I would have liked to get there by any means other than walking, but we have little luck with that. Reaching out and “touching” the tower, which I’d been warned ages ago was a surefire way to get caught by it, does nothing. Kiana peels into the air, propelled by darkness, but doesn’t get any nearer any quicker. Attempts at ritual teleportation, proposed by Mordred, fizzle out explosively.
The tower has decided to make our lives harder, which at this point is entirely expected. I don’t actually know if it’s Katoptris shutting us down or some trick of Prevara or the Demiurge, but it doesn’t change the result: the conceptual distance between us and the tower is only going to lessen by walking there.
Once the matter of transport is settled, our march becomes a quiet affair. Kiana and Mordred might not be at each other’s throats anymore, but that’s only on the surface; I doubt any kind of real forgiveness has passed between those shards. Thalia, meanwhile, is content to match the rest of the group. The murderous homunculus in a wedding dress keeps grinning at me and wiggling her eyebrows, which I have no idea how to interpret, so I’m letting the silence stick. I’m too nervous for verbal fencing.
I know something is going to find us before we reach the tower, it’s just a matter of what spots us first. Prevara has spent the past however many thousands of years setting up the board for a final confrontation over the fate of both the Labyrinth and Pandaemonium. I doubt most of its pieces would be more than slight speedbumps for the band of killers I’ve assembled, but some of them are going to be real problems.
I keep my eyes peeled for trouble, gaze darting across rooftops and down alleyways as we trek through the streets of Fata Morgana. Where are you going to hit me from, you bastard?
My paranoia is justified when I take another step and feel a shift in the air. My skin crackles with the sensation of something wrong, aberrant, opposed to my presence.
Thalia stops walking half a second before I do. We share a glance before I call out to the other two, “Trouble’s knocking. Get ready.”
They barely have time to react before the city block explodes in burning white.
An inkling of warning shouldn’t be enough for me to do anything about it, but that’s the mindset of someone still fundamentally mortal. Hastur whispers in my ear and nudges my hand, and when I pull the red velvet around my shoulders it is familiar and real, a mantle I’ve worn before. Unburned.
White energy fills the street in an instant, a pure inferno that melts stone. I know this fire. In my latest lifetime I’ve only ever seen its cousin, but the Intercessor and the Red Queen both witnessed its use from the source: the white flame of destruction, breath of the white dragon. One of the five wizardly arts.
My fireproof cloak spares me the flame itself, though the concepts of ravage and ruin embedded in the flame manage to tear past and rip a few holes in my flesh that hurt like a motherfucker. I grit my teeth and bear the pain. The blast wounded me, but I survived it, and that means another moment of endurance to stitch into my cloak.
Let’s see how the others fared.
As the white fire fades, I catch sight of Kiana and Mordred both breathing heavily. Kiana is lightly singed but relatively unharmed, a thin coat of darkness still clinging to her skin but torn in places; her shadows must have rushed to her aid the moment she was warned. Mordred looks much worse, covered in glowing burns and snarling, but she’s clutching a bright white marble in one hand. She took the hit to make a copy.
Thalia is completely untouched and already moving toward the source of the blast. Yeah, we definitely want to keep that monster on our side. What did she do, dodge an explosion?
Most of the buildings to either side of the street were turned to slag and ash, but one looks like it was blown open from the inside, and the interior is perfectly intact. Standing in the burnt hole is Reska, or rather the walking corpse of another Reska clone.
Urna’s latest puppet is very different from the one that tried to kill me before my reunion with Cheshire. Aside from the obvious of looking more like Reska than myself or Homura, this corpse doesn’t have stitches across its mouth. The zombie Kiana is wearing a half-translucent white shift and nothing else, because Urna is a deranged pervert, and she holds a long staff of green crystal. The eyes, like all of Urna’s servants, are that same icy blue.
“Sorry about this!” she chirps as Thalia rushes her. The zombie slams her staff against the ground and a dozen panes of glimmering blue force appear in front of her. “It’s not that I want to kill you or anything, but Mistress said she’d throw me back in the grasping pit for another month of touch training if I failed.”
Despite her words—and despite the way Thalia carves through one pane after another with her knife, shattering each with a single tap—the zombie Kiana seems freakishly cheerful.
A seismic tremor snaps my attention back to the others, where a woman in burnt armor is rising out of a crater. She hefts a giant sword over her shoulder, a weapon so brutish and massive it’s more a slab of iron. Dark hair falls around an emaciated face and haunted, icy eyes. This one feels like a Mordred, and I get another sense from her, too: this used to be an exalted, like Dante briefly became, but Urna ripped the light clean out of her victim. Some sort of knight or paladin, maybe.
The zombie Mordred screams, a cutting noise full of pain and hate, and she rushes the living Mordred with sword aloft. My splinters spring into action with fluid teamwork, the product of a hundred fights they remember clearly yet never truly fought.
Kiana swirls her shadows around the fallen knight’s legs, working to slow it or trip it while Mordred invokes a burst of speed and strength to dart behind her doppelganger and run it through the back. The blade pierces through blackened steel, propelled by unnatural power, but Mordred’s lip curls in distaste at something she finds. The blade is removed, covered in some kind of greenish-black muck—but no blood, I realize. Inconvenient for her.
Zombie Kiana incinerates another wall of the shop and races out through the melting hole, pursued by Thalia. The zombie is laughing, but also clearly panicking with the way she throws spell after spell to no avail. Nothing she casts can do a thing against Thalia, either cut in half by the Adversary’s knife or splashing harmlessly off her wedding dress.
It feels wrong not to help with either clash, but both fights seem well in hand. Two of Urna’s pets, but nowhere near strong enough to do more than slow us down. Which means that’s exactly what they’re trying to do.
Where’s the necromancer? Where’s the last Veseryn?
I hear the flapping of wings a moment before snow and sleet bury the world. A dragon, blue scales dotting a rotting carcass, soars overhead and unleashes a flurry of frost upon living and dead alike.
Thalia cuts through the dragon’s frost breath as easily as she’s cut anything else, but my cloak doesn’t do anything against the cold and I find myself trapped in growing frost. Mordred fumbles with Vorpal’s secret compartment for the right marble while Kiana transmutes fully to shadow in order to shake off the layer of ice that was coating her. The zombies move through the frost like it isn’t there, one pursuing Kiana and the other running from Thalia.
Mordred fishes the white fire marble back out of Vorpal along with two others glowing with violent energy. She absorbs the power from all three of them and immediately shunts it down the length of the blade, unleashing the violence and ruin as a beam of blinding white that spears straight through the center mass of the undead dragon.
The dragon lurches, torn nearly in half by the force of the blast, and roars pitifully as it crashes into one of the few buildings in the area not already ravaged by the initial explosion. I don’t know if it was destroyed or just wounded, but either outcome is a victory.
As the dragon falls, two figures leap from its back and land gracefully amid the snow and violence below.
The first I was expecting: Lord Urna, Noble of Desire and Disgust, the half-corpse queen with platinum hair and a vicious sneer. She tried to kill me when I arrived in the bubble city, and she proudly boasted of murdering two other splinters. The first to claim a shard of Katoptris and enslave herself to its power, the greatest of Prevara’s prizes in the Labyrinth.
The second figure is a man with elven ears and fiery hair, orange eyes and gilded hunting boots. A man I’ve met before, and never wanted to meet again, though I knew the day would come. A faerie of Summer and a Rider of the Wild Hunt. Servant in title to Lord Invernus of the Labyrinth, servant in truth to the Emissary of the Leviathans.
Eirdryd Llewellyn. The bastard who took my name.
These two, these are my opponents. They need to die. I need to kill the elf before he can use my name against me, and then I need to kill the necromancer before she can find some way to extract my name from the Huntsman’s corpse.
The Red Queen would have no difficulty with the dragon’s icy prison, so it’s her strength I borrow to shatter my bonds. I run, attention locked on the pair of monsters before me, stealing speed and agility as well.
“Ah,” Eirdryd sighs. “See how she’s grown? It would be a waste not to add her to my collection.”
A hundred insectoid horrors rise from the shadows cast by wreckage and surge toward the elf in a wave of gnashing teeth and writhing limbs. Vorpal is in the hands of another, but the Intercessor collected many weapons in her travels, so I pull one of those swords from the skein of space and time. A slender blade, black as night and cool to the touch, falls into my grip.
“Keep to the deal,” Urna snaps. “We made you a Noble, now pay your debt.”
A wave of sickly rot bursts half the bugs and green-gold flame chars the other half. They part the horde like it’s effortless for them, like I haven’t grown at all. But I’m almost there. I’m so much more than I ever was, so much more than the girl who sold her name. My power is gathered, I just need to—
“Morgan Mallory, this is a command: kill yourself.”
My body is paralyzed instantly. All I’ve done since that day in the forest, all I’ve bled, and I’m still too fucking weak to stop him. I want to scream, but my lungs and throat aren’t mine anymore. My hand twitches, compelled by the Huntsman’s command, and the blade I summoned begins inching toward my neck.
I can’t die here! I scream inside my mind, the only place I still have full control. Damn that fae! Damn them all!
Willpower alone isn’t enough to halt the command, my sword drawing inexorably closer to killing me. Desperate and afraid, I retreat into Hastur.
Through the deeper layer of vision that I possess in my oversoul, I can see exactly what Eirdryd has done to me. The compulsion clamps down on my lesser soul like an iron spider, like a thousand strands of wire digging into my flesh to halt the electrical impulses from my brain before they reach any of my muscles. I can tell, too, that I underestimated myself; a lesser victim given that command would immediately lose control of their heart and lungs, no need for the crude violence of a blade. Small comfort when I’m still seconds from death.
I can slow the process further, but destroying the compulsion directly feels like another transgression of my role. I can buy time, because the hero always has just enough time to escape the trap, but it still needs to be Alice that escapes, not Hastur.
So I use the time I’ve stolen to wrack three timelines of memories for a solution.
Meanwhile, in the space I’ve stepped away from, the real battle begins. Urna and Eirdryd both unleash their throne worlds, reshaping reality around themselves and dragging everyone into a twisted landscape of warring concepts. Falling snow blankets fields of burning flowers, verdant forest paths winding through lifeless tundra. The dead rise from the ground, a thousand shambling corpses called by their wicked mistress. The Huntsman calls his own servants, wolves of bark and flame that howl with human voices.
Thalia stops chasing the wizard and follows Eirdryd into the depths of his throne world. The zombie splinters join Urna and her horde as the dead surround Mordred and Kiana and grasp at them from below. My body, Alice’s body, is a pocket of stillness in the raging storm, monsters and magic alike pushed aside by the intense wills clashing within and around me. No outside force will be permitted to resolve this conflict.
Okay. Okay, we can do this. I can save myself, I just have to figure out how.
The Red Queen was saved by Cheshire, teleported away before Urna could finish the kill. That won’t work here, since the command to die has already been given. Running won’t do a thing.
The Intercessor escaped her contract by reforging herself. By the time her old name was brought to bear against her, it was no longer true; in this, she had succeeded where her old self had failed, replacing one name with another on a soul-deep level. The cost of that trick is obvious: by the end of her story, the Intercessor was barely Alice. Even setting aside the risk of ego death, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Demiurge responded to a development like that with another reset of the timeline. Every move I make has to be calculated against that outcome.
Learning the true nature of the cycle hasn’t made it sting any less how much of my existence is at the Demiurge’s whim. It’s absurd that I have to play by her rules when she gets to set so much of the stage. Her hands are hardly tied when the whole board is a mirage.
Even the name being used against me isn’t really mine. That name was forced on me, the memories a fabrication. I was never Morgan, I only thought I was Morgan. One great big cluster of lies implanted in me. I took a new name barely an hour into my time in this world, made myself Malice and Maven, but that first moment and those fake memories are somehow still enough to bind me. Fae magic is bullshit, and I just know that bullshit was cultivated just to fuck with Veseryn clones.
If I could only cut away the parts of me still Morgan, the parts still stained by a name I never asked for, then…
…Wait. Maybe the Intercessor’s playbook does work for us. We just have to be clever and careful.
We’re not as clever as we think we are, I warn. That’s the downfall of every Veseryn.
I know that! But if we don’t try something, we lose anyway. And besides, can you think of a more Maven Alice solution than this?
…Do it.
I stay Hastur for long enough to reach into my soul and whisper a message, a hidden command I won’t hear until the appointed time. Then I return to Alice just as the sword reaches my neck. It touches the chain of the heart locket, stalled for a single instant. It presses past and draws blood.
I know the spell to save me. My spell, the core of who I chose to be. The beast of sacrifice that the Demiurge forged me into, but still me. Still Alice. I thought it was gone when Melpomene changed me again, but how could it ever leave me? It’s the Truth of me, the quintessence of what it means to be Maven Alice. My whole life…
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
[Feast or Famine]!
Hungry shadows surge across the blade as it cuts into my neck, the power of the Abyss once more bound to my will and answering my call. The magic takes a bite out of my soul to fuel the spell at the same time as the effect of the spell devours the parts of me connected to that invasive compulsion. I’m being consumed from both sides, swallowed up my own creation, and the pain whites out my vision.
I feed it memories. I feed it every memory I have from before I woke up in the Labyrinth, every memory that Melpomene gave me when she cut me from her flesh.
Years of soul-crushing retail are gone in an instant, fed to the black flame with enthusiasm. Friends and girlfriends go with them, all of them passing, temporary, immaterial. I burn away the town I moved to, the places where I ate, and all the people I met.
I burn the girls I loved, the girls who hurt me. I burn the little joys and pleasures alongside the depths of despair, and my soul feels lighter for it. Love is a lie.
I feed my school years to the hungry dark, all those years of failure and rot. For ten years I learned to hate and suffer and rage against the world, against every disappointment, and the hate kept me moving but now it falls to flame.
I burn the classmates that were never my friends. I burn the grief and anger on my father’s face. I burn the books I lost myself in, the stories I tried to escape to, and with them burns the bitter yearning. Love of reading, too, must be deception.
Deep, deep down inside, there is a memory that forms the core of me, the core of who I was made to be. I remember a scared child, too young to understand what was happening, as she said goodbye to her mother for the very last time and ran away to her room. I remember the ashes, scattered to the wind and sinking beneath the waves.
I burn that day, and the days that followed, and a whole lifetime of sorrow and regret buried beneath feigned indifference. I burn days in church being told these things just happen and we have to accept them. I burn the nights I wish I had died instead. I burn it all.
I burn away every ounce of the girl named Morgan Mallory, until only Alice is left.
The sword is still at my throat, so I move it away slowly and get my bearings. I’m bleeding, but it’s shallow. The bigger concern is the state of my soul; devouring myself has to have left me with less material than I started with, even accounting for the spell’s efficiency.
Yet what are a few gallons to the ocean? A smaller infinity is still infinity, and that’s the power crackling at my fingertips. I am so much more than this insignificant world. More than my sisters, even, for they are all failures and I am blessed with eyes.
The fae’s dirty little trick couldn’t kill me, and now I’m hungry. I’ll replace whatever I lost by snacking on another me, and that wretched Huntsman too.
I scan my surroundings. Thalia has already carved a path through Eirdryd’s minions and is harassing the fae directly, as untouchable as ever. Kiana and Mordred are in worse condition, both wounded and yet to finish off their foes. Most of the lesser dead are back in the ground, but the splinters and Urna are still standing.
I’d love to get my revenge on Eirdryd up close and personal, but I can take out my aggression on his corpse. Urna is the real threat, and this is all her fault to begin with, so I think I’ll enjoy giving her a taste of her own medicine.
And, I muse, it’s time to really put these powers of mine to use.
I pour my authority as the Intercessor into a slash of my sword and cut open a portal leading right to the other Veseryn. I step through the gate and into cold winds, sleet clinging to me with malevolent intent, Urna furious at my arrival.
“Oh great,” she sneers, “the bad copy is back! Fool move getting close to me, but what should I expect from one of Nyara’s little pets?”
She lunges for me and I let her, uncaring if she touches me. Power blooms in my chest and I release it into Urna’s throne world as a cascade of thorny red tendrils that sweep across the field and bury themselves in every corpse, moving or otherwise. This is the Red Queen’s embrace, my everburning hunger, and with a whisper of will I command every tendril to drink.
Urna is like me, another Veseryn taking power she didn’t earn, a thief. But the difference between us, at our cores, is a willingness to sacrifice. I bleed my soul to make it stronger. Urna, though? She’s just a filthy graverobber.
My embrace devours a hundred souls she’s trapped inside herself, using them for fuel and bodies but unable to incorporate them like I can. Unable to trap them like I’m certain she’s trapped her own soul, with the way she’s twice now tried to make contact with someone she believes can eat souls through touch. Prevara’s gifts won’t save you, little sister.
The horde crumbles as Urna reaches me. Her grasp is necrosis, pure withering intent, but my body is not and has never been real. I let the flesh she touches slough off and disintegrate, not even attempting to reach back through the momentary connection. I continue feeding on her undead minions, drinking in their essence and using it to repair the physical damage to my avatar. If she tries to match me here, she’ll lose.
To my displeasure, she’s smart enough to realize that. The necromancer dismisses her remaining servants with a snap of bony fingers, banishing the flood of zombies to deny me any more food. That leaves Kiana and Mordred free to focus on their doppelgangers, and I get to kill Urna with my own two hands. Delightful.
This Veseryn hates me. It pours off her like a thick malaise. Her perfect teeth grind into each other, her plump lips pulled back in a snarl on the half of her face with intact skin. Her back is still straight as a rod, her chin upturned in arrogant disgust, but it’s a mask; inside I bet she’s seething that I didn’t take the bait and try to eat her.
“Why couldn’t you just lie down and starve?” Urna hisses at me. “Why wouldn’t you die, you brat?”
I laugh. “What, like you did? Sorry, doll, but I’m not so weak. I’m not broken like you are.”
“I’m going to rip your chest open and fuck the gaping wound,” she promises.
Then it’s back to the violence.
Urna flings spears of ice from the winter storm, I deflect them with stolen instincts and a very nice sword. I conjure bugs and bats and wolves, she rots them all to dust. She starts an incantation, I stab her throat.
Through a second set of perceptions I monitor the other conflicts happening around me. Thalia and Eirdryd have passed out of my sight, tumbling through the faerie’s soul, but Mordred and Kiana are still visible. The princess brings a falling star down on the wizard, who I expect to survive, while Mordred takes a hit from her double and sends it back tenfold with her mirroring spell. Burnt armor cracks and the zombie Mordred stumbles, brought to one knee by the force of the retaliation.
“You’re pathetic,” I taunt the necromancer as her hands leap to my blade and try to push it out of her throat. “Just another failed Veseryn. Did you even try to rise above our fate? Did you ever make more than a token attempt to escape your end? Just another gobbet of ruined flesh. You’re weak, Urna.”
Urna abruptly stops pushing the blade and instead pulls. The sudden switch catches me off guard and I stumble into her, and then we’re both falling through starlight and memory.
A girl skitters around a painted circle, book in hand and eyes alight with hunger. Cold light rises from scattered bones and a still-beating heart, coalescing in an orb of arcane frost. The girl snatches the orb and pops it in her mouth, swallowing with gusto, and once-brown eyes flare an icy blue.
The girl steps into a stone chamber, now hooded and ethereal. In the center of the chamber is a brazier of black metal and burning coal, the flames an unnatural blue. Into the fire she casts a slip of paper with two words written cleanly: Morgan Mallory.
The girl, the Veseryn, steps into another chamber and another time. Her dark robes have gained silver embroidery, one hand now gripping a black staff of rotting wood. She takes a ring of bone from her pocket, the trinket inscribed with arcane runes, and tucks it away in a hole in the wall that seals itself with a whisper.
The scene changes again, and this time I see a war. Thousands of risen dead march across a vast plain toward a tower of black glass. Urna, now draped in furs and reclining on a throne being carried by bulky zombies, challenges the master of the Labyrinth. Skeletal footsoldiers are joined by ossified siege behemoths and a trio of undead dragons.
A golden-haired woman stands atop the walls of Fata Morgana. I know this woman: Irma, mother of Reska, taken by Prevara to use as a puppet. Prevara raises Irma’s arm, hand outstretched. She’s wearing a ring of bone.
I crash out of Urna’s memories alongside her, the two of us crumpling in twin heaps on a cold stone floor. My sword is still stuck in her throat, but she dislodges it as I stumble to my feet and gather power for another round. She laughs, the sound coarse and strangled as her throat slowly restores itself.
“Now,” she rasps, “let’s see who lasts longer.”
I catch a glimpse of something moving above us—golden eyes and golden hair, the sparkle of light on a shard of glass—and then everything is torture.
My skin shivers and curls and curdles, this itchy scratchy paper that needs to come off, it sticks to me and I can’t help but feel every inch, every pore, every point where it connects to the flesh beneath. My fingers prickle at the tips and along the lengths, needing to be torn, needing to peel away so I can be free. Two fingers brush against each other and I nearly vomit at the horrible sensation.
My tongue feels like a slug, slimy and wet and wriggling. It wants to crawl down my throat and I need to spit it out but it’s stuck to me. There’s another texture, almost moldy, a thin layer of fuzz starting to coat the insides of my cheeks and over my teeth. My flaking lips split open and pus oozes out, sickly fluid dribbling down my chin.
The glass shard flashes and my body is normal again. I shudder, sent back to the floor by the sudden and overwhelming sensations that flooded my mind. Psychic assault, but what—
The shard flashes again and this time my focus wrenches away from my own body and toward Urna’s. I feel hungry, but it’s a hunger full of heat that keeps my attention lingering on the lines of her curves, that flesh so supple I want to reach out and squeeze it, the shine of her lips and eyes, everything about her begging to be touched. I want to rip her open and taste the spurting blood while its’s hot and rich. There’s a need inside me, deep and molten, narrowing my existence to two bodies that could be joining in glorious violence. Even those skinless and rotting parts of her have a certain appeal, the sheen of bone and the whorls of decay like a painted tapestry of the world’s most beautiful woman.
I crawl toward her, shivering and gasping, and the contempt on her face drives me wild. She’s shivering too, but she keeps her back straight and her hands still, just watching me approach. There’s hate in her eyes and desire in the way she bites her lip, and I need to get my teeth on her face.
I’m inches from touching her when the shard flashes and everything about her body disgusts me. I fall away and the floor is grime and filth like sandpaper on my brainstem, it’s a luxurious bath and I could stretch here for centuries, my stomach churns with bile, my brain boils with heat and need.
Caught between shifting extremes, I writhe on the floor. Urna, shuddering but somehow lucid, stumbles to my side and looms over me.
“This is how it broke me,” she hisses, voice tight with pain and eyes wild with hunger and hatred. Desire. Disgust. “We’re made to be broken. To suffer.”
The contrasting sensations flood my body and mind in neverending waves. It’s almost impossible to think through the relentless sequence of turning emotions. Almost. In flashes of self-control I scrabble blindly through the levers of my soul, looking for my salvation.
“Be proud, you damn copy,” Urna sneers at me. One hand slips under my shirt and gropes me, the sensation cycling rapidly between a revolting sense of violation and overwhelming pleasure. “You’re the only splinter I’ve ever had to use this on.”
My will grasps what I’ve been looking for.
[Feast or Famine]!
My signature spell flares to life again and devours the overwhelming influence of Urna’s curse. Pleasure vanishes into pain, desire and disgust subsumed by a far more visceral and all-consuming hunger. Surprise flashes across Urna’s face as I call another of the Intercessor’s swords to hand and plunge it into her filthy grasping arm.
She tears the arm off to get away from me, backing against a wall of the shadowed chamber and staring at me in horror. The crystal flashes, again and again and again, but every new wave of sensory compulsion is devoured by my magic running on loop in the background. The pain is immense, but pain is an old friend.
“You think I’m like those girls,” I say, panting from the effort of standing while my soul rips itself apart over and over again. “And I am. But I’m better. I’m—I’m what Veseryn could be. Should be. You settled. Let petty hungers s-swallow that b-beautiful ambition. I am the god of the knife. I fall and I rise. I burn and I bloom. I will annihilate myself to forge anew whatever you try to break. And I’ll never stop.”
I take the surging hunger of my magic, the Abyssal truth of me, and I pour it through every ounce of my being. Every drop of blood, every pound of flesh, every jittering neuron. And then I spread it further, out through the shadow I cast and my presence in the world, from skin to air and from air to everything. I stain the world, ink in water, and everything goes red.
The Red Queen devours the heart of Urna’s throne world. I crunch the glass shard in jaws of shadow and blood, and then I eat the necromancer.
Her soul is sinfully sweet.
I return to Fata Morgana with tendrils of Abyssal hunger still swirling around me, a vortex of blood and shadow and teeth. It’s hard to tell where I stop and the darkness starts, but, ah, what was it Reska said? I am the dark, and the dark is me. I was always a monster.
What a lovely sentiment. Being a monster certainly feels better than whatever I was before. I feel powerful, and what else could a Veseryn ask for?
Mordred and Kiana are still playing with their food. The wizard is dead, hacked into pieces and laying in a blood of her own ichor, but the noisy brute is still swinging around that big lump of iron. It’s cute, but I’ve had enough of this.
I reach out with one of my limbs to devour the wizard’s corpse, trusting her tortured soul to still be lingering by the body. With six more of my hands I wrap around the death knight and pull her into me. She resists, of course, but her mistress is gone and I am so, so, so much more. I swallow her whole with barely a hiccup.
The other splinters aren’t quite as sweet as dear Urna, but they’re still very satisfying snacks. There’s something more real about a splinter, something deliciously filling about eating food that isn’t illusory. Even precious Lena can’t compare: the taste of her neck is a fond memory, but she was barely a potato chip next to my feast of selves.
I want more. It’s so indulgent to suggest after gulping down three other Alices, but I’m still hungry. Urna was a scrumptious meal, but those other two were morsels. I’m not full yet.
More prey catches my eye, gathering themselves and moving toward me with a clear sense of caution. I recognize them. They’re mine. The princess and the warrior, my sisters and creations. My little gobbets of flesh. They shout something at me, or one of them does, but I’m not listening.
What would my gobbets taste like? I wonder. Kiana and Mordred, the two I made, would they taste like truer splinters? Are they true enough, planted by the Demiurge and given form by my flesh? I need to find out. I need to eat. I made them, so it’s only fair that I devour them.
Something else moves into my range and I curl away from it in fear. It’s the predator, the elder sister. The bigger monster. I’m not strong enough to eat her yet, though I yearn for it desperately. If I devoured her, if I tasted her essence and made it mine, if I had my way with that perfect, beautiful heart… maybe, just maybe, I could eat the Demiurge next.
The predator throws something at me and I catch it with a tendril. It’s a body, but not the body of one of us. Summer, fae-thing, enemy. I devour the one who took my name. But, if he’s dead—
Now.
My hand—my flesh hand—moves against my will and darts to the chain around my neck. The locket. The anatomical heart. The artifact. I try to stop myself, but there are strings pulled tight around my wrist, red strings from a crimson cloak. No, no, no! I don’t want to go back to being that girl! I’m perfect like this! This is what I’m meant to be!
The strings move my mouth, strum my throat, and speak the words: “[My Heart].”
A lifetime of memories slam back into my mind, along with all the pieces of myself I’ve cut away since making that artifact that moment in the maze, helped by the Beast. Why did it help me? Why did it give me this tool? Was it acting on the command of Katoptris or Prevara, or did Melpomene meddle to bring this about? Was this always meant to happen, or was the locket seeded for one of the timelines that the Demiurge abandoned?
I fall to my knees and throw up on the ground, but I don’t understand why. And then I do, and more sick spills out of me.
I remember the girl who woke up in the schoolhouse, lonely and afraid. I remember everything that made her that person, all the days that never were. I remember all the pieces of myself I fed to my ambition, every soft edge that needed to be sharpened. I remember the pain of loss, of cutting away pieces of myself over and over again because the ends are worth the means and I cannot abide my failure. I remember my own blood dripping from my fingers.
Is this what she would feel, if we gave her back every splinter?
Why do we both keep destroying ourselves?
A hand touches my shoulder. Arms pull me to my feet. Thalia is there beside me, watching me with those burning eyes. Smiling, knife still in hand, still dressed for the altar and her unholy matrimony with the pitiful monster that made me like this.
“All good?” she asks. There’s no sympathy in the question.
I clear my throat and force calm. “All good,” I affirm. “Let’s keep moving.”
“Great! To Katoptris we go! I bet Prevara’s next, and I’m itching to settle that score.” Thalia giggles and prances away, skipping toward the glass tower.
Kiana looks at me with worry. “Are you actually good, Alice? That looked… unpleasant.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I turn away from her and start walking after Thalia. “We don’t have time for anything else.”
“The work,” Mordred mutters, “always the work.”
I hear her follow, and a moment later so does Kiana, and our journey goes on beneath a shattering sky.
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