Archive of Our Own

×××

There are thousands of cruelties she could recall: a sliding scale of snide remarks that crescendo into unspeakable brutalities done by the hands of others. 

But the cruelest of these is the betrayal of her own body: every atom so confidently split from her sisters, her organs burnt to eternal ash, and then, wholly without her heart's consent, Shadow Weaver's form stitches itself back together.

×××

The first thing she hears is the sound of her own sobbing, a rattling, wheezing cough like she's forgotten how to breathe, and perhaps she has. 

The first thing she feels is the chill of morning dew on her bare flesh, and the first thing she sees is pink dawn light blanketing the lush grass. 

The first thing she smells and tastes is rich, wet soil, the flavor of petrichor musky on her tongue. It grates against her molars, coating her disfigured lips, and she heaves, weak as a newborn fawn, until darkness claims her again.

×××

When her senses return in full and she realizes that she has been reborn, naked and powerless, a writhing, gasping monstrosity wallowing in Etheria's dirt, she begins to weep in earnest.

All her old scars are there, blanketed by new burns, the remnant of her explosive demise.

She did not ask for this, another violation.

×××

In the months that follow, Shadow Weaver considers that there was a flaw in her self-destruct, that she didn't account for the sheer volume of energy required to permanently decorporealize. But eventually she rules this out too. She expended her reserves down to their dying breaths, and was mercifully no more. 

Then some vestige-- she knows not what: She-Ra's mysterious powers, the Heart of Etheria, her own Dark Magic, Adora's inconvenient, boundless love-- brought her back. 

She feels an illness inside her, wriggling like worms on pavement, an emptiness where the last fragment of her powers used to reside. It is like a hole in the ground where a fertile thing used to grow.

×××

The villager who finds her has red feathers on his head, some botched approximation of a cardinal, and a shortbow and quiver slung across his back. 

She tries to scream, to rise and lunge at him, to pray his arrow flies true and splits her heart, but she collapses naked in the forest, and the man has pity in his eyes.

As he wraps his cloak around her maimed shoulders, she thinks, I will kill him for this. 

×××

When they first give her a mirror she shatters it. 

The father shepherds his children outside of their small home, and the mother flinches away with a cry as the glass splinters around her wooden wardrobe.

Shadow Weaver's bloody fist smashes into the mirror again and again, as rhythmic as a heart that shouldn't beat: Monstrous. Monstrous. Monstrous.

×××

They do not cast her out and this, she thinks, is most irrational. It's no wonder these people are so easy to conquer.

They feed her simple things like bread and fruit, and do not ask many questions except, "Are you hungry? Would you like milk or water?" She says nothing.

They give her a roughspun brown dress, a hand-me-down of the mother's, that is far too short for her tall frame. It leaves her knobbly knees bare when she sits with them at the low table. The children, little fledgling birds, peek up at her over their plates, curious and terrified.

Her body, the disintegrated traitor that it is, is now hairless, pockmarked by blistering burns that haven't healed. Her beautiful black hair, the only beautiful thing left about her, is gone. The scars from the Spell of Obtainment remain, criss-crossing her body from toe to tip: deep, sickly grey spiderwebs. Her cleft lip remains and her sharp teeth show if she doesn't make a proper effort to close her mouth.

She can feel herself bleeding through the dress as the scratchy fabric scrapes across her back. The pain of her body is unbearable, the fact that it exists at all an insult.

"Does aloe vera grow in this region?" she rasps on the second day.  

"Yes," says the mother, her neck feathers ruffled.

She wants to leave the house, to be away from their beady eyes and pity, but her legs cannot hold her meager weight. She can barely walk three steps without her vision curtaining at the edges, though she is no stranger to chronic pain.

"Gather it. As much as you can carry."

×××

Her hair is spiky fuzz by the time a Princess is finally called to intervene for the cardinal family. She refuses to tell them her name or how she came to be dying in their hunting grounds or why she's digging up their flower beds, transplanting their tulips in favor of something more useful. She is a quiet, creeping houseguest; she eats what they give her, and prefers to sleep beneath the stars when the weather is good. Otherwise, she curls into herself on a small pallet by the fireplace and ignores the life around her, or she gathers plants in the forest if she feels strong enough.

Still, she has overstayed her welcome in these crowded quarters. She never wants to see the princesses again, least of all Adora and her shadow, Catra, but a small piece of her feels scorned that a lesser one is sent to investigate.

"This is oleander," says the blonde, her tan hands brushing through the flowers in the garden. "It's toxic and probably shouldn't be out here with your herbs."

"Those belong to me," says Shadow Weaver, and she cannot help but smile when Perfuma's mouth hangs wide.

×××

She did not know her father, but she knows she had two siblings: an elder sister and younger brother. They did not resemble each other, except for sharing their mother's fangs. 

They grew up poor and unsupervised, hungry most nights, sometimes banished from their single bedroom home if their mother had company, but at least they would have coin the next morning. 

Her sister was strong and lithe, quick and slick and roguish, an outstanding thief. She tried to teach her, but she was gangly and uncoordinated and bookish. Even her brother, two years younger, showed more physical prowess than she did, viper-fast and dexterous.

They made mother happy and she did not, even when she tried to show her that she learned to read all by herself. She listened to the school teachers through open windows, her skinny body hidden in the thorny bushes, and stole the water-stained books they threw away. She taught herself to write, and do simple arithmetic.

"I can learn," she whispered to herself in the alley behind the school.

When she returned home empty-handed, explaining lofty concepts like division and grammar, mother slapped her hard across the face.

"What good is reading?" mother spat. "We can't eat words."

Her siblings stole food and jewelry, things that mattered, and learned to mock her for such useless proclivities.

×××

In typical, superfluous Bright Moon fashion, it is a whole event when she returns to the castle. A month has passed since her death, she estimates, but the princesses of Etheria still cling to one another, revisiting their own territories alone only as frequently as necessary, usually with a companion in tow, another parasite, for reasons Shadow Weaver cannot understand. They are always in each other's company, the whole hodgepodge rainbow of them.

Castaspella is there too, neglecting her duties in Mystacor again. She folds her arms around herself, looking concerned in the lush green courtyard as the guards escort Shadow Weaver and Perfuma. Castaspella's flair for the dramatic is unusually gratifying when the shock of recognition shoots up her smooth face and she gasps, one well-manicured hand flying to her lips.

They have all seen her true face now, even worse than it was when she covered it with a mask, the blisters half-healed, shiny white starbursts across a grey expanse. Shadow Weaver's stomach twists in shame and agony: she hates her ugliness, her normalcy. Her only solace is that they cringe when they look at her; her face brings them just as much pain.  

Perfuma's voice shakes, "I didn't know where else to go." She looks to Glimmer, whose pink eyes are wide in shock, her fingers digging into Bow's arm.

There are no hugs, not even from Adora. No warm welcome or expression of gratitude. No one even has the decency to ask what happened, or how or why. Shadow Weaver stands in the half-circle of her once-enemies, once-allies, magicless and crippled and disfigured, and drawls, "Good to see you too."

Only Catra responds, surprising in her silence: there is none of her normal screaming or scowling or rage. She quivers, tears streaming down her face, a terrified creature, and staggers back. She sprints to the castle so quickly that not even her red-maned cat can keep up. Adora follows after her in the slow, rigid march of a shell-shocked soldier.

×××

When she was nine, a nameless man behind a fruit stand caught her stealing, and bashed out two of her baby teeth with a cudgel that he kept handy for those exact purposes. He screamed and swore and spat at her, even as she lay dazed on her back, blood soaking her tunic and the cobblestones.

Her lips were never the same after that, always slightly cleft on the left side where she thinks she must have bit herself when the cudgel struck.

"That's what you get for being too slow, isn't it?" her mother drawled. "Maybe you'll talk less now."  

The wound got infected, rotten and feverish; it took years to properly seal. As she laid outside beneath the stars, her blood boiling, the ache of her wound throbbing behind her eyes, she liked to imagine that her father was already dead. No living man, good or evil, would leave her to this life.

She had to learn to talk again, to suppress the lisping impediment from her injury. She practiced with the flowers and bushes, a friendly, captive audience-- not her family, never her family-- and listened beneath the school's open windows. She worked until her diction became crisp and precise. 

When she was fourteen she fled to Mystacor and named herself Light Spinner. She spoke eloquently and was hungry for knowledge like no other student in her class. She always wore a veil.

×××

They didn't touch her room, the prison, Angella called it, or what few possessions she left behind in the days before Horde Prime's invasion. The bed, the sofa, the table and chairs are all untouched, lush and gaudy like all things Bright Moon. She supposes it's better than sleeping curled up among tree roots, or being woken by the small cardinal boy's beady eyes staring from across the room. At least here she has some shelter, some privacy.

There is a large crack up the southern wall, one that reaches nearly to the ceiling, but Bow quietly assured her that the builders had evaluated its integrity. She cares little for these reassurances: let the castle of Bright Moon crush her. The whole of the world remains unstable, cities on the brink of collapse, structural instabilities at every turn. The princesses work hard to fix these issues, Bow tells her, but Horde Prime's canyons ran deep and Etheria still trembles as she heals.

She experiences her first earthquake early the next morning, jolted awake alone in her bed. The crack grows and she watches, sheets balled in her fist.

×××

She hardly remembers Castaspella in the early days of Mystacor, so enraptured was she by Micah's magical prowess, his dynamic personality. She recalls some little sister, an afterthought, only useful in theory until she displayed her lack of aptitude. Shadow Weaver thinks it criminal that such a dull, slow learner could rise to the position of Head Sorceress; no doubt she is as fearful and weak-spined as her predecessors. 

If Castaspella demonstrated any ambition or cunning she could have begrudgingly given her some measure of respect-- even the weak could climb high under the cover of darkness-- but she knits and shares meals with the children and laughs at all of their most asinine jokes. 

Even my shadow constructs defeated you, weak little woman. 

Shadow Weaver sees how Castaspella smothers her niece, the divine sorceress queen, the only child with power worth her attention. She dotes and pries with all of them, more slowly with Catra, whose tail sometimes bristles at the attention, but she collects them all around her in some form or fashion, a little army of traumatized teenagers. 

They never spoke even once when they both occupied Mystacor. She was called Light Spinner then, though she always favored shadows, and was fifteen years her senior. She never taught the younger children-- Norwyn said her methods were too harsh and impatient, one of the few things they agreed upon-- and Castaspella lacked all of Micah's gravitational pull.

Shadow Weaver watches as she smiles, broad and full, surrounded by the children, still lacking that sharpened-steel quality, that galvanized backbone that the Head Sorceress should have. When their eyes meet, Shadow Weaver scoffs and removes herself from the room. She can feel Castaspella's eyes boring into her back.

×××

The first time they try to share a meal together like some convoluted, patchwork family, it is Glimmer's idea and Glimmer's fault when it goes awry. 

There is a lull in the conversation between Micah and Bow, a taut rope of tension and wine glasses raised to closed lips, and Shadow Weaver blinks in quiet agony. She wishes they would have left her alone to eat in peace. She doesn't want to be near any of them, and sees on Adora and Catra's glowering faces that they share the sentiment.

"What did it feel like," Glimmer asks her, "dying?"

Bow chokes mid-sip on his wine, some cheap red vintage Castaspella brought from Mystacor. Micah pats his back heartily, cringing as he splutters. Castaspella stares wide-eyed at her niece, then at Adora and Catra, who have gone still across the table, their hunger suddenly diminished.

Shadow Weaver blots at her mutilated lips with the napkin in her lap. The moment she stepped into the dining room with its tense, practiced niceties, she knew the others would collapse under the weight of her presence. This plot to bind them all together is nothing but wasted effort. Glimmer insists she is not a prisoner any longer, but she they do not trust her and never will.

She says, "It was quite gratifying saving the world."

Catra scoffs, her sharp little teeth bared. Adora's hand rests on her forearm, unnoticed.

"You did one good thing in your entire life and it fucking killed you," Catra sneers. "Dying doesn't undo until all the harm you did."  

Castaspella shifts in her seat as if taking a defensive posture, and Shadow Weaver wants to laugh. What am I going to do, Castaspella? My magic is gone.

"Catra," warns Adora in a voice meant for her alone.

"You're quite right, Catra. I shall have to live the rest of my days as Bright Moon's slave," she says, "to make up for hurting your feelings."

"My feelings?" she hisses. Her cropped hair stands on edge as she rises from her chair, half-crouching. Adora rises beside her, hand on her stomach, but doesn't stop her. "You abused me every single day of my life! You abused all of us-"

Shadow Weaver does not raise her voice, "I kept you alive in the face of adversity. You were an orphan who survived on my mercy and kindness alone."

"You had no mercy or kindness, and you never took care of us-" she stops short, sucking in a quivering breath. The room is silent. "I'm done with this." She picks up her porcelain plate and Adora does the same with a pained expression.

"Allow me," Shadow Weaver smiles sarcastically, and she rises in a graceful sweep, reaching out for both of them. She takes Adora's plate, and clutches Catra's wrist.

Catra's half-empty plate drops to the table and shatters, her whole body rigid, eyes wide as saucers. Shadow Weaver smiles again; she has not lost her touch.

"Stop it!" Adora shouts amid the screech of chairs pushing back, a cacophony of unhappy voices calling names.

The violence of the room surges, Catra locked in her terrified stasis, but of all people at its peak, it is Castaspella who throws Shadow Weaver through the door.

×××

Her head slams against the stonework in the hallway, a hundred pounds of pressure on her ribcage, the force of magic crushing her lungs. Castaspella follows her in sharp, staccato steps, her arm outstretched to maintain the spell. She moves so quickly Shadow Weaver can barely process what's happening, and then elegant Castaspella wraps her beautifully painted fingernails around her throat.

"If you ever touch her again, I will take your hand," she breathes. "You reek of resentment and decay, but I refuse your rot. You will not drag those girls into your pit."

The spell holds Shadow Weaver against the wall, toes scuffling uselessly against the tiles, her visage a terrified mask. Now her raw terror is so plain on her wretched face, puckered and canyoned by arcane scars. Even as she chokes, she thinks of how hideous she must appear.

There is no facade for either of them. Her pupils, the split things that they are, flit across Castaspella's furious face, her perfect white teeth bared. 

She is pinned, stuck to the wall, her atrophied body too weak to put up a fight. She chokes, she quivers: the spell caught her off guard, a thunderclap between her ears. She is helpless to do anything against Castaspella's power.

A tidal wave, an earthquake. There is no precision in her magic, but it yawns, deep and endless and unfathomable. Her saccharine smiles a single, untuned violin that belies her majesty: the full orchestra unleashed into a rousing, masterful overture.

"You will not touch anyone without their explicit consent. Do you understand?"

Shadow Weaver attempts to nod, a feeble motion, as the doors from the kitchen burst open again.

Micah calmly approaches. "Casta," he says.

She obeys his tacit command immediately, releasing Shadow Weaver's throat and dropping her spell. She slumps to the floor, gasping and aching, and balls her hands into tight fists to stop their shaking. Shadow Weaver has seen such violence in her life, much of it both earned and expected, even this outburst from Castaspella. But the absence of sound, the vacuum of her mercy, leaves Shadow Weaver shaken to the core.

The siblings look down on her with their beautiful, brown eyes and symmetrical faces and their powerful magic, and she wishes again that she had simply stayed dead. The silence is unbearable.

They leave her like a puddle on the floor.

×××

Hordak is always around, his hair dyed black again, or perhaps that is his natural color and it's grown out. She doesn't care to ask. They leer at each other from across the courtyard until the other Hordak, Wrong Hordak, tugs at his hand, all naive enthusiasm, and they return to the machine shop where Entrapta waits with motor oil in her hair, loose wiring wrapped around her fingers like rings.

Somehow the princesses do not question Hordak's presence despite all the torment he inflicted upon them. They welcome him and his bumbling brother.

The sun beats down on her, and Shadow Weaver cannot fathom how he tolerates this meandering copy of himself. She thinks, If I had a clone, I would kill her.

×××

"So is she like... immortal now?" Scorpia asks. She sits on a bench beside Perfuma in the Bright Moon greenhouse, thick with overgrown vines and unpruned saplings.

Shadow Weaver slinks between the foliage in silence, her gnarled lips twisting in displeasure. She grew sick of her gloomy room, and hoped to keep herself occupied in the greenhouse until someone decided that it was against the rules for her to be entertained. It was only a matter of time before Glimmer or Adora or Castaspella sent her away, so she decided to allow herself a small rebellion, to cultivate her long-ignored gardening hobby again.

But her old greenhouse isn't empty, and now they speak of her. 

"No, I don't think so, at least," Perfuma adjusts her wide-brimmed hat.

No one hears Shadow Weaver when she doesn't want them to and, mercifully, the guards didn't follow her inside. It has been three months since she died and, though her leash has grown in length, they follow her closely at night.

"She's more like a saprophyte. She's never thrived in sunshine and doesn't photosynthesize like other plants, but sustains herself on decaying organic matter."

"Mmhmm. Yeah, I know some of those words."

Perfuma smiles up at her, laying a dirty hand on her knee. "Like a mushroom, or a mold."

"You're so smart," says Scorpia, and she leans down to kiss her, no hesitation or desperation, only a comfortable, practiced motion. Shadow Weaver clenches her jaw; their tenderness disgusts her more than their words.

Perfuma smiles against her lips, "I have a knack for plant analogies, that's true."

"Do you think she'll be okay here? With Catra and everyone?"

Scorpia speaks with such reverence in her voice-- for Catra of all people-- that Shadow Weaver is certain Perfuma's rare anger will flair, jealous and cutting. So stupid of the Force Captain to lace her voice with love for another when Perfuma's breath still ghosts across her lips. She will certainly be punished for letting her affection stray.

But Perfuma readjusts her wide-brimmed hat again, and softly wipes a smudge of dirt away from Scorpia's cheek, a crumbly brown trail she left only moments before.

"I think so. She can still grow flowers."

Shadow Weaver tenses, her skin burning hot, and turns back to the castle. There is nothing for her in the greenhouse today.

×××

At night she wanders the castle's halls, restless and teeming with unspent energy, tailed by two guards who trudge ungracefully behind her, their armor echoing like thunder down the corridors. She hates the way they ruin her silence, her contemplation, and her soft footfalls quicken around a corner in a futile effort to lose them.

Castaspella stands before her in the hallway lined with stone reliefs of Bright Moon's royalty, no High Sorceress gown or halo in sight, only a navy robe draped over her silk pajamas. She stands in a shaft of moonlight and wraps her arms more tightly around herself, her lips pursed at the interruption. Her dark eyes flick to the guards, a hint of agitation tugging at her mouth.

"At least now you won't be sneaking up on anyone," says Castaspella. Her eyes return to Queen Angella's unfeeling, marble face.

Shadow Weaver scoffs, grateful she hasn't stepped into the light. A warmth spreads to her mangled cheeks, an ashen blush beneath pearly scars. The last thing she needs right now is another tongue-lashing from a sorceress whose spells are wild gouges and sloppy noise, her greatest gift her raw power. She has none of Micah's finesse but a surplus of condescension. 

"I wasn't sneaking," she drawls, her voice gravelly from disuse.

She clenches her hands into feeble fists, quivering with leftover embarrassment from their last exchange. It had been months of solitude and shame since that awful dinner, left in a pile of pitchblack despair, a stain in the hallway. Shadow Weaver wants nothing to do with her.

"Is there something you need?" Castaspella does not look at her, only the winged statue, alone in the moonlight with a relic of her dead sister-in-law.

"Only one of us lives here," Shadow Weaver says. "Don't you have business in Mystacor? Or are you too busy enjoying a sleepover with all your friends?"

Castaspella's robe slips off of her shoulder, the pale skin of her neck milky in the dim light. Her hair falls in waves around her and she readjusts her robe with a sigh. She looks disheveled, as sloppy as her spellwork.

They were in the woods when they were last alone, Shadow Weaver masked and mysterious, and Castaspella all mint and starlight. She touched her shoulder, her hand, her hip, and whispered of the First Ones and their stolen magic. Brown eyes widened, receptive and mistrusting in equal measure, so easy to manipulate in her desire to protect her family of misfits. So short-sighted: unable to see the forest for the trees.

They shook hands, the only time she didn't scorn Shadow Weaver's touch. She listened at first; she trusted enough to threaten retribution.

Castaspella said, "But if you try anything, I won't hesitate to strike you down." And months later she made good on her promise, unflinching and sure-footed.

But her heat is gone now, a campfire burned too long, brittle and choking on its own smoke. Her voice is soft when she murmurs, "Go away."

"I can't leave," Shadow Weaver hisses. "I'm a prisoner here."

She tilts her head up to Angella, her eyebrows knit together in anguish, and calmly replies, "That's more than you deserve."

Shadow Weaver swallows thickly. Nothing ever changes. She knows what they must say about her: Shadow Weaver is a miasma. A grey void, a sore thumb lurking nearby in judgmental silence where nothing green takes root. They tolerate her for her utility, her sacrifice, her knowledge. They leave her alone because they don't know what to do with her, her very presence a burden. But neither will they let her go. Castaspella is just the same, poisoned by Catra's oversimplifications and lies.

Shadow Weaver's face warps into a snarl, hostile and grotesque, and her shoulders hunch forward to protect her heart. She spins on her heel, slippers twisting beneath her, and pushes between the guards before they have a chance to move.

Before she rounds the corner to her prison, she turns back- because she always turns back, she must have the last word and drown this wave of shame before it eats what's left of her- and hates the unsteadiness in her voice as she says, "I never asked for any of this."

Castaspella finally has the decency to look at her, and the pity on her face shines brighter than the moonlight in her hair, her arms wrapped around her chest in a lonely embrace, so sorrowful that Shadow Weaver wishes she said nothing at all.

×××

The second time she looks in a mirror she is alone. She has caught her reflection in passing, split-pupil green eyes sweeping quickly away from the shock of her missing mask. The red metal was her shield and an extension of herself, hard and unforgiving, a comfort. It is far too late to cover herself: it would simply betray her own discomfort and she will not give them more fodder to use against her.

She eats more regularly now, always alone in her room where no one can see her little fangs, perfectly visible through her damaged, cleft lips, and her skin is less sallow and gaunt for it. But for what purpose? This thing she sees before her is not herself; it cannot be. As if she occupies a grey body that is meant to be dead, calcified and rotten and still shambling forward with no end in sight.

Her short hair bothers her the most, her newest deformity. No longer does it float delicately behind her like gossamer spider's silk, no longer does it meld into the darkness she commands. It is limp and brittle, and tickles her pointed ears, an insult on injury. Her hair used to be the most beautiful thing about her, her favorite thing: she always believed she inherited her hair from her father, thick and black and luscious, not her mother's mousy brown.

Brightmoon is gaudy and simpering- it lacks the clean elegance of Mystacor- but it instills a sense of wonder. The princesses fit here, adding their own color and tones, lovely, unblemished young things that they are. There is logic in the fact that Castaspella fits here too: shining and beautiful and soft.

She has never been so lonely in her life, if this unnatural, unwanted second chance even qualifies as such. She always had some fire to extinguish in the Fright Zone, some mess to clean. Even as a prisoner she had frequent guests, all begging for her input and assistance. No one needs her here.

Death was easy, quick and painless. She saved the world with it. This agony of being alive, surrounded and unwelcome, is so much worse. Even at her lowest, when mother mocked her bleeding lips, at least she saw her in those moments. She spoke to her, acknowledged her, however cruelly.

She stares at the thing in the mirror for a very long time. When she cannot endure her appraisal a moment longer, she begins to weep in earnest. 

×××

Someone like me doesn’t escape. I think you sleep awhile,

then you descend into the terror of the next life

-Louise Glück, “Thrush”