This revelation put Momo in an unfortunate situation. Luckily, Momo was no stranger to unfortunate situations. Some would say the opposite – when put in a fortunate situation, it was Momo’s instinct to, as quickly and with as little self-awareness as possible, turn it into a very agonizing one. Her parents had shamelessly referred to her as the unlucky child for a reason, and she was in steep competition with a brother whose personal idol was the neighborhood drug dealer.
“He’s more than that, man, he’s an up and coming rap god,” Dae-hyun would remind her as they watched him from Momo’s bedroom window, their tiny eyes completely absorbed by his feeble attempts to insert the ends of balloons into his mouth and inhale the helium.
“Vivienne,” Momo said calmly, backing away just a smidgen to obstruct the path between the blonde woman and the upper staircase. The former Sera-loyalist tracked her every movement with a pinning, watchful gaze. “No offense, but giving the chronic liar and backstabber access to ultra-powerful artifacts with unknown effects seems like a really stupid idea, even for me.”
To Momo’s surprise, Vivienne didn’t react by pushing her out of the way and running for it.
(It’s what Momo would have done, if their roles were reversed.)
“Of course it’s a stupid idea,” Vivienne said instead, scoffing and hastily pulling her sleeve back down. “Which is why I intend to trade you for them. You have been good to me, despite having every reason not to be. I, unlike my sister, am not going to repay that kindness by slicing your neck open,” then for no apparent reason except to make Momo squirm, she added, “for now.”
She then took a moment to survey the frigid basement. A forlorn look took over her features.
“Enough empty bloodshed has occurred here,” she said softly. “I don’t intend to add to the pile.”
Momo didn’t hide her surprise, an odd feeling of warmth spreading within her. It wasn’t often she saw her kindness genuinely repaid. Momo’s grace was usually responded to with, at best, more threats, and at worst, actual attempts of murder. Receiving neither, she relaxed a bit.
“Trade what, exactly?” she asked.
“Information,” Vivienne said. “But first, let’s get out of the dark. This feels ridiculous.”
Vivienne stepped forward, but Kasula cut her off, pressing a dagger to her nape.
“Nuh uh,” the elf said. “Momo, please, at the very least, have the foresight to put the goods back on the ship before letting the vampire upstairs.”
Momo turned red, mentally accosting herself. “Oh, that’s – that’s probably a good idea.”
—
The deal was carried out in the undercabins. Six wax candles drew lines of light across the damp floorboards, which were wet with not alcohol, but grape juice. A gaggle of child sailors had gathered there earlier, attempted to play hide and seek, and then, with nowhere to hide, decided instead to invent a game that involved spilling every juice canteen on the ship into one ginormous puddle of mirthy fruit.
Momo’s clogs stuck horribly to the floors, making that dreaded sticky, grippy sound as she disattached them. It made her cringe inwardly, shuddering as she settled into her seat.
“Are you alright, your highness?” Grimli asked, posted behind her like a minifridge-sized bodyguard. “You seem rather off-kilter. Is there something I can do?”
“Yes, actually. Please get some soap and a mop.”
Grimli stared at her blankly. “I don’t think the scary lady will take kindly to you washing her, your highness. It is not customary during deals of trade.”
Momo instantly decided it wasn’t worth continuing that line of conversation.
Vivienne dropped into her seat, parallel Momo, with tired impatience. Kasula and Ribeye watched the door, and Kami was in the adjacent room monitoring the artifacts.
“Alright, let’s cut to the point,” Vivienne said, crossing her arms. “I haven’t told you everything.”
“Duh,” Kasula added. “You’re clamped as tight as a clam in a straight jacket.”
Momo side-eyed Kasula aggressively, quickly interjecting, “I kindly ask that third parties refrain from commenting.” The elf laughed, then made a zipping motion across her lips. Momo turned her attention back to Vivienne, who was looking absently towards the door. Her mind was clearly on the artifacts.
“I want to know about the beginning of the cult, please,” Momo said quietly, drawing the woman’s attention back to her. “I want to know what happened to all those bodies on the beach. Why you and Nia weren’t affected. What Sera is hiding from Morgana. What her full plans are for the Holy Resistance. All of it, and the artifacts are yours. I don’t like carrying them around anyway. They’re unreasonably heavy for a pair of accessories.”
Vivienne frowned, but ultimately, she talked. “Fine.”
What Momo appreciated about Vivienne – in direct contrast to her sister, and Valerica, and pretty much every necromancer or necromancer-adjacent being in the realm – was how little time she had for evasive metaphors and unrelated tangents. She gave just enough detail to steer the story along, then moved on. It was so refreshing it nearly made Momo fall in love with her. Not like that’s hard to do.
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“Nia and I were orphans,” Vivienne admitted first, visibly shrinking into herself. “Got dropped off right outside the old granary like a rotting sack of potatoes. Really, that isn’t some metaphor – they thought we were rotting potatoes. We smelled filthy, and we came delivered in a withered old linen sack. It was Hobert, the town artist, that discovered us, took us in, and raised us until we were about eight. He couldn’t hear, so he used the language of the hand. But we caught on eventually.”
Emotion finding its way into her leveled speech, she took a moment, breathed in the grape juice scented fumes, then continued. Momo thought of ordering Grimli to get the knight a tissue, but she was sure that would only add fuel to whatever miscommunication they already had going on.
“One day, this older girl comes to town. God – she smelled terrible. Worse than us in our little flour sack,” Vivienne said, and the tips of her lips curve upwards, amused. “We asked Hobert about it and he said she was a sage. That was a code word for a magician that couldn’t do magic, a useless, impotent type. Soon enough, though, she started miraculously saving people from the dead. Just as they were about to todge off into the Nether, she woke them back up, as if they were only napping.”
Goosebumps ran up Momo’s skin. That sounded oddly like [Soul First Aid] – the same technique she’d used to save Culver from descending into the abyss. To think Sera had only used it as a manipulation tactic, a performance to bring the townspeople to her side, made Momo sick to her stomach. That woman was an absolute leech, she thought. Dae-hyun would have probably looked up to her.
“Didn’t take much after that for the whole town to be obsessed with her,” Vivienne continued, malice creeping back into her voice. “Nia and I weren’t unaffected. We thought she was the most incredible sorcerer in Alois, and, naturally, the ego-maniac that she is, Sera loved us in turn. She loved the attention. She’d call us her apprentices. She taught us everything she knew about necromancy. This carried on until most of the children in town were part of her apprenticeship program, their parents her sworn evangelists. Not Hobert, though.”
Vivienne sighed, momentarily lost in memory.
“To put it plainly, Hobert was loyal to Kyros. And not in the way that those doof Holy Knights are. He was a true believer. He didn’t care so much for piety, or for the god himself, but for living by Kyros’s original principle tenet: live well, praise truth, disavow lies,” she explained, surprising Momo. She had never heard any of Kyros’s actual principles before; this one sounded like something she’d see printed on a shirt sold by an Etsy seller that targeted middle-aged, religious soccer moms.
“He saw it plainly that Sera was lying about being a cleric. She was masking necromancy as something it wasn’t, so he began to try and undo her influence. You can imagine how that ended for him,” she said, tone dripping with spite. “He was the first to be mummified. Sera then took all his belongings, all his precious paintings, and left them in that ransacked house. She altered them to be storage containers for her experiments and artifacts.”
Momo’s eyebrows creased. “So she originally had the Blood Immortality Set?”
“No,” Vivienne said, with an air of relief. “Only I had the dagger. I bought it off some strange merchant with an even stranger accent – he was selling giant dogs, mainly, and talked like he couldn’t use his tongue properly – but anyway, I hid the dagger from both Sera and my sister. My discovery of it alerted the Class System, and it allowed me to evolve my class all the way up to Sanguine Death Knight. I knew the other two artifacts were out there, and that they were a bracelet and a necklace, but I could never find them. It was so frustrating. Until now.”
Her knee bobbed with anticipation, her eyes affixed to the door handle. It was clear she wanted nothing more than to be done with this interview. Momo didn’t blame her. Being a fake Holy Knight for so many years sounded unimaginably exhausting. Momo found it tiring enough dealing with necromancers, but at least they weren’t annoyingly obsessed with some tentacle-tongued feline whose religion was based on Pinterest quotations.
“Anyways,” Vivienne said. “Soon after Hobert was mummified, the town turned against Sera, adequately horrified that she transformed one of their own into a lifeless wax mold. Nia and I were the only two who didn’t turn on her, so we were spared. The whole thing happened in less than a day,” Vivienne swallowed. “Once Sera deems you unnecessary, death comes swiftly.”
“And you two just… watched it happen?” Kasula interjected with a disbelieving laugh. “You turned on your own adoptive father. Pretty damn heartless.”
Momo bit her lip, mentally groaning as she gave the elf another hard stare.
“And what would you have done?” Vivienne barked back, levitating out of her seat an inch to bear her teeth towards Kasula. The elf only smiled. She’s doing this on purpose, Momo realized. Teasing out information by playing with her emotions. It was totally evil, unethical, terrible and also – it was working. “We had no choice. Sera would have mummified us just the same. Also, we were children. She told us, under her mentorship, we’d become powerful beyond belief. That we’d be able to bring back not just the dead – but the souls of the dead – like Hobert’s soul.”
That piqued Momo’s interest. “And did you?” she asked softly, directing Vivienne’s attention – and her fury – away from Kasula. “Did she teach you how to bring souls back from the Nether?”
“No,” Vivienne said coldly. “It was a lie, obviously. No one can do that. Not without Morgana’s permission slip, at least.”
Momo hummed. That aligned with what Valerica had told her about the Nether Pool: the shimmering liquid cauldron that allowed her to fetch souls from Earth, or as she liked to call it, the Other-World. It seemed that souls could be ripped between the universes without issue, but not directly from the Nether. The Nether was Morgana’s domain, and she was terribly territorial.
“Okay,” Momo said, racking her brain to remember the rest of the questions she wanted answered. Urgh. This is why she should have bought a bulk package of that ADHD-curing tea from Drachenheim. Unfortunately, the tea had worn off before she could remember to buy it. It was an eternal circle of executive functionless suffering. “So the Holy Resistance. What’s her end-goal there? And how does it connect to the…” Momo lowered her voice, “the box?”
Kasula gave her an intrigued look, but said nothing. Momo had yet to mention it to her.
“Sera’s goal has been the same from the very beginning,” Vivienne said, the mirth in her voice only increasing. “It’s the thing she keeps failing miserably at—to be beloved. Or, at the very least, to be feared enough to be beloved. It’s exactly what she did to me and Nia, only she wants it on the grandest scale. She wants to agonize and torture enough souls that they come crawling to her on their knees with roses in their mouth. She wants to hold the entirety of humanity in the palm of her hand, and then look back at Morgana and say, hey look at me. Aren’t I special?”
After that, a silence like death plagued the room. Momo wasn’t sure what else to ask, Vivienne wasn’t sure what else to say.
“But I would be wary of one thing, Momo,” Vivienne said, finally. Her eyes moved off the door and towards Momo’s pouch, where the dismal cube was stored. “If the box hasn’t activated yet, there’s a reason for it. Sera… she must be waiting for something. Unless you want to end up inside it, twisted miserably around all the other sorry soul chains, I’d suggest you find out what.”