The light stung Zoe’s eyes, and she saw nothing as Not-Cassy dragged her up from the mausoleum’s depths. Shattered marble steps crumbled beneath her feet and chips flew back into the earthen abyss. Snow lay about and reflected the lights, the dim silhouettes of tombstones and angels to mark the fallen. There was something wrong with emerging from the ground. The human brain wasn’t supposed to see such a sight. Such an act was reserved for nobody. The dead stayed down and the living never ventured… Zoe breathed deeply, trying to calm the frantic circles of her mind.

But even the air was wrong.

Everything was wrong and the thing wearing Cassy’s corpse strode ahead of her — the monster’s presence as calming as a record scratch.

Zoe felt like a worm. Something feasted on the dead and the darkness and now exposed after too great a storm. She stared at the light, blinded, but desperate to embrace something other than the deadly waters rising from beneath.

She blinked, saw, and wished she could blind herself again.

“Delightful, isn’t it?” Not- Cassy said. “It took some effort, but I’m making your world better.”

Not-Cassy’s slaves thronged the graveyard. Dead-eyed humans who stumbled back and forth between the headstones. They wore torn clothes over bloodied bodies. They limped with injuries, or their arms hung limp at the shoulder. Small bite marks littered their flesh. One middle-aged woman turned blank and bleeding eyes toward Zoe. With shock, Zoe realized she was still alive. Dark eyes sparked behind lanky brunette locks.

ding!

Is she like you?

Not-Cassy quirked her ear at the Black Star’s voice.

“Is the cow like the farmer?” Not-Cassy replied.

Zoe shuddered internally. She had thought the Black Star could only speak to her…

The slave gazed at Zoe with disinterest and hunger. Her eyes passed over Not-Cassy and she cringed away. As she turned, she revealed an engorged pulsating growth on her shoulder. A long tube dangled from the mass and dragged along the ground, and one of Not-Cassy’s children ran over and sucked at the end. The slave moaned, with an uncomfortable pleasure.

“The flesh was just the first stage,” Not-Cassy said. “The true change was in the mind. You craved purpose the way liquid craves shape. You don’t understand what it is to be nothing, to expand… so I gave you purpose. Don’t worry,” she smiled wickedly. “They are all thankful.”

Disgust rose in Zoe’s core. If she wasn’t paralyzed, she might have puked. It felt like a snake thrashed beneath her skin.

Still, despite the horror clawing at her mind, Zoe wasn’t sure what Not-Cassy meant, until she noticed what the slaves were doing.

They carried odd items from the nearby town. Lines of them moved down the streets like ants. They carried chairs, toys, appliances, anything and everything. Two men carried a sofa between them, one on the pavement and the other in the street. They carried the objects toward piles of those same objects. Breaking up and separating to stack like with like until the objects towered above the graveyard. The pile of fridges flashed beneath the neon sky. Spoiled food spilled from open doors. The chair pile already stood three stories tall. An enslaved young man stood at the top with a wide, toothless smile.

“You are one of the greatest things of all,” Not-Cassy said as she dragged Zoe through the graveyard. A furrow of snow trailed her feet. “You are living flesh. So fleeting, so wonderful. The greatest toy in all creation.” She turned back and met Zoe’s eyes. “Or is that just what you want me to say? You are a surgeon, no? You know the joys of playing with the living meat. The trick — the fun — is to keep the meat alive.

Zoe’s eyes widened as a faint moan rattled in her throat. Other than this slight sound and the slighter movement… there was nothing she could do.

Fortunately, she wasn’t alone.

The Black Star chains coiled around Not-Cassy’s shoulder.

ding!

Zoe wants to know if you’re going to kill her.

Zoe didn’t appreciate the Black Star system’s put-upon tone.

You’re not the boss of me.

An exasperated scream rang through Zoe’s skull.

Not-Cassy stroked the chains.

“No.”

She let her hands fall from the chains and dragged Zoe onwards.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

The mausoleum had been at the bottom of a hill, and now they headed up. Leafless trees stood at the top of the slight rise in the earth. Snow coated everything, and as they ascended the sugar-white slope Zoe gained a vision of the rest of the town.

Even in the dark, she could see the damage. The swirling lights and shadows of the hallucinogenic sky lit the broken buildings. In the magenta light, a tower of bodies stood monstrous and rounded in the cemetery parking lot.

ding!

Zoe wants to know if you killed those people.

Not-Cassy kept dragging them uphill.

“No,” she said. “I merely rearranged them..”

Who killed them?

“The bugs, the bugs, the bugs,” Not-Cassy sang. “The terrible, terrible, terrible, bugs!”

ding!

That news made Zoe sad.

“We can only react according to our natures,” Not Cassy said with a shrug. “We are here now, and here we must be.”

Dead trees loomed above them. Their branches stretched toward the colorful sky. The unseasonal, unnatural cold stole their leaves. Twigs shriveled and cringed away from the air. Pain radiated from their wooden limbs as they sought to escape the bone-colored snow.

Not-Cassy propped Zoe up against the base of one. The cold bark trembled against Zoe’s skin. The thrumming of a small heart cradled in giant hands. Not-Cassy knelt beside her.

“I’ve eaten a few people in this very position, as they leaned against a tree and begged for escape.”

Zoe forced her tongue to move. A slow, slurring motion as she fought the poison.

“You’re a monster,” she said.

Each word was like pulling barbed wire through her muscles. Not-Cassy sniffed the air appreciatively.

“Your pain is delicious. Do you know how many points I had to pump into that poison skill just to guarantee it would work on a freakish body like yours?” her smile cracked the dead flesh at the corner of her lips. “I wonder which of us is truly the most unnatural. Theoretically, it’s me, but probability says you shouldn’t exist.”

Zoe creased her brows into the barest frown.

“What?”

Not-Cassy sniffed the air. She stuck her fingers inside Zoe’s mouth, dragged them around her cheeks, and pulled them out. She smelled her drool-covered digits and cackled.

“Maybe I shouldn’t tell you! I never understood how uncertainty can scare you more than pain, but I will certainly take advantage of it.” She stood and dusted off her pants in a far too human gesture. “I brought you here because you are another tool in my plans. Who you are and how you got here doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you do next. You see all this crap out there?”

Not-Cassy gestured at the town and sky.

“This is such a small sliver of the system, but it is not so different. The Heart Torn system will assert its dominance over reality, but it will do what all systems do,” she snarled as a guttural voice rose from her throat. “The braiding of chaos and order into something perverted. They’re making something out of nothing, as though the abyss wants to be anything at all!”

She crouched and shook Zoe’s shoulders.

“You’re going to destroy the system? You’re going to fight it?”

Zoe could still taste Not-Cassy’s horrifically dirty fingers. Bile slowly rose in her throat and she struggled to breathe.

“Yes,” she choked out.

Not-Cassy shook her head.

“And what will you do next? Supplant them? Take their throne for yourself?”

Zoe knew the creature wanted her to say no. The cold air swirled and pressed around her. Despite her Might and Vitality, the air numbed her skin in spots like burning fingertips. She wanted to cry out a denial to make it stop, but something compelled her truth.

“Yes.”

Not-Cassy snarled. She pulled away and laughed.

“Am I speaking to you now then?” she danced in the snow. “Have I got your attention?”

“I don’t…” Zoe gagged. Her mouth was loosening, but it only made the taste worse. Her arms were still numb, and the chains refused her commands. “What?”

Not-Cassy leaned in close. Her dead eyes stared into Zoe’s. A maggot swam beneath the corpse's filmy orb.

“Don’t think I don’t know you’re watching, and waiting,” she said. “You think you’re subtle when you tip the scales in your favor?”

“What… are… you talking about?” Zoe felt her jaw loosen. A warm feeling ran through her body as her Vitality finally made headway on the toxins. “I’ve had no luck.”

Not-Cassy snorted.

“Your story riddles your flesh. An essence-boosting title? A system for hands? A parasite’s abilities? Time manipulation in a build that shouldn’t permit it? You are a statistical anomaly, but you think it was luck. No, someone created you. You are as much a tool as this flesh I wear.”

The words sank into Zoe’s mind. They rang true and ripples crashed through her thoughts. She had been to Hell, faced off against the Gambler, killed an Angel… the dungeon, the other dimensions, Rue’s attention… was it all some grand plan?

Her brain wanted to seize that answer. So much horror… would it be easier to accept a plan? A degree of intentionality? Did she dare allow herself to believe it?

And in that moment of doubt, Not-Cassy grinned ear to ear.

“You see that?” she said. “That is why your plans will fail. You trust in the flesh. You let it build itself, but a tool cannot make tools.” Not-Cassy gripped Zoe’s chin. “Your power is not your own. You think the system will let you destroy it?”

Zoe jerked her head away from the icy fingers.

“I will burn it down and piss on the ashes,” she snarled.

“No,” Not-Cassy said. “It will stop you.”

[Mind’s Eye Incision]

The blades flickered. She couldn’t quite summon them yet. But soon. Her Skein was working on the toxin. Digesting the ethereal energy into something tangible. With her technique, she could remove it, destroy it…

But not yet.

“The world out there is full of dungeons and treasure and I will gain enough power to —”

Not-Cassy giggled.

“Don’t you see that it’s already trapped you?”

She flexed, and the chains lying loose by her side flexed. The movement was so slight it made no sound. The Black Star might ignore her, but Zoe could control them soon.

“What are you talking about?” she said to buy more time.

“You will gain power, you will become the most powerful!” Not-Cassy threw her hands into the air. “You will rule because that is what those with power do! They take the responsibility of others unto themselves. The system is not the name or the beings that embody it like a mass of spines and pulsing hearts! No, the system is the power that passes from grasping claw to greedy mouth as the eons burn. The universe will grow cold before the system dies, unless…”

Zoe’s pulse sped up. She didn’t like where this was going. She didn’t like how much she agreed with Not-Cassy’s points.

“Unless what?” she asked.

Not-Cassy leaned in close and grinned like a shark. The smell was repulsive.

“Unless you let me help.”

ding!

You should listen to her.

Why aren’t you helping me?

And Zoe felt the Black Star wink inside her soul.