Day 188.
I had Spite and Malice decorating since dawn.
"Your Wickedness, where would you like the large one?"
"By the door. Wait, no— a little to the left. More left. She needs to see it the second she walks in."
Malice rehung the painting. It was six feet tall and framed in gold. It depicted a clown with an unsettling expression. The eyes were dead, the mouth was wide open, and the teeth were red. I found it in the treasury, three floors below mine. Apparently the tower contained all sorts of things if you looked. The moment I saw it, I knew.
Ayla hated clowns.
I knew this. The same way I knew she hated vegetables, the way I knew the texture of wet hair on a shower wall made her gag, the way I knew that toenail clippings were the one thing in the world that made her physically recoil.
"Spite, how are we doing on the vegetables?"
"Arranged beautifully!" Spite emerged from behind the throne, where he'd been assembling a cornucopia of raw produce directly in Ayla's line of vision: broccoli, brussels sprouts, an enormous cauliflower as a centerpiece, a pile of raw celery fanning out like a bouquet. "I took the liberty of adding radishes. I wasn't sure if they qualified but they seemed appropriately repulsive."
"Radishes are perfect, Spite."
"You honor me, Your Wickedness!" His little face went pink with pride.
"And the bedsheet?"
"Deployed, oh Glorious Ruination!"
I looked to my right. Malice had draped a white bedsheet across the floor, directly in the path from the entrance to the throne. On it were hundreds of toenail clippings. Spite and Malice collected them from... Actually, I didn't know how they'd collected them. The important thing was that the bedsheet was covered in toenail clippings and Ayla was going to have to walk across it to reach me.
I sat back on my throne and looked around the room.
Clown painting by the door. Check. Vegetable shrine near the throne. Check. Toenail bedsheets across the floor. Check!
I also made sure to scatter wet strands of hair all over every armrest Ayla might touch, and there was a giant zucchini on a pedestal directly in her path for no other reason than that it was a vegetable and I thought it was funny.
I had reduced myself to this. The Demon Queen of the hundredth floor, sovereign of ruin, she who ends all things, was decorating a psychological torture chamber for her ex-girlfriend.
I giggled.
It just came out, this awful, delighted, villainous little giggle that echoed off the vaulted ceiling and made Spite and Malice exchange a nervous glance. They didn't understand any of it. They didn't know why I wanted clowns and broccoli and toenail clippings arranged in my throne room. They just knew I'd asked for it with a look in my eye that apparently scared them more than my usual look, which already scared them plenty.
They were good boys. Horrible, cringing sycophants who would walk into traffic if I asked them to, but good. They didn't need to understand. They just needed to put the clown painting where I told them to.
Truth be told, when you are obscenely powerful but don't know how to use it, you become bored. This boredom is devastating, mind-numbing, and even existential. Apparently, my magic was infinite. I had passive abilities running in the background at all times that I couldn't turn off, including one called "Abyssal Presence" that meant every time I felt something too hard, someone died. That was pretty much my entire combat repertoire: someone would come in, give a speech, charge at me, and I would either explode them because I flinched, set them on fire because I panicked, or both because I panicked while they were screaming, which was worse for everyone involved.
I couldn't cast spells or aim. I couldn't control the output, direct it, or turn it into anything useful.
Making Ayla explode got old pretty fast. I figured since I couldn't control how I fought, I had to get creative and focus on the surroundings instead. I had more than enough time to figure out exactly how to get under her skin.
This became the only hobby I had. It was the only thing that made the waiting bearable.
I bounced my leg on the throne. Then both legs. Then I was bouncing around in my seat like a child waiting for a birthday party. In a way, I was. My birthday party. The gift was watching Ayla walk across a bedsheet of toenail clippings and seeing a six-foot clown painting, which made her lose her mind before I killed her.
"What time is it?" I asked.
"Approximately the ninth bell, Your Darkness," Malice said.
Ninth bell. She was usually here by now. Her average arrival time on floor 100 was between the eighth and ninth bell, depending on how fast she cleared the lower floors, which, annoyingly, kept getting faster.
Ninth bell. She was late. Not unheard of, but unusual.
"She's probably on a lower floor," I said. More to myself than them
"Or perhaps she was devoured by a lesser beast on the road to the tower! A wandering gryphon, perhaps, or a territorial drake! She could be inside a stomach right now. Your Wickedness, slowly dissolving in digestive acids! Wouldn't that be wonderful?"
"Or!" Malice chimed in, ears perked. "She was set upon by bandits! Highway robbers who slit her throat for her coin purse and left her body in a ditch where it will be eaten by crows and rats and forgotten by history! A fitting end for one who dares challenge Your Glorious —"
“I think--," continued Spite, practically glowing with enthusiasm, "she fell into the river! And drowned! And her body was swept out to the Muir Sea, where it was consumed by a leviathan! And the leviathan choked on her staff and died as well! Two deaths! A magnificent —"
"Ugh." I sank into my throne. "No. We're not lucky enough for that."
"Your Wickedness?"
"She's always fine. She's an unkillable cockroach with a stupid face and she's just running late. People run late. It happens."
Yeah. She was late. That was all it was.
I stared at the door.
The tenth bell came.
I repositioned the painting of a clown by moving it two inches to the right. Then, back. Then two inches to the left. Malice stared at me with huge, worried eyes.
The eleventh bell came.
I ate three Brussels sprouts out of the decorative cornucopia. They were disgusting. I had two more.
"She's dead, Your Darkness!" Spite gleamed with enthusiasm. "Permanently!"
"She's not permanently dead, Spite. She's just —"
Not here.
She wasn't here. For the first time in 188 days, Ayla was not here to see me.
"This is fine," I said. "I don't care. I literally do not care. This changes nothing about my day. I was going to sit here regardless. I sit here every day. This is what I do. I sit here."
The thirteenth bell.
I stood up.
"Your Darkness?"
"Where are you going, oh Glorious —" Malice started.
I was already walking. Past the toenail bedsheets. I passed by the cornucopia of vegetables, and the clown painting that had been placed to maximize its psychological impact on someone who was not in the least affected. I burst through the doors, both hands on them. They banged against the stone walls so hard that they cracked. My fault, because my strength stat was in the hundreds of thousands, and I still hadn't learned to compensate.
I began to descend.
Now. The demon queen does not leave floor 100. She just sits on her throne and she waits for adventurers to come to her and she kills them. That's the job. But here's the thing: nobody was going to stop me. Who could have stopped me? I was the most powerful thing in the tower. I sneezed once and disintegrated a wall. The tower could take its arrangement and shove it, because I was going downstairs to find out where my mage was.
Floor 99: empty. Some kind of elemental guardian hiding in the walls, ambushing adventurers. As soon as I came downstairs, the walls stopped moving.
Floor 98. A skeletal knight in black armor, sitting on its own throne. It was smaller than mine, and much worse. When I stomped through its room, it stood up, drew its sword, looked at me and sat down again.
Floors 97 through 90. I didn't even see the guardians. Apparently they'd heard me coming, because every floor was empty by the time I got there. I just saw vacant rooms and the faint echo of something running in the opposite direction.
Floor number 89. A party of adventurers.
There was a fight underway, and I didn't know what against. Suddenly, the target disappeared, and when I entered, the group of five froze in their tracks. The complete team: swords, shields, and a healer at the back, all in place.
One of them fainted. Just like that. He crashed to the floor in full armor. The person beside him let out a squeaky sound, and a dark mark spread across the front of his trousers. He looked at it. The other three just stared, mouths open, eyes wide, weapons half-raised as if they'd forgotten what they were for.
"Didn't your mother teach you it's rude to stare?" I snapped. "What, you've never seen a woman with horns before? Close your mouths. You look like fish."
They closed their mouths; one of them dropped his sword.
"Ugh."
I kept walking.
Down through the eighties. Down through the 70s. Down through the 60s and 50s picking up speed, my footsteps echoing through the stairwells. More adventurers. More staring. More fainting. One woman on the 47th floor saw me and immediately jumped out a window. I didn't think that was an option in the tower, but apparently self-preservation finds a way.
I made it to the 42nd floor.
The door was already open. Through the haze, I could see her in the center of the room, coiled at full height, her massive serpentine body wrapped around something that was making a lot of noise.
It was a man. Sable's tail, coiled around his lower body, was slowly squeezing him as he wheezed and clawed at the scales. His face was red. His eyes bulged. He was having, by all accounts, the worst day of his life.
Sable looked up, noticing me.
"Lily!"
"Where is she?"
"Where is who?"
"You know who!
"Your little mage?" Sable smirked. The man wrapped in her arms uttered a muffled cry. She squeezed a little tighter, not looking at him. "She didn't show today?"
"No. She's showed every day for a 188 days and today she just doesn't? Without warning? What gives? I had a whole thing set up, Sable."
"A thing?"
"A psychological warfare thing! I had clowns!"
"Clowns?"
"A clown painting! Six feet tall! Terrifying! And vegetables! And a bedsheet covered in toenail clippings across the floor so she'd have to walk over them to get to me and —"
Sable stared at me. The man in her coils, even though he was actively being crushed to death, also stared at me.
"Toenail clippings?" Sable asked.
"On a bedsheet. Yes."
"Lily, that's... that's really gross."
"It's psychological warfare!"
"Whose toenail clippings?"
"That's not the point!"
The man wheezed. "Can I —"
"Shut up!" Sable and I said in unison.
"Look," Sable said, adjusting her coils so she could face me more fully. The man rotated with her. "I think this is actually healthy. A little space is good. Couples need room to breathe. A day apart is normal. It builds anticipation. Makes the next encounter more meaningful. She'll come back tomorrow and you'll explode her and the toenail clippings will have their moment. Think of it as—"
The man in her coils raised a shaking hand. "Can I say something?"
I glared at him. Sable glanced down.
"I totally agree with the snake lady," he gasped. "Space is key. My girl, right, she used to get so clingy, always texting, always wanting to hang out, and I was like, babe, I need room, and she backed off, and honestly, that's when things got better. Dudes hate clingy chicks. Just saying."
I felt my eye twitch.
"Who asked you? Literally, who asked for your perspective? Actually," I said, "why do I care? Sable, kill him."
"With pleasure."She squeezed, and there was a crunch. The man stopped having opinions.
For a moment, I stood in the fog of Sable's floor, surrounded by the ambient mist and the sound of scales settling and the quiet drip of blood.
"She'll come back," Sable said. "You'll see."