Chapter 17: Chapter 17: Knock Knock

 

The tower shakes, a thumping moving through it as something strikes against the wall outside.

 

Schlinge sits on the ground, her back pressed against the overturned table, her chest heaving as she tries to catch her breath. The woman turns her head, looking to the right at the others. A cold wind presses into the room atop the tower from outside, entering through the jaggedly broken glass facade.

 

“Ready?” asks a voice next to her. Paladin Abrischka, a colleague from the order of the lance.

 

Schlinge looks at him, her gaze moving over the smear of blood that runs from where they hide out toward the window. The smears are thin and four-pronged, the shape of bloodied fingers that had been trying to hold onto the stones, nails breaking off as they clawed on for life as they were pulled away into the night. Schlinge shakes her head, holding her crossbow tightly against her chest. She’s not ready. She’s not ready at all.

 

Abrishka nods and jumps to his feet. “GO!” yells the man. Screams fill the room as dozens of people move at once.

 

SHE’S NOT FUCKING READY!

 

The Palisade is the old, ancient fortress of the many different paladin orders, all come together under one unified banner and roof generations ago, to fight an old, great evil of the world. Since then, they have housed together, grown together. Training takes place between the many houses of paladins, as do sessions of prayer and reverence, allowing them to become stronger as a unified force.

 

Each of the seven houses of paladins lives and trains within its own tower, one of seven, each of which is atop its own mesa, connected with two bridges. One bridge goes to the prior tower, and one bridge goes to the next tower in the line. The Palisade as a whole is a long, snaky construction that spans the length of the cliffy, rocky region here. At the entrance to the fortress, there is one bridge in, by tower one, where they are, and one bridge out, by tower seven, where she really wishes she was right now.

 

The entrance bridge to tower one has been destroyed.

 

The Demon-King and his carnival stand there on the other side of the ruin, their road having come to an end. Volleys of arrows flew from the tower down onto his convoy, destroying and piercing hundreds of undead and ghoulish creatures of the night. This was all well and good, everything seemed to be going well enough, and there were even some jokes being told about how easy it was to stop the Demon-King with some bad infrastructure.

 

— Until it saw them.

 

Schlinge screams, jumping to her feet together with all of the others. It felt like an eternity had passed between the instant Abrishka gave the order to move and now, but it wasn’t even a second. Her body is pumped full of adrenaline, and her mind is racing like it never has before.

 

Dozens of boots run off, making a break for their lives. They have to get out of here, they have to make it to tower seven and Commander Trinitatio, that’s where it’ll be the safest, the furthest from the Demon-King.

 

Glass crumbles, as something moves through the already broken, jagged edges of the windows and reaches inside. She dives down, hiding beneath another table for a second as a scream cuts through the air, the man next to her having been grabbed and torn out into the darkness. They hear him screaming outside the windows, which is a feat in and of itself, given how high up they are, but nobody stops to go towards him as they all make a break for the doorway, shuffling through into the stairwell.

 

The paladins shuffle down the spiral staircase. “Let’s just go into the quarters,” suggests a man as they move. “No windows there.”

 

“Yeah, and one door,” replies someone else.

 

Abrishka turns his head around. “Sounds like a death-trap to me. We’re going out. We have to get to tower seven, the .”

 

They move, the thin windows of the tower stairwell on their right sides aglow with the faint shine of moonlight. Schlinge wipes her face, looking at the glass as they go.

 

It’s outside.

 

The thing, the lurker, the monster. She doesn’t know how it’s even possible, but it’s out there. It’s watching through the windows of the tower, waiting for anyone to come too close, to come out of hiding.

 

The next window doesn’t glow. Something is blocking the moonlight.

 

She doesn’t have time to scream a warning before her instincts kick in and she drops down. Schlinge falls. Glass shatters, and she looks, watching as a set of long, pale, white fingers with too many joints wrap themselves around Abrishka.

 

It yanks its hand back outside, but it's too wide with the man in its grasp to fit back through the hole, as he is too large to fit through as is. Angrily, something pounds on the tower from outside, screams filling the room as it tries again and again to pull its hand back out, refusing to let go of its catch, and, in doing so, repeatedly crushes the man against the narrowing window. His chest compresses in its grasp. His head and neck, too long to fit out sideways, break and hang at a full right angle, as do his legs, as he vanishes into the night.

 

“THIS WAY!” yells the man from a moment ago, grabbing hold of some people and tearing through a door to the left, to the central inner area of the tower. There are no windows there.

 

Schlinge, laying down on the stairwell, watches them go, running to the side. Something screams outside of the tower, a banshee wail filling the night, as a ghostly, long limb enters back inside the tower, reaching for the door where they’re all vanishing.

 

It feels around, trying to grab hold of anyone but failing to do so.

 

Horrified, she watches as they vanish, leaving her alone down on the stairwell. The arm, above her, flails around as the tower shakes, a fist hitting it from the outside. Schlinge cries, her chest heaving as she crawls forward on her stomach, moving down the staircase, pressing herself as flat as she can to not touch the arm hanging above her.

 

She’s all by herself now.

 

The woman crawls over the smear of blood, left by Abrishka, as she escapes. The tower shakes behind her, the long arm still trying to grab hold of anything.

 

---

 

 

“The bridge is destroyed, your majesty,” says Cartouche.

 

Swain sits on his throne, his head resting on his massive fist, as he looks down at the dancer. “All is well, Cartouche,” says the man. “We’re playing a little game today,” he explains. “We’ll be on the move again soon.”

 

She looks up at him. “You seem to have a penchant for games these days.”

 

The Demon-King shakes his head, laughing. “Life is meant for living, Cartouche.”

 

 

---

 

 

She holds her breath, keeping her eyes as open as possible. One hand presses itself back against the wall; the other clutches the crossbow against her chest.

 

She made it down the stairwell to the gate house. The bridge to tower two is just beyond.

 

They were prepared for many things. They were prepared for an onslaught of undead hordes, for demons to storm the towers, and for flying horrors that filled the night. They were prepared for soldiers and legions of darkness. But whatever this thing is, they weren’t prepared for it.

 

She’s not even a paladin; she’s just an initiate. She came here to study the ways, so she could decide if it was something for her. Schlinge curses herself. She knew she should have tried the wizard’s academy first. Being a wizard is more fun. Paladins are so strict and uptight — not as bad as priests, but she wouldn’t want to become a priestess anyways. They’re not allowed to do anything and are barely paid at all. But her parents encouraged her to come here. Too many wizards on the market already, they said. Poor pay, poor conditions. Paladins as partial-healers and partial-combatants are always wanted, no matter where they go. Sure, you have to make some vows here and there, but it’s a decent gig. Kill some monsters, preach a few sermons.

 

It all made sense.

 

But right now, she really wishes she would have done literally anything else.

 

— Something groans in the darkness. A creaky, wordless voice that sounds like it belongs to an old hag fills the air, causing the hairs on the back of her neck to stand on end as she watches the long arm quietly move around the room.

 

Its fingers, each as long as the tallest men she knows stacked together, crawl and walk like a spider, like a bored child, moving its hand over an empty table. The fingers with too many digits bend and curl unnaturally as it flicks around, touching, feeling, and sensing for anything that it can grab.

 

Sometimes, it will find something it thinks is a person, like an old tapestry or a torch that burns it, and it will yank those things away.

 

Schlinge slides along the wall. She’s on the opposite side of the room, but she isn’t taking a chance. The arm moves her way. The woman, her heart thudding in her chest, silently slides down the wall onto her bottom and then falls over.

 

The fingers crawl towards her as she tightens herself into a ball. A large digit lands next to her, her vision filled with the off-white of its skin, as another finger lands behind her and then another. Old dried blood and gore cakes them, filling her lungs with the nauseating smell of rotting meat that enters into her senses, even if she isn’t breathing at all. It smells of dank, musky death. It smells like the unwashed body of a demented senior, rotting during a phase of livelihood.

 

She silently prays, her chest burning from holding her breath for so long.

 

The fingers step over her, continuing to crawl around the room. She slowly exhales, moving forward towards the exit, towards the very hole that the arm is coming through, the open gate to the bridge to tower two.

 

— Something lurches.

 

She lets out a yelp, sure that it’s over, that she’s been sensed. But the arm glides straight back past her and then pulls itself out of the gatehouse, its owner apparently either giving up or having found something more interesting.

 

Schlinge breathes, jumping to her feet and running to the gate, carefully leaning against the wall as she looks out into the night, trying to see if she can see anything there at all.

 

But she can’t.

 

The storm is too heavy and thick, and even if there is anything out there to see, she simply can’t identify it.

 

A glint of metal catches her eye.

 

She looks to the side, across the bridge. A man is standing there inside of tower two, waving to her to run. He looks to the side, out towards the side of her tower, and changes his gesture, signaling for her to stop and wait. Her fingers grip the edge of the tower. He waits for a moment and then nods, looking back her way, with a more hurried motion now that signals for her to run.

 

The elf takes a deep breath, not sure exactly how she manages to make her own hand let go of the corner-wall, as her boots splash through the puddles. Water streams from the bridges, high up in the air above the canyon below, which, while dry only weeks prior, is now full of water with a raging river, the numbing roar of which can be heard even all the way up here.

 

The woman squeezes her crossbow against her chest as she runs towards the man.

 

She isn’t brave enough to look back, to look at tower one or at what might be around it. She isn’t brave enough to lift her gaze, to make sure that there is nothing looming above her head — greedy fingers, ready to yank her into the darkness — all she does is run. She runs and she listens to the little, hissing voice in her head.

 

Schlinge isn’t particularly good at anything, honestly. She knows it. While some people are clearly called to be tailors and smiths, archers or great wizards, given their obvious natural talents and gifts, she’s always just sort of existed in the middle of things. She’s not terrible at much anything, but she’s also not really good at anything either. She’s not smart or wise, she’s not beautiful or strong, she’s just sort of perfectly, acceptably, normal in every way possible. Not so much so that people would describe her as boring, but more so that, if they ever actually saw her, they would be surprised that she was in the room at all with them. She’s unnoticeable. This is why the crossbow is her favorite weapon. It requires significantly less expertise than other forms of fighting.

 

However, one thing she’s always had is a very strong and well defined inner feeling. That particular internal voice that is, for men, commonly referred to as a ‘gut-feeling’ and for women as a ‘woman’s intuition’, which is actually the same exact thing. She’s not sure why this is split up into two ways, not that it matters. What matters is that this sense of hers has always been particularly strong, and right now, it’s telling her that something is wrong.

 

Despite all the logic and reasoning in the world saying that she shouldn’t stop, she does, her boots slowly thudding to the end of their pace as she stands three-quarters of the way across the bridge. Schlinge stands in the rain, looking at tower two. Her eyes, following the voice in her gut, wander up the exterior walls of the tower, staring at the broken, hammered on facade and shattered windows.

 

— Lightning flashes on the distant horizon, illuminating a long, meaty tube that presses in through an upper window of tower two at a downward angle that she follows, all the way to the man standing in the doorway, waving for her to hurry up.

 

She lifts her crossbow, aiming at his chest, and fires.

 

The man doesn’t stop waving.

 

The hairs on her neck stand on end as she hears a voice in the night around her, an excited, giddy moaning. She can practically feel its breath on her neck, waiting for her to do something.

 

Slowly, the woman reaches down to her belt quiver, pulling out another bolt, not daring to make any surprise movements.

 

It’s right behind her.

 

The game ends. It knows that she knows.

 

The man in the doorway stops moving. Five long fingers, pressed into his flesh, one for each limb plus his head, flop down to the ground. The long-dead corpse used as a doll flops down to the stones, as the long arm slithers back out up the stairwell of tower two, towards the window.

 

It was just pretending, playing a game, to lure her out into the open. Tower two was already compromised from the start.

 

She sets the bolt into the crossbow, quietly reloading the spring through use of the cranking mechanism. The crossbow shakes violently, as if the wind howling over the bridge were janking it around, its cool touch intermingling with the warmth of its gleeful breath.

 

Her hand shaking, the crossbow rattling, Schlinge exhales.

 

Her plan is to spin around. If she spins around very quickly, before it can react, she can… she can shoot it in the eye or the face or whatever it is and make a break for it, right?

 

The crossbow shakes.

 

She’s such an idiot. Why didn’t she just stay inside the tower?

 

Schlinge’s hand shakes.

 

Now!

 

…She doesn’t move, her body not having the willpower to follow the command that her mind gave. Slowly, lifting the crossbow, she angles it upward.

 

— She just has to pull the trigger. It’ll hurt less. Gods know what will happen to her if it grabs her, right? She saw what happened to the others, sort of. She doesn’t want to go out like that.

 

NOW!

 

Her body still doesn’t move, but her arm does, slowly angling it up just a little higher, moving her elbow just an inch higher, so that the bolt is closer to her own head.

 

The rain stops falling on her. It continues falling literally everywhere else. One could only assume that this means that something is hanging over her, blocking it.

 

Her finger twitches on the trigger, her legs shaking.

 

“NOW!” screams the woman, pulling the trigger.

 

---

 

 

“GUARDS!” screams the king, smashing his fists against the table. His eyes, wide, red, and bloodshot like a ruby moon in the sky, stare with terrifying intensity at the court artist. “STOP THIS MAN!” he screams, froth building at the corners of his mouth as he points at the artist. The man has moved the little game-piece over the large map again, signifying the movements of the Demon-King.

 

Why would he do this? He’s making the Demon-King move.

 

“My lord…” says his adviser. “Please. You need to rest,” says the man in concern. King Mercator’s eyes, wide and still not blinking, look around the room that is full of so many people. Most of them have faces, but a lot of them don’t.

 

A shadow hangs over his shoulder, whispering and pointing at the artist too. He’s making the Demon-King move by touching that damn piece on the map. He’s the problem. The shadow whispers to him and tells him this. It makes sense. A traitor. A traitor in his own court — that’s how the Demon-King has managed to come so far. Of course. He should have seen it sooner.

 

But the fool artist made the mistake of moving the game-piece to the Palisade. The Demon-King is going to be stuck there. The paladin orders are ready for him. If there’s anyone in the world who can stop him, it’s them.

 

“Where are the Vildt?!” he screams, turning to look at his adviser for affairs of war.

 

The man stares, lifting a hand and then slowly lowering it. “My… my lord. Because we reduced their numbers by your order, the Vildt were unable to repel the Demon-King’s counter-invasion forces upon landing.” He shakes his head. “They’re gone. We’re alone.”

 

King Mercator screams, grabbing a knife from the table and his adviser with the other hand.

 

ANOTHER TRAITOR.

 

“YOU DARE MOCK ME IN MY OWN COURT?!” screams the king, his eyes bulging. The shadows whisper in his ears. Look at the man’s eyes. Look at the glint in them. He’s trying to make him look back; he’s trying to insert the sparks of rebellion. Everyone at the table… the artist, the adviser… they’re all working for him, they’re all agents of the Demon-King. “GUARDS!” screams King Mercator, spittle flying everywhere. The whispering intensifies. They’re mocking him. They’re all against him. They’re trying to help the Demon-King. They’re —

 

 

His eyes grow heavy and his head droops.

 

The shadows dance all around him, whispering into his ears, trying to fill his mind with dire warnings and promises.

 

But the magic is too strong, and he falls to sleep, being caught before he falls to the floors.

 

---

 

 

She screams, falling forward. The bolt flies off at an angle, whistling as it vanishes into the night as explosions ring out all around behind her. Scrambling, she runs, looking over her shoulder just in time to see a long, gangly silhouette vanish into the mist. Magical explosions strike against it as spells are blasted out from her tower. She moves, her heart racing as she makes it across the bridge, looking back as an appendage, long and tendril-like, wraps itself around the entire middle of tower one, as if the long arm had more joints inside of its middle. The stones crack.

 

The people inside, her group, whom she had separated from before, had distracted the creature, attacking it with their arrows and magic.

 

— The tower cracks as a whole as the creature squeezes, stone pressing inward, parts of the structure failing, falling over and off, creating large gaps where bricks and woodwork are missing. Chunks of ancient stone, carved generations ago, fall down into the dark ravine below.

 

She can’t see the creature.

 

It’s off too far in the distance, reaching over with impossibly long arms, standing on impossibly long legs that must reach all the way down to the bottom of the canyon. With those long, gangly arms of its, it reaches into the broken tower, grabbing the people who no longer have any cover.

 

Schlinge slams the door to tower two behind herself, not watching. She jumps over the corpse of the waving man, doing her best not to look at his skinned, hollowed out body that had been used like a plaything, as she runs through the rooms towards the exit.

 

The Demon-King.

 

They’re supposed to be stopping him, but it sure doesn’t feel like that’s what they’re doing.

 

Towers one and two have fallen. She has to get to seven, that’s where everyone is going to be, everyone who's made it. She has to warn tower three about what’s coming.

 

— She stops, entering the main hall at the base of tower two, between both gate houses.

 

Red flaps hang everywhere, blood dripping down the odd things that are draped over the walls, over the banisters, and on the backs of chairs.

 

Lifting a hand, she grabs a lantern on the nearby wall and lowers it down to look at the flat, draped thing there.

 

A pair of hollow eyes, lips, and a nose look back her way. They belong to Abrishka.

 

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It’s skin.

 

A human’s skinned face, still attached to the rest of their exterior, hangs there like a doll’s undressed clothes.

 

She covers her mouth, dropping the lantern as she runs as fast as she can towards the next gate.

 

Rubble blocks the doorway, and she comes to a stop, looking around for a way forward. The window. She clambers over to it, looking outside and across to tower three.

 

— A horn blows in the distance.

 

She listens, recognizing the tone. It’s the sound of the gathering horn, signaling for everyone to regroup. It’s coming from tower seven, all the way in the back. Schlinge wipes her eyes on her elbow, feeling herself crying. People are still alive. They’re still there.

 

The sky lights up, glowing as it would during a spring festival, as barrages of holy spells shoot through the air from the back tower. Hundreds of them, colliding and exploding in the night as they either hit the creature or one another in flight.

 

A scream fills the air, and she takes it as a sign that this is her chance. Jumping out of the window, she lands on the bridge below and runs as fast as she can towards the ajar door, her soaked hair clinging to her neck.

 

---

 

 

He looks down at the king. “Bring his majesty to his chambers. Call the royal physician to attend to him,” he orders. “Make sure he sleeps through the night,” orders the adviser, being next in line as he sighs and rubs the bridge of his nose.

 

It must have been too much stress for his majesty. The man hasn’t slept a wink, which after this many days would destroy anyone.

 

With his own tired eyes, he looks back at the board.

 

The Demon-King hasn’t moved yet; his carriage is still parked at the broken bridge leading into the Palisade.

 

Maybe it really has worked. Maybe the paladin orders really are holding him off.

 

Gods bless them.

 

He can only hope that the crusade and all of the stragglers still on their way, pressed into the belly of the Demon-King’s castle, can defuse the menace before it finds a way to go on.

 

All they can hope to do in the meantime is buy more time.

 

His eyes wander up the road, looking at what would come next, assuming the Demon-King proceeds from where he is.

 

“Send a messenger out,” he orders, pointing at the spot on the road ahead marked with a skull.

 

“…Sir,” replies the guardsman, looking at the map. “That’s a dungeon. Nobody lives there.”

 

Adviser Blumen shakes his head, tapping against the map as he looks at the guardsman. “Send it to the dungeon,” he orders.

 

“S… sir?”

 

The man looks back at the overview of the world. All of humanity is interested in stopping the Demon-King and the reign of monsters.

 

But he isn’t the only thing with dominion over the creatures of tooth and claw. Surely the dungeons of the world, uncommunicative as they are, have a few varying opinions on the matter themselves.

 

They can’t afford to leave any stones unturned.

 

“Jot this down,” he orders, coming up with a plan as he looks at the skull on the map, one of the forty-nine dungeons spread across the world.

 

---

 

 

“GET OUT OF HERE!” screams the old man at her, cowering in the corner. “GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!” he howls, swiping through the air with his knife. She backs off, holding her hands in the air.

 

Schlinge looks around herself. Tower three is empty. There isn’t any blood. There aren’t any broken windows or walls. It’s just empty. It’s like everyone just got up and left, except for this man here, all by himself.

 

“We need to get to tower seven!” she says.

 

The man looks at her, holding the knife out with wide eyes and a shaking hand. He starts laughing and laughing, looking at her with a demented, wild look in his eyes all the while.

 

A second later, he draws the knife across his own throat and falls down, blood streaming out of his neck as he gurgles and chokes, gasping for air, laughing all the while he looks at her, the insignia of his order, a rod and ring, vanishing in the pool of red.

 

Schlinge runs.

 

She reaches the bridge to tower four and waits for her chance.

 

The night is quiet.

 

The elf leans against the gate-house, doing her best to keep down the nausea in her gut as she listens carefully to the noises of the outside world.

 

It’s just… quiet.

 

The storm howls on like always, but there aren’t any horns, there isn’t a blasting of spells, or the screams of terrified people. It’s just entirely silent. The woman stares for a while, watching and listening.

 

The rain sounds like it should. It doesn’t sound like there’s anything here, stopping it from landing nearby.

 

Taking a deep breath, she checks her crossbow and then runs across the bridge, as the only thing that makes noise in he night, crossing over to tower four, which is burning with wild-fires that aren’t quenched by the rain. Tower four’s order is the order of the flask, they’re alchemists, brewers, and all manner of spell-weavers. Their home is full of incredibly volatile reagents, which seem to have all caught fire.

 

Schlinge makes it across, despite her bad feeling about the matter, and quietly closes the door behind herself, looking around the area.

 

Smoke drifts through the tower, which is also devoid of bodies, but for some reason, there are boots everywhere.

 

The elf’s eyes wander as she looks down at the rows and rows of neatly arranged, sorted boots. Small boots and big boots, metal boots and leather boots. All sorts of shoes and slippers are lined up here by the hundreds. They’re stacked neatly onto tables and on chairs. They’re patterned across the room in zig-zag lines. There are pairs of boots neatly placed on the chandeliers above.

 

She gulps, walking across the room past barrels of explosive material that haven’t caught fire yet.

 

Her eyes stare at them for a moment as the idea comes to her. The woman grabs some of her crossbow-bolts, dipping their heads into the alchemical solutions. A little extra firepower can’t hurt, right?

 

Carefully, she stows them away, sorting them apart from one another, as combining the liquids will result in an explosion, and then makes her way to the exit, before looking around and running across as before to tower five.

 

— The horn sounds again, from up atop tower seven as she’s halfway across and she quickly vanishes into the tower, her heart racing.

 

Everybody must have already evacuated and regrouped at tower seven. She’s probably the last one trying to get across.

 

The elf steps inside, leaning back against a wall, to catch her breath, the warm vapors of which rise up in the air, drifting past idols and altars of tower five, belonging to the order of the salve, priests and priestess, who devote their lives to praying, healing and mending wounds.

 

Her eyes follow her own breath, rising up to the stained glass windows that fill the room’s upper area, past the full-moon which is behind a central image of religious iconography.

 

The moon vanishes for a moment as something draws over it and then rises back up again.

 

Her body shakes with strong, but slow, janky shakes as the terror comes in a new form, with the elf starting to cry again, her chest lurching, and her throat aching as warm urine runs down her leg and down into her boot, pooling beneath her foot and dripping down to the stones as she stares at the window and the moon behind it, which is actually an eye. It stares back at her through the glass.

 

The span of a large, gangly smile with many sharp, wildly spaced conical teeth is visible only in part through the many, many windows that it spans. Dozens of small visions of its face come together into a collage.

 

Its eye is purely white and unnaturally round. It is surrounded on all sides by misshapen, uneven black squiggles, as if it were a poor drawing of a face. Streaks of black hair, as long as the night itself, drape down around its angles, wet and greasy. The red splotches covering its faces, born of the stained glass, look like endless streaks of blood.

 

It’s like a child looking down into a dollhouse.

 

— Playing.

 

It moves away, leaving her standing there against the wall, the bolts in her quiver rattling as the wooden poles strike against one another.

 

---

 

 

 

Swain holds back a laugh, the grunt scratching in the back of his throat as he looks at the window that has appeared.

 

“OH NO!” yells a voice to the side. He turns his head, looking at Kirsch, the ghost. She looks at him. “I just remembered that I have to tell my mom that I need new bedsheets!” she says, looking down at herself, at the blood-soaked cloth wrapped around her body. She looks at him. “…She’s gonna yell at me…” says the ghost, sadly.

 

The Demon-King looks at her. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. The Demon-King looks to the side, grabbing a terrified ghost out of the air. “Bedsheets,” he orders, his voice growling and shaking the rocks, his dozens of eyes bulging. The ghost flies off in terror, coming back a moment later with a set of fresh, white linens, the source of which is not wise to be questioned within the confines of the Demon-King’s castle.

 

He hands it to the ghost. “Just replace them with these and hide your old ones,” he says.

 

She tilts her head, looking at her doll and then at him as she takes the sheets. “…Isn’t that lying, though?” she asks.

 

Swain leans back on his throne. “Sometimes, lying is the best thing you can do,” explains the Demon-King.

 

“But isn’t lying wrong?” asks Kirsch.

 

Swain looks at her with his dozens of eyes. “Your mom is going to be mad if she finds out, right?” he asks. The ghost nods. “So by not telling her, she won’t get mad. It’s the best thing, isn’t it?” asks the Demon-King. “Don’t you want her to not be mad?”

 

Kirsch thinks for a moment and then nods. “That makes sense!” she says, clutching the bedsheets to herself and immediately staining them with the blood streaming through her own sheet. “Thank you!” says the ghost.

 

Swain nods, waving her away with a swipe of his fingers as he leans back on his throne.

 

 

Truly, the immorality of the Demon-King knows no bounds.

 

---

 

 

She doesn’t know how she did it, but she made it. Ignoring all senses of shame, Schlinge keeps on walking as she reaches the gate to the bridge leading to the last tower.

 

She’s almost there. Just a little further.

 

— A horn blows atop tower seven.

 

The barrage of spells comes again, dozens of them flying out of the tower and into the night behind her, where she assumes the creature to be.

 

This is it.

 

Schlinge gulps, breathing in heavily as fast as she can, her mind and heart rushing with energy. She screams, running across the bridge and towards the door to tower seven, which is closed.

 

She reaches it, hammering against it to get it to open, which it does.

 

The elf steps inside, her chest heaving as she looks around herself.

 

She made it.

 

She made it to tower seven.

 

This is the only place that’s safe. She’s just an initiate, so she can’t leave the sanctuary that is the Palisade. Her level is too low, so she wouldn’t survive within the territory of the Demon-King. The fortress's protective warding keeps her safe from the Demon-King’s magic.

 

She listens to the cracking of spells in the night coming from upstairs and runs to the staircase, heading upwards towards the top of the tower. Tower seven belongs to the order of command and is home to the grand-oathkeeper, the leader of the Palisade, and the father of all orders of paladins.

 

They’re staging the defense here. The woman runs up the stairs, patting her crossbow that she managed to lug all the way with her. She can make herself useful here. She wouldn’t mind pelting out a few arrows into the darkness now that she’s not alone anymore.

 

Schlinge runs past many open doors and many people standing by windows, hurling spells out into the night.

 

She reaches the top, hoping to find some officer there to report to, looking at the insignia on the back of a rod and ring.

 

Commander Trinitatio himself, the leader of tower seven and of the orders, the commander.

 

The spellcasting stops.

 

— The commander’s bare feet leave the ground, as the fingers, pressed through his torso, lift him up into the air, together with many other limp bodies that are pulled out through windows and doors. None of them have shoes on.

 

She falls down, back onto her bottom, and crawls back against the wall, kicking an old horn to the side inadvertently as she lifts her gaze, looking up towards the sky, following a long, long, slender thing that rises up for as far as she can see, vanishing into the mist.

 

Only a large, toothy, gapped smile is visible, together with two perfectly round, white eyes that glow like a pair of moons in the night.

 

It was just playing with her.

 

Everyone is dead.

 

Everyone has been dead this entire time.

 

Crying, she holds her crossbow aimed up at the giant in the sky — larger than any of the towers, larger than all of the towers put together.

 

The woman grabs her explosive bolts, firing them off and screaming between each shot. The bolts don’t even come close to reaching its face. Even with the power of a crossbow, they just fly somewhat up and then are taken away by the wind, striking uselessly against the landscape below or just against its torso, which doesn’t bother the creature at all.

 

— She grabs her last bolt with a shaking hand, loads it into the crossbow, and cranks it back up.

 

A shadow moves over her head as an arm reaches across the darkness. It’s long, so impossibly long, that it reaches all the way through the night, kilometers back to tower one, past tower one, where it grabs something and lifts it into the air.

 

Schlinge aims the crossbow at her own head a second time this night.

 

Joints crack as the giant arm moves and then stops before the tower, holding a carriage in its open palm kilometers up in the air. Its other hand carefully plucks a handle on the side of the wagon, unfolding a stage that opens up like a walkway across the abyss. A heat, a steam escapes from the open carriage like the hot breath of an open mouth.

 

Terrified, Schlinge looks at the creature.

 

In one hand, it holds the carriage for her to enter.

 

In the other, it holds aloft with its fingers dresses and clothes made of skin and meat for her to wear as they play some more.

 

She’s just a plaything for it. A toy. A puppet. She has been this whole time. It has been playing with her, like an excited child moving a doll through a little house. Now, the game has come to an end, and it’s time to play something new.

 

It smiles.

 

Schlinge pulls the trigger.

 

There’s a loud snap, the thing in her hand jolting. Crying, heaving, she looks out of the side of her eyes at the broken crossbow. The string has given way, snapping apart, rendering the weapon useless.

 

The last bolt clambers uselessly to the stones, rolling against the wall.

 

The shaking elf cries as the choice is made for her.

 

---

 

 

His heart thumps with dread as the artist purses his lips, looking at him as he grabs the game-piece on the map of a carriage and moves it onward, just a little further past the canyon.

 

 

---

 

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