Vigor Mortis

Chapter 159: Queen’s Gambit

I haven’t felt this lost since August died.

Though some callous part of me notes it’s not as bad now as it was then. I don’t really have the option of not recognizing that; time doesn’t dull my wounds the way it supposedly does for humans. A simple look backwards is all I need to know that, yes, the death of my father was much more distressing than my current situation. Of course, this doesn’t exactly make me feel better.

I am too cowardly to talk to Galdra on the way up. Just piggybacking her headless corpse, killed freshly enough to still be warm, is too surreal to even consider. Her mangled stump of a neck is limp with unattached muscle and torn flaps of skin, and I have to avoid looking at it all to prevent myself from getting excessively hungry. It would be so easy to devour her here, and it would be an exquisite meal. One I would regret forever.

My hunger is not the least bit calmed when I remind myself I’m about to devour my own kin. They are never a satisfying meal for anything other than my conscience. I don’t like the idea of attacking Hiverock. A defensive battle is unambiguous; I am protecting people, full stop. I know an offensive battle on enemy territory also arguably protects people, but it still feels different to me. I agreed anyway. I guess I’ll see how stupid that was soon enough.

Everything is over my head right now, spiraling out of control. The woman who saved me from jumping off the edge, who gave me my purpose in life when I was at my lowest, who helped me and trusted me and taught me so much… is dead. Killed at the hands of Lady Vesuvius, an ally and confidant that never once flinched at the sight of me, even after I nearly killed her when we first met. If anyone else had killed Galdra, I think I might have eaten them and damn the consequences. But Lady Vesuvius said that Galdra was an animancer. And also she’s an animancer. And we’re teaming up with Vita, who we recently sent an army after because she’s an animancer! Everyone’s an animancer! It’s animancy everywhere! Because why not! It’s not as though the very practice fundamentally infringes on the domain of the Mistwatcher, defiling our purpose through the ravaging of the greatest gift god gives us! (This is, of course, sarcasm. Animancy is evil and wrong.)

…Except for how every living person I respect uses it.

Perhaps that’s a stretch in a few ways. I respect my captain a lot, but I also respect my squadmates, none of whom are… well, none of whom bar Vita are animancers, but she’s arguably not my squadmate and I’m not entirely sure if I… hmm. Okay, I respect Vita. I’m not entirely sure if I like her. She’s vulgar and rude and downright cruel. She hurt a lot of people I care about, she’s nearly killed me multiple times, she’s responsible for a lot of horrible things happening to the Templars specifically, but at the same time she’s gone out of her way to help and save us when she didn’t have to. Is that Melik’s influence? No. It isn’t, is it? She’s always been honorable in her own way. I saw her stop the moment we called a retreat, back in that horrible battle. She could have kept killing us, but she didn’t. Just like she said she would. Vita is a person of contradictions. She helps and hurts in equal measure. I don’t understand her, but I do have to admit I respect her.

Galdra, meanwhile, stretches my previous claim by arguably not being alive. She’s not breathing. Her body is destroyed beyond what I know humans can survive. And yet, to my senses, she’s inarguably a living thing. My body urges me to eat her. She can speak, and when she does her words are as cutting as ever. And most importantly regarding our situation, she can still annihilate. She may be forced to follow Vita’s orders, but she’s still her, isn’t she? I get that she’s maybe not the nicest person. Looking back at my interactions with her, she’s always been a bit on the careless side, treating me as a form of entertainment as much as she would a person. But… I liked that, because she treated everyone that way. I wasn’t any different to her, and she made sure I knew it. She gave me meaning in my darkest hour. She helped me join the Templars. She made me who I am today. And Lady Vesuvius says she’s an animancer. The very animancer that caused her to… well, not quite be Lady Vesuvius anymore.

The only real defense against animancy is animancy. I know this, and it is hardly an uncommon situation. Thermomancy is the best way to protect against thermomancy, kynamancy does well at disrupting kynamancy, and so on. So I’m not terribly flabbergasted by the idea of Lady Vesuvius learning animancy from a captor altering her mind and using it to un-alter herself. Horrified, maybe, but not disbelieving. I’ve never met anyone more intelligent and driven than her. And now, that has multiplied beyond what I’ve ever seen in a human before. She’s not a human, not now. Her body and soul have been changed into something utterly unique and new. I yearn desperately to devour it. The idea that she did all that to herself is terrifying. But still… Lady Vesuvius was my confidant, my ally, and to some extent even my friend. She gave me a lot of good advice and we had a lot of interesting conversations when she was chopping my limbs off for science, and much like Galdra she never treated me like a monster. Looking at what she’s done to her body, I guess now I see why.

And then there’s Captain Jelisaveta. She’s an Inquisitor. One who bears the mantle of sin to protect the rest of us. One of the kindest and best people I have ever known. No one deserves a happy afterlife more than her. And yet according to our doctrine, she’ll be punished. That’s… wrong. That’s revoltingly wrong in ways I can’t really express. She’s been doubting her orders, trying to find better solutions to problems that are much more complicated than anything I’m used to. It’s terrifying.

“Snap out of your funk, Lark,” Galdra grunts at me. “We’re here.”

I blink. She’s right. We’re in a fight to the death. Magical explosions erupt around us, most of them blocked by Vita as we race up the inside of a stone tube that was probably used to drop boulders on us. I need to focus. I have kin to kill.

We reach the top of the tube, landing hard on the stone floor in the middle of a brutally prepared kill zone. The stony interior of Hiverock is cramped and tight, chitin spears and arrows stabbing towards us from every direction the moment we land inside. Galdra pulls me towards Vita and Penelope, then protects us all in a bubble of heat, incinerating the projectiles heading our way.

“I wish Norah was here,” Vita complains, stepping forward and killing every Hiverock soldier in her range. I’m not sure, but I think it’s bigger than when we fought.

“Nugas is fetching her,” Penelope explains, “though I judged it would be unwise to wait for her, given the circumstances.”

“Everyone would definitely think Nugas is me if she started carrying Norah around.”

“Yes,” Penelope agrees. “That was the initial plan. Then you charged suicidally against Galdra and revealed yourself, so I took advantage of the distraction while I had the chance.”

“And now we’re all the bestest of friends,” Galdra grumbles. “Where are we going, new boss? I assume we’re not just standing here until they run out of ammo?”

“Right, yeah,” Vita says. “Um… that way, I think?”

“You think?“

Throughout all this bickering, I am silently wringing my hands together and stepping over the corpses of the people in our way. Vita revives one of them and demands that it direct us to our objectives, and it obeys despite not seeming to understand our language. Vita herself is jittery, frightened, and distracted, which somehow feels oddly human, despite the horrifying circumstances. Vita was never scared of me, and that… well, I mean, I don’t want people to be scared of me. I generally like it when people aren’t scared of me, it’s just… most people are, at least a little? I don’t know, I shouldn’t be thinking about this now. There’s just… not much for me to do. I feel superfluous. The three deadliest women on the island are with me, after all. Er, well, the three deadliest women on the island we just left.

It isn’t long before Lady Vesuvius’ diseases kick in and the forces arrayed against us start to rapidly die in every direction, at which point our pace speeds up considerably. The thin stone hallways of Hiverock go from crowded with foes to crowded with corpses in an instant, the eerie kynamancy glyphs lighting the walls giving the whole place a haunted feel. Vita hurries us along, urgency oozing from the way she moves.

“I… don’t like this,” I admit.

“Well it’s a little fucking late to turn back now,” Galdra sardonically points out.

“I-I know that!” I stutter. “I’m not saying we should, I just… this is a genocide, isn’t it?”

“Unfortunately not,” Lady Vesuvius says flatly. “Hiverock is too large and my diseases are far from foolproof. Quarantines, competent biomancers, or simply a particularly unlucky spread pattern could all end this plague before it even kills a quarter of the Hiverock population.”

I swallow. That, somehow, doesn’t make things feel any better.

“Besides,” Lady Vesuvius continues, “weren’t you all gung-ho about genociding your own species?”

“That’s different!” I protest. “Hiverock is organized and intelligent. Vrothizo aren’t.”

“Individual vrothizo are capable of organization and intelligence,” Penelope argues. “Such as, for example, you. Meanwhile, while Hiverock is clearly capable of diplomacy, they actively choose not to use it.”

“Hiverock has been trying to kill us over ten times longer than you’ve even been alive,” Galdra adds. “We’ve tried to send diplomats. We’ve tried to negotiate. They’ve never once responded to it with anything other than violence. If being unreasonably murderous is what makes vrothizo worthy of death, Hiverock has proved that above and beyond anything you have, little kitty.”

“I know, I know,” I mutter. “I’m sorry. It’s just—”

“Oh, shut the fuck up, Lark!” Vita snaps suddenly. “Are you going to help or not?”

“Of course I’m going to help!” I tell her. “It just feels awful, that’s all! We’re walking through hallways filled to the brim with corpses! It’s just… a lot, is all.”

“Well now you know how I fucking felt when I had to do this to you!” she growls at me. “You think the rest of us are having fun, Lark? Do you think we like slaughtering unreasonable assholes that just won’t leave us the fuck alone!? I don’t wanna fight any more than you do! But when people refuse to leave and refuse to stop trying to kill us, what choice do we have?”

Oh. Oh, no.

“Just leave,” she’d said. She said it over and over. I wanted to, I wanted to so badly. But I couldn’t, because… why, really? Because the people in charge of me wouldn’t want me to? Because they didn’t trust her? Because I was told killing her was the right thing to do? But were we really the heroes of that situation? Or were we Hiverock?

“…I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I… I think I might get it now. I’m sorry.”

“Well… thanks for the apology, I guess,” Vita grumbles. “But now is a terrible time to be having heart-to-hearts. The soldiers are wimps but we really kicked the disintegration wasp nest upstairs. The Queens are going to come after us soon, and we’re almost to our first objective.”

“What are the queens, exactly?” Lady Vesuvius asks.

“They’re… Queens,” Vita repeats, as if struggling to explain more than that. “That’s just what they are. Rulership is in their souls. They’re learned mages, I think, and a lot of them are stronger than you and Galdra. Not all, but… enough to wipe the floor with us if they really tried. I think they’re still debating if they should try, and that’s the only thing saving us.”

“What reason do they have to not try?” Lady Vesuvius presses.

“Arrogance, I think,” Vita answers. “If somewhat justified arrogance.”

“No arrogance is justified,” Lady Vesuvius answers immediately. “Let’s exploit this weakness to its fullest.”

“Not like we can do much else,” Vita sighs. “We’re coming up on the first vrothizo pits. Lark, you take the eggs. Galdra, incinerate the live ones.”

Vrothizo pits…? Well, I guess I’ll see. The stony underbelly of Hiverock has had little to show us so far other than cramped tunnels and corpses. I’m not sure what a ‘vrothizo pit’ is, but at least it will be a change in scenery?

“Here we are,” Vita says, pointing down a hole. “Galdra, this one is yours.”

I peek down the pit and immediately wish I hadn’t. A giant mass of dozens of my own kind, all biting and clawing and devouring each other, rages below me. I can only see the top layer, but I know there are countless stuck below them, barely able to move around with the mass of consumption and combat crushing them from above. And below that layer, no doubt, are the corpses. It’s a constant, deadly battle to get and stay on top and be the last one alive. It’s hideous, it’s revolting, and it is a horribly poetic description of my kind as a whole. I turn away before Galdra turns it all to ash.

The next pit is similar, but calmer. It is the end state of this horrible contest: a single four-armed, snake-tailed monster child glaring up at us atop a pile of exotic corpses, some vrothizo but many not. It stares expectantly, a contemptuous edge to its hungry gaze. The way Vita hesitates before ordering Galdra to annihilate it only confirms the idea that it’s intelligent, like I am. It’s a person. It dies all the same.

My first job involves a pit full of eggs. Unborn members of my species, all packed in the same kind of hole as the living ones. I jump in, letting the others move on ahead as I smash the eggs open and devour whatever survives. I see what the people of Hiverock are doing now. The eggs are kept and used as weapons, since they’re generally sturdy enough to survive long falls. If the eggs hatch before they can be used, however, the resulting children are simply left alone to consume and kill each other until there’s only one left, which is then fed powerful monsters and raised for breeding. And so the cycle continues.

This is where I come from. This is the reason I exist. Vrothizo devour animals, vrothizo devour people, but vrothizo don’t tend to destroy structures or plants except out of accident or convenience. Hiverock is using me, using my entire species, to try and wipe all the people and monsters off Verdantop, then run out of things to eat and either starve or jump off to the islands below, at which point they can effortlessly colonize a fertile and untouched land rich with aquifers and greenery. Everyone I know and love is just in the way, and I’m the weapon they sent to purge them all.

Screaming furiously, I tear through everything in the pit, slaughtering the last of my unborn kin before leaping from wall to wall to get back up to the top and catch up with my allies. This repeats whenever we come across an egg pit, while Vita and Lady Vesuvius speed up to kill the ‘worldshakers,’ a fitting moniker for giant breeding females that all need to die.

Hmm. That was an abnormally aggressive thought. I think I’m getting bitter about this situation. I just… I feel like such an idiot. Vita said I wasn’t made by the Mistwatcher, and in retrospect it’s kind of obvious. No loving god could have made my species. Not even as a test. Seething furiously, I smash through a third pit of eggs and wonder: is Vita right? Everything she showed us, all the crazy things she claimed, is that really how things work? Just a pointless, meaningless world with no afterlife, no reward for the good and no punishment for the evil? Just death and consumption? Is she really right?

Was August wrong? And if so, what does that mean I should do?

“We have to go,” Vita announces when I rejoin with her again.

“Already?” Galdra protests. “We’ve gotten less than half of the big guys, right?”

“It’ll have to do,” Vita snaps. “Penelope, get us out of here.”

She hesitates, to Vita’s obvious distress.

“…We haven’t yet dealt a crippling blow,” she argues. “Our work here will have largely been for nothing if we leave now. And next time, they’ll have no doubt prepared for us, especially if they are as skilled of mages as you claim.”

“If we don’t leave now they won’t have to prepare for us at all!” Vita snaps at her. “We’ll be dead! Galdra, make us a way out now!”

Galdra bristles at the order but immediately obeys, turning the area below us into molten rock and forcing Vita and I to jump onto our respective fliers. Galdra preens innocently. Vita seems furious, but apparently the time for chatting is over.

“Go,” she growls in order. “Now, Penelope. They’re not the only people that will have time to prepare, right?”

Galdra, with me on her back, descends down the red, dripping exit in the floor as soon as Vita gives the order. Lady Vesuvius hesitates for only a moment, and then follows with Vita in her arms.

“Shit,” Vita hisses. “Start preparing a teleportation spell, they’re coming after us. Don’t fly towards the city, we need to get away from everyone else!”

We change course and head towards the forest, the vast beauty of Verdantop below us. It looks breathtaking from up here, the glorious greens interspersed with rocky clearings. I see the walls of Skyhope, the ruins of New Talsi, and the terrifyingly vast forest stretching out before me. It’s even bigger than I ever thought it was. It’s hard to focus on it all, though, what with the explosions of runic defenses and the almost tangible aura of stress around Vita herself.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she hisses. “Okay, there’s three of them. Two are only about as strong as we are, we could probably take them. But the third is… shit, we can’t fight them. We’re fucking dead. How long does it take you to cast a teleport spell, Penelope?”

“I’m down to about three minutes now,” Lady Vesuvius answers. “But I’ve had one prepared for a while. We can teleport at any time.”

“But just once?” Vita presses.

Lady Vesuvius licks her lips. Yeah, that’s not a question I want to hear when our strategy is ‘run away.’

“…Only once,” she confirms. “You believe they will not have the same issue?”

Vita has no time to answer before power erupts around us, my incessant hunger screaming with desire. Three people appear in a triangular formation surrounding us, each of them absolutely glorious to my senses, as if some part of my body instinctively knows it should revere them. Like the Hiverock soldiers, they’re insectoid creatures with four arms and two legs, their faces like porcelain masks. They have wide, unblinking eyes, and no apparent mouth, though this is where the similarities to their warriors end. Their bodies are a pure, brilliant white rather than a stony brown, and what little parts aren’t covered with intricate, runic-engraved pure metal armor reveal a thick, delicate, fur-like covering over their bodies. Wide, moth-like wings catch the air as they fall with us, and that’s all I manage to see before all of us are suddenly somewhere else, on the ground and deep in the forest. Startled, I glance up through the canopy and spot where the four of us just were. It’s easy to notice, since it’s now a tetrahedron of frozen air tumbling through the sky.

“I guess Vesuvius doesn’t have a monopoly on teleport-assassination,” Galdra mutters.

“Shut up!” Vita hisses. “They’re watching for mana fluctuations! Everyone stop casting!”

I don’t bother to ask how she figured that out. If being on a squad with Vita has taught me anything, it’s that she just knows things, and everyone around her simply has to deal with that.

“They’re not giving up,” Vita continues. “They’ll find us soon, we’re going to have to fight them. Lark, you need to blitz the weakest… no, you won’t have time to figure out which is which. Blitz whichever one is closest and try to be lucky. Galdra, Penelope, they’re going to use the same tactic again. Be ready to counter it hard. Don’t hold anything back.”

“Should we split up to avoid getting caught all at once?” Lady Vesuvius asks.

There’s a beat of hesitation.

“I genuinely don’t know,” Vita answers. “They’ll probably change tactics if we do that. I’m not sure if it will be better or worse.”

“The danger we know is better than an unknown danger. Will it alert them if we start to channel and prepare?”

“Yes,” Vita confirms.

“Should we do it anyway?”

Another pause.

“…Probably,” she agrees. “Everyone get ready. They’ll be on us once you start. Less than a second after my mark is the most warning I can give you.”

We tense up, and I let my quills out to shred the rest of my armor, quickly kicking my boots off and digging my talons into the dirt. I cast my mana sight spell as well, since I’ve no doubt it will be useful against a squad of spellcasters. That’s not really my role, though. Vita needs me to be fast, and I can be fast. Crouching low into a runner’s start, my heart pounding and body tense, I wait for what a self-proclaimed demigod says is our certain death.

“Mark,” says Vita, and I move.

The air feels like a hammer in front of me as I accelerate in an instant, the horrid thickness of an unbelievably powerful spell popping into being around us at the same time our targets do. Claws out and mouth open wide, I see the bug woman in front of me flinch in surprise as I plow into her… slightly too late. The air freezes solid where we just stood, the edge of it solidifying around my ankle. Pain screams through my body as my leg is subjected to impossibly low temperatures, but my momentum cares not; with a horrid sound like cracking ice, my foot is torn completely off the moment it gets caught, and I land on one of our assailants in time to bite down on her shoulder. …Or I try to. There’s nothing my teeth can’t cut, metal armor included, but my teeth fail to reach the armor at all, my body hitting an invisible force that crumples me like I just flew into a stone wall. Then a spell picks me up and flings me away, a bright flash and body-burning pain soon following it.

I dimly note the other three at least seem to be doing better as I tumble through the air. Galdra has countered the ice spell with her flames, naturally, and an inferno roars forward to both clear a path out of the frozen air and attack at the same time. Lady Vesuvius surges into the sky, opting to follow up with a physical strike on the one I targeted. Lightning flashes around her (right, lightning, that’s what I got hit by) but the deadly light simply dances harmlessly over her scales. She strikes from above, going for the head. I get my senses back and attack the moth woman’s legs from behind. We’re both halted instantly by that invisible force less than an inch away from our target. Our momentum doesn’t transfer to her at all, it just stops. At least until Lady Vesuvius’s eyes narrow, her tail twitching for a moment before I feel the resistance disappear. My teeth start to slide through the metal… and then our target is gone, and my jaws clamp down on air.

I leap with all my might, grabbing Lady Vesuvius out of the sky moments before ice replaces our previous location once again. Tackling her feels like tackling a building, but I barely manage to get us away from the spell as I hold back a scream. I had to jump with my stub of an ankle! I’m so much slower now! Unexpectedly, Lady Vesuvius grabs my jaw, sticks three fingers in my mouth, and then forces it closed, severing part of her hand. Startled, I instinctively swallow, causing my foot to regenerate. I watch in horror for a moment before Lady Vesuvius’ hand regenerates at a similar speed. She tastes heavenly. I want to—

No! No time to think about that! We land and I rush towards where Vita and Galdra are fighting against another Queen with flames and antimagic, trading world-shaping blasts of magical might. Together, their defense seems impenetrable: Galdra incinerates any projectiles as Vita renders the pair immune to targeted spells. But the two of them combined are only holding off one of the three Queens, and Galdra’s responding bursts of flame don’t seem to be living up to her name. All four of the Queen’s arms dance in intricate patterns, warping and shaping mana in ways I’ve never seen before while a low hum from her throat makes adjustments on the fly. If I live through this, I’ll probably replay this moment a thousand times in my head without fully understanding everything the Queen is doing at once.

At least the Queen that Penelope and I forced to teleport is still gone, so there are only two to face right now. Not that I think we did anything that would prevent her from returning to the fight whenever she wants. Still, while Vita and Galdra continue their stalemate with the second Queen, the third watches us with cold contempt.

And she does nothing.

She’s not helping her ally. She’s not attacking us. She’s just… watching. Penelope and I move to reinforce Galdra and Vita by unspoken agreement, perfectly willing to take the apparent handicap we’re being given. Our opponent is a master of magic, so we just need to get close enough for Vita’s mana-removal ability to disable her for a split second. I drop Lady Vesuvius (who is extremely heavy, not that I’ll ever say so to her face) and pick up Vita instead. We’re going to charge.

The unmoving Queen says a single word I don’t understand. The Queen we’ve been fighting reacts with apparent exasperation and points to us, reshaping her spell with a few gestures and words. Vita responds by annihilating all the mana around us as we rush forwards, negating every spell in her range. My teeth bite down once again.

And once again, they are stopped cold.

What!? I thought we had her! Vita eliminated the… no, it’s back. Her mana field is gone. Why’s it… oh no. I leap away, a dreadful pit in my stomach as I glance over my shoulder and come face to face with what my instincts know is Vita’s corpse. Melik’s corpse now, really. There’s a smoldering hole drilled through the helmet, one that no doubt goes all the way through the brain. How? She just pointed at us, I didn’t see anything! Shit, Vita is dead! Now we’ll… well.

Actually, now that I think about it, the poor Queen probably shouldn’t have done that.

The insect woman we’ve been fighting screams and starts to convulse, falling to the ground and clutching her belly as the Lich no doubt starts burrowing inside her soul. Now this should turn the tides. I immediately turn to the one remaining Queen and—

I…

I’m flying. Tumbling head over heels through the sky. I think… a lot of my bones are broken. What happened?

I smash into the trunk of a tree. If most of my bones weren’t broken before, they certainly are now. Faceplanting on the ground, I try to convince my rattled head to inform me of what just happened. Rewinding slowly through my memory, I find it: a gesture from the queen hit us all with a wave of force, leveling a significant chunk of the forest and launching us far, far away. Then I briefly fell unconscious, and woke up in the sky. I sniff the air. Lady Vesuvius is nearby somewhere. Galdra… I don’t smell. I’m not sure if that means she died or is simply very far away. I try to move and completely fail at anything other than sending a roaring pain through my body, but it doesn’t take long for Lady Vesuvius to find me again. Descending down on me from above, she sticks her whole hand in my mouth this time, and I don’t hesitate to bite down on it. I doubt I could have if I tried. This time, she regenerates faster than I do. I’ve taken a lot more damage.

“What… happened?” I cough.

“They took the one Vita was possessing and teleported away with her,” Lady Vesuvius reports.

“Do we… go save her?” I ask.

“I don’t believe we can,” she answers simply.

Oh.

“What… now?” I ask.

“Hmm,” Lady Vesuvius hums to herself, offering me another body part when my healing starts to slow down. Why not. I’ve already eaten her twice today. I accept it. Watcher, she tastes so good.

“Well in regards to Hiverock,” Lady Vesuvius eventually announces, “I believe we have either decisively won the war or decisively lost it. Not that we have any way to know which one. So I suppose… now we dethrone the Templars.”

“What!?” I yelp.

“Incompetence in power must be replaced, or the country will fall. You have seen the way the leaders of the Templars mismanage their own people, have you not? Wasting lives away to uphold ideological values that hurt the undeserving? Refusing to aid the causes at which they are sorely needed? With Cassia and Braum’s assistance, we could have easily crippled Hiverock’s war structure and retreated before they could properly retaliate. The current leadership needs to be removed.”

“I’m not going to help you assassinate my own superiors!” I snap at her.

She responds with a blank stare.

“I did not say I’m going to kill them,” Lady Vesuvius chides. “A peaceful solution would be greatly preferred.”

I deflate a bit at that, not sure what to say. I suppose admitting that might be exactly what I should say.

“I don’t… understand any of that stuff,” I tell her. “Politics. Policy. Leadership. Strategy. I’m too busy failing at figuring myself out to handle understanding human nature, let alone the workings of an entire society. I don’t know what the right thing to do is. I don’t think I ever have.”

“That is,” Lady Vesuvius notes, “what makes you such an easily manipulated follower.”

“What?” I ask with surprise, wincing a little as I sit up. I think I just got insulted!

“You have no principles,” she continues. “You rely on others to tell you right from wrong. As such, you collect understanding of what is and isn’t good, but it is fragile. It changes on a whim. It’s self-contradictory. Because while you have some basis of what good is, you have no basis on why.”

“The ‘why’ is because it’s the Mistwatcher’s will,” I protest, though I quickly frown. “Or… well, it’s supposed to be.”

“Even if the Mistwatcher had the desires the Church claims it to have, that would not be a ‘why,'” Lady Vesuvius says firmly. “That is just letting others tell you what is right and wrong but an extra step removed. Even if you presuppose such a will, you should know why the will exists, why it holds the values it does. If you follow values without questioning them, Lark, you will commit countless evils without ever realizing it.”

I grimace.

“So I’ll never stop doing evil things until I figure out all of morality?” I groan. “That sounds impossible!”

“It is. And even if you accomplish it, you’d still do evil things. Just with a bit more self-awareness.”

She gives me some horrible mix between a reassuring smile and one that is amused at my expense.

“So I’ll just always be evil?” I snap. “No matter what I do, no matter what I try, it’s all pointless?”

“That’s not what I said at all,” Lady Vesuvius answers, shaking her head. “You’ll always cause some evil, yes. But avoiding evil is not synonymous with doing good. To really help the people who need it most, you have to take chances. And sometimes, you’ll fail.”

She looks up at the looming darkness of Hiverock above us.

“Like we did today,” she notes quietly. “Our actions may have simply invited worse retribution. Perhaps I doomed us all. We will have to see.”

We both stare at the sky for a while, letting it all sink in as the horrid island floats away and dawn starts to break.

“So!” Lady Vesuvius says suddenly. “Are you interested in deposing a government with me?”

“No!” I yelp. “What are you…? No, of course not!”

“Ah, a shame,” she muses, picking herself up and stretching out her wings. “Well, I do hope we can still be friends, if nothing else.”

I stare incredulously at her.

“…Are we friends, Lady Vesuvius?” I ask her.

“I’m technically not a Lady anymore,” she says. “And we are if you’d like to be.”

“…Well, um, sure,” I answer her slowly.

“Wonderful,” she says, her body lifting up off the ground. “Well, I’ve got to prepare, then. Will you have any trouble making it back to Skyhope on your own?”

“No,” I tell her. “I don’t think so.”

“Then I shall see you later, Lark,” she says, and takes off.

Geez. What was that about? What do I do now?

I scowl as a thought comes to me. I know exactly what I should be doing. I set off through the forest, sniffing the air as I search. No sign of Hiverock soldiers or Queens. There’s a wide, wide area I have to search for what I’m looking for, and it takes me a couple hours to finally come across it. Melik’s corpse. I need to burn it, so it won’t end up as monster food. It’s what he would have wanted.

I hope that somewhere, he’s finally resting in peace.