged against stone, the sound low and grinding. Deep in the darkness where secrets and stories were imprisoned under tighter hold, yellow-green eyes flickered open.

Just for a second.

A puff of purple smoke filled the air as the dragon’s chest rose with a breath, air rattling in a chest with a sword freshly buried hilt-deep between ribs the size of support beams. The metal was thick with magic that tasted like Savior and slick with blood from a wound as fresh as the dragon was old.

The eyes closed again, slower this time, as purple smoke bled from it with each breath. It left the dragon in thick plumes, drawn in by the scent of magic and death, coiling around the corpse as it recognized something familiar in the cooling flesh.

Solid became gas; flesh and bone dissolving into that same purple mist, the body of scales breaking apart piece by piece as it rose up through the cavern. Past the ceiling and layers of earth and concrete and foundation, up toward the surface where a curse of three decades was actively shattering like glass under a sledgehammer.

The purple smoke thickened as it went, feeding on itself, growing denser and more purposeful with every foot of elevation. Magic recognized magic, and this magic knew exactly where it belonged.

By the time it reached the surface, the smoke wasn't just smoke anymore.

It was hers.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Effie — not Effie, not anymore — sat on the bench outside the station, her thoughts coming back to her bit by bit as the purple smoke thickened around her, drawn like ants to a pool of sugar water.

Effie was realizing she never had so much as a last name.

Not much of a first one, either.

She was simply an afterthought, a cap for the useful part of her; the part that couldn’t be ignored or done away with.

The woman had been sitting here for hours, maybe days, outside the sheriff’s office — waiting on her usual meal from her Mr Red. He hadn’t come and she didn’t know why. He was always so nice to her, even when everybody else simply ignored her or shooed her off; he was the first in so long to see her.

She remembered that much and more as the smoke wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl.

Crazy Old Effie tilted her head back, matted grey hair falling away from a face that was all sharp angles and sunken cheeks, and breathed in.

Thick smoke the color of bruises vanished down her throat and filled her old lungs; thick and sweet and tasting like home, like power, like everything that had been stolen from her when Regina cast her little curse and shoved a chunk of a realm’s people into this suffocating little trap.

Effie's eyes snapped open.

Yellow-green, bright as headlights and glowing even brighter the more the smoke filled her.

Sagging flesh pulled tight over bones that were remembering how to be something other than brittle; liver spots faded, wrinkles smoothed, and the wild halo of grey she called hair for so long darkened to the black she knew, taming itself into something sleek and deliberate as magic rewrote three decades of forced decay.

The breath came out slow as she let it free, purple smoke curling from between teeth that were white as snow and lips full, young and dangerous.

The old woman was gone.

What sat on the bench now was something else entirely, something that had spent twenty-eight years locked in a rotting meat prison while her dragon body died alone in the dark.

Her hand came up, fingers long and elegant with black-painted nails sharp enough to draw blood. Running them through her hair, the long locks began to shift, wrapping tight around each other until they tightened and darkened; horns once again back in place.

With a sigh, she let both hands drop and stared up at the darkening night sky.

"Regina, you bitch."