“Everything that's wrong with magic is because it has a mind of its own, and it hates me!”

The angel looked at Sarah with unconcealed disdain, polishing its glass from behind the counter. Its waiter uniform looked oddly appropriate on its frame, accenting the fact that in the end it was still a servant.

Sarah wilted a bit.

“Ye-you're right. Sorry. Er. It's not that it has hates me, that's..the...I'm justifying myself, ain't I?” The angel didn't need to tell her, so it didn't.

“Right. Er. The problem is that magic dislikes being exploited, unlike...unlike literally every other physical law that exists. Those are easy. Or at least, Bob said it was easy. That in the end it was all math, and so everything turned out exactly the way people wanted.” 

Sarah looked wistfully at her empty glass. She was hunched over the counter, resting her head on her crossed arms, her eyes barely inches above the bottom. Fitting, that.

“I miss him. Wish he hadn't left me...”

The glass filled up with an amber liquid. Sarah looked up, but the angel's tiny mustache was as straight as its spine. Still, she was grateful, and drank deeply of the ambrosia, sloshing the liquid messily.

It would irritate the damned thing, but she didn't have much to lose anyway.

“Right. So. Let's get my thoughts in order for the big showdown. So. Magic; not at all like the vidya games. Not at all like the ErrPeeGees the nerds keep playing for some reason.”

She looked at the bar, trying to find some inspiration. The light was soft, more like a sunrise than lightning coursing through a wire. The walls were some dark wood she was too ignorant to recognize, but looked very classy.

The rest was hazy and indistinct. Maybe she in the concept of a bar, not in a real bar.

“Magic is poems, and artsy. Magic thinks like people, magic likes stories, magic can be bullshitted. I draw a magic circle, plop down the right dècor, say some words that sound like they should be right and out comes a demon! Nevermind that demons didn't exist until three years ago.”

The angel tucked its brilliantly white rag in its immaculate apron.

“Wrong. I studied law and passed the Bar exam under It That Lights the Lights, who is now He Who Lights the Fires, and your phrasing is wrong. You've left a loophole in what you've said so vast that all of He Who Is could pass through. Correct it.”

Sarah's brow furrowed.

“Ah! Right. Magic makes it so that demons had always existed...?”

The angel didn't reply, but it didn't correct her either.

“So. There aren't any actual rules in magic, because you've got to convince it of what you're doing every time you cast a spell, and it's not stupid. And it doesn't have to have your opinions on things.”

Sarah shuddered and held herself. This next bit was going to hurt. She looked at the angel's wings. They were fractals, the spaces between the spaces spiraling off into infinity, eternally similar to itself, each and every curve filled with mercy and love, none of it for her.

This time, it gave her a mug of hot chocolate.

“For example, I became a chaos mage.”

A pause.

“Because I thought it meant that I could do everything, be everything. Instead, it meant I'm an agent of destruction, and half of America is now...”

“Wrong.”

Sarah gulped. It all came down to this. Her last spell, using her own life and her own soul as lottery tickets. It'd surprised her to see an agent of God, but God was probably the only thing who could undo her fuckup.”

“Frankly, Sarah, it doesn't look good. Unless something extraordinary happens, every outcome is bad for you. You need a third option that just isn't there. I don't think you can grasp how bad Hell truly is, but my colleague made sure that stay in it would not be a fair price to pay to save all the people who died because of your actions.”

Sarah gulped, then took out her coin.

“Time for one last call, then. Heads, I go to Hell, but everything that happened because of me is undone. Tails...nothing happens.”

Was it just her imagination, or was there a glimmer of empathy in the angel's eye?

She threw the piece of metal into the air, flipping end over end.

The coin grew wings and flew away.