Chapter One

“Watch it, nerd!”

Lanie Saunders wants nothing more than to go to The Eras Tour, the person who is supposed to accompany her, her big brother, who is home from grad school for the summer, doesn't want to go. Alex is worried someone from high school will recognize him, and to him, there's nothing more embarrassing than being seen at a Taylor Swift concert. But Lanie has an idea: what if she casts a spell that will disguise Alex? Alex thinks the idea is silly, because magic isn't real, but he's about to get an up close and personal lesson at just how real it is -- and how magical a night at a Taylor Swift concert can be.

AUTHOR'S NOTES:

When I posted my first long TG story on here, I did not think it would be eight years before I posted another one. But here I finally am, with a story I started writing about a year ago, then tinkered with a lot over the past year. Unlike my last big story, this one focuses a lot more on the person who triggers the transformation, rather than the person who gets transformed. It also involves identity death for the person who gets transformed, so if that's not your thing, feel free to skip this one. And for those who've read "My Shallow Regret," you'll notice this story uses names that are very close to that one -- there's no connection between the characters, I just like using the names.

Also, shoutout to anyone who can use the small clues I tucked into the story to figure out where the main characters live.

Hope's Light

Chapter 28

by Erisian

Book 6

Chapter Twenty-Eight - Questions

There, hovering before what only pretended to be the blackest of clouds, lurked a sinister metallic sphere. How, one might ask, does a smoothly specular ball floating within an emptiness pressing against the true Void of Voids earn such a moody description?

The answer is simple: it emanates a hum of resonance filled beyond the brim with barely restrained violence, like a coiled spring which required industrial machinery to press into place and then held back only by a worn and rusted clasp on the brink of snapping. The tension so mighty that, if unleashed, the sphere would launch itself across a cosmos and plow through any stellar object foolish enough to happen to be in the way.

Rules of physics literally be damned.

When word spread that Akari had successfully forged her divine artifact, the entire academy buzzed with a mixture of awe, fear, and curiosity. The halls were filled with whispers of the feat she had accomplished, and students and faculty alike couldn’t stop talking about the lantern with its eternal flame.

Hope's Light

Chapter 27

by Erisian

Book 6

Part Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven - Pursuits

Entire chapters spin past.

A terrible encompassing war visits destruction’s touch to every level of Creation - slaughter and fire, anguish and ruin, all spreads ahead. Victories and losses pile on, culminating in the great rift cleaved across the tapestry, and a Gate forever locking one side from the other.

Hope's Light

Chapter 26

by Erisian

Book 6

Chapter Twenty-Six - Threats

Cassiel was helping Turiel to his feet when Krux’s military force finally swarmed the cavern, his soldiers bursting through the steel doors or clambering over the broken stones of the walls. Seeing three angels as the only ones moving, they didn’t know what to do. Deciding it was safer to simply leave us alone, they spread out to check the numerous cultists unconscious or dead splayed messily across the cracked tiles.