“And what did you do with Mary?” asked Fox.

  “Immediately accuses of something,” Belyana giggled. “Zemlyana is busy adapting her to the world, which is not surprising - the girl spent too long in this state.”

  “I’m more concerned about something else,” Karina said thoughtfully. “Shouldn't there be demons too, if there were so many angels?”

  “I finished them all,” as if it was about something ordinary, Belyana answered. “So they shouldn't.”

  “Yeeah,” Fox jumped into.

  “What, ‘yeah’? One of them wanted to live, so all the others were fed to him. Are they dead? Dead.”

  “Yeeah. No difference at all, exactly the same. Just think, somewhere a monster is still alive, who ate a hell knows how much evil spirits - everyday life, as it is.

  “It's totally harmless.”

  “If my memory doesn’t fail me, and it doesn’t, you also claimed that Mary, as long as she has no consciousness, is also harmless. The one who blew up the mythical monster, as if scratching her ass.”

  “But no,” Belyana laughed. “I said that she can only scare fairies, which the Firebird, technically, was. If the same Morevna had punched the barrier, we would have had soup from Karina. So, given that in the end it was the Zemlyana who had to defend her, you lost again, so it’s not up to you to argue what is safe and what is not.”

  Instead of answering, Fox whistled as she looked around the town they had come to. On each building, sometimes entire families, corpses hung in loops, obviously not very fresh. Karina blinked. The corpses disappeared, and with them some of the buildings, while the rest somehow subtly changed.

  “Uh ...” Karina drawled and looked at Belyana. “Whatever, you still wouldn’t tell.”

  Belyana imperceptibly chuckled.

  The current streets were quite busy, however, the entire population moved in wheelchairs, since everyone was legless. Suddenly, someone unsuccessfully turned and fell out. The same thing, already deliberately, was repeated by absolutely everyone who saw it.

  “Whoa,” Fox wondered. “And if I piss on someone’s face, all the others will also ask?”

  “Take it and check it,” Belyana shrugged.

  “Hey!” Karina shouted at them, not appreciating the joke, but did not have time to continue, as she found herself in the dark.

  A moment later, she saw in front of her a small tower with a door, standing in the middle of an endless field.

  “Something new,” she said. “Belyana?”

  But there was no answer, except that an annoying red line from heaven to earth appeared right in front of Karina's face. Surprisingly, no matter how Karina turned her head, the line remained right in the center of her vision, not moving even a little, so she decided to just ignore it.

  She entered the door of the tower, and a huge assembly hall appeared before her eyes. In absolute silence, a little girl danced on the stage. At first glance, it might have seemed that she was also naked, but either an unfortunate choice, or such was the idea - in fact, she was wearing a flesh-colored gymnastic leotard. There was only one spectator in the hall - a shadow sat on the front row, more like a bowling pin than a human.

  The dance was not very long. As soon as the girl, with her last movement, bowed, the shadow disappeared, and the world was torn apart.

  Space had become a universe of mirrored shards, each reflecting something, but none of it seemed to exist or even be described. Only in the shard that Karina herself was standing on, there was something like a green sky with black clouds, so she just let it pull her inside.

  The sky really turned out to be green, and the ground was covered with bluish grass. A little further away stood a building very similar in its view to the Colosseum. However, behind its walls was only a round field, fenced with a simple rope fence.

  Here, Karina's eyes were presented with an absolutely amazing performance.

  A fly flew into the elephant's trunk a couple of times, flying out through the ass, from which animal’s eyes rolled in pleasure. On the third time, it stuck its trunk into its anus, as soon as a fly flew into it, clearly illustrating an old anecdote.

  The bear and the hare were giggling after the bear hit the bandaged wolf on the head with two manholes.

  A contented fox was sitting at a kind of table, with a fork and a knife in its paws, chopping off a piece from a kolobok. Opposite, for company, a frog sat, croaking softly, and in the end, the fox handed a small piece to it, and it immediately grabbed piece with its tongue, somehow even managing to smile.

  At the sound of a gong, a wooden house crawled out of the ground, and the whole company of animals immediately rushed inside. A fly, then a frog, then a hare, a fox, a wolf. And on this, the place inside not only ended, but the house even crackled. The elephant somehow did not care at all about what was happening, it was just snoring, but the bear very carefully tried to climb in, although others tried to dissuade it with shouts and even swearing. In the end, the bear gave up and just climbed onto the roof. And the building, having sustained its weight for several seconds, eventually collapsed with a crash.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  There was a screeching laugh, more like a cough. It turned out that this sick show also had one viewer - the same shadow standing right by the fence.

  This world also exploded into fragments.

  The room she found herself in was made up of plumbing pipes, but the dim lighting made them look more like intestines intertwined, if only very thick. A shadow sat on the floor, and in the middle of the room a giant cockroach stood on two legs, importantly moving its thin antennae. The cockroach cleared its throat in a thin voice, about to speak, and Karina settled comfortably on the floor, not in a hurry anywhere.

  “There was one beetle in the world. I must say, it was lucky with its parents too - they turned out to be wealthy and caring. The best teachers were engaged in its education, all its undertakings were supported, and the reasons for its mistakes were clearly explained to it, so that it never got upset, always realizing that everything was only in its hands - neither a higher power, nor whatever else, its life did not ruled.

  It grew and grew, and at some point, of course, grown up. It converted the accumulated knowledge and experience into its own business, which brings it a good income. However, it did not stop there, expanding its business further and further, covering almost the entire planet. Not that it wanted to make the world a better place, nor that it cared about this world - all that really interested it was its own well-being.

  At some point, its wealth became such that even if it threw money out of the window in bags for full days, they would not end until its death in extreme old age. And it thought: ‘What am I doing? Do I live at all? Maybe I sho–”

  Yes, that's when the thought broke off. Everything was in its hands, but not the moment when everything ends.” And with a bow of a cockroach, after the disappearance of the shadow, this room also crumbled.

  But before Karina had time to orient herself, a bright light blinded her. When her eyes adjusted a little, she found herself in a very strange place, furnished with no less strange huge furniture.

  “Mama!” a deafening voice rang out, from which everything around vibrated, after which it was replaced by an approaching roar.

  Karina turned around, and a giant baby was already crawling towards her, quite to match the furniture.

  “Play!” the source of the voice, oddly enough, was the child.

  “Well, close your eyes,” said Karina, and added quietly under her breath, “well, hell with it.”

  As soon as gullible child obeyed, she closed her eyes too, allowing the darkness to drag her even deeper.

  “Well, fine,” said Karina, being in place. “You dragged me into your very core. Not that it changes anything, but why?”

  In the middle of the dense nothingness, on countless threads, hung a transparent likeness of a ball covered with transparent hairs. In the middle sat a luminous human of indeterminate sex, with eyes that can best be described as absolute nothingness. They were not even black, in this sense, rather, space itself did not exist in their place - that is, their presence was somehow felt, but none of the methods allowed them to be seen.

  “Loneliness ...” this silhouette did not have a mouth, so it was rather Karina's brain itself that interpreted the flow of feelings with which they communicated. “Why?”

  “How should I know?” she rightly asked. “You drew a whole crowd into your domain. I think this is the last thing you should feel.”

  “There is not anyone. There is nothing. N snds. N vsn. Nflngs. Mptnss. Threads–”

  A black shadow appeared right in front of them, immediately piercing them, either with a hand, or with something that looked like it, in the stomach, interrupting this nonsense. The transparent ball burst like a soap bubble, and the luminous human crumbled into small sparkling beads, scattering in all possible directions.

  “Well, this is something quite strange. If you hear me there, then I'm ou–”

  One bead suddenly hooked her, and she was immediately thrown into some kind of space, consisting of stretched ribbons, penetrating everything around, including her. She felt rather than saw how something began to unravel on ribbons her too, piece by piece, as if loosening clothes. This, however, seemed to her terribly pleasant, so that she did not even try to resist. But even before she was completely unraveled, a squeak broke the total silence. Karina listened.

  “The last chance,” it turned out to be Belyana's voice so far away that even in order to make out the meaning of the words, one had to select by ear the ones suitable for the length and tone. “Grab the red thread.”

  Karina wanted to swear about the absence of such, even without having a face to do it, but after thinking for a second, she realized what was being said. And she touched the red line that had followed her from the beginning.

  It was not that much of a jerk - rather, a blow to the ground when falling from a skyscraper, or if the rocket from the ground did not accelerate, but immediately started at full speed. The line dragged her roughly and quickly through the tape universe, speeding up and speeding up.

  For a second, a black-and-white world flashed before Karina's eyes and an unimaginably huge oak tree growing from somewhere out of the sky, dotting it with its endless roots, and hanging from it with crown and foliage. In another second, Karina was already standing next to Belyana and Fox, seeing her lying body, and the red ball in Belyana's hands, from which the same thread was stretching. Finally, she opened the eyes of her own body.

  “An amazing desire for death,” Belyana commented displeasedly.

  “In terms of?” Karina was surprised. “It was even nice.”

  “Brr,” Belyana pretended to hug her shoulders, as if freezing. “When the Sea dissolves you - it really is like an endless series of the best orgasms in your life. The only problem is that no one comes back from there.”

  “Actually, it didn't look like them either.”

  “If it were, we wouldn’t be talking anymore,” Belyana shrugged.

  “By the way,” Karina said thoughtfully. “Just now you clearly held a ball in your hands, but now it is gone. How is that?”

  “Ugh fuck,” Fox snapped. “Are you really carrying this crap with you?”

  “Bad,” she answered to Karina. “If you saw it, then you're still late. It’s even interesting which of the threads you lost ... But don’t worry, we’ll find out someday. The loss of even a couple is recoverable.

  And you,” she said to Fox, “Could show more respect for Yaga. She is, in fact, the core of human civilization.”

  “I'm not so human to care about that,” she replied. “And the question is not in her, but in the fact that almost everything she does is connected in one way or another with her cunt. Especially these threads. I wouldn't even touch them with gloves on.”

  “I'll tell her so,” Belyana laughed. “She'll appreciate it. Even though I wonder how you found out.”

  “All of you are just disgusting,” Fox finally sighed. “It's my curiosity. At some point, I wondered where she gets the raw materials for yarn, if she leaves the hut only in exceptional cases. Well, I saw.”

  “And I always tell you that you know less - you sleep better.”

  “Here I would still argue. When curiosity takes over, falling asleep is much more difficult than after discovering that it would be better if it remained just curiosity.”

  “And you say, not so much a human,” Belyana giggled. “It's only a human trait - for the sake of curiosity even risk your own life, fully aware of the risk. Foxes are too careful for that.”