For three hours, Momo was silent.

Speechless was the better word. Grimli doted after her like a worried mother, constantly asking her if she needed anything – tea, coffee, an inspirational theme song – but she just nodded mutely. In truth, she was paralyzed. Fighting off upstart mortal idiots like Nia was one thing, but she’d done this to herself. She was the one who promoted Sera, indirectly, to godhood.

And now she was paying the consequences.

She sighed deeply, turning the black cube around in her hand. Despite the inner inferno raging within, it was as cold as death. It made the skin on her hand tingle and hiss, as if the device was trying and failing to suck the very organ off of her bones. Charming.

If only I could have asked Nyk more questions, Momo thought, growing mad at herself once more. Momo had done nothing but stare dumbly as the dokkaebi disappeared back to the Nether. It seemed that no matter how many points in Charisma or Intelligence she accrued, her strategy for women seemed to stay the same – complete immobilization.

It’s not like she would have answered my questions anyway, she thought, comforting herself. Or would have even known the answers. The only person who truly knew what the devilish device in her hand was capable of was Sera herself. Nia, maybe, but Momo would sooner get a hungry rat to share its secret storage of cheese than get that woman to open up to her.

Momo’s eyes trailed to the edge of the wooden desk she was sitting by. After realizing that there was no campaign event, Momo had paid for a night at the town inn and retreated to a room to mope. The small cabin came equipped with a bed, a desk, and a heaping serving of cold-weather blankets – thankfully, since Guinevere’s alleged blessing was still chilling her to the bone.

Momo had set her belongings on the side of the desk in an unorganized pile – her bloody backpack, her new assortment of scarves, and finally, Dusk, who was chewing at the edge of Lione Baumfreund’s unopened letter like it was a cat toy.

Wait. Lione.

“Hey, stop that,” Momo chided, swatting Dusk lovingly. The cat meowed in annoyance. “I bought three entire mackerels for you that you’re actively ignoring, go eat those instead.”

Momo gestured towards the pile of semi-rotting fish in the corner of the room. Dusk did the feline equivalent of a shrug, and jumped from the table.

Momo reached urgently for the letter. If there was anyone else on Alois who might have a clue about Sera’s plans, it was Lione. After all, she used to be Sera’s devout student. Back when Sera was just a professor at Kalendale’s Mage College. A colleague to someone like Viktor Mole, not a demigod who was dead-set on seeing her dead.

Wasting no time, Momo took a knife and sliced open the top of the envelope, unfurling the neatly stored piece of correspondence. Leaning back in her chair, she began to read.

Dearest Momo,

First of all, I’d like to start off by thanking you. Without you and my annoying brother, I’d have been killed immediately by the Earl’s men. Your appeal for my rehabilitation saved me. Of course, I despised you at first. After you destroyed my glob, I was sent to rot away in the Earl’s cellars, forced to talk to something called a sigh-cy-a-trist. Urgh. I shall tell you about him.

This sigh-cy-a-trist came to me as a troublesome man named Devon, who wore a monocle and spoke with a very unpleasant and unusual vocabulary. Trauma, he’d say. Baggage. Motherly issues, Fatherly issues. Listening to him drone on and on, I would pray everyday for the return of my Glob, so that it could devour this man and his words whole, swallow him up to the Nether.

But eventually, either by a blessing or by delirium, his lectures began to get to me. They started to make sense. I realized, then, that what I thought was my calling – my purpose – was instead a coverup for the pain that I had faced as a child. I know, it sounds ridiculous. But this is the result of sigh-cy-a-tree. My mind has become open like a dissected animal.

To cover up this child-like pain, I sought the guidance of my mentor, Sera, a brilliant woman. We worked together on a project like none other. Completely unprecedented in the study of the undead: the practice of soul-fissuring. It’s a practice invented by the wraiths of The Mists, and why their territory is so feared. It involves cutting up and re-attaching the soul chains of small, inconsequential things, so one can create unimaginable horrors, like my dear Glob.

Of course, my Glob was merely a glimpse. An amateur experiment. Sera dreamt of much grander things. She wanted to create something self-sufficient, you see, something that would replenish itself. A monster that would soul-fissure the chains from hundreds of human bodies at a time. Eliminate entire cities with a mere touch. The Wraith Box – she affectionately called it. A quaint name for such a beast.

It would not kill people, you see. It would consume them. There would be no Nether afterlife for its victims. Fissured to such a creature, all a soul would be capable of is eternal screaming.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Such a tantalizing thought, isn’t it?

Ah, silly me, I don’t mean to go on such tangents. My sigh-cy-a-trist tells me it’s good to write things down, but I shamefully must admit it still thrills and delights me to think about such a creature. Not that I’d like to build one anymore, no. That’d be most inhumane. But it harms no one to simply contemplate it…

And if you were wondering, such a thing was never feasible within the confines of our reality. I dedicated myself to this research for years, and I was never able to come even close to replicating it. Even my Glob was a simplistic thing. It couldn’t even properly kill people. It just stuffed them inside its amorphous body like one might submerge themselves in a pool.

Ah – how I miss my research.

Anyway, if you’d ever like to chat again, I’ll be taking a new residence in the city of Karahtan, the capital of the Vagrant Dunes. I fear that if I stay in Bruda any longer, I might revert to old urges.

Blessed tidings,

Lione Baumfreund

—

“Who would store a wraith in a box?” Grimli asked, positively aghast. “That’s like putting a Demonic Boar in a petting zoo. Or storing a ticking time bomb in the pocket of one’s trousers.” He eyed Momo’s lower half, and his face went even pinker. “Speaking of the subject, it comes to mind that you should absolutely take that hideous contraption out of your trousers, your highness.”

Grimli pointed his shivering finger towards Momo’s pant pocket, where the Wraith Box was sitting, unmoving and undisturbed. Momo ignored him. As far as she knew – it couldn’t do anything to her. But Grimli was right, they would need a better place to store it.

If only Alois had tupperware.

“I don’t think it’s exactly like she shoved a wraith in a box, Grimli. It’s more so like… er… do you know what happens when someone comes into contact with a wraith in the wild?”

“Hm, well, much can occur,” Grimli said, tapping his chin thoughtfully. “Firstly, one’s soul is typically torn from their body, then there’s the whole thing about the eternal screaming.”

“Great to know that Lione wasn’t exaggerating,” Momo muttered. “Yeah, so, that. Sera created a device that does that, but on a much larger scale. At least that’s what I think it does. It interrupts the natural death process, so that souls don’t get sent to the Nether, they just… scream. Forever.”

“No souls in the Nether?” Grimli gasped. “That seems highly destabilizing. Morgana’s realm would be nothing without her shades.”

“I think she’d survive without her Subway sandwich employees,” Momo drawled. “The part that scares me is the… self-sustaining bit. Lione suggested that a device like this would never just stop consuming. Unlike wraiths, who act defensively, this thing would act offensively. Once it goes off, it might just devour every soul it can get its grubby little box hands on.”

“Positively terrifying, your highness. Such a thing would make a wonderful ballad,” Grimli said in a too-cheery tone. “I trust we will need to intervene with these dreadful shenanigans?’

“It seems that preventing world-ending catastrophes is now part of my day job, so yes,” Momo frowned miserably. I miss when my most adventurous job task was cleaning the men’s bathroom at Mallmart. “By the way, you know you can just call me Momo, right? Your highness is just… a lot. It feels weird to have you treat me like royalty.”

“But you are royalty, your highness,” he corrected her. “And if I were to refer to you as anything but, I’d have to off myself,” he said with the utmost casualness, “for I would have disrespected you. And I will not let anyone disrespect you, least of all myself.”

Momo stared at him. I think that Demagogue perk is less of a perk and more of a curse.

“Ugh – nevermind.”

—

Momo decided the only sensible thing to do was to keep moving.

From her [Focused] inspection, there was no way to just disable the box. If she tried to manipulate the soul chains directly while [Nether Cultivator] was activated, there was a high probability that she’d be electrocuted to death – or whatever you might call the Mana-depleting equivalent. It would be like shoving your fingers in an open outlet, or dancing on a live wire.

Neither of which Momo intended to do.

At least on purpose.

So there existed only two real options in Momo’s mind – one, she could give up, which she considered briefly – or two, she could take some scissors to the campaign trail plan, cut it into a pretty little one-way path, and chariot her and Grimli straight to the Mekna, skipping over all the stops in between.

Although she’d lose out on some approval points, she had gathered quite a boost in Bruda. The towns between Snowdrop and Mekna were quite small and insignificant (not that she’d ever say that publicly.) But in Mekna, she’d have the opportunity to talk to Miss Kelly Kraken of the Mekna Gazette personally, which, if it went well, would be another huge boost in approval score.

And then – urgh – she’d have another important choice to make.

Mekna was, of course, the port of sail to all other continents. The biggest dock in Aloysius. She could buy a ticket there to go directly to the Vagrant Dunes, and have Lione look at the box in-person. She’s probably the only necromancer on this planet who would know what to do with it.

But taking that route would mean abandoning her post entirely. Leaving the country unattended, save for Sumire. It’d go against the entire plan she so carefully set out of her. A total repeat of her days ruling Nam’Dal, when she stupidly and naively gave the reins over to Viktor.

And look how that turned out.

Momo frowned.

You see, the worst thing that could ever happen to Momo was to disappoint someone she cared about. But she had made the fatal mistake of caring about multiple people, all with different and varying interests – Morgana, who would be very unhappy if souls stopped showing up to the Nether; Valerica, who would be very unhappy if Morgana was very unhappy; and finally Sumire, who… just wanted the best for her.

Momo sighed, missing her viscerally.

Thinking back to the pirate-knight, a flash of memory crossed Momo’s mind.

“A queen doesn’t have to look like one thing, Momo,” Sumire said slowly. “I think I’d like to see the queen you’d become if you tried doing it your way. Not Valerica’s way. Or Morgana’s way. Your way. In clogs. With more jail cells full of expiring tuna fish than prisoners.”

Momo looked down at her feet, at her worn and muddied clogs.

My way, she repeated in her mind. Okay.