"Your clear times are up. Your contract completion rate is the best in the guild, and you haven't died in three weeks." Harlan was sitting behind his desk with his arms crossed, looking at me with an expression I had never seen on him before, at least not directed towards me.
Approval.
"The debt is still nowhere near cleared," he said, as Harlan couldn't offer a compliment without adding a caveat. "But the trajectory is good. Keep this up and you'll be solvent within the year."
"Thanks."
"Don't thank me. Thank whatever made you stop throwing yourself at that tower every day."
He didn't need to know about the Thursday group. He only needed to know that I was sleeping more, that I was using fewer stamina tonics, and that I was showing up to contracts without bags under my eyes for the first time in months. The dark circles were fading. The weight was coming back. My mana pool was actually full at the start of each day.
I had not set foot in the tower for three weeks.
I had gone for three weeks without seeing her, the longest time since I started. I was riddled with guilt, and I was planning to bring it up during our Thursday meeting with Niall, because apparently, it's perfectly acceptable to feel guilty about not visiting the woman who killed you multiple times, and support groups are exactly the right place for such discussions.
The meetings were helping, even with Neasa being Neasa. Last Thursday, she told me that I looked like I'd gotten dressed in the dark and circled back twenty minutes later to give me good advice on setting boundaries. That was her whole thing. She'd stab you and then hand you a bandage, and somehow you ended up thanking her for both. To be fair, dating a banshee for that long would probably rewire anyone's personality.
But today, I was going. Enough was enough. I had something I needed to say.
The walk to the tower was the same as always. The tower getting bigger with every step. I'd been taking this walk for months, and unfortunately this time gave my brain too much room to rehearse conversations I wasn't ready for.
I was reviewing the talking points from Thursday's meeting. As usual, Séimh had been blunt. "This thing you two have going, is not a relationship. It's a pattern. And patterns don't stop until someone breaks them." Bess had agreed, which was rare because Bess agreed with nothing Séimh said on principle. Even Cairde, sweet Cairde, had gently suggested that "perhaps a period of intentional distance might allow both parties to develop healthier frameworks for engagement." He'd been reading self-help scrolls.
The collective decision was unequivocal: hatred burns with the same intensity as love. The dynamic: the daily killing, the gifts, the jealousy, the whatever-this-was — was keeping me confused. Tangled up. Unable to see straight. And the only way to unravel it was to end it.
It couldn't continue this was. Not since I'd started looking forward to getting killed because it meant she'd looked at me first. That had to stop. For my health. For my sanity. For the part of me that kept dreaming about a throne in ways that had nothing to do with sitting on it.
I was composing my opening line when someone bumped into me.
"Oh, sorry!" A woman in a cloak, with her hood drawn down low over her face. She had emerged from the trees along the road as if she had been waiting there. It was probably paranoia talking. "I'm so clumsy, are you alright?"
She didn't move. She was standing too close. Her hand was grasping my arm, refusing to let go.
"You're the mage, aren't you? The one who goes to the tower? I've heard so much about you, I'd love to talk if you have a —"
"I don't know you, lady." I recoiled, pulling my arm back. Her fingers lingered. She was a pickpocket, no doubt about it. This road was notorious for that. Travelers heading towards the tower with full inventories were easy marks. I had heard the guild warnings: a friendly stranger and physical contact, and before you knew it, they had melted into the trees with your coin pouch.
"I just wanted to —"
"Not interested."
"If you'd just let me —"
I used a spell slot, and then disappeared in a blink of an eye, appearing fifty feet farther down the road and continuing to walk without looking back. I couldn't afford to lose any gold right now, not with Harlan's debt hanging over me. And there was something about the way she'd grabbed my arm that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I shook it off. Tower. Focus. Conversation. Stay on task.
The entrance runes at the tower were dim. The doors were open, but no one was there: no early-morning adventurers, no low-level parties near the entrance, no vendors selling last-minute potions. Everything was empty, except for me, the wind and the massive, silent tower looming above everything.
As I entered, I found the ground floor deserted.
Second floor: empty. Third floor: empty. The sound of my footsteps echoed in the stone.
Something was wrong. I tightened my hold on my staff and continued ascending, moving more slowly, scanning each room. The fourth and fifth floors were empty. By the tenth floor, I was feeling uneasy. My mana was pooling in my hands on instinct, ready to cast at anything that moved.
Floor 12: Ooze's floor. It was empty; not a puddle in sight.
"Okay, what the hell," I mumbled, and I walked through a door on the fifteenth floor. The wall swallowed me.
I passed through the illusion, a high-level glamour magic that was seamless, like stepping through a curtain. I found myself in a room full of noise and light and every monster in the tower.
A common room packed wall to wall. There was noise, chatter and laughter. Music coming from somewhere.
"Moon!" Sable emerged from the crowd, her tail parting people's bodies. Before I could react, she kissed my forehead and held me by my shoulders.
"What's going on? The tower is empty, I thought something happened."
"Tower's closedddddd for renovations, baby!"
"Oh." I said. "The doors were open though?"
Sable grinned. "Someoneeee saw you coming from the window. And someoneeee unlocked the front door. And someoneeee may have dismissed the entrance wards specifically so a certain mage could walk right in."
I saw the ripple from across the room. Heads turning, gentle nudges, and elbows jabbing. A hundred monsters noticed my presence and linked it to the person who had unlocked the tower for me.
The demon queen stood in the corner, arms crossed, tail rigid, face the color of a dark plum. She was trying to look angry, but mortification showed through.
"Ooooooh," Ren said, giggling. "Someone unlocked the tower for her giiiirlfriend."
"She's not my girlfriend!"
"Lily and the maaage, sitting in a treee," Sable crooned, and the room echoed back. A cacophony of voices, ranging from high to low, filled the air. The atmosphere grew hot. Near the demon queen's head, a lamp ignited, its flames dancing. Everyone went quiet for half a second, then started laughing harder.
"I will incinerate every single one of you," the demon queen threatened.
"She let her iiiiiin," Hana exclaimed, her eight legs wiggling in delight.
The demon queen crossed the room in a few quick strides, grabbed my wrist and pulled.
"We're leaving. Upstairs. Now." She dragged me toward the exit. The room exploded behind us.
"Oooooooh!" Kissing sounds everywhere.
The demon queen stopped, then turned. She gave the room a look. The look.
The kissing noises stopped. Mostly. Sable managed a last quiet "mwah" before Ren elbowed her.
She spun around, continuing to clutch my wrist, and dragged me through the door and up the stairs.
She was walking at a rapid pace, almost bounding. Her grasp on my wrist was firm but gentle, while her tail, which was behaving in a particular way, was wagging back and forth. It was... cute.
I violently dismissed that notion to the point of almost stumbling on a step.
We climbed in silence, floor by floor, her hand still on my wrist. My brain is screaming at me to remember why I was here: the talking points, the boundaries. Hate is as passionate as love. The cycle must end. It is not a relationship if it continues to end in tragedy.
We reached floor 100. She kicked the doors open and pulled me inside, let go of my wrist and turned to face me.
“So,” she said.
"I'm here."
"You are." She went to her throne and sat down.
"It's been three weeks."
"Has it? I didn't notice." She was playing coy, glancing at her nails while her cheeks flushed.
My chest was behaving in a certain way. It was that foolishly warm sensation that Séimh warned me about, Neasa described as a suicidal impulse, Bess labeled as "just being a person." I had to do this now.
"I need to talk to you about something!" I blurted out. "It's... important."
"Okay?" She was still examining her nails, but her tail was wagging so hard that the seat vibrated.
"I think we need to... stop."
The tail stopped moving.
"Stop what?" she asked her voice going up an octave.
"This. Us. Whatever this is. The whole..." I pointed between us. "Thing."
She remained motionless. Her face was perfectly still, but only her eyes moved, from her hands to my face.
"I've been talking to some people," I said. "About this. About us. And the consensus is that what we're doing isn't healthy. It's become this pattern and the pattern is confusing me and I can't think straight when I'm around you."
I was speaking too quickly. I had to force myself to slow down.
"I think we should... be friends?"
"Friends," she repeated.
"Yeah. Friends. So, you know we can still see each other. I can still come by. We can just... talk. Like normal people. I think it would be healthier. For both of us."
She placed her hands, one at a time, on the armrests. "Was it something I did?"
"What?"
"Did I do something wrong? Is this about the musical? I'm sorry! I know the cannibalism bit was too much, I know that now. If that's what this is about I can —"
"It's not about the musical. The musical was —" I stopped myself. "It's not about anything you did. It's about me. The way I've been handling this. The way I feel when I'm here."
"It's not you, it's me," she said, flat. "That's what you're saying."
"Well. Kind of. Yeah."
"You're breaking up with me???"
"We're not — we weren't — you can't break up with someone you weren't dating."
"You're breaking up with me." She got up from the throne.
"I'm trying to establish healthy bound—"
"Who is she?"
"What?"
"Who is she, Ayla? Who's the new one?" She was pacing, arms crossed. "I know how you operate. I know there's always someone. You can't just leave, there always has to be a replacement waiting in the wings. So who is it? Who finally caught your eye? Who's more interesting than me?"
"There's no one... what are you talking about?"
She laughed. "Oh, that's rich!" A candelabra whizzed by my head; I quickly dodged it. It detonated against the wall behind where I had been standing. "I know it's not the queen." She was now picking up items from various surfaces and throwing them. "It's not Victoria, you barely talk about her anymore. So who is it? Did one of the floor bosses —"
"Nobody from the —"
A vase. I blinked. It crashed into the throne.
"You always had a wandering eye! Always. The second something shiny came along, the second someone new walked into the picture —"
"That is not what's happening —"
She threw plate. It spun through the area before smashing into a pillar. She grabbed the bear blanket and threw it. It billowed above my head, and I tripped as I tried to remove it. When I regained my footing, she was directly in front of me, her chest heaving.
"Who. Is. She."
"There is no she. I swear. I'm doing this because my support group said —"
"Your SUPPORT GROUP?"
"Yeah! They told me the dynamic was unhealthy and that I should establish boundaries because hate is as passionate as love and the pattern needs to —"
"I am going to find this support group and I am going to BURN IT DOWN. I WILL FIND A WAY."
She trembled. From the effort of containing whatever was building inside her, the thing that exploded people and set rooms on fire and couldn't be controlled when emotions ran too hot. The air around her shimmered. My stat debuffs were soaring because of the Aura of Dread amplifying with her mood.
"You don't get to do this," she said, quieter now. "You don't get to show up all this time and make me... feel things... and then just stop. That's not how this works. You don't get to make someone need you and then leave."
"I'm not trying to —"
"Get out."
"Wait —"
"GET. OUT."
Everything in the room that wasn't bolted down came off the ground, all of it hovering in the air around her, suspended by raw arcane force bleeding from her body. I looked at her. She was in the middle of her throne room, surrounded by the floating objects, with wet eyes.
I teleported out. I heard everything she'd lifted shattering behind me as it all came crashing down.
I sat on the grass near the tower. I rested my head in my hands, with my pulse racing. My hands trembled. After a few minutes, I started heading back to the barracks.
The walk back to the tower seemed longer than the walk to it. As I was midway down the road, someone emerged from the trees and collided with me. My staff was already raised by the time I hit the ground. A figure, scrambling, with the hood up and face hidden.
"Hell no." I was on my feet with my staff aimed. "If you think you're robbing me, you picked the wrong day because I have nothing left to take and I am in a very bad mood."
"Wait—wait please—" The figure raised both hands, palms out. The hood fell back.
Dark curls. Eyes that I'd seen in posters and coronation portraits and a dozen commemorative illustrations and once from three hundred feet at the Harvest Festival. Queen Victoria of Muir was sitting on the ground in front of me in a traveling cloak with leaves in her hair.
My staff fell.
"You're very hard to track down, you know that?"