Elia found herself in a circle of adolescents dressed as knockoff legionnaires, ancient philosophers, and entrepreneurial tradeswomen. Their costumes were fancy, their gazes rich with curiosity. Within seconds, they had swamped the new and unfamiliar girl, tightening the circle around her like piranhas ravenous for gossip.
More importantly, they were also blocking access to the pudding.
“She’s so pretty. Is she from outside? She really is?” a girl with pretty pearl earrings asked. “From where? How far away?”
“Umm…” Elia umm-ed gracefully.
“Is she a guest of honor?” another one asked. “Look at her arm, she’s a knight. Did she already sign the pact?”
“No way!” another answered. “She has to be a princess. Are you a princess?”
“Two hundred souls she’s a dreg they found in a crypt.”
“Alright, first off, nobody ‘found’ me, and not in a crypt either. I come from the maze.” Her crowd of kids oohed. “And clearly, I am here for only one reason: Because I’m awesome.”
“Not as awesome as a gun.” One of the kids said, conjuring an old gun barrel and shooting it in her general vicinity.
He didn’t hit. “What the fuck!?”
“Language,” the little psycho said. He couldn’t be older than twelve. He giggled as he aimed his conjured weapon again.
“Aaack!”
The others had already cleared his firing line. They had planned this. It was an ambush by little psychotic kids. Elia was not about to have ‘death by toddler’ on her record and so she ducked, jumped, and dodged over the next shots.
The kid was laughing all the while, up until Elia caught his barrel and bonked him over the head with it. “Bad kid. No shooting people, please?”
The kid fell over like a sack of potatoes, and the others burst out in cackling laughter. Her heart fell. Did… did she just murder a child?
One of his friends pulled his lolling head up, then tipped a plastic bottle filled with water into his mouth. Within seconds, life returned to the kids’ eyes, and he looked up at Elia who had thrown his conjured gun away.
“There. That’ll hopefully be a lesson,” she said, not really feeling great about triumphing over a bunch of kids. “Anybody else want to try me?”
That only served as the starting shot. Every kid wanted to show off their cool boons and whatnot to the woman who just would not get hit. Apparently, violence was a lot more socially acceptable when there were no lasting consequences to it.
Elia picked up the lid of a kitchen pot as a makeshift shield. In short order, she had blocked: A conjured ice arrow. A flaming fist. Two stabs and a kick. Three ghostly bulldog pups conjoined by an umbilical cord. A rock. And a rock with googly eyes.
Some jokester took her frantic parrying as an opportunity to underhand-toss her a bowl of pudding. She almost fumbled it, freaked out by the blatant risk of wasting good pudding, whereas the Rye-part of her was freaked out because it was served in glass bowls. Her gauntlet arm blurred as she snatched it out of the air and wouldn’t you know it, that was impressive enough to warrant throwing two more her way.
Good thing she knew how to juggle, too. The ludicrous amount of time she had on her hands while in the maze was not going to waste after all. The attacks ebbed out as her audience watched her toss the pudding without losing a single drop. It was surprisingly easy to keep two bowls in the air, their contents sticking to them through the inertia while she caught, swapped, then tossed a third in after.
‘Holy shit, I could do so much more.’
She wasn’t as rusty as she should have been. In fact, she was better than before, much, much better. The amount of fine coordination that had been lost only really hit her now, after using her minor shard.
“She’s just a performer!” A precocious boy with too well-cut hair hollered as Elia took out a spoon. “What’re you gonna do with that, duel someone?”
“Hey, isn’t that the girl who beat Zane in a duel with just a spoon?” Some jokester crowed from the back lines, causing the boy to swallow as he backed off.
Rumors were quick to spread here. It occurred to her that now that she had survived the initial onslaught, maybe she should try to stand out less. ‘The nail that stands out gets hammered in’. The other adults were not directly looking her way, but she didn’t think they needed to be. A quick glance confirmed that they all had ways of surveilling her without looking. Some had shadowy familiars, or were looking at her through the reflections in the glass bowls. One lady even had an eye in the back of her head that blinked before blending in like a chameleon.
Everyone had at least one good boon here, even the children. This was high undead society, emphasis on high. Some part of Elia looked at herself and thought herself lesser. All that effort she had gone through, and she still only had a handful of boons that didn’t work well together. Maybe it was easier if you had a hundred people to trade with, or maybe these people walked the road slowly and steadily over years.
On the one hand, she must have been fairly boring. On the other hand, her juggling skills were real and awesome.
“Show us a trick, show us a trick!” a younger kid with orange hair chanted. “Not like the pink fiddle-piper. He’s such a bore.”
With her spoon in one hand, she took a spoonful of pudding every time a bowl came close enough to her mouth. Elia was surprised, but not disappointed to find that it wasn’t vanilla, but a fruity lemon mix. Another wave of ooh’s and aah’s reverberated throughout her audience.
“Why is she here?” A boy with a broken crown mused to her face. “She doesn’t look like a hero from the before, and if she were a hero now, we would have heard of her. What’s your name? What can you do?”
“Elia.” She said, talking in between bites. “But sometimes, I go by Rye.”
“An alter ego. A superhero,” The girl with earrings gushed. “Or a villain. Do you fight crime or commit crime?”
“Both?” She thought about all the dead dregs and plundered loot. “Mostly desecrating the dead and grave robbing?”
“Everybody does that,” the girl grumped. “When I’m grown up, I’ll be a bona-fide looter like my parents.”
“Oh.” Right, the medieval zombie apocalypse must have created a slew of odd career options for young undead. “Nice.”
Elia juggled some more. Two bowls were empty already, which meant she had to be more careful to adjust for their reduced weight. “By the way, how old are you all?”
The result was from anywhere between eleven and seventeen. She realized then that the comparison with piranhas was apt; besides what they could do with their boons, not one of them had less than two knives she could see. Maybe they learned self-defense at school, assuming they even had school. The threat of dying over and over again to some random undead likely outweighed the threat of kids stabbing each other once or twice.
Elia smiled. She could fit in with people who enjoyed knives and other sharp things.
Suddenly, a completely decked-out marble statue burst into the group of children.
“Guys, look! It’s me, Nathan! I snuck away with my dad’s backup body. Look at what I can do!” The boy inside the greek athlete’s statue flexed his stone muscles, pretending like he was some mister universe.
Elia watched the kids’ interest acquire a new target. They were off her in a heartbeat and onto the marble man, trying to find out how many kids his artificial body could carry.
“Attention spans really are sinking,” Elia mumbled as she ate her last bowl of pudding in peace. She was just about to sample the next delicacy when she noticed two people beeline it towards her. They looked like twins, brown hair cut to shoulder-length curls on the woman, and in a short mop of the same on the man.
“I see you’re not too cool to hang out with the little ones.” The woman remarked. “Or survive them. You might not recognize me without the mask. I’m–”
“Cat!” Elia pointed at her with a spoon, then at her companion. “And you’re Crow.”
“We have names, actually,” the man said, but it did not matter. They were already the heckling pair of Cat and Crow in her mind.
“So, Cat, Crow, are you the reason why I’ve been feeling watched all this evening?”
The twins shared a look between each other.
“I think that might be our resident house’s protégé,” Cat remarked with a wry grin. “You really did a number on poor ol’ Zane. Who ever knew he was into the dominant type?”
Elia blinked. “You’re saying he likes getting his ass beat?”
“She’s saying that he is currently staking you out from the punch bowl over there,” Crow said matter-of-factly. “He lost a bet on whether he could seduce the secrets out of you. Lo and behold, you plucked one straight from his heart instead. Now he’s on watch-the-new-girl duty, and for once he’s not dragging his feet.”
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Elia blinked. “Alright. First off, this place is weird and creepy. And second off, romance is the last thing I’m looking for.” And somehow it was the main thing she was attracting, besides odd questions and poorly hidden stares. “I don’t even get what there’s to like about me, except my body, which doesn’t even technically belong to me.”
“Oh girl, but you have that and more.” Cat stretched, innocently guiding Elia’s gaze to a group of bachelors and bachelorettes dressed like ancient Greek wrestlers. A few of them turned their head. They had been checking her out. “That is your league. When one of them approaches you, they’ll see a sweet girl with fire in her eyes. They’ll be in for a penny, in for more, and most of them have never been burnt before.”
Elia did her best impression of a cow as she stared at her, munching on some indiscernible greens. “What?”
“What my sister is trying to say is that you’re hot, and you look like a total sub, but IRL you kick ass.” Elia chuckled. She was starting to like them. They had a nice dynamic going on. Must have taken a lot of practice to get right. “You have, what some educated folk might say, ‘mad rizz potential’.”
“Okay.” Elia took a few seconds to process, which Cat took as an opportunity to press a pair of glasses filled with bubbly liquid into her hands. “Alcohol?”
“Champagne.” Cat shrugged. “It’s an import.”
“The alcohol, or the region?” Elia chuckled, but the only answer to her joke was a pair of smiles. “Oh no. Oh please don’t tell me–“
Crow nodded all too happily. “Yes. A god liked some of the photos we had – we were on a class trip when we were summoned – and sure enough, they made a replica, down to the shape and color of the hills. They mostly did it due to the promise of good booze, and boy were they not disappointed. Camille once said it is subpar, but eh, she complains about everything.”
Elia gaped at the casualness with which he explained it to her.
“B-but, but that’s insane. And this,” she pointed to her glass of champagne, “this is plagiarism.”
“It’s also pretty good,” Crow pointed out and took a sip.
She had to admit, they were right. Her imagination plus bowl water could never get even close to this.
“You say there’s alcohol in this, but I’m barely feeling it.”
The twin pair looked at each other again. One bout of nonverbal communication later had Cat speaking up. “This is the ‘soft’ type, for normal people. We didn’t know your level of tenacity. There is some stronger stuff if you’d like, stuff that could knock out giants.”
She pointed over her shoulder, where a ten foot giantess was already fast asleep, happily hugging a sloshing barrel to her chest.
“Let’s keep it safe for now.” This was only the second time she’d had alcohol anyways. “The party isn’t going anywhere.”
“Not at all, not at all. We’re partying for another full week, thanks to a certain someone. To the princess!” Crow crowed and gained an echo of toasts all around.
The duo flanked her and laid their arms around her. “Now, you on the other hand are a slippery fish to catch.”
“That’s cause I’m an independent fish. I make my own flow,” Elia said, looking at her feet and hoping to the gods that she wasn’t sounding too stupid. “Not so sure where it’s going right now though. Not sure I even know what this place is, besides a haven for outsiders apparently.”
“Outsiders do fit in the most, ironically.” Cat purred.
“How about an exchange of gossip?” Crow asked. “Tit for tat. We tell you about the pact, and all you have to tell us is what exactly brought you here.”
“Alright,” Elia said, steering the duo towards the nearest buffet table. “First question then: Where does all this food come from?”
“Dregs. Thousands and thousands of our dregs patrol outside, hunting critters and slowly pulling their corpses back. Undeath preserves, but without good cooks, everything tastes like old jerky. Thousands more dregs work at our hidden gardens, coaxing plants to grow where they otherwise wouldn’t with the help of boons.” Crow stared at her as she slurped up a crab leg. “By the look on your face, you can’t imagine how that would be possible.”
Elia slowly nodded. Thousands of agriculture dregs. That was a lot of food. “The dregs I’ve met either tried to murder me or didn’t seem smart enough for agriculture.”
Cat smiled. “It’s all a symptom of the curse taking pieces of you over time. You can fight it of course, but in this dreary world, you can lose a lot by just giving up. What that leaves is a dreg, and dregs are creatures of repetition, creatures that lust for souls. Make them do one thing, then feed them a soul or two, and slowly but surely they’ll remember to repeat that action in the hopes of getting more souls.”
“They’ve got the intelligence of a particularly dumb dog.” Crow added. “And that’s the better ones, the ones you can teach to wait for a plant to grow before they harvest it.”
Elia chewed as she thought on why that morally squicked her. “Not sure how I feel about enslaving the feeble minded.”
“It’s all part of the pact,” said Cat. “If you lose yourself and become a dreg, then you will be put to use for your friends and family. I wouldn’t want to fall, but considering the alternatives, I’d wager we’re among the better ones.”
There was truth to that. Being a dreg forced to mindless servitude sounded a whole lot better than being flayed and set on fire like the 41st legion did it, being turned into a goopy knight, or whatever it was that Rhuna did.
‘I hope the three legionnaires are alright.’ She thought as her companions sat down on a roman-styled couch to flank her.
“Now, that was two questions, so we’ll ask you two in turn.” Cat popped a grape in her mouth. “Who are you and what brought you here?”
“I’m Elia, from Portland. And I dunno,” Elia said, because she did not know. “What do you think brought me here?”
“The princess.” Crow blurted out. “I mean, come on, we’re all partying in the name of Karla’s return, and the new person who shows up somehow isn’t related to her? The odds are astronomical and – oh look, the house of fire is putting on a show.”
They watched a line of people prance on by. All of them had some boon or magical tool that allowed them to manipulate fire as if it were liquid, on a string, or connected to an invisible torch-stick. People looked on in amusement as the children tried and failed to interact with a flame that turned out to be some sort of illusion. When they had passed, Elia realized that both the alcohol was starting to work and that also something else was niggling her.
“Where is Karla?”
“Likely in her tower.” She stared at Cat, who didn’t seem to want to clarify for an uncomfortable long time. Too bad for her, Elia was a master of defeating even toads in staring contests. “Camille has probably locked her in, and if not, then she’s under heavy scrutiny. She never leaves much anyways.”
“Because she doesn’t have a reason to?”
“Because otherwise everyone would be–“
They all stared at where a second wave of commotion was parting the crowd. From on high there came a woman with short, black curls, red clasps ornamenting her splendid roman tunic. Her red laurels echoed her eyes and contrasted her immaculate black lipstick. There was something about her that was more real than everyone else, as if she was from a different plane of existence, as if even the most frivolous of nobles was nothing more than an ant to her.
“Is that her? The bloody princess?” A witch who was half salamander whispered. “She-who-gives-wounds?”
“Wasn’t aware she’s allowed among people,” a tall guy commented through a handkerchief. “Is it safe to be this close? Where are her bodyguards?”
“And look at those laurels. Pretentious.” A woman with olive skin scrunched her nose. “She ought to be kept far away, not out in the open.”
The throng of nobility parted, and she let her eyes wash over them before alighting on the one person happily waving at her among the hundreds of others that weren’t. Everyone did a double take as she stepped on over to the trio.
Karla, who looked only somewhat smaller from up close, fidgeted in place. This was her party and she was the person least welcome to it. Elia meanwhile heard all the rumors, every single one, before deciding that in this situation there was only one kind of person she’d like to be.
“Karla!” She opened her arms and embraced her in a big hug, lifting the girl off her feet. “Look at you go, girl. You’re like a little gothy roman goddess. And you didn’t overdo the eyeliner either! Let me tell you, you’ve avoided a big beginner's mistake right there.”
“Um, ok.” Karla squeaked, “G-glad you like it?”
Everyone went silent, as if they’d just seen a child walk in with a bomb. A big bomb.
‘Let them watch. The nicer I treat Karla, the worse they’ll feel about themselves.’
She turned to Cat and Crow, who looked like they were just about ready to bolt and fly away respectively. Having newly empowered strength proved useful as she snagged them by their collars and reeled them into a four-headed huddle.
“Cat, Crow, meet Karla, princess of the maroon pact, future savior of the world, and overall good girl.”
“Shhh, don’t say that!” Karla hissed. “I’m not a savior yet, and it’s supposed to be a secret. And what is that last part about?”
“What? It’s true.”
“You’re acting so weird right now. You are Elia, right?” Elia nodded and Karla turned red as a cherry. “Oh. Oh gosh, oh gee, oh–.”
Someone cleared their throat.
“Oh great and mighty princess Karla, please don’t kill us humble peons,” Crow whimpered. “We can make you laugh, we have a bit.”
“We can also slander your enemies.” Cat added. “Need gossip spread? Rumors? If your foes are low, we can go lower.”
“Aww, that’s so sweet,” Elia cooed. “But that won’t be necessary, because Karla is too good to have enemies. If there were someone unfortunate enough to already be spreading lies about my friend here, that would be unfortunate. Very unfortunate.”
“Elia,” Karla coughed. “You’re squeezing me a bit hard.”
Crow and Cat looked at each other. “What is your… exact relationship with Karla?”
“We’re friends,” she said, squeezing Karla until she sounded like a balloon losing air. “Good friends.”
Cat and Crow looked at each other a bit more knowingly this time.
“How? HOW!?” Cat spluttered while Crow shook his head.
“What did I say? Mad rizz.”
Karla beamed. “Yes! Elia is the rizziest of them all. She is so rizz-ful. And she has an entire heroic portfolio!”
“But enough about me,” Elia said. “I’m more interested in why everyone treats Karla like dogshit.”
“I want to know too!” Karla added. “All my life, everybody has been scared of me, has talked behind my back. I never did find out why, and additionally, additionally, Auntie Camille always holds me back from attending social events and such, which means I can’t even defend myself from this slander. And then there are the rumors.”
Elia’s smile turned ever more strained. She turned to the duo. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
They shriveled under her gaze. They were right to be afraid, but not of their princess.
“We may be aware of a thing or two,” Crow whispered. “We can tell you exactly who has been spreading what, when, and how.”
Elia’s grin turned feral. “Good. Then that means we have some targets. Gentlemen, ladies, personally, I am disgusted by the methods of which our fair princess’ name has so thoroughly been pulled through the mud. I propose that someone ought to do something about it.”
“Wouldn't that get us in trouble?” Cat asked. “Some of these people are big fish in the pact.”
Elia sent a meaningful look to Karla. Despite hesitating, her excitement that someone was going to do something was palpable. “Don’t worry, if anything happens, we have a princess on our side. And we’re just giving them what they gave our girl. That’s just entirely legal self defense.”