Rita jumped when she felt a tugging at her backpack.

“What are you doing?” she asked Alice.

“Another hunch. I don’t know how this is going to turn out, and maybe this does nothing, but it doesn’t cost me anything to try,” she replied as she zipped it closed. “There. Ready to go.”

“Go? You mean up there?”

“We want to go home, don’t we?” Alice asked over her shoulder.

Rita swallowed nervously but followed behind Alice as she made her way along the branch to the central platform, feet ticking along the wood-slash-bone structure.

She was not keen on getting closer to the pile of slithering appendages waiting for them in the centre, but Alice was right. They had already done the hard part and beaten their Guardian, all they had to do was go collect their reward. Would be a total waste to chicken out now. Besides, the Tree was strange and alien, but also rather sedentary. Apart from potentially the pile of writhing tentacles in the middle, nothing really seemed specifically dangerous here.

Well, for all she knew, it could turn the air into toxic vapour in an instant or retract the platform, dropping them into a bottomless abyss, but she firmly suppressed those thoughts. Dwelling on the morbid possibilities was going to achieve nothing but scare herself.

The eyes in the walls stared at them as they made their way across the branch, slowly swivelling in their… sockets? They looked somewhat like human eyes, with white on the outside and a greenish-brown iris and a pupil in the middle, but both were irregularly shaped. The pupil was a lopsided oval with the iris a band of varying width around it.

Something about its stare made her shudder in revulsion.

They finally made it to the middle platform and stood before the pulsing orb. The pile of greyish-green tentacles supporting it had gone still as they approached, but Rita was not sure whether that was good news or bad news.

When it spoke again, the voice still seemed to come from everywhere, but it had dialled the volume down a bit to a more conversational level. Even the nails-scratching-blackboard quality of it had been reduced, making its words clearer and a little easier to understand, though not much.

“Y̵o̷u̸ ̶h̵a̶v̸e̷ ̵c̴o̸m̷e̵.”

They stood in silence, eagerly waiting for it to deliver on what it had promised. Unknowable knowledge from an alien mind, granted to supplicants that had successfully defeated the trials it had set for them.

Rita’s stomach was twisting itself in knots from the tension as the silence stretched.

“Y̸o̷u̴ ̶a̷r̵e̸ ̶h̵o̷m̵e̵,” it finally said.

Her heart sank as the realization hit. It was going to fucking monkey-paw them, referring to the old story of the monkey’s paw that granted twisted versions of people’s wishes. And it was not even particularly subtle about it.

“Bullshit!” Alice exclaimed, pointing her spear at the pulsing orb. “You know what we meant! This might be your home but it sure as hell ain’t ours!”

“Y̸o̷u̴ ̶a̷r̵e̸ ̶h̵o̷m̵e̵,” the tree repeated.

“Im sorry, Mr Tree, but I have to agree with Alice here. I’m pretty sure you know very well what our home is and where we came from and we would really like to go back,” Rita stammered out. “If you don’t know or can’t help us, then okay, but please say so.”

There was silence as the tree seemed to digest her words. Then one of the tentacles whipped out from the mass towards the two arachne, startling them into taking a step backwards as it rose up, its tip hovering in front of Rita’s face.

“Y̶o̵u̵ ̶a̷r̸e̸ ̴w̶r̸o̷n̸g̴.”

Then the tip split open. Expecting teeth, Rita was surprised to see it was instead filled with nothing more sinister than long fibrous threads, which also spread open. Further and further it stretched, until it formed a large circle, hovering in front of them.

Then… some sort of disturbance in the air formed in the middle of the circle. A thin film that hovered between the spread-out tips of the fibres, barely touching them. It looked like a vertical pool of water, rippling under some form of invisible outside influence.

At first it appeared to be just random, but like a strange, biological television screen it cleared to reveal a scene.

“T̶h̴i̵s̴ ̶i̵s̸ ̵n̵o̶w̸.”

It was… her. Human her. Sitting at that little café on the corner she liked, in a world that looked shockingly normal. No sign of rot, or cracked walls, or inhuman monsters. Just… crowds of normal, ordinary people in the background.

She was sipping what appeared to be a coffee and laughing at a man sitting next to her. It was her face, her mannerisms, she even recognized her clothes! But the man… she had never seen him before in her life. He was attractive, though. Definitely the type she could see herself falling for and judging by the way TV-Rita casually rested her hand on his arm, he was her type too.

“What are you showing us? I don’t understand,” Rita asked, confused.

It did not make sense. Rita was certain… almost certain that she had no memory of this event. She had sat in that café many times, but usually alone. Certainly, never with a guy as cute as this. She could not help but feel a momentary pang of jealousy towards TV-Rita. She got to flirt and sip lattes while Rita herself, the real Rita, was wading through figurative hell.

She would literally kill for a latte, right about now.

“T̶h̴i̵s̴ ̶i̵s̸ ̵n̵o̶w̸,” the Tree repeated.

“Oh!” Alice piped up. “I think what it’s saying is that this is a live feed. Right now, you are sitting in our favourite café, staring dreamily into the eyes of a hunk of scrumptious manflesh.”

“No? I’m right here. What are you talking about? Are you saying that this is… some kind of dream? Some kind of nightmare?” Rita asked.

Alice shrugged. “I… I don’t know. I mean, there’s two of us, maybe there’s a third? A part that stayed behind and kept up your life or… I have no idea…” she trailed off.

Rita had been so set on finding a way back, she had not even considered what was going to be there waiting for her if she made it. Had she just disappeared? How much time had passed? Had she been reported a missing person? But if this was a live feed, then it appeared her life had just been going on without her just fine.

“I don’t understand! What’s going on? How can I be here and there at the same time? And who is that person that’s living my life?” Rita demanded.

“Y̶o̵u̵ ̶a̷r̸e̸ ̴w̶r̸o̷n̸g̴.” The tendril closed, cutting off the feed, and withdrew back into the mass. “S̴h̴e̶ ̴i̵s̶ ̶r̶e̶a̸l̴. Y̸o̸u̵ ̵a̶r̸e̸ ̴n̷o̷t̸.”

Rita stared at the pulsing orb in shock. She was… not real? But…

“What am I then?” she asked softly.

“A̴ ̵b̵r̸o̷k̵e̴n̸ ̸c̶o̴p̴y̶.”

Spikes of pain assaulted Rita’s mind as broken, shattered memories that were only partly her own fused back together.

Ethereal tendrils reaching out towards her as she slept in her own bed, gently touching her mind. Bits and pieces drawn out… no, copied out and flung into an infinite void.

Being nothing. Being nobody. Pieces of a person, spiralling out into nothingness… but it was familiar. She had been through something like this before.

Slowly, she began pulling herself back together. Just like the last time.

Then… something grabbed the pieces and just mashed them together in whatever way they somewhat fit. But it was wrong. It was wrong in a way that hurt on a level that could be felt without pain receptors.

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It hurt so badly.

A shoddy, broken mess that had to repair herself all over again, to somehow try and build something functional out of the jumbled pieces of a person that had been forcibly rammed together.

Pain, every step of the way, but with no way to scream or cry out. Just the constant, unending agony of tearing out pieces of yourself because it hurt less with them out than to leave them in.

At the end, just as the pain started to recede and something that could again be called a ‘person’ started to take shape, realizing all the removed pieces had to go somewhere, but she could find no way to fit.

The second lump, even more tattered and jagged than the first, formed out of the leftovers haphazardly stuck to her with the spiritual equivalent of duct tape. It too, hurt, but there was nothing that can be done for it. No more changes that could be made without making things worse.

The only way to make the pain stop was to shut her mind to it and all the memories that formed a part of it. At the same time suppressing it and letting it unravel into little, tiny pieces that could not hurt anymore.

And then opening bleary eyes in a world gone to hell, soaked and weak on her bed.

“Rita? Rita are you okay?”

She had collapsed into a sitting position, legs splayed around her. Alice was hovering in front her face, looking worried. Behind her, the tendrils writhed under the pulsing orb.

“Yeah… I just remembered some stuff…” she mumbled, still shivering as the memories rampaged through her mind.

Somehow, even the memories of that shattered time hurt, like she was being torn to pieces all over again.

“Y̵o̵u̴ ̷a̸r̶e̴ ̶b̴r̷o̵k̶e̵n̷,” the Tree said, its unnatural voice echoing through the air around her and sending shivers down her spine. “̸B̷u̴t̸ ̴I̷ ̶r̸e̶p̵a̷i̴r̵.”

Rita watched in horror as three thick tentacles wrapped themselves around Alice’s middle, thorax and legs and yanked her away, lifting her up in the air.

Alice screamed, furiously struggling and kicking with her free legs, trying to squirm out of their grip.

“Alice!” Rita shouted, struggling to her feet and ignoring her throbbing headache. “What are you going to do to her?”

“E̸x̵c̷i̴s̸e̷ ̶t̵h̴e̷ ̸c̵a̷n̷c̷e̶r̵,” the Tree intoned, yanking the spear that Alice had been trying to angle to stab it with out of her hands with another tendril, dropping it dismissively onto its wood-slash-bone platform with a dull clang.

“I am not okay with this!” Alice screamed. “I do not give permission for medical treatment!”

Another tendril arced up and Rita saw something shimmer at the tip. A blade, seemingly made out of nothing, yet still somehow catching a light that wasn’t there.

Then it clicked. The extra bundle of personhood she had stuck to herself like a cancerous growth. Beyond all expectation it had somehow also managed to form a person.

Alice.

“No!” Rita shouted as the blade wielding tendril slashed down. It seemed to pass through the tentacles holding Alice aloft without harming them but slashed a deep gouge all the way down her back.

Alice screamed in pain.

“Let her go! She’s not cancer! She’s me!” Rita shouted.

“E̸x̵c̷i̴s̸e̷ ̶t̵h̴e̷ ̸c̵a̷n̷c̷e̶r̵,” the Tree repeated as its bladed tendril kept slashing down, again and again, to tear great gashes in Alice’s body.

With every slash there seemed to be just a little less of Alice there. As if they did not just sever flesh, but actually disintegrated it. Rita could see muscles and bone through the open wounds, with not a drop of blood leaking out. They seemed unnatural, and something about them seemed like really, really bad news.

She had to do something.

Her eyes fell on the spear that had been wrenched out of Alice’s grasp and she scooped it up without a second thought. She lifted it, aiming the point at the pulsing orb. With most its tentacles busy holding Alice, only a narrow pillar of writhing things held it aloft. It was vulnerable.

She remembered those tentacles. They were the ones that had stolen into her mind while she slept; that had crudely crunched her together as she had been delicately trying to reassemble herself.

No shit she was broken. The Tree was the one that had broken her!

“Let her go!” she screamed as she charged forward, thrusting the spear into the bulbous mass of the orb.

The tip pierced into its outer, fleshy layer, but the only noticeable result was that her spear got stuck.

“̵C̴e̸a̷s̵e̵ ̶y̴o̶u̶r̸ ̸r̵e̸s̸i̸s̷t̶a̷n̸c̷e̵,” the Tree droned as she tried to yank the spear free for another stab, a hint of annoyance creeping into its eerie voice.

Alice was not doing well. Several bloodless tears had been ripped in her body, and her struggles were weakening. Even her screams of pain were turning more into whimpers as the bladed tentacle kept slashing at her, over and over.

Fuck. The tree was massive, some kind of monstrous, god-like being capable of reaching across dimensions to pluck at the minds of unwilling sleepers, of course her piddly little spear was not going to do shit to it.

She felt… helpless.

“Run… leave me…” Alice whimpered, now just hanging there, jerking every time the blade came down to carve off another piece. “Save yourself…”

No.

Fuck that.

She was done running. She was done fleeing. She was done being treated like the mildly irritating property of a god-tree.

And she was done being useless.

Instead of running away, of fleeing like she had been doing since the moment she had arrived in this horrible nightmare, she rushed forward, scrambling up the side of the pillar of writhing tentacles holding up the pulsing orb. Tendrils grabbed at her body, at her legs, trying to pull her off, but she took a firm hold of the spear shaft still stuck in its side and forcibly dragged herself up, straining against its grip until she had managed to bring her head up to the orb.

Her teeth unfolded and extended outwards. It wanted to make her a monster?

Then that was what she would be.

“̵C̴e̸a̷s̵e̵ ̶y̴o̶u̶r̸…”

Her teeth sunk into the fleshy mass of the orb and the tree screamed, a high pitched, warbling sound that made the very air vibrate and sent a pulse rippling outwards from the orb.

Fizziness exploded into her mouth, so much that it overwhelmed and numbed her senses. It was like biting into an ocean of abstract flavours, all rushing into her brain faster than she could process them. So much of it, it threatened to overwhelm her very sense of self.

And then it was gone. Rita just barely registered the feeling of flying through the air before she hit the ground in a boneless heap.

The Tree had yanked her off itself with every tentacle it had and flung her away.

Alice lay on the ground exactly where it had dropped her in its rush, still and motionless, jagged rents in her body. Despite not a single drop of blood flowing out, none of the wounds looked clean or neat. Something about them just seemed… ugly.

The pulsing orb on the other hand was streaming a steady flow of glowing grey goop from where she had bitten it. It ran down its side, dripping down the tentacles holding it up and pooling on the ground, glinting in rainbow highlights.

The Tree screeched, no longer bothering with words. Tentacles reached out towards her to rend her limb from limb in its fury.

Rita felt very, very full. Too full. Ready to burst. A mosquito that had somehow bitten into a jugular. She was filled with power she had no business trying to contain, that was dangerous to hold onto. She had to let some of it out before it killed her, and she knew the perfect target.

She poured every bit of excess… stuff sloshing around inside her into a single word.

“S̵̛̥̪̎̋͛Ṯ̷̟̝̀̿̍O̶̧̧̺̺͐̎̃͝P̷͈̗̔̅͜”

A blast of white light surged outwards from her and everything it touched crumbled into nothingness.

----------------------------------------

Gora was spent.

It was not just that Nezzerorth – she had decided she refused to think of him as her father – was slowly getting the advantage of her. That ship had sailed. By now he could have killed her a dozen times and each time he either pulled his strike to only cause a minor injury or stepped back and mocked her while she recovered.

It was infuriating and humiliating.

“Come now, no blood of mine gives in that easily. I would never be able to face the others of my kind in shame. Get up and fight,” he taunted her again as he towered over her fallen form.

Gora gritted her teeth and rolled over before slowly struggling to her feet. Blood trickled down her limbs in rivulets from wounds that were not regenerating properly anymore, her body at the edge of collapse. Her arms and legs felt like lead. She was so tired.

“Come on, you weakling! I’ve fucked Succubi with more killing intent than you!”

And each time she thought that she could not go any further, Nezzerorth opened his damn mouth and poured some more fuel into her guttering inner fire, pushing her just that little bit further, renewing her determination to either kill the bastard or die trying.

“Yes! Pick up your sword! Ready? Here I come!”

He swung in a wide arc, not even bothering with defence, just hammering at her with his oversized blade. Gora blocked, feeling the wash of malice from the blow wash over her and aggravate her injuries, but she tamped down the pain and counterattacked, getting inside his guard and trying to slice across his undefended chest.

His fist caught her in the solar plexus, knocking the air from her lungs and sending her staggering backwards, gasping for breath.

“Aha! I knew you could do it! Look!”

He was grinning as he pointed to where dark red blood was pouring from a deep slash across his chest, the wound already starting to close. Her blade had struck true after all. It just had not done much.

Fuck! No injury stuck! How was she supposed to hurt him if he just healed everything?

“Every time I think that you’re grown boring, you go just a little bit further. You really make a father proud, you know that?” he said, a wide, happy grin on his face.

“Fuck you, I don’t owe you shit,” Gora wheezed, still struggling to properly breathe again. “You’re not my father. You’re just the monster who raped my mother.”

She didn’t know exactly how she had expected him to react to that. Possibly laughter, possibly killing her on the spot.

What she had not expected, was for the elder demon to look like he had been slapped.

“W… what? Is that what that witch told you?” he asked, shocked and seemingly off-balance for the first time since he had crawled out of the portal.

“You can drop the act, you’re going to kill me anyway,” Gora replied simply.

Whatever game he was playing, she was too tired and hurt to indulge him.

Nezzerorth’s face turned to anger. “If I had had a single moment of freedom, do you think I would have stopped to sate my carnal desires instead of just ripping your mother’s head from her body? Do not be obtuse! She was the one who…”

Whatever he was going to say was blown away by a pulse of force that rippled across their arena, knocking Gora off her feet and even forcing Nezzerorth to slam his blade into the ground to hold his balance.

Her father looked off to the side where a rapidly growing bright white light was visible even through the mists. Accompanying it was a screaming sound that was rapidly growing in strength, like tortured metal being ripped apart.

“No! I’m not finished yet!” he shouted above the noise.

He pulled out his blade and rushed Gora, moving faster than he’d moved up to that point, and, before she had a chance to even figure out what had just happened, rammed his sword through her chest, the blade impaling her into the ground.

She stared up at him, his face strangely calm, as the light turned blindingly white and the world blew away like sand in a hurricane.