Vigor Mortis

Chapter 119: Last Meal

After dealing with all of the defenses, it turns out a prison break gets pretty boring. The bottom thirteen or so floors held all of the truly dangerous prisoners—animancers, splices, and instant-death talents, mainly. I am, modesty aside, a superlative example of all three and so my dominance is established quite easily.

Well, I guess I’m not technically a splice, but the familiarity and awe I get from that crowd seems to give the prisoners the impression that I’m part of the Ars conglomerate. Maybe they’re right. It seems more and more likely that the guy wasn’t bullshitting me, but I’m still not really sure what that means. He said something about making an empty vessel and then me filling it? It goes without saying I have no memory of anything even remotely like that. As far as I know I have always been Vita, the starving girl from the streets with nothing but a Rosco to my name. But the more I think about it, the more I start to worry about the fact that I can’t really remember anything from before I was about six years old. That’s normal though, isn’t it? People don’t have memories from their early life.

…Is what I’d like to say, but I’m not a fucking moron. Like maybe if the bottomless barrel of animancy in my life didn’t exist that wouldn’t be suspicious, but it kind of totally does. I mean, seriously, the fact that I am only just now concerned about the fact that I have literally zero memories before I was six years old is in and of itself really damn suspicious. But also, that timing doesn’t match up. I would have been… what, three years old when Ars was imprisoned? Four? Why does the memory problem start a couple years after he got locked up?

I keep these questions to myself, though. They are the kind of thing to dissect when I am safe at home, cuddling Penelope and making her do all of the thinking for me. It would just make me look weak to have an existential breakdown while I’m trying to maintain control of a bunch of ex-prisoners. Speaking of, while the bottom set of floors has all the dangerous prisoners there are still a whole fuckton of them up above that. The alpha and beta prisoners are relatively weak, at least in terms of magical potency, but it still takes a very special kind of weirdo to get stuck in the top-secret super jail where they hid Ars. (He’s apparently kind of a big deal.) Alphas and betas therefore either have crazy physical-enhancement talents that can’t be turned off with a collar or they are just the kind of thing that simply cannot be kept at a normal prison. Sometimes this is for practical reasons, but sometimes…

“What the fuck am I looking at?” I ask Jelisaveta.

“This is, to my knowledge, the only Hiverock soldier that we’ve captured and kept alive,” she answers me stiffly.

I can see that much, but for some reason it’s still a shock. I spent a good bit of my time as a hunter going after Hiverock monsters, also known as vrothizo, so it’s somewhat easy for me to forget that for most of Valka’s history, that is not at all what people thought of when someone said ‘an attack from Hiverock.’ That first night the vrothizo eggs fell, we did not expect it. What we expected stands in the cell in front of me, and to most people it’s no less frightening.

Two legs, four arms. A humanoid body shape. No face. The Hiverock soldier is thin and dangerous, without a hint of fat or other soft spots on a body encased completely in brown chitin. I mean it, this guy is so flat and smooth you could use him as a writing desk. He doesn’t even have a butt! There’s only the subtle curve of his armored hide, like a man wearing full plate that he can’t take off. Although the helmet is a little more… complicated than ours. His head is human-shaped at its most basic level, but he has no hair, no nose, and no apparent mouth. Only two large, black eyes that bulge slightly out of his head, and a series of subtle seams in the area below his eyes that hint at the fact that there is certainly a mouth somewhere, and we absolutely do not want to see it open.

No, what really weirds me out is that Hiverock soldiers are mindless bogeymen, bad men from the sky that drop four times a year for no purpose other than to kill every man, woman, and child they can point their weapons at. And yet I made sure to go to this cell as soon as I could because he has possibly the most beautiful soul I have ever seen.

Human souls are just kinda… ball-shaped, usually. There are exceptions, and that’s what I initially thought this was, but I suppose it’s something beyond human entirely. This is like a flower blooming in every direction simultaneously. The nested complexity of a rose, extrapolated and expanded into a sphere. It is as much sculpture as it is soul, dazzling and artistic in ways I’ve never seen in anima before.

But the beauty does not extend just to the superficial. This is not some mindless drone of an insect in front of me, this is a full and complete person. And, I suspect, an extremely intelligent one.

“Can he talk?” I ask Jelisa.

“I wasn’t assigned to him, so I’ve read his file once and that’s it. But as far as I’m aware he doesn’t understand us.”

Hmm.

“Let’s kill him, then,” I say in exactly the same tone as before.

Jelisa sputters in protest and the soldier makes no outward reaction whatsoever, but I can still see the fear and recognition in his soul, like tiny pinpricks of light traveling through the folds of his inner being in a way that, given the circumstances, can’t help but remind me of an ant colony. They jolt and start moving rapidly, plans for survival no doubt passing through this creature’s mind.

“Yeah, he’s bullshitting you,” I tell Jelisa, cutting off her indignant demands that I don’t kill the person I never had any intention of killing in the first place. I turn to him. “You can understand us, can’t you?”

Again, he makes no outward acknowledgment, but I can see it in his soul. He absolutely understands every word. Very, very interesting. Honestly, it’s pathetic that a bunch of animancers had him imprisoned this whole time and never managed to figure this out.

“The rules have changed,” I warn him. “You’re a good actor but acting doesn’t work on me. At the same time, I am not an Inquisitor, and I am not your jailer. Drop the bullshit and show that you are willing to play nice, and I’ll let you walk out of here alone if you want.”

He doubts that. He thinks this is an interrogation trick. I suppose that’s fair enough. I turn around, grab the door to his cell, and shatter it into pieces. Now that gets a visible reaction from him.

“Well,” I say. “Would you look at that. Now there’s nothing between you and freedom except me. And Jelisa, technically, but we both know you could fold her like a slice of bread.”

“Rude,” Jelisa mutters.

I grin. ‘But not inaccurate’ being the unspoken rejoinder, and she just owns that. Damn, I just don’t get it! I have never met anyone so comfortable with being weak as Jelisaveta, and it’s so refreshing every time. Especially since she is still a Templar and probably better in a fight than ninety-five percent of the population. She still somehow lacks even a shred of arrogance.

“But me?” I continue. “You don’t have any idea what I am. And that’s because the only thing even remotely like me lives twenty thousand miles below.”

Smirking, I extend to him a thumbs-down, Rosco loosely wedged in the pit of my other arm. The gesture both points to my supposed older sibling and symbolically indicates his chances of beating me. Doubt flashes through him, warring between the audacity of my claim and his chances of getting through me even if it’s a false one. Which, to be fair, I have no idea if it is.

“Do you really want to call my bluff, though?” I ask him. “Because I can and will crush your chitinous head like a grapefruit if we throw down. You won’t need it after I reanimate you. Or… you can just confirm something I already know and walk out happy with us. Honestly, I’m not asking for that much. I don’t need your life story or whatever. I just don’t like people trying to fool me.”

Okay, that seems to get through to him. I feel his intent to finally reply to me before he does it, but it still startles me when his entire fucking face starts to unfold. The mask-like brown chitin pulls itself apart in six different places, revealing a terrifying maw that’s some horrible liminal space between completely toothless and entirely tooth. An overlapping, radial pattern of chitin lines the inside of the monster’s throat, at first interlocked to show no opening but quickly expanding in every direction like a dilating eye. This creature does not chew, but the now-unfolded mouthparts can certainly crush and stab while the throat itself can cleanly cut off chunks of meal to swallow.

And then, as if just stretching, he folds all of that crazy bullshit back up into his face and talks without using any of it. The words just thrum out with no apparent motion on his part, like they’re being expelled from his ass.

“I will not divulge any information that could potentially provide a military advantage to your people,” he buzzes.

“Yeah, that’s fine,” I tell him bluntly. “I didn’t really expect you to. Do you have a name?”

He pauses for a moment.

“In your language my moniker would translate as ‘To-Kill-From-Above.'”

“Charming,” I answer dryly, and leave the cell.

With the door busted, my promise is fulfilled. He can follow me or leave at his leisure. Lyn, who has been waiting outside, gives me a quick side-hug and then follows in step, opposite to Jelisa.

“Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you’re letting the Hiverock soldier out if you had no compunctions about Ars,” Jelisa grumbles, “but shouldn’t you at least remember that these guys are seriously bad news? Why did you just let him go?”

“He’s not hostile,” I tell her, “and I really, really like his soul.”

“Is that just how you judge everybody?” she asks. “‘Oh, your soul tastes like raspberry jam! I forgive your crimes.'”

I snort with amusement.

“I mean, kind of, yeah,” I tell her. “But think about it: I can literally see into a person’s soul. It’s the fundamental fabric of who they are! Why the fuck shouldn’t I judge people by it?”

Jelisa falls into that thoughtful silence she always tends to when she doesn’t want to admit that I have a point. But that’s okay, I can tell she’s actually thinking about it and that’s more than I usually get around here.

“I have to ask,” Jelisa eventually says, changing the subject. “What was it like raising this girl, Miss Lyn?”

My mom barks out a laugh.

“Well, I don’t know if I really raised her, per se. Raising people is more Vita’s thing. Ha-ha! Necromancer joke.”

“Ugh,” I grumble, eliciting further cackles from the incorrigible woman.

“But in all seriousness, as much as I call her my daughter? You’ve kept her in prison longer than I’ve known her, Inquisitor. Vita here mostly raised herself.”

I stop walking, the truth of those words hammering the back of my skull. Holy fucking shit, she’s right. I’ve been in prison longer than I’ve lived with my own mother. I mean, sure, it was only two years, but… damn it! It’s like everything important in my life, every single defining moment only happened in the short span of time between ripping a soul out of a man and my arrest. The rest of my entire existence was just an endless deluge of painful, wretched monotony, the struggle to survive so all-consuming that it became routine. Where did all my time go? Where did all my life go?

My body trembles, threatening me with tears, but I square my jaw, squeeze my Rosco, and start walking again. No sense wasting water. I finally had that taste of happiness, those couple months of genuine bliss, and I will get them back. It’s pointless to mourn.

It’s also a shitty use of my time. Due to the remote nature of this place, any Templar reinforcements are going to be days away, assuming they even got notice at all. Still, a couple days is a pretty short amount of time to put distance between myself and whatever absurd force would get mobilized to an emergency at the prison holding Ars Rainier. (Again, he’s apparently a really big deal.) I have shit to do and less time than I’d like to do it. Still, Jelisa must have noticed my reaction because the previous line of questioning quickly gets dropped, forcing her to initiate a not-so-smooth transition into a new one.

“Are you sure you can help Melissa?” she asks.

I sigh, rolling my extra eye.

“I mean I’m not going to be sure until I do it, but I have dealt with a lot of similar problems before, both with slimes and animavores. I’m pretty damn confident.”

Another reason Jelisa is the best: she apparently has a mom complex towards a motherfucking soul-eating slime. Every single inquisitor in this facility knew that Melissa is an animavorous ozoid, but Jelisa is literally the first person I’ve seen try to help her by feeding her anima. And the worst part is I’m pretty sure everyone else had the idea at some point. It’s not like it’s difficult to figure that out, it’s in the goddamn name. But no, eating souls is somehow blasphemy against the soul-eating god and nobody else wants to get mixed up with that even if it means curing dementia in a fucking child! Ugh, I feel myself shaking again. Now I’m just getting pissed off.

I let Jelisa take the lead, politely knocking on the door as the girl inside shapes herself into someone more presentable. She lets us into the sticky room, coated in cast-off residue from Melissa’s own body, which congeals to the walls and floor, needing to be constantly replenished by meals that rejuvenate her mass without truly feeding her. The nervous, vaguely girl-shaped glob of golden ooze is filled with mana and a soul like a cracked plush, as if someone had frozen a stuffed animal and started chipping pieces off of it in bigger and bigger chunks.

“Hey, Melissa! Have you been doing okay?” Jelisa asks cheerfully.

Melissa blinks.

“You’re not Paris,” she says fearfully. “Who are you?”

The anguish that grips Jelisa’s heart spills over into me. What must it be like to have someone you care for not even remember—wait. Oh shit is that part of what I was picking up from Altrix?

“I’m Inquisitor Jelisaveta,” Jelisa explains carefully. “You’ve only seen me with my helmet on, but…”

The goop girl twitches and jiggles as she tries to process that, struggling painfully against her own fracturing psyche.

“…Jelis… Jelisaveta. R-right. Yes. Yes, I remember. You’re not supposed to take off your helmet.”

“Rules have changed,” I tell her.

Melissa turns to look at me, though I’m fairly certain the action is entirely performative. It’s not like she has eyes. Still, her ability to mimic body parts is actually kind of impressive. She can talk by using air pockets in her body as faux lungs, even. It would be pretty cool if she could also see, but if she does it’s not with organs.

“I… I’m really sorry, I don’t r-remember you…”

Ouch, this poor girl.

“We’ve never met,” I reassure her. “I’m Vita, this is my mom Lyn, and I’m going to help make sure you don’t forget things like that anymore. Can you hold still for me?”

She’s stunned for a moment, but then gives me a rapid, wobbly nod. Her whole physical structure is… well, interesting. I kind of have a passive mana sense these days, although it’s pretty vague and doesn’t let me see things like spell patterns. I can still tell that this girl is yellow because she’s absolutely fucking full of Mistwatcher juice, though. Her ooze is kind of holding onto mana in the same way a soul does when channeling. Not… exactly like that, but kind of. The Mistwatcher mana doesn’t seem pissed off, although it is trying to escape. I think Penelope said something about that. High pressure and low pressure mana zones, or something?

Experimentally, I poke a tentacle into her body, making sure it doesn’t have any of my mana floating inside it, since that would no doubt react poorly. Nonetheless, I have to quickly yank it back out as an unexpected pain shoots through me. Shit, soul damage hurts so much more than physical damage! Well, ‘damage.’ It hurt a lot but it didn’t really injure my tentacle at all. Still, I really should have expected that pain, considering that this creature eats souls,but oh well. Now I know. I pull out a soul shard and flick it inside of her, expecting to see it dissolve away and repair her right up.

…But it doesn’t. The fully-intact shard just starts making its way towards her soul as if it was about to fuse with it like one of my Revenants. Which is, you know, really bad. Immediately, I plunge three tentacles into her and grab my shard back, resisting the urge to scream for the split second that takes.

“…Vita?” Jelisa prompts, worry dripping from her tone.

“Do we know if Melissa died before or after becoming an ozoid?” I ask her.

Melissa twitches, her whole body shuddering as Jelisa sends me a scathing look.

“I’m not trying to be rude, I actually need to know,” I say flatly.

“D-die? I died? B-but I…” Melissa looks at her own gooey hands, her whole body starting to come apart.

“Before or after, Jelisa,” I press.

“Before,” Jelisa hisses. “Her body was found at the scene, with far worse injuries than acid burns.”

Hmm. A vrothizo-like situation, maybe? Do animavorous ozoids normally consume their prey alive? Can they just not digest anima without a body to dissolve as well? No, wait, that doesn’t make any sense. If you dissolve an undead body you will also dissolve the soul, but if you dissolve a living body the soul will be just fine. So that can’t be it…

I guess now that I think about it, ozoids in general are way too slow to normally eat anything with a soul the size of my shards, let alone an entire-ass person. They probably feed mainly on sleeping ground rodents and bugs too stupid to realize the slowly-encroaching glob is dangerous enough to be worth avoiding. I break off a much, much smaller shard of my soul this time, something comparable in size to the cockroach souls Jelisa gave her a while ago. Sure enough, that starts dissolving much faster and is gone long before it can fuse with her.

“…Their digestion system is magic-resistable,” I infer.

“Uh, what does that mean?” Lyn asks.

“It means we need to keep her the fuck away from warzones and zombie hordes unless we want some kind of ozoid-wight on our hands,” I answer.

Jelissa and Lyn start giving me matching ‘oh shit what have we gotten ourselves into’ looks, which amuses me greatly.

“…But also it means I know how to help her,” I finish. “Just give me a sec.”

Melissa’s soul, even as a child, was probably just too big for a much weaker ozoid to overcome, so it… didn’t get eaten. It got fused. If that happens any time one of these things eats a soul too big for it, then… well. At the very least, Penelope is going to want to meet this girl. And in the best case, we might have Immortality Step One.

I therefore can’t keep the excitement from creeping through my body as I crush and feed Melissa a hearty helping of soul dust. The look on her self-sculpted face as she takes in the largest and most nutritious meal she’s had in a decade and a half is downright rapturous, and I watch with significant satisfaction as the blasphemous food starts working to patch up the cracks in her being almost immediately. It takes a depressingly large number of crushed shards to fix the worst of the damage, but the results speak for themselves. Literally, in this case, since the first thing Melissa does is babble excitedly.

“”I-I-I… oh! Jelisaveta!” she announces joyfully. “Jelisaveta, I… it’s so much clearer, not… not flashes and pieces! I can… I can think about you and it d-doesn’t get lost!”

Lyn ruffles the top of my head where a bit of fuzz is finally starting to grow back in after the Templars shaved my head. I’ll admit, out of all the fucking things they did to me in the name of security, that one is somehow actually kind of legit. With long enough hair I can probably wrap my tentacles in it and do some serious damage to someone. …Of course, I can also just pull their soul out and ignore the whole hair thing, but the Templars didn’t know that. They figured the collar would stop a yank, whereas it clearly didn’t stop me from just moving the tentacles around.

I don’t know why I end up thinking about that while Jelisa literally starts crying with relief, chatting with Melissa and just generally being overjoyed at how much better she seems to be feeling. I’m glad it worked, though it reminds me I have Revenants at home that hopefully aren’t suffering a similar fate to Melissa. If Vitamin has been like this for two years, I don’t know what I’ll do. Hopefully Penelope figured something out.

The rest of the upper floors and the prisoners therein aren’t very exciting compared to a Hiverock soldier and an immortal goo-child. Only a few people rush off on their own to brave the forest by themselves, though, so I collect a pretty large following by the time we make it to the fourth floor from the top, where the cooking and cleaning staff have all locked themselves in a large storeroom to try and hide from us.

Obviously that doesn’t work out for them. They’re complicit, after all. If not for these people, the Templars would never have been able to run this place. That means I have plans for them.

“Hey!” I call out as I boot down the door to the room they’re all hiding in. “Any chance you could cook us all some food?”

Twenty minutes later, everyone in the prison has piled themselves into the mess hall, waiting for the cooks and servers to do their jobs at Site 4 one last time. Well, technically they are barely doing half their jobs, as they normally cook food for a prison with substantially more living people in it. Between the Templars and the prisoners I deemed too evil and crazy to live, barely a quarter of the former residents here—willing and otherwise—are still alive. The first floor looks like it was once a deadly killzone, but Sky seems to have obliterated everyone there, leaving Mateo and Netta to defend the elevator for us. I gave them both a hug, but they declined to join us for a meal. Which makes sense, I guess, considering that they can’t eat. They didn’t seem hungry for soulstuff, either, so I guess they’ve been getting food somehow while I’ve been away. That’s reassuring.

All in all, I have just under thirty former prisoners, eighteen serving staff, four Templar prisoners, and eight Templar revenants including Manus and Ice Guy. The Templar prisoners include Jelisaveta and Victoria, obviously, but I found two more that actually fled and hid from the carnage after watching Sky rip a dozen of their comrades to shreds. On penalty of my mother’s disappointment, I bound them in collars instead of killing them both. Later, perhaps.

In the meantime, my interesting fellow ex-prisoners have been up to some fascinating things. Jeremiah in particular has been organizing some of the prisoners and the former staff to start constructing makeshift sleds outside the building on which he intends to load food and other supplies. So… he’s pretty smart, and I’m glad to have him. I also really liked his answer when I asked who would be pulling sleds over miles of rough road.

“We are both necromancers, Vita. Is ‘who’ really the right question?”

What a guy. I knew he smelled good.

But enough of that nonsense! It’s time to eat! The non-Templar staff of Site 4 are being pretty good sports about this whole takeover deal, all things considered. I basically just explained that I had no intention of hurting them or letting them get hurt, offered to let them tag along on the road so they aren’t stuck here waiting for help to maybe arrive at the top-secret base no one is allowed to enter or leave, and asked for one more meal for the road.

Are they absolutely terrified of us anyway? Oh yeah, definitely. But what am I supposed to do about that? They are making us a hearty stew and right now that’s pretty much the only thing I can think about. Most food tastes the same to me nowadays, but for the past year I have not at all been feeling properly full from prison rations, even with Jelisa passing me larger and better portions in the last month or so. I’m just so goddamn hungry all the time, and the thought of massive pots of vegetables and shedclaw meat from which I can devour as much as I want has me vibrating with excitement.

Us prisoners are all mulling about in the cafeteria, a few conversational groups forming but most people sitting relatively far apart from each other. Nix is back to being the primary face of Altrix, and while she sits next to Vicki and is guarding her like I asked, she has also been actively avoiding me. I’m sitting across from Jelisa and next to Lyn, the latter of whom I’m happily leaning on to try and start paying off two years’ worth of hug deficit. Rosco is, of course, on my lap.

I’m surprised when the cooks start coming out of the kitchen and personally serving the stew, and I have no idea whether or not I should be. I don’t think I’ve ever been served before; Penelope and I always avoided any restaurant that would cater to nobles, so even at my fanciest, my meals tended to cap out at outdoor food stalls. There are certainly no servers in the hunter’s guild mess hall. But I mumble a startled thank you when a girl drops off a bowl for me, and immediately begin to dig in.

I am not at all happy when my meal is interrupted.

Honestly, even more so than the server thing, I was not at all expecting my meal to be interrupted. Who the fuck would try it? I pretty firmly established the pecking order here, and I am on top. But I forgot that people, particularly certain kinds of people, can bother me without involving me at all. Jaw clenched, I turn around to glower at a man with a repulsive grin on his face, chatting contemptibly with the extremely uncomfortable serving girl that he just pulled onto his lap. I’m not the only one that has noticed, either. Jelisa is about to snap at him when I beat her to the punch.

“Hey!” I shout at him. He’s a few tables down. “Hands off her.”

“Chill out!” he crows back to me. “We’re just having a little fun. If you can cuddle a pretty lady I don’t see why I can’t—”

I jump, sailing over the heads of those sitting between us to land on his table, my soft, Epsilon-security-approved socks nearly cracking it in half. His stew bowl goes flying, but I catch it with my elbow tentacle. Can’t let food go to waste.

In evidence of this man’s unparalleled lack of intellect, he still hasn’t unwrapped his arm from the waist of the damn girl, who has quickly gone from worried and uncomfortable to mortally terrified. Still on the table, I squat down so I can look at the two of them eye to eye.

“Go ahead and leave if you’d like,” I tell the server-chef pleasantly. “And thanks again for the food.”

Her fear of me successfully overpowers her fear of the asshole holding onto her and she squirms free, her padding footsteps the only noise in the hall as I retrain my glare on the captain of the grand idiot caravan.

“So! Let’s temporarily set aside the fact that ‘because I said so’ is the only reason you will ever fucking need to do anything,” I snarl, using kynamancy to project my voice around the room. “You know, just for a moment here, so we can focus on all the other reasons why that was something you are going to regret.”

“I just—” he stammers. “You know, I figured this was a party. A celebration, right? I didn’t think you’d care about—”

I cut him off by lashing out and grabbing his neck with my Rosco-free arm, lifting him out of his seat as I stand up.

“I generally care quite a lot about people who prepare food, actually, as long as they don’t try to attack me. But that’s not really the problem, here. Apparently, the problem is that you think there might be, at any point, some kind of person I won’t kick your ass for molesting. So let me make this perfectly clear for everybody: I don’t care if it’s a man, a woman, a child, your best friend, your partner, or your fucking dog. You try this shit with anybody, and I will make you regret it.”

Then I punch him in the balls, drop him, and chug half his stew before hopping off the table and leaving him the rest. I’m not going to starve him, if I was that pissed I would just eat his soul. I already did that with every prisoner that had a history or inclination to straight-up rape, and this guy fully intended to stop way before that line. So, you know, he’s fucking awful, but he’s not public-execution-awful. Which is kind of frustrating, because it means he’ll continue to be a pain in my ass.

“Sorry,” he wheezes out, clutching his testacles and trying not to cry. “Message received. But can I just… speak my mind for a second? Are you going to kill me if I do?”

“Go for it,” I allow.

“It really fuckin’ rankles to just go from one jailer to another,” he grumbles. “Especially one that’s a little mutant girl that carries a stuffed animal everywhere.”

I raise my eyebrows. Well, I can see why he wanted the reassurance I wouldn’t hurt him for that.

“Well, just don’t think of it like that,” I smirk at him. “Think of me as your liberator. Think of me as the goddess looking over your shoulder. Think of me as the one who very literally ate a High Templar for breakfast this morning.”

I flex my hands, physical tentacle writhing. My spiritual ones, too, for those that can see them.

“I am Queen around here, you wretched bastards!” I declare. “Queen of the Broken and the Dead, and every damn one of you is one or the other. Walk if you don’t like it, but as long as I have you, you will follow my rules. And rule number one is to just have basic fucking decency. Cop a feel on anyone again, and you’ll pay the price.”

My instincts scream danger as every eye in the room watches me return to my seat and resume my meal, but those instincts are the ones learned by the old me, the powerless me. These people are not sizing me up as a mark, oh no. They have finished their assessments, and their conclusions all fall somewhere between fear and reverence.

I feel a very strange concoction of emotions coming from both Jelisa and Lyn, so I glance up just to see a pair of equally odd facial expressions. Pride, worry, disappointment, respect… man, they really have the works.

“What?” I ask.

“Did you know that publicly declaring yourself a monarch is grounds for treason?” Jelisa asks idly.

I roll my eyes.

“Oh no, treason,” I drawl. “Now they’ll send the Templars after me.”

Lyn busts out laughing, and I enjoy the rest of my meal.