The Other Side

Chuva went back to the courtyard that night, long after the combat course had been disassembled and returned to storage, at a late hour when all but a few vigilant guards were asleep. She’d originally intended just to pace for a while – when she was agitated, she always found that movement helped to placate her, if only a little – but found upon arriving that she was more sad than angry. Sad and…uncertain; a bad combination for someone who would become the official Royal Enforcer in the morning. So she decided to take a seat on the edge of the fountain, hoping that the gently rippling water could soothe the savage beast running rampant through her head.

Her thoughts weren’t all the same, but Silas dominated every one, no matter what. It was faintly ridiculous, like when she was a young teenager and had been cultivating a crush on him and thinking of it like it was an earth-shatteringly tragic romance, rather than the typical adolescent-boy-and-girl stuff that it really was. That was probably why, once they were a little older, she’d ceded to his discomfort about being romantically involved. But now she wasn’t thinking about dating, she was thinking about being friends…about being doubles. She’d never thought that the relationship they’d maintained from the age of nine would be asking too much of him, and yet…

People change, she told herself. And circumstances change, too. As someone who’d lived a life where absolutely nothing went according to plan, she knew that very well. But while she hadn’t exactly come out at the other end wanting the exact same things, she had still wanted to be with him. That desire had been a part of her for so long that it was practically hardwired into her: she ate, slept, breathed, and gravitated towards Silas, it was all part of how she existed. To find that he no longer felt the same way about even that simple truth made her wonder if he’d ever been all that attached to her to begin with…and from there, it was a short trip to wondering how much of his life had been choices he’d really made, and how much had just been a series of events that she’d inadvertently pushed him into.

I never pushed him into anything! If he didn’t want to become a soldier or even to meet me, he could have said something; he knew he could trust me enough to tell me anything…! But was that really true? She’d always had the stronger personality – it was one of those things that children never thought of, but was transparently obvious to adults. And as a little girl with a large amount of confidence, she’d never been afraid to speak her mind, and had simply assumed that most other people were the same way. It was perfectly possible that, before she was old enough to know better, Silas had gone along with her out of sheer complacence, giving into her flights of fancy because she had phrased them like plans – like demands.

But no, that still didn’t make any sense, because they had been linked back then. There was no long separation to muddy the waters, and he hadn’t worn any stupid emotion-suppressing mask, so his thoughts and feelings had reached her unsullied and unmolested. And while he’d occasionally expressed some apprehension about the future (and so had she; the future was a scary thing, after all) there’d never been any outright terror, any hidden rejection of her ideas, or any significant dissent at all.

At least, that was how she remembered it.

Chuva tugged off one glove, then reached down to trace a swirl in the fountain water with her finger. It was astounding how much effort she had to put in just to stay happy every day. If someone had described to her, three months ago, her current life situation and asked her how she thought she’d feel about it, she would have reasonably declared herself to be overjoyed. A job relevant to her skills, where she had a decent amount of power and worked alongside her double? How could that be anything but wonderful? And yet, without the bond she’d once shared with Silas, the joy that she wanted to feel was proving to be elusive.

A subtle shift in the water’s reflections caught her attention, and she glanced upwards, towards a balcony – the same balcony, she realized, where she and Silas had shared their disastrous first rendezvous. There was a lone figure moving around up there, its shape wiry but strong, and she knew who it must have been. He was up there, looking down on her –

Looking down on her. Maybe that was the key. She didn’t have his knowledge or his fighting experience, so even without the mask further complicating things, he couldn’t see her as his equal anymore. She’d become a foolish child to him, even though they were the exact same age. If only she had a way to prove that she wasn’t as fragile as he seemed to think she was…

Chuva was seventy-five years old if you counted her time in hibernation, twenty-four if you didn’t, and she usually felt as if she were somewhere in between the two – but any way you looked at it, she somehow still hadn’t learned the simple lesson of be careful what you wish for.

When the heavy pounding on her bedroom door wrenched her out of sleep, Chuva’s first thought was oh, fuck, I’m late for my first real day on the job. But then her eyes found the clock on the bedside table, and even in the dark, her god-vision easily made out that it was about half past four in the morning. A full half-hour before she was supposed to get up.

She lunged out of bed and towards the door, wrenched it open, and stood there in her nightgown and cape. Her clothes suggested that she’d just woken up, but her expression did not; the realization that something was very wrong had roused her quicker than a round of cannon fire. There was a Royal Guard standing in front of her, and she demanded, “What the void’s happening?”

The guard seemed to be fighting the impulse to squirm nervously, although she couldn’t keep her fingers from fluttering across her hair. “Enforcer Chuva, ma’am, we’ve just had word from the watchtower that there’s a demon approaching the northeastern boundary of the city…!”

A demon. Shit. “Give me five minutes,” Chuva answered quickly. Her mind was already reaching out to connect with Silas’s, instinctively and unselfconsciously, and the details of his battle plan were soon flooding through to her. “Go and join your squadron. Sir Silver will tell you whether he wants you defending the castle or on the evacuation crew. I can’t fight a demon in my fucking pajamas, but I’ll get to the border before the demon does.”

The soldier hurried off. Chuva got dressed. Shirt, trousers, boots, belt and sword; she tied her hair back in a knot while simultaneously bolting down the corridor. Silas had given her the location, and now she asked him, ’How long do I have to get down there?’

I give it twenty more minutes, came his grim reply. No longer. If you run all the way, you might be here in twenty-five, and I can certainly hold the demon for that long, but –

’I’ll be there in fifteen,’ she cut him off. ’And I don’t have to run.’

Her room was on the third story of the castle, and she was glad of that. It meant that she could tear her cape off, thrust open the nearest person-sized window, and hurl herself into the air just as her wings were appearing on her back.

The sun wasn’t up, but she stayed on the perimeter of Cumula City anyway, just to make sure that no one would see her. She flew with all her speed, all her strength; this was neither the measured pace that she’d used to get across the sea, nor the leisurely who-cares-how-fast-I-go-they-won’t-be-able-to-catch-me-anyway flight that had taken her away from Noto City. This time she flew like a woman possessed, and when she finally touched down on the ground near the northeast watchtower, she was panting from exertion – albeit not as much as she would have been if she’d tried to run all this way instead.

Silas received her as she arrived, breathing pretty hard himself; he couldn’t have gotten here more than five minutes before she had. “You flew?” he asked, like he didn’t already know the answer.

“Yes,” said Chuva shortly as she swung her cape back over her shoulders. “And if you’re going to say anything about how I shouldn’t do that when people might see me even though it’s an emergency, then so help me I’ll–”

“Honestly, I was more concerned about you wearing yourself out before the fight had even started.”

With her cape now re-secured in its mantle, she straightened up, one fist squeezing the hilt of her sword. “Trust me, Silas, I’m just getting warmed up.”

The northeastern terrain was somewhat hilly, so she couldn’t catch more than fleeting glimpses of the demon (or Equalizer or whatever) as it approached from the distance, somehow seeming to both charge and meander at the same time. She couldn’t tell what it looked like, but she could tell that it was big – very, very big, if the slight vibrations beneath her feet were anything to go by.

Silas had an entire squadron of Royal Guards behind him, all of whom were doing their best to mimic their leader’s stone-faced stoicism, and all of whom were visibly failing at it. More soldiers were weaving in and out of the nearby streets and buildings, escorting night-shift workers and sleepy families to safer ground. The Guards might be able to keep their heads enough not to run off, but they probably wouldn’t be much use when the actual fighting started, which meant that he was almost completely relying on her. Fucking fantastic. Here was that chance to prove herself that she’d wanted, and it required putting her ass on the line more than she ever had before.

“Please tell me that you’ve gone up against giant Equalizers before,” he said.

“Are you kidding me? It’s only the little punks who bother trawling out in the gray lands and the small towns, and I’ve never had to deal with them in big cities before.” The only time she’d ever been faced with a giant Equalizer was when – no. That was exactly the kind of unproductive thought that she didn’t need to be thinking right now. “But the same basic principles apply, right?”

He gave off no disappointment or aggravation, probably didn’t have the capacity to feel anything but dead serious right now. “I’ve had to take them down with only one or two other people before. Just follow my lead.”

’I don’t have to follow your lead,’ she retorted, switching to doubles-telepathy so as not to waste her breath. ’We practiced this, remember? When we work off of each other, neither of us is really leading!’

I know, Chuva. But please, be very, very careful. Even when I had to battle giant Equalizers in small groups, a few of my companions could usually…

He let the thought fade out, but she got the gist: they could usually “transition” into their demigod forms. Well, who was to say that she couldn’t? She knew that she was the Light, and in a high-pressure situation like this one would surely be, then maybe it would be prudent to…

Only as a last resort, he warned her.

She never got a chance to answer, because at that moment, there was an alarmed shout from the watchtower and Silas’s backup squadron began to spread out. The demon loomed over them all, its head just higher than the tower, its face mainly occupied by a mouth that was filled with enough teeth to make it look like the innards of some demented factory machine. Beady little eyes glittered in the light of the encroaching sunrise; its body was stooped and spindly, a marionette made of long-dead tree trunks, with huge gnarled hands and feet. But the overall impression was not of frail gawkiness, but rather of something monstrous and otherworldly, warped in all kinds of wrong ways that almost hurt the eye to follow.

Silas bellowed to his squadron, “Your first priority is defending the civilians! Attack with caution!” The next thing Chuva knew, he was at her side, sword in hand, already composed into his battle stance. He reached out to her mind, and they linked.

Now she was looking at the skeletal demon through two sets of eyes as it swung one long arm towards the watchtower, in a quick but easily anticipated arc. She felt her double’s stance, and understood that he was more defensive – let the enemy dictate the tone of the battle, be attacked and then retaliate – so she should be more offensive. Somehow her body had known that before her mind, and she was already coiled to make a predatory spring, so she was able to bound forward in less than an instant when the demon made a move.

She slashed viciously at its ankle – what was it made of? Wood, bone, something else? If it was wood, maybe she ought to throw some sparks around with a spell, see if it caught fire – stabbed her blade in as deeply as she could, and twisted viciously. The demon shrieked, high and warbley like a drill in her eardrums, and its hands began to flail around without purpose. The watchtower couldn’t be saved, though, and it tumbled to the ground like a child’s building block construction. At the very least, she’d bought whoever was up there a few more seconds with which to escape.

Silas was already on the move. He’d gone to target the demon’s other leg; she felt him drag his sword across it in a long slice, and wait a minute, what the void?! – the path of his sword manifested as a glowing golden streak, which actually severed the foot at the ankle. It was some kind of spell, that much was obvious, but she hadn’t ever seen anything like it before. She caught the briefest glimpse of him as they both bolted to avoid the debris from the watchtower, and his sword was blazing in his hand.

The demon staggered, almost dropping to one knee, but then apparently managed to get its bearings and balance on its ankle-stump. Chunks of walls and ladders crashed to the ground behind her, and she spared half a second to hope that none of the evacuees had been close enough to be struck.

We’ve got to bring it down!, Silas relayed to her frantically. The head and chest are always most vulnerable, and to get at them, we need to bring it down to our level!

Chuva darted across the street, ducking into the cover of an alleyway where she could wait for the ideal moment to make her next move. She sent a frequency of wordless agreement out to him; there was no point in trying to fly, because even if getting spotted was no longer a huge issue, their fragile wings would be easy for the demon to snare or rend. No use in making easy targets of themselves.

She spared a couple of precious seconds to plunder his mind, taking a few especially useful spells stored there, and he freely offered up a couple more. They had to bring down the demon, but it was imperative that they didn’t use the same trick too many times, in case the thing was smart enough to wise up to their methods.

The giant skeleton-scarecrow creature lumbered towards the buildings on the edge of the city – mostly businesses with floors of residential tenements stacked above them, the highest of which were about on the demon’s shoulder level – and Chuva took her cue to move again, scuttling up the alley wall. Climbing obviously wasn’t as efficient as flying, but the uneven bricks provided easy handholds, and her muscles were more than up to the task of hefting herself upwards.

She hoisted herself onto the roof at almost the same moment that the demon reached out for the very building she was on; every other moving target was on the ground, and she must have looked so much more appealing…or possibly just more annoying. After all, wouldn’t anyone be more likely to swat at a fly in their face than a few ants underfoot? Before it could swat at her, though, she brought her arms forward, casting one of the new spells from Silas: the Invisible Arrow. The process involved condensing energy into a sharp, narrow beam, then hurling it forward at a desired target like an arrow from a bow. If she’d learned the spell from Magi Corona, it might’ve taken her ten or fifteen minutes to do it properly for the first time, but from Silas, it was more like ten or fifteen seconds.

Unfortunately, that was still far longer than she would have preferred, and as she let her projectile fly, the demon’s spindly fingers stretched towards her. She hit the ground hard, rolled underneath its reaching hand, and heard its shriek of indignation and agony when the Invisible Arrow burrowed into its eye. At the same time, Silas had assembled part of his squadron on the ground, and they fired off a dozen real arrows to pepper the demon’s legs and lower back. She followed the attack through his eyes, subsequently felt his sting of frustration when the attack seemed to anger the demon more than actually hurting it, and she wished (not for the first time) that somebody had bothered to invent a gun that was even half-decent before all scientific progress had ground to a halt. She started prepping another Invisible Arrow, only for an enormous and enraged hand to dig into the upper edge of the building, crumbling it like she might crumble a lump of brown sugar.

“Shit!” she yelped as the roof buckled beneath her feet.

She was falling for a second, or perhaps two, during which time she felt a rush of vertigo from herself and a pang of alarm from Silas; even though they could both fly, they were still vulnerable to the instinctive mortal fear of heights. Then Chuva reached her arm out, grasped the demon’s finger, and had swung herself onto its shoulder before she’d stopped shuddering at the slimy feel of its hand. Ignoring the slow, deafening thrum of the building collapsing beside her, she drove her sword wildly against the demon’s neck, its cheek, the spot where its chin should have been – wherever she could reach, basically, and all the while she hopped and ducked to avoid its increasingly frantic attempts to pluck her off. Finally she must have hit something vital, because the wound gushed thin gray fluid into her face, and the creature wailed and thrashed so hard that she could no longer keep her footing. She was flung against another building – luckily, not hard enough to do anything but slow her fall and scrape up her arms a bit – then fell again, too quickly to pull off her cape, too far to land on her feet without the risk of breaking her ankles from the impact’s force. An instinct gleaned from years of both learning to fly and learning to fall prompted her to angle herself in a way that allowed her rear and the fleshy part of her upper arm to absorb the impact. It hurt…but not as much as it would have if she’d been skinnier or even more muscular. Thank gods I’m fat.

Now she was sprawled on the ground, staring at the demon’s foot and ankle-stump, realizing that its unwillingness to give up its tentative balance was probably why it hadn’t stepped on her yet. Instead, it was going after another building, while she sat here smarting and needing a few precious minutes to shake off her hurt. Surely Silas could cover her for a short time – she felt his endless motion, running, planning – but she couldn’t just do nothing…! She wracked her brains, trying to think of a spell that would be effective from down here, or maybe she should risk flying, or –

Or neither.

With the way she’d landed, the lump of her starstone, still in her pants pocket, was pressing into her sore thigh. It reminded her of things she could do intrinsically, and by extension, of a power she had that didn’t come from a spell.

She could transform. Transition into her demigod form and blow this demon away before it had a chance to wonder why she wasn’t incapacitated. Silas had told her to save transitioning as a last resort only, but this definitely counted as an opportune moment. If she was going to do it, though, she had to be quick; she had all of two seconds to decide.

Chuva stood up, only staggering a little, tried to focus as hard as she could on the reservoir of power that fueled everything extraordinary about her, gathered every spark of energy in her body…and declared as loudly as she dared, “I am the Light!”

Nothing happened.

Literally, nothing. No physical change, no mental change, not even the spluttery rebound that she used to get whenever she hadn’t chanted an incantation quite right.

The demon was gripping the sides of its target building. Her eyes flared wide with dismay, and she tried again, a little louder still, “I am the Light…!”

No reaction. It wasn’t working, and she could feel that it wasn’t going to work, at least not right now; she was too panicked, too wild, too distracted, or she was doing some-fucking-thing wrong. She heard a rumbling smash, the second building started to come down, and the pain in her body had diminished just enough to let her sprint away from the carnage, spewing curses in her wake.

It was Silas who came to the rescue. He’d been on top of the now-crumpling tenement, and had taken a mighty leap into the air just as it started to come down, aiming straight for the demon’s chest. With impeccable and almost unbelievable timing, he uttered a few deliberate words and pointed, causing some kind of small explosion to go off inside the demon’s…ribcage or heart or whatever it had in there. It moaned, doubling over before collapsing to its hands and knees.

Silas seized the chance and jumped to safety, landing so close to her that she was practically right next to him. Without pausing to get his bearings, he thrust his fist forward, and a good-sized hunk of debris from the street punched up into the demon’s face; it uttered a short cry and attempted to shield itself. He managed to attack the same way twice more before exertion forced him to take a step back.

“Nice one,” Chuva shouted at him, sheathing her (by now quite disgusting) sword so that she had access to both of her hands for spellcasting. The skeleton creature uttered a gurgling moan, slitting its eyes open to check if the onslaught had ended, just in time for her to blast out a cloud of toxic smoke that would burn like acid against any demonic flesh. The only adverse effect that mortal bystanders would experience was limited visibility caused by the smog, but Chuva, whose vision was divinely sharp, was immune to even that. An otherworldly howl battered her senses, and she winced, but still powered forward and plunged her sword into her opponent’s eye cavity.

This time, the force of its scream actually threw her to the ground, forcing her to hunker down as the sour wind of its breath blasted around her. With her eyes squeezed shut, she only saw the final blow vicariously, through Silas’s consciousness: he put the same enchantment on his sword as before, then used its magical beam to neatly decapitate the demon, cutting off its scream the way that closing a door would cut off an obnoxious sound.

Grit slithered across her skin – that dust that demons disintegrated into after you killed them – and finally, she opened her eyes.

Silas was standing a few yards away, starkly silhouetted against the sunrise; his drawn sword and lightly flapping cape made him look like one of those historical paintings. And here we see Saint Silver in his moment of triumph after saving Cumula City from an Equalizer. Except that there was no triumph in his expression at all, only resignation. The visible parts of his face blankly stated that he had seen this a million times and expected to see it a million more.

“This” was not only the death of the demon, but also the destruction of the watchtower and residential buildings. She turned to survey the destruction for the first time without a monster breathing down her neck, the early morning breeze whipping flyaway hairs around her face, and felt a chill numbness sweep through her veins. One tenement was half-obliterated, the other nothing but rubble, and there was practically nothing identifiable left of the watchtower. Even if the evacuation had gotten every single person out of those buildings – which was unlikely – some civilians must have been crushed under the debris. It was certain, it was unavoidable, and even without a trace of visible blood or gore, it was the grisliest scene that she’d ever witnessed.

“We…failed,” she whispered disbelievingly.

“We did not fail,” answered Silas flatly. “We destroyed the Equalizer. Most of the city is safe.”

“But…all of this…!” Her hands came up, tried to clutch at the scope of the destruction, then realized the futility of their task and dropped back down. “This has never happened to me before! We shouldn’t have let this happen…!”

His head rotated towards her, a gear turning on its well-oiled joint. “Yes? And what should we have done?”

“I-I don’t know…!” she stammered. “But couldn’t we have done something differently?! Couldn’t I have done something differently…?!”

“No. We did everything that we could. You fought admirably.” But the compliment was hollow, and he said it with less emotion than he would have used for a phrase like lovely weather we’re having or I am fine.

She gave her head a few desperate shakes, clenching her teeth so hard that it made her temples throb. “If I’d just managed to transform…!”

“Then you would have transformed. This still would have happened. It is the price we have to pay.”

“The price we have to pay for what?!”

He indicated the desolation before them with a vague gesture. “For going against the Equilibrium.”

Chuva opened her mouth, then snapped it shut. Her shock, her indignation, her struggle to grasp the scale of how much had really been lost – all of these were things that a soldier in the Thirty Years’ War would have grown accustomed to long ago. And if they couldn’t get used to it on their own, then they’d take it a little further, coming up with some slapped-on solution like Silas’s damned mask. Yet she still struggled to understand why he’d ever donned it. What she felt now was far from pleasant, but the pain provoked her, made her want to fight even harder so that she never had to look at a situation like this ever again.

I thought that way, at first, said Silas in her head. But you can see how little it matters to “fight even harder.”

Chuva squeezed her hands into fists, breathing harshly behind clenched teeth. She wasn’t yet ready to concede that she was totally useless…just another god destined to fail exactly as those before her done.

They walked all the way back to the castle; neither of them had the stamina, emotional or physical, to fly there. A couple squadrons’ worth of soldiers trudged along behind them, not marching in step like they were supposed to, but not even Silas was going to reprimand them at a time like this. This could very well be the heaviest loss of life that Cumula City had seen in years – decades – even centuries might not be a hyperbolic description.

Upon their arrival, the ordinary soldiers got to be dismissed, while Chuva and Silas were taken directly to King Cecil. Chuva knew from the start that the meeting wouldn’t go well. Silas was dusted with silt from the fallen buildings, she was stained with sticky dried demon blood, his mask had made him so stoic as to be almost completely emotionless, and her lack thereof made her feel as though she was going to start screaming and punching things at any moment. But this was part of the duty that she’d accepted when she became the Royal Enforcer, and even if she’d never exactly respected authority at her previous jobs, there was a difference between throwing a broom in a restaurant owner’s face and throwing a tantrum in front of the king.

King Cecil took one look at them as they approached the throne and immediately started to turn that pasty color again.

“You two look awful!” he cried, leaning forward despite the obvious discomfort that their haggard appearances were causing him. “Are you all right?”

If they weren’t, then they would be in the damn infirmary right now; their scrapes and bruises didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. Chuva kept her lips sealed, not trusting herself to speak, so Silas answered for both of them: “We are unharmed, Your Majesty. Thank you for your gracious concern.” He sounded like if a boulder had taught itself to speak without learning how to feel emotions first.

Lord Algernon, in his usual spot at the king’s arm, stepped forward, looking concerned but not especially shocked. She guessed that he’d seen Silas get like this before. “We need your damage report immediately,” he interjected. “It was a very bad one, wasn’t it?”

“The official damage report is currently being collated by my people,” replied Silas. “The northeastern watchtower has been completely destroyed, as have two buildings, the addresses of which you will receive when the report is filed. Casualties cannot be assessed with complete accuracy at this time, but our best estimate right now is at least two dozen deceased.”

Chuva plowed her fingers through her disgusting, slimy hair; it was that or beat her fists against the nearest wall, which would have looked highly unprofessional. In her walk-around to talk to the damage-collating soldiers before she’d left, they’d told her that several evacuees were unaccounted for, and that some of the occupants of the collapsed buildings had chosen to wait out the attack rather than fleeing. Okay, it was a little foolhardy of them to stick around, but Cumula City residents didn’t really know how destructive demons could be…and even if they did, they didn’t deserve to die for their choices.

King Cecil’s reaction to hearing the bad news was somehow even worse than hers. His face was rapidly shifting from white to pale green, and he appeared to be on the verge of regurgitating whatever breakfast that his royal chef had whipped up for him. “Two buildings destroyed?” he gasped. “Two dozen casualties…?!”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Silas’s voice was completely detached, disembodied. “They were crushed under the rubble. We will uncover their bodies, as well as some survivors, undoubtedly.”

“Th-this is…” King Cecil turned to Algernon, like a little boy seeking guidance from Mommy, even though he was the fucking king and he was really going to allow his right hand to tell him what to think at a time like this…?!

Lord Algernon finished softly, “Unprecedented. I am truly sorry, Your Majesty, for the loss of your people and for the difficult situation that you now find yourself in. Just know that I am here to assist you.”

“This is only the second-ever demon attack in our history,” mumbled Cecil. He fiddled with the cuffs of his robe, wiped beading sweat away from his temples. “And it’s k-k-ki…ah…t-taken the lives of twenty-four people, at least. I was always told that we were under divine protection on Atlas Isle…”

“Twenty-four is a relatively small death toll for a demon attack,” Silas said. “And now you see the proof that whatever divine protection you once had is no longer present.”

“And it’s going to keep happening,” said Cecil bleakly, as if confirming the idea to himself. The expression on his face…it was almost more like disgust than horror. As if he felt, not the existential dread of realizing that so many lives had been lost, but a squeamishness from picturing all of those messy bodies that would need to be cleaned up. So Chuva couldn’t help but wonder – exactly how much did he care about the lives of his citizens at all? This quivering so-called monarch who’d flinch at the sight of chicken blood and now had to deal with savage monsters rampaging through his kingdom…

Her mouth was still shut tight, her jaw muscles visibly straining.

Now Cecil was asking hurriedly, “Were there many witnesses?” He directed the question towards Algernon; talking to either of the warriors in the room clearly made him too uncomfortable.

“I would expect so, Sire,” answered Algernon, who seemed slightly puzzled by the question. “For a large-scale attack like this…”

Silas put in, “The demon was a giant, taller than the watchtower, so the number of witnesses should easily exceed the number of casualties.”

“Oh…” Cecil slumped down, like a schoolboy at his desk, told off by the teacher for spouting ridiculous ideas. “I had hoped…I mean, people are going to panic now, but I thought that perhaps if we…”

He’d thought that if they’d been able to cover it up, then he would have been able to save his own ass from having to answer for what had happened today. He didn’t want his subjects to know the truth, to understand what they were up against, if it meant having to do his actual fucking job. Chuva struggled to control her breathing, repeating a mantra over and over in her head: Do not scream. Do not scream. Do not scream.

“So. Um.” Now he was fumbling for something semi-intelligent to say. “I suppose that we could think of…uh…evacuations…?”

“Evacuations to where?” demanded Silas. “The rest of the world has been dealing with these attacks for decades. We cannot run; we can merely attempt to minimize the damage.”

“Perhaps resettlement for those living directly on the edges of the city?” suggested Algernon tentatively. “For those who wanted to, anyway, so that there would be less danger for anyone in the demons’ paths, and the Royal Guard would have more space to subdue the threat. We could prevent any further great tragedies like this one.”

Cecil compounded the schoolboy imagery even further by starting to shift and squirm. “B-but that would take ages to complete!”

Yes, of course it would, all major changes to a kingdom take a long time to finish, but that was what he had signed on for when he became the king – just like she had signed on to serve this pile of – Do not scream. Do not scream. Do not scream.

“I am not certain that doing so would make things any better,” stated Silas.

Cecil released a shaky sigh. “Do we have to decide about this right now…?”

Oh, fucking void, what did he think, that monarchs got to have coffee breaks for when the job just got too stressful?! That when you were the ruler of an entire kingdom, you still got to duck out for your daily nappy-wappy and let the grown-ups sort out all the difficult – Do not scream do not scream do not scream do not scream…

“Enforcer Chuva, are you all right?” she suddenly heard Algernon ask. “You look rather strained. You’re not hurting, are you?”

Chuva realized that she probably appeared on the verge of exploding; her muscles were rigid, her face hot, her cheeks slightly puffed out from the effort of holding back so many biting comments. As she forcibly dragged her attention to Lord Algernon’s apprehensive query, she felt a moment of quick lightheadedness, like when she used to step off of a tree branch back in Saint Valdez, uncertain of how well her wings would work that night. She looked between her three superiors – the incompetent king, his yes man of a babysitter, and the Captain of the Royal Guard who thought that emotions were beneath him – and thought about how much of a joke this all was, how fucking little it meant to serve under rulers like this.

She locked eyes with King Cecil and said evenly, “You spineless, pathetic, cowardly son of a bitch. People are dead, and you’re sitting on your ass, afraid to put your foot down in case it gives you an ouchy-boo-boo. I’d laugh if it didn’t make me so fucking sick.”

Dead silence. You could have heard a speck of dust hit the floor. And Cecil could not have looked more stunned if she had stridden right up to him and plunged her sword into his gut.

Silas, he of the measured speeches about damage control, was the first to step forward. “Your Majesty, please excuse her,” he spoke up hurriedly. “Chuva is under an enormous amount of stress from her role in fighting the demon earlier today, and she does not mean what she–”

“Oh, I’m fucking stressed, all right, but not because of the demon,” she snarled, stomping past her double, and the unshielded fury bristling out from her mind actually made him flinch. “I’m stressed because I just put my ass on the line trying to save a bunch of people I don’t know and a city that I’ve lived in for a few weeks, and what is your first reaction?! ‘Eww, gross, icky corpses, please don’t make me look at them!’ And your second reaction?! ’Were there a lot of witnesses? Yes? Oh no, now I actually have to do something instead of just pretending like this never happened!’ You are un-fucking-believable, you gutless creep, you bastard! You don’t really give a damn about this place – you’re just some fucking overgrown baby that somebody dressed in a crown and plopped down on the throne for some fucking reason! Whose cock did you have to suck to get up there?! And when are you going to do the right thing and let someone who actually knows what the void they’re doing take your place?!”

By the end of her tirade, she wasn’t breathless; on the contrary, she was breathing much too fast, air blasting in and out between bared teeth. The words had not relieved any of her tension, and in fact, her desire to strangle some sense into King Cecil was stronger than it had been just a few minutes ago. He must have seen the malice dripping out of every pore, because he shrank back, looking for all the world like he expected her to attack him right then and there.

Her thoughts were diverted when Silas snatched her arm abruptly. She glared into his mask-eyes, picturing them narrowed angrily at her, and knew that he was livid in his own quiet way. She didn’t break his gaze, and after a moment he looked back towards the throne, saying gruffly, “Excuse me, Your Majesty and Lord Algernon, but I need to have a word with Chuva, alone.”

With that, he started dragging her towards the exit like a parent might do to their misbehaving offspring; she smacked his hand away (not lightly, though not as hard as she could have) and he took the hint, letting her follow him out on her own course.

When the doors had shut behind them, Silas didn’t bother to make sure that they were out of earshot or even send away the two guards flanking the throne room; instead, he spun on his heel to face her, arms crossed and lip curled with displeasure. “What do you think you’re doing?!” he hissed, incensed but also as cold as ever. “Are you trying to get fired from your job?!”

“To void with the job!” spat Chuva. “Some things are more important than jobs! Like the fact that people are dead, no one’s doing anything about it, the kingdom’s being run by a jackass, and–”

“And somewhere in there, your pride has been injured,” he interjected coolly. “So you dish out a tongue lashing to your ruler and superior, as if that’s going to change anything.”

This riled her up almost more than before. “Oh fuck no, don’t you dare start trying to pin this all on me! Cecil’s an incompetent piece of shit, you’ve said so yourself, but now that he’s shown how cowardly he really is…!”

Her double’s mind was now as opaque to her as the mind of any mortal; he’d shut himself off completely, and was looking down on her with a maddeningly condescending scowl. “You really haven’t changed since you were a child,” he said, as if it were an insult of the worst kind. “Not at all. You’re still nothing more than a selfish little girl inside.”

Chuva gaped, flailing to find any words that could express how stunned, how hurt, and how incredibly fucking furious she was.

“When are you going to abandon these childish ideals of bravery and honor?” he continued, like he hadn’t said enough already. “Look around you, Chuva: this is the real world. Where good people die in battle regardless of how skilled they are at fighting, where foolish and cowardly men can ascend to the level of kings, where nobody cares about what you have to say or how smart you think you are. Yet you still behave as if fairy tale rules apply, as if everything’s going to come out right in the end, no matter what you do. Aren’t you embarrassed about that immature outburst back there?! Don’t you feel any shame knowing that you can’t even control your own emotions?!”

She almost shoved him against the wall – but her mouth came up with the perfect barb in time to prevent that. “You can’t control your emotions either!” she shouted. “That’s why you wear that fucking mask!”

His mouth dropped open, just a little.

“You’re just as numbed out as the gray lands beyond your precious little island!” she ranted at him, ejecting the words like a constant deluge of acid, made all the more pressurized and more poisonous by being held back for so long. “You couldn’t grow enough of a pair to deal with your feelings, so you just made it so that you don’t have to care about anything – not about demons, not about all the people who’ve died and who are going to keep dying, not about what’s best for the world, and most of all not about me! You can’t care! You’re barely even a fucking person anymore; you’re just a corpse, going through the motions and pretending you’re alive, when really you killed yourself a long time ago! And I can’t believe that I came all this way looking for my double, my closest friend, and all I found was this dead fucking body!”

Silas said nothing. She wanted to read him, wanted to see if he’d had a reaction, wanted to at least figure out if he felt any remorse at all – even if it was just so that she could lord it over him and know that she’d hurt him as much as he’d hurt her. But his consciousness was still sealed, impermeable, and the uncovered parts of his facial expression could have meant anything at all.

Finally he asked, softly, “Well, what did you expect, Chuva? Did you think that I would be exactly the same after fifty-four years? We can’t all go for so long without growing up.”

Her last word on the matter wasn’t really a word at all. She struck him bluntly across the chest, not nearly hard enough to hurt, but with enough spite to let him know exactly how she felt about his comment.

Without looking back, she walked away briskly, with her boot heels pummeling the floor and her strained face turned defiantly towards the sky.