A Perverted Path to Victory

Sara

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The party was as snotty an affair as she’d feared. The novelty of a wooden hall stuffed with enchantments thick enough to choke on could only do so much to distract Sara from the insufferable guests she was forced to rub elbows with.

There were about twenty of herself meandering around the grand hall, joining and exiting conversations at her leisure. She was outside and inside, speaking to servants and generals, commoners and Warriors. The mid-morning light was hidden behind grey clouds dropping a light dusting of snow, flakes creating clouds of simmering steam where they landed on the wyverns that communed in the building’s central courtyard.

The structure itself was as primitively advanced as the cabin she’d been provided. The steep roof was held up by wooden beams ancient enough to have been worn smooth by untold centuries of passing hands, the space dimly lit by crudely enchanted fist-sized gemstones. The floorboards creaked under every visitor’s feet, adding an irritating chorus that nearly drowned out the venue’s sole entertainment: that of an elf plucking at a harp-like instrument, his music carrying unnaturally far. The way his hands flew across the thing looked pretty impressive, but it was still only one instrument. Sara was tired of hearing it five minutes after she’d arrived.

Though Sara and Evie were focusing their politicking upon more mortal Imperials, there were more than a few elves present. Their willowy, almost sickly-thin limbs were easy to pick apart from the crowd, made more distinct by the eerie grace with which they drifted from place to place, a distant look in their eye as they mingled with the common folk. Their apathy was palpable to her Blessings. They’d seen thousands of humans be born, grow, and die, and they found nothing remarkable about this latest crop of mayflies.

They were also unnerving. She had to admit that to herself. When she’d gained her Levels, Sara had developed an unnatural surety to her steps, a confidence in every movement that would have been impossible back on Earth. The way she carried herself, the precision with which she moved every limb, was eerie in its perfection. The elves, however, were as far beyond her as she was her old self. Further, even. She was just keen enough in her perception to notice the way their steps fell with deviations measured in millimeters, pressing down on the stone floor with the subtle pressure of the finest industrial machinery. Though they floated through the room at a speed like any other, Sara’s Blessings would occasionally catch their eyes darting from left to right in microseconds, squinting to take some small detail in for an imperceptible fraction of a second. Sometimes they would move to brush a bit of dust from their clothes at a speed that sent a gust of wind stirring the clothes of everyone around them, and they did so without thinking anything of the display.

None of the elves present at the gathering were Warriors. They weren’t even particularly important amongst their fragmented subdivision of society; elves with something better to do wouldn’t have bothered attending a mortal gathering. Yet they were freaks of nature. After thousands of years spent gaining Levels, they exuded such power that Sara knew any of them could tear her head off before she so much as blinked.

“What’s the big fuckin’ deal with being one of you, anyway?” Sara slurred, shoving forward a mostly-empty bottle of wine. “So what if an elf’s so much of a… so much of a…” She paused to burp, then wiped her mouth with the bottom of her shirt, nearly showing her tits to half the party in the process. “So much of a coward that they didn’t die in a couple thousand years? Why’s that mean you getta be in charge?”

The elven artisan Sinnasae, a pottery craftswoman by trade for the last three millennia, smiled with unabashed delight.

“After so many other Divine Children proved disappointments, it is truly wondrous to know that a Child of Aphrodite is everything I expected her to be. My thanks and my congratulations, Sara Brown.”

Beneath the facade of drunkenness, Sara’s brain whirled into gear. She’d offered that offensive challenge in hopes of learning what an angry elf was like, only to end up slapped across the face by the woman name-dropping Aphrodite. The Greek goddess. As a substitute name for the goddess Amarat, when the mortals of the Empire didn’t even accept the Sporaton notion of singular named divinities in the first place. There were so many wild implications in the brief statement that even her Blessings struggled to find what she wanted to say.

“How the hell you know ‘bout Aphroditty?” Was what she went for in the end, alongside a suspicious squint and, to complete it, a swig from the illusory wine bottle in her hand.

Sinnasae laughed, an otherworldly tinkling tune not unlike the sound of a chandelier swaying in the breeze.

“Is that how it is pronounced? It has been quite a while since I spoke to the one from your world who named her, Child. Even my kind can grow forgetful when the tally of years grows too troublesome.”

Okay, it was just some Champion that used the name Aphrodite for Amarat back in the day. Religious disaster that would make Dad shit a brick averted, Sara thought with relief. Does that mean the elves believe in singular gods, though? That could be an angle to drive a wedge between worship of the elves and the basic religious beliefs of the Empire’s commoners.

Despite Sara’s best efforts to the contrary, Evie had been slowly turning her into a genuine statesman, one that had the ability to delve beyond what her Blessings handed her on a silver platter. Since Sara’s goal— one of her many goals, anyway— was to undermine lopsided power structures across the Empire, sniffing out a way to pit the ‘mortals’ of the land against their elven masters was something she was very interested in. The fact that she was willing to do so was a hell of a thing. Sara simply wouldn’t have been thinking that way before Evie. She’d been too absolutist in her worldview to ever contemplate playing one distasteful element against another; she’d have wanted to tear down both societal pillars together, no compromise, no nuance. The fact that she now had the patience to work on one problem at a time was remarkable in and of itself.

While that self went to work on Sinnasae by playing the role of a drunken jester, another of Sara’s selves was standing in the snow, careful to maintain consistent illusory footprints as she paced before one of the party’s few wyvern guests. A green-scaled they/them (she was starting to suspect funky gender identities were more common amongst wyverns) was leaning against the gathering hall’s interior walls, fifty paces of bulky lizard causing the ancient wood to creak ominously under the strain.

“But ya gotta care about the war, right?” Sara asked, cupping a mug of nonexistent alcohol in both hands like it was warm cocoa. “Sure you’ve been around for a long damn time, got smart enough to be bored by wars and stuff, but people’re still dying, right?”

She was slurring her words here, too, but not nearly as much as she was with Sinnasae. After it had become clear how cautious her presence made the party guests, she’d been steadily soothing their nerves by presenting herself as increasingly drunken through the hours. She wasn’t, of course. Evie was worried enough about poison that Sara wasn’t allowed to eat or drink a single thing, much less get sloppy drunk. But her reputation was that of a woman who would undoubtedly get carelessly drunk at a party, and that meant people were more likely to approach her. Chosen, Champion, Divine Child, whatever they wanted to call her, they all knew that it was a lot easier to please a happy drunk than it was a stone-cold sober Sara. Very few of them had considered just how easy it might be for her to fake the affliction, and that meant precious few had noticed her drunkenness varying from conversation to conversation.

“Oh, I mourn their deaths,” the green wyvern sighed, their steaming breath melting a wide patch of snow beneath their nostrils. “But it is the sad way of the world. That the dead hadn’t more time to prove themselves worthy of greater glory is a tragedy, but I have faith that the gods will be fair judges to their souls.”

Sara’s real self, the one hidden behind more illusions and facades than she wanted to count, bit back a disgusted snarl. The illusory self facing the wyvern only nodded sagely.

“I bet the gods’ll know what they’re worth then and there, yeah.” She smacked her lips thoughtfully. “But I still think it’s not fair that they didn’t get as long as they could to get a good thing going. Y’know, have a full life to do all the impressive stuff they could.”

“That is true,” the wyvern intoned sadly. Sara still hadn’t been told their name, even after directly asking earlier in the conversation. “But the gods know the weight of one’s soul, not just their deeds.”

“Probably a lot easier to get into a better heaven by actually doing stuff than just having good ideas in your head,” Sara countered.

“The war is nothing less than a tragedy, on this we can both agree.” The wyvern shifted their wings, rubbing against the wall in a way that caused great clods of snow to fall onto their scales. It began to hiss and steam as if dropped onto a stove. “But if it is my presence in battle you seek, even one so prodigious as yourself will find no success. I’ve sent too many to the embrace of divinity already. I’ve no interest in doing so again.”

Sincere, Sara’s Blessings determined. Which was annoying as shit, considering she didn’t really have any way to fairly argue with what they’d said. Not wanting to kill people was about as infallible an argument against joining the war as could be, and she couldn’t stomach the thought of using her Blessings to twist the big bastard’s opinions around. She wasn’t sure how much murkier her morality had gotten over the last few years of being a Champion, but that, at least, was a line she wasn’t going to cross.

That didn’t mean she was going to leave the lizard alone, though.

“What were the old wars like, then?” She asked. “What became the Kingdom of Tulian probably didn’t leave the Empire without a fight, right? You know anything about that?” Then, seeing the disappointed glint forming in their eyes, she quickly added, “Wyverns’re just so damn cool. Used to have a big book about ‘em when I was a kid, but I thought they didn’t exist. To be honest with ya, the little girl inside my head’s been freaking out the whole time I talk to any one of ya.”

She briefly worried that reverting to a drunken provincial accent was laying it on too thick for the green wyvern’s tastes, but was quickly assured by the crinkling of their eyelids in bemusement. Just as her Blessings had suspected, the ancient creature had a real soft spot for kids— and it wasn’t hard to act in a way that made them think of someone Sara’s age as a kid.

“Perhaps I could tell a few stories from the time,” they mused, serpentine tongue flicking across their jaws. “I often worry that retelling the more glorious of my tales might encourage the youth to think too well of war, but I can see your distaste for the practice is already fully formed. Good of you.” They adjusted themselves once more, remarkably similar in demeanor to an old grandparent settling into a rocking chair to tell stories of The War, then drew in a deep breath. “The war began, as so many do, with those that could not hear the ring of compromise over their furious shouting. But I was a younger wyvern then, and I knew little of the cause. Only the glory its battles might shed upon myself and my crew.”

While that Sara began receiving the less-than-thrilling braggart’s version of minor aerial skirmishes that preceded a petty upper-caste slapfight over colonial taxation, another Sara was guiding Evie’s hand to her hip, falling into the elegant steps of a waltz that another old elf had asked if she knew.

Evie, more dextrous than her by far, easily kept up with the steps that Sara herself only knew from movies she conjured up in her mind’s eye. In Sara’s defense, Evie’s job was made a great deal easier by virtue of the fact she was standing stone still a few meters away, cloaked in a box of spellcast invisibility as she amused herself with twirling one of the knives the event’s guards had failed to find on her. Done-up in a loose dress of fine make, yet another piece Ketch had stolen from the wealthy of Ta-Pet, she’d instructed the tailors to leave its ribbons scandalously loose on her frame, giving the garment a flowing grace that barely kept her decent by Imperial standards. The tattoo of her collar shone prominently under the crystal light, and Sara’s Blessings had caught more than one hushed conversation about that.

It seemed there was a theory spreading through Imperial high society. They believed that Sara’s retroactive alteration of the Divine Slave Collars was what had shattered the world’s prophecies to pieces, an act that was particularly offensive to the ancient elves, some of whom had been collecting tattered threads of fate for their entire lives. So far as the most irritated of them were concerned, Sara’s audacious demand of Amarat had spat on those precious threads, torn them in half, then tossed them in a bonfire. Nevermind the fact that the actual disruption of the prophecies had occurred months after she’d completed her Divine quest, or that the actual day it happened had coincided with a dozen different disasters across the known world. To those that had decided to blame her, that didn’t matter in the slightest. They supposed that, if not in quite so vulgar terms, that if Sara had fucked with the timestream so hard that it blew up a gazillion years of prophecies, it only made sense that the consequences of her bullshit had shown up at a bizarre and seemingly unrelated time. They had their scapegoat selected, and they were ready to push all the blame on her.

Which was why Evie’s collar tattoo was proving so controversial. To those elven conspiracy theorists, Sara was flaunting her deliberate meddling of a fate grander than she could ever hope to comprehend. They didn’t know that Evie had chosen to get the tattoo herself, that the design hadn’t even been picked out by either of them, and the elves had already developed enough of a persecution fetish that learning either of those facts wouldn’t change their opinion. So far as they were concerned, Sara had decided to obliterate the world’s knowledge of the future as part of some deliberate ploy, and now they were only concerned with figuring out what her real goal was.

Also, as her and Evie’s illusory dance came to its end, Sara was pretty sure she’d found a Tenth God cultist amongst the elves. No wooden mask, but they had a special kind of hate in their eyes that Sara had gotten pretty good at recognizing. A mixture of deep personal enmity and religious fervor that, while not wholly unique to the cultists, was pretty damn unlikely to have come from anywhere else. Finishing her waltz with a dramatic bow that gave just enough time for Evie to slip into and assume the position of her illusory version, Sara straightened with a flourish, smiling at the elf who’d asked her if she knew how to waltz.

“Not really, but I’ve seen a lot of movies where they do it. Hope it lived up to your expectations.”

“A beautiful-”

“Yeah, cool, thanks.” Sara turned to the angry-looking one. “So you gonna try to kill me now or after the party?”

Those near enough to hear the question froze. Sara’s Blessings narrowed in on the elf woman, monitoring the twitches of their every individual muscle fiber.

Tense, angry, and frustrated. Not surprised, though.

“There is no need for violence at this gathering,” the elf smiled.

“Pretty sure there’s never really been a need for violence between my people and yours, but it keeps happening anyway, so…” Sara spread her fingers, waiting for the elf to make her move.

“On that we must disagree, I am afraid. There is—”

“Oh, you’re afraid, alright.”

The elf’s lips turned down. “Must you always be so juvenile?”

“I can be whatever you want, baby.” With a twist of her physical body’s palm resting on her dagger, Sara altered the appearance of the self standing before the cultist elf. Fat globs of rouge powder spattered her cheeks, eyelashes fluttering out to lengths nearly as comical as the puffiness of her lips, which she pressed together in a kissing gesture, drops of saliva flung loose with every wet smack of newly whorish lips. “Whatever you want, girly, and for only a few coin, I can even do whatever makes you feel all warm and fuzzy.”

“Disgusting.” The elf stepped forward from the now-silenced crowd. “Control yourself, woman. We are both Children of the Divine, and your conduct is unbecoming of us all.”

Sara’s exaggerated features shlurped back into her face, revealing the snarl that they’d been hiding.

“I don’t give a flying fuck about making you look good.”

“Liafina? What is going on?” The waltzy elf looked at their companion, confused.

“All will be clear in due-”

“She’s one of those cultist fucks,” Sara explained. “The tenth pantheon ones, remember? Pretty sure my flyers have to have reached even your ivory towers by now. She’s part of the cult that keeps pissing me off by trying to get in my way every now and then.”

“We have done more than try, that I assure you.”

“Have you? If so, you’re doing a shit job of it, because I’m pretty sure I haven’t noticed. Unless you’re talking about all of your people I’ve killed, I guess.”

Evie was poised for violence. She may not have looked it to most, with her arms wrapped in fancy silks and no weapon in her hand, but that was misleading in the extreme. They were both past the point of strength that mere silk could restrain them, and the arm Evie had resting across her chest was concealing a dagger between her breasts. If the fighting got started, the first blink would see nothing more than shredded clothes floating in the spot Evie had occupied the instant before. Sara, whose real body had been resting against the cool wall of an empty cellar some twenty meters below the party, had already started making her way up top, blacksteel dagger gripped in one hand.

She was under no illusion that she could win the fight, however. The cultist mages she’d faced in the war had been given their power unnaturally, rendering them useless against her Champion’s Blessings. The ones she’d faced since then had been human, no more a threat than any Warrior or Knight of similar age. This elf was different. She didn’t need any divine intervention to tear Sara apart. If violence started, Sara was hedging her bets entirely on nearby elves intervening on her behalf.

“We have our ways to oppose you from the shadows,” the elf assured Sara.

Half-truth, her Blessings informed her. She fully believes it, but doesn’t have any proof herself. She’s just taking it on faith.

“Why?” Sara asked.

The elf’s ears twitched, a shadow of confusion ghosting across their features.

“Why what?”

“Why are you ‘opposing me from the shadows’ and all that dramatic crap?”

The party was slowing. Not stopping, unbelievably. Just slowing. A ring of spectators was building itself around the confrontation, mortal and elf alike watching with varying intensities of interest and anxiety. The elves had the least of both. Many hadn’t bothered to set aside their drinks or food. Others had chosen to chase their meals down with the last of their alcohol, like sports fans getting ready for the final minutes of the match. General Borek, Sara’s Blessings informed her, was rushing over, but he was on the opposite side of the gathering and had only just received word of what was unfolding. Not wanting to cause a scene by sprinting across the party, it would take him precious seconds to arrive.

“It is my duty to oppose you, of course.”

“Not asking why you’re opposing me, lady,” Sara scoffed. “I’m wondering why your little cult is so pissy at me. Haven’t you noticed how little of a shit I give about you?”

The elf took a single step forward, causing many to flinch. Evie stepped in front of Sara’s illusion as if to protect her, but that was just a ruse. It drew the elf’s attention elsewhere, getting their back toward the spot Sara’s real body would emerge from.

“We are fated opponents,” the elf loftily declared, chin raised high. “Our means and our goals diametrically opposed, the futures we seek incompatible. You have already ruined too much of the world, Sara Brown. We will not let you ruin the rest.”

She stuck out her bottom lip poutily. “But what if I reeeaaallly want to?”

A catfolk in the back of the crowd failed to cover their mouth before sputtering out an incredulous laugh. Several others chuckled as a result, despite the tension of the moment. The cultist scowled.

“Once again, an exceptionally juvenile plea. You fit the moniker of Divine Child better than most, Sara Brown.”

“It’s not childish,” Sara shot back. “It’s fucking reality. I don’t give a shit about y’all. I haven’t chased you down, haven’t hunted you, haven’t done any purges or included the ban of your religious practices— whatever the hell they are— in any of my trade deals. I’m done with you. I don’t care about you. Never did. Are you a big enough deal to tell someone important in your cult that? That I don’t give a shit what they do, so long as they aren’t causing problems for me? Unless Amarat gets on my back real hard about it, I’m not gonna do a damn thing to any of you that I don’t have to.”

The elf— what had that other one said her name was? Liafina?— took a moment to consider this, two fingers coming up to pinch their chin contemplatively. Sara briefly considered calling the bitch a wannabe-Steve Jobs, but decided even the longest-lived elves in the audience probably wouldn’t get that reference.

Faking it, Sara’s Blessings determined. Wants to look like she cares about compromise for political reasons, but isn’t actually interested in negotiating.

Fortunately, the elf took so long with her elaborate theater that General Borek arrived. Mottled fur slicked back and spit-shined to a blinding gleam, he joined the conversation with all the subtlety of a charging bull.

“Is there a problem here?” He asked, coming to a stop directly between Sara and the cultist. “I wouldn’t want any of my guests to grow irritated with one another.”

“Ask her,” Sara said. “I was just telling her how much I didn’t care what she did, and now she’s been thinking about it for a good long while. Don’t know what she’s decided yet.”

Borek looked right, to the elf. “And the cause of this disagreement is…?”

“A matter of religion.”

“She’s a cultist,” Sara added.

General Borek clenched his jaw. It was good he hadn’t come to the party armed; he looked ready to swallow a pistol barrel.

“I see the problem,” he cautiously ventured. “Honored Elven— Liafina, if I am not mistaken?— though I know I am overstepping my bounds by quite a degree, may we discuss this matter… elsewhere?”

The piercing glare that turned to General Borek made even the veteran Warrior wilt. Liafina said nothing. She left Borek to suffer in the intensity of her gaze.

“Ah, Liafina!” A voice called. “How fascinating to learn that the rumors are true. Are you able to speak on behalf of your fellow worshipper’s beliefs?”

The Adjutant swept into the conversation with a toothy smile bright enough to rival Sara’s own, every inch of his bearing exuding a calm, friendly attitude. He bowed to Liafina briefly, then put his hand on Borek’s back as he straightened, giving the man a subtle tug that told him to exit the conversation. The General did so only reluctantly, putting himself amongst the crowd of spectators.

“I speak for myself alone on this night,” Liafina replied, eyeing the Adjutant up. “Ours is a finer, kinder Pantheon. We have no need of arguments and petty leadership. Not when the Divine comes to personally guide each and every one of the truly worthy.”

“Excellent!” The Adjutant clapped twice, summoning a scroll-wielding scribe from seemingly nowhere. “The Empire, of course, has never banned the worship of the true Pantheons, but we have never known about your kind. It is my most sincere desire to learn all that I can— for the Empire to lack places of worship for an entire Pantheon is nigh unforgivable. I humbly beg for but a few hours of your time, so that I may begin preparing the proper resources for your fellow followers to honor the Divine.”

He really doesn’t want shit to hit the fan, huh? Sara thought, crossing her arms. I guess an all-out brawl in the ancient land of elven neutrality would be a pretty bad PR disaster.

You didn’t need Amarat’s Blessings to see that the Adjutant was more interested in defusing the hissing time bomb than he was learning about the cultist’s religious beliefs. Liafina certainly saw through it. But, though his top priority may have been avoiding a slaughter, the Adjutant was also clearly interested in learning about the Tenth God and the cultists. He wasn’t lying when he said the Empire didn’t ban worship of any god; they were firm believers that allowing anyone to plead for the favor of divinity was more likely to help the Empire than harm it. With the cultists clearly having integrated themselves into the upper echelons of Imperial society, appealing to their sensibilities was common sense.

As if listening to a distant voice, Liafina’s nose wrinkled, elven ears twitching on her cocked head.

A bluff, Sara decided. Trying to up her street cred by implying she’s important enough to get direct divine intervention on the spot.

“I suppose that would be a better use of my time than bickering with an infant,” Liafina said. “Though I will warn you that there is precious little I am willing to reveal. We have worshipped in secret for longer than any can fathom. Such ancient habits cannot be easily undone.”

“I need not know your secrets, Honored Elven. Only what you require of me.” The Adjutant bowed gratefully, then snapped his fingers, causing another scribe to emerge from the audience. “Have a room prepared. Enchantments for privacy and defense of course, and stock it with refreshments appropriate for one of Honored Liafina’s status.” The Adjutant turned to Sara, smiling apologetically. “I do hope my company will not be missed, Chosen, but duty calls. I know you are familiar with such difficulties.”

Powerplay in Liafina’s favor. Appeasing her by placing me beneath her in importance.

“I’m sure I’ll manage just fine on my own.” Sara waved them off dismissively. “I’m far from your only guest, I know. Have a pleasant evening, Adjutant.”

“You as well, Chosen.”

As Liafina and the Adjutant departed, the entire party heaved a simultaneous sigh of relief. By the end of it, even a few of the elves had been getting twitchy. Not because they thought Sara and Evie were a threat to them should a fight break out, but rather because they very much did not want to be forced to pick a side in that conflict. Choosing which superpowered religious authority to back was a lose-lose situation. No one wanted to piss off a god if they could help it, much less an elf that might be dealing with the ramifications for the next thousand years.

“I’m surprised, dear,” Evie murmured. “Choosing to avoid a conflict instead of stoking the flames higher? Rather out of character for you.”

“Lot easier to bite my tongue when I know the person I’m arguing with could snap my spine with a slap,” Sara murmured back. “She was out of our league. I’m not suicidally stupid. Just regular stupid.”

“Well I am pleased nonetheless. However slowly it may be, you are learning.”

Sara snorted. “How flattering. Thanks, Evie.”

“You are welcome.”

The party recovered in short order. Some of the guests hadn’t even bothered to depart from their conversations, the great green wyvern included. They were still regaling Sara with tales of their small role in the war that earned the Kingdom of Tulian its independence, growing more grandiose with every passing minute. Sara wasn’t learning anything useful from the big bastard, unfortunately. For all their hemming and hawing about ancient ways and the youth of tomorrow, Sara had picked up on the fact they were just around four hundred years old— younger than Fanlah, and younger than most any wyvern of importance in the Empire.

And I’m not learning anything useful from these stories, either. Sara’s real self grit her teeth. The wyvern wasn’t interested in talking about aerial tactics or strategy. Only their precious few duels against other wyverns, which they seemed to have won mostly through the brute strength of being bigger than their opponent. Once more, Sara’s habitual awe for the giant flying lizards was being chipped away. Less an aged and wizened veteran of times long past, this wyvern was more like an accountant in their ‘50s still talking about scoring the tiebreaker for their high school championship team. If Sara felt anything more than irritation at the tedium of the conversation, it was a sneering pity for how dull a life the wyvern had lived.

Other avenues of discussion were proving more fruitful. Namely, as was her forte, the common serving staff. Sara’s magical clones managed to corner a few of them into conversation as they rushed to fulfill the party guest’s every whim, batting her eyes and pushing her tits up with crossed arms until they forgot all about whatever duty she’d just pulled them away from. Most of those conversations were more interesting than any of the socialites that were bickering for her attention.

Granted, Sara’s own attention could’ve been put to better use. She was half an hour into a conversation with a serving guy whose quarter-elvish ancestry gave him an adorably twinkish build, his narrow-tipped ears turning bright red every time she flexed or stretched her arms. She really hadn’t done anything more in that half hour than tease the poor guy into a flustered mess. Which was worth it, honestly. Great stress relief. She mostly felt bad that she couldn’t actually do anything with him, considering he was only talking to an illusion. There were a lot of unoccupied closets just begging to be put to use nearby. Hopefully later Levels would allow her illusions to have a bit more weight to them.

Her other selves stayed more on task, thankfully. The common people of the frozen elven paradise weren’t cagey with their thoughts. A butler told her in matter-of-fact, direct statements that no, he didn’t find his elven employers abusive, but yes, he’d heard of those that were, and no, he didn’t know any personally, and also he thought the claims were mostly rumors born of more common human masters. The general consensus was that the elves didn’t care enough about their staff to even bother tormenting them, save plain old yelling at them for breaking something if the elf happened to be there when it happened.

That matched what Sara was learning from speaking with the elves themselves. They were so… detached. Completely untethered from reality. One elven mage spoke entirely in verse, keeping rhythm and rhyme as they explained to Sara that they’d been pursuing the magic of song for the last three centuries. This was the first time they’d left their home in fifty years, and they’d only done so because they’d known a Chosen would be about. Vindictively, Sara had left the conversation immediately. Another elf, a woman wearing layers of thick fur hides that suited the ancient decor far better than most other’s outfits, had claimed she’d spent the last twenty years trying to find an albino bear to add to her collection of pelts. While that wasn’t as crazy as others, Sara’s questioning about the civil war had revealed that this was far from the first long-distance hunt the woman had ventured out on: she didn’t know there was a civil war happening. She also, upon learning of its existence, didn’t care. She’d simply pulled out an ivory-hilted knife and changed the subject, wistfully telling Sara of the times when walruses had still roamed this far south. Considering the complete lack of ocean within at least a hundred kilometers of the capital, Sara could only assume it had been a very, very long time.

In summary? The elves were, in Sara’s formal opinion, batshit insane. There was no other way for her to explain it. They’d been alive for too long, done too much, and the experience had driven them out of their damn minds. They had no sense of perspective, no grasp of reality, and hadn’t had anything close to those traits for longer than Sara could fathom.

“Have you killed anyone yet?” One elven woman asked, eyes peeled wide as she stepped too close to Sara for comfort. “The other Children I have met, they always struggled to. Many never did. They spoke of power and responsibility, time and what is right, and many never did take a life, so great was their strength of conviction. Are you one of them?”

“Uh. No.”

“So you have killed?” The elf cooed, stepping even closer.

“Yeah. A lot,” Sara said, stepping back. The elf followed. If Sara’s body had been real, she would’ve felt the woman’s breath on her collarbone.

“And how did you feel? Are you sad about it? I must know! The gods always choose such interesting people for their work!”

With her Blessings finding no way to escape the topic save flickering her illusion out of existence, Sara was forced to answer.

“Depends on who you’re talking about, I guess. There’s a few people I’m proud to say I killed. A lot of them were just what had to happen. Most of them though, yeah. I’m sad about that. The regular people that didn’t want to fight me, but had to anyway.”

The woman dropped back, face falling. “Oh. How disappointing. The gods didn’t claim you as young as most others, did they?”

“I was twenty-two.”

“Dissapointing,” the woman repeated. Then she stepped away and began meandering towards the great hall’s doors, apparently done with the party entirely.

That tended to be the case with the so-called Honored Elven. Untold human lives had passed them by as they made their way into a second or third millennium of existence. A few of the younger ones, however, the ones who hadn’t yet broken the thousand year barrier, were a bit closer to normal. Sara could hold a conversation with them, could convince them to talk about things other than the esoterica that had begun to consume their lives, but it was by a narrow margin. They pulled away from the conversation when she broached the topic of the mortal side of the Empire, changing the topic without subtlety or patience. The civil war— or any aspect of mortals, really— dredged up a certain kind of sadness in them, she sensed. A grief they didn’t know how to deal with. Death wasn’t quite alien to the Honored Elven, but it was a distant, difficult concept to grapple with. That there were millions of mortals all around them living with it as a constant companion… it depressed them. That was the best way to put it. They were depressed by contact with humanity. They didn’t want to think about it. For the elves who hadn’t yet drifted off into their own version of reality, the lives of mortals were nothing more than a sad, unenviable blip.

She’d never seen class stratification like there was at this party. Fifteen year old humans were sneaking sips of the wine they handed to elves that were already ancient when the Roman Empire was founded, darting between soldiers and generals who could have cut them in half with a flick of the wrist. It was daunting. Sara and her Dad had all their lofty plans of how to equalize the societies of this world, but technology, education, and equal-opportunity policies were a far cry from rivaling the absolute power of an antediluvian sorcerer.

Especially when we’ve got people like this bitch to contend with, Sara thought, turning one of her selves to the door with a brittle smile. Mage Mayaran had arrived, fashionably late as usual.

Sara excused one of her clones from a conversation, drifting over to put herself in the woman’s path, choosing to spare Evie the frustration of Mayaran’s presence. The elf— who seemed terribly young, now that Sara had acquainted herself with the elders of Mayaran’s society— for once entered without fanfare. The doors creaked open to admit her amidst a swirl of snow, then she handed her heavy snowcloak to an attendant, accepting a slim wooden mug from another.

Walking out into the party, Mayaran greeted her with the same old fake smile, raising her drink in acknowledgement before taking a sip.

“Chosen. I trust you have been charmed by the amenities of my homeland?”

“Absolutely smitten,” Sara replied. Then, because patience wasn’t her strong point, she decided to cut straight to the point. “The Honored Elven have proven as fascinating as I was promised. I’d never known someone could go senile and keep so much of their wits about them. ”

To her surprise, Mayaran laughed. “Oh, aren’t all the world’s elders the same, in the end? Wise enough that it’s best to mind their advice, yet twisted strange enough over the years that one wonders how much of their counsel still matters at all.” She took another drink, smiling warmly. “It’s a peculiar place, is it not? After so many years away, I feel that all the keener. Yet I’m glad to be home amongst peers.”

“Ah, there it is.” Sara clucked her tongue in disappointment. “You were almost saying something I could respect, but of course you couldn’t quite get there in the end.” She waved at the party. “You consider yourself these people’s peers? Which ones? The soldiers or the serving girls?”

Mayaran rolled her eyes. “Oh, calm yourself, girl. For all you talk of wishing others to treat you as an equal, I would have thought you’d understand the struggle I speak of.”

“There’s quite a difference, I’m afraid. I want people to have enough self-respect that they don’t grovel at my feet. You’re just glad to be around those you think don’t deserve to kneel before yourself.”

“True enough, I suppose. A key difference between us, Chosen, is what we are willing to acknowledge. That I know and accept my superiority over the peasants is a reality you haven’t been able to face.”

Ah, here comes the old dance again, Sara thought, mentally settling in for the ride. With more than a dozen conversations rattling through her head at once, Mayaran was, paradoxically, a lot easier to deal with. There was a lot more she could distract herself with to help keep her temper cool.

“Unlike you, I don’t think being able to cast fancier spells or lift more weight is enough to consider myself better than someone else. Believing that might makes right is something the educated of my world gave up on centuries ago.”

“If you really believed that, you wouldn’t be so eager in your desperate clawing towards greater power. Much less would you be so readily disregarding the consequences of that search.”

“Frustrated that a mage can be dropped by a single cannonball, huh?” Sara patted the empty holster that adorned her outfit: a leather hunter’s garb, the exact same one she’d worn for several social functions before. “I’ll admit that mages and Warriors have been putting up more of a fight than I expected against gunpowder, but they won’t last forever. Not without adapting. Sooner or later the rich and powerful will be as vulnerable to a gunshot as the poorest and weakest of society.”

“A notion I would have thought you’d find more concerning, what with your paranoia over protecting your family.”

A threat, her Blessings supplied.

Sara laughed. “Oh, don’t worry. We’ve got them—”

Her illusion froze, tongue pressed to the roof of its mouth. Sara’s attention turned inward.

A threat?

A threat, her Blessings confirmed.

Mayaran looked at her frozen body, one eyebrow raised.

“Chosen?”

“—more than well protected enough, I assure you,” Sara finished.

Mayaran blinked several times, then frowned. “I’m sure you do, but-”

She didn’t threaten them, did she?

It was a threat, her Blessings repeated.

“-if you have your way, I’m sure you’ll-”

She wouldn’t.

A threat.

“-be delighted when the time comes that-”

At the far side of the party, one of Sara’s illusions flickered, colors shifting, lines blurring.

“-be rather glad that others suffer the same vulnerability.” Mayaran started to say something else, then paused, squinting. “Chosen?”

Against my family?

She threatened them.

She wouldn’t.

She did.

Desperate for proof to the contrary, Sara dug deeper into her mind. The furthest of her illusions sputtered in the middle of their sentences, snuffed out like the pinched wick of a candle. Those selves nearest them began to degrade, losing their life and vibrancy.

She reviewed her memories of the moment. Mayaran’s pulse had spiked when she uttered the words. The tendons in her forearm had tightened, fingers gripping her mug with a fraction of a pound more force. Her lips, though still split in a smile, had flattened to hide the tight clenching of a jaw behind. Pore dilation, sweat production, stance, all had altered by degrees through the sentence.

She threatened my family.

It began below.

It was felt first by the rats in the deepest cellars, their whiskers twitching, heads tilting. They looked to the ceiling, uncomprehending, searching for the shadow of a hawk that their instincts claimed could be the only cause of their racing heart.

It welled upward. A mother holding her daughter, resting on sacks of flour, clutched the girl closer in her sleep, not knowing why her dreams returned to the foul master’s home she’d escaped so long ago.

It bubbled and built, swirled and it rose, the soil too porous a cauldron for the rising tide. Two serving staff below, each turned aside to face one another as they passed through a door, stopped in place. They didn’t move, didn’t speak. They watched the other, not knowing what nameless thing was sweeping in around them, wondering if the other felt it too. When it became clear the other did, they still didn’t speak. They stepped into the room and shut the door behind them, working together to hide themselves in a burrow of piled goods as silently as they were able.

A threat.

Like stars fading before the rising sun, Sara’s illusions blinked out. Some lost their lustre and melted away, others popped with a gust of ghostly color. Still she turned inward, searching for a way out.

She didn’t know it was a threat. She was caught up in her emotions. Accidental. Inadvertent.

She meant it as a threat.

She wouldn’t have. She couldn’t have.

Nearby, the general Evie was talking to looked down, cursing, reaching for a sword he wasn’t wearing. When a baffled Evie followed his gaze, she was surprised to see that her rapier had appeared in her hand, her knuckles turned white as they clenched down on the hilt. She turned to the Sara at her side just in time to see the illusion vanish, blown apart as dust in an invisible wind.

A threat.

Down below, someone screamed. In the courtyard, two wyverns took flight. General Borek, pulse racing, snapped off a table leg and brandished it before himself, shouting at everyone around him to get away— then stopped, wondering why he had done such a thing at all.

The elves began to leave. The crowd had fallen silent first, then began to get louder and louder, whispering and shifting in place. The elves, though, were silent. They moved towards the exits as one, offering no explanation. She’d threatened them.

The whispering became mumbling, then rumbling. Someone cried out, an agonal sob wrenched from their lips, and then there was a gunshot, prompting a wave of screams and running guests. A man dropped to the ground, the smoking pistol he’d put to his own chin clattering to the stone.

“Sara!” Evie yelled. She started shoving others out of the way, claws dragging long marks through the skin.

Sara stared. No, not stared. She wasn’t really there, was she? Mayaran was standing before empty air. What pressed down on the elf were other senses. Indeterminable, intangible, so unknown they’d never been given a word. Knowledge incarnate, the sum total of all the privileged information that could enter her mind. Faster and faster. She counted hair follicles and fingernail ridges, the angle and rate of pupil dilation, and the perspiration that began to cover the elf’s skin.

“Chosen?” Mayaran was going to ask. Sara watched the word form. First as a ripple of the soul, then an artifact of the mind. She tracked the impulse’s race. A bundle of electric signals exited the soulfire of neural thunderstorms that lit the brain, leaping and sparking its way down the neck before whipping forward into the skull, lightning fireflies animating the lips into motion. Sara watched the diaphragm extend, lungs compressing, breath traveling through the quivering flaps of flesh that shaped air as it exited the trachea. Lips curled and tongue danced, giving final shape to the word that Sara had already seen coming.

Above, a fist-sized crystal burst. More screams erupted as the room darkened, redoubling when a second crystal shattered into darkness. Sara’s final illusory selves vanished with them, disappearing in chunks alongside every popped light.

A low, silent fog rolled across the floor. Blood-red tendrils crept outward, sweeping over the feet of the panicked crowd. Driven by the same animal instincts that gripped the rats so far below, men and women leapt onto the tables, some clutching one another for support. At one table, a man and woman’s curled fingers closed on the other’s necks in a guttural rage, rictus grins overtaking their faces when they felt blood vessels pop beneath their palms. Beside them on the table, one man fell atop another, their tongues intertwining and hips grinding into warm, sturdy flesh. They gasped in pleasure. A knife slipped into the ribs of one, placed by the man tasting his mouth. He wept with joy, the blood gushing from his arteries an emission beyond the greatest pleasure he’d ever known.

Mayaran fell to her hands and knees. Her pupils had swallowed all the color of her eyes, her heart racing five times a second. Desperate to feel something that was of her own, she bit her tongue until it bled, finding the pain a great relief. Her body ached in all its joints, but she could not cry. It wouldn’t let her.

Many began to vomit. Others, those who had managed to find an exit early, were falling to the snow in paroxysms, muscles and tendons tearing themselves from the bone with the force of their seizures.

In the darkness, lit only by the rolling, boiling sea of fog, Evie reached Sara, opening her mouth to ask a question. She got, in answer, a whisper.

She threatened them.

And then it was over.

Light burst into the room, bright and sterile as it shone down on the trembling figures. Sara walked up to Mayaran and offered her a hand, smile beaming.

“Sorry to say, but I think I’ll have to continue this conversation another time. I just remembered that—”

The elf retched noisily, spilling bloody vomit across Sara’s boots.

“—I promised Fanlah I’d let her take me hunting. I’ve been damn curious to see what kind of big bad wildlife lives in the jungle. I’ve got a little bet going with my Dad about whether or not there’s a T-Rex out there somewhere.”

A dozen calls for healers went out, rivaled only in volume by General Borek’s demands to bring his armor and weapons. Mayaran finished her retching and rolled onto her side, shivering terribly.

“I-I-I’m s-ss-s-sorry…” she gasped.

“Oh, don’t be!” Sara smiled, still holding out her hand. “It’s my fault for forgetting about the hunting trip. I’m sure Evie will be able to handle everything she needs to while I’m gone.” Sara clicked her tongue, shaking her head. “A shame, really. I’d been making so much good progress with her. So dear?”

Still holding her rapier, Evie’s ears turned toward Sara, even as her gaze stayed on the curled, trembling form of Mayaran.

“You’re off the leash while I’m away.”

Sara stepped over the elf, heading out into the swirling snow. Mayaran brought herself to her knees, weight rocking back. She spat, wiped her mouth with the elbow of her robes, and then looked up at Evie, meeting her empty eyes.

Then the elf was on her feet, cursing and stumbling out into the snow.

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