I do not own DGM.

Final chapter! Let me know what you think!

Grace Esztergom told the story in third person, disconnecting herself from it. It reminded Mia of the way she thought about Edith, and how that was so much simpler than admitting to herself that Edith and Mia were the past and present of the same person. She couldn't blame Grace for doing the same, though it seemed like an attempt to dodge the responsibility for her actions.

"I'm sorry we messed up the rose," Mia said because it was the one thing from the entire tale that she felt genuinely sad about, "we didn't know."

"It's fine. It's probably…" Grace sighed, "time I moved on. She's in a better place."

Grace had a sureness to her presence that was comforting when she wasn't trying to kill people. Mia let her sit in contemplation for a while. She thought about the blood that Grace had used for the spell that unravelled her soul, and if she still wanted to know what sorcery was. If it required sacrifice, then it wasn't really magic, but Olivia would never forgive her if she didn't at least try to find out.

"So you're a sorceress," she began.

"Look, I'm tired…" Grace started to get up, and Mia quickly raised her revolver and pointed it at her head. It was nice to see Grace hesitate and sit back down when half an hour ago the sorceress had been plotting her death.

"You still killed those Finders," Mia reminded her coldly. "It was unnecessary – they were only trying to save the world, that's all they ever do."

"I was scared," Grace repeated. She sounded upset at the memory, but Mia didn't think that her's was a good enough reason for mass murder. "The villagers were confused about them as well, they were just fresh stock for the curse, more people would have died."

"I was happier when you weren't making excuses… How did you even cast the curse?" she asked. It wasn't like she could just hand Grace over to the Order, she would end up in the same situation as the Exorcists. Mia couldn't allow that to happen even to someone who was effectively evil. Grace Esztergom belonged in a prison, however, so Mia couldn't let her go. Besides, magic was interesting and the sorcerers at the Order were secretive as hell.

"It was an accident," Grace smiled with her teeth, "I figured it out later, out of curiosity, but you won't understand the magic – it's not as simple as your Crystal. Real magic requires–"

Mia shifted the aim of the revolver thirty degrees to the right and pulled the trigger. The shot echoed through the night, joined by Grace's surprised yell.

"Shit! Fine–"

"Can you break it?"

Grace laughed, and her laughter echoed like the gunshot. Mia shifted her weight nervously. I'm really not the best person for this... Where're the Bookmen when you need them?

"Why would I? It's a masterpiece."

Whether Grace was really that proud of the blue-eyed monster was unimportant to Mia, but she wanted more time to come to the decision. It would be even better, she thought, if she didn't have to judge people like this at all.

"Really?" she asked, sceptically, taking her golem out of her pocket. "Your masterpiece is an accidental curse you cast fifty years ago? That's all your life's work amounts to?"

She was mostly hidden by the dark of the night, but Grace looked hesitant for a moment. Slowly, she picked up her hat and set it on her head, further obscuring her face. Mia continued to aim her revolver at her, and with the other hand switched the golem on and ordered it to call Bookman. Grace's eyes followed the electronic magical bat with unhidden curiosity, but it wasn't enough to make her lose focus.

"Soon you will see," she said ominously. "You won't have to judge me then."

Mia took a step backwards, a little nervous that the woman was reading her mind. Bookman was asking something through the golem, but she was too distracted to answer because Grace still had blood smeared across her face. It reminded Mia that she was talking to a person who wielded magic, the most unpredictable phenomenon.

"What are you doing?" she asked the sorceress. The reply she received was a sad smile. Faster than Mia could register, Grace's hands folded into a set of strange gestures and she was gone.

The Bookmen found her shivering on the ground with a tree at her back. She didn't know how to start a fire, and the darkness and cold of the countryside were oppressive enough to make her thoughts descend into a small orbit around oblivion. She wondered why it was that faced with a simple way out, she still chose to stay. Grace's spell hadn't been that hard to break; it was like she hadn't even expected her to fight it.

Lavi had brought her a coat, because she had left it in the storage cupboard that had been acting as her room. She thanked him, reluctantly, gritting her teeth.

"Don't patronise me," she snapped at him, before he could say anything. He lifted his hands like he was trying to calm her down.

"Would you rather I shouted at you for losing the homicidal sorceress?"

"Yeah," she muttered, wishing he wouldn't speak at all. Bookman was investigating the little bowl of blood, and some alien symbols drawn onto the grass with mounds of fine salt. Grace had taken her books with her when she fled.

"How could you, Mia!" Lavi exclaimed theatrically, "you wretched thing! Such a disaster, and all your fault!" Mia closed her eyes, leaning her back on a tree trunk so that a jagged piece of bark was painfully digging into her skull. She was pretending in her mind that he was being serious, which Lavi took as encouragement. "Now all is lost!"

"How hurtful of you," she said flatly, noting that he had carefully avoided saying anything remotely truthful. He thought he was being kind, she reasoned.

"You're welcome."

Lavi was more bearable when he wasn't happy, but it was annoyingly difficult to upset him.

She told Bookman, "I think I might have stepped on some of the drawings." Bookman glanced at his apprentice, who had almost choked on a dramatic intake of breath, then looked at her with a fair amount of pity.

"No bother, this is almost certainly irrelevant," he said with a sigh. Even so, he copied them down into a notebook. Mia had already committed them to memory to draw for Olivia's secret research project when she got back.

"We should get back," Bookman said, "in case the fort is in danger."

The fort was not in danger. Mia knew this because she remembered how disinterested Esztergom had seemed about the village in general. Whatever she was planning – unless it required human sacrifice and it was fairly certain it wouldn't – the fort was probably safe. She explained this to the Bookmen, but they were politely doubtful of her ability to draw such sophisticated conclusions about people.

This time she stayed in the fort to activate her Innocence, wondering if turning her soul into a dragon was going to be more difficult when she wasn't in mortal danger. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and thought of Sparrow, smiling involuntarily at the hope of seeing her again.

When she flew through the ceiling, it was with wings. They caught more air than she expected of a non-material substance, which made flying a little more intuitive than it had been previously. With a whoosh, she dug her claws gently on the roof of a watchtower and surveyed her surroundings. The sun had just risen over the horizon, and everything was covered in bright yellow light: the same colour as living human souls. She wasn't going to find anyone this way. Beating her wings against the air more for dramatic effect that actual need, she threw herself into the open sky. The fort flattened itself into its surroundings, even less impressive from above; Mia wondered how it was that anyone ever felt safe there.

About two miles off, she saw a white light, the kind that magic was made of. It was swirling above the ground on the side of a hill, so the sorceress must have been underground. Mia memorised as much as she could of the directions and returned to the fort, where Bookman and Lavi were waiting for her with expectations of valuable information. It took her a few minutes to decide what to tell them, and she spent the time pretending to gather back her bearings. Eventually, she just asked for a map.

"What are we going to do?" she asked, "if we do find her?"

"Report her to the authorities?" Lavi said, with a laugh. Bookman quietly reminded him not to be stupid, but he himself did not offer any ideas. They were trying to make her eat again and she was stubbornly refusing because she was still worried about what was going to happen to Grace Esztergom. Besides, whatever it was looked pretty awful and the fort only had wooden forks because all the cutlery had been molten down into weapons and hinges for the gate.

"She's not going to break the curse," Mia told them, "unless we give her a reason other than ethics. She's proud of it, in a way." Though Mia didn't approve of Grace giving up on her career so quickly, it wouldn't make sense to destroy her work if it meant that much to her. The villagers were doing an admirable job dealing with it anyway, excepting the wooden forks and the occasional murder.

Bookman shook his head slowly, "let the Order deal with its enemy."

"We are the Order," Mia insisted defensively, "it's our decision."

"You want to let her go!" Lavi exclaimed suddenly, then asked still smiling, "whose side are you on, princess?"

Mia smiled back and shrugged. She didn't think Lavi cared much about whose side she was on, but she knew it was easier to fight if you knew the loyalties of your teammates. He wasn't accusing her of treachery, he was being practical.

"I don't think it's going to be as easy as you think to contain a sorceress," she said, "but we could try to offer her freedom in exchange for breaking the curse."

"That will make everyone happy," Lavi concluded, but Bookman shook his head again.

"Only if we keep it secret from the Order," he muttered thoughtfully.

"Of course." Mia drummed her fingers on the table in anticipation of having a secret to keep from the admins. She was a traitor now, she had gained a tiny little piece of freedom. This was what Nathanael had meant, she realised, about being sufficiently far from Central for rules to matter a little less. The Innocence couldn't kill her for this because Grace wasn't taking sides in the holy war; she was an enemy of the Order, not God.

Mia looked at the map and circled Grace's location on it in pencil.

The grass was yellow and dead, and she could see Grace's soul glowing softly from underneath. The fort-dwellers didn't know of any caves nearby, and an entrance proved impossible to find, so when they arrived at the hillside Grace was staying under Mia activated her Innocence and went to check it out on her own.

With trembling fingers, the sorceress was tying a knot in a rope, then she slung it over a wooden support beam. Mia watched her with horror, because the action was something that she'd imagined herself doing on several occasions. They were only daydreams. The dreadful day when the thoughts would become reality was still unreachable, and yet, here was a woman tying a second knot to secure a loop of rope two metres off the ground. Was this what Grace had meant when she said Mia wouldn't have to judge her? She was wrong.

Then she thought, that's right this is impossible. Grace wouldn't go through with it, she was only in that mindstate in which giving up seems like the best idea. In a few seconds she would go back to being murderous and lost. Mia had to laugh at her, and her misery, because it would be okay, because it couldn't end this way, and she couldn't watch Grace take her own life.

"Idiot!" she cried, "you're going to look back on this and laugh at how silly you were being!" The same way that Mia looked back at Hrebenne, and how childish she was when she thought it would be fine to just let the Innocence betray her.

"You're never going to get that knot right. It's not like anyone really knows how to tie a noose, it just seems like the easiest way at first. Honestly, it would be simpler with a knife, you will bleed out quicker than you'll choke. You'll change your mind a million times when you're dying."

Grace untangled the knot and tied it again, and an occasional sob was the only sound in the cavern. The air became thin and filled with burned wax, so Mia snuffed out the candles one by one until it was pitch black and Grace had to crouch down and touch the ground for stability. A minute later, the Sorceress managed to find a match and struck it on the nearest wall.

"Mother?"

Mia felt a tightness in her chest, as Grace lit the candles again. She recognised fear buried in the whisper and kicked the barrel, but all she achieved was a slight wobble. Grace kept speaking in Hungarian, shifting the stand into a more stable position, and Mia couldn't understand a word but kept waiting for the woman to come to her senses.

She heard a laugh, high-pitched and sweet, like when Mia played along with misogynists, like the parody of a laugh from something that didn't believe in laughter.

"Hee hee hee! What a tragedy!"

Mia retreated into the rock wall, feeling the familiar pressure of a magical barrier at her back. The Earl's face, a permanent mask, grinned at Grace from the shadows, but like the cavern of the silver tree, this one was a solid enclosure.

"Finally… I knew you would come." Grace stopped faffing with the rope and straightened to her full height. "You're not the only one who feeds on despair for power."

"Eeee! Seems like we've been caught," the Earl's voice screeched out from underneath its teeth. It glanced at Mia, and through the fear, it was still unclear to her how such a cheerful costume could convey so much hatred. Death did not terrify her as much as being killed by the Earl itself did.

Nevertheless, there was one other thing she kept thinking.

It was a reasonable conjecture that if the Earl died now, nobody else would have to sacrifice their life for the stupid holy war and all the things that Mia said about all the lives the Order ruined would be meaningless. Olivia could go home; the Wizards could continue to expose corrupt politicians; Lenalee could stop worrying about her family being gone one day. Nathanael could live forever.

She could become a mathematician.

Or not.

She was fine with the last being impossible. The other reasons were numerous and already enough and she was never very good at living to begin with; when Ethel died, Edith should have died with her, and none of this misery would have happened.

The third and last time she became a dragon was out of a desire for people to be free of the Black Order. The cavern, too small to contain her, blazed with magical fire, but Grace's soul was unhurt so that she could continue chanting the spells that had taken fourty-seven years to design.

In four spinning steps, the Earl tapped its way over to Grace and rested a pink umbrella on her hat. The sorceress slid sideways to escape it, showered in a snowy flurry of ash that settled on her hair, then waved her arms in a circle over her head and folded her fingers in the shape of a diamond. The space filled itself with a careening, hurtful magic that cut the air to pieces, twisting everything living into corpses and molten rock. Only nothing in the cave was truly living apart from the architect. Clumsily, with one wave of the pumpkin head, the Earl banished the spell leaving the cave in the dark and silence of nothingness.

A shuddering breath rang out.

Of course, they realised, no human being could defeat the Earl.

Mia, with very little space to manoeuvre, grabbed the pink umbrella from the Earl's grasp with her teeth and swallowed it. It screamed like a child, and the Earl made a disapproving sound, but the distraction was enough for Grace to clap her hands, disappear, and send the ceiling crashing down into the cave.

The sorceress was gone, the Earl was still intact, and Mia sank her teeth around its head while rocks smashed the rest of it to a bloody pulp and added to the fire. The umbrella, still screaming with rage, tore itself free through the scales of her skin and while the world slipped away, the Earl's grin shone cheerfully through the earth. Its hands reached for the dragon's head and twisted it until the skull was splinters.

Mia turned to dust knowing that the war would continue for many years to come. Who was she to challenge a being that was capable of such destruction? She was an Apostle of God who did not agree with Him. She was one of His mistakes; a failed experiment in redemption.