May 2019

  ***

  “Someone help me!”

  Maria was limping into the emergency room of the nearest hospital, desperately pushing shreds of her torn shirt on the profusely bleeding hole in her left shoulder. Her fingers threatened to slip, so slick were they with her blood. Nurses and a doctor ran her way and soon Maria found herself on an operating table, just having received a dose of sedatives as people prepared to stop the bleeding to save her life. Her consciousness drifted away, and she found herself in dreams shaped from memories.

  ***

  March 2018

  ***

  Her transformation into the Dream Empress happened roughly a year ago. Maria Hattori just became CEO of the family business after the death of her father. He died of natural causes, or so everyone believed. In truth, he was slowly poisoned by Maria by adding digitalis to his daily tea, in vanishingly low doses until he finally died of heart failure. He crushed her dreams of being an actress at a young age and made her work in the family business with the goal of taking over after his death, so she thought it was only fair if she combined her revenge with acceleration of the takeover process. However, her dreams still eluded her. Having missed her chance, she was stuck with the business she inherited, forced to continue the plan her father made for her entire life, for which she killed him in the first place.

  Leading a company was dull and unfulfilling, and the only joy she found was random acts of cruelty she could inflict on the designers or even the models who came for a chance to show off Hattori Designs’ newest creations and make a name for themselves.

  She didn’t like the ones who acted like modeling was their dream job. If Maria Hattori was never allowed to live her dream, why were these commoners getting off on doing a job they loved? She had to knock these shining, glamorous girls down a peg or two.

  She founded a new company with the sole purpose of crushing those dreams under her heel. Young, inexperienced models who came to her were harshly criticized, berated, made to see that modeling wasn’t the path forward for them due to their lack of experience and confidence. Once they were hurt and vulnerable enough, Maria would flip the script and offer them different opportunities. She would praise the girls’ looks and bodies, while proposing a career in which they would prosper: as AV idols, actresses in pornographic videos. Maria thoroughly enjoyed the process of ripping girls’ dreams and aspirations away, and then, while attending the shoots for the videos, watching them as they moved their bodies in a rhythm of lust, with the previous spark of dreamy aspirations gone from their eyes. A lot of them came into full bloom doing these kinds of videos, and Maria soon considered herself someone who brought out a model’s true talents. Dreams and passion paled in the face of raw talent, or so she told herself.

  ***

  One night, she was visited by a strange person in her own dreams. In it, she was an actress and had just finished shooting her latest movie. She went to talk shows to promote the movie, she attended dinners with co-stars, she talked to rich, important and famous people alike. She felt seen, as she should be.

  But one person didn’t match. He looked foreign, and his skin was cracked like it was drier than the sand of the desert. His eyes were glowing in a deep shade of purple, and he sprouted wings from his back, which ruined the expensive suit he was wearing. No one else at the premiere seemed to be able to see him as he simply walked past them. He stopped right next to Maria, keeping eye contact as he just gave her a knowing smirk.

  “You love dreams, don’t you? Your own, which you cherish, and those of others, which you crush for your own amusement.”

  “Who are you?” Maria managed to ask. She was strangely lucid, fully aware that she was conversing with this man in her dream, and yet he didn’t seem to belong, like he invaded from the outside.

  “I am Morpheus. I have come to grant you wings, as well as sovereignty over dreams,” the strange man simply announced, and Maria narrowed her eyes at him. Part of her wanted to dismiss this ridiculous offer outright as nothing more than a charade, but another part of her knew how strange her own world had become these past few years.

  “Oh? I know that name. There’s always a catch to these things. What do you want? Should I use my money to influence things in my world in a certain way? Or do you want something as banal as my body?”

  The strange man showed a wide grin, eyeing her up and down as if to consider her offer, but then he shook his head.

  “No. There’s no bargain. I won’t even accept a ‘no’ from you. I will grant you wings and the power to wield dreams as you wish, and my aunt has already left a weapon for you by your bedside. We are curious what you are going to do with it.”

  Maria wanted to respond, to challenge his assumption that she would do anything with his strange gifts, but she jolted awake instead. Morpheus was nowhere to be seen, and just as he announced, there was a scythe by her bedside. Its blade was crafted from obsidian, giving it a slightly serrated look, and as she touched it, she could feel it humming with a strange power.

  And speaking of power, she felt some surging through her as well. When she flexed her back muscles a specific way, she could now make black-feathered wings sprout from her back, as well as make them disappear.

  She grinned from ear to ear as she realized that this wasn’t a dream, and that there were now strange powers welling up inside her, waiting for her to explore them.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  May 2019

  ***

  Maria awoke in one of the hospital’s beds. Her being alive meant that the operation went well, but she was afraid that the gaping wound was going to scar. No, she wasn’t afraid that it could, she was furious that it most definitely would. Her appearance was her pride and joy, a quality that would have elevated her to stardom near-instantly, had her father not insisted on killing her aspirations, and now an ugly scar would mar her shoulder.

  She thought back to what brought her into this situation: after receiving her new powers from Morpheus, she experimented. She quickly found out that she could slash the air with her new scythe, and it would open a wound in reality itself, allowing her to travel to all sorts of strange places, or, as mundane as it was, it could allow for fast travel in her own world.

  She used that opportunity to test her new abilities in different worlds, where no one knew her, where no police or Magical Girls would look for her. She quickly learned to trap people in bubbles and extract their unfulfilled dreams in the form of ghosts. Even more than that, these ghosts would in turn capture the people they touched and could thus create a cascading effect. Once, she had an entire medieval-looking town trapped in her dream bubbles, as the wandering ghosts quickly propagated through the narrow alleys. She never bothered to find out what happened to the residents after she left.

  Maria also worked on an outfit. She had powers and a mighty weapon, but annoyingly enough, she wasn’t given the same sort of transformation abilities as the Magical Girls of her world. Thus, she took once more to the sewing machine, like in her first years of mandatory training at her father’s company. She always admired the beauty of Venetian Carnival masks and the associated dresses, so she fashioned her outfit after them, including the mask. She looked beautiful in it, while it completely concealed her identity.

  Soon after she took to the skies of Tokyo for the first time, and this was where she had her fateful encounter with the two Magical Girls Minerva Crimson and Bellona Azure.

  She started out by trapping a few people in dream bubbles, while she sat back and admired the unfulfilled dreams which these humans wallowed on. Minerva Crimson arrived soon at the scene, but she fell into the dream bubble traps herself, without much interference being necessary from the Dream Empress. She got to enjoy the unfulfilled dreams of a Magical Girl that day. Dreams of intimate relationships with other women, which she couldn’t commit to out of fear for their safety, or so Maria assumed. Her enjoyment was cut short the moment the other Magical Girl entered the scene. She had seen everything and knew not to let the dream phantoms touch her. Maria watched her fight against them with some interest, until said Magical Girl and her locked eyes and she immediately rushed her way – and impaled her on her halberd.

  The strange gifts given to her gave her unnatural resilience – she had brushed off sword slashes and other attacks that would have killed her previously, but this halberd… it pierced through whatever it was that gave her this new resilience, like she was nothing more than an ordinary woman.

  Maria grimaced and clenched her hands into fists as she was continually reminded of her humiliation by the pain radiating through her shoulder. She swore that day that she would make the Magical Girl who did this to her pay.

  August 2020

  ***

  Fate had a curious way of working out. Maria kept a low profile this year and took martial arts courses with various polearms. She knew by now that the Magical Girl who scarred her was Bellona Azure, a Magical Girl who possessed proficiency with any kind of weapon. If Maria wanted to take revenge on her, she would need to learn seriously how to wield her strange weapon, and how to use her ability to her benefit in combat, as she had no illusions about the outcome if she confronted the warrior Magical Girl directly with her weapon alone. She went back to other worlds and after getting a child trapped in one of her bubbles, she learned to her delight that she had limited control over what kind of dream phantom she wanted to materialize. Instead of the regular ghosts which propagate the creation of dream bubbles, she could create stronger phantom soldiers, based on an individual’s dreams and aspirations. Children were dreaming big, so she was getting powerful heroes out of them. Mighty warlocks, gallant knights, all these creations were at her beck and call.

  And as fate would have it, she would possibly get to use all her newfound abilities tonight: in front of her was a woman, willingly tied up and blindfolded by her, while Maria held a riding crop in her hand. She met this woman, Ayame was her name, last month at a fashion expo which they both attended as representatives for their respective companies. Maria immediately recognized her as one of the women from the Magical Girl’s dreams, and as the Magical Girl was embracing them all as well as Bellona Azure, that meant the true identity of the blue Magical Girl must have been either this woman, or the Gothic Lolita styled one, and Maria would find out today, one way or another.

  She had to suppress her murderous rage for weeks as she entered a steady relationship with this woman. The sex was great, and, in another life, Maria might have settled with her, but her mind was made up. She would hurt her today. She would make it hurt unbearably, to the point her partner would flail and scream, but there would be no way out.

  If she was the Magical Girl, she would transform to escape, and Maria was ready. She had captured another child beforehand, holding it trapped in a dream bubble in a basement a short distance away, just in case she found herself in need of ghostly assistance. Holding a knife in her left hand she raised the riding crop in her right and unleashed a world of pain on Ayame.

  ***

  In the end, Ayame wasn’t the Magical Girl. After Maria untied her, the woman turned around and slapped her, hard. She could see the ruined make-up from an endless stream of tears on her face, and the infinite hurt of betrayed trust in her eyes. A part of her felt sorry for what she did, but another clung to the notion that Ayame was in cahoots with those Magical Girls, so she deserved everything coming her way. She didn’t even consciously hear the curses and insults flung her way as Ayame stormed out of Maria’s apartment, declaring their relationship over. She stared into space, gritting her teeth as she found herself at square one again.

  Glory of the Moon Matron, 6310

  ***

  “Wake up!”

  The words were accompanied by a light kick into Maria’s ribs, and she groaned. She sat up in her bed and glared at Taenya, the dark-haired elven assassin who crossed her arms and looked at her, already dressed in her dark leather armor covered in an unfathomable number of sheathed knives.

  “The day has come. The mistress wants to see us,” she declared.

  For the past months, Maria had been in this woman’s world, only returning to her own from time to time to avoid suspicion and get some work done.

  Day and night the assassin and her trained and sparred, often leaving Maria bruised. Luckily, this world had healing magic, or she would still feel it this morning. Taenya’s declaration, however, got her attention and made her heart soar. She jumped out of the bed and got herself dressed in her crimson outfit before grabbing the scythe. She faced Taenya, who looked her up and down and nodded.

  “You look as ready as you’ll ever be. Let’s rid ourselves of some Magical Girls.”