Her eyes stayed closed as she lay on the shore of the lake, the sticky clay, dyed by blood, sticking to her skin. For a moment, a peaceful moment, she’d been her teenage self, screaming in hate and pain while fighting for her life. For a moment it was simple, her against them. Now, as she lay on the ground - the floor - of this ship, she finally understood.

The memories weren’t tormenting her. They were teaching her. The faces of her attackers had been so ugly and warped at the time that she’d failed to see them for what they were. Scared. Desperate. Victims. They had always been the victims. Rat had lived her whole life so in the moment that she was blind to the bigger picture. She was blind to the fact that she had caused this pain. The slaves had been right. It was Rat who had to die.

She opened her eyes. The burning wood was gone, the smell of blood was gone, even the shore was gone. She was in a tunnel again and she bit back a scream of panic. Was she back at the beginning? The tunnel felt different. It was too small to stand in and was made of a tar, that got stickier as it stretched in front of her.

Behind her, she could smell bodies, flesh. Not rotting or burning or melting. It was the fresh scent of a dead body. The fresh taste.

She couldn’t go that way, so she went forward, each step struggling to bring her hand or knee clear of the sludge.

She had wanted nothing to do with the riot, but that didn't stop the enforcers from blaming her. She was just too easy a scapegoat. They had taken her knife, so she ripped their throats with her-

No more more no more no more please. She understood it now.

She thought she had saved them, or at least would finally die to protect them. She thought she would rest, vindicated. She was wrong.

The black tar that reeked of waste. The rancid muck got colder as it rose to her-

The flood came in an instant and to think that single child, sopping wet, could have ever caused-

-knees. The chill was painful but not distracting enough. Maybe she would drown in it and her body would decompose and somehow serve a purpose.

She clawed at the slick, seamless wall of the stone tomb until her hands bled.

Rat stopped. The tunnel wasn’t going anywhere. It wasn’t leading her to the ship’s core. If someone existed who could shut this place down, it wasn’t her. It wasn’t Rat.

The shot ripped through her shoulder, burrowing deep into her skin.

No. Rat was just another monster that would die here. Perhaps she’d be added to the ship’s arsenal of weapons, to be used against the next victim. She was done trying. Done with the memories.

The radiation left only molten burns in her chest and stomach.

She wasn’t trying anymore! She was giving up, she was done.

The boy screamed, his arm slipping her grasp.

Rat howled, a long, injured, pitous sound. Why wouldn’t the memories stop?

…for your sake, I hope you will do no killing…

Because the ship couldn’t kill her. She had to be the one to do that. To prove she’d learned her lesson.

She closed her eyes, nails finding their way to her neck, her throat. Breathing deep, she tried to find the will to tear it out, when over the stench of decay, she smelled heat. Heat, metal, sparks. Not organic like the blood, but hard and raw from the Earth itself.

Could she do one more memory? See her face again? Capture that face in her memory before finally ending this agonizing charade that someone could have once called life?

She opened her eyes and she wasn’t in the tunnel anymore. She was in the mouth of an enormous cave. For a moment, her heart hung still in terror. Had she been wrong about which memory she’d see? She climbed to her feet, trembling. The gunk, the blood, it was all gone now and she stood in her grubby smock, feet planted on pitted stone. Had she been wrong?

But no. As her eyes adjusted, she saw the glowing veins of ore. The black floor was marked by streams of gold flowing in angular patterns. They spilled up the walls merging and splitting around glowing gemstones. Billions of silver threads wove together like wires. Circuits crafted of molten metal and uncut gems, set in living rock. Rat took a step forward, trying to avoid the hot rivers, but a puddle formed under her foot as she put weight on it and she screamed in shock. She waited for the sharp sear, but it never came. The gold puddle covering the top of her feet was cool as water. This was a different kind of unnatural. Whenever metal floated or fire froze, the Deathless or one of their puppet Gods was close by.

Rat shut her eyes, almost at peace, knowing what she’d see next.

Rat had only ever met one God. The Deaconess was showing off her new pet while on one of the sept annual blessings. She said it was a God of stone and metal, here to bless the mines with bounty. The God was sent down into the caves while her Deathless master held prayers. Rat, curious, went down into the mine.

The God was small, smaller than Rat even. She looked close to Rat’s age, maybe ten or eleven, even though she was likely much older. She was dressed the same as any slave, rags, barefoot, nothing of note save the golden collar around her neck. The collar was bare of the leather leash, crafted from human skin, that normally led to the Goddess’s owner-

Rat stumbled, catching herself on the wall. She had nearly bitten through her tongue, trying to stop the flow of images, but the agony made her lose her grip. She tripped and was assailed by the images again-

"-but, they call me Rat."

The God smiled, showing teeth made of shimmering diamond. "Rat? Is it an insult? I know some humans do not like them but they are smart and soft and little. It is a cute name I think. More appropriate for you than mine for me.”

Rat crossed her arms. "It’s a shitty name.” The God’s eyes widened at the crassness and Rat grinned. “Alright, what’s your name then?"

"Avara." Her eyes widened in protest as Rat rolled her eyes. "It may sound pretty. It means lackluster in the language from my home.” Her eyes swam with crystal tears. “I do not want that. I would much rather be soft and hidden."

"Well in imperial talk, Avara means pretty.”

Avara didn’t look convinced. “Does it really?”

Rat nodded emphatically. “It does now!” She wrinkled her nose and pitched her voice in her best impression of the Deaconess. “So it is decreed.”

Avara’s huge eyes doubled in size as she stared at Rat, horrified at her irreverence. But Rat didn’t care and instead tapped one of the bubbles of gold that had blossomed to life at Avara’s feet.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“See?” Rat said. “You get to be pretty.”

Avara crossed her arms. “Well, you get to be clever.” She smiled, then, finally laughing at Rat’s impression, and the bubble floated off the ground, joining the other specks of glittering gems that glistened around her.

Avara showed Rat more of her magic, making precious stones in the shape of flowers, turning granite to marble, and making quicksilver lakes. All the while Rat watched in awe and delight. At the end, Avara took a small white stone from the ground of the cave, an ordinary rock, and wrote Rat’s name in it, in the glittering rubies that Rat had requested. When the bells tolled, signaling the end of the mass, Rat smiled, a note of contentment in her heart that maybe these powerful beings, these Gods, weren’t so different from a meager slave girl like herself.

The two had nearly exited the mine when a voice, like thunder on a clear day, struck the pair. "Avara. You took unacceptably long. What delayed you?" The Deaconess stood apart from her flock, nearly twice the height of each apostle. She wore papel robes of white and royal purple. More striking than the dark, stiff robes that obscured most of her form, was her blazing mask, in the shape of her sigil, The Brass Embrace. Two slender metal hands covered the top of her face, their fingers framing her burning white eyes.

Rat gripped Avara’s hand, squeezing it as Avara’s eyes grew huge and empty with fear.

“Fraternizing with the serfs again. Oh dear." The Deathless priestess tapped her chin in thought, before a benevolent smile crossed her face. "I have a wonderful idea." Rat felt something descend on her mind, ripping through her memories of the last few hours, viewing and violating those few, pure memories. "Avara, punish it."

Avara stepped between the two, narrow shoulders held strong, as though she could spare Rat from the words of a Deathless.

"Oh Avara, still so resilient." The Deaconess coiled a leather leash in her hand and the God’s eyes widened, knowing well the leather rope didn’t need to attach to her collar to take effect. "Perhaps I should remind you," she pulled it tight between her hands and Avara screamed, "how much you have left to lose." She let the leash go slack. "Now, do as you are told, little God."

Avara turned to Rat, her face stained with molten tears. "I'm sorry," she whimpered.

Rat shook her head, the tiny rock Avara had made clutched in her hand. “Avara you don’t-”

Her words broke into a sharp grunt as Avara’s foot made contact with her ribs. She blacked out for a moment, the look of despair on Avara’s face seared into her mind. When she came too, her mouth tasted of blood and Avara was slamming her into the ground. Rat’s lips moved to issue silent begs that her lungs could not provide the air to produce. Avara hit with a strength and hardness greater than her size would suggest. It was the strength of iron and granite, hard as diamond and hot as magma. After close to a minute, Rat’s brain stopped recording the assault.

She woke up on the cobbled path leading from the mind. The sun had almost set, and the world around her was dim and grey. The pain faded into one long ache that spilled into the concussion she awoke with. No one was around. The Deaconess and her apostles must have just left her there. Avara must have just left her there.

With a groan, she pushed herself up, brushing some particularly dust off her. In the faint light, she could see the dust glint a dazzling red. Her rock had been shattered and the rubies knocked free. She frantically grasped for them but each movement made her head swim and vision blur and no matter how much she patted down the path, searching, she couldn’t find a single ruby.

Rat opened her eyes, the phantom ache of Avara's fists still echoed in her skull, her ribs, and her spine. She lay on her back, cold puddles of silver welling around her but couldn’t bring herself to wipe it off. Why she thought this memory would bring peace was beyond her. At the very least she was fully resigned to her path.

The Butcher King had said the bodies of her predecessors had been horribly mutilated. How had he even found them? Would the ship spit her corpse out at him, one more wretched soul, killed in the experiment of a Deathless. The all knowing, all controlling, all powerful Deathless. The Deathless who, in their might and glory, could only cause pain.

The Butcher King had promised Rat whatever she wanted. Whatever she fucking wanted.

Silver and gold, the metals so precious to the fucking Deathless but so worthless to her now, streamed from her hair as she pushed herself up. Whatever she fucking wanted?!

With enough impact to blind her, she bashed her skull into the ground. Could the Butcher King wave his hand and bring back all the dead? Again she smashed her head against the wall, blood vessels breaking. Could he make Rat happy again? She raked her nails down her own face, tearing the soft tissue of her lids and cheeks and lips until she could barely see past the blood. Could he bring the rare, soft feeling of Avara’s giggle back into Rat’s heart? With another scream, a scream she’d grown so used to hearing in the dying throats of those around her, she pressed her bleeding, bruised face into the ground, grinding her skin into the rocks and slimy molten metal. Could he bring Avara back to her? Could the Butcher King, in all his strength, fucking do that?

The cave was silent except for Rat’s wounded breathing. Her skin, so hot one moment ago, was cold now.

Could he?

Avara wasn’t dead. She wasn’t something abstract, wasn’t happiness, wasn’t love, wasn’t incorporeal. Could Rat use this wish to free the poor God from servitude?

Rat sat up. She wasn’t long for this world, not with the injuries she’d given herself, but she would make it to the core and she would live just long enough to whisper Avara’s name into the Butcher King’s ear.

The cave was a simple one now. No gold lined the walls, no rubies or sapphires, no platinum flooded through creeks in the floor. It was just a cave, a mine, and it was ready to collapse.

Her milky skin was marred with purple and black bruises. She looked around, at the smashed lantern, and the blood seeping from under the rock that crushed Vallery. Ron’s eyes were wide open, his face shocked, and she thought maybe he was still alive until she saw the stalactite lodged in his ribs. The cold numbness came as her eyes followed a slowly oozing grey substance on the ground, dimly reflecting the faint light, to its source, Glinda’s cracked skull. She took a step forward, body not convinced it couldn’t still help, but her knees gave way halfway through the step.

Where had they gone? Where were they, now that their bodies were so destroyed that they couldn’t possibly sustain life? The idea that a few thousand neurons, deprived of something as abundant as oxygen, could just flicker out and rob the world, rob her, of her found family, had not yet permeated her static mind. It just kept repeating: where did they go?

She sat there until the lantern dimmed and went dark.

In the dark, time moves funny. It loses all meaning, hours can pass in heartbeats and seconds can last centuries. She sat still until her throat burned in thirst. Her head pulsed in pain. Her limbs hung like sacks of meat at her side.

‘Water clears your head,’ Ron would always say. ‘Clear head gives you a clear day.’

But Rat didn’t want her head clear.

‘Drink, little one.’ Glinda never had time for anyone’s self destructive stupidity.

So Rat drank.

Each person’s canteens held water for a twelve hour shift of hard labor. If she sipped it, she could last weeks. This prospect didn’t cheer her, but her death wouldn’t help, so she drank.

The hunger was harder to solve. In the dark, with nothing but her misery to distract her, her stomach made its displeasure known. She waited and waited for help to come. She tried to count heartbeats to measure time, but lost track. A day of hunger wouldn’t be so bad. Two days? Had it been a week? How desperate was she? Did she have the right, the level of desperation, to eat the only thing down here that could sustain her?

Her fingers sought out the body of Glinda, the muscles that had taken on the work Rat had been too weak to complete, the scowling face that warded off the more violent slaves, the body that had, occasionally, held the shivering girl when her body was too thin to insulate her properly. The once warm body was cold to the touch.

‘Eat, little one.’

So Rat ate.

Not long after that, or maybe very long after that, she was joined in her solitude. She heard them, skittering in the darkness, the rats coming to join her in her meager feast. She really was no better than them. Still, a meal was a meal, and her guests were less beloved than the food they scavenged. She became very good at catching rats, skinning them with her teeth, picking their meat out. Across the ground, hundreds of bones carpeted her great dining hall. She was picking through the meat of something, rat or human, she’d long lost the ability to tell, when there was a loud boom, and light assaulted her eyes. The first thing her adjusting eyes fell on was her blood stained hands, bits of organs and muscle trapped under her nails.

What must she have looked like to the shocked slaves that had rescued her? Was she like a demon to them? A savage beast? Did a single one of them see a terrified eight year old girl? The story spread, of how she had been found, covered in blood, and chewing on bones among the rats. They said the story wasn’t enough to convey how wretched she truly was.

That's all people saw in her after that. A dirty rat, gnawing on bones. That’s all they called her, until no one remained who remembered the original story. No one knew her tale, but everyone knew of the dreaded and feared Rat, bringer of ruin.