The Other Side

Violet probably would have heard about the demon attack much later if it hadn’t been for the fact that school was cancelled that day. When she’d stood in the living room, bewildered in her nightgown and slippers, and asked her parents why exactly the school had been closed, her parents had frantically eyeballed each other in a scramble to come up with some plausible excuse…but in the end, their panicked expressions spoiled any mundane lie they might have told. So they reluctantly gave her a very watered-down account of the recent battle, then commanded her to stay in their quarters “until we know for sure that everything is safe.” Lady Priscilla scampered off to a series of hastily-assembled emergency meetings, Lord Geoffrey lurked around the suite of garishly opulent rooms – even if he’d wanted to go elsewhere, all of his socialite friends were probably too frightened to stick one toe out the door – and Violet herself sat on the parlor couch nearest the window, squeezing Teo in her lap as she strained to see into the city, simultaneously yearning for a glimpse of the damage and nervous about just how gruesome it might really be.

Teo, for his part, seemed oddly restless despite being too young to understand the concepts of demons and battles and death. He kept signing for her to draw the curtains – well, actually he signed “windows” and “close”, but she knew what he meant – and when she asked him why, he only responded by repeating his gestures more emphatically. She guessed that he must have been responding to the somber mood of the household, and he’d probably also gleaned that something bad had happened outside, even if he couldn’t comprehend what it was. Games and treats did little to distract him, and she was only able to calm his fussing when she brought him into his bedroom, where she made sure that the small window remained securely blocked off from his line of sight.

It was late afternoon when Priscilla bustled in, dramatically fanning herself and flopping down on the sofa to show how exerted she was. But while she had no shortage of comments about how stressful the meetings had been, she insisted that she wasn’t at liberty to discuss anything interesting like what they’d actually been about. She did, however, give Violet permission to go on a walk; Geoffrey expressed concern, but his wife replied with a dismissive, “They gave the all-clear hours ago, and I’m sure our poor daughter doesn’t want to be cooped up here any longer. Look, it’s all right, tomorrow the school should be open again, and we’ll be back on a normal schedule. Everything is fine.”

But everything wasn’t fine. Soon Violet was striding through the hallways, her muscles locked into a posture of grim determination. Her parents might be more worried about their lives being interrupted than they were about the well-being of the planet, but she was going to find some way to help, no matter what they thought – and today, she’d start by getting a straight answer about how bad the demon attack had been.

Her first thought was to speak to Sir Silver, and she asked the first Royal Guard she encountered where she might find him, but the soldier would only say that they were so sorry, Miss Haraka, but the Captain has been detained in discussions with King Cecil, he won’t be available all day. Well then, what about Enforcer Chuva – was she held up in those discussions too? Actually, Miss Haraka, nobody’s seen Enforcer Chuva since this morning, who knows where she is. Sorry about that, Miss Haraka, maybe tomorrow; you have a nice night now.

Violet had to admit that she wasn’t surprised about Sir Silver’s preoccupation, and it wouldn’t have been odd to hear that Chuva was trapped in the same procedural labyrinth, but hearing that the Royal Enforcer was unaccounted for caused a ripple of unease in her chest. Could Chuva have been a victim of the demon attack, trapped or even killed…? Unsettled by the notion, Violet began to wander along the outer hallways of the castle, occasionally straying onto balconies and outdoor walkways, useless theories and speculations chasing themselves around in her head.

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been walking when, passing a second-floor terrace, she spotted a familiar figure leaning dejectedly on the railing. Was that…? “Miss Chuva!” she exclaimed, hurrying over with a burst of both relief and anticipation.

Chuva turned around, startled, but only mildly. “Oh. Violet,” she said in an uncharacteristically weary tone of voice. Facing forward, she’d revealed a pale ring of bandages tied around one arm, along with a nasty purple bruise beneath her left eye.

Violet stopped up short at the sight. “You’re hurt…!”

“Not really.” Chuva touched the bandages with two fingers, momentarily self-conscious, before shrugging and returning her gaze to the landscape. “Just got a little scraped up is all.”

Well, as long as she wasn’t mortally wounded or anything like that… “What are you doing out here?” asked Violet, making her way over towards the railing. “I talked to one of the guards, and they said that they didn’t know where you were! Shouldn’t you be talking with Sir Silver and everyone about – what happened today…?”

Chuva snorted. “No way. After this morning, I’m just counting the minutes until somebody shows up to fire me.”

“Fire you?!” echoed Violet incredulously. But Chuva had only barely been hired! Stunned into impoliteness, she couldn’t keep herself from asking, “Why, what did you do?”

Without looking at the girl, Chuva smiled grimly; no teeth this time, pointed or otherwise. “After the attack, King Cecil was acting like a spineless bastard, and I told him as much. I’m censoring myself for your sake, by the way, as both the length and the language of what I said to him were a little more…intense.”

“Oh.” Violet’s arms prickled, not quite breaking out in goosebumps, but coming fairly close. Speaking to the king like that would definitely be a grave insult, worthy of immediate termination, and yet… “He is spineless, though.”

“You don’t have to tell me. He and everyone else in his cabinet are going to run this place into the ground, and that’s a damn shame. I’ve really liked living here.”

Violet swallowed. She had known all along that her home was in big trouble, but hearing an adult admit to that made her truly realize how dire the situation had become. A catastrophic battle had taken place mere hours ago, and the king’s response to it had apparently been so unintelligent that it had caused a professional warrior to lose her temper at him. Now he’d probably banish said warrior, and if he did, he’d be getting rid of one of the only people who actually seemed to know what was really going on. “It’s too bad,” she finally murmured. “I’ll miss you if you get fired.”

Chuva made eye contact with her for the first time, expression softening. “Thanks, kid. In a weird way, it’ll be nice to know that at least one person will miss me.”

“Two people,” corrected Violet, recalling their impromptu question-and-answer session from the other day. “Sir Silver will miss you too.”

She couldn’t help jerking back a little when Chuva barked out a sharp half-laugh and smacked her fist down on the balustrade. “Ha!” she said, humorless, sneering at nothing in particular. “That’s rich. No, he won’t – he’ll barely even notice I’m gone. The man’s a damn cadaver.”

Violet wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, exactly, but she could guess that it wasn’t a compliment…and that Sir Silver had been less than thrilled when Chuva got all insubordinate on the king. There must have been an argument between them, a bad one. This was all but confirmed when Chuva continued, “Honestly, he’s a total stranger – I feel like I barely even know him. But I guess that’s what happens after you’ve been in the Thirty Years’ War. Maybe if I’d been there too, I’d get it.”

She leaned out on her elbows over the railing, glaring at the city view before her: portrait of a woman caught between rage and despair. Nearly two full minutes of silence had passed before Violet finally worked up the nerve to speak again. “Um…Miss Chuva…if you don’t mind me asking, why weren’t you in the Thirty Years’ War? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” she added hastily.

Chuva peered at her for a moment, completely bewildered, as if the girl had just spouted off some bizarre non-sequitur…or asked a bafflingly obvious question that she should have known the answer to already. Then: “Oh. That’s right. I never finished telling you my story, did I?”

Violet shook her head furtively.

“Yeah, I remember now. And…shit, if I’m not gonna be around for that much longer, I might as well tell you now, right?” Chuva shrugged noncommittally. “That is, if you actually want to hear it, and you aren’t just humoring me.”

“No, honestly. I want to hear it very much.”

“What the void, then.” And she whirled around, tossing her cape out of the way, managing to look majestic in the golden daylight despite the bandages and bruise. “Direct from me to you, here’s the rest of the story. Starting from right after I turned twenty-one…”

…and, just four days after her birthday, she was getting ready to set out for her job (she’d been working at the tavern for the past six months; the general store had axed her during a round of layoffs) when the long-festering tension in the house finally came to a head.

It differed from the other, earlier fights in that she hadn’t seen it coming. She was in the kitchen, gathering herself some snacks for her meal break later, and she happened to idly mention how her birthday had been somewhat of a letdown. “I mean, technically I became an adult when I turned twenty last year, but even now I don’t feel any different. Does the official age of adulthood even mean anything anymore? With the way things have been, nobody’s going out into the world in case they get attacked by demons, so people are staying in their family homes longer and longer.”

Saría grunted from across the room, where she was scrubbing the earthenware countertop; she always insisted that it had “streaks” on it, although it looked perfectly clean to Chuva. “Should I take that to mean that you’re planning to be here for a while, then?”

“No way,” scoffed Chuva. “There’s supposed to be Global Safeguard Army recruiters in Azuna within the next few weeks. As soon as I get word that they’ve arrived, I’m out of here.”

She closed the cupboard she’d been raiding and started to make for the door, only to hear a dramatic sigh emanate from behind her. “I just don’t understand why we bothered to spend all that money on magic lessons if you were only going to throw it all away like this,” lamented Saría. “You’re talented, and if you weren’t so lazy, you could work hard and really make something of yourself. As opposed to joining the army like any unschooled peasant can do…”

Chuva’s skin prickled. Saría was trying to start a fight in that subtle and possibly subconscious way of hers, and Chuva knew it, yet she couldn’t help being goaded. “I’m trying to help make the world a better place, Mother,” she retorted. “And in case you didn’t know, it’s not actually my fault that the council wouldn’t let me take over from Magi Corona!”

“Yes, I know that. But still…”

“But still what?” she demanded. “Is me trying to protect people from demons just not good enough for you?”

Unlike her daughter, Saría never wrinkled her nose or puckered her mouth when she was starting shit; instead, she kept her head angled upwards almost proudly, as if declaring through her posture that she was always in the right. “I still think that you could have put aside your childish delusions of grandeur and come up with other options. That’s all.”

Chuva turned on her heel, heedless of possibly being late for work, and scowled. “Yeah, well, this is the option that I chose, Mother. I’m not a little kid who needs you to dictate my schedule for me anymore – I’m twenty-one years old!”

“When I was twenty-one,” remarked Saría pointedly, “I had my own apartment, I was a mid-level employee at the woodworks in Azuna, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking my parents for money or living under their roof…”

“And the gods were still around, and magic still worked, and there weren’t demons on the prowl waiting to eat you if you stepped out of town,” snapped Chuva.

“Oh, here we go, now you’re just being a typical adolescent. ‘My parents can’t possibly understand what it’s like to be young…’”

“Maybe you remember what being young is like, but the world is completely different now than it was when you were my age! Things are changing all the time!”

“Perhaps. But one thing that will never change, Chuva, is that you’ll always be a stubborn, selfish underachiever with your head in the clouds and both feet in my house.”

Throughout everything, Saría never reverted to one of her former screaming fits; even when her tongue was at its sharpest, she always seemed to carry the memory of the dish that had exploded into shards. This time was no different. It wasn’t Saría who finally broke, succumbing to the charged atmosphere that had saturated their relationship for years…it was Chuva.

“You know what, Mother?!” she shrieked, her voice ascending to that warning-siren pitch that she’d once cowered at, and even Saría flinched back, truly understanding for the first time what it was like to have a conversation suddenly detonate in your face. “At least I won’t be an ABUSIVE BITCH whose family can’t even stand to stay in the same room with her for two minutes! At least I won’t have such a meaningless existence that I’ll have to belittle my children just to feel better about myself! At least I’ll have my OWN LIFE, and I won’t be the shitty little copy of you that you want me to be, going out and doing exactly what you did so you can tell yourself that you didn’t fuck up that badly – even though you did!”

Chuva’s outburst made up in intensity for whatever it lacked in length, and as she shouted the words – not crazily and uncontrollably like her mother would have, but with a fierce and deliberate fury – an unsettling mixture of horror and satisfaction swirled in her gut. And…another emotion, too, one that had often been there before but that she had been too apprehensive to name. Hatred. True hatred, which felt much different than she’d expected; it was not a presence but an absence, the physical manifestation of all the affection she’d felt for her mother being scratched out until it was unreadable. Not hatred as it was described by many teenagers (including herself) when, in the heat of the moment, they screamed “I hate you, Mother!” No, this was the actual opposite and absence of love, and it was a cold empty sensation rather than the hot bursting one that she was used to.

Now Saría was opening her mouth, about to say something indignant, and the sight made Chuva feel like laughing. None of this mattered anymore – her mother could say whatever hurtful thing she pleased, and she’d only be beating a dead ox, because the worst possible damage had already been done. Chuva whirled around and strode out the front door, then slammed it carelessly behind her, shutting out Saría’s cries of “Chuva! Where do you think you’re going?! Are you listening to me?! Chuva–!”

She tromped through the village, slightly dazed with all of the new feelings and revelations coursing through her, bypassing her workplace without a second glance. When she didn’t report in today, her boss would definitely notice, but that didn’t matter; by the time word got back to her parents, it would all be over. She reached her usual spot by the flying tree, only instead of flying, she sat down and thought and planned.

It was sunset when Chuva returned to her parents’ house for the last time, opting to climb through her open bedroom window rather than alert anyone to her arrival by using the front door. Silas woke up while she was flinging various articles of clothing into her largest shoulder bag, and his inquisitive presence buzzed around her for a moment like a hovering insect, trying to figure out what she was doing.

You’re leaving?, he finally asked. Did the GSA get to Azuna early or something?

‘No, but I’m not staying here another minute,’ answered Chuva. Her movements may have been hurried, but her words were not; she’d had hours to cool down. ‘I’ll head towards Azuna and, I don’t know, find someplace cheap to stay, I guess. I’ll camp out if I have to.’

Camp out?, he echoed fearfully. But Chuva, there could be demons…!

‘It’s fine, Silas. I can take care of myself. And I’d rather take my chances with demons then live with THAT WOMAN for another day.’

Already sensing his desire to know what had happened, she fed him a stream of her memories and emotions, letting them do the talking for her as she finally closed up her bag and went to retrieve her training staff. She’d get herself a real weapon once she joined the GSA, but until then, she’d still be able to whack someone around pretty hard with what she had.

Just be careful, he pleaded in a soft mental tone that was meant to simulate a murmur. I understand why you’re going, and I know that you can take care of yourself, but…it’s still dangerous out there.

She looped her bag around herself, feeling it settle reassuringly against her hip. ‘Don’t worry. Things are finally about to start going our way. I’ll see you real soon.’

In the present, Chuva gave the balustrade in front of her a compulsive squeeze, every muscle in her body tightening.

“Miss Chuva? Are you going to continue the story…?”

“Yeah. I’m just trying to figure out the best way to tell this part.”

Chuva had always thought of herself as having exceptionally good eyesight – further proof, if any more was needed, that she was a saint-to-be – but for some reason, she always struggled to see at dusk. The suffused balance of light and darkness made everything so blurry that she felt like she should be wearing eyeglasses. So perhaps she hadn’t chosen the ideal time of day to leave home, but after spending her entire life in this village, she could have navigated its roads blindfolded.

Familiar structures unfolded in the murky bluish light around her, houses she’d once passed by every day, stores where she’d run errands or whiled away endless boring shifts at work, the town hall where her former aspirations of becoming the next magi had been crushed. There was nothing wrong with the village, really, other than the fact that she had never quite fit into any of the options it offered, but that didn’t make it an awful place to live. It occurred to her that she would not be seeing these things again for a long time, if indeed she ever did.

Panic and loss stabbed into her for the first (and, she hoped, last) time. For a split second, she thought about calling this whole thing off, going back to her parents’ house and crawling into bed, hoping that she’d feel more prepared for this in a few weeks’ time. But the temptation faded as quickly as it had come to her. Of course she was reluctant to leave what she knew and trusted…but like she’d told her mother earlier today, things were changing all the time. The countryside was no longer peaceful, magic was no longer available to turn the wheels of the world, and she herself was getting older with every passing moment. What she really missed was not a physical place, but the carefree childhood that she’d left behind, and there was no point in seeking out something that she’d never be able to find. The only road available to her now went forward – and whether it would eventually lead her to happiness or misery, at least the choices that brought her to that point would be hers alone, no longer unduly influenced by Saría peering over her shoulder.

Saría…

Chuva had been trying to avoid thinking of her mother. When she climbed back out her bedroom window, she hadn’t even left a note, partially because anything she wrote probably would have ended up sounding too passive-aggressive but mostly because her parents would likely immediately surmise where she’d run off to. Her father probably wouldn’t care that much – he barely even spoke these days, at least at home – but how would Saría react? Would she be angry? Distressed? Fearful about her daughter’s future, the way she’d perpetually been for the past decade or so? Mournful of the relationship that the two of them had never had, the way that Chuva couldn’t help feeling now…?

Probably not that last one, because it would require Saría to admit that she’d been an abusive bitch, and acknowledging her mistakes was not something that she excelled at doing. Still, maybe eventually…

As Chuva crested the small hill that separated Saint Valdez Point from the forest trail that would bring her to Azuna, Silas, who’d been humming on the edges of her awareness like a thought that she couldn’t quite pin down, finally “spoke” again. You don’t have to go through with this, you know. You don’t have to run away from your problems. I know how much your mother’s hurt you, but isn’t it better to talk things out with her, patch things up before you go…? Otherwise, you’ll just keep hurting forever.

She sighed, both internally and externally. ‘That would never work with her. She’s just…too angry all the time to not blame other people for her feelings. If you knew her, not just through my impressions but really knew her, then you’d understand. And as for any pain she’s caused me, I know that’s all going to go away the second that I finally get to see your face.’

A little smile-frequency resonated between them. Chuva, now at the very top of the hill, turned around to get one last look at her dusk-drenched hometown…and immediately, all traces of positivity drained out of her, as quickly as the blood drained from her face.

At first, it looked like a mountain had spontaneous cropped up over the village. That was what its general shape suggested to her: a distant, silhouetted mass, lumpy but decidedly wider at the base and narrower at the top. Then, in front of her astonished eyes, it shifted just a bit – and she could just barely make out arms, a tail, a head with what might well have been a misshapen snout…

The realization of what she was seeing pummeled into her, and her mouth gaped open in a strangled cry of horror.

The odd thing was that Chuva never actually got a good look at the demon; by the time full dark came that night and afforded her eyes some relief, she was in no position to see at it or anything else. In later years, she retained memories of the creature being the largest, most frightening, and most formidable demon she’d ever encountered. Granted, her opinion might have been tainted by circumstances – it was, after all, both the first demon she’d ever seen and the one that effectively ruined her life – but giant demons were not all that common, especially at the time, so maybe her first impression was correct after all.

Before she even knew exactly what was happening, her legs were sprinting back towards the village, which of course meant back towards the demon too. In her head, Silas was frantically asking, Chuva, what’s going on, what happened…?!, and when she took half a second to share her senses with him, he immediately demanded, Why are you heading right for it?! You should be running away!

“I have to warn somebody!” protested Chuva, too terrified to realize that she was speaking aloud. In moments, she was back on the edge of town, where she screamed, “EVERYONE, WAKE UP, THERE’S A –”

The air trembled as the demon roared, drowning out her calls. She winced and instinctively raised her hands to her ears; its cry had been mostly bass, vibrating at a pitch low enough to make her eardrums ache, but with a shrill edge of grating metal that stabbed and pierced. If nothing else, the sound at least served as a better alarm than she ever could have.

A brief but powerful earthquake rumbled underfoot, once, twice, three times, and now the demon was looming over her; another step and it’d be within striking distance. Chuva’s first instinct was to take a step back, but her second instinct was to draw the practice staff strapped to her side, holding it out on front of her as if it were a real sword.

Chuva, what are you DOING?!, yelled Silas in her head. You have to get OUT of there!

‘If I do that, everyone will die!’ She could just barely make out flickers of activity in the village now, lights coming on in dark windows, people opening doors or sticking their heads out of windows before jerking back inside with a yelp. ‘I have to fight it!’

With what?! You don’t even have a weapon! You CAN’T fight it, Chuva…!

She almost retorted: what, you don’t think I can do it?! But his emotions were coursing through her, more intensely desperate than anything she had ever known before, and she understood that his pleas did not stem from doubt about her capability but rather from genuine fear for her life. And that, more than the threat standing before her, really drove home the fact that there was something to be afraid of.

She looked at the village, her home for twenty-one years, showing the first stirrings of panic. She looked at the demon, which had developed a red glow at the end of its conical, open-ended snout, until it promptly spat out a burst of heat that enveloped two nearby cottages in uncanny, otherworldly flames. She thought of the people inside those cottages, and of her mother and father and Magi Corona; she thought of her plans to help the world by ending the demon scourge once and for all, which she’d never accomplish if her life ended here; and she thought of Silas, begging her to stay safe, and of how it would feel to die without ever meeting him face-to-face.

Her two choices were to die honorably, defending her village and her family; or to live shamefully, fleeing during her hometown’s hour of need in order to save herself.

She turned around and ran.

Back towards the forest, back towards the road to Azuna, alternately cursing herself and rationalizing her actions. If she made it out of here, made it to the GSA recruiters, then she could save a hundred villages, or a thousand, or a hundred thousand to make up for her failure tonight. Besides, for all she knew, all or nearly all of the villagers would be able to escape successfully, just as she was doing now. If they didn’t, then surely their lives would be a noble sacrifice for the greater good, a tragic fate that would nonetheless be remembered for centuries. Yet no matter which direction she twisted in, she could not escape the truth that she honestly did not want to die, and that she valued the potential of her continued life more than the nobility of a heroic but unremarked-upon death. And yet, for all that her own predictability left a bad taste in her mouth, she still wasn’t even slightly willing to go back to the village.

Don’t think like that, Chuva, murmured Silas. You’re doing what anyone else would do.

‘But I’m not anyone else,’ she thought at him quickly, desultorily, before she conserved her energy for running.

Among the trees, everything was much more shadowy, which ironically made it easier for her to see than out in the open. More than once, she glanced over her shoulder, noting the demon’s bulk still clearly visible above the tree line – and rather than focus on destroying the village, it seemed to be slowly drawing closer to her, a massive and unhurried stalker. Then her shit-stupid cape snagged on a branch or a root or something, and in her struggle to pull free, her starstone brooch came loose and the cape suddenly fell from around her shoulders; cursing, she yanked it free, then held it awkwardly against her back so that her wings would not emerge. She’d gotten briefly disconnected from Silas, and now she squeezed the starstone tight in her palm, reaching into his frenzied thoughts with reassurances: ‘It’s okay, I’m fine, I’m here.’

It was the last thing she’d ever “say” to him until they met on Atlas Isle, some fifty-four years later.

Chuva’s breath began to come in harsh gasps, and she realized that all of this running would ultimately just tire her out and make her an easy kill for the demon, if it was indeed following her. What she needed was a place to lay low until the coast was clear – and, like an answer to a prayer she’d never made, she spotted an open cave coming up on her left. It was big enough to duck into, plus it sloped downwards slightly to a larger underground space; the interior was pitch black, of course, but that was no problem for her. She swung in that direction and scampered inside, her feet soon skidding on a blanket of gravel.

There were a few sizable boulders scattered around the cave entrance. Grunting from the effort, still awkwardly holding up her cape with one hand, she shouldered the rocks into a crude blockade – easy enough to knock down again, plus they’d give her some warning if the demon tried to get inside. Feeling a little more secure, she retreated slowly into the depths of her hiding place, panting softly.

In the quiet darkness, her whirling thoughts began to settle down, forcing her to ask: just what the fuck was she doing? Hiding in a cave, cooling her heels while everyone she’d ever known was probably dying. What had she ever done to deserve this? Why couldn’t she have at least been able to battle that demon, saving her village and simultaneously proving to her mother that the self-defense lessons weren’t so much of a waste after all? And, of course, what the void was she supposed to do now?

As if in response, a soft glow began to pulse between her fingers.

All this time, she’d been clutching her starstone, preserving her link to Silas – but now she was so startled that it nearly tumbled out of her hand. She squeezed it again as it started to slip, then lifted it up to get a better look at it, pinching the tarnished casing carefully between thumb and forefinger. It was still the same shade of navy blue that it had always been, flecked with the same silver speckles, but now there was a faint light radiating from deep inside of it…as if a sun had come to illuminate the stone’s tiny night sky.

Chuva?, asked Silas warily. What’s going on now…?

She’d fully intended to answer him in a moment, but she never got the chance. She lifted her free hand and pressed one fingertip against the starstone, and that was it, she went out like an electric light. There was a split second of dizziness – that much she remembered – but by the time she hit the ground, her cape piled up by one limp hand, her brooch rolling away into the darkness of the cave, she was already unconscious.

Chuva remained catatonic, sequestered in the barricaded cave, for what she would later learn was a period of fifty-one years…and then one day, she began to flicker back into groggy awareness, hearing unfamiliar voices echo around her as she awakened. All at once, her last coherent memories resurfaced, and she opened her eyes and tried to scramble to her feet; unfortunately, she was far more dizzy and weak than she’d anticipated, and it didn’t help that her wings were out and adding extra weight to her back. There had been two men nearby, she recalled, and they’d taken one look at her before they ran screaming out of the cave, leaving her to her own devices.

And at last, she managed to crawl on hands and knees back into the daylight – only to discover that there was no daylight anymore, at least not here. The forest was an assemblage of featureless gray poles, the sky was neither dark nor light, and everything that she’d ever known had been numbed into just another section of the ever-expanding gray lands.

Silence stretched on after Chuva ended her tale, and she stared at the view of Cumula City just as she had once stared at the numbed-out ruins of her hometown. There was a breeze, though, stirring her hair; that was something to remind her of where she was. Winds did not blow in the gray lands.

Violet broke the long hush with – what else – a question. “Did you ever find out what happened to your village, or to your parents…?”

“They told me later that Saint Valdez was completely destroyed by that fire-spitter demon,” answered Chuva dully. “Some people got out, of course, but even if my parents were among them, they would have been dead from old age by the time I woke up. My father would have been over a hundred years old, and my mother would have been ninety-nine. Way more than a normal lifespan even in good times, and it was not good times out there. Everybody was starving and demons were attacking all the time.”

These mentions of the timeframe, of course, brought up more another question, one that Chuva saw forming on Violet’s face even before the girl dared to ask it. “But then…exactly how old are you?”

“Seventy-five.”

“What?!” Her eyes widened. “That’s not possible!”

“Hey, I never claimed to be good at math, but I can at least add.” Chuva held up her fingers, ticking off the chunks of her life: “I was twenty-one on the night I decided to run away. Then I was in stasis for another fifty-one years. Then I spent the next three years looking for Silas, and that’s seventy-five years.”

“But you look like you’re…!” Violet flailed with her hands, as if gesturing would somehow help her communicate what she was struggling to anticipate.

“I look like I’m what, Violet?” asked Chuva softly, raising her eyebrows a little. “How old do you think I look?”

“I don’t exactly know,” admitted Violet. “Older than twenty-five, younger than thirty-five? But what I can definitely tell you is that you don’t look like you’re in your seventies!”

“Neither does Silas,” Chuva pointed out; she felt a little twinge just from saying her double’s name. “He doesn’t look much older than I do, but we’re the same age – literally. We have the same birthday.”

Violet quieted down, splaying her fingers against her cheek thoughtfully. “That’s true. I used to think that he was forty or fifty, and that he’d just fought towards the end of the Thirty Years’ War, but if he was there from the beginning like you said, he would have to be much older. So then, why don’t you two look your actual ages? Did you stop aging at some point or something?”

Chuva made a vague noise. “It’s hard for me to explain it to you when I don’t fully understand it myself. You know, when I woke up from stasis, after I’d gotten myself cleaned up and everything, I realized that I did look a little older, more like I was in my mid-twenties…not that there’s a huge difference between twenty-one and twenty-five, but usually you can kind of tell, you know? And then after a few years of working hard and traveling harder, I got to the point where I could pass for thirty in a certain light, but I still don’t look all that different than I did when my gods-damned starstone knocked me out. Maybe I only ever look as old as I feel – maybe that’s another side effect of my weird powers.”

“The same ‘weird powers’ that gave you wings, and made you able to communicate with Sir Silver?”

“Those would be the ones.” At another time, Chuva might have taken this opportunity to make a stupid joke – a sarcastic comment about ‘no, actually I meant my other powers, which allow me to grow seven heads and become fifty feet tall’, something like that – but right now she wasn’t in the mood. Besides, she was starting to drift a bit too close to the shores of the truth. The pessimistic part of her remarked that maybe it didn’t even matter anymore, but mostly she was thinking that even if she was pissed off with Silas at the moment, unleashing a mob of hysterical mortals on him would not be the best response to the situation. “Either way, the end result is the same, isn’t it? I’m alive now, I’m probably going to be alive for a while longer, and everybody I ever knew is dead. Except for Silas.”

Violet gazed at her somberly in the intense way that kids sometimes did, big dark eyes mulling over everything she’d heard. “…do you miss them?”

“If you mean my parents…I’m going to sound like a piece of shit here, but not really. Or at least, not exactly.” Chuva rubbed her knuckles against a headache that had started to build behind her forehead. “It’s not like I think they deserved to die just because of where they lived. And I know I didn’t talk too much about my mother, but it’s not like she was an awful bitch all the time; she could also be perfectly nice. She did care about me, I won’t deny that, but she was just so…volatile…that I never knew when the nice moments were going to end. I was always living in fear with her, and that’s what I don’t miss. But like I said, she didn’t deserve to die, not even for that.”

“You sound like you still blame yourself for running away from the demon.”

Chuva forced out a laugh. “Don’t get all head-shrink on me, Violet. I can’t exactly ‘blame myself’ when I could have done jack shit to stop what happened. But the way it all worked out just reminds me of what a horrible world we sometimes live in. I ran away, they died, and for what? I never got to the Global Safeguard Army. I never fought in the Thirty Years’ War, or helped to protect anyone.”

“Haven’t you done that here? Like today, for example–”

She turned to Violet, her lips drawn back from her teeth in a strained not-smile that often appeared on her face in times of extreme stress. “Today, a fucking demon showed up and killed twenty-four people, despite me doing everything that I could possibly do. Which should give you some idea of exactly how helpful I am in the grand scheme of things.”

Violet bit her lip and shivered slightly. Chuva realized that the girl might not have heard yet about the high death toll – although she probably would have wanted to know. She was that kind of kid.

Chuva forced her posture to soften, then heaved a sigh, turning back to the melancholy view. “Sorry for being harsh. It’s not your fault, it’s just…everything.”

“I understand. Um…maybe you want to be alone now…?”

“Maybe that would be best, yeah.”

Violet began to edge away, her steps gently pitter-pattering like those of a dainty animal, but just like last time, she stopped to ask one final question. “Miss Chuva? If you do get fired, will you at least come and say goodbye to me?”

“If I can, I will,” she replied. “You have my word.”

“Good.” She hesitated, then added, “And good luck.”

When her footsteps had skittered out of earshot, Chuva squeezed her eyes shut for a moment against the dying sunlight, once again allowing her mind to slip backwards in time. There was, of course, still more to the story. She hadn’t been able to tell Violet everything, but she could at least finish it for herself.

This was how the story ended:

Chuva, broken starstone in hand, had managed to make her way back to Saint Valdez Point, only to find that it was as gray and devastated as the forest had been. She’d wandered around for a while, dazed, and had spent a particularly long amount of time on the site of her parents’ house; she couldn’t have said exactly what she was hoping to find there. Bodies? A message? A portal that could take her back in time to the night when everything went wrong? All would have been equally unlikely to encounter, and of course, none of them turned up. There was nothing left, not even a scrap of one of her old drawings to serve as a memento.

After that, she’d trudged back to the path that would bring her to Azuna, loaded down by a heavy dread that outweighed all other emotions. She couldn’t help wondering why she was going this way; was she making some feeble attempt to change the past? It had clearly been far too long for her to reach the GSA recruiters – months, at the very least…her head swam a little at the thought. But the fact remained that she had no idea what else to do. The gray lands had hurt her eyes and increased the swimmy feeling in her head, but she’d told herself that surely everywhere couldn’t be like this, and if she kept walking, she’d have to come across a normal place eventually. Well, normal was a relative term, but after she’d gone far enough, the pallor had abruptly lifted from the world as she crossed some invisible boundary. She was quite weary by then, but she’d decided to try and hold out until she found some sort of settlement where she could rest.

Not too much later, she reached a village – it had probably been very much like Saint Valdez once, but now it was a miserable, dying place, with shaky and taciturn residents who were just biding their time until the encroaching numbness overtook them. Many of them hadn’t looked much less raggedy than her, but they’d given her a wide berth nonetheless; she guessed that she’d probably looked like a risen spirit to them. Certainly there was a haunted look in her eyes as she murmured questions to people, seeking out the one person here who might be of some assistance: the local magi.

A while later – she’d been in no condition to keep accurate track of time – she’d found herself seated in the cottage of an ancient man, whose shabby home was wallpapered with magic diagrams that had seemed comfortingly familiar. Although she disliked the strong smell of the tea he’d set on to brew, she had no inclination to leave the home of this Magi Antonio, who’d remained calm when faced with her ghostly appearance and now agreed to hear her out without hesitation. Chuva explained everything to him: her starstone, her wings, her connection with Silas, her magical abilities and her theory about why she was like this…and her experience on that night. She even showed her wings to him in order to prove her story true; the broken starstone was no longer very convincing evidence, and she was too exhausted to perform even the smallest spell.

Once she was done speaking, Magi Antonio had lapsed into grave silence, stirring his tea. “Madam, there are two things that it is imperative for you to hear,” he had said at last, in the sagely whisper of a very old man. “The first is that this village you call your hometown, Saint Valdez, has been destroyed and numbed for more than fifty years.”

Chuva, feeling pretty numbed herself, had not been able to say anything.

“The second,” he’d continued, “is that during those fifty years, there was a war – a very long war between people and demons. The people eventually lost. But…many tales were spread about warriors battling the demons who were not people. They had tails, third eyes, extra limbs…or, yes, wings. They also possessed extraordinary magical abilities, and appeared to come in pairs, much like you and this boy Silas that you described.”

The slightest spark had ignited in Chuva’s eyes at that, and she’d leaned forward, to show that she was listening. If there were others like Silas, others like her…

“You are almost correct in thinking that you are meant to be a saint. Almost, but not quite. If you are like these warriors – and simply feeling your aura makes me certain that you are – then you were not chosen by the gods. You are a god.”

Words that would change everything about Chuva’s life, and yet she’d reacted in the slowest, stupidest way possible. Not even anything overdramatic, like a sudden faint (which would have been almost justifiable given how weak she was at the time). No, instead she’d just gaped at Magi Antonio dully, her mouth hanging slightly open. “No,” she finally said. “I can’t be a god. The gods are gone.”

“The gods disappeared,” he agreed. “They became powerless. But they did not vanish completely. Instead, they assumed the form of people who would one day grow into soldiers and fight their way back into the pantheon. One of those gods must have become you.”

He’d told her everything then, explaining the Thirty Years’ War, the demons, and the numbing. She had worked so conscientiously to retain all of the information that she didn’t actually remember much about how it had made her feel, other than the thought that she had disbelievingly repeated in her head: I’m a god. I’m a god. I am a GOD…

And Silas was a god, too, which he’d almost certainly found out long before she did. And Silas, oh damn, she had to communicate with him somehow – she had to let him know that she was alive…!

With her starstone rendered useless, she’d demanded to know if any of her fellow gods had survived, and if so, where they might be found. Magi Antonio had replied that the remaining god-soldiers had set themselves up on and around Atlas Isle, guarding the few uncorrupted places left on the planet; one of the things that she’d later learn that he was wrong about, but it did set her on the right track for meeting Silas in person.

She’d had something to eat, and drink (water only; Chuva, who hated caffeine at the best of times, refused to drink tea), and then she slept. The next morning, she’d awaked to find that Magi Antonio, who considered it his purpose in life to serve the gods as best he could, had mended the tears in her cape for her and strengthened its concealment magic. He also offered her one last word of advice: “Very few people know that the gods themselves fought in the Thirty Years’ War, and that is to your advantage. There are too many mortals who would feel betrayed that your kind abandoned them, and who would express that feeling as violence against you. The world is much more desperate than it was fifty years ago, Madam Chuva, so I recommend that you keep your true identity to yourself.”

The words true identity had reminded her of something. “Can you tell me which god I am?” she’d asked hopefully.

“Alas, no, I cannot. But you should be able to find out – if you reunite with your double.”

She set off.

And then…?

Then she worked her ass off for three years, making her way to the other side of the world in order to find the other side of herself. Then she met Silas for the first time. And then he brought her here, got her this prestigious job, ushered her into a life that should have been wonderful, and then (now she was gagging at the bitter sarcasm of her own thoughts) they all lived happily ever after.

Except that no, they didn’t. Which she’d known all along…hadn’t she? She’d paid her fucking dues. She’d gone through the “fairy tales are bullshit” phase, the time of shedding childhood fantasies. But ever since her fight with Silas this morning, she’d been fighting down a slowly growing horror at the understanding that even as her mind had steadfastly rejected those fairy tales, her heart had clung to them with mute conviction, making her certain that as soon as she found her double, they would fall into each other’s arms and live happily ever after. Why else would she have crossed the world for him?

Because he’s my friend!, she reprimanded herself angrily. This is different! I’M different!

Was she? Or had thinking of herself as strong and infallible only made it easier for the fairy tales to creep up from behind and cover her eyes?

The sun was setting, ushering in the dismal dusk, and she stared at it and swallowed. What really mortified her was finally figuring out how easily she’d been duped, and for how long. And the only reason why she’d never realized it before now was because she’d been happy that way. If her starstone hadn’t knocked her out, if her personality had clashed less with Silas’s, if any number of circumstances had allowed the two of them to continue getting along like they had in childhood, then she never would have seen the saccharine naiveté of her own beliefs. But now that she was thinking about it, now that she was prizing out the truth, now that she was looking back on everything that she knew and everything that she was…why had she never seen how incredibly fucked up this whole “doubles” thing really was in the first place?

Their situation was forcing them to be together, to need each other, to love each other. And it was forced. If she wanted to help the world, she needed powers. If she wanted powers, then she needed to be with her double, always. And without him, she felt so empty, so alone…like she was missing half of herself. But she wasn’t Silas, and he wasn’t her. Light was not darkness. But if one can’t exist without the other…

And, shit, maybe that was just fine and dandy when they’d been gods; maybe it was a kind of existence that really had worked for them. But Chuva was increasingly beginning to suspect that the gods, in their original forms, had been so different from mortals that the two were hardly comparable. And like it or not, she was currently more mortal than god.

She squeezed the balustrade so hard that it felt like either the stone or her hands would crack from the tension. Why had she come here?! Why had she ever let Silas matter so much to her?! Because she loved him? Well, obviously, but why did she have to love him, why had she let her heart be trapped…?!

Because was my friend.

And it was only with that thought that the tears finally came, a roiling lightning storm giving way at last to rain.

She thought, then, about a little girl who was angry that no one appreciated her extraordinary powers, and about a little boy who was quite terribly sensitive and scared. The girl pretended that old her stuffed animals were demons and felled them with a wooden practice staff; the boy wrote poetry about the mysteries of the world and the beauty that came with them. They’d both eventually learned how to fly, and they’d plotted out a way to meet one day, because even if the circumstances that’d brought them together had been sickening and contrived, their friendship had been genuine. Silas had once been the only thing she’d had.

And now…?

Tears oozed down her cheeks, clogged her nose.

It wasn’t his fault that he’d changed; that was a natural consequence of mortal life. After all, she had changed, too. And when she woke from her stasis and went out in search of Atlas Isle, she hadn’t really been looking for him, but rather for an idea of him that was all tangled up with her lost childhood and adolescence. Now she was mourning for the loss of that idea.

He was no longer that little boy, and she was no longer that little girl.

Chuva felt desolate, yet at the same time, her mind was blessedly clear; she hung onto the fact that she knew exactly why she was so miserable. She had a right to feel that she’d been played, as long as she didn’t blame Silas for it, since he’d been manipulated by circumstance as much as she had.

She was sorry for him, and she wished him well, but did she love him? How could she, when what she had loved for the past three years was a version of him conceived in her imagination, part past experiences, part fairy-tale-knight, and part pure wish fulfillment? Letting go of that, forcing her fingers to unclench from the stories she’d been gripping so tightly, was as painful as it was cleansing. There was certainly nothing pleasant about it, but she was in no hurry to chase these insights away.

This is a feeling I want to hold on to. She breathed deeply, the air catching on the lump in her throat. Chuva had finally seen her life for what it truly was, and she didn’t want to forget that. Not ever.