#and Bastian grumbles and protests and knows that he needs it and loves her for it

[pyrrhiccomedy]

Lisbet - The Devil's Alchemist

The first attendant to the antichrist was his death-touched squire;

The second was his fairy wife.

Lisbet was the third.

Born a trapper's daughter, raised an iconoclast: she was proud and peculiar, literate and skeptical, blunt and awkward and unbending in the wind. The devil was nothing to her until proven otherwise. This witch-touched great lord was a man like any other. She spoke plainly, thought clearly, and with her bow and her dog and her knowledge of the wood, in the face of censure she could always walk away.

The antichrist knew that he would never find another Lisbet: a genius, a free thinker, a slow-growing but powerful tree. It took years for her roots to find purchase in the alien soil he had transplanted her to: years of self-doubt, uncertainty, unhappiness and frustration. But in his garden of thistles, thorns, and arrowroots, he made room for a great oak.

It grows more quickly now. The shade from its canopy begins to creep out across the world.

She has invented the cannon; guessed the nature of the Emperor-Wolf; wrapped the mantle of the alchemist around her shoulders; never knelt to anyone.

Her brain crackles with strange fire. Her hands grope out to find the levers of the world.