Interlude: Final Curtain Call

The first thing Zatanna Zatara noticed when consciousness returned was the taste of copper on her tongue.

The second was the migraine from the pulsing, throbbing pressure behind her eyes that felt like someone had driven an ice pick through her frontal lobe and was now using it to stir her thoughts into a thick, unmanageable slurry even as she was on the floor of her sanctuary, sprawled across the Persian rug she'd inherited from her father, her stage costume still clinging to her with the sweat of a fever dream.

She had been dreaming again.

No, not dreaming. 

Seeing.

The visions had come in waves, each one more vivid than the last. Bruce facing the golden Servant on a battlefield of shattered concrete. 

A dark violet haired girl with hollow eyes and worms writhing beneath her skin. 

A knight in black armor screaming a name that sounded like a prayer and a curse all at once. 

A man in a trench coat, his face a mask of cold determination, his hands stained with blood that would never wash clean.

And at the center of it all, a cup. 

A grail. 

Something that should have been holy but had become something else entirely as a vessel for all the world's evils, a crucible of suffering and sacrifice that would consume everyone who touched it.

Zatanna pushed herself upright with her fingers then pressing against her temples. 

Even as the migraine was receding now, the images stubbornly remained, burned into her consciousness like afterimages of a lightning strike.

She had to move.

She had to move.

She had to help Bruce.

But first … she had to prepare.

And she was in just the place to do it as the sanctuary was a pocket dimension that existed between worlds, a space her father had created decades ago, when he had been young and reckless and had believed that he could have it all. 

Stage magician. 

Husband. 

Father. 

Hero. 

He had been wrong about many things, but he had been right about one: the importance of preparation.

Zatanna rose on unsteady legs and walked to the center of the room, where a full-length mirror stood against the far wall.

 It was not an ordinary mirror. 

She looked at her reflection and saw the dark hair, the pale skin, the dark eyes and it was when she looked at the costume she was wearing so soaked in sweat that she knew she had to change after a definite wash.

The corset went on first after the far too quick wash for her liking, its reinforced structure pressing against her ribs then fishnets came next in all their black tantalizing form for the top hat, the tuxedo jacket, the white gloves with the black and crimson underneath cape to complete her signature look.

She checked herself in the mirror and could now see the Mistress of Magic she presented. 

Zatanna had been taught magecraft from a very young age. Her father had been a prodigy, a man who had taken the ancient mysteries of their bloodline and translated them into something that could be understood by the modern world. 

He had been her first teacher, her first inspiration… but he had also taught her something that no one else could have: the difference between stage magic and magecraft.

Stage magic was misdirection. It was the art of making the audience believe they had seen something impossible, when in fact they had simply been shown what they expected to see. It was the power of the human mind to fill in the gaps, to connect the dots, to create meaning where none existed.

Magecraft was the hard work of mankind paid forward years ahead at an instant. It was the power of the human will to impose itself on the world, to say "this is how things should be" and make it so without the long-term building.

And yet, as her father had often said, stage magic was more magical than magecraft.

As the fundamental truth of the modern era, one that her father had drilled into her from the beginning was that magecraft was not magic but it was a system of cause and effect that could be studied and replicated that ebbed and waned on human understanding to function because magecraft relied on Mystery, and Mystery was the opposite of understanding. A Mystery that was understood ceased to be a Mystery. It became merely another thing that the world knew, another fact to be catalogued and dismissed. And as understanding grew, Mystery diminished.

But stage magic was based on misdirection. It acknowledged the limitations of human perception and used them to create wonder in defiance of what was made aware. Magecraft, by contrast, was a constant, desperate attempt to achieve what was lost.

This was the great tragedy of magecraft: that it was a self-defeating enterprise. Every spell that was cast, every Mystery that was revealed, brought the end of magecraft one step closer. One day, all magecraft would vanish, fully replaced by science.

Tonight, she would need both in the new skills she earned and her ancient works. And the Zatara bloodline was old. Older than most mages could imagine in fact as it stretched back to the Age of Gods, when magic was not a craft to be studied but a reality to be lived and her ancestors had communed with spirits, spoken the language of creation, woven spells that would make modern magi weep with envy.

The power had been passed down through generations, each one adding to the accumulated store of Mystery and knowledge.

And a way as its inheritor to use it now to channel the accumulated power of 14,000 years of careful investment and cultivation.

But the cost was high. The more she drew on the ancient power, the more she risked losing herself in the process.

She had made her peace with this long ago and had accepted that her legacy was not to preserve the past, but to shape the future as not a gift to be hoarded, but a tool to be used.

And she had accepted that she would need to use it tonight.

Zatanna finished her preparations and stood before the mirror one last time. 

She was ready to perform.

She spoke the start of the ten-count aria incantation under her breath, her voice soft and precise. Zatanna closed her eyes and reached out with her consciousness, touching the leylines that ran beneath the city and felt them hum with power, ancient and deep, the same power that she would be tapping into tonight.

She began to weave the spell for the Warp Gate using the Mirror and the Anchor she sent.

She was going to Fuyuki.