Momo apprehensively descended the stairs. The skeletons walked ahead, mindless, their bones clunking against the narrow corridor. The deeper they delved, the louder the echo, and the more that a chill began to envelop her, hugging her from all sides.

Kezko trailed his fingers along the rough rock walls reverentially. He seemed to have history with this place. Or, at the very least, an affection for it.

“How much do you know about sirens?” he asked.

Momo huffed out a laugh.

“Oh, so now you want to talk about them?”

Despite Momo’s incessant asking about the creatures on the ride over, Kezko had shared very little. She imagined he had a reason for this, but she also imagined it was not a reason she’d like.

It reminded her of how Valerica taught—through tests. First, the ridiculous digging through the dirt, now this question, unprompted.

The fact that he’d decided to bring it up now made dread creep up her spine.

They had to be close.

“I know you disagree, but I strongly believe that it is best to discuss relevant information as close to the event as possible,” he said as they finally came to the end of the staircase, exiting onto a level floor. “It keeps things fresh in the mind. So, I take it that you know nothing at all?”

She wavered in between yes and no. Momo had studied mythological creatures during one semester at college. It was an art course intended to give students an opportunity to get adventurous with anatomy, to play with size and proportion. At the time, Momo had preferred not to get adventurous with, well, anything, illustrations included, so she had spent the length of the semester drawing birds with slightly oversized beaks.

But sirens… she had seen them in her textbook, even if she hadn’t deigned to draw them: fish women who sang sailors to death. They were uncomplicated in design: half fish, half beauty queen. She hadn’t been very interested in them then. They had just seemed like another mythologized male fantasy; nothing but a redundant trope about beautiful women, unmasked—the rotten core lying beneath.

“I don’t know much, no.”

As they turned another corner, light poured in. It was a cavern they had entered, lit not by torches, but by a mysterious, glowing lake. Frozen grass surrounded the body of water, and supernaturally large icicles hung from the cavern’s domed ceiling.

She pressed her fingers to her cheeks, and they felt frigid; her breath, coming out in slow puffs, emerged like white vapor. It was as cold as winter in the arctic.

“It’s freezing in here,” she said, hugging herself. “How is the lake not frozen over?”

“That would make it very difficult for Ms. Baumfreund to come up for a snack, now wouldn’t it?”

Momo did not like the insinuation there. Nor did she enjoy the sight of human bones littering the lake’s edge. The two conjoined to create a very specific image.

“You were telling me about sirens,” Momo reminded him impatiently while she watched the water. It was unmoving. Stagnant. For now. “They’re supposed to be like… singing fish women, right? Lots of scales, beautiful faces, fanged teeth?”

He gave her an impressed look. “How apt. You certainly know your legendary monsters.”

Momo grimaced. From an outdated art textbook written by some guy in upstate New York, sure.

“That’s all I know, though. How do they attack? How big are they?”

Kezko hummed as they approached the rim of the lake. Momo saw their reflections in the shimmering surface: her, with her white hair, tousled, and him, with his twitching eyeball.

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“She can attack you two ways. Firstly, up close, with her claws, and then from a distance, using psychic magic. It will feel like your ears are ringing,” he instructed. “And they are, well. Big.”

“And how do I kill one?” Momo pressed.

That was the most important part, of course. Survival wouldn’t be enough. She was here for the experience points, and in order to maximize them, heads would have to roll.

He smiled at her mischievously. “I don’t know.”

Momo blinked at him.

“What?” she said, air falling from her lungs. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“That’s the fun of it,” he giggled. “I have no clue. Do you think she would still be alive if such a fact was common knowledge?”

He gestured to the bones on the ground, then at the undead skeletons which were standing at the perimeter. Momo gaped at him, equal parts fear and anger building in her chest.

“How am I supposed to kill something that’s unkillable?” she hissed.

“She’s not unkillable,” he corrected her, suddenly serious. “There are no immortal monsters. Just ones with very long lifespans. I have it on good authority that there used to be many sirens in Alois, thousands of years ago, but they all died, or were killed, somehow. Unfortunately, that somehow has been lost to time. Discovering these lost killing methods, putting them down on paper—that is my mission. For the sake of historical memory.”

Momo could punch him. She took a long, leveling breath in.

“So that list of Excalibur-grade monsters you have,” she said, her hands balling into fists. “Is just a list of monsters who no one knows how to kill anymore?”

“Precisely!” he said, giddy. “Hence my lack of answers during our little carriage ride.”

“Kezko, I told you I wanted to find a way to level up quickly, not how to die quickly—”

She was cut off by a long, languid note echoing throughout the cave. The icicles clinging to the ceiling shattered, bats skittered and fled. The Siren’s note fell sharp and heady on Momo’s eardrums, engulfing her with an overwhelming sweetness—like all icing without any cake. She found herself unwittingly searching the room for the source of it.

As she whipped her head from side to side, a faint wind blew over the grass. The lake, which had been stagnant before, was now rippling softly, like someone had skipped a dozen stones across its surface. A sense of foreboding crept up her spine.

Kezko’s frigid fingers placed something in her palm.

“You might need these,” he said.

She looked down, then fixed him with a glare that said I’m not done with you yet.

He had given her two small lumps of wax.

Earplugs.

She hurriedly forced them into her ears, the Siren’s sound dulling, but not completely.

Something flicked across the water.

She readied her rapier, her eyes fervidly tracking it. A splash to the left, a splash to the right. It looked like a frog that was jumping from lilypad to lilypad, only there was no frog—there was nothing. Between movements, there was only stillness, silence.

The water at Momo’s feet gurgled. Two pure white pupils stared back at her from below.

Momo dodged back urgently, but not urgently enough. A giant snake erupted from the water, spraying water in a furious torrent. The humongous wave crashed over Momo, and she was instantly soaked through. Freezing damp cloth clung to her skin as the serpent stalled in the air.

Blinking through her wet eyelashes, Momo’s eyes raked up the scaled, beefy body of the cylindrical creature, until her eyes finally halted. A human-like torso sprung from the tail of the beast, a naked, flat expanse of blue skin that extended into arms, then a head.

The head belonged to a woman—or something like a woman. The creature’s lips were full, and her eyes had dark creases that resembled swooped eyeliner. Chaotic mats of seaweed hair sprung from her scalp, and blue scales jutted out of her cheekbones, giving her a jagged but striking silhouette. She was beautiful, powerful, terrifying.

She was everything Momo ever read about, but alive.

A completely strange, unbidden thought crossed Momo then, at just how incredibly lucky she suddenly felt. Lucky to witness this creature, this woman, this myth. Because, as it turned out, what had been so artfully depicted in her textbook was not a product of the human imagination, but of human telepathy: the universal fact that, even though someone from Earth may never visit Alois, memories floated between the two worlds, ever-malleable.

It was evidence that the Nether was not just a place where people went to die. It was a subway system of mortal experience, constantly transiting ideas through multiplexes of universes.

What was a storybook page on Earth was a living, breathing monstrosity before her now.

How beautiful was that?

Pain tore through Momo’s skull as the creature’s lips began to move. Even through her earplugs, Momo could hear the siren’s song. It was angelic, saccharine, almost begging. Begging for Momo to set down her weapon. It was a white flag of a melody, a cry for treaty.

It burned like a needle directly to the brain.

Momo felt her grip weaken. The muscles in her arm were acting without volition, her fingers twitching. She wanted so badly to set it down—to rest, and lie, and sleep.

No.

She gripped the hilt of her sword, and clenched her jaw.

If this altercation became a myth someday, passed across the universal consciousness and into future art textbooks, she wasn’t going to be remembered like all those dumb, ogling sailors. She was going to shape the narrative her way.

And her way started by running the hell away.

“Skeletons,” she yelled, twisting her head to the back of the room. “Charge her!”