Smoke filled the upper stairs hallway as Bella hacked at the gigantic spider. The stench of burning wood, carpet, and paint licked at Bella’s mind. Her home was in ashes, and this guided her blade. It flinched away from her knife, drooling, begging, but the fear in Zoe’s eyes only vindicated Bella’s righteous assault. If Zoe hadn’t never attacked, none of this would have happened. She sliced at the venomous mandibles, and the spider reared away. With a shoulder charge, Bella knocked it onto its back. The few remaining legs twitched and kicked. Bella leaped onto its exposed belly and raised her sword high.
“This is for Oriz!”
Her screaming sword plunged toward the monster’s foul heart, but before she could strike, the spider reared. The last remaining fang plunged into Bella’s thigh. It sank deep and struck her bone. For a split second, she felt nothing. Then fire filled her mind. It was as though the inferno raging through her home extended through her veins. Black bubbling venom overflowed from the wound as she froze completely. Her limbs refused to move, and she stood there with her sword tip resting upon the spider’s gigantic bloated abdomen.
Zoe retracted her fang and exhausted laughter spilled out of her mouth. She spat away the mandibles and wriggled, as though her head were trying to remove herself from the body. Her neck extended, and two dark shoulders emerged from the spider’s exoskeleton like islands rising from the sea. Mirrored fingers reached around the lip and with a grunt of exertion, Zoe pulled herself up and out to the waist. She rested a moment like a spider-centaur hybrid and gazed at Bella with a complicated expression.
“Time to end this,” she said.
#####
Zoe’s fingers twitched as the last shreds of Time flowed through them. Fire filled her tendons and veins. Her Mirrored armor stuttered and vanished as Moth poured herself into the offensive component of [Empress of Time].
Bella stopped in mid-air. Half-spun, the runes on her blade glowed like fires in the night, and her eyes were as blank as a doll’s. Zoe rushed forward. Her body felt leaden as she charged. Using that technique so frequently drained her.
Bella skipped forward and stopped again. A semi-pirouette like a broken machine. She floated above the ground as Zoe charged forward.
[Mind’s Eye Incision]
Spectral blades flickered into existence around Zoe’s fingertips. She focused, and they grew longer. She would need every inch of reach if this plan was to succeed.
Bella skipped forward again. Her toes touched the floor, and she bounded forward, eyes still lidded, the runeblade screaming toward Zoe’s throat.
It stopped a hair’s breadth away as the grip of time reasserted itself. Zoe swept her hands up as fast as she could. Oriz’s weave might hide the strings of Skein, but Zoe would cut until she found them. Her glittering psychic blades sliced away at the air.
Bella slid forward in time. Zoe ducked away and sliced around Bella’s arm. She felt the tiniest twang of resistance as she sliced through a strand of Skein, and Bella’s arm fell limp to the ground. The runeblade bit into the grassy weave beneath them.
Wind swept through the long grass around them. The sky darkened. Bella’s fingers gnarled into claws and she thrust them toward Zoe’s eyes.
But time stuttered.
Being this close, Zoe could see how Bella’s limbs moved. She couldn’t see the thread of Skein that worked her friend like a puppet, but she could infer where they were. With the swift precision of a surgeon, Zoe sliced.
###
Zoe is killing me…
Smoke obscured the ceiling as Zoe straddled Bella. Bella couldn’t close her eyes. Scarred lips filled her vision as they twisted with grim emotion. Cold hands of Mirror wrapped around her throat, and she was powerless to fight as the poison flared through her veins.
The thought looped like an echo in a canyon as the fingers tightened.
Zoe is killing me. Zoe is killing me. Zoe is killing me.
Black spots bloomed in her visions. The same color as the poison. Bubbling. Hissing. Droplets of tar burning through this photo of the world. Bella tried to grab her sword before she ran out of time.
…killing me. Zoe is killing me. Zoe is killing me. Zoe is…
How did it come to this?
What fell apart between two friends that one would dress up as a giant spider and choke the other to death?
It felt like a dream…
A sound like a plucked thread in the back of her mind, and then that same thread snapped. The sharp little twang echoed behind her eyes, and Bella gazed up as the world darkened with the taste of poison.
She could hardly breathe, but still she forced her lips to move.
“This isn’t real…”
The mirrored grip tightened, but Bella stopped reaching for her sword.
Zoe is killing me. Zoe is killing me. Zoe is —
No, that wasn’t her voice. She wasn’t saying that to herself, someone was saying it to her. A voice she knew.
She frowned as another thread snapped in the back of her mind.
Oriz’s voice.
Bella’s finger twitched. Despite the pain of the burning venom, she raised a hand to grip Zoe’s wrist. Her fingers wrapped around that fine line where hot dark skin met cool Mirror. Blood on glass slicked with sweat. She squeezed her friend’s hand as the darkness bloomed in her vision.
“You would never do this,” she said.
Zoe’s eyes widened.
“Yes… Yes, I would!” She gripped Bella’s throat so tightly it was as though she was trying to rip her head off. “I hate you! I love you! If I can’t have you nobody can!”
Bella’s vision darkened, but she smiled, for an anchor is at home in the dark.
She gripped the blade beside her and twirled the sword. The runes howled with familiarity and with a twist of her wrist she sundered space and time. Zoe’s head hit the ground with a thump. The hands around her throat fell away. Zoe’s headless, handless body slumped over and Bella stood. She rubbed at her throat with her free hand as darkness slipped from her gaze.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Smoke curled around the ceiling. The wallpaper was old, chipped in places, the carpet clean, but worn. This place felt real, and she was sure she had walked many hallways like this in her life. The gigantic spider was bloated and monstrous and leaking fluids from its neck where Zoe climbed out. The acidic stench of its viscera mingled with the smoke and the iron tang of Zoe’s scarlet blood. The mingled flavor struck the back of her throat as Zoe’s Mirrored hands disintegrated like silver tinsel in the wind.
It all seemed so real…
She couldn’t say what tipped her completely, for she believed Zoe’s aggression to a point. Only a fool would say that Zoe wasn’t violent, dangerous, or a creature of conflict. She even believed her becoming a gigantic spider if it meant she fulfilled her goals, but would she kill her friends?
“No,” Bella whispered. “But I know someone who would.”
With a heavy heart, she turned toward the door at the end of the hall. It seemed so much smaller now, so much less important. She strode toward the hall, but it shrank even further. She ran, and the doorway extended. Oriz’s voice no longer came from the other side. Something scrambled behind the closed door. Bella frowned and sprinted, her heart pounded as she raced toward the truth, but when she blinked, locks appeared along the door’s edge. She stopped running. The walls trembled, strained, like a weave stretched to the point of tearing.
Bella shook her head as her blade spoke to her.
“I don’t know why,” she said. “I guess running is a force of habit when you’re born with legs?”
She swiped the air, and a black wound opened up in the hallway. With a step, she passed through space and appeared in the master bedroom. The strange transference robbed the moment of some impact. A bed lay in the center of the room. No sheets. No pillows. No curtains on the windows, only the green sunlight beating through like a burning emerald. Bella looked around. No Oriz, only a woven doll of grass. A lifesized wicker woman. It trembled and rocked, as though it were just disturbed, but when Bella poked it with her runeblade, nothing happened.
She sighed.
“Anticlimactic,” she said.
Her blade whined.
“Yeah, it’s about time.”
She held the blade aloft and centered her breathing — a technique Oriz taught her ironically enough — and then she brought the blade down. A burning cyclone rippled out from the tip. Time and space shredded. The ceiling collapsed, the walls ripped free, and the bed flew up into the air as the cyclone tore the lies apart. Bella stood there on a little section of the floor as the flames danced beneath her. She felt no heat, for she no longer accepted that part of the dream. With a smile, she raised the blade for another strike.
“Oriz, my darling,” she said. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
###
Oriz fled through the cocoon. She crawled, she slid, she flowed, but she fled. The weave of Skein collapsed around her as Bella’s runesword swept at one-half of its reality. On the other side, Zoe cut free the strings she used to hold Bella in place.
[Looks like your plans are collapsing around you]
Despite the tickling pleasure that came from the Witch’s voice, her disinterest was clear.
“No!” Oriz said. “I can still save this.”
[I don’t think so. Your candidacy was really more a matter of love than skill. I thought there might be something to this Bella, but understanding the twists of my brother’s heart is no simpler now that he is dead]
“Please! I’m begging you —”
The howling runeblade sliced the cocoon, and Oriz tumbled out of the sky. She hit the ground, blood oozing from a wound in her stomach, for the cocoon was her as she was the cocoon. Her grey body glistened, soft as warm rubber, as she picked herself up onto her knees. Grass bent around her. Fire raged in the distance. Wind howled.
She didn’t have long before the entire cocoon collapsed, and then Zoe and Bella would be upon her. If they fought together, she would die.
But she had one last desperate plan.
[Oh? You do?]
Oriz plunged her fingers into the woven grass that made the ground. She felt the weave of Skein that was her soul and her desires. Tears slid down her cheeks. Was this too far? She still felt the abrasive sand of Purgatory’s desert rubbing against her skin. The hot dry breath of a dead world. When she closed her eyes, dunes stretched as far as the eye could see. Loneliness was a wind that blew you to the horizon, and Oriz knew she needed an anchor.
She thrust her hands deep and grabbed the cocoon, and with the last of her power, she twisted the surrounding land. Grass shifted, and a clearing formed. Oriz knelt in the middle as she extended the shape. Grass fell away into paths that extended out in the shape of the crossroads.
Blood dripped down her cheeks. She heaved for breath, struggled, faint, and raised her gaze to the heavens of her making.
“Witch! I kneel in the crossroads as your servant. I summon thee, I beseech thee! Give me your power and I will give you anything!”
The wind blew through the grass, and it carried the sound of a hungry sword. Oriz’s chin fell to her chest. She wept, blood and salt spattering the ground, as exhaustion filled her.
Again, she failed, and now she had no more —
[Anything?]
Fingers settled upon her shoulders. Too many. She couldn’t count. Hot lips pressed against her ears.
[I want everything]
Oriz shuddered. Was this too far?
“I am yours.”
[Excellent]
The fingers plunged into her flesh, into her Skein, into her soul. And Oriz screamed. Her head tilted back, and for a horrible, beautiful, perfect, shattering moment — she saw the Witch.
And the Witch smiled.