“I’m telling you mine’s better!”
“Bullshit! I’m the one who taught you!”
Vyra and I were currently in the bathroom of her dorm room, staring intently at our reflections to determine which of us had done our eyeliner better. I knew it was me, but Vyra was having trouble accepting when she was beat.
“You might’ve taught me, but clearly I perfected it!”
“Show me where exactly yours is better than mine!”
“Right here! Your lines look like a drunken artist with carpal tunnel compared to mine!” I pointed towards the outer edge of my eyes, leaning in towards Vyra to show her how much more precise I could be than her. She might have a wider knowledge than I did when it came to beauty, but what I did know, I had taken the time to perfect.
Vyra leaned in towards me with a mischievous grin. That should have been my first sign to prepare myself for whatever she had in store, but I hadn’t caught it until it was too late. Vyra quickly swiped her tongue across my closed eye, wetting and smearing the wonderful work that I had painstakingly done in the mirror earlier.
“I don’t know, it looks pretty messy to me!” Vyra cackled and pointed at my face with a devious mirth.
“Ew! Oh my Gods, Vyra! D-Did you just lick my fucking eye?!”
“Hah! Gods you look so grossed out right now!”
“I am! What if I get diseases from this? Am I gonna lose my eye?”
“Oh please, Ester. We’ve shared enough bodily fluids that if this is what gives you some kind of eye diseases I will personally give you my eye in penance”
After rubbing the wetness off of my eye in disgust I looked towards the mirror. The makeup on my right eye was now a complete mess. It looked like I had just been punched in the eye with how the black eyeliner had smeared across my eye and everything surrounding it.
The sight only made Vyra tumble over to the floor in laughter. “You look like you just got socked in the eye! Whose boyfriend did you piss off, huh?”
“Shut it, V!”
It took a good amount of time before Vyra could calm her laughter, each time she would nearly get over her giggles, she would look back to me and it would restart anew, like I had wound up the key on her back to reset the laughing Vyra toy.
I decided to take it into my own hands to dispel her laughing fit, dropping to my knees on the bathroom floor and closing the distance between the two of us. Vyra looked up at me as she lay belly up on the floor of her bathroom, her joking stupor being instantly silenced once our faces were hovering mere inches away from each other. I watched her close her eyes as I leaned in, a sight that had become regular in the past two weeks since I started to be Ester in private with her once more.
She had tried many times in the past two weeks to get me to leave the room with her, but each time a panic attack would latch around my heart and stop the plan in its tracks. I had planned to try leaving the room as Ester for the first time tomorrow, as much as it terrified me.
Once she had closed her eyes in anticipation for a kiss, I took my chance and planted a sloppy kiss on her left eyelid, pulling back with a satisfied smile.
“Ew! That was a nasty trick!”
In a true reversal of our roles, I was laughing loudly at her animated reaction. She wiped her eye dry, smearing her makeup in much the same way that I had smeared mine.
“Looks like I’m the winner after all!” I smirked.
A knock at the door disrupted our antics, making the two of us freeze like a caritune in a stasis spell. I immediately started to panic. Not only was I not supposed to be in her dorm room at the current moment due to the strict curfew, but I was dressed in a black pleated skirt, black tights, and a red feathered blouse. Not even remotely a school uniform, and not something I could easily explain to anyone that walked into the room.
Tomorrow was supposed to be the first day I tried to be Ester in public! I was already afraid of that, so the idea of having to move that up even more was mortifying to the highest degree. Vyra could see the fear flashing across my eyes, and whispered towards me as she scrambled to her feet.
“Hide!”
I pulled the bathroom door closed as softly as I could and peered through the keyhole that lay beneath. You might think it strange for a dorm room to have a locking mechanism on the interior bathroom when there is only one student in a room. I always assumed that it was to save money, what with the bathroom doors being identical to the doors to enter each dorm room.
I watched Vyra shake her hands by her side to calm her nerves. It was a nervous tick that I had gotten so used to seeing her do that I would occasionally mimic it without even thinking.
She opened the door with a neutral expression. The expression quickly turned to one of surprise when Headmaster Gelgin strode into the room without the slightest politeness to ask to enter. I suppose if you’re the Headmaster, you don't need to bother much with asking for things.
“Vyra Thrusal.”
“H-Headmaster Gelgin. Is everything okay?”
“You are to surrender yourself to the Varenthell council immediately. They will decide the mode of your execution for desecrating this academy with your demonic presence and for murdering two burgeoning students.” The Headmaster spoke with all of the pomp and circumstance one would expect from being delivered an excellence award despite having just told Vyra that she would soon be executed.
“W-What?! I-I don’t understand!”
“A moment, dear.” Gelgin raised a finger towards Vyra to silence her, slowly turning his head without moving so much as a muscle of the rest of his body. His owl-like turn stopped when it reached the bathroom door. Did he know someone was in here?
“Xavier Sylberith. It is rude to eavesdrop. Have your parents not ensured you were raised with manners?”
How did he know I was in here?! I shot one last glance towards the mirror, a terrified looking woman stared back at me shaking like a leaf in a storm. My right eye still had smeared makeup covering all around the socket. There was no point in attempting to hide if he already knew that I was here. I slowly turned the knob and pushed the door open. Headmaster Gelin’s eyebrows raised as he looked down at me. Each time I had to speak with him, I felt like I was under the watchful eye of a god. The man stood at a towering six foot six inches, though the way he would look down at you, he might as well be nine feet tall.
“A cruel manipulation for a familiar, Ms. Thrusal. Even for a murderer.”
Vyra and I both struggled to process his words. Familiar? Greater demons were capable of taking on a familiar, a lesser being that would be bound to and eternally loyal to the greater demon they served. Most familiar that demons took were humans that fell to the corruptive power a demon possesses, thinking they would be able to receive a portion of the demon’s strength through servitude. Was he implying I had been made a familiar?
“Assume your true form, Vyra. I revile an individual who appears before me in illusions.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir!” Vyra choked on her words, flecks of tears breaking off from her lashes to fall to the ground. Every bit of her reaction clawed at my heart and made me bite my lip to not speak out of line. Headmaster Gelgin had a reputation for punishing people who did so.
“If you wish to be difficult, then so be it.”
The Headmaster raised his ornate golden cane a few inches off of the ground, before bringing it down towards the ground to issue a light tap with the metal end. What seemed like such an insignificant motion of his staff turned out to be a malicious spell being performed with a shocking state of calm.
I watched with horror as a brilliant flash struck Vyra in her forehead, wrenching a guttural scream from her lips and sending her reeling to the floor. The skin along her body began to flake away into dust, revealing a textured red surface of skin. As the golden wave of light coursed across her body, two large black horns sprouted from her head, twisting and arching forward from her forehead. When the spell had run its course it left a whimpering demon dressed in the school uniform where Vyra had just been.
Vyra was a demon. Suddenly the years of conversations we had where she lectured me about how cruel the curriculum treated demons made more sense. She had been advocating for herself. Was that why she was always so vague about her family?
“You will come with me, any resistance will only expedite your execution.”
“Vyra!” I ran to my friend that lay curled on the floor of her dorm room, all caution of respect, discretion, and my presentation thrown to the wind.
“Back away from the demon, Xavier. I will not ask again.”
“You can’t just execute her! S-Shes done nothing wrong!”
Headmaster Gelgin was true to his words, he did not ask me a second time, instead he tapped his staff on the ground and a golden circle slithered into existence from thin air around my neck. It tightened painfully around my neck, before moving into the space between where Vyra lay and the bathroom I had come from. The circle hovered two inches above my natural height, causing me to desperately hold myself up on my tiptoes to relieve the weight around my neck.
“You’ve done a number on the boy, haven’t you Ms. Thrusal? Undying loyalty is par for the course, but dressing him in your clothes like some kind of perverted doll? It’s sick enough that I will add it to your sentence. Stand.”
Vyra was nothing but a pile of sobs contained by unnatural red skin. When she raised her head to look towards Headmaster Gelgin and then me, I saw a glimmer in her icy blue eyes. They held the essence of trouble, a glint that I had become all too used to before Vyra did something reckless.
“N-no…” I barely managed to choke the words out from my restrained neck. I hated that look in her eyes. It had always spelt trouble for me, like I was mere moments away from falling into one of her pranks that she had set up. I couldn’t see the usual mirth in the glint. In the gaping absence of mirth seemed to be something entirely different.
She looked sorry.
Vyra stood with a concerning confidence considering she had just been unable to catch her breath from the choked sobs. “A girl isn’t allowed to have some fun? I have him wrapped around my finger, Gelgin. I’ve strung him up like a harpsichord, and he sings nothing but my melody.”
Him? Each time she addressed me it felt like she was peeling the skin of my fingers back. She didn’t mean it, right? Was everything we ever had a guise to form me into a familiar without even knowing it? I didn’t want to think so, every part of my body screamed at me to move towards Vyra to save her. I love her.
Is that what a familiar should feel? Was I just a doll to her? Were these emotions even real?
I watched a terrible fire form in both of her palms, something that Gelgin had obviously also seen. The two of them moved faster than I could even see, but in a short moment, a burning detonation occurred between the two of them, sending Vyra flying into the wall the her bed was pushed against, and Gelgin shattering through the wall of the dorm room and out into the hallway.
Despite my distance, I was not spared from the burst of magic where the two had clashed. I was lucky that Gelgin had lost concentration on the golden ring around my neck when he was struck before I was sent flying backwards. Had it not dispelled in time, I certainly would’ve had a snapped neck and a number of complaints that I would never be able to voice.
I slammed into the wall with a sickening crack, my limp body crashing to the floor soon after. My vision was nearly indecipherable, looking like six different interpretations of my surroundings had all been superimposed into each other to create the suggestion of sight more than the actual function of sight.
I could hear the conflict continue inside of the room as my head reeled. By the time I managed to raise my head off of the ground, I could feel a trickle of blood streaming down my neck and into the red blouse. A concussion, if ever there was one.
When I looked back up at the fight, I noticed that it had already come to a close, with Vyra choking up blood at the foot of her bed, and Headmaster Gelgin standing overtop of her. To her credit, he looked the most disheveled I had ever seen him.
With a flick of his hand, since his staff lay on the ground near the entrance, he summoned a glowing golden blade into the space next to him. I watched as his hands slowly wrapped around the hilt. When he raised the blade above his head, I cried out in desperation so forcefully I felt something tear in my throat.
“VYRA!!!”
The sword plunged into her chest, continuing until it pierced the very floor beneath her, spearing her in place with a cry of agony. I clawed my way towards her across the ground, my nails shaving off a layer of wood as I pulled my body weight along. Headmaster Gelgin spoke in a cold tone, completely unphased by his murder of a student.
“I’m off to fetch the council. They will clean up this filth. If you run from this room I will burn your retinas from the inside. A necessary precaution until we can be certain you’re freed of her influence. You understand.”
With that, he left.
“...I-I…m… sor- ry… Es-ster”
The second that I heard Vyra’s voice, I crawled up to her, wrapping my arms around her and propping her head up to put us face to face.
“No no no, please! You c-can’t leave me! I-I don’t want to be alone, please!”
I cried out in desperation as I held her face in my hands. I could see my tears dripping onto her face.
“I can’t- I can’t do anything without you! Yo-you said you’d be there every step of the way! You swore on your fucking name! Don’t leave me please!”
My tears had painted a constellation of sorrow on her cheeks. My hands grew wet as I held her face. I was not the only one crying.
“I-I’ll… be- back… for you… I-I swear on-... my name”
Through my blurry eyes, I could see her painfully raise her hands towards each other. I watched as she used her clawed fingers to carve a ‘V’ into her right palm, drawing blood and adding to the pool that collected beneath her. She then reached out towards me and waited. I knew exactly what she wanted.
When I raised my hand, she held it firmly before beginning to carve an ‘E’ into my palm, tearing through the skin and drawing blood of my own. Once she finished, she pushed our hands together, the blood pouring into each other in a final act of intimacy. She held my hand with a vice grip as she cried all of her worries out into the air.
“L-love… you… E-Ester…”
The vice grip her hand had on mine loosened as she closed her eyes for the final time, searing the image of her blue eyes into the back of my mind.
"VYRA!!!"
The love she had for me in that moment had wormed its way into my heart to stay.
I felt Cecelia’s hand brush away a tear that had started its somber descent along my face. I had been crying through the entire ending of my story, barely able to get the words out through sucking in breaths. Though she had not been crying, I could tell in her eyes that the sadness was there. I wouldn’t put it past her to hold back tears in order to focus on comforting me instead.
“It makes a lot more sense now.”
It was the first time she had spoken in the last two hours. I told her when I had begun that I didn’t want any interruptions. I wanted to get the entire story out before we talked, that way if she was disgusted with me, I didn’t have to hear that in the middle of talking.
“What does?”
“Uh… I don’t know how to say this in any way other than blunt.”
I waited patiently for her to continue, giving her the signal that I was fine with whatever blunt statement she had for me.
“The boobs. Uh, whenever you transform you’ve got boobs.”
I stared at her in confusion.
“Every time?”
“From the start.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?!”
“I thought you knew! How could you not notice!”
“Every time I transform I’m usually hunting or in a life threatening situation!”
A pause lingered in the air.
“Oh my Gods have I been naked every time?!”
“No! You’ve got shadows all over your body. But even with shadows covering you it’s pretty easy to see your… uh, assets?”
I rolled onto my side with my hands and covered my face with embarrassment. I sat and stewed in those feelings for a while, cursing every single person who had even seen my shadow form and decided to not tell me. Gods I was going to give it to the rest of the group when I saw them next.
“...You aren’t disgusted? About all of it, I mean?”
“...Should I?”
“Yes! Or-no! I’d like it if you weren’t disgusted, but why wouldn’t you if I guy wanted to be a woman?”
“Is that how you think of it? Yikes. I can see why you’ve been holding it so close to your chest. I don’t have a problem with it, bandit. I thought you looked a lot cuter as a girl in the mansion but of course I would, I’m a lesbian.”
“You… liked it?”
Cecelia smiled and moved from sitting in front of me to circle around and sit next to me. “I guess that explains some of the feelings I’ve been having.” She gave a hearty laugh. “I thought I was gonna have to stop calling myself a lesbian with how I felt about you!”
I felt a blush creep along my face. “Do you really like me? It wasn’t just Xavier you liked?”
“I like the person before me now. If you say that you’re not Xavier, then I couldn’t care less about him. You’re the one I’m interested in.”
The last part of her sentence felt like I was being caught in a web. With the fingers working their way up my arm and to my shoulder, I began to wonder if I was being trapped. Cecelia lightly brushed a hand along my cheek and turned my face to meet hers.
“Care to try this again?”
I felt my ears press down against the sides of my head. I gave a short nod with eyes wide as saucers.
“I’d love to.”
‘In the dojo? You have rooms! Use them!’
When my lips met Cecelia’s, Lilith was nothing but a distant murmur.