POV Isla:
My pain cuts off abruptly and I am sucked down, down, down through a deep dark intensity pulling forcefully from deep inside my chest, a sensation I have never known before. The vacuum compels me to fight it, but I don't know how, and still I am pulled deeper into the forceful darkness as I try to stop whatever is crushing my body from the inside. I pull and I pull and suddenly cold, crisp air comes through my mouth, filling me up again.
My eyes fly open with the shock of it and with the pain that has returned in full force. My very bones ache. I suck air into my lungs and then, involuntarily, I do it again at the unfamiliar sensation.
"You're breathing!" Wanderer exclaims, "Isla, you're alive! You're breathing!"
Am I? Is that what this is? I've never done it before. And I feel odd. And....and...
My fear is quelled by a familiar wispy tentacle snaking its way toward me. It wraps gingerly around me and props me up, and even that causes me to gasp with the sudden pain that shoots to my ribs.
I manage turn my hear far enough to look Wanderer in the eyes. Well, in a couple of her eyes. They keep moving.
For the first time, she's come out of the mirror and shrunk down enough to fit into my apartment. I've never seen her in person before, only through the mirror and in dreams.
"I thought I'd lost you," she says.
"What happened to me?"
"Isla...you died, in a way. And now you're...well. You're not exactly anything. But you came back, and what you are now...it's pretty close to human," she says. She seems preoccupied with some troubling thought, or so I read from a pair of eyes that then vanish back into the swirling fog before I can glean further knowledge.
"So...I'm not a Magical Girl anymore?" I don't know how to feel about this. I don't know how to feel at all - emotions more powerful than I've ever known writhe within me.
"Well, not exactly." I've never seen Wanderer hesitate before; she's always claimed to be all-knowing. "You see...this has been happening more and more, Isla, and even I just don't understand it. But you...you are no longer a Magical Girl, but I'm detecting magic in you still. You held onto it in the void, right up until I pulled you out. You held onto it through death itself. I don't even know if that can be called defiance, but I don't...I don't know what else it could be. That's on a level even I've never seen."
As I struggle to make sense of this, the air is rent by a drawn-out shriek. "You thought you could abandon meeeee?"
"Oh," Wanderer sighs, and for once all her eyes hold the same expression, "Wonderful. Shumei's back."
