Chapter 5: Chapter Four: Mercury Makes a Poor Recompense

(Moonsilver)

Here's a pretty little vignette to muse upon: a beautiful woman who could almost be human if she wasn't glowing at the edges like a dream or a dust-speck on a poorly-tended camera lens, could almost be human if she wasn't making the cinderblock alcove tear itself apart around her, could almost be human if she wasn't pausing now and then to do the same with her right hand.

Suspended islands of pale flesh dappling mid-air rivulets of silver blood like the shattered shards of a shell that never hardened properly. The lurid purple of veins, the counterintuitive blue of arteries, splitting open at the ends. Breaking down further and further like unraveling ropes, like the roots of a lateral tree making their patterns among the fracturing black-iron bones with their razor-barbed joints.

Nails glittering bright pink, displaced, above half-cylinders of unfolding skin.

Each time my unraveling seeps into a new patch of flesh it begins as a tingling wash like numbness, like a limb beginning to freeze. A heartbeat or two and it explodes into aching, stabbing, scorching torment so intense it makes all the intact parts of my body throb. I would compare the exquisite agony rippling through my exposed nerves to that of plunging my hand into molten steel--as I did a few minutes ago, when I and my two attendants passed a smeltery that exists only for the sake of its crucibles--but that's not quite right.

This pain is different, a journey of constant psychic subdivision that splits my mind with each branching. An army of little Moonsilvers shrinking down the lightning paths of pain receptors, and in shrinking themselves, making a hundred, a thousand, a million little pains all feel as titanic and consuming as the one great blaze.

I'd finger myself at the delight of it, but if I start doing that we'll be here all day.

"Well, I--" The indescribable bliss of skin and flesh and bone all recombining, with the electric sensations of midair auras and dust-specks trapped inside tickling, teasing, caressing nerve endings as I slowly assimilate them--the sudden erogenous jolt stabs right through my consciousness and puts me in my knees, moaning, cumming steaming translucent streams onto the pebble-strewn concrete between my quaking knees.

"Oh, oh, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck." My fingers plunge in and work frantically. I'm doubling over, rubbing my face against the ground, panting and groaning and writhing in the brainless abandon of that sweet unheralded orgasm. Afterglow leaves me panting and exposed, sweat shining on my upthrust ass, coronas of pink radiance spilling from the boundary-lines where the trickles of girlcum from my quivering pussy make contact with the floor of the alcove.

Sometimes, being able to feel my own appearance is the greatest gift in the universe.

Because yes, as I learned recently, my power of unraveling lets me pull knowledge from the air--including the way I look from this perspective of that, the images of me painted by the refractions and rebounds of light. I'm pretty sure I've started to slide into a feedback loop of kink and cumming and conditioning myself to obsess about being slutty.

Should I try to course correct? Probably.
Will I? No.

"Sure would be a shame if somebody shoved their cock into me while I'm down here." Is that woozy, airheaded voice mine? Do I really sound like that right now?

"M-mistress, we're dolls." Haz is the doll of pink plastic and blood-red hair I met when I sliced--no, wait, when she lost track of her surroundings and sliced my wrist open. "Haz" is short for "Hazard," of course.

Showpiece is the doll with the tan-painted ceramic body and the blond hair. They're following me because, to use Showpiece's earlier words, 'You seem like the kind of witch who will only break us on accident.'

As for that memory hiccup, thinking for a moment that I was the one who hurt Haz, I know exactly what that is. That's guilt. The agony of awareness about how much harm I could do. The dolls are so obedient, so sweet, so pliable. I could absolutely ruin them in any one of a million ways--or all of a million ways--and they'd still thank me for it as long as I patted their little heads and promised it was all because Mistress loves them.

My memory's becoming more malleable every day. That's not all bad. When I need to remember something, I make it sink right in. When I need to forget something, it's out of my head in a heartbeat. But my power seems to be able to alter my memory through the lens of my self-image. When I'm depressed, or just frightened of hurting someone vulnerable, I start to remember myself as a worse person--am I still a person, though?-a worse creature than I already am.

"So, just to be clear." I prop myself up on one elbow and look over my shoulder. "Neither of you is going to pull her dollish girldick out and rail me?"

"W-well, I'm not really equipped," Showpiece confesses. "I can finger you if you want, mistress..."

My pink brows draw tighter together. My narrowing eyes drift to Haz. "Hazard. Am I to infer from your silence that you are equipped?"

"Y-y-y-y-yes." Hazard's painted blush expands uncannily until it covers her entire face. "Th-th-th-this one c-c-c-c-can s-s-s-service youuuuu if you--if you--if you want..."

I trace spirals in the concrete with one of my nails, leaving strands of skin and flesh behind. "... hmmm... no. All this back-and-forth has damped my mood." I stand up, dust my gown off--another great use of my unraveling. Getting even the tiniest specks of debris out of my nice silks is the easiest thing imaginable!--and turn past them. "Well, that was a bust. It seems like no matter how liminal I make a place, a portal doesn't just happen."

I fiddle with my hair as I set off at a brisk stride. The dolls--my dolls? My dolls... my dolls. Oh, that feels good. That feels right. My dolls fall into step behind me to either side. Just thinking about them puts an extra sway in my step, and I can drink the delicious subby feelings that gives them. I talk while we walk out of the alcove and along a bridge where gravity rotates to follow its twists and turns.

The skyline of an impossibly huge construction yard spins around us: skeletal giants of girders and barren foundations cutting their shadows into an ocean of red stars under a lurid purple moon with a honeycomb of titanic lidless eyes grown into it. "So, Earth is open for business but we're going to have to find our own way there. Pain in the ass. Though, I suppose there are worse things than a scenic journey."

Ah--the words of a witch who is absolutely not anticipating an encounter with her definitely-rival, Tandra, who's found a bunch of neat artifacts and made alliances with all the forgotten powers of the middle world while I'm looking for a portal.

"I didn't realize you'd stopped wearing panties, mistress," Showpiece says, while we step off the bridge and walk through a collapsed swimming pool into an upside-down graveyard. We walk on the floating shingles of a fallen cathedral.

"Oh, I haven't stopped intentionally." I stop to consider a pedestal where the City has tried and failed to simulate a gargoyle. It's a jumble of hunched granite shapes, misplaced wings and disjointed stumpy limbs and leering beaks jutting out of flesh, melting forms running together. So, of course, it's far more terrifying than a properly-done gargoyle statue could ever be.

"No," I continue, "I was just so focused on lacing pieces of myself around my suite so I have a link to lead us back there. After that was done I rushed out and ran into the two of you and completely forgot to put my underwear on."

"Oh, mistress," Showpiece giggles, "you're such a ditz! We're totally going to die!"

A double-barreled salute of witchly finger guns for a doll who gets it. "That's the spirit!"

Onward travel, onward gazes, onward with our occasional words until words until an odd sense of desolation brings me to a halt.

"Mistress?" Showpiece asks. "Is everything okay? Do you sense danger?"

I survey our surroundings with snappy glances. An alleyway of buildings that are built like divebars stacked on divebars, level after level of scratched, worn, red-painted metal doors on every side, doors turned sideways, doors falling open to reveal interiors full of even more dive exteriors.

There's nothing of note here. Just scraps of paper, the bones of a few unfortunate animals that starved to death in the liminal depths of the City... wait.

I step to the nearest scrap of paper. It's gloss under my finger. Laminated. Like the back of...

"Dolls," I order, turning it over to see my suspicions were correct, "get me the rest of this photo." The piece I hold depicts a shy brown-haired girl. She's small, not quite waifish, in a black hoodie emblazoned with the name of a band I'm not familiar with: Feminazgûl. A phantom hand, ruined by fraying, rests on her shoulder.

My dolls shortly bring me the other pieces, and we're left with a group of five friends: a blond girl, average height in a pink jacket, a much taller brunette with a neat, straight fall of shining hair, a stocky muscular guy with a buzz cut and a piercing apiece for his lips, each nostril, and each ear, and a slender twinkish boy with black hair and a chest full of tattoos.

The shy brunette's right in the middle of them. She looks nervous, but happy to be there.

That just adds depth to the hole forming in my belly. Huh. I guess witches can have empathy, after all. So... does that mean the weird, monstrous things we do around Metronome House are just normal for us? Healthy? A way for weird, monstrous beings to show their acceptance and affection to each other?

I guess so. Different beings, different culture. What's right for humans isn't always right for us. What's right for us isn't always right for humans.

Salvaged photo-pieces make a softly-chittering heap inside my satchel. "Alright, you two. I guess we're just going to keep walking until we find out what this is about."

After that it's another half-hour of walking, give or take, through a region of starship hulls and echoing LED-lit hallways with bridges and control rooms and reactors with neither a crew nor an external view in sight.

I laugh. "Wow, the City would be an absolute godsend for humans looking to film derivative shows. Look at this--set after set after set, ready to go." A little smile spreads my lips. "Shame I'll have to kill them if they try."

"Why's that, mistress?" Showpiece asks. "I watch human TV sometimes. It seems... fine."

"Yeah, but you haven't seen what commercialization does to a place." I pat an exposed length of power cable. The current jumps down into my flesh, drawing explosions of fire across every nerve ending and burning holes through my skin and blotting my thoughts right out of my head.

Oh. Right. Silver is an excellent conductor. Forgot about that part. Of course, because of that, I haven't taken any serious damage. Moonsilver the lightning rod. There's an idea.

"Look, just..." I blow out a breath. "It's not that I like the idea of killing people. But, take this from a former human... you cannot just let them go waltzing through the universe, thinking that every place is improved by being turned into a twee replica of the way things work on Earth. If you leave them to their own devices, humans will leech the soul of everything they touch and then sit around whining to each other about how all the magic is gone."

"Ah." Showpiece trembles. "Would they... would they try to make me... human, again?"

Damn it, Amaranth. You could've thought a bit harder about what you said before you started monologuing in front of your poor dolls. "Yeah. They probably would. Most humans, um... they're not very good at understanding the idea that just because being human is their favorite way to live doesn't mean it's everyone's favorite way."

A doll is a doll, though. She fills herself with the heavy calm of Stillness and nods firmly. "Mistress Moonsilver. Promise me that if they ever try, if you can't free me and they're doing some... some kind of horrible magic or ritual or something to make me human, you will destroy me before you let that happen."

"Yeah!" Haz pipes up. "You have to promise to do the same for me, too!"

I nod. "I promise."

As if our grim little chat has stirred something in the unknowable essences that shape the City--hell, knowing this place, it probably has!--we emerge from the latest circular doorway into a labyrinth of loading bays and concrete ramps. They ascend up and up and up into hazy blue skies on all sides.

"Hey, Showpiece?" I catch her pale green eyes and wink. "I think I overstated the case a bit, hun. All humans aren't like I said. Just the ones who make TV shows and movies. That's kind of the whole problem, y'know?" I carve crosshatching grooves into the nearest concrete slope. "For a long time now, humankind's relationship to the monstrous has only existed through stories too often told by the particular kinds of humans who pride themselves on being irreverent and disrespectful. Which is okay, maybe, if you're just dealing with a stuffy old body of lore. But when it's somebody's passion project, full of heart and a desire to connect, when the monster has their own thoughts and desires--"

My Very Special Episode braindump comes to a jarring halt at the sound of three thunderous impacts in succession as three hulking shapes drop out of the night around us and tense. Brandishing huge knotched chopping blades and oversize guns with yawning bores dark with the promise of the last light at the end of the tunnel.

Hazard peeps and rushes closer. Its beady black eyes are sharp with the envelope of Stillness flowing from it. The very essence of a doll in the face of danger. Within that envelop there's the quick, Purposeful murmur she offers to my ear--one that, I sense, our visitors shouldn't be able to hear.

They'll see that Haz is whispering to me, though. There's no helping that.

"Be careful, mistress," it whispers. "Please be careful! Hunters aren't human and they know it, but they want you to pretend you don't! They want you to pretend you're underestimating them! It's part of the play!"

The creatures around us look like post-human parodies of posthumanism. I can't confidently guess what ethnicity any of them were before their changes.

The one on the left with the leering too-wide, toothy face under a broad-brimmed boiler hat and greasy strands of long grey hair could have brown skin, or just skin that's been sun-darkened until I can't tell the difference. Their arms are stretched, with the sharp set of the thick elbows and biceps and forearms offset by the tapering of the too-long forearms into the oversized wrists and hands. And their "nails", chipped and grimy, are keratin grown so long and hard and thick that it's become claws that still have the sheen and hue of fingernails.

Their eyes are slit-pupiled, glowing molten gold, and way too big for their already-big head.

The one blocking the way behind us is pale, bluish, eyeless, and as slippery as a fish inside their ragged trenchcoat. A mess of nasal slits, constantly opening and closing to test the air, mark the ridged expanses of their head all the way down to their long, white, needle-like teeth.

Last of all there's the one ahead and to the right, with a black ten-gallon hat obscuring whatever eyes might lie beneath its brim. No skin. Just raw, reddish muscle fibers and sinews mapping out the shapes of a face. The skeletal leer of white teeth in their gums.

And despite all this, a certain idiot corner of my brain won't stop bombarding me with visions of throwing myself at their feet, spreading my legs, cooing for them to breed me. Or... is that an idiot corner, or is the part doing this self-examining just a cocoon I've built around my lust because I recognize submission won't get me the sex I want, it'll just get me killed?

Focus, harlot. You're a witch. You and your dolls could be in terrible danger. This isn't the time for... whatever those other thoughts are.

It's the hunter above us to the left, with the boiler hat and the grey hair-strands and the golden-glow slit eyes, who speaks first. "On your way somewhere, little witchling? Off to make trouble now that the Earth is open?"

A flash of calculation. I could pretend I don't know, but what advantage do I gain from that? It'd just make me look clueless if the lie succeeds, and if they catch me in it we'll just be in more danger. Sometimes, even for a witch, honesty is the best policy.

"That was my intention, good hunter," I answer, with a graceful curtsy. "Should I consider the way shut?"

"Oh, no." The hunter's grin is awful, a tortured Cheshire palisade of yellowed fangs. "Nothing as oppressive as all that. Just caught the scent of your power in the night and wanted to have a look at you up close, that's all."

"And my dolls?" I walk a slow circle around Haz and Showpiece. The more time I have to size up the threat, the more frightened I become. There's a fluidity to these creatures, a weight of power, melded with constant twitches and predatory sounds.

And I'm a fledgling witch, a witchling like the hunter says, who barely knows what she's doing. There's no way I can take all three of them in a fight.

"No sport in hunting dolls," says the hunter I'm starting to think of as Goldeneyes. "Weak. Submissive. Not much fun pulling them apart, they break so easy. But witches..." its grin gets wider. "Witches do feel possessive of their dolls. Doll can be a good bit of bait."

"Do you dislike weak things, oh hunter?" I might as well keep them talking. If we're talking we're not fighting. If they're playing, they're not on the hunt.

I have to keep telling myself that.

"No!" says the pale hunter closing the way back. It--he? The auras I peel out of the air tell me to call this one 'he'--he continues, "no, no, nonononono. We don't hate weak things. Well..." he smiles awkwardly. "I don't, anyway." His webbed, clawed hand splays across his broad glistening chest. "I love weak things. The strong need the weak to get all fed up on so they can hunt other strong things. What's a hunter without the prey? A healthy ecosystem takes all kinds. Just gotta cull the herd sometimes, that's all. Trim out the sickly ones and burn the dead growth so the forest as a whole can be healthier."

Goldeneyes nods. "Yeah, that's the way it is. And don't you worry, little witchling. We're not here to hunt you. Not today. Not for a while. Witches are almost like hunters, when you grow right. I want to see you get strong before I take you down. I want you to give me some scars. I want this to be fun." They grin. "Maybe you'll even turn the tables. Now, wouldn't that be something?"

They slump down, arms folded on the edge of the concrete platform, and rest their big, shaggy, grinning head on the uncanny limbs. Their eyes are now isolated glows in the darkness beneath their hat, behind the worm-like strands of their hair. A predator at their leisure, leering out at the world from the cavern of themselves.

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"You looking for the little vampire?"

"Who?" I ask, genuinely confused. It takes me a few seconds to remember the photo-pieces we picked up earlier.

"Little slip of a thing," says the pale fishy hunter who I've decided to think of as Cavedweller. I don't get the impression hunters care about names one way or the other. "Turned oh-so recent-like. Didn't take it too well, it seems. Had that black hoodie on for that band." He licks his teeth. "Some feminist thing. Not much into -isms anymore, these days. That world is dying. There's no point." A shrug makes his jacket rustle. "There's strong and weak, hunters and prey. She or he or they or it, any of those things can be strong. Any of those things can be weak."

Swell. Cavedweller believes in the equal right to participate in zero-sum power struggles. I'm so glad that in this progressive era, we can make time to dismantle gender norms while we're advocating eugenics.

"I thank you for these insights, good hunter." I curtsy again. "Is there anything you would ask of me in exchange for..." I almost say 'good passage,' but that feels too much like acknowledging their strength. I have to play this stupid game. Pretend they're human, even if they're doing a terrible job of that very thing. "... for getting to continue my walk without the annoyance of putting you in your places?"

So terrifying and stupid and counterintuitive. I know they can see the pinkish sweat-beads on my brow, let alone smell whatever it is that fear smells like when it comes from a creature like me, when it's coming to the noses of creatures like them.

Forcing me to pretend I'm the powerful one while they threaten me. Yeah. I guess maybe witches and hunters do have a lot in common.

"Don't be worrying about that, little witchling," Goldeneyes chuckles. They push themselves upright with a self-satisfied grunt. The force of their arms sends them whipping to their feet with a rush of air. "Like I said, we'll take care of that on our own end. Gonna make sure you don't get too entangled with any," they gnash their fangs, "corruptive influences. Wouldn't want to abandon someone with so much promise. Let you get all... weak."

And they leap upward, an impossibly high thundercrack leap followed shortly by both of their fellows.

I watch the darkness for a long time.

"Sweet. Awesome. Fucking amazing." My steps are swifter, jittery, scuffing on the concrete. "Haz, Showpiece, c'mon. From now on, let's be cautious about who we try to make friends with, and where we do it." I shudder. "I wouldn't want to put anyone at risk of getting, y'know... disentangled."

"This isn't right," Showpiece mutters. "You're a witch. You're supposed to have agency. You're not supposed to be a toy for those things."

"All of that is true." I rest my hand atop her pretty blond head. "And it doesn't matter, sweetheart. Ideals only work to change the hearts of creatures that want more from life than their own satiation. Power, my dear dolls. Only power is absolute."

That knocks the words right out of them.

We find a tram car with no rails to follow that's just plowing its way through solid rock. Its frame screeches and warps and sparks, but it never quite collapses. We sit inside on stiff barely-padded seats and watch the rock ahead split open. That's how we travel for... cinders of my morning glory, I don't know. One hour, three, five? I need to come up with a name for the frame of mind a monster like me falls into when they're just experiencing the City. Existing within the greater whole of this crazed incoherent place.

It emerges into a sewer tunnel that flows with fresh, cold milkshake instead of sewage.

"See, this is what I hate about the City," I say, pointing. "Even when we do run into something fun, I'm too paranoid to trust it."

My dolls giggle at that. They're still giggling when we turn a corner into a junction of the maintenance walkways and find a small figure in a black hoodie kneeling at the hub of many gory spokes.

I check the dead against my memory. There's the tall brunette, splayed out with one blood-crusted hand still draped over the ragged chasm of her throat. Her eyes stare, wide with rigor mortis, at the dull bricks of the ceiling. There's the twinkish boy with his chest raked to pieces and his face torn off, the stocky muscular body of the man whose piercings gleam faintly in the exploded mass of his head, and right at the feet of the little vampire there's the girl in the pink jacket.

The vampire turns the dead girl's eyes over between her fingers.

"Just sad and lonely," she mutters, desolate. "That's what Ari said. Not a monster. Not a vampire. Just sad and lonely." She pops one eye into her mouth and chews without a change in expression. A painful-looking swallow. "What about a sad, lonely vampire? Why can't they be one and the same?"

I motion my dolls to stay back. I walk just a few feet closer before stopping. "What happened?" My voice echoes three times around the chamber before it fades.

The little brown-haired vampiress flicks her eyes to me. "They kept saying this wasn't me. That the Liz they knew didn't deserve this. And I thought... I thought, why were they talking like that, unless they didn't believe I really wanted to be a vampire, unless they were going to change me back?" Her nails draw raw gouges down her arms, peeling skin but failing to bring out blood. "I thought, y'know... in a group of all trans people... they had to understand, right? They had to know that wasn't okay to say..."

I take a seat. "They should've."

"Yeah." She tosses the other eye over her shoulder. "But they didn't." She plays an off-rhythm beat on her thighs, little hands pattering. "So, what happens now? You going to kill the monster? Are you a hunter?"

"Uh-uh." I'm self-conscious of how garish my pink hair looks. An anime character flopping onto the scene of a modern gothic horror. Shameful. But I'm the one who's here. I'm the one who has to try to talk her down. "They shouldn't have said those things. Does being a vampire make you happy?"

"Of course it does!" She yells, first, and then her voice collapses back in on itself. "Of course it does. I thought... in my head I saw how cute I was when I put my little fangs on things, when I would peek around corners and perch on rooftops, I imagined how fun it would be to sneak in through another girl's window and... y'know, I'd get consent, we'd set up a safeword, and then I'd drink some of her blood and she'd get all melty and..."

She drops her head into her hands. "It wasn't about scaring people. I never wanted to hurt anyone. Why?" Her shoulders begin to shake. "Why did they think I wanted to hurt people?"

"It, um..." My eyes trace the dead. "It sounds like they had a lot of problems of their own they should've handled before trying to tell you who to be."

"Yeah." She sniffles and looks up. "Did they deserve to die for that?"

"No." I scoot away and clamber to my feet. "But they did. That's just how it is." I glance to my dolls. "I'm not going to push you. I just want you to know that if you want it, I can get you a suite at a place called--"

A hulking figure blurs past me and skids, seizing the vampiress before she can do more than yelp and claw at its massive skinless hand. It's one of the hunters from before. The one with the ten gallon hat casting shadows on the skeletal maw of its muscle-and-sinew face.

"Pardon the intrusion," it drawls, "but this is exactly the sort of thing we were talking about when we discussed weakening influences. Caring for this little parasite's a waste of your talents, witch. Please, allow me to spare you the strain of her codependence."

No point talking. It's squeezing harder and harder, hard enough the vampire-girl's screaming already, and reaching for the big black holster on its hip.

Concentrate the pressure, fill the air with it like a million descending vises, crush down on the hunter's arm--the arm resists. I feel my power glancing off, sliding around, breaking apart on it. Sinews still split and tremble in the air, but it's slow, so slow, only surface damage.

"You're gonna wanna back down," the hunter growls, turning to glare at me, "before you do something that's gonna get you killed before your time."

Okay. Its body is full of its own power, and for reasons I don't fully understand yet, that makes it resistant to mine. Fine. What about the ground underneath it?

When it drives into the ground, the same surge-worth of my power that scarcely took millimeters from the hunter's arm creates an instant stretched crater, stone and mortal melting open and ripping upward to become carving razor pinnacles that shear clean through the hunter's arm.

It roars. "Last straw, witchling!" It hurls the vampiress at the far wall and rips the gun from the holster on the hip. It's already sending shots at me before it finishes talking. "You want it, you got it--this hunt begins now!"

I feel the brass-skinned bullets for a fraction of a second, but they slip through before I can take any real mass off them and punch holes in my torso. It's not the pain, it's the sudden conviction of my own weakness. Each impact, each stagger backwards, fills my head with humiliating thoughts--too slow too weak too unskilled with your powers--your powers?

Oh. Of course the hunter's attacks would be full of its ideas about me. Piercing its being into me.

The wave of stone I unravel from the ground barely scratches it before it darts around, moving unspeakably fast for such a massive being, and lunges in. A single swipe of its claws rips my front wide open, and into the agonized void of the strike flows a freezing, seeping sense of rot and unmaking.

The shining silver spray of my blood transmutes before my eyes to human reds. The violation of my form goes deeper than words can ever hold, the conversion of my dark-iron bones back to banal off-white filling me with sickness. Hazard and Showpiece scream.

"It's just a little dysphoria!" the hunter snarls. "Get over it!"

It rakes me, one massive staggering sweep after another. The unholy changes driven through me roil and crunch against my own natural healing. My limbs seize. My unraveling bleeds out into the foreign matter infesting me, opening sudden tears and explosions of gore. While I'm reeling the hunter reloads its revolver and cracks off six more shots, one after another, right into my gut.

Everything's cold and fuzzy. I can't seem to weight myself enough to project outside my body anymore. Tottering sideways, not even blacking out, just... not even here, now and again, faster and faster. Can't clear my head.

This is where I die. I'd finally found a single shred of joy, a place where even I can belong, and I'm already dying.

The sound of my knees cracking on the savaged floor makes no impression on what's left of my mind.

"Now then--" the hunter begins. A metal whir, a swifter darker blur, and a skidding shape.

A human. Just a human with a two-handed sword--not a huge one, but an elegant duelist's sword with a glinting black-steel blade and a single purple amethyst at the center of its crossguard. He's lean, brown-skinned and silver-eyed with a neatly-cut head of black hair, right around six feet, wearing a black robe with form-fitting sleeves under arm-protection and a glossy iridescent cuirass.

"This is why I hate hunters," he says, rising and whipping the sword up above his head. "You're full of big words about fairness and competition until someone pushes back."

"The witchling had it coming!" the hunter roars. "She went back on our bargain! She--"

The human casts lightning, and not a few little tesla-tendrils. This is a real storm-grade lightning bolt, a massive blinding fissure in reality itself that fills the air with the scent of ozone and, despite its fury, skims just over the surface of the hunter's form.

My rescuer, if that's what he is, flicks his brows up as the hunter snarls and charges him. He throws his sword over hand, snaps his hands out, and casts lightning bolts to all sides--what is he doing? What purpose can that possibly serve?

The hunter closes in, brandishes its gun, and loses it when an upward finger-flick from the human mage--he has to be a mage, right?--sends a gout of white light blasting up from the floor. The instant the hunter staggers, the mage's sword comes whipping back the other way and impales it in the spine.

"Word of advice for your next incarnation," the human says, stepping past the hunter as it falls to its knees. "If someone tries to get you talking in a fight to the death, just don't."

He snaps his fingers and twenty bolts of lightning converge on the pommel of his sword at once. The hunter howls, on and on and on as it cooks from the inside out. The stench of burning flesh fills the air. Finally, it topples, still burning with the last of the lightning-tide flickering under its skin until it collapses into ash.

I still feel awful, so there's clearly a limit to how many wounds I can sustain at once before my power gives out and I die, but I've gathered my wits enough to rank as 'burned out' instead of 'actively dying." I'll take what I can get.

"Sorry about the delay," says the human in the black armored robe. His sword whirs through the air and nestles into the palm of his left hand. "Ardel Gura of the Gravadan Illuminators. We're spread thin and increasingly exhausted, but I'm here for the moment, and I'll do what I can to help." He finishes cleaning the sword and sheathes it with only a cursory flick of his eyes to help guide the point to its scabbard. "An escort, perhaps?"

I exchange glances with my equally-stunned dolls. "Uh... yes, Mr. Gura, that'd be much appreciated." I hurry to the edge of the platform and help the vampiress out of the water below--black, inky water that must come from a very different source than the out-of-place milkshake-flows nearby.

He nods. "Where to?"

"Well... uh..." I'm staring at Ardel and his tall, elegant figure and those strong swordsman hands and the charming wave his black hair makes atop his handsome face and... um, indeed.

"Ma'am?" he asks, inclining his head. "Are you alright?"

I shake myself. "Yeah. Yeah, I uh... I... I mean... I guess I'm just crushing on you a little. I know that's absurd, but... well... nobody's ever protected me before." Confessing it only redoubles the shock. Someone protected me. Someone thought I was worth fighting for, someone thought my existence was worth saving... oh, fuck... I guess there are one or two things about the human body I don't want to change.

I'm a really hideous crier. My face scrunches up so hard and I get snottier than you can imagine. Now my snot is burning bright pinked flecked with black, which doesn't help.

Ardel drops to one knee, and seeing someone act so gallant towards me only makes me cry harder.

The words tumble out before I have time to think about them. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" I tear off a piece of my gown to use for a tissue since I can trust it to regrow eventually. After blowing my nose and rubbing my eyes onto my now-soggy sleeve I just keep blubbering. "I'm sorry for all the things I said in college!" My eyes ache and I have to fight to make myself look at Ardel. But, I do. "Boys are so good. I'm never going to let anyone tell me otherwise again."

That hits him harder than I expected. "Um..." he clears his throat, sniffles, rubs his eyes a little. "Well, I am boys, but I wasn't there to hear whatever you said in college." He reaches out, and when I offer him my hands he folds them into his. His touch is so gentle and his gaze is so warm and I'm being ridiculous, I just met this man, come on, Amaranth.

"I can tell you're a woman who's been through too much for your age, too much for anyone," Ardel says, "and that you are both desperate for and deeply deserving of love and affection." He squeezes. "You're too vulnerable for any relationship I formed with you to be fair. Your life has value and meaning for the sake of who you are, never mind any kind of romance kindled as a perceived way to 'reward' me. That's what my sword sings for." He smiles softly. "You're a beautiful and intriguing being, madam witch. If the circumstances were different I would give in to temptation." The smile saddens. "But not here. Not now."

I stare at him. Well. That's done it. Before, it was a crush.

Now I'm in love with him.

"That's, um... that's good of you to say. Thank you for being direct with it, and gentle." I ease my hands away and stagger to my feet. "As far as an escort... I need to send, um... I'm sorry, hun, what was your name?"

"Lisbet." The little vampiress has shrunk into herself. "I'm sorry I didn't help you fight. I, um... I was kind of hoping you'd lose and the hunter would kill us both. Sorry."

"It's okay, Lisbet, I understand." I look to Ardel. "I need you to keep an eye out for any more of those hunter while I figure out what it'll take to get Lisbet here back to Metronome House--" Ah, hells, I shouldn't have told him that's where we live. But he only nods as I finish, "and then we were hoping to find a portal to Earth."

He frowns. "Ah. You're sure?" I answer with a slow nod. "Then let's be off, and quickly." He waits for the dolls and I to draw even with him before he starts walking. "Can't say I envy you. The way I hear it, the whole world's splitting itself apart."

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