Karla looked like she was about to implode. “We’re in so much trouble! Oh geez, oh man, I think I’m going to be sick. Sick!”
“Calm down Karla. Deep breaths. Find your center. Do you know how to meditate?” Karla shook her head. Elia clicked her tongue. “Well, I’m not qualified to teach you. But I can tell you to take deep breaths. Slowly.” The girl calmed down just enough to start talking. “Alright, tell me what happened.”
“Ok. So, um, the last thing I remember is us talking on top of a roof. Then I woke up inside a fountain, and the spymaster’s men were surrounding me and everyone was yelling. They pulled you out of the water and you were bleeding and I thought ‘oh no, I did it again, I killed someone’, but then it wasn’t as bad as I thought, except Auntie Camille had a talk with me and she was very mean a-and she called me a ‘bad girl’ and said I was grounded!”
Karla looked up at her with wet puppy-dog eyes. Clearly, she was traumatized beyond belief by such a heavy punishment. Elia pulled her into a hug and for once, it didn’t feel wrong.
“Your aunt was exaggerating.” Elia said, patting her back. “You’re not scary at all Karla. What happened was my fault, not yours.”
“That’s very nice of you,” Karla said, wiping away a streak of tears. “But I know it’s not true. I did this.”
“Hey, it’s unfair to judge you for something you don’t even remember.”
“I could just have a bad memory!” Karla countered.
“Nope.” Elia sighed. The girl was clinging to her like a limpet. Maybe there was some trauma behind it all. She should have taken it seriously from the start. “You’ve got a second person in your head, like me with Rye. Except when it wakes up, you go to sleep.”
Karla’s mouth gaped open and closed. “So, that’s it. That’s it!? No one ever bothered to tell me. No one!”
She squeezed a bit tighter, but it felt like Elia was put into a hydraulic press. “Karla. Air.”
“S-sorry.” She seemed to collect herself a little, which was to say that she leaned into Elia instead of clinging to her for dear life. “I hate this place. When I’m awake, people avoid me. They say I’m their princess, but it’s like they just want me to sit in my tower and look pretty. When I sleep, I always dream of being lost in a great sea. I sit there on my island and watch the waves watching me, judging. I don’t do anything but build sandcastles, but the waves just keep growing larger and larger, threatening to wash me away.”
Elia didn’t know what to say to that. “Well, maybe you’re glad we killed Yolon then? No more dreams since then. Happy little accidents and whatnot?”
Karla stayed poignantly silent. Her grip around Elia’s wrist tightened painfully.
“Oh. It wasn’t an accident,” Elia said, realizing too late that she said it out loud. Karla had lead them there on purpose.
“Don’t be mad.” Karla whispered. “Please.”
She wasn’t even looking at Elia. “Mad? Why would I be mad?”
“Think it through. You’ll get there. Everyone finds a reason to be mad at me in the end.” Karla turned away. “I think that’s why my mother left us all behind.”
Elia thought it through. She really did. “Nope. I don’t see it. Our bags are full of loot, Rye and I have found a way to split into two bodies once she’s recovered from gaining god-powers, and I got a taste of what a normal life is like. That’s worth something, isn’t it?”
“Not worth starting a war.” Karla muttered. “Not worth removing dreams from the world.”
“I’ll be honest with you Karla, I’d start ten wars if it just meant I got to live the past few days over again.” Though the dream part was slightly more worrying. Rye had the shard of dreams, but dreams were not working. Similarly, the god of princesses was dead, but his old rules still had to be obeyed. There was something she was not getting here, perhaps something only people who had a shard could get.
She looked up at the message still notifying her that two gods were watching. Or maybe that was broken too, like a glitch in the system.
Idly, she stroked Karla’s hair.“There’s lots of bad in the world, Karla. You’re not part of it.”
“And Rye said you were the mean and grumpy one.” Karla sniffled one last time “To me, you seemed like angels sent from on high. I heard of times when the gods still did that, sent their servants to mend the rifts between mortals. Then the cracks became larger, and the people more unthankful. The rest is history. You can read it yourself. I have a lot of books.”
She gestured to a bookcase, though Elia could barely make it out between the gloom of the room. She pulled away the curtains. They were on Karla’s squat tower, on the top floor. One could still see the festivities still going on in her honor. If you squinted hard enough, you could even see the faces of everyone below smeared in smiles of drunken stupor.
Here was a paradise, and Karla was not invited. They were afraid of her power, and yet they were oblivious that insults and gossip could be ten times worse than outright stabbing her.
She tore her attention away from the window in favor of Karla’s prodigious book collection. Book was the wrong word, as while one bookcase was modestly filled with traditional literature, two entire walls were nearly overflowing from the collected comics and mangas.
“Holy shit.” Elia said. “Did you use interdimensional magic to summon comic books!?”
“Not me.” Karla fidgeted, though she managed a small prideful smirk. “The academy of Yorivale did. They conjured a lot of things, before Yolon went and… changed.”
Elia wiped a tear from her eyes. “I think I found El Dorado.”
“El Dorado is over there.” Karla pointed at an old, like really old superhero comic, from the sixties. “Most of the stories are incomplete. I do have a few volumes of spiky hairdo man.”
Elia opened a Dragonball volume with reverence. “Wait, why is this in Portuguese?”
Karla gasped. “You can read it?”
“No, nope.” Elia flipped it on its head just in case she was going crazy. “I’m an American-only speaking kind of person. I’m also fluent in British.”
Karla giggled. “Why did you say that so weirdly?”
“What, Bri’ish? Brish? Brit-tish? Oh shiver me timbers, I dropped me crumpets and cream.” At her continued laughter, Elia pivoted into a southern accent. “Well howdy-do, what can I do fer you fine feathered fellow? A t-bone an’ peas, some lemon-ade?”
Neither of them could keep themselves back as they devolved into giggling fits. They spent hours reading the comics to each other in exaggerated funny voices, squealing and laughing and crying, until they had forgotten that they were technically locked inside this tower. Comfort had eventually led them from reading on the ground to the table to reading on Karla’s bed, which was a wide, ten by fifteen foot rectangle of pure fluffy goodness.
“And they lived happily ever after.”
Elia finished the last book, some sort of remake of an old fairytale. She was trying quite fiercely to ignore how Karla had scooted ever closer to her, and how she was now staring up with starstruck eyes. A hand brushed along her wrist, pushing her mind over the edge and into a plunge.
“So, your other you. The one I call not–“ she couldn’t call her by name, that was what had summoned her last time. “The other Karla. She told me a few choice things. Private things. Karla, do you have a crush on me?”
This time, she could practically feel the princess’s blush searing her arm.
“And what if I do?” Karla asked.
Ever the charming individual, Elia knew exactly what to say. “Oh. Well. Um.”
“Yes?”
“I’m not exactly very well versed in… you know. Stuff. Romance. The inevitable knock-on effects.”
And what was more, she wasn’t sure if this was the time. Didn’t you need to go on a date first? With grim realization, she noted that climbing the academy tower could technically be construed as a date. She should have just stayed in mentor-mode, should have pushed everyone away. It would have been better for everyone involved than whatever was coming next.
Karla simply huffed. “Oh please, Elia, you can’t be worse than me, I am a sheltered princess. I’ve only had two suitors; Timothy, who was a stuttering fool, and Erik, who only ever kissed my cheek once. That’s nothing, you’d have to have exactly zero experience to beat that.”
This time Elia was the one to stay suspiciously silent.
“Really?” Karla brightened up as she straightened until their faces were inches away. “There is something you aren’t good at?”
“Um, w-well,” Elia stammered, turning to the side. She couldn’t chalk this up to Rye’s influence any longer. It was her inexperienced-ass heart beating in a frenzy, it was her who after months and months was slowly learning to be human again. “I couldn’t exactly learn that in a maze.”
“We have books.” Karla whispered, innocent eyes entirely at odds with her alluring gestures. “I haven’t shown you the spicy ones yet. Not even Auntie Camille knows about them. Do you want to see them?”
“Books can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” Elia countered. “I’m over two hundred, Karla!”
“You could be two thousand and I’d still like you. I like you when you’re cool. I like you when you’re silly. I like how you’re still looking out for everyone, even though you always claim otherwise.” Karla tried to catch Elia’s eyes. Elia evaded her gaze up until she squished her cheeks and gently led her forward until their faces were inches apart. “Elia, look at me.”
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
“Nnnh.”
Karla grabbed her chin and slowly turned Elia towards her. “Do you not like me?”
“I don’t know?” But she liked the way she locked her chin in place. The touch, the intimate closeness, the inability to move and twist out of the way. Excitement.
Karla was looking just about as red as Elia was feeling herself. “W-would you think less of me if I made the first move?”
“I don’t know…” Was this love? And if it was not, was that alright?
They stared at each other for an awkwardly long moment. “Don’t move.”
Karla closed in, poised to make a lasting impression on Elia’s heart and Elia let her. She had convinced herself that she was not interested in relationships or sex, because why dream of the impossible? And now that it was, was she even allowed to live like this?
The princess’ soft lips stopped inches away from hers. Karla was straining against some invisible force. Elia felt it as well, like two plus poles of a magnet held against eachother.
“Stupid… princess rules…” Karla muttered through grit teeth, giving up. “I decide what ‘ following proper courting procedures’ means, not some distant princess-shard-owning schmuck!”
“Ummm,” Elia ummed, not sure how to follow up on that. “Maybe we can just cuddle?”
Karla grumbled, but inevitably settled in her arms. She seemed to relax, enjoying it. Elia meanwhile was completely stiff, mind playing loops of all the times she had relaxed in the maze. Death by hidden dagger, death by distant arrow, death by spider, hound, bird, and everything else.
‘Breathe in, breathe out. It’s all in the past now,’ she told herself. ‘I am allowed to be happy. I can let go.’
She did, and for a moment, she was happy. She peered out of the windows and didn’t regret spending her time in here instead of out there.
That was why, when her eyes focused on a streak of movement in the distance, she reacted within milliseconds. She pulled Karla close and tugged her off the bed moments before a shuddering impact shattered their shared moment of bliss.
Stone dust and wood splinters went everywhere. Elia looked up at the bed, where a ten-foot pillar of stone had shredded the exact spot they had been in moments ago. Karla was still in shock when Elia released her from her embrace and went to peek out of the hole it had made in their mountain-facing wall.
The world was chaos. Pillars stuck from every surface like a dropped box of giant toothpicks, uncaring if they impaled buildings or people. Members of the pact ran about, still dressed like Greek gods, shortly before they caught fire, were sliced apart by conjured blades of ice, or simply stabbed in dark alleys.
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit.” She pulled at her hair. Her normal life, her food, her fucking friends. Everything was going down the drain, like it always did, like it always would. Except this time, there was clearly a person who was responsible.
Heya frenemie. Forgot to click ‘send’. Le-mao. If you’re shacking up at Karla’s place, I suggest you keep your head down. Whaaat, this is a totally disproportionate response you say? Fuck you, I liked having dreams during my beauty sleep. Pick you up when I’m done cleaning blood-cultists off my boots!
Toodles~
Rhuna.
Rhuna was out to get her, Rhuna and the gods and the world and everything. And it was her fault.
“Elia?” Karla asked. “What’s happening?”
At the foot of Karla’s tower, a group of lanky individuals broke off from the swamped defenders. Among all this chaos, the threat of violence was the one thing that managed to center Elia’s mind.
“Karla, incoming, about three minutes. We need gear – weapons, armor, everything.”
Karla froze as she saw the devastation for herself.
Elia tapped her cheek. “Hey, eyes on me. Focus, Karla.”
“I have it all here… but three minutes? I cannot don my plate armor in three minutes.”
“Then get something easy to move in and add whatever you can.”
“O-ok.” Karla ducked under her bed and returned with a small lockbox. It was full of rings, the magical kind. “Help yourself. I need to change.”
Elia grabbed a handful, slapping them on in turn.
Ring of the mighty Grug
Amethyst ring
Ring of Grace
Promise band
Witchwood knot
Power ran through her body as they all did… something.
She didn’t have the time to look as she tore through her gear. The pact’s secret service had been so nice as to relocate Elia’s pack of many things here, but Elia didn’t have the time to put on her full armor any time soon either. She settled for a helmet first, then her right bracer, boots and shin guards. She had just finished attaching her left knee guard when she heard an arrhythmic click-clack-clack coming from the hole in the wall.
A plague-masked head peeked over the edge.
“Oh. Guys, I found her!” It said in a cheerful tone. “Hello!”
An echo’s of ‘hi’s’ and ‘hello’s’ came from further down. The intruders had arrived in two minutes, not three. Judging by the number of voices there were easily a dozen of them hanging off the side of the wall. The uppermost one pulled himself up to his full height. He was a lanky nine-foot hulk that jittered like a spider, three hooked blades extending from his hands like claws.
All Elia had was a spoon. A single, slightly bent spoon.
‘Friend, foe, other?’ she thought, her limbs loose and ready. ‘Did they find me, did they find Karla? What’s their goal, how do I win, why are they here, why now, why me?'
A second head popped over the ledge. “Rhuna’s going to give us so many praises.”
Elia didn’t hesitate as she barreled straight into the first intruder. The plague-mask skidded backwards but locked his limbs as she tried to push him out of the hole in the wall.
“Hey, hey, rude!” it said. “Aren’t you going to let me introduce myself?”
“Nope,” Elia grunted, jabbed her spoon through the freak’s knee and kicked him out.
“Bye Clive,” the second intruder chirped happily. He was echoed by the rest of the spider-men as he swiped at her and clambered on in. “Guys, I don’t think she wants to come with us. What do we do now?”
“Break her knees,” one of them helpfully suggested “People don't need knees.”
“Wow, thanks Ben. You’re so smart. I should have thought of that.” Number two then proceeded to try exactly that. The claws he swiped at Elia with were as long as shortswords, while his assault was relentless. She switched to dodging after a spoon-parry made her lose a finger.
‘Fast,’ she thought, ‘fast, but not unbeatable. Need weapons, need armor. One hit and I’m done for.’
She ducked under the next swipe and went for his knee instead. He jumped, then stomped at the place where her foot had just been. It was the wrong move as she jabbed him with her [Gauntlet of the Viper] from the side. He went stiff as a plank, but the fight had taken precious seconds.
“Danger… glove…” he called as a third and a fourth made their way in over his twitching body.
“What the fuck is wrong with you guys!?” Elia yelled.
She dodged and weaved, but she was being pushed back more and more as the two launched a coordinated flurry from two angles. When she swiped at one of their heads and tore off their masks, dull, undead eyes stared back at her. They were dregs, but they could talk. Everything above their mouths was dead. Only their lips and tongues were jarringly alive.
“You’re not very nice.” Said the unmasked one. Its head lolled to the side, but its mouth moved in imitation of shock. “But Rhuna is very nice. She gives us pets and praise.”
“Rhuna loves us all.” Echoed its friend.
“You’ll love her too when you see. It’s impossible not to. She’s literally the best.”
Elia’s stomach twisted. She hadn’t felt this ill since the goop knights. As she mistimed her next step, she was about to be cut in half when a massive slam tore a plague-mask of its feet.
“You interrupted my almost-first kiss!”
Karla stabbed it right through the middle, then pulled her jagged sword back, sawing it in two.
“You entered the abode of a maiden uninvited! You didn’t wipe your shoes! UNFORGIVABLE!”
Her conjured chain coiled around the other one as it tried to back off. It was not strong enough to resist, its bones cracking as the chain drew tighter, ever tighter, until its spine snapped. Karla heaved as she stared at Elia with frantic eyes. Her entire room was bathed in blood that coiled behind her like some giant angry kraken, eager to pay them back.
She looked at the blood soaking her books, her comics, and her tunic through. “I’m sorry I screwed our first kiss.”
Elia was too slow to open her mouth, and she was too slow as well to move as the last plague mask aimed a familiar handgonne at her. The blast was loud enough to shatter the remaining windows. Karla staggered back, clutching the gaping hole in her chest with disbelief.
“No!” Elia cried.
“Who was she?” the sharpshooter asked.
“I think she was the other greater shard bearer,” said the other plague mask. “Rhuna is going to be so happy.”
“Fuck… fuck you! Fuck you ALL!” Elia threw herself into the crowd with feral rage. There was never a day where it felt more right to turn her brain off and kill things than today. But her assault was like the flailing of an angry child, as they outranged her, outnumbered her, and she didn’t even have a real weapon.
Quibbles squeaked in fear as she was thrown against a stone wall. Moments later, something pierced up through her palate and out her head.
You have died
Divine grace protects thee, loyal undead
You have lost: Ring of grace x1
The sweet blanket of death smothered her awareness for only a short moment. In the next, she stumbled out of a bowl, coughing and wheezing.
The room was dark, but she could still make out the four familiar fellows on the floor. Mouggen, Cesare, Nali, Karla. She felt around the groaning mass with a muted expression. There was no blood, no screaming, no sounds of death and despair and all those other things. Elia had dreamed enough dreams to know better, and yet she felt like she was still dreaming.
Slowly, she touched her way along the wall until she came to a door. She knew what was on the other side, she knew it because it had all been there the last time.
The door opened. Light greeted her with the faces of one hundred confused aristocrats. Elia was not confused. She recognized their faces, saw the guy with spikes who was seconds away from biting into an apple.
He broke the silence, and someone yelled something obvious. As the dreg guards piled onto her and hit her over the head, only one thought crossed her mind.
‘Oh. I think I get it. This party’s theme is ‘hell’.’
----------------------------------------
Camille left the guest room, rubbing her forehead. She quickly picked up her pace as she walked down the hallway. A man in darkened leathers melded out of the shadows. Despite his large and broad frame, he joined her without making a sound.
“How’s the girl?”
“I’ve met more stable people in a psychiatric ward, spymaster. The room will need a new wardrobe. And a new window.” She took another sip from her wine glass, when she realized it was empty. “I hope she is not always like this. Karla seems completely smitten and I worry what this says about her type. You know how people always try to take advantage of her naivety and her shard.”
“Awfully kind of you to take the time out of your busy schedule to visit her.”
“It was awfully kind of her to drop my dear niece off without demanding a ransom.” She slurped idly on some bowl water, sobering up instantly.
“Aren’t we inviting too much risk by letting her and her allies stay here?”
“I’d rather know where the knife pointed at my back is than not know where it is at all.” She took another sip. “Christ’s sake Randy, they killed Yolon with five people. We have him rated for twenty.”
“So, they’re the reason there will be a war with Rhuna.” Randy said. “Though then again, she was just waiting for a casus belli.”
“She would have attacked us once she wasn’t so busy dealing with the legion and Avon’s knights anyways. She was likely getting bored.” They reached her office, where she shut the heavy door behind her. “Also, Rhuna killed Yolon. That is our story. Make sure it spreads, so nobody in the council can obstruct us by calling us warmongers. We are amassing our dregs late already, and that is to say nothing about the witches, who have still refused to sign a defensive treaty against Rhuna. How is your plan to assassinate that childish demigod?”
“The chances are slim,” Randy said, “ but if it buys us peace, I’ll do it.”
Her gait slowed for the briefest moment. “Thank you, cheri, but the pact still has need of you, matters are accelerating toute suite. If you go missing, I will give command to Zach, then Zonja, then Zane. Tell your sons and daughters that they need to double their watches and watch out for spies. Information is key and a single weak spot could be our undoing.”
He nodded, once, then disappeared within a half-beat.