The Chamberlain considered the Scientist to be the most beautiful woman in the multiverse. She would never see it of course, though it was for the best. Her malcontent with the traits that had seen her shunned and reviled as a mortal preserved them as scars on her mind.

It made her easy enough to manipulate, the Chamberlain thought. Of course, it was not easy enough for his tastes. She was as rational as she was ruthless, for the most part.

With one hand, she brushed her crimson hair carefully over her ears. In her other, she held a baby

“I see one of your experiments has borne fruit.” The Chamberlain said.

“Not an experiment.” She replied, “No… no experiment at all.” Her voice was strained. Thin. She had been crying. The babe was months old, at least. How long had she wept?

“If you’d been about the last year or two,” she said, “You would know that.”

Her own child, thought the Chamberlain. That was unheard of, which was good. A mother’s priorities could cover the cold rationality she tried to project.

“Well,” said the Chamberlain, “That makes my tidings all the more urgent for you.”

“Tidings?”

“For a long time, I have worried… He – you know who – doesn’t much care for change. Or many other things likely to create it. Weather, nature, free will. And the more I have thought, the more I’ve come to a conclusion. I want you to tell me if it’s a reasonable one. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Investigate a hypothesis.”

“Go on.”

“There’s no room for two in a world of one law, no prismatic colors against a black and white morality. We’ve all agreed, and nodded our heads, and let it go on. The bells, the purges. They were for the best.”

The chamberlain forced a frown

“But what happens when the little variances we are accustomed to are the biggest ones left? When any… little aberration… is all there is to crusade against. Eventually, it all comes to one end, doesn’t it?”

“That’s… sound.” The Scientist replied, and held her child close. The chamberlain knew his words had found their mark, struck all the right cords.

“Everything known, catalogued, and put in a dusty box. And if it’s unknown, well, it must not be worth a chipped powerstone anyway, isn’t that right? Well, I may have a solution. We can talk all about it if you’d like, as long as you’d like.”

“All right,” said the Scientist, “But first I need to put her to bed.”

She stood from her chair and walked slowly to a cradle at the other end of the chamber.

“She will make a fine addition to our Order one day,” the Chamberlain said, “When we have solved our little problem.”

“No.” the Scientist said, tears creeping into her voice again, “She won’t. She might be my apprentice some day, even my spellsquire, but she will never be a Planeswalker.”

***

More field reports, more demands for inventions and chemicals, more letters that made the scientist wish she could be on the battlefield, seeing her creations in action. Wooden siege-engines and iron men, titanic beasts and microscopic plagues. Worlds were falling into ruin, and she had to rely on second-hand data!

It was almost as frustrating as their being a war at all. The Master had not seen a day of it. Why did nearly half the cabal, and most of its senior members, still fight in his name?

Her daughter, Ilinda, entered, carrying a cup of tea on a saucer. It had been seven years since she was born! If not for the war, that might have been the blink of an eye, but now? She had been wondering more and more why the daughter of her womb couldn’t be more like the creations of her vats and workshops, ready to go within days.

“Here, mom!” she said with a big, bright smile. The Scientist took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and took the teacup and saucer. Bless her heart, the girl was trying. It wasn’t her fault she was born nothing but a mortal.

That fact, that damnable fact, still haunted the scientist. The father had been a Planeswalker himself. Was it not a heritable trait? Did the spark that united them come from nowhere. Every other damnable piece of a person, the scientist had more or less tied down to biology. Why wouldn’t the Spark work the same way?

She took a sip of the tea, then set the cup back on the saucer with a loud ‘clink’

“Honey.” She said.

“Mom?”

“You forgot the honey.”

The scientist couldn’t keep anger from her voice, and her child recognized it.

“I’m sorry!” the little girl cried, “I’ll go-“

“No.” the scientist said. “You made your mistake. I will fix it.” She picked up the saucer and teacup with a dark look at her daughter. “Don’t touch anything while I’m gone.”

She stormed from the room, bitterness greater than that in the cup she carried residing deep inside her.

***

Ilinda fell to her knees – her pathetic, weak knees – in front of the home she had once known. Serving as spellsquire to Flayer had been unpleasant, cruel, painful. She bore a fresh scar beneath one of her emerald eyes, and plenty elsewhere, but more importantly, she had knowledge. She had power. Flayer had died, but Ilinda had become everything a spellsquire was supposed to be. She had done well. If she could bring her stomach under control, she could hold her head high.

Part of her knew, as Mother Wailer, who had been one of the Mentalist’s students, left her behind, that she wouldn’t find what she was looking for in the labs. She still couldn’t hold a candle to them. Couldn’t hold a candle to her mother, to the others, to her father whoever and wherever he was.

But she was the best she could ever be. Her mother didn’t expect brood wasps to write poetry or augment soldiers to strategize, surely she could expect no more of Ilinda. Surely, she had to see.

Ilinda went through the doors, navigated the maze of twisted passages, lined with war machines, breeding tanks, autopsied corpses and preserved limbs. At the heart of the tangled web, she found her mother, the Scientist.

Her mother did not even look up. “Fortune or cowardice?”

“Mom?”

“Flayer is dead, torn apart by that worthless wyrm, and yet here you are, the little spellsquire come home to mother. So which one is it? Did you hide from your duty in battle, or were you just too pathetic for him to notice you?”

“I… I tried my best! I did my best!”

“And it was not enough.” Her mother said coldly, “You failed again. Honestly, if you were an experiment…”

Her mother trailed off, like she always did. The sentence had never been finished, but Ilinda knew how it ended. “I would have scrapped you and started over by now.”

She thought about demonstrating her power, conjuring and summoning. She thought about raging, making a ruin of the lab, doing gods knew what damage. She sat down, rested her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, and tried to keep from crying.

“What more am I supposed to do?” she asked, softly, not really meaning for her mother to hear, “What more can I do?”

Her mother looked over her shoulder at Ilinda. “There is one thing you might do.”

Ilinda perked up. This was new. The rest of the conversation, less the specifics, had happened a thousand times before. Look what I did mommy! But it’s not good enough. It’s wrong. You’re a failure. But a chance to redeem herself? That was a first.

“What is it?” Ilinda asked, “Please, whatever it is, I’ll do it!”

Her mother turned around, and lifted an item from her workbench. It was a large cup of what looked to be tarnished silver.

“Do you see this?” her mother said, “It’s a fanciful thing Souldrinker recovered while you were off playing spellsquire. It’s helped us greatly in this war already.”

“What are its powers?” Ilinda asked. She didn’t really care about the answers, but the few times her mother had showed her as much as a hint of approval where when she had expressed curiosity about things she had no reason to know.

“Drink from it,” her mother replied, “And you’ll be a Planeswalker.” Ilinda could see her mother conjure threads of mana into the bowl, and then pour in a draught of cold water from a pitcher. Water and mana mingled into a single substance with a pale glow before even normal sight.

Ilinda reached out for the chalice.

“Before you drink.” Her mother said, “You’ll have a mission, once you ascend. The Mentalist has been on the loose for far too long. If we removed him, we’d have a far better chance of breaking the other side’s armies, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes.” Ilinda replied, “Without him, their control over the mortals collapses. That’s what you’ve said.”

“You are going to find him,” her mother declared, “And you are going to kill him. And you are going to do it very quickly, while we still have the element of surprise. Do you understand me? Fail here and there will be no second chances.”

There never were for Ilinda. Not until now. She took the grail and drank its potion down.

***

A little over three days later, Ilinda returned to the laboratory. She stood for a moment, and then pain raced through her body, coursed along her nerves, bringing her to her knees before her mother. She looked up, tears in her eyes. She was dying, she knew, but she had done well! She had done everything she had been asked to do! Surely, her mother had to know some way to stop it – stop the degeneration. Surely, she had to be proud.

The Scientist looked down at her daughter and smiled.

“I take it you were successful.”

“Yes!” Ilinda cried, tears staining her face from the pain, from the fear of death, from seeing her mother smile for once in her life at her. “I did it! The Mentalist is dead!”

“Hm.” Her mother said, and turned away.

“Mom…” Ilinda moaned, some of her joy fading along with the approval, “Aren’t you proud of me? Did I do good?”

“You managed, at least,” she replied, “To perform adequately. I suppose that is an improvement over each and every one of your previous endeavors.”

“I can do more!” Ilinda said, “I can feel it! I can do so much more! I can be who you wanted me to be!”

“Are you really that naïve?” her mother asked, “You’re dying.”

“But… you can fix it. It’s just some mistake, something with the chalice. You said you had used it before! You must know a way to fix this…”

“We have used it before.” Her mother replied, “And every mortal we used it on died… about as quickly as you, to be honest.”

“Mom?” Ilinda’s tears turned to sorrow, to pure terror. She felt a fire in her heart, a fire eating her from the inside out, and she knew her time was very short. If her mother couldn’t do anything, she’d die in this room. “You’ve worked out how to fix that? Right mom?”

“Fix?” her mother asked, “Frankly, I think it’s working as intended.”

Ilinda couldn’t make any reply with words, but sank lower into the floor.

“Even if the grail could make a real planeswalker of a mortal like you, and it can’t, how would we guarantee their loyalty? The bell would work no longer. We’d have to risk our truly loyal servants remaining loyal with new powers at their fingertips.”

The Scientist shrugged, “As for you,” she said, “Well, I finally get to bury my mistake. End of the experiment. If you want to make me very happy, daughter, you’ll go quietly and with dignity, and leave behind a corpse we can examine.”

Ilinda closed her eyes. She stopped fighting the pain, the fire inside. She stopped trying to hold the power, stopped her tears and would-be screams. She let go, hoping against hope that that, at least, would make her mother proud.

1) The Dominia Cabal Planeswalker War, in broad strokes at least, happened
2) The DCPW was instigated by the Chamberlain
3) Ellia the Endbringer was, by birth, a half elf and suffered a significant stigma for this before her ascension
4) The Black Grail and Calling Bell(s), from the Artifacts List, are implied by this story
5) This story provides some names (well, titles) and a few fates for Dominia Cabal planeswalkers: The Mentalist (Ranked, Loyalist, killed by Ilinda), Flayer (Traitor, killed by a dragon [planeswalker?]), Souldrinker (Traitor), and Mother Wailer (Traitor)