Vigor Mortis

Chapter 178: Skyclad

I curl my tail in irritation, then immediately become even more irritated at the unconscious movement. Flexing the spine of my tail doesn’t have a negative effect on my ability to cast with the many tendrils lining its underside, of course, but both the involuntary movement and the involuntary emotion are unwanted. Annoyance is a frustratingly difficult emotion to suppress, due to the nature of emotional suppression, and my dislike for allowing myself to have thoughtless physical tics is deeply ingrained enough to have survived two separate soul mutilations. I simply disdain any reminder that I am not in full control of myself at all times.

Though on the subject of soul mutilations, I can’t say I’m happy to deal with the reason I had my first one, even if he has somewhat poetically met the same fate that befell me at his hands. Vita—no, Malrosa—would be a more optimal choice of combatant for facing Sky in single combat, but she is busy so the task falls to me.

Malrosa. What an interesting correction that is, rife with potential causes and very few of them good. I ponder the name as I levitate myself silently out of the facility, preparing my opening move against Sky as I go. The Athanatos Princess’ prominence in what has become of Vita makes her frustratingly unpredictable, Malrosa’s obvious intellect pairing with Vita’s paranoid cunning to make someone who is equal parts dangerous and capricious. The speed at which she shelved her irritation at Lark was uncharacteristic of her, to say the least. Fortuitous, certainly, but not something I’d have expected from the Vita I knew. Perhaps spending more time with her will allow me to understand her better, to recognize the causes and likely results of her strange mood swings, but for now I have only theories.

I can only hope we have the time to properly investigate the issue before it blindsides us at the worst possible moment.

“You can’t escape from me!” Sky’s voice barks from above. “I can feel you.”

Then why are you blabbering about it out loud instead of getting a preemptive strike off? Not to mention the presumptuousness of assuming I’m trying to escape. I don’t respond out loud, of course, because that would be wasteful. It’s been a contemptible indulgence to even think about it this much internally.

I finally emerge from the complex, still invisible and inaudible because revealing myself just because someone says they know where I am would be foolish. Sky is hovering up above me, still wearing the body I crafted for him, but a quick glance at his soul paints a different picture. He is a victim of Ars now, his soul enhanced by numerous pulsating grafts that make him more or less unrecognizable. His core almost looks like it’s been turned inside-out, hardly even appearing human anymore. Yet he floats in the air with the same smug imperiousness as always, the same impatience for subtleties. He looks the same as he always did, in posture and expression and attitude, and if all that is the same it makes me wonder what the hideous additions to his soul did change.

He turns and looks in my direction as I float slowly up to meet him, closing the distance between the two of us at a sedate pace least likely to appear threatening. I suppose this proves he does, indeed, know where I am, but I remain invisible anyway.

“Well aren’t you a big one,” Sky sneers, glaring down at me. A light telekinetic force crawls over my body, pressing lightly around my face, my wings, my breasts, my hips, my tail, my nether regions. It’s not harmful and there’s very little I can do to prevent it, so I ignore the sensation. It’s so delicate that I suspect most people wouldn’t be able to feel it at all. Sky’s mouth twists from a glower to a crude grin as he runs his talent over my naked flesh, and he speaks again.

“Vesuvius,” he greets me. “I’d heard what you’d done to yourself, but I found it hard to believe. Here you are, though. Nearly eight feet of woman, as teasingly plump as ever. I’d always suspected you were an exhibitionist, so it’s nice to see that confirmed. It figures that your idea of ‘transcending humanity’ is just making your tits bigger.”

My breasts are only bigger to match my larger body. Proportionally, they are identical to my former human form. I kept them that way on purpose, partly because I’ve actually done research and testing on the optimal chest-to-body ratio and it would be foolish to waste that effort, and partially because when I designed this body I was still capable of vanity. I’m not anymore, but my body remains as it is for practical reasons. Attractiveness is a tool, and tools can be used as weapons. But of course, I say none of this either, and merely keep approaching. Sky keeps allowing me to, because he believes he is stronger in close quarters than I am anyway. He might even be right.

“Nothing to say?” he taunts unsuccessfully. “Not that I’m complaining. I’ve never liked your voice. So damn haughty and perfect. You were always more attractive when you were quiet. Or just moaning.”

I wonder what he thinks he’s accomplishing by saying this. Perhaps he isn’t trying to accomplish anything at all, and is just being crude for the sake of it. I once would have dismissed it as just that, but Sky is a man that successfully fooled me into believing I had him wrapped around my finger despite the truth being anything but. He is so vulgar that I often forget he is cunning, enough to not only fool me but to run one of the most successful criminal enterprises in the city. Is it just an affectation? Is he aware of the tendency to cause people to underestimate him that his demeanor causes? Or does he simply enjoy getting under people’s skin?

His efforts are useless either way. I don’t have skin to get under anymore, neither literally nor metaphorically, and even if I did I wouldn’t be offended by his reference to our frankly quite enjoyable bouts of sexual intercourse. I made those sounds because I knew he would like them, because I was aware he was insecure enough to need the knowledge that yes, he was indeed quite proficient at using his newly-physical manhood. Simply telling him so would have been ineffective, so it was better to not use words. That increased his confidence, which in turn increased his proficiency, and we both benefited as a result. Even Capita, busy as she was finding ways to occupy herself on either side of him, was quite pleased with the situation. I have nothing to be ashamed of.

…Well, I suppose that’s not even remotely true, but I have nothing to be ashamed of in regards to my sexual exploits. And if Sky is clever, and I must assume that he is, he knows this. So why mention it?

I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’m in range now.

“What’s wrong, Vesuvius? Too proud to—” Sky starts to taunt again, but I cut him off by turning everything within a five foot radius of his center of mass into plasma. It feels strangely fitting to kill him with Galdra’s signature spell.

He’s the reason I miss her, after all.

I clamp down on that feeling and lock it away, forcing myself to focus on evasive maneuvers. A furious and now one-armed Sky roars at me, having unfortunately avoided instant death thanks to his unnatural agility. He dives down at me, blood trailing behind him. The open wound gives me an easy vector for infection, and I try to capitalize on it but end up getting confusing feedback from my talent. Holding back an irritated hiss, I dodge Sky’s mad assault. Too much uncertainty. I can’t use my talent in these conditions. The burning need I feel for obeying my principles multiplies as my talent is denied.

That’s how my system works, in essence. I could not find a way to stop my talent from urging me to use it. Whenever I repressed that part of my soul, it grew back in mere hours. Perhaps if I carved my entire talent away I could manage it, but I’ve no way to know the consequences of such a thing and I doubt any of them would be good. So instead, I took that urge and rerouted it. Failing to use my talent no longer multiplies my need to use it, but instead my need to obey the strictures I have imposed upon myself. And since those strictures often restrict my talent usage, it’s an effective positive feedback loop. I wouldn’t call it elegant, or even truly safe, but it is effective. And that is an improvement over my prior system, ‘just try my hardest to be good,’ since that was obviously not effective at all.

Anyway, I need to focus on the battle at hand. I easily dodge Sky’s approach, but it would seem that closing the distance with me was not his objective. Instead, he reaches the ground, carving a gouge into the stone with his telekinesis and launching the fragmented shards in my direction at such incredible speeds that they crack the air like a whip. Pathetic. Such an attack would be harmless to me, even if I took a lucky shot to the eye. But underestimating an opponent is foolish so I dodge anyway. It is fortunate that I do, because the moment the projectiles fly past me, they explode into searing bursts of heat and force, the shockwave knocking me to the side and causing me to crash through the wall of a nearby building.

So. He can turn objects affected by his telekinesis into bombs now. That’s new. I shake off some rubble with the flick of my tail and exit the building through a different wall, just in time to see the spot I had landed burst into another set of explosions. I need to move back towards the facility and put myself between it and Sky. He probably isn’t allowed to use such destructive abilities in the general direction of the city’s defensive network.

“What’s wrong, Vesuvius? I thought you liked it rough!” Sky laughs, the blood from his missing arm already slowing its flow. Is that a stump starting to form already? Is he regenerating? I cease maintaining mana flow to my stealth spells so I can focus more on combat. Irritatingly, he also seems to shoot me less while he’s talking, which means I’m incentivized to banter. Ugh.

What to say, what to say? Countering with similarly bawdy conversation will only encourage him to continue, and there aren’t any angles I can really pull on there. The obvious rejoinders—talking about Capita or her child—are ineffective given the fact that she was quite enthusiastically participating in bed with us, and it would just lead to Sky countering by talking about Vita, and I don’t want him to think about Vita because I am currently running a distraction operation for that exact purpose. Besides, mentioning her would be similarly pointless to mentioning Capita since Vita could not care less who I sleep with, even if that person happens to be a mass-murdering treasonous narcissist.

Although speaking of mass murder, that does give me a good idea for a conversation topic.

“For a man who wanted to help the poor so badly that he decided to kill all rich people, you’re certainly working hard to uphold the status quo,” I tell him.

“Oh-ho! Finally sassing ba—” Sky starts, but his sentence is somewhat drowned out by all the lightning I take the opportunity to blast him with. He shrieks in agony for a moment, giving me time to reposition, but he does not fall unconscious or die like I was expecting him to. Definitely a talent for regeneration, then, if not also anatomical reinforcement. That explains the issues I was having with figuring out a disease that might work on him.

“Watcher fucking damnit, Vesuvius!” Sky roars at me once I cease channeling my electrical attack. He seemed to be getting more and more resistant to it, so I stopped wasting my energy. “Do you have to keep cutting me off when I’m trying to fucking talk?”

“It’s the most optimal time to—” I briefly cease speaking as I dodge the incoming explosive projectile that I’d been expecting and wait for the shockwave to pass.

“To attack you,” I finish. “You tend to get distracted by your own voice.”

He barks out a laugh at that, to my mild surprise. He seems to be in an unusually good mood overall, really.

“Ha! You know, I’ve never liked you, Vesuvius.”

“This news shocks and saddens me,” I lie to his face.

“But here’s the thing,” he continues, and I let him this time. “I don’t hate you, Vesuvius. Not anymore. I hated you for a bit when we first met, sure. I saw you as part of the problem. But the more we got to know each other, the more I realized you were trying to solve the same problem I was. You just had a dumbass way of going about it.”

“Having my methods disparaged by a man whose plan was to kill everyone he didn’t like and pick up the pieces later is truly the most scathing insult you’ve managed to conceive thus far,” I admit honestly. “I do not hate you either, Sky, though I suspect it is for no reason other than incapability. You have hurt me more deeply than anyone else alive. Many would argue that you have killed me. And I do not bear a grudge over this.”

A sharp pain in my belly flares when I say those words, but I ignore it. There’s nothing physically wrong with me, so it’s just false pain from damaged bits of my soul.

“No, the thing I truly cannot forgive is that you won,” I continue. “You succeeded with your wild ambition. You did exactly what you set out to do. You carved the rot from Skyhope, extracted a massive, bleeding tumor from the heart of our city… and only then did you realize someone had to heal the wound that made. And so your grand ambition did nothing but bleed out, taking the rest of us with it. You’re too clever for your own good, Sky, yet still far too stupid to be good for anyone else.”

He opens his mouth to respond and I fire a concentrated light ray between his eyes, burning through his skull, his brain, and out the back of his head in an instant. My principles make it difficult for me to kill people, most of the time, but this is not one of those times. Sky is guilty of a thousand different death-worthy crimes, he is an actively dangerous combatant disrupting an operation of great importance, and he is not trustworthy enough to be believed even if he were to claim surrender, due to his history of betrayal. Untimely, hypocritical and utterly horrific betrayal far more cruel than simple death. A clean death like this is more than he deserves. …But it’s nothing personal, of course.

I ignore a no doubt entirely unrelated urge to scream when I see Sky’s body fail to fall out of the sky, his forehead starting to repair itself. Nobody should be that durable other than me. I send some neutered diseases his way, safe and pathetic ones with no interesting attributes, just to put extra strain on his regeneration as I attempt to prepare another annihilation spell. It is exhausting to cast so many powerful spells in sequence, and unfortunately it’s not the kind of exhaustion I can simply flush out of my system with what I’ve learned from Bently’s talent. No, this is the sort of exhaustion that strains the soul, massive amounts of mana entering and leaving it as my tail repeatedly weaves the kind of spells that our nation would have considered impossible just a few decades ago. The only upper limits to my magical prowess are knowledge and mana capacity, and it is very much the latter which is being strained here.

I flinch as something in my soul painfully cracks, and I’m forced to abandon my spells out of self-preservation. A deep ache suffuses my body, and I know better than to strain myself further when I’m already at my limit. Today has been a very long day full of sustained spellcasting, but even then I should have been capable of casting much more powerful spells much more often than I already have. Something must be severely agitating my soul internally. How frustrating. I need to figure out how to fix that.

I haven’t learned how to stop having emotions. I’ve only learned how to make them stop influencing me, to remove them from my conscious decision-making process. I’m fully aware that they’re still there, bubbling around inside me and being dangerous to the world. Trying their best to make me unstable. It’s just another thing I still need to improve.

In the meantime, I’ll have to reduce the stress on my soul and cease casting all nonessential spells. I let myself drop to the ground, my feet both creating small craters where I land. I glower up at Sky, quickly reevaluating my options. His brain is probably regenerating based on a backup contained in his soul. I’ll have to unbond his soul from his body in order to kill him, either through animancy or raw brute force. And I am currently unable to safely cast animancy.

“Three times!” Sky roars furiously, his whole body shuddering as it finishes regrowing its flesh. “Three fucking times you take a cheapshot at me while I’m in the middle of trying to say something!”

“Then shut up,” I snap at him, beckoning with a come-hither gesture. “Quit running your mouth and try to kill me already.”

“I thought you liked what I do with my mouth,” he answers, and I wrinkle my nose. Goodness. The man did not used to be this bawdy. It must be the influence of one of the souls leeching off his own. Maybe that’s also why he won’t shut the fuck up, the disgusting literal bastard.

“You haven’t earned the right to be listened to,” I tell him frankly.

That finally gets him to charge me. Good. Now I just need to win a fistfight with a man who can turn metal into dust by just walking nearby and thinking at it. Shouldn’t be too hard.

Being a proper lady of noble-born origins, I have never been much of a brawler. It’s not something I’ve ever needed or wanted to learn. I didn’t put myself in supreme physical condition to ignore the kind of experience necessary to take advantage of that, however. As Sky falls towards me, I lower my stance, taking a steadying breath. Let my entire body be the lever with which I impart force. Let the island itself be my fulcrum. Step. Twist. Strike.

I do not strike with a fist, because that would be inefficient. Humans use fists because to strike with the tips of their fingers is to invite weakness. If the finger bends or breaks on impact, you’ve wasted enough force to more than nullify any advantage one might gain from the reduced area of impact. Obviously, I have no such weakness. I lock my joints, trusting my bones to withstand anything I need them to. My clawed fingertips make for Sky’s neck, aiming to divest him of his entire head.

The air screams at our movements, but when our bodies meet it is no dramatic clang of blades. I feel like I am striking a vat of molasses that’s trying to rip my skin off. Sky’s telekinetic power slows me immensely, fighting my every movement and desperately trying to worm its way into my arm and rip me apart from the inside. My natural magic resistance protects everything underneath my skin, however, and the skin itself resists even the obscene forces Sky can throw at them. But still, his defense is enough to slow me. I carve open his neck, but it isn’t enough. He dodges enough damage to survive and that’s all he needs to do. My whole body is within optimal range for his power now, and he’s tearing against my entire body at once, holding me in place as he searches for weak points in my flesh.

…Which gives him time for his neck to heal so of course he immediately starts fucking talking again.

“You talk a lot of shit about the perception event, but that’s your problem, Vesuvius. That’s the reason I could never like you. You’re fake. No, worse than that, you want to be fake.”

I strain my muscles against him, my heart pounding and body vibrating, but I’m locked in place. Sky floats at eye-level smirking as his telekinetic assault picks and peels at my scales, probing and pressing with ever-increasing pressure.

“You want everyone to love you and see you as the prim and proper little noblewoman doing everything by the book, working within the system, checking all your little boxes, doing all your grand plans in the shadows and making sure everything is perfect and fucking over as many people as you need to in order to keep looking like you’re a good person. And all the while, you’re barely helping fucking anybody. For two years we worked together, and for two years your girlfriend rotted in prison while you did jack shit because you were so obsessed with freeing her in a way that wouldn’t get you caught that you didn’t care if that meant passing up the chance to free her at all.”

I growl at him, but I can’t do much else with my jaw locked in place. My head and soul throb, and all the while I still can’t move.

“What’s wrong, Vesuvius?” Sky asks, lessening the pressure on my jaw. “Got something to say?”

“For a slave to an abusive monster, you sure do prattle on a lot about how I’ve failed to make the world a better place,” I grunt.

“Ars will make the world a better place,” Sky insists, his eyes fervent. “We’ll all finally be equal under his rule.”

Ugh. Bad tactic on my part. There’s no using logic to dislodge such an obviously illogical ideology. I strain my leg muscles against the ground and start to make a bit of headway, but he just lifts me into the air and gives me nothing to press on, no way to move. And then he starts to find his way in. The smaller, thinner scales on my tail-tendrils, worn from constant flexing and constant motion. He tugs harder back there, and starts to peel me apart.

“You talk the talk, Vesuvius, I’ll give you that. You act like you’re mad at all the right people. But you don’t fucking do anything about them anywhere except behind the curtain. It’s too slow. There are too many fuckers that need to get cut and not enough of you. It was a battle you were always going to lose. Just like this one.“

There are not many people physically capable of making this body bleed. Sky adds himself to their number, scale by scale. I hear myself growling even louder, but I ignore it. So frustrating. How can I still be so weak? If Vita weren’t busy, Sky’s soul would already be in a dozen pieces, chewed and swallowed with contemptuous ease. The thought makes my snarl even more pronounced. I do not need her help. I will not let her help! I am First Lady Penelope Vesuvius, and I am no one’s lesser.

“You’re absolutely right,” I tell Sky, awarding me with my first glimpse of genuine surprise on his face. “I won’t let you disparage my triumphs. I did make Skyhope a better place, but it’s true that I was… hesitant. Subdued. Perhaps… insufficiently zealous. I saw the injustice I was trying to fight. But you lived it. Your anger was always greater than mine.”

“Exactly,” he hisses, seeming genuinely pleased. “You don’t have the anger, Vesuvius. You were always one step removed from it, never really caring. You enjoyed being part of the problem too much.”

“Mmm,” I hum in agreement. “As did you.”

The bloody gouges Sky is digging into my tail suddenly halt, giving me an opportunity to start regenerating them. I don’t need it.

“…What did you say?” Sky asks dangerously.

I take a deep breath and start channeling mana again, a smile twitching at my lips.

“You’ve suffered. You’ve been trodden on. You think that gives you a free pass to being an incorrigible piece of shit. It doesn’t.”

If Sky wants to make this a battle of kineticism, I’ll make this a battle of kineticism. Ignoring the pain in my belly, ignoring the mental demands to abort, I start to shove power into my arms. I start to move them, slowly but surely, to that bastard’s face.

“You don’t care about Skyhope,” I sneer. “You’ve never cared about anyone other than yourself. Oh, you want to change things, sure, but it was never about making the world better. It was only about flipping the script, putting yourself on top instead of anyone else. And the saddest part about all of this? The thing that makes you so fucking pitiable? You believe I’m wrong about that.”

Sky tries to fly away and that’s all the opening I need to snatch him, reversing the situation in an instant. My claws wrap around his head, smothering him completely. He starts to struggle, and I start to squeeze, savoring the delightful cracks and snaps as his skull starts to fracture.

“You actually, genuinely have your head so far up your ass that you think you’re doing the world a favor whenever you break wind. You legitimately believe that if everyone who disagreed with you would just shut up or die, all the problems would be solved. And you don’t even think about how that just makes you the next monstrous king that all the trodden folk want to kill. You legitimately think that you’re just better than the people in charge, so that just magically won’t happen to you!”

He starts screaming, focusing all his power to try and rip my hands off his face, but I’ve interlocked my fingers and I’m not going anywhere. All he accomplishes is freeing my tail to wrap him up and start crushing the rest of his bones, too.

“So I hope you’re fucking happy, Sky,” I taunt him. “You did it. You managed to talk so much contemptible bullshit at my face that you’ve motivated me to monologue back, just like old times. So allow me to hit you with my thesis’ conclusion: you are a failure. You have always been a failure, you were always destined for failure, because you never stopped to check outside your self-centered bubble of righteousness. I may not have your drive, but you forgot the one thing that makes your drive worth anything. You. Lack. Principle.”

And with that I up the pressure further, letting the fractures turn into breaks and the breaks turn into complete, shattered messes. Sky’s screaming stops long before he’s dead, his lungs punctured by nearly all of his ribs simultaneously, unable to take a breath of anything other than blood. Even when I finally bring my palms together and splatter the contents of his head all over my face and chest, my eyes enraptured by the liquid arc of viscera as it flies through the air, he’s still alive, his soul clinging desperately onto his body as it tries to regrow his brain. So I continue to shatter and break, to rip off limbs and sever his spine in a dozen places, letting wet, unidentifiable clumps collapse to the ground and stomping them hard enough to put cracks in the earth. Some still-living part of me thinks of Galdra’s face every time my foot comes down, and that ensures the next one drops even harder. Betrayer. Bastard. Asshole. Even once his soul finally detaches from flesh, going inert and unequivocally dead, I continue to strike the paste that was once his corpse a few more times. Just to be thorough.

My breath heavy, I slowly correct myself, returning to my normal, regal posture. There’s a crack in the wall of my soul that I’ll have to repair soon, but with Ars still alive I can’t honestly consider it the first priority right now. Still dripping with blood, shards of bone sticking to the warm, red sludge, I turn around. Vita is there, her insectoid eyes smiling at me with horrid, macabre warmth.

If not for Sky, I would still love her.

“That looked cathartic,” she comments happily.

“You were watching?” I ask, frowning. “You could have stepped in, saved me the trouble.”

“It didn’t feel like you wanted me to,” she answers, picking up Sky’s dead soul with a tendril. I scowl and look away. I hope she eats it. I doubt she will.

“I thought you were busy accomplishing a more important task,” I say. “That’s all.”

“Well, I’m done. All that’s left is to chase down Ars.”

I nod, wiping my face with a hand and somehow coming out of it feeling like they both got more blood on them.

“Then lead the way, Malrosa,” I invite her.

She nods and takes off into the sk—into the air, and I follow her, preparing the teleportation spell we’ll likely need to chase him down. Annoyingly, Vita was right about my weight. Damaged as I am, I should not be teleporting with her. I don’t think I could teleport myself alone right now, let alone both of us. I’ll have to send her on her way alone, but that was always the plan to some extent.

I’d ignored the citizens of Baldone during my fight, but suffice to say we no longer have the element of surprise on our side. Everyone is well aware of our presence, and we don’t attempt to mask it as we approach Ars’ current location. I don’t know where that is, only Vita does, so she leads us to where Lark and Jelisaveta are invisibly waiting: the ceiling of a large, flat bunker, one of the only buildings in the city that isn’t multiple stories tall.

“Is this the place?” I ask, ignoring Lark and Jelisaveta as their eyes seem to bulge at the sight of the blood on my body.

“About fifty feet directly below us, yeah,” Vita confirms. “Last call for preparation. If anyone isn’t ready, say so now.”

“It sounds like he’s underground,” Jelisaveta comments. “How are we getting down there, exactly?”

“Well,” Vita answers, pulling out one of the metal daggers on her hip with a tentacle and giving it a flip. “Like this: Sky, clear us a path.”

She drops the dagger and it falls straight down, obliterating all the matter between us and our destination. The soul of the man I just killed is in there, awake and aware. I… I have to admit it is a practical use of resources. It is the optimal method of descent. I move to pick up Lark and follow, but she and Jelisaveta both grab on to Vita—presumably to avoid being covered in Sky—and the three of them go down together. I follow.

“I won’t be able to follow,” I tell Vita, “so I’ll teleport you first. Save your own for after.”

“Got it,” she confirms.

We fall through the ceiling of the bunker’s ceiling, and I barely catch a glimpse of Ars before Capita touches him and he vanishes. I feel the spatial coordinates enter my mind thanks to Lark’s spell, so I touch Vita and she vanishes a moment afterwards, leaving Lark and Jelisaveta to drop to the ground, both of them immediately flanking the teleporter splice.

“I surrender,” both of her bodies say together, and combined with the vulnerability caused by her pregnancy that firmly puts her in the category of people I am not able to hurt. Damn.

I look around the inside of the bunker, instead. It’s a large room, lined nearly wall-to-wall with naked, sedated Baldonese people, their souls in various states of disrepair. They are strapped up vertically, their arms bound to their sides and their heads lolling, drool pooling in many of their mouths. Some of them are dead. Some of them are children. Yet while that is vaguely horrifying, nothing else stands out as atrocious. Ars’ lab is impressively clean and sterile, no blood, no injured or dying, nothing. Everyone here would seem perfectly healthy were I not able to see their souls.

I wonder which souls are in worse shape right now. Theirs, or mine? I’m not feeling like myself at all, I need to do repairs soon.

“What is this place?” Lark whispers.

“It is the Artist’s workshop, of course,” One of the Capita bodies replies helpfully. The other seems distracted by her own belly, still swollen with the child she holds. It doesn’t have a soul yet, its brain still too undeveloped for the Mistwatcher to have given it one. A welcome mercy.

“You seem oddly unperturbed with us being here,” Jelisaveta comments.

“My role is done,” Capita says as if that explains everything. “I am to wait until he returns. You are free to do so as well, if you like.”

“Search the area for traps and failsafes,” I order the other two. “Then we’ll start dismantling all of this as safely and quickly as possible. Capita, to me. I am going to knock you unconscious.”

“Okay,” she agrees easily. “May I ask why you’re covered in blood?”

“I killed the father of your child,” I tell her. Hmm. Why did I phrase it like that? That’s basically goading her into attacking me.

“Oh,” both Capitas answer, blinking in sync. “Well, that’s okay.”

Again, she rubs her belly, smiling down at her growing baby.

“Ars will be a better father anyway.”

The room goes silent. Lark, Jelisa, and I all share a moment knowing those words will return to us in nightmares. Until this moment, I believe I wanted to kill Capita. She declared me damned for what I did to Nugas, but then left me to the same fate? Hypocrite. Monster. She is everything she hated, and she always was. Why shouldn’t I kill her? For everything she’s done, she deserves it. But I don’t feel that urge anymore. After all, it would seem she’s currently experiencing a fate worse than death.

I’ll have to be sure to remove the part of me which finds that so pleasing.