In the days following her trip to the library, Momo prepared everything for her ascendance.
The biggest matter of all was, of course, transferring queenship. It was a whole lot of paperwork, and involved quite a few speeches to the public; luckily, the recent destruction of the queendom meant that the public was largely out of town, so Momo only had to deliver her speeches to a few skeletons and a Mekna Gazette journalist, who did the rest of the work spreading it across the continent.
“And how long will it be until I see you again?” Sumire said, holding Momo’s wrists and looking at her with preemptive annoyance. “Days, months, my entire lifetime?”
Momo laughed at her. “Don’t be silly. To you, it’ll probably be seconds. Remember how it was last time? When I teleported out just as the Wraith Box fired? As far as I understand it, time in the Nether doesn’t really correspond to time out here.”
“It better not,” Sumire said, softening at Momo’s reassurance. “I don’t want to be an old lady by the time I see you again. I have plans for that new shapeshifting form you told me about.”
Momo blushed the color of the sun, and Sumire just laughed, throwing her head back.
Vivienne approached the pair of them, slinging her arm warmly around Sumire’s shoulders.
“I promise,” Vivienne cut in, giving a wry look at the pirate. “Your queendom is in safer hands than just hers, Momo.”
Sumire shrugged her off. “You wound me. I will run this place like a capable ship captain.”
“Run it into an iceberg, sure,” Vivienne teased.
Momo beamed at them.
It was hard to imagine these two being so chummy many months ago, but looking at them now, the perfect balance of organized chaos, Momo could imagine no other pair more capable to run her city. Their partnership looked nothing but comfortable and inevitable—with Vivienne balancing out Sumire’s impulsivity, and Sumire taking charge when Vivienne found herself incapable of plowing forward.
A partnership that would have never happened without Momo’s ‘insufferable forgiveness and tireless mercy,’ as Nia would put it.
A tiny flame of hope kindled in Momo’s chest.
She prayed that she could do the same for one goddess and her very dangerous cat.
—
In the middle of the endless desert, where the sun never set and no water ever ran, was a castle. Surrounded on all sides by the finest goldest granules of sand, and guarded by hundreds of men in suits of fine armor, the castle enjoyed its first visitor in many months.
“Your lordship. I return from Morganium with news.”
Venice bowed before the throne, his eyes squinting. Even for a dokkaebi, accustomed as they are to going rapidly between various different biomes of existence, the eye-piercing sun was a heavy contrast to the usually polite darkness of the Nether.
The jingle of a bell panged in front of him, followed by a hiss. As Venice’s eyes adjusted to the brutal light, he made out the familiar form of a cat sitting on the throne, bones jagged and exposed, pawing at a bell-toy. The toy was held out to him by one of the cat’s loyal guards, as a knight might offer his king a sword.
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After a few continued minutes of pawing and hissing, the cat sighed.
“This bell tires me,” he said. “Find me a new one.”
“Of course, Lord Kyros.”
The knight bowed deeply, almost to the point of falling over, and shuffled off toward a warchest at the end of the room. The chest at first looked like something that might hold fancy weaponry or choice poisons, but quickly revealed itself to be stuffed with all manners of cat toys: fishing hooks with fake worms at the end, rattlers, light beam pointers. The knight bent down on the ground and fished slowly and carefully through them, as if his choice might just decide the fate of the world.
And, well, given present company—it just might have.
Kyros straightened rigidly in his throne. It completely dwarfed him with its enormous size, making him seem like a chair accessory more than an all-powerful feline tyrant.
“Well, don’t just stand there and stare,” he said tiredly to Venice. “Is the girl dead yet? Did she succumb to my unwavering heatwave and finally wither away?”
Venice gave the cat a tight smile.
“Unfortunately, your highness… no. On the contrary, she is alive and well, and from the looks of it, she is planning to ascend any minute now.”
The feline leaned forward sharply, his eyes opening wide. Two tiny suns existed in each of his eye sockets, and they burned Venice just to gaze at.
“Then why didn’t you finish the job?”
Venice’s smile got even tighter.
“Sir, as I’ve said, I cannot kill a fellow Nether dokkaebi. Even if her form has changed. It’s one of the rules that Morgana introduced when she first created us.”
Kyros hissed, his forked tongue protruding from his mouth. Tornados began sweeping the grounds outside the castle. Sand furiously whipped the walls.
“Morgana cowers in a corner of the Nether, powerless and weak, and yet she still continues to bind me,” he growled. “I am the most powerful being in the universe, Venice. I should be able to put down a little girl.”
“Of course, your lordship.”
“No—not of course. I should be able to, yet I haven’t been able to.”
Kyros shimmered in the sunlight, and his body began to twist and expand. Bones cracked and muscle whined. His small feline ribcage became that of a human, of a man; his skull went from slender to full, the bones of his arms multiplied and grew.
The skeleton of a cat became the skeleton of a man—an undead man.
A guard quickly came up behind him and dressed him in a regal robe of gold. The robe had a puffy white fur collar, and embroidered suns dancing all the way down its silk hem. Kryos shrugged it on with gruff impatience, and stood, towering over Venice and taking the dokkaebi by the collar of his shirt, hoisting him up.
“No matter how I shape and arrange myself,” he said coldly, practically spitting in Venice’s grimacing face. “No matter how many gods of the pantheon lay their loyalty down at my feet, I still feel utterly powerless. All because of an agreement I forged with that woman. All because of the rules I so naively agreed to. Rules that we would not harm mortals directly. Rules that we would let mortals settle mortal disputes. That we would serve as shepherds to these playthings, that we would require their piety and their attention, but nothing more.”
Venice began to choke, but Kyros only leaned closer.
“You are so lucky, Venice, that I gave you this chance. That I invited you to my side,” he said. “I could have had you ostracized for delivering that letter, just like I’ve done to the rest of your kind. Instead, I saw an opportunity. That girl—Momo—she will trust you now. When she arrives here, you will be first to greet her. You will discover what she knows. What she plans. I have not been able to kill her yet, no. But with your help, we will do worse than that.”
“Sir, if I may,” Venice interjected, voice hoarse. “There are more drastic measures you could take on Alois. Actions to stop her from ascending at all. You could level Morganium with sandstorms, or perhaps compel one of the weather deities to create conditions for a famine in Aloysius—”
“Silence.”
The castle’s walls shook with the power of an earthquake. Kyros dropped Venice, and he collapsed to the floor. The dokkaebi’s hand flew to his chest, catching his breath. Even though there was no oxygen in the Nether, the body still operated on the assumption that there was—in this between-place, perceived pain was just as real as the real thing.
Kyros sank back into his throne, bony fingers wrapping around the arms of the chair.
“She has shown us that no matter what catastrophe I throw at her, she will persist. She will persist and—beyond that—she will take the pitiful hand I’ve dealt her and turn it into a house of cards. I will not give her further ammunition to become more powerful. No.”
He began to shrink back into his original form. As his hands receded, his talons clawed long, deep marks into the arms of his throne.
“She might have been protected by mortal law before…”
The two suns in his eyes burned.
“But she enters my domain now.”