“Dumbass. Dumbass. Dumbass. Dumbass. Dumb—” Emma groaned, stirred, sat up. Or…Tried to. She got halfway before something snagged her, something else rattled, and she found herself half-wrapped in…Chains. Leading to shackles, around her wrists.
Oh shit.
Larry was beside her, looking pleased. He was the one who’d been speaking.
“Oh you’re up.” He called out, eyes rolling back in the way Emma had learned they always did when he was trying to look behind him. “Hey, the dumbass is up.”
Emma followed Larry’s gaze, or rather she followed where his gaze was probably trying to go, and found Aexilica. Next to her. Against a wall, which Emma was…Also against. And also shackled.
Oh shiiiiiit.
“Aexilica.” Emma mumbled, feeling her head start to clear up. “I…You’re okay, that’s good.”
“You came to rescue me.” Aexilica said, ignoring Emma’s babbling entirely.
“I did.” Emma beamed.
“You got yourself captured too.” Aexilica added.
“I…Did.” Emma glowered.
Aexilica surprised her, then, by smiling. It was a fragile thing, as might have been expected of any smile in their circumstances. But it warmed Emma regardless.
“Thanks.” The woman offered.
Emma just sort of short-circuited at that, babbling something she didn’t hear, attempting several gestures only to be reminded of how much the shackles impeded her motions, and generally doing everything she was physically capable of to ensure that the following sixty seconds were the most embarrassing period of her entire life.
“Ah, my, what a lovely pack of sacrifices you all shall make.” Came a new voice. Emma’s head whipped around to the entrance, where its source stood, and she felt a sudden flood of relief.
“Oh, god, perfect.” She breathed. “Can you kill me please? Right now? I don’t mind how.”
It was, Emma realised, the man who’d almost sacrificed her before. That made the joke a bit less funny, a bit less cool, a bit less abstract. Suddenly the idea of sacrifice was a lot more tangible.
What was his name? She thought, more to just give her brain something to do than anything. Guldin. Guldin, that was it. Stupid fucking name, Guldin. Sounds like a shitty Raid Boss. There we are, now he’s just a shit boss. Can’t be scared of something shit.
But she could, and she was. No matter how desperately she tried to tell herself otherwise.
“Oh, no, don’t say anything.” The man chuckled, waving a cheery hand at the silent room and sweeping his eyes across its occupants. “By the Gods, you will make for a bountiful tribute. Two women with magic even I have never seen before, and a head still talking after the removal of its body!”
“I’m as surprised as you are.” Larry growled. “You’re the first cock I’ve ever seen talking without a body too.”
The Priest’s face didn’t twist or darken the way so many people’s did when they were used to having things as they liked and suddenly hit with a barb. That interested Emma, seemed worth noting. She was, unfortunately, rather too pants-shittingly scared to wonder about why.
“You have your sacrifices already, savage.” Aexilica growled, startling Emma with the apparent eagerness she had to piss the deranged zealot off. “You can stop gloating and eying us, just hurry up and get it all over with.”
“Do NOT get it all over with!” Emma yelled. “Holy shit, don’t, we can be useful to you—we will be useful to you don’t kill us!”
The priest seemed more amused than confused by the mixed signals he was getting, eyes flickering between them. Regrettably spending more time on Aexilica than Emma.
“Fascinating,” He noted, “A coward and a hero strapped down together. There’s a sacred symmetry to killing you both in one session.”
“How about the sacred symmetry of you killing yourself, and all of us going free?” Larry suggested, with the cadence of a man who did not have a heart to be stabbed. The Priest just eyed him, shaking his head in wonderment.
“You…You I will keep, study. There are secrets to you, I sense, and I will wring them out.”
Larry actually blanched at that.
Motherfucker, so you do know how to shut up?
But the Priest wasn’t done, his eyes now falling on Emma.
“And you, your powers are unlike any I have ever heard of. The other woman, hers are strange too but only in source. Strong and fast like a berserker, but without their compact with the spirits. You though…I have never even seen a Demigod do what you have. Where did you acquire such gifts?”Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.
Emma was suddenly aware of several facts at once, and somehow the man before her having personally met fucking demigods was not the most important among them.
He needs me for information.
If he needed to know things from her—had questions—then, for the moment, that made her useful. And it meant that her usefulness would be reduced with every clear answer he got. It would also be reduced if he became aware that she wouldn’t be giving any answers, or was just bullshitting when she did.
A balancing act. Everything was a balancing act.
“I didn’t get them from anywhere, I just have them.”
True, pretty much. Emma was surprised by how easily the answer came. It wasn’t that ‘you’re not real, I imagined you and this whole world, so I can do whatever I want in it’ was a difficult sell. As tempting as it was to tell herself she’d bitten that retort back out of pragmatism…It just wasn’t true.
Emma’s first instinct, the notion that had frothed to the forefront of her mind when asked the question, had been what she’d said. She was born like this. Born on Earth, now here. Because maybe, after all, it was all real.
The priest did not seem impressed by her epiphany.
“Nobody just has magic.” He growled, eyes suddenly flashing with anger. Dangerous.
Well, Emma had just gotten her magic. Whether that was true or not didn’t change that this man seemed murderously convinced to the contrary. A truth perceived as a lie was as good as a lie. The opposite, fortunately, was also true.
“Okay, fine.” She amended. “I didn’t just get like this. I…” She thought of a suitable half-truth, always best to lie as little as possible. Made it easier to remember which fabrications she’d shared. “I died.” Emma blurted out, then nodded towards Larry. “I died, and I met that bastard there. And my powers awakened.”
The priest seemed stunned, staring, disbelieving. Larry started swearing away, calling Emma a dumb bitch—she didn’t really listen. Her eyes were on the priest. Scrutinising, terrified, desperate. She needed to see his reaction, needed to know whether her bullshit was being swallowed. If she was believed, this lie could become more. Could become more still.
Eventually, Emma might deceive her way into actually getting out of this. And for one stupid second she actually had even herself convinced there was a chance of that happening.
That, in the end, turned out to be by far the best deception she’d woven today. And it proved devastatingly likely to be the last.
Slowly, the priest began laughing. Shaking his head, sighing.
“It seems I will get nothing of use from you, mad-girl.” He murmured, turning back to Larry. “But you…That she included you in her babbling is interesting, I truly will enjoy getting to the bottom of whatever you are, little head. Later. For now, we have other things to attend to, eh?”
Emma deflated, tried to find the will to say something else but felt herself suddenly emptied of ideas. The stress washed over her, left her stupid all over again. And she was dragged from the room as a stupid, silent girl.
This stupid, silent girl was bundled onto the back of another wagon. She expected some spasm of fear at that, some gripping horror. But whatever trauma was dwelling at the back of her mind seemed oddly inactive at the reminder. Aexilica nudged her as the wagon took off, face drawn back and eyes shaky. She was putting on a brave front, for Emma’s sake. A shit one.
“Thank you.” The woman told her again. “For coming back, thank you Emma.”
“Didn’t do much good.” Emma noted, grumbled really. She felt stupidly petulant for doing it, but then she was going to die soon anyway. Might as well get all the petulance out of her system before all her blood joined it.
“Of course it did.” Aexilica pressed, actually coaxing Emma’s gaze up at her with the sudden intensity in her voice. “I got a nice, long laugh out of your response to me thanking you the first time.”
It really wasn’t very funny, not at all. But something about staring death in the face made everything seem a lot more amusing. They both laughed, hard and long. Hysterically, lungs-achingly. Almost without control of their own bodies. Emma didn’t think she’d ever laughed so hard in her life. Not when her stupid brother had fallen from that tree and broken his leg, not when she’d finally gotten her inheritance and been helped off the street, and not when she’d started mastering her powers for the first time. There was nothing quite so gigglish as madness.
She wasn’t mad though, not really. Not now. Emma’s realisation that everything around her was real hit like a falling boulder. It robbed her of that screen between reality and herself, of the calming protection she derived from knowing…What?
That she was untouchable? Yes, but no. Not just that, not by half.
Everything was real, and so her actions mattered. They had consequences. She could still screw up. She had screwed up, over and over. She wasn’t free, this wasn’t a new start for her.
It was just more of the same. Once again, and felt all the harder from her brief lull free of it, Emma found herself shackled by reality.
Aexilica tried to say more to her, once or twice. Emma didn’t listen. She couldn’t. Found herself just shrinking in, closing off. Tuning out the world around her and hiding, shivering, behind her mental walls. It was nothing new. She’d been like this before.
Been like this for so long that she’d ended up out on the streets, right up until her inheritance had come and saved her.
There was no inheritance now. Just the wagon, the road, the ever-shortening space between Emma and where she was going. Where she was dying. Where Aexilica was dying, because of her failure.
Better to have done nothing at all, she decided. Better not to bother. Better not to fail.
After what felt like hours, but was more likely just a few minutes, they came to what Emma guessed would be the place her life would end. It wasn’t as grand or vast as she might have hoped, with no orchestra to see her off and no audience to weep. It was nothing, really. Just a big room with some hastily-assembled stone tables. Almost improvisational.
Aexilica fought as she was dragged to hers, fought well. Her exhaustion was clear enough, but even with the visible deterioration of her strength clear in every movement it took five big men to hold her as she was forced across the room. Emma didn’t struggle at all. She wasn’t nearly so tired, but it didn’t matter. The one man grabbing her would’ve been enough even if she had.
“Emma!” Aexilica’s voice hit her hard, a punch in her ears. She stared across the room to see the Aethiqi woman glaring. Glaring. “Last chance.”
For what? What had she been…
To escape. The realisation hit Emma fast, of course Aexilica was urging her to escape. She hadn’t given up. She wasn’t too scared to even think. She—
The door burst open, all eyes shooting to it as someone entered. Someone new. Emma felt the worst, most torturous sensation yet at that, despite trying not to with all she had.
She felt hope.