The Other Side

On the following day, the third of Reapsmonth, Chuva did not leave her room. She wasn’t sulking – just waiting for somebody to show up and confirm that she was fired before unceremoniously throwing her ass out. Maybe if she was really lucky, they’d pay her for her short period of work, but she doubted it. She’d already spent most of the night packing, though she couldn’t quite bring herself to dress in her raggedy old vagabond clothes, and had decided to keep wearing her Royal Guard uniform until she was told not to.

With every hour that dragged by, she felt more bored, more restless, and more isolated. She had no idea what Silas was up to; he was shutting her out completely, and she in turn was doing the same to him, so she hadn’t picked up even a trace of his emotions. The only thoughts she had to occupy her were her own, and they mainly resolved around where she would go now, what she would do. On the off-chance that she wasn’t banished altogether from Cumula City, this wouldn’t be a horrible place to settle down, but then she’d have to get a job – and she didn’t think she had the strength for more unskilled labor…

The light outside her window eventually dimmed. Why the void hadn’t anyone come to dismiss her yet? Were they possibly planning to do something much worse: put her on trial for gravely insulting the king, throw her in the dungeon…? But if that were the case, wouldn’t they have come to arrest her by now? No matter which theory she went with, there was no plausible reason she could think of for why she’d been left alone this long, which only increased her anxiety and agitation.

When it got dark out, she risked sneaking off to the kitchen larder, and smuggled a few nibbles back to her room as a halfhearted supper. No one saw her, stopped her, or came anywhere close to reprimanding her. What the fuck was going on between Silas and the other higher-ups? Was their idea of a bizarre, abstract punishment – just ignoring her until she repented?

She may have dozed off for a short while, or she may have only zoned out, but either way, she found herself being jerked out of a period of blankness by a scream.

Chuva, who’d been stretched out flat on her bed, bolted upright before even fully comprehending what she’d heard. That scream seemed to have triggered a slowly building stampede out in the corridor, footsteps and voices shouting alarmed words that she couldn’t quite make out, but it was the scream itself that she fixated on: the cry of a young girl, just grazing the edge of recognition. Violet?!

She thrust open the bedroom door and rushed outside, sword in hand within seconds. Whether it was Violet or some other girl, this warranted the Royal Guard’s attention, and Chuva was still a member of the Royal Guard until somebody told her otherwise.

She turned a corner and fell into step with a group of three other soldiers, who certainly must have noticed her but acted as if there was nothing strange about her joining them. As if they didn’t know about what had happened yesterday – but she must have been infamous by now, how could they not know?!

“NO!” The shout, which came from up ahead, obliterated all doubt as to whether or not it had been Violet who’d screamed. “I know what I saw!”

In front of a door which must have led to the Haraka family quarters, two guards were attempting to soothe a practically hysterical Violet, all while her stunned-looking parents stood behind her uselessly. One of the guards, probably a woman, leaned down to the girl and murmured something soothing that Chuva couldn’t hear, only for Violet to recoil and yell again, “No!”

“What’s going on here?!” demanded Chuva, who had, without realizing it, taken the lead of her group as they approached.

Violet inhaled sharply, stared at Chuva with enormously wide and slightly damp eyes, then took off running for her as if it were a matter of life and death. “Miss Chuva!” she cried, grabbing hold of Chuva’s arm desperately. “Miss Chuva, a demon s-stole my brother Teo, and nobody believes me…!” Moisture began to spill against her cheeks.

The soldier who’d been trying to reassure Violet shook her head. “Enforcer Chuva, as I’m sure you know, there’s no way that a demon could get all the way to the castle without the border patrol noticing, not even after–”

“Shut up,” interrupted Chuva mildly. “I want to hear what Violet has to say first.”

Violet looked grateful, despite the way that she was digging her fingertips into Chuva’s sleeve. “I-I was getting ready for bed when I heard something thumping around in Teo’s room – his room’s r-right next to mine – and he should have already been asleep, but I went in there to see what was going on, and this – this thing – it was kind of flickering and hard to see, b-but it had grabbed Teo and he was struggling, and then as soon as it saw me it took off with him through the window!” She gulped down a shuddering breath and dragged her arm across her eyes, obviously trying and failing to keep a stiff upper lip.

Chuva looked from Violet up to the parents with a raised-eyebrows expression that asked the questions for her.

“I came in as soon as I heard Violet scream,” replied the mother, who seemed so deeply shaken that she didn’t know exactly what to do with her face. “A-and Teo’s crib was empty, but I didn’t see anything else…”

“I wasn’t there,” admitted the father. “I was visiting with some friends further down the wing when I saw what was going on.”

One of the guards who’d come over with Chuva frowned skeptically. “We’ll definitely look for the missing child, but there couldn’t have been a demon. Like Ashi said before, even right now, when our defenses are compromised–”

“If you’re about to bust out the old ‘oh, she must have dreamed it or imagined it’ line of reasoning, then save your breath,” said Chuva, placing her free hand protectively on Violet’s shoulder. “Because Violet Haraka is one of the most intelligent, straight-thinking people I’ve ever met, kid or not.” Smoothing over the coarseness in her voice just a little, she asked, “Okay, Violet, you said that the demon was flickering and hard to see, right? Could you please explain that a little more?”

Violet, although still shaking a little at the thought of what had happened to her brother, had calmed down slightly now that she knew someone was on her side. “I’m not even sure what I saw…” she murmured tremulously. “It looked like it was almost as big as I was when it grabbed Teo, but then when it was going out the window, it was closer to his size. A-and it’s almost like its skin was made out of mirrors, because parts of it seemed to – to blend in with the rest of the room. I can’t describe it any better than that.”

Chuva fought back the impulse to swear. She’d heard of this sort of thing before, but it was so rare that it was almost legendary, and she’d hoped that it would never be something that she had to deal with on her own. But now…well, she wasn’t exactly on her own, was she?

“You!” she barked, addressing the female guard who’d been comfortingly dismissing Violet before. “Your name’s Ashi, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.” The woman straightened into her military-at-attention pose.

“Okay, Ashi, I need you to and get Sir Silver right now. Tell him that we’re dealing with a–”

Before she could finish her sentence, she felt the mosquito-like buzz of energy at her back informing her that fetching Sir Silver would not be required.

“A shapeshifter,” completed Silas, emerging from the shadows like a wraith, grave and taut-mouthed. “An incredibly dangerous demon.”

“So it is a demon, sir?” ventured Ashi uncertainly. “But then, how did it get all the way to the castle without any of our people noticing?”

“Because, obviously, it shifted its shape,” responded Chuva impatiently. “This kind of demon can warp reality to make itself bigger or smaller – and faster or slower, for that matter. It probably crept into the city looking like a little bug, except moving at hyper speed, and probably camouflaged just in case. Oh yeah, it can camouflage itself, too.”

Violet released her hold on Chuva’s arm in order to press both hands against her mouth, her shivering growing worse again. “I-I-I’ve read about this before,” she stammered. “These k-kinds of demons can go almost everywhere, do almost anything…”

“But what does it want with Teo?!” demanded her near hysterical-mother.

Silas shook his head briefly and replied, “I can’t immediately say.” He turned his head towards Chuva, and she looked back at him, feeling the insidious link between their minds slide into place. Both of them knew that the real problem with shapeshifters wasn’t necessarily their abilities – it was their intelligence. All of the power in the world was useless if you didn’t know what to do with it, after all; and while most demons were brutish killers with only enough thoughts in their heads to destroy things and protect their bodies from harm, shapeshifters were supposed to be cunning, sneaky, and able to strategize during battles. After all, the one they were dealing with was smart enough to get through all of Cumula City undetected, only revealing itself by accident because its victim had started fussing.

“Silas, will you follow me?” she asked. As soon as he nodded, she took off down the hall at a jog.

What are you planning to do?, came his voice in her head. It wasn’t a rhetorical question; even if he hadn’t been her double, it would have been hard to miss the purposeful way that she was moving.

’There’s a spell I want to try so we can figure out where that damn thing is, but I need to be outside to cast it.’

Right, the Incantation to Otherworldly Presences, of course. I’ll help boost it for you. Between the two of us, we can probably track the Equalizer within a few miles’ radius of the castle.

‘What worries me is that, given how fast it can move, it might already be long gone.’

Perhaps not. If it was carrying Master Haraka with it, it wouldn’t be able to alter its speed beyond physical limitations without killing him.

They were not traveling alone; all five of the guards from the hallway were tagging along with them, as was Violet, who was practically moving faster than the soldiers. Chuva sighed, not wanting to talk about whether or not Teo was dead right in front of his older sister, even if said sister couldn’t hear it. “Kid, you really shouldn’t be here.”

“Yes I should!” insisted Violet indignantly. “My baby brother was kidnapped!”

“I know that, and we’re going to–” Fuck, what could she say here? Get him back might very well be a lie – “do something about it, but what use is it throwing yourself in danger, too?!”

“I’m not just walking away! Teo needs me!”

Groaning, Chuva snuck a glance back at Silas, whose face revealed nothing but whose mind was open and ready to listen. In the heat of the moment, they had reconnected completely, as if they’d never clashed at all. ’What makes you so sure that the shapeshifter cares whether or not it kills him?’

He answered promptly, Because it had ample opportunity to kill him, but didn’t. Remember, all Equalizers come from the Equilibrium, and the Equilibrium often uses its more intelligent creations for fetching objects.

‘Okay, great, but why the void would the Equilibrium give a shit about some random three-year-old?!’

That is a very good question.

The residential wing, which they’d been trotting through, was so densely packed that there weren’t any balconies to step out on or even many windows, but finally Chuva went around a corner and spotted a veranda that would be open enough for her purpose. Ordering everyone but Silas to stay back, she barged through the doors, slamming them shut as soon as he’d slipped out behind her.

Nighttime air, crisp with the onset of autumn, nipped at her ears as she took a deep breath and began to chant. The Incantation to Otherworldly Presences had originally been designed to let magic users seek out more of their kind, or to see if any gods had manifested nearby. At some point, some enterprising magi had discovered that the spell was also a sort of demon detector; demons weren’t magical, but the Incantation didn’t specifically seek out magic, only the presence of beings that were not ordinary mortals. As the power activated by her voice started to hum in the air around her, she felt a sort of dark overlay spread across her mind where non-mortals burned as the only bright spots – Silas gleamed amidst the spell’s imposed blackness, but there was no sign of the demon yet.

After a few more seconds, he joined in her chant, speaking a modified version of the Incantation that was meant to boost its range. His voice faltered a bit at first, but as he grew accustomed to the strange dead words, the two spells twined together like melody and harmony. Now Chuva could feel her magic reaching out, through the castle, through the streets beyond, extending much farther than she would have been able to manage on her own…

But in the end, the wide range wasn’t even necessary, because the demon was much closer than she expected.

‘Feel that?’ she prompted Silas, her mouth still too full up with magic for her to speak.

He responded efficiently, taking the bright spot that she showed him and applying it to his mental map of the castle. It’s in the courtyard. I think that it is waiting for us.

While she agreed with his assessment – she was somehow getting that vibe from the hidden shapeshifter, even though the Incantation normally didn’t provide such information – something else had grabbed her attention. ’But there’s two presences down there. And the other one doesn’t quite feel like a demon…’

No, agreed Silas. The second one is Teo.

‘Why is Teo showing up in the Incantation to Otherworldly Presences?’

Silas replied aloud, letting his chant drop. “That is something that we will have to discuss later.”

“Yeah, add one more thing to the list,” she grumbled. Ordinary tension and anticipation quickly flushed the magic out of her body. “Who’s counting?”

He ignored her, having already marched back inside to issue commands to his soldiers: they were to surround the courtyard completely, and no one would be permitted to join in the battle against the demon without leaving someone else to cover their post. “And stay incognito until after Enforcer Chuva and I have entered the courtyard. After that, subtlety will no longer be worth much.”

“Is the demon in the courtyard?!” demanded Violet, seizing Chuva’s sleeve as soon as the older woman had stepped through the doorway. “Is Teo there too?!”

“Yeah. And if you insist on coming down there with us, then you’d better hang back with the soldiers, because things are about to get intense.”

She shook Violet off gently, then quickened her pace to catch up to Silas, who was leading the way downstairs. The connection between them was now so tight and secure that she had to wonder if this whole “doubles” thing wasn’t just meant to be an asset during fights, and if the emotional bond it kindled was nothing but an unintentional (undesirable) side effect. But there was no time to pursue the thought when a child’s life – and potentially the security of the entire kingdom – was at stake.

They left Violet amidst a throng of Royal Guards before cautiously advancing into the courtyard, walking in sync, breathing in sync, and thinking in sync. The place looked as unassuming as ever, its intricate landscaping silver-green beneath the pale moonlight. Nothing moved; even the breeze wasn’t strong enough to stir any leaves.

But Chuva didn’t let her guard down, and it never occurred to her to doubt whether or not her spell had worked as intended. After all, at the end of the day, she was still a god, and being a god had given her certain gifts. Such as magic, wings, heightened senses…and a finely tuned instinct for when some serious shit was about to happen. And right now, she was one hundred and ten percent sure that there was a demon nearby, and that it was waiting for the ideal time to lunge out at her.

She hardly even realized that her sword was in her hand.

All of a sudden, a distant sound caused both her and Silas to stiffen and glance around wildly: the thin but unmistakable wail of a child. Its acoustics were precisely calculated in a way that kept Chuva from figuring out which direction it was coming from, and she was pretty sure that Teo was mute, which meant that this wasn’t him crying but rather was the demon’s attempt to unnerve them. As eerie as the noise was, right now it was only pissing her off even more.

“Don’t try to be cute,” she hissed, shifting one foot back into a fighting stance. “Get your ass out here.”

Something whipped against the back of her legs and knocked her off her feet.

Chuva yelped, crashing to the ground alongside Silas, who’d been taken equally off-guard by the attack. Before she even had a chance to start getting up, an indistinct patch of color streaked past the corner of her vision, making her swat reflexively at the empty air.

It’s goading you!, said Silas sharply. It’s trying to get you confused!

‘Well, it’s succeeding!’

You have to stand your ground and let your senses do the work for you!

She scrambled up, planted her feet solidly on the ground, and clenched her teeth. Another streak zipped past her, close enough to ruffle the hairs on the back of her arm. She clenched her teeth, thinking that Silas was very wrong in his choice of technique – even if he’d used it successfully against shapeshifters in the past, this demon was deliberately using their expansive god-senses against them, trying to befuddle them with too much information that couldn’t be processed and didn’t add up.

Something with a slimy texture brushed the back of her neck, and with a shudder of revulsion, she flung herself around and stabbed at it – just in time to see the barest hint of the retreating creature. And even then, she wasn’t even certain what she’d seen; something segmented, without visible legs or eyes or anything like that, shiny like chitin but apparently slick to the touch. It could have been an arm, a leg, a tentacle, or even a tongue. And in the space of the two heartbeats she spent contemplating it, the whatever-the-void-it was vanished, only to reappear an instant later wrapped around Silas’s ankles.

He released a short cry as the demon snapped him backwards, dragging him a good three yards across the grass; he was lucky that he didn’t drop his sword. Chuva rushed after him, just in time to see him take a swipe at the indistinct shape wrapped around his leg, which released him even though she couldn’t tell whether or not she’d actually hit it.

’Silas, are you all right?!’

Yes, I’m –

The same vague appendage, now much larger and thicker than before, slammed against his stomach and sent him flying against a wall.

“SILAS!”

Chuva was not especially agile, but she had strong legs and always moved in the most direct path possible; until now, she’d been speedy enough to catch up with any demon. But this time, no matter how fast she ran, her opponent kept abreast of her easily, and Silas – who, she could feel, was straining to use figure out the shapeshifter’s location through vibrations and subtle sounds, still stubbornly believing that his old tactics would see him through this – was clearly no better off. When she rushed over to reach him, the demon struck her in the side, ruining her balance so badly that she skidded painfully against the ground, and then it was back on Silas before he got a moment to recover, leaving only another taunting streak in her peripheral vision. As she shoved herself up, she glanced at the various entrances to the courtyard, noting that the other soldiers were standing at the ready but not rushing in to attack. And, well, what were they supposed to do, anyway? Their captain had already strongly discouraged them from fighting, and if this thing was nothing but a disjointed blur to her, then they probably couldn’t see it at all. All they were looking at right now was the two strongest demon fighters in Cumula City being thrown around like ragdolls by an invisible enemy.

And they still didn’t even know what the demon had done with Teo. Fuck, fuck, fuck...!

The shapeshifter shot out and bit Silas or stung him or something, because she felt a piercing pain echoed in her head, even though she didn’t even see what had happened. They were in their hyper-linked, as-close-as-psychologically-possible state now, only this time it wasn’t doing them any good because they had no information to exchange. Neither one of them could get a hold on what they needed to do, and when their consciousnesses combined, it just resulted in twice as much confusion. Nevertheless, she tried to run for her double again, for lack of any better plan…until she saw a very visible, obvious, mortal shape running along the edge of the courtyard.

“VIOLET!” bellowed Chuva, bolting forward.

She’d been set up again, of course. The demon must have allowed Violet to get a glimpse of her little brother – there was no other reason why she would have run out into the open like that – and when Chuva took off in pursuit, she found herself on the receiving end of the worst beating yet. Punches to her stomach, her jaw, and her solar plexus in such rapid succession that they were almost simultaneous; she doubled up, all of her breath stolen, and was promptly knocked back down before she could retaliate. Gods DAMN it, this wasn’t FAIR…! She could be winning if this were a good, clean fight…!

A good, clean fight – ha. She would have laughed bitterly if she weren’t still struggling to get her air back and trying to beat her own pain into submission. Even if such a concept as a good, clean fight actually existed, she’d always been a dirty fighter. What she wanted wasn’t for things to be fair, it was to be able to actually hit the demon so that she could feel like she had accomplished something. Silas was right when he’d told her that she enjoyed battles a little too much, of course. She’d always gotten a primal, visceral joy out of fighting.

Chuva staggered to her feet. Some soldiers were ushering Violet back to safety, which was good. They were lucky that the beastie didn’t really care about them. And Silas was standing again…barely. The shapeshifter was lunging at him from all directions, staying camouflaged, changing its shape often and shifting in and out of physically plausible speeds. From what she could see, he was losing the fight because he couldn’t tell what or where to hit, all of his carefully cultivated swordsmanship rendered useless by another creature’s intelligence. She started towards him – then stopped herself, knowing that as soon as she went over there, she’d get pummeled again just before the demon switched back to her double, rinse and repeat, until they were both too exhausted to keep fighting. And yet…what was the other option? Run away, like how she ran away from her village?

There had to be a third option. Something that was neither stay and get wrecked, or flee like a coward.

A spell? Attack spells wouldn’t be much better than regular attacks, and even if the Incantation to Otherworldly Presences didn’t make her a sitting duck while she chanted away at it, it wasn’t quick enough to keep up with the shapeshifter’s movements. She didn’t know any magic that could anticipate an enemy’s motion, and while she’d once read a spell that dealt with revealing invisible objects, she’d never been able to make it work and thus hadn’t actually bothered to remember it.

She could try to transition into her demigod form again. After all, she was backed into a corner, and both her and Silas’s lives were at stake; maybe that kind of extreme situation was exactly what she needed to make the transformation work. But if it was a dismal failure like last time…

Silas got knocked off of his feet again, and she felt the dull pain spreading through his chest at the blow, felt his desperation as he scrambled for some kind of defensive strategy. And meanwhile, here she was, standing and watching her double suffer, and DAMN it – she still cared about him whether or not they’d argued, she couldn’t NOT care about him, it just wasn’t possible. But she was doing nothing because she was afraid of a little pain, because she was selfish, and she’d always been selfish! She’d always been a clueless little punk who’d decided to start fighting just for the glory and fame and personal pleasure, but the second that things turned dire, she completely froze up, and why the FUCK was she still just standing here…?!

Swallowing, not feeling very much like the Light at all, she nevertheless took a deep breath and started to declare uncertainly, “I-I am…”

And that was when she realized.

It was very much like the moment when her wings first emerged, or when she spoke to Silas through her starstone for the very first time. The battlefield slowed to a virtual standstill around her, and instead of hearing the sounds of her double’s struggle, she was instead listening to a comment he’d made while they were walking through the castle a few days ago: With us – with the others, at any rate – the gods we embody seem to have some effect on our temperaments. It didn’t always manifest in an obvious way, but…

“I am…” she whispered to herself in a tone of slowly growing wonder.

What was she? She was selfish, definitely. Immature, yes, that too. Temperamental, fuck yes; the tantrum she’d thrown at the king yesterday proved that. She could be greedy and an attention seeker and a little too fond of throwing punches, but on the flip side, she was also ambitious, cunning, and tough. She may have been positive and energetic on the outside, but her core was bittersweet – just like how Silas, on the surface, seemed troubled and brooding, and yet in his heart had remained the kind of person who loved the world and would sacrifice anything for the greater good, even his own wellbeing.

She was a god, but she never had been, and never would be, the Light.

Chuva stepped forward, threw back her head, and screamed, “I AM DARKNESS!”

Power. That was her first impression: power, countless tons of it, roaring in her head and exploding in her chest, driving out the pain with a surging energy. For the first time, she realized that the “weird magic” she’d been doing since childhood was only a tiny taste of this – of the force sleeping within her. And it was good that it had slept, because no mortal body could possibly contain all of this; fortunately, her current body was more god than mortal.

She looked down at herself. Her uniform was gone, replaced by a – not a mere dress, but what she could only call a gown – which was made of a substance that certainly wasn’t fabric. It was sleeveless, purplish where it hugged her torso and descending to pitch black as it approached the ground, and the hem itself seemed to be dripping and flowing as it pooled around her feet, sometimes more like gas and sometimes more like liquid. It was, she realized, made of pure darkness, and it felt more comfortable and natural against her body than any worldly garment that she had ever known.

Her wings stretched triumphantly overhead; her cape had vanished somewhere, as had her hair tie, but it didn’t seem to matter. She had flooded with such strength that moving her wings took no more effort than raising her pinky finger, and her hair simply rippled behind her as if in an invisible breeze, never getting in her face or spitting flyaways into her eyes.

Chuva looked up. Only a handful of seconds had passed since she’d first decided to try transitioning to her demigod form – a handful of tiny eternities for her – but the battle had since come to a complete standstill. The dark night was as clear as spring water, her vision more acute than it had ever been during the day, and now she could actually see the shapeshifter, which was looking at her with something like horror. It had been playing with the balance of light in order to hide itself, but now that she was Darkness, her eyes could cut right through that bullshit – and her mouth stretched into a wicked grin when she saw that the big, scary demon was just a worm, a tube of flesh plated with brittle chitin that would be easily hacked apart now that she could see it. It shrank back, perhaps because her teeth had sharpened into fangs, or perhaps because it understood just how thoroughly fucked it was now.

And right behind it was Silas, his sword still held out in front of him, his mouth agape as he processed what his double had just become.

Chuva sprang forward. Fighting in a gown should have been ridiculously impractical, but the darkness around her legs always shifted in just the right way to let her move freely, and she leapt ahead faster than she ever had before. Her sword had gone the way of her clothes and hair tie, but that didn’t matter; she didn’t need it while she was like this. She struck at the demon with her open hand, her fingers as hard as metal, as hot as blacksmiths’ irons, searing through slimy flesh before the shapeshifter had managed to stop staring at her. A breathy but grating shriek of agony left the jagged hole in its front segment (which looked too primitive to even be called a mouth). When it reared back in preparation to retaliate, she actually laughed, delighted. If the thing had decided to go down without a fight right after she successfully took on her demigod form, then she would have been very, very disappointed.

Behind her, Silas suddenly called out, “I am the Light!”

His transformation swept a wave of supplemental power over her, and when the demon attempted to attack, she effortlessly released her physical shape and deliquesced into a black shadow on the ground. From this vantage point, she could slither around literally at the speed of light, as well as shoot up a collection of snaking tendrils to constrict around the shapeshifter and fling it aside – which was exactly what she did now. When she reemerged from the intangible darkness, Silas was waiting for her, smiling.

For the first time, he looked exactly like the Silas who’d lived in her head since they were children, not through any change in his features but simply because of the new atmosphere he extruded. He was clothed in a simple floor-length robe that appeared to be made from a single broad beam of light, bright enough to reveal the dazzling patterns on his wings; his hair floated loose, freed from the tight style that he usually slicked it into; and he was no longer wearing his mask, revealing a face that was – not healed, exactly, because psychological wounds couldn’t close up as neatly as paper cuts, but he looked serene, at peace with who he was and everything that he’d been through. Nothing about his face itself had changed, not even the tiny scars, but the difference in what lay behind it made him seem like a whole new man. This was him as he couldn’t be in his mortal body, him as he wished he could be…and as she wished he could be, too.

And if she’d thought that their connection was as close as it could get while they were battling before, she was wrong. In these forms, their bond was perfect; they were two halves of a whole concept.

He held out his hand to her and offered, “Let’s finish this, shall we?”

Chuva beamed at him, slipping her fingers between his. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Together, as Darkness and Light, they closed in on the increasingly terrified shapeshifter.

Their opponent was as powerful and intelligent as ever, but now the tables had been turned completely, and it was the one without a single viable strategy. Chuva and Silas easily stripped away its means of camouflage, then took turns at batting it around. He sliced off its rear segment using a moonbeam as a blade; she cut off its view of the courtyard, so that this time it would be the one fighting a foe that it couldn’t even see; he dragged its dirty little thoughts out into the open for her to scrutinize; she twisted them like soft putty, whispering to the shadows until they disgorged apparitions of things that demons were afraid of, things like the Equilibrium vanishing, the numbing being reversed, the mortals no longer living in fear…

With the power allotted to her by her transition, it was all nearly effortless, like humming a tune or jotting down a couple of words. She no longer needed prepackaged spells to guide her magic – she could dispense with the dead language, the gestures, and the intense concentration. Now she could do anything she could think of, as long as it fell within the jurisdictions of being Darkness.

And when the quivering, blind shapeshifter tried to escape, there were throngs of Royal Guards who could now see it very clearly waiting to stop its progress.

Chuva would have happily kept toying with it all night long, but Silas gently and wordlessly pointed out that it needed to be disposed of sooner or later, and besides, they still had one thing left to do. She conceded, and they crossed the courtyard, where he picked up the demon without touching it and held it out at arm’s length.

“Where is Teo?” he asked. His voice was smooth, resonant, unperturbed without being emotionless; she could have listened to a voice like that forever.

The demon, despite its shivering, stared back at Silas defiantly. It was refusing to speak, thinking it could withhold its purpose from them – but deception was part of her domain, and she could easily detect the lies that it was trying to shield itself with, congealed across its twisted little brain like a layer of ooze. She clawed through the gunk, extracted its truths with a with a few swift tugs, then passed them on to her double so that he could decipher them.

“As I thought,” he said – aloud, which just had to be force of habit at this point, because there was really no need. “Teo has been hidden not far from here, unharmed. The Equilibrium wanted him alive.”

“Yes, but why?” demanded Chuva. She burrowed deeper into the shapeshifter’s thoughts, exposing them in great bloody chunks, until it cried out weakly from the horror of being so exposed…but Silas found nothing else illuminating.

He told her, “It doesn’t know any more than that. It was only sent here to get Teo. And to test us.”

“To test us?”

“While the Equilibrium never told its minion here exactly why, most likely it wanted to see if we could take on our demigod forms or not.”

Chuva processed that, nodding grimly; the Equilibrium had sent out one of its more capable tools, because if they weren’t able to transform, it would have gotten rid of a couple of pesky gods, and if they were, then this sacrifice would be worth that valuable information. “Then I guess we should put it out of its misery. Do you want to do the honors?”

He flashed her a wry smile. “I finished off the last demon. You can go ahead.”

She showed off all of her newly-sharpened teeth. There were so many ways that she could kill it: she could stab it with a shadow-sword, to match Silas’s light-sword; she could plunge into its memory and obscure the parts that made it know how to breathe and how to make its heart beat; she could cast a spell that would make it explode on the spot. But she wanted to do something befitting of the god she was, something…dark.

So she twisted her hands, calling up swirling shadows from all across the courtyard, which began to circle around the shapeshifter. They drew closer and closer to their target, showing just flickers of fearful hallucinations, suggesting their horrors in low whispers as they enclosed the demon, wrapped around it, smothered it…

Then both it and the shadows vanished, leaving nothing but a fine gray powder that gently dissolved against the grass.

Silas let his arm drop. “You scared it to death?”

“I was just returning the favor,” she retorted. “It practically scared me to death with the way it was on you before.”

Instead of reprimanding her like he would have in his mortal form, he beamed at her, and then did something that she didn’t see coming despite their connection: he grabbed her lightly around the waist and twirled her in a circle, a little dance of joy, like they’d become children again.

They both laughed, and that was when she knew that she loved him as much as ever.

Teo was hidden just inside one of the passageways that led into the courtyard, affected by some kind of transfixation that both hid him and froze him. That was something new; Chuva had never seen a demon cast a spell before, not even a rudimentary one like this. Fortunately, she spotted him easily, and it only took a touch from Silas to undo the magic and restore the boy to his usual self.

She had never met Teo before, Silas had only met him a handful of times, and he’d certainly never seen either of them in their demigod forms – but you’d never know that based on the way he looked up at them and clapped happily, undaunted even by Chuva’s fangs. But that was nothing compared to the expression of utter jubilation that overtook his pudgy face when he spotted Violet running towards him.

“Teo!” she shouted, sweeping him up into her arms as soon as he was close enough. Teo made a sign to her, the same one over and over again, and while Chuva couldn’t understand sign language, she was willing to bet that he was calling back: Violet! Violet!

“Oh, thank goodness! I was so worried about you! You have no idea how frightened I was…!” Violet babbled on like that for a few minutes, expressing every sentiment that one could expect from a worried big sister as she checked over him for injuries. Only when she was satisfied that he was fine did she slowly turn back to the two more-than-mortal presences behind her.

She took a deep breath. “You…you’re…”

“Go ahead,” Chuva prompted her. “Say the G-word.”

“…gods,” whispered Violet, her eyes fit to pop out of her head.

Chuva smiled self-consciously, then quickly stopped, remembering her teeth. “Yeah. Uh, I might have left a few things out of those stories I told you…sorry about that.”

Violet gave her head a dazed little shake. “Even you, Sir Silver! You’ve been here my whole life, but I’ve never seen you like this!”

Silas spread his hands in front of him. “I could not do this without Chuva here.”

“And I couldn’t do it without him here,” added Chuva honestly.

Violet squeezed her lips together, shifted Teo in her arms; she was visibly working through her shock and returning to the logical thinking that fueled her life. “Why didn’t I know about this?”

“No one knows about it,” replied Silas. “Aside from Lord Algernon, that is. And no one can know about it.”

“Why not? Why don’t you just tell everyone?! We’ve all been thinking that the gods were dead, but all this time, you’ve really been–!”

“No.” Giving her head a firm shake, Chuva glided forward. “We aren’t who you think we are, Violet – at least, not completely. We aren’t the all-powerful gods who made the world and kept everything running smoothly. Something happened to those gods, and now, we’re what’s left of them. We don’t remember what our lives were like before, we aren’t nearly as powerful – not even like this, as demigods, the way we are right now – and we can’t just reach out and change the world. We have to work a lot harder than that. But if we tried to explain all of that to the world…well, you know how stupid people can be. The only thing they’d hear is ‘the gods aren’t dead’ and then they’d freak out on us: why didn’t you stop the numbing, why didn’t you answer our prayers, how could you let this happen…blah, blah, blah.”

Violet processed that, looking confused and a little disappointed, but she of all people would know that the masses didn’t often appreciate knowledge. “I suppose that’s true. But…does that mean that there’s nothing you can do to stop the numbing?”

“We’ve been trying to,” said Silas quietly, his eyes flickering downwards for a moment. “During the Thirty Years’ War, we did everything we could, including sharing the truth of who we were with some mortals – that’s how we know that telling them would do more harm than good. Eventually, we had to concede defeat, and we’ve spent the past twenty-two years defending against the numbing rather than attacking it.”

“Which is not enough,” Chuva added.

“It is not enough,” he agreed. “What happened tonight has proved to me that our enemy has some new tricks. But then, so do we. It is time for us to regroup before the entire world is lost.”

She looked at him, gazing into his true face, understanding that he’d changed far less since childhood than his masked self would have had her believe. Sir Silver may have claimed that there was no hope at all, but Silas could no more completely give up believing that there was beauty in the world than he could survive without breathing. And she also saw that her fear that she’d pushed him into battle when he couldn’t handle it was an irrational one after all; she may have planted the seed in his head, but even if she hadn’t, he would have eventually ended up in the war anyway. He was the kind of person who would do everything in his power to fight for the greater good. It was all a part of being the Light.

Violet pressed the still-unperturbed Teo to her chest and cleared her throat. “Miss Chuva…um, no offense, but…are you Darkness?”

Chuva’s lips curled, as if being called by what she really was amounted to a compliment of the highest caliber. “I most certainly am.”

“But then, didn’t you – that is, you aren’t the reason why all of the gods disappeared in the first place, are you?”

Oh, right…that old theological theory about Destruction, Death, and Darkness, so irrelevant to Chuva’s life that she had long forgotten about it, was probably what Violet had grown up hearing most often. She shook her head. “The gods didn’t vanish because of infighting. Besides, I’m Darkness, not evil.”

Still, this was yet another reason why the mortals of Cumula City couldn’t learn the truth about their Royal Enforcer. Violet must have understood that, because her next comment was, “You know, your secret might already be out. At least a dozen guards saw you two transform.”

“Maybe, but they won’t remember it,” said Chuva. “I’ll make sure that they don’t.” She was at work upon it even as she spoke; her powers didn’t allow her to delete memories, but she could hide them, obscure them, disguise them with conceivable replacements. None of the soldiers would recall seeing anything except her and Silas disposing of the demon in the usual manner.

“Will I remember it?” asked Violet softly. “Now that you’ve told me your secret, are you going to make it so that I don’t remember, either?”

Chuva frowned and turned to Silas, whose wings gave a slight flutter of thoughtfulness. The two of them conducted a thorough discussion between themselves in about a second, in which she suggested that Violet might be smart enough to realize that something was fishy with her memory if it were tampered with, and Silas conceded that Violet wasn’t likely to go blabbing about her discovery, anyway. So he cleared his throat and said, “That won’t be necessary, Miss Haraka. You’ve proven to us over and over again that you’re interested in helping the world, and we all know that spreading the truth about the gods will not be of any help. From now on, you will be our ally, a holder of secret knowledge and a servant of the greater good.”

“You talk like a damn epic poem,” snorted Chuva, rolling her eyes at him. Then she turned to Violet and said, “Your first job will be taking good care of Teo. Seems like he might be part of something more important than any of us know.”

Her brow furrowed as she looked over her unassuming little brother. “Such as…?”

“We haven’t figured that out yet, but we’ll be sure to tell you once we do.”

Violet nodded. Her shock was abating now, giving way to the determined shine in her eyes that appeared when she was conducting research in the library, or questioning Chuva. “Will you also tell me everything you know about the numbing and the demons so that I can help you?”

Before Chuva could answer, Silas stepped forward and took his double’s hand. “Yes, but that can wait until tomorrow. You and Teo should go show your parents that you’re all right. And Chuva – you and I really ought to change back before you have to mind-wipe the entire Royal Guard.”

Chuva pushed her fingers through her autonomously rippling hair as she watched Violet start to walk away. Even with the battle over, she still felt such power, such a strong and assured sense of identity…and between that and the closeness of her bond with Silas, returning to a more mortal state held little appeal to her. But then he reached out, took her other hand, and looked right into her eyes. Things are different now, Chuva, he told her. We’ve both changed because of this. We don’t have to be as uncertain as we were before.

’You can say that now,’ she thought back at him. ’But how do I know that you’re not going to dismiss it as soon as that mask goes back over your face?’

Because this has – because you have reminded me of who I really am. I’d forgotten about who I was behind the mask, but I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to forget feeling like this, even with my emotions dampened.

She couldn’t exactly take him at his word…but nor did she think that he was intentionally trying to deceive her. “I hope you’re right,” she said aloud.

Together, still hand in hand, they closed their eyes.

Chuva purged herself of Darkness, not pushing it out of her, but drawing it back to its origin place within her. It was a simple process, easier by far than taking on her demigod form had been…and yet, in the last few moments before she was completely returned to normal, she could have sworn that she heard a voice in her head. Not Silas’s; this voice was dry and flat, very far away, and it only spoke two words to her: Pitiful god.

Her eyes flew open, prepared to search Silas’s face for some sign that he’d heard it, too, but she found herself looking at his empty mask eyes and neutral mouth. Their uniforms had returned, along with the capes that concealed their wings. Chuva even felt that her hair tie was back in place.

He squeezed both of her hands gently. “The Equilibrium,” he murmured. “Ignore it. We’ll deal with it another day.”

Sighing, she looked out across the courtyard. The gray dust that had once been a shapeshifter was drifting in the wind; Violet was just hurrying out of sight, a dozing Teo in her arms; a small throng of Royal Guards stood awaiting their Captain’s (and Enforcer’s) return. Light and Darkness had once again become Silas and Chuva…at least, on the surface. She knew for a fact that the first time their demigod forms had come into the world would not be the last.

“Let’s go,” her double urged her, releasing one of her hands but not the other, and they walked side-by-side towards the soldiers.

“You know, you still haven’t told me something,” she said pointedly. “Something kind of important.”

“Yes?”

“Am I fucking fired or not?”

His emotions nudged the edge of her mind: disbelief, exasperation, amusement. “We’ll get to that, Chuva. Soon, but not right now. Don’t you think we’ve had enough excitement for one night?”