"We died," Ayla kept saying, running her fingers through her hair and spinning on her heel every three steps. "We're dead! Oh my god, we're fucking dead! I've been walking around for months with no memory? What even IS this place? Are we in hell? Purgatory?" She stopped. Her chest was heaving, and her eyes had widened so much that I could see white around both edges.
"Are you done now?"
"Maybe? I don't think so?" Her hands were pressed against her forehead. "How are you so calm right now?"
"Because I've been here for months." I pushed off the throne and walked toward her. "I figured out we were dead in the first week."
Her jaw dislodged from its socket. "You knew this whole time?"
"I recognized my own ex-girlfriend, Ayla." I circled her, and she followed. "You, on the other hand, kept trying to kill me!”
"Because I didn't REMEMBER, Lily! You could have told me!"
"Oh sure. That would've gone beautifully. Hey, quick heads up, you're dead and I'm your ex-girlfriend and this is hell or purgatory or whatever. Want some tea?"
She stared at me for a long time, then covered her face with both hands and groaned. "We're dead," she said through her fingers.
"Getting warmer, yeah."
"I've been trying to kill my dead ex-girlfriend."
"Now you're all caught up."
She dropped her hands and looked at me, exasperated. "How are you not losing it right now?"
"Because I already lost it." I shrugged. "I screamed for a week straight and tried to rip my own horns off, which made me black out. Then I woke up and dealt with it, because nobody was coming to help."
A flash of guilt crossed her face, but I didn't let it linger.
"At least you're still human. I'm a freaking demon. People try to kill me every week and I have two vaginas now, so you'll excuse me if I'm fresh out of sympathy."
"You..." Her index finger trembled as she pointed at me. "You have two vaginas?"
"That's what you took from everything I just said?"
"I mean — kind of, yeah." She tilted her head. "How does that even work?"
I waved my hand and continued walking. "It's not relevant. Point is, freaking out about being dead is pointless. We're here, we're stuck, and crying about it isn't going to —"
"Wait, no, back up." She held both hands out. "You have two vaginas? How does it work? Are they like — side by side? Stacked? Can I see?"
I struck her hard on the cheek, causing her head to jerk to one side. She touched her cheek, blinked twice, and then nodded slowly.
"Okay, yeah." She nodded again. "That actually helped." She sat down on the steps below my throne. She put her forearms on her knees and let her head hang. "We're dead. We're in some kind of afterlife. We can work with this."
I found myself seated next to her, going against my every instinct. "It's not as bad as you think once you stop fighting it."
"See?" She lifted her head. "It's manageable. We can figure this out together."
And that's when it hit me. I don't know why it chose that exact second. Maybe it was hearing someone else say the words out loud after months of only whispering them to myself in an empty room. Or maybe it was sitting close enough to the person I'd spent months pretending I didn't miss.
No matter the cause, the wall that I had leaned on since my first day crumbled from under me.
"Oh my god!" I said.
"What is it?" Ayla turned to face me.
"Oh God, oh no." My hands had started to tremble. "No, no, no!"
"Lily, what's —"
"We're dead." I stood up, but my legs gave out and I caught myself on the throne's armrest. "We're fucking dead. We died in your car. Your horrible, stupid, piece-of-garbage car that you swore every month you were going to replace!"
"I — Yes?" She blinked up at me from the steps. "We covered that like two minutes ago."
"I have been sitting in this tower for MONTHS." Now, I was pacing. "Alone. In a tower full of monsters. And you've been out there FREE with your new girlfriend and--"
"She wasn't really my —"
"— While I was up here rotting, waiting for you to show up and try to stab me every week!"
"Lily, you were the calm one." She got up and walked backwards, putting her palms out in front of her. "You were the rock! Please don't make me be the rock!”
"I have never been calm!" I spun on her, and she flinched. "I have been faking calm because there was nobody here to lose it with!"
"Lily —"
"We are dead and in hell and I have two vaginas, Ayla!"
"Oh God," she whispered, pressing her hands to her face again. "You're right. We're dead. We're so dead!”
"We are so dead," I confirmed while pacing.
"We're so completely dead."
"Utterly and totally dead."
"What are we going to do?"
I was crying now. "I'm a prisoner," I wailed. "I’m trapped in this tower and I can't leave and nobody is coming for me and I'm going to be here for...forever!"
"Okay, okay, okay." Ayla grabbed my hands. "Let's just... let me think for a second." She wiped her palms on her pants and squinted at me, as if reading something I couldn't see.
I stared at her with swollen eyes.
"We… we can work with this! You're crazy powerful, you could blast through those barriers, we could get out of here, find help, figure out how to —"
"Are you listening to yourself right now?" I wiped my nose on my sleeve. "I can't LEAVE, Ayla. I'm trapped. There's a barrier on this tower that won't let me past the front door. I've tried. Trust me, I have tried everything."
"But your powers —"
"My powers are overrated." I threw my hands up. "I can blow things up and that is the full extent of my skill set. I'm a glorified bomb with horns."
"That's not true, you—"
"It IS true! I think I know what I can and can't do by now!"
"And I've been fighting you for months, and I'm telling you there's more in there than you think!"
"Oh, you're going to lecture ME about MY body?"
"A curious position," remarked a voice from the windowsill, "for two people who share the same wound to stand here sharpening knives on each other."
We both went silent. Pebble sat on the wide stone ledge, his golden eyes catching the candlelight. His tail was curled around his front paws. "What good will this accomplish? You are both lost and afraid, and you direct that fear at the only person who understands it."
I used both hands to wipe my face, then glared at him. He was right. I despised being outsmarted by a cat, but he was right.
"Yeah, and like, also?" Brody unfolded himself from the shadows and padded forward on silent paws. "She's literally the only person in this whole world who knows what you're going through, bro. And you're over here screaming at her. That's like finding the last slice of pizza and chucking it at a wall."
I narrowed my eyes at him, and so did Ayla.
"What?" He sat down and licked one of his paws. "I can be deep."
Pebble continued. "Every creature in this tower was placed here for a reason. Every floor was arranged in order. The barriers that hold you are not natural: they are rules, authored by hands neither of you can see. Perhaps the question is not how to break free, but who wrote the lock?"
"It's like she's got this whole moveset and she's just mashing the same button, bro. You gotta try different combos."
Ayla's head snapped toward Brody, then to Pebble. Her mouth hung open, but the gears in her eyes were spinning so fast that sparks seemed to fly out.
"Holy shit," she whispered, placing her hand over her mouth. "Oh my god. Lily, do you know what this means?"
"That my cats are smarter than both of us?" I blew my nose. "Yeah, I caught that."
"No, Lily, listen." She grabbed my arm hard enough to bruise. "We're in Eternal Requiem!"
"Eternal what now?"
"Eternal Requiem! The video game!" She was bouncing on the balls of her feet, shaking my arm. "I played this game all the time, Lily, you know this!"
"I remember you playing a lot of video games. They all looked the same to me."
"They did NOT all look the —." She caught herself, inhaled through her nose. "Fine. Okay. Moving on. If this world is Eternal Requiem, then you're the final boss of the game."
"Yeah, obviously." I rolled my eyes. "People literally come to my door to kill me. You came to my door to kill me. This is not new information."
"No, but Lily — if you're the final boss, that means you're the most powerful being in this world." She shook my arm once more. "You should be able to break out of here! You have powers you're not using!"
I pulled my arm free. "Are you not hearing me right now? I keep telling you, I've tried everything. The barriers don't budge."
"But —"
"And say I do get out... then what, Ayla? I stroll through the kingdom? The demon queen, window shopping on main street? I'd be putting a target on my back the size of this tower. At least in here I have walls between me and every adventurer with a hero complex."
She paused, chewing her lip, and I watched the excitement drain a couple of notches.
"Okay, fair point. I forgot about that." She rubbed the back of her neck. "But I mean... you did kill the king."
I flung my head back and groaned at the ceiling. "Everyone keeps bringing that up! What is the big deal? Isn't the whole appeal of this place that death isn't permanent? You've died hundreds of times, and you keep popping right back up like nothing happened."
"Because I don't think he could come back." She spoke slowly, carefully choosing each word. "In the game... in the lore, the demon queen didn't just kill the king. She consumed him. Absorbed his essence and his soul so he couldn't respawn."
I blinked at her several times. "Are you telling me I ate a man?"
"In the game's lore, yeah." She winced. "Sort of."
"I ate a person?" I pressed both hands flat against my stomach. "Ew? I feel like I would remember eating a whole person, Ayla. That is not a thing you forget."
"Maybe you don't remember." She was pacing again, but was more focused this time, moving her hands as she talked. "Think about it. I lost every memory of our past life when I got here. What if it works in the other direction for you? What if you kept our old memories but lost everything about your life here... your lore, your powers, what you did before I showed up?"
I opened my mouth to argue, but nothing came out. She had a point. I'd woke up in this body knowing I was the demon queen, knowing people wanted me dead. But the details: why they wanted me dead, what I'd done, how anything worked... had all been blank. I'd just assumed everyone started fresh.
"I guess that tracks," I said, hating every word.
"Okay." She said. "I've fought this boss fight a hundred times. I know what you're supposed to be able to do." She held one hand out in front of her and made a pulling motion, and a translucent blue panel flickered to life in the air between us.
"How did you just —"
"Stat menu." She was already flicking through it, her gaze skimming over lines of text that I couldn't make out in reverse. "Okay, base stats are maxed across the board, that tracks. Vitality, magic output, defense... and here, look, it's your abilities."
She turned the panel toward me, and a list of words emerged, illuminated against a sea of blue. Phase Shift. Abyssal Barrier. Consume. Soul Summon. Entropy Field. About a dozen more below those, each one dimmed and grayed out.
⌜ MORRÍGAN — Demon Queen ⌝
Level: ???
⌜ ABILITIES ⌝
◇ Phase Shift · · · · · · · · · · · LOCKED
◇ Abyssal Barrier · · · · · · · · LOCKED
◇ Consume · · · · · · · · · · · · LOCKED
◇ Soul Summon · · · · · · · · · LOCKED
◇ Entropy Field · · · · · · · · · LOCKED
◇ Dark Nova · · · · · · · · · · · LOCKED
◇ Void Step · · · · · · · · · · · · LOCKED
◇ Throne's Dominion · · · · · LOCKED
◇ Soulfire Cascade · · · · · · LOCKED
◇ Eclipse Form · · · · · · · · · LOCKED
◇ Ruination · · · · · · · · · · · LOCKED
◇ The Queen's Gambit · · · · · ???
◆ Hellfire Blast · · · · · · · · · ACTIVE
"These are all locked." She tapped one, and it pulsed red. "But they shouldn't be. You should have access to every single one."
"What is a Phase Shift?"
"It lets you... okay, so basically, you go intangible for a few seconds. Attacks pass right through you. It was one of your most annoying moves in the game. I died to it like fifty times."
I kept staring at her.
"Right, sorry, not helpful." She indicated the next line. "Abyssal Barrier is a shield, but not a regular shield, a full dome that absorbs incoming damage and reflects it back doubled. In the game you'd pop this at half health and it was a nightmare because you had to time your hits between the pulse windows, and if you mistimed it you'd just heal right back to full, which was the worst because by the third phase you'd layer it with Entropy Field and the whole arena would just —"
"Ayla!" She stopped and looked at me expectantly. "I don't know what any of that means." I hated saying it. I hated the sound of my voice, which was small and defensive. "Intangible? Pulse windows? What are you even saying?"
"I'm just explaining your abilities. It's really not that —"
"It IS that hard! You're throwing out game words like I'm supposed to get it, but I have no idea what any of this means!"
"Lily, it's not —"
"Don't tell me it's not hard!"
It was happening again: the apartment. She handed me the controller and led me through the game like it was second nature. She'd say things like, "just parry then dodge cancel into the backstep.” She spoke those as though they were real sentences, and I sat there gripping the controller until my knuckles ached while my character died over and over. She'd get this little pitying look on her face, and I'd throw the controller at the couch and go and lock myself in the bedroom.
I have always been bad at video games. I didn't understand statistics, menus, ability trees or any of the other junk that she'd based her personality on. Now, apparently, I was supposed to learn it all because my life was a game and I was too stupid to play my own character.
"Forget it." I turned my back on the blue panel and walked to my throne. "I don't want to look at this anymore."
"Lily, come on, we barely got started —"
"I said forget it." I sat down hard, with my arms crossed and my jaw locked. "You're not explaining this in a way that makes any sense and I'm not going to stand here feeling like an idiot in my own jail cell!"
The panel flickered between us.
"I'm done. Just leave me alone, Ayla."