Magical Girl Demara | A Crystal Empire Story
Magical Girl Demara takes place in an alternative, non-canon universe remixing elements of the Crystal Empire series. It contains some characters that may be unfamiliar to those who have not read Book 2, Imperial Heart.
Demara walked, not ran, down the middle of the echoing hallways of Imperial Heights Academy, stepping as softly as she could on the cold linoleum floor and hoping nobody asked her for her hall pass. If they did, the dutiful teachers would have no choice but to send her back to Mister Rhens’ classroom after writing her up. None of them could afford that kind of delay, especially not after the school went into lockdown when they heard the alert over the radio. Then she’d be stuck and the police would have to stop the monster rampaging through Manhira without the help of Crystal Warrior Amethyst.
She paused on the small landing at the top of the east stairs, already shady in the early afternoon, cautiously raising the flap of her brown canvas messenger bag. Demara managed only the barest of peeks before she heard someone’s shoes in the hallway behind her, coming fast. It wasn’t hard to look flustered and nervous as she smoothed the bag, then her gray-blue school uniform, waiting for whoever it was to “catch her”.
Over the last year, since the monsters appeared, she’d run out of at least one lecture from all her teachers. Mister Rhens has been the first to follow her, catching her before she could activate the transformation. Early days. Luckily, the science teacher had readily accepted her lie about panic attacks, and even offered to show her some breathing techniques he thought would help. Rayni, her best friend, was probably right though; she wouldn’t get away with missing so much class if she wasn’t getting such high marks on every test.
She sighed a breath of relief when it was the tall, broad-shouldered football player who came around the corner. Kinro arched an eyebrow at her, cocking his head to the side. They weren’t friends, and never had been despite their years of school together, but they’d come to understand each other pretty well over their past few months risking their lives saving the city from twisted horrors that crawled out of… wherever they came from.
“They really buy the crying thing?” he asked, shaking his head as he pointed toward the stairs. “Girls have it so easy.”
“Shut up.” She almost pushed him. Almost. But sending one of the two other Crystal Warriors she’d met tumbling down four flights of stone stairs was, at least tactically, a bad idea.
They exited through a rusty old door at the bottom of the stairwell. It creaked its song into the brisk spring afternoon, disturbing only the birds. Sirens from a few blocks away echoed in the narrow, shady alcove between the library and the east wing. She glanced at Kinro, and he nodded. There was nobody around, time to get changed.
Demara reached into her bag and drew out her crystal. It was a hand and a half long slender rod of pale amethyst. No matter how long she left it, the gem was always warm to her touch, and right now it was glowing. It only did that when there was trouble, and the brighter it was, the more dangerous the foe. Today’s monster must have been particularly mean.
Kinro’s topaz was almost a twin to her amethyst, except for its deep orange color. It glowed just as brightly as her own gemstone, their light together lighting the nook in pale magenta.
Together, they raised up their crystals to the sky and called out “Crystal Power Activate!” Neither of them were embarrassed by how they had to draw upon their powers. Anymore.
Both gems shone so brightly they shattered. Pale violet petals streamed from her upraised hand, swirling around until they formed a cocoon of light. The power surged into her uniform, transforming it from its dull grey to a soft lavender with deeper purple for trim and along her lapels. Her skirt grew long on the back but remained open at the front, her shoes and stockings merged into boots that wrapped her legs so tightly nobody could have actually put them on. Light swept back her hair, shifting it from its natural shoulder-length brown to cascading locks of violet that hung down past her back, holding it in place with a circlet of amethyst stone across her brow. As the blossoms faded away on a wind only they could feel, a woman several years older than Demara was standing where she had been only a moment before. She had become Crystal Warrior Amethyst.
Beside her, Kinro was undergoing a similar transformation, only he got flames instead of flower petals, and tights and shoulder pads instead of a skirt. The Crystal Guardian had said their transformations were a reflection of their ideal selves. When asked why only Demara had to wear a skirt, the old furball said that where the crystals came from, Kinro’s outfit was the unusual one.
“Ready?” Kinro, no, Crystal Warrior Topaz, asked. She nodded.
Summoning light from the Flow of power that connected all things, they could bend and shape it to their wills. It could make them strong, fast, and helped them take hits from monsters that could flip cars. They could hear better, see better, and react faster than a normal person thanks to a sense of awareness in the Flow telling them when things would move. Right then, the sense was pulling them toward downtown.
The two of them became blurs of purple and orange bolting across the school’s open lawn. It was a rare half-block of green space in the city’s uptown, a neighborhood where even the shortest buildings had at least three floors. They raced past old red brick rowhouses mixed with a few more modern replacements of concrete and glass, dodging cars in the moderate traffic along Tulian Boulevard. Despite months of training with her powers, the closest Demara had come to being able to fly above the streets was launching herself like a bullet. The corner store she’d crashed into had to close for a whole month while they rebuilt.
They were still several blocks from the sirens and the screaming as they crossed 50th Street, yet something was coming toward them in the Flow from the other direction. Demara looked over her right shoulder to see a green bolt of light zip in alongside them. Crystal Warrior Emerald pressed a vee with fingers against her cheek as she flashed them a wide smile. Her outfit was almost a twin of Demara’s, green instead of violet and with two bands holding two balls of black curly hair on either side of her head. Zia, that was her real name, went to a different school across town, as Demara had learned when they both were on a tour of Mahira University. Then a monster attacked the campus, and she had been a full part of their team ever since. Together, Topaz, Emerald, and Amethyst were the Crystal Warriors. Supposedly there were seven crystals that had fallen to Nyara, but they were the only three Demara knew about. That two had been so close led her to think the others had to be nearby.
“Oh good you made it,” Emerald said, as if she’d been waiting for them. “I was worried I’d have to fight this thing myself.”
They had to split up to weave between a jam of cars trying to enter a parking garage. Demara really wished Amethyst could fly.
“What, you can’t handle one of these yourself?” Topaz smirked. “I thought you were the strongest of the Crystal Warriors.”
Emerald raised her dark eyebrows and her lip thinned, readying a retort.
“Save it for the monster,” Demara ordered. She was going to have to ask Kinro what his issue with the other girl was. “What do we know about it?”
Zia produced a handheld radio from her backpack without breaking stride. Her mother was a detective in the City Police Department, and had a spare police scanner she thought her children didn’t know about. Zia did. It was a good thing, too. The police were good at handling crime, not incursions from twisted nightmare creatures. Zia’s mother was on the team investigating where the monsters even came from. When Demara had asked her uncle, an officer in a different precinct about Zia’s mom, he’d said the woman was supposed to be legendary.
“Last I heard it was heading up Memorial toward the financial district,” Zia said. “They were setting up a blockade along 25th to try and keep it contained.”
Good. Once the Crystal Warriors engaged, the police would close in and form a perimeter around the battle, evacuating as many people from the streets as they could. While bullets hardly hurt the monsters, they were irritating enough to keep their attention off of civilians. Usually.
Demara froze when they came around the corner of 34th and saw an actual, scaly, serpentine, four-limbed, two-winged dragon, slithering its way up the steps of the First Imperial Bank, trusted by the country’s richest and powerful with their gold and jewels. A natural place for a dragon to make its den. It was pulling itself over the top step while its tail was still touching the street thirty-six steps below, its blue-green scales shimmering in the afternoon light.
“Hey Topaz look!” Emerald pointed, “She’s just your type! I know how badly you wish you had a girlfriend, now’s your chance! You should ask her out!”
Despite herself Demara cracked a smile and tried to dispel it with a furious shake of the head. Kinro was sputtering, looking between Zia and the dragon as it squeezed through the broken bank doors.
“Quick, she’s getting away!” Emerald continued, “I bet she even breathes fire.”
She didn’t give him a chance to respond before running toward the bank, leaving behind a trail of green leaves for them to follow. Police sirens grew louder and a cruiser came sliding around the corner, red and blue lights mirrored a hundred times in the glass towers surrounding them.
“I hate her,” Kinro muttered. The orange light gathered around his hand and feet flickered like flames in the wind.
Demara scrunched her eyebrows at him. “No, you obviously don’t. Let’s go.”
The bank looked like a bomb had gone off. The walls were charred with soot where they weren’t broken. A fire blazed at the far end of the bank’s long teller counter. Some people were running past them out the door while others were trapped behind the flames. In the center of the bank, the fifty-foot long lizard roared, spewing a fresh gout of flame into the air. Its blue leather wings were spread so they couldn’t see the source of the vines wrapping themselves into reins around the dragon’s neck.
“I’ll help Emerald, you deal with the flames,” Demara said, her eyes tracking the beast’s tail. If they could just pin the monster down, they could perform the Banishing.
Pulling power from the Flow, Demara wrapped a fallen section of a granite pillar in violet light and grunted as it rose into the air, levitating as though it weighed nothing at all. Under her direction, it floated until it was just above the spinning arc of the dragon’s tail. She let it drop to the floor in a burst of pale flower petals, crushing the dragon’s tail.
The beast’s snarling roar of pain scorched the inside of the dome, sending peeled, melted flakes of paint raining down from above. It twisted itself so hard trying to snap at whatever had pinned its tail that Emerald was thrown from its back and through a wooden door into a room full of desks and setting off a fresh wave of screams from inside. The dragon wrapped its razor edged maw around the pillar and threw it back at Demara hard enough it knocked her back several feet even through her shield. Thankfully, the pane of lavender light still held, an ineffable barrier between herself and the murderous reptile on the other side, a fire growing between its open jaws.
It took every ounce of her strength to keep Amethy’s Shield powered against the onslaught of a thousand tongues of flame lashing for her. Even without reaching her she could feel their heat in the sweat beading on her skin and evaporating before it reached the floor. Demara’s burns would have been at least second degree, but Crystal Warrior Amethyst was made of stronger stuff.
Dragonic jaws snapped shut in a puff of thin white smoke, green vines wrapping around them like a muzzle from the left. At the same moment, a wave of blazing orange flame crashed into its head from the right. Topaz’s attack burned Emerald’s away. The dragon smirked, showing its razor teeth as it reared up and roared at them. It swept across them with another burst of flame, only it lacked the momentum to chase them. Then the tail came.
Demara picked herself up from the marble floor and looked left and right for her team. Emerald would have taken the brunt of the swipe and… She was climbing to her feet using a crashed over pillar for support.
The dragon had turned its back on them, focusing all its ire on the two story metal door in the bank’s back wall. The vault. Already the four feet thick block of steel was starting to glow with the heat.
“Pull it back,” Demara told her team. “Trident maneuver….”
But it was already too late. A river of red hot molten steel wound across the bank’s marble floor as its vault was breached. The dragon roared with delight as it slammed through the vault doors.
And took an icicle the size of a motorcycle through its chest. It wailed as it was impaled backward, falling in the middle of the bank floor, its head nearly at Demara’s feet. The monster paid her no mind as it feebly raised its head, craning its long neck to pull at the spike of ice driven through its sternum. She glanced between her teammates. They knew it was time for the Banishing.
A woman stepped out of the vault door, each step of her long stiletto heeled boots chiming like a bell as the molten steel froze and cracked beneath her. She wore a dress of pale blue with deep navy trim, its skirt split along her leg almost to her hip. Her neckline was similarly revealing and decorated with a gaudy amount of gold chains and gemstones. Her arms and wrists as well. Long, flowing pale blonde hair was kept back by a silvery circlet crested in a gleaming sapphire, which was joined by a pair of mismatched jeweled tiaras.
“Thanks for your help kids,” the woman said as she hefted a gray-green, fully-stuffed duffel bag off the floor. Blue light began to gather in the air beside her, looking somehow like big drops of rain caught midair and forming a sideways puddle. As the light grew brighter, suddenly it darkened and… Opened? Demara swore she could see shelves and boxes on the other side. The woman tossed her bag through the newly formed portal. “Mind cleaning up? I really can’t stay.”
Without waiting for their reply, the woman stepped through, and her portal collapsed into a bright blue fog that quickly faded through the room.
The dragon’s roar had none of the ferocity it’d shown only minutes before. That woman hadn’t just beaten the monster by herself, she’d done it in one attack. There had never been a time when the Crystal Warriors had defeated a foe so completely. It usually took at least two of them to pin the creature down so the third could perform the Banishing. This would almost be easy.
The crystal warriors fanned out, forming a triangle around the dying dragon. Gathering their power at the tips of their fingers, Demara led them through the hand motions. Light traced their fingers as they drew two circles connected by two lines in the air, one complete the other, wider, missing opposite quarters.
“Dragon begone!” they shouted together as they shoved against the radiant symbols. Orange, green and violet lights slammed into the dragon, who hardly thrashed as the symbols broke into tiny fractal pieces, dancing about its scales. Where they mixed they grew brighter until the dragon itself shone a brilliant sunlike white. They were forced to shade their eyes for an instant before the light began to fade. When it was gone, so was the dragon.
Cheering erupted from behind them. A crowd had formed on the steps of the bank, held back only by a chain of Manhira Police. Her uncle Derik was standing behind the line, chatting with the small black radio he wore on his shoulder. He broke off mid sentence to yell at a camera-wielding paparazzi looking for a picture for the evening paper. People, apparently, loved to read about the exploits of the Crystal Warriors.
Finally noticing what had riled the crowd, Officer Derik Deblosm started toward them. Demara looked away, inspecting the puddle of steel and the melted bank vault. He had almost recognized her in the past, she was sure of it, and she couldn’t risk the secret getting out. Who knows what her uncle would do if he knew she was sneaking out of school to play superhero? Probably tell mom and dad, and Demara didn’t want to think about that.
“Good thing you were here,” Officer Derik called to them. “I can’t believe there was an actual dragon.”
Topaz graciously stepped in, pitching his voice deeper than normal like he always did when speaking to ‘civilians’. “Anything is possible these days, officer. That’s why we’re here.”
Uncle Derik’s next question froze her in place as she inspected. Her uncle was a good cop, with an instinct for asking the right questions to get people talking. “And who was that woman? Was she with you?”
“We don’t know,” Amethyst said before Topaz could so she could lie through her teeth. “But I think I know where she went. We need to go.”
Demara stifled a grin as her uncle swore quietly to himself, wrinkles forming around his scrunched up, twice-borken nose. “Want to share your leads?”
“Out of your jurisdiction, officer,” Demara said. Then she glanced at the door and the crowd blocking it. “Do you mind?”
Derik shook his head and sighed as he turned. He started barking at the officers and the crowd, and soon, the three Crystal warriors were once again dashing through the streets of downtown Manhira.
“Where are we going?” Kinro asked as they ran along Aldrimar Street, passing through the shadow of the construction site of the city’s future tallest building, Cygnus Tower. Stellar themes must have been a favorite of the owner, because “PISCES” was written on the side of one of the cranes in bold silver letters.
“Back to school,” Demara said. “Unless you know how to track that woman, we’re going to need to get back before anyone notices we’re missing.”
“Park tonight?” Zia asked. It was one of their code phrases. The Crystal Guardian lived in a tree in Veria Park, not far from Demara’s home. “We’re gonna need the racoon’s help on this one. I wonder if he knew there was a fourth Crystal Warrior already?”
It was a good question, Demara did too. Even in their few short months as the Crystal Warriors, there had been a few times where Old Rown had known more than he let on. Not that anyone had gotten hurt, but he seemed to prefer they figured things out on their own, even if he knew the answer the whole time.
Transformed back into herself, and her crystal reformed and returned to its place in her bag, Demara’s lessons passed by in a blur that afternoon. Her mind was occupied with more interesting things than ancient imperial history. She could always read about the Silver Sun and its war in a book sometime. No, she was busy.
First with questions to pin down the elusive rodent until she filled a whole page in her notebook, front and back. Then silently wondering who the woman at the bank could have been. Zia was right, she clearly was one of them… Only she was a criminal. Rown had said the impure of heart couldn’t wield the power of a crystal. Finally, she sketched out a series of what she hoped to be costume improvements, only to crumple the paper up in frustration. One of these days she was going to have to learn to draw.