Zoe sat and leaned against the wall. Her skin cold against the cold stone. Moth lay in her arms, the weight nothing, the weight everything, and Zoe’s tears fell and splashed upon the mirrored cheeks of her clone and continued rolling down until they struck the dusty floor.
Power rippled through her. Not cold, not hot, but a current of Skein returning to its rightful place. After Moth’s heart stopped beating, Zoe felt her siphoned attributes renewed. Gravity lessened, her breathing eased. She felt light as the air, strong as the steel floating in her veins.
The power tasted like ash upon her tongue. Was she doomed to repeat these acts? When Princh first confronted her with the nature of her technique, she had refused to believe it. Not deep down. The truth had skipped off her thick skull.
But she could deny it no longer. [Our Hearts Toll As One] was evil. She carried an evil technique, and it pulsed with every beat of her heat, living with her.
She wanted to swear to never use it again. She did swear, in her head, and out loud, the words small in the domed room.
But how strong is an oath sworn to oneself? How unbreakable is a promise made without witnesses? She didn’t know. Her Willpower was restored, but her resolve wavered.
There was a buzz, a vague awareness, at the back of her brain. Some notification, some message from the Crimson Armada system, she wouldn’t be sure until she flexed her Willpower and pushed away the Black Star’s interference. She could do this at any time, but she waited, and sat, mind empty.
Empty and cold.
The glowing spores of moss drifted toward the rent in the ceiling but bumped away from the opening. Something prevented their exit into the night sky. A glow formed in the crack. Steady light of deep emerald. The spores floated, confused in their mindless way as a bubble squeezed itself through the crack. Its ethereal body deformed and twisted, strained and wriggled with mindless curiosity before it emerged with a pop as an intact sphere.
It spun slowly and bobbed about the room. A spherical emerald the size of a human. In its reflective surface, by its own light, Zoe saw herself down on the ground with Moth in her arms.
[Ding!]
[Yay! A bubble found you! Now you can play. No more sitting around moping. It’s so boring!]
The Black Star’s childlike voice sickened her. The bubble infuriated her. The intrusion, the watching, not even a moment of her life where she hated herself, where she wanted to curl up in a ball and cease to be, not even a second of privacy to wallow in the grief of her actions.
She recalled — in startling clarity — the man on the plane who stared at her breasts. The man who asked if she thought god was real.
If there is no god, anything is permitted.
Well, now she knew gods existed, and they only wanted to play games. Anything was permitted so long as it fit the sick designs of their entertainment.
Her rage, in her time with Moth, had guttered. A low flame, almost too low, almost dying. Now, it roared. She slid Moth to the ground and stood and she screamed.
Eleven chains thrust out like spears.
The bubble spun. A chain lashed out from its perfect surface and blocked one of Zoe’s attacks. Another shot toward her face, but with her attributes restored it was too little, too late. She dodged, leaped up, and her chains smashed into the round surface. For a second, it deformed, bending under the pressure, as though it might snap back into luminescent perfection.
But Zoe ground her teeth. Forced her chains to work for her. Living extensions of her burning hate. They thrust deeper and pierced the bubble’s skin. It sagged like a balloon with a sick sound like a loose fart. From ten wounds, rivers of grey gunk flowed. The bubble hung suspended on her chains, and the gunk trickled down the lengths, dripping onto the floor like ash mixed with vomit.
Zoe gagged as a foul pool spread across the ground. She retracted her chains, flicking away the foul substance, and scooped Moth into her arms. The bubble drifted down to the floor like an empty skin and floated atop the puddle. With an easy leap, Zoe cleared the spreading filth and landed on the other side of the dome
The puddle slowed its spread and stopped a few feet from where she sat panting and breathing in the wretched odor.
[Ding!]
[No what have you done! Why did you pop it? Why did you break my toy, you’re so mean! I hate you!]
[- 4 chains]
[I thought you could be my friend like Trinch, but you’re nothing like him! He just uses my chains to jump higher, but he’ll never jump away from me. I love him too much!]
[Tee hee hee…]
Four of the chains from her back slipped away into the ether. She now had six tethered to her spine, and one wrapped around her neck like a collar. The chain around her neck seemed to be the Black Star system’s favorite. Maybe it served as a reminder — and it did — though she only wanted to growl at the thought.
She would not be leashed.
It took her a second to adjust to the lightened burden. She waited for further announcements, but the system remained silent. Still, she knew it was there, watching her.
The gods would always be watching.
###
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The puddle of bubble innards crept toward the entrance to the domed room. It seeped into the spiraling hallway and drained away. Slow, but steady. The foul odor cleared somewhat, and Zoe could think, and she knew, it was time to act.
The buzzing of notifications at the back of her mind persisted, as though bees built a nest in her skull. She ran a hand through her tangled hair. As though she might sweep her fingers through the annoying feeling. She touched nothing but dirty locks.
She needed a haircut. The urge to shave it away swept over her — the urge to tear it out by the roots and scream — and when she noticed her twisted expression in Moth’s mirrored chest she shuddered.
They were getting to her, and so she breathed. In and hold, out and hold, and she flexed her Willpower into the void. Her aura rippled out, weaker than the smooth shield of Oriz, and smaller, but it calmed her and cut away the creeping sense of the Black Star’s peeping.
[Level up! You are now level 9.]
The voice of the Crimson Armada system was almost relieving after all this time. It came as though from a long distance, a voice blurred by static, but she kept her Willpower flexed just to hear it echo through her mind. Cold energy rushed through her. She trembled and fell to her knees as her muscles numbed.
After fighting and meditating for a week she had almost hit level 9, and now with the two kills the death energy poured into her. She could feel that level 10 was within reach.
The gluttonous, treacherous hunger awoke before she even received the notification to incorporate an element. Her soul reached out with tendrils, with tongues, for anything in range. But a notification surprised her before she could satiate the empty beast inside.
[So many accept the boons of the system, but so few take up the cause.]
[Congratulations! You have traveled into the dimension of another system and taken the fight to the enemy! In killing a being of the Black Star system you have proven your loyalty to the Crimson Armada in the only way that matters.]
[Title awarded: True Believer (The path to the Mountain of Faith has opened to you.)]
She must have received this Title from attacking and killing the bubble. Simply, defending against them out in the swamp hadn’t counted. Likewise, the baboons she fought earlier must have fallen from some other dungeon, because neither system had reacted as strongly when she killed them.
The rush of energy was intense. She knew the bubbles were dangerous in large numbers, but the death energy almost felt compensated. As though the Crimson Armada system was rewarding her for the nature of her efforts, rather than the efforts themselves.
But what was this reward? She gritted her teeth in frustration. Why did everything come with a dozen questions attached?
She tried to examine the meaning of [The Mountain of Faith] and felt as though she were sucked out of her body. A sensation of towering height, as though a being such as Trinch rushed toward her. She quickly canceled the examination.
With a feeling of smallness, she settled back into her shivering body. Sweat soaked her skin. Hunger wrapped around her spine. She turned her attention to the surrounding elements with desperate need. It burned through her Willpower to keep the Crimson Armada system stable and present enough to look at her choices. She had to be quick.
[Please select an element to incorporate:]
* [Mirror skinned Doppelgänger(Mirror, Blood, Faith): Dexterity -2, Might +2, Vitality + 8, Willpower +2, Insight +2]
* [Stone: Dexterity -2, Might +2, Willpower +4]
* [????: ????? - ??, ??????? - ?, Chains + 8 ]
Her mind spun. She had expected Moth’s body to be offered to her, and she had expected that it would be worth more than the surrounding elements. The recurrence of Faith as an element surprised her, but hadn’t Moth embodied that? Childlike optimism could be a sort of faith. The attribute gain was compelling, but she almost ignored it as she stared down at the mirrored face, at her own mirrored face. Did she want to incorporate Moth? She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Was it more respectful to bury her somewhere in this dimension than it was to make her a part of herself?
She examined the other options.
Stone made sense, but the last option surprised her. What could it be?
She eyed the pool of filth draining from the room. It had come from inside a bubble of the Black Star system, so maybe it was so alien that it jumbled the prompt from the Crimson Armada system. Whatever that stuff was, gaining chains wasn’t worth the obvious drop in her attributes. Even the sight, let alone the smell, of the stuff made her gag. It seemed to be the stuff incorporation forced out of her body, there was no way she wanted to put it inside her.
Though that raised another question. If the Black Star denizens were filled with what the Crimson Armada considered impurities…
Her hunger screamed. Patience gone. Restraint snapped. It seized control.
Her scars grabbed her lips like fingers and peeled them back into a crazed grin. Her hands moved, but not with her motions. Zoe was a trapped puppet as she grasped Moth’s hand and brought it up toward her mouth. Locked inside her body, she couldn’t move, the hunger had never been like this before. She tried to scream, but the sound only came inside her mind. Her gaping mouth moaned, hunger, pleasure, as her teeth bit down upon Moth’s mirrored finger.
The taste of sweat, glass, and skin upon a tongue she could not control —
No!
With all her dwindling Willpower, Zoe selected [Mirror Skinned Doppelgänger]. She wasn’t a cannibal. She wasn’t a monster. She was going to carry Moth with her for the rest of her life, she would take her inside herself, just like where she had been born, but she would do this on her terms.
Not her hunger’s.
Moth’s mirrored skin became tendrils that flowed toward Zoe like fingers of mist. They settled on her skin, softer than any other incorporation before, and flowed into her pores. There was the faintest impression of a voice in her mind, a sigh that was almost a word, almost a message.
Or maybe she just wanted to believe that death was not the end.
Zoe’s eyes blurred as Moth’s body unraveled and slowly, gently, settled upon Zoe’s flesh. She wept long streaks of filth down her cheeks. The foul waste stung her eyes but she merely sat against the wall and let the pain throb. Staring out into the dark room as Moth vanished and filled the bottomless pit inside.
Satiated, her hunger released its control over her body. The forced smile faded away, and her mouth closed. She once more occupied her flesh, but she shuddered at how quickly the gluttony took over.
Her curse was only growing more dangerous.
###
Pale light shone through the crack in the ceiling and lit Zoe.
She sat alone.
Rivers of filth crusted her cheeks, dried, and flaked away as her fingertips swept over her face. Head in hands, she sat, and wished she was home. She wanted a shower; she wanted a bed; she wanted to wake up the next day and not have to deal with anything.Maybe watch some show she didn’t care about. Read a book. Go for a walk in a park that wasn’t full of things trying to kill her.
She cried a few more tears, salty, warm, and they seeped between her fingers.
And it passed…
Moth’s essence settled inside her as the incorporation concluded. It felt right, taking the body of her sister and bringing it with her. A burial was for those you leave behind, and this way she would know Moth was always there.
It was a cruel reality that forced her into this situation, and Zoe couldn’t help but feel as though she failed some test. There was no system-announced curse, but she felt the brand upon her soul all the same. She had failed Moth, but she would not fail her memory.
Her eyes still burned, tears wept, and she blinked and wiped them away.
No more time for tears, she had things to do. She stood and moved around the doorway to the exit, but stopped when she saw the back of her hand. Wet with tears…
Tears of mirror…
She staggered as the world crawled.
[Refrain from accessing Skein or performing other activities until Technique crystalizes.]