Rhuna was not smiling. Her face had always been oddly overly expressive for a person, if not for a statue, but not now. Now, she looked as if hewn from stone, stock-still and unalive. Rye looked down, noting that her controller had snapped in two. The announcer sounded hesitant, as if whoever accepted the reality of the situation first was going to catch the blame for it.
“T-THE WINNER…” he said, swallowing heavily. “R-RHUNA’S GUEST! THE WINNER IS RHUNA’S GUEST, RHUNA’S FRIEND, THE GGGRRRRREAT–“
Rhuna’s hands blurred. The announcer yelped as one part the controller crashed into him, knocking him from his unseen station. The fury in her eyes quieted after a moment. It was followed by a heavy, painted-on smile.
Somehow, Rye would rather have slightly pissed-off Rhuna than this.
“Now, Elia. Good game. I’m a woman of my word. I’m sure that from among the treasures that took me centuries to gather up, there’s at least one thing you’ll like.”
She says it as if taking the wrong thing will be the last thing I ever do. Rye thought.
She chuckled, letting only a hint of her nervousness bleed through. “Well, who can say no to loot?”
As she got up, she felt the lioness’ eyes burning holes into her sides. “You’re supposed to say ‘good game’.”
Rye flinched. “It was a good game. I think I would like to play it again.”
Rhuna eyed her. Then she snorted, and with an air of aloofness, strode right towards the Coliseum gates.
As Rye followed along and Rhuna did not paste her against the cobblestones for daring to one-up her, she finally had the time to appreciate how much her heart was pounding in between her ears.
Rhuna had lost. It was just a game for sure, but even that much was enough to open a hair crack in her untouchable façade. Her hands were fast, but they were not too fast to follow. If Rye could do it, that meant Elia had a definite chance in a fight.
Together. They needed to work together to take the Rhuna down.
They entered the Palace of Three Hundred Seats, yet another site of cultural heritage twisted into an effigy of narcissism. From this place the senate once guided the fate of the empire. Now, the halls of debate were depots of plundered riches, dregs carting in piles and piles of rare metals, stones, and common bone shards.
“Why so much gold?” Rye asked after they passed a room full of the worthless metal.
Rhuna shrugged. “I gotta pay people somehow. Gold’s everywhere and easy to work with. It’s not easy keeping an empire on a leash, even if literally everyone has that kink. Do you?”
Rye blinked, completely caught off guard.
The lioness laughed again, but this time it was missing its bluster.
“You wanted to learn why from the dregs to the champions, all my people adore me? Funny, ‘cause that implies that you think they don’t have enough reason to like their great and divine leader. Makes me think you don’t trust my charm.”
Rye shook her head, vigorously. “Oh no, quite the opposite in fact. You have, uh… rizz?”
“Don’t fuck with me, you obviously don’t think so.” Rhuna grabbed a jagged dagger out of the piles of loot, stared at it for a moment, then left it with the rest. “Since you spent two-hundred years with your head in the ground, let me tell you about the journey of an undead. When you first wake up in this fucked-up place, you see the undead prophecy, you see dregs killing dregs, dragons large as houses. Everything is unfamiliar, and you feel everything, from your first kill to your first boon to your first death. You find your vendors, find your upgrades, and step out of an alley only to be obliterated by a fucking furry ten times your level. So far, everything normal, classic video-game logic.
“You’re an undead. You’re weak and pathetic, so you band together. Only makes sense, right? Except, there’s no telling who’s gonna stab who in the back. So, you don’t rest, and after a few weeks running on bowl water and precisely zero sleep… you screw up. You lose your twelfth life, and ‘cause infinite respawns are too much to ask for while you’re a pissant, you pay the undead’s tax. A boon.
“So, there you are, lying with a knife in your neck on the cold, hard ground, and think to yourself: ‘Wow, I sure do wonder where my boon just went.’ And then you read the undead prophecy again and you realize: ‘Oh. So this is just as intended.’ You see, you’re not paying superpowers to get a cure. You are paying the gods to give you a quick fix. Do you understand?”
Rye nodded, then nodded more vigorously as Rhuna increased her scrutiny.
“So, you get back up, and make some more souls. You get better, you fight bigger monsters and lose some boons, but gain more. You stop feeling worried about the pain, the death, the loss. Then, you meet people again. You fight, you win, you get enough shards to fill up all your boon slots. But then you find an altar, realize you can exchange your boons, but there’s another catch. It costs boons again. But you know what’s cheap? Trading boons with other people.
“Next thing you know, you’re crusading against world-bosses. Killing ascenders – the biggest mortal god-simps –, fallen gods and the odd Lovecraftian nightmare rolled through a pile of compost and shit. You’re with people you trust now, people you have fought with, people you can sleep nearby without jumping at every sound in the night. That means smart people are with you too, and the smart people start figuring the game out real quick. And the game is rigged.
“So what do you do? You complain to whoever is responsible. You send people up the mountain, and kick the manufacturer’s shit in. So, people do that. A group is gathered, the strongest are sent up. By any measure, things go great for them. Then they reach the top and everything gets worse. The world changes. Frickin’ physics stop working, all cats just straight up disappear. One day you’re talking to a friend, the next day all that’s left of them is a tree with bark like a human face. So, you send a second team, you send the smart guys, the doctors, the psychologists, the engineers. And things get worse again.
“Do you understand, Rye? I’m not repeating myself.”
Rye nodded, hoping that that would be enough to stop the threat music from playing a nervous jig. But it continued, as did the madwoman’s rant at a frantic pace.
“So, what’s up there, you might ask? What’s up there that makes the world go sideways? Is it a way home? Is it a permanent death? Is it a djinn that turns all your wishes into curses? Rhetorical questions of course, nobody who makes it all the way ever comes back. All that matters is when people go up the mountain, life gets worse for everyone else.”
They reached an open-air atrium, old benches that once carried the weight of the empire on three hundred behinds. A dreg accountant was scrabbling away at a sheet of parchment, noting how many of what type of weapons were landing on the pile behind him. They both looked up, seeing the snowy massif of mount Gatheon stretch skywards until it was swallowed by the ever-unchanging clouds.
“So, what do you do then,” Rhuna asked, quietly, “when all your friends want to change the world?”
Rye did not know. She did not want to know either, what the kind of people who gathered to slay gods were thinking. It felt wrong to tread down that path, because she would inevitably come to understand them, and with understanding came empathy.
With one hand, Rhuna gestured at everything around her. “Do you understand now?”
Rye leaned back as two heavy hands gripped her shoulder like vices. “I-I do. I think? You did not have it easy.”
The fingers around her shoulders tensed.
“Nobody had it easy. I wanted to, I really, really did. I think you can empathize. But, to come to an end, I built an empire.”
“An empire where everyone bows and scrapes to one person isn’t the empire I know,” Rye countered. “And you still haven’t answered how you actually demand so much jolly cooperation.”
Rhuna laughed as she waved away some undead that were about to give her a report. “Simple. Brain-worms.”
“B-brain-worms?”
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“It’s easier to show you.” Rhuna pushed her through a newly opened bowl portal.
“The training pits.” The lioness gestured left and right. The Great Baths, once world-renowned for their hot springs, were now pools of algae that seemed to twitch and roil every few seconds. “You see, when a brain worm enters your bloodstream, it tries to nest right on top of a human brain like a little squiggly hat. There, it does some biology shit and boom, suddenly, you’re thinking very worm-inspired thoughts. But what if I told you that if you put them in a dreg, that you can teach them to talk again?”
Rye remained deathly silent as they walked through corridor after corridor of cherubs and feathered lions. Left and right, extra-large pits were dug into the ground, surrounded by palisades. One of them was filled with a murky kind of water. In another, a couple dozen dregs were standing neatly in line.
“Repeat after me,” an undead said. “Rhuna is great. Rhuna is your friend. Rhuna wants what’s best for you. You owe Rhuna your life.”
The dregs muttered and murmured, lips jerking, face twisting as if controlled by an inexperienced puppeteer. In another pit the dregs were further along. Their expressions looked at least vaguely human as they were being taught basic phrases such as ‘hello’, ‘how are you’ and ‘oh boy’.
“Brain worms are smart little critters,” Rhuna said, resting a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Once they’re hooked up with the host they start thinking ‘man, I need to get a job’ or ‘oh, I don’t want to die’. Did you know that you can teach them to work for a society by a mixture of repeating the same thing, again and again, and electroshock therapy? Pavlov, you son of a bitch, you were right! Man’s best friend is the cattleprod.”
Rye gulped, heavily. “This is fucked up.”
Aurana voices her indifference. Valti worries about the worms’ mental health.
And worse yet, the gods condoned it.
“It’s necessary. If you want the world to stop going down the gutter, you gotta compete, you gotta win.” Rhuna squeezed and Rye almost screamed as her shoulder made grinding sounds. “I thought you understood. When the worm is happy, the people are happy, and worms are easy to please. Don’t kill them, feed them enough water, and you get the happiest, most productive dregs in Loften. They don't want to change the world. They just want to eat food and carve statues of yours truly.”
“It’s wrong,” Rye clenched and unclenched her fist, glaring at Rhuna’s feet.
Rhuna chuckled. “It’s more right than Avon’s tar-crap, more right than Quintus’ legion of self-immolators. I am not them, I am not evil. And, from me to you, I trust you, Elia. You know that if you run away, I will hunt down the pact and kill all your friends, starting with that pathetic cotton-candy colored guy.”
Rye pointedly looked at her oath tattoo. “What’s keeping you from doing that now?”
“Well, you’ll just have to take your chances.” Rhuna smiled, signing on some report an undead had hurried to her. “To be honest, I barely even need to show my face once a year for this, it’s all almost automated, a self-feeding loop. Exhume, indoctrinate, send out to do whatever needs doing.”
“Which includes killing people that did nothing to you,” Rye pointed out. “Like the pact.”
“The pact.” Rhuna scoffed. “Those late-comers have no idea what it takes to maintain a nation, what it took to even get here. They whine and bitch and moan, but they didn’t suffer, not like us.”
“They don’t have to suffer,” Rye said. “They can just live their lives.”
“They yearn for the secrets of the mountain, Elia. They already slipped one person through my net. I can’t afford half-measures here.”
“Then send me out. I will talk to them. I will swear an oath so they won’t return, and bring them beyond the mountain range. They’ll live outside of Loften, next to the maze.” And they would be as far away from this rotten hellhole as humanly possible.
“Ah, you’re a crafty one.” Rhuna smiled, and for the first time, Rye thought that it was a genuine smile. “That’s why I wanted you to be my successor.”
“Whuh?” Rye did a double-take as Rhuna talked on and on as if everything was set in stone.
“We’ll get you a cool new body, touch you up a bit. Let me tell you, granite is nice for fighting, but it’s a bitch if you want to keep your furniture intact.”
“Wait, go back to the part where I become your successor. Why would I ever do that? You kidnapped me!”
“You came willingly, after some shows of force. As for why I would do that, it’s because I want to retire. I have been running around putting out fires for decades without having the time to appreciate it. I also want to rest on my work, you know? Work on a farm, maybe up in new-champagne.” Rhuna sighed. “Wouldn’t feel right to leave everything behind like this. And I know you, you wouldn’t abandon such a responsibility. After all, you’re not really Elia, now, are you?”
A cold shiver ran down Rye’s spine. “W-what do you mean, I–“
“Shut. Up.” Her words brooked no argument as she loomed over Rye. “I don’t care really if you’re bipolar, got a personality disorder, or possessed by a fucking ghost. All I know is that you’re the responsible one, and Elia is the one who gets shit done.”
That was… true, to an extent, but Rye had since discarded any notion of blanket descriptions. “Elia is responsible.”
“And you can get shit done? Then show me. Show me, or I’ll tear your spirit right out and let you watch as I feed her the fattest, juiciest brain worm.”
Rye wanted to scream. There were fates worse than death, and then there was this. She had died in her past life after slaving away as her family's good little prima, only to awaken and… what, serve the world's most premiere psychopath?
She had to get out, now.
A thousand thoughts chased each other inside her head, but instead of finding a way to de-escalate or a route to run away, all she could focus on was the writhing, squirming sound in the water in the pools all around.
That was why she was the first to notice a discrepancy. One of the worm handlers threw his bag of feed into a pool. Instead of the water frying, it was still. The yawning blackness inside seemed to grow deeper by the moment.
Then, the brain-worm culture suddenly thrashed in a struggle for life before sinking beneath the tarry depths. A hand reached out, bony and wet, followed by armor decorated with sticks and moss rotting away in a swamp.
“Greetings,” the massive smiling-knight burbled, as a handful of huge hulks crept out of the murky depths behind him. Giants, or moor-ogres, and all armored with the same dark, dripping metal. “We are the disciples of tar. You know why we have come. Grant us passage, oh Warden. Passage to Gatheon and to the realm of false gods.”
“Oh come on. It’s just one thing after another today.” Rhuna looked surprised and annoyed at the same time. “How’d you even get past my perimeter?”
“Where there is water, there is tar,” said another voice like a thousand thousand slimy worms. The pool of living tar was talking, and the more it did, the more certain Rye was that she would like to leave, yesterday.
“Oh – oh, you would pull some horseshit like this. Oh, you would, you fuckin–” Rhuna, with a frustrated motion, pulled a pair of massive, clawed gauntlets out of her chest. “I’m gonna have to completely quarantine that pool after I’m done wiping the floor with you.”
“Then in the name of our lord Avon, we come for your head.”
They leapt, as if the weight of their bodies meant nothing, and clashed with Rhuna. Magic and boons filled the air, projectiles and strikes taking chunks out of everything. A dozen undead rushed to Rhuna’s protection, but were immediately pasted into the ground. The mix of threat music was going ballistic.
Rhuna punched, turning an ogre’s hands into floppy noodles, but was launched back by a blast of magic. Rye watched as she jumped right back in, beat the crap out of another knight, then was flung backwards, landing right in front of her.
Her back is right there, Rye thought. You can end it here. Come on. Come on.
And yet, even though this was her best chance, Rye found herself unable to move.
Rhuna backhanded one of the ogres through a wall, giving her the opening to turn the tide. Her chest rippled as she pulled a clay-colored object from it.
Lightning fried the ogre just as it was recovering. The air was filled with the smell of heated metal. Everyone froze and Rhuna’s grin could not have been wider.
“Behold! The grail of ages. Pretty neat, huh?”
That was impossible. The grail of ages was the tool of Ruthe, the thing that facilitated the cycle of souls. If Rhuna had looted that from somewhere then nobody in or outside Loften was safe.
But something didn’t add up. In the legends, the grail was said to need ten grown men to be moved, but this one looked normal, only a tad too large for human hands. Rye also could not help but notice that it looked slightly… cracked. On a second look, it was actually made up of hundreds and hundreds of grail shards, lesser and greater glued together by some gray fabric.
“The grail,” the voice in the tar said. “Get it. Get the grail!”
Rhuna casually backstepped out of the way. “Chill, it’s just a replica. C minus in arts and crafts, baby. Now, Freeze.”
A frigid wind swept over the tar-knight assassins. They did not frost over, but instead something was taken from them. The tar stopped flowing and writhing; a knight was left suspended in mid air. One of the dregs snapped his sword against him and it broke without even leaving a scuff mark.
They couldn’t move, and they also couldn’t be moved.
“Yeh-eah! Timeout, mudlicker.”
Rhuna turned around, her chest flowing around her artifact until it was safely hidden inside her abdomen. She took in Rye, her sword, and where a handful of conjured bolts had bounced right off her back.
“You’re definitely going to prison for that.” Rhuna snatched her, dangling Rye from a leg. “What a disappointment. If you want to kill me, go ahead. Maybe in a few decades you’ll find the one boon that actually can hurt me. But if it’s not the one, or if your luck is bad, well… you’ll just have to take your chances.”
There was not an iota of fear in her entire body. Rhuna had to be insane. And as Rye was led to her cell, she only grew more certain of one thing: No mortal should ever have such power. No mortal should ever be a god.
Rhuna had to die.