My horde was dying, and I had never been more relieved. Not that I could show it.
The Demon Queen was supposed to rage, scream and swear vengeance. Thousands of years of history demanded it. So I stood there, watching the battle through the eyes of my fortress.
Outside, the Order of the Silver Pegasus flew through a crimson sky, golden lances lowered at my demons. Very heroic. Below them, the Band of the Golden Dawn carved into whatever Imps, Fiends and Hellhounds I'd bothered to muster.
White fire rained in from their mages. Elemental magic was nuisance enough, but Holy Magic was far deadlier, and the combined forces arrayed against me had that to spare.
It was a shame I had wiped out the Dwarves so thoroughly -their dark magic had at least been interesting to watch.
We were losing, something that might have frustrated me once.
A thought was all it would take to change things. I needed to ask, and the world, the [System] would answer. The temptation, the pull, was still there, faint. I fought against it. It was all the slack my chain had.
"Your Royal Darkness, the horde is fighting well!" An almost serpentine voice whispered behind me.
Seryth was one of my more loyal retainers, though even she would stab me in a heartbeat if she thought she'd live long enough to draw her blade. She was also wrong. The horde was fighting pathetically.
She simply told me what she thought I wanted to hear.
"I suppose."
"The intruders are approaching, Great Mistress."
"I am aware."
I had felt their presence for some time. I could feel everything within my fortress. It was as much a part of me as my flesh and blood. They had slowly worked their way through the many floors of my fortress and had slain some of my Generals.
Malrath had died first. His constant boasting hadn't kept him from folding under a Hero's Sword. Zarvok had fallen next, and then his sister Zera, who'd died trying to avenge him.
Orzathiel had fallen two minutes ago. That fight had lasted half an hour. It had taken them some time to kill him fifteen times. I'd killed him fourteen myself, back when I was rising through the ranks. I'd spared him his last life, and he'd given me his loyalty for it. As much loyalty as a demon could give another, anyway.
The doors to my chamber exploded inward. The shockwave ran through the floor and up through my legs.
"Humans? You dare?!" Seryth hissed.
I didn't need to turn to see.
"Foul demons, this is where you were hiding?" A rough, angry voice shouted. It was the kind of voice that belonged to a Hero who'd just cleared a Demon Queen's castle. They always sounded like that.
"Ash, wait up! I know how you feel, but-" A feminine voice cut off, presumably as she stepped into view and saw the people who stood within.
"You filthy mongrels dare look upon the Demon Queen with those wretched gazes of yours?!" Seryth cried and then lunged.
There was a burst of mana, enough that the air picked up. There was a scream. It came from Seryth's throat. They had seen through her illusion that quickly? Now that was a surprise.
I finally turned to regard the Hero's Party. They were the fourth, since I'd become Queen.
A Hero. A Sage. A Saint. A Warrior.
The Hero and the Warrior were men, the Saint and the Sage were women. That's how it always was. How it had to be.
No matter how many decades passed, some things always stayed the same. Perhaps that was simply how the world worked. Just as there was always a Demon Queen, there always had to be a troupe of misfits to fight her.
The Hero -Ash- stepped forward. He moved over Seryth's corpse. The woman was already decaying, her body turned into wisps of mana and aether.
"You are the Demon Queen, then?" the Hero asked, raising his blade in front of him. It shone a brilliant white, casting back the shadows in the room. "Lysanthia?"
I didn't answer. Instead, I looked into the Hero's shadow. The God of War clung there. The God of Time. Haste. Skies. Fate. At least a dozen lesser divinities crowded in behind them, jostling over a single mortal.
The rest of his party would have their own divine backers.
It seemed the heavens had finally come to claim me after all. Good. I had been waiting for a very long time. With this much power in one place, I could finally achieve it. That which even I, the strongest Demon Queen in this world's history, could not do on her own.
But it had to look convincing. Fate was watching, as she always did, and she would not release me for anything less than a proper ending.
I had played my Role long enough. It was time to see if this Hero could end it.
What remained of the Demon Castle was rubble and silence.
Ash's sword bit into the ground. Without it, her legs would have given out entirely. "Elowen? Are you okay?"
The Sage was lying face down, a small trickle of blood leaking from beneath her. Damn it.
"Orvyn?"
"I'm alive," the woman croaked out, sounding like she was moments away from death. Ash didn't dare turn around to see her, afraid of what she might find.
Ronan was dead. He'd charged the Demon Queen first, because of course he had. One swing of that obsidian sword had split him clean in half. The strongest man Ash had ever known, and one attack was all it had taken to end him.
The Demon Queen now stood in front of Ash. She was exactly as Ash had heard -and somehow more terrible all the same.
She was pale enough that she looked wrong, with eyes that bled a mix of white and red. Dark hair trailed down her back, reaching the floor. Horns -curved and silver- framed her regal face. Her clothing was a mix of mostly black with red accents, trailing down her body, as thin and flattering as any dress yet sturdier than any armor.
The only thing Ash's strongest attack had done was chip it.
After all of this, they were going to die. The journey they had set out on five years ago would come to its end, and it would be a bitter, pointless end. All of the people who had prayed for their success would soon be swallowed by the horde.
Somewhere beyond the walls, the horde was faltering. It wouldn't last. Nothing would, once the Demon Queen was done here, once this distraction was squashed.
"Tell me, Hero," the Demon Queen's voice was soft, too soft to belong to someone so deadly. "Does your Role not chafe at you?"
What? What the hell was she saying?
Ash grunted and channeled more of her mana. She could feel it very faintly now. Her aura was even fainter, but she could coat her sword for another few blows. That would have to be enough for a last stand.
"I'm going to kill you, Demon," Ash hissed, reaching deep inside of herself.
The Demon Queen sighed and stepped forward. "Please, do not shout pointless platitudes at me. I have heard them before. They are no more interesting the tenth time around."
Many other great warriors had tried to kill the Great Demon Queen over the last fifty years. This woman spoke of them and their struggles as if none of them amounted to the dirt beneath her boots.
"Oh?" The Demon Queen paused and tilted her head.
"What?" Ash growled, buying time. She needed time to cover her sword again, when she had so little aura left.
"You're a woman?"
Ash froze. Had her illusion failed her? Was she that out of mana? She didn't dare look to check, but if Lysanthia had said it, then it must have been so.
"Does it matter?" Ash growled. Her sword was starting to glow again. "Man or woman, I'm still going to kill you."
Lysanthia smiled. "No, I suppose it doesn't matter. I was just surprised my eyes didn't catch the illusion immediately. How cruel -it seems your talent lies more in the subtle arts, and yet the Gods made you a Hero."
"Shut up," Ash hissed and took a step forward. She thought she could feel her bones creak. Her wounds split wider inside her.
"I will ask you again: does your Role not chafe at you?"
Ash still didn't know what this Demon was asking, no more than she had understood the first time.
Her mana core was all but drained, and her aura reserves were no better. The only thing she could feel was her connection to the Gods, but they had already given her all of the help they could give a mortal vessel. There was nothing left.
Well, there was one thing. One last resort.
"Not yet," Ash growled.
"Finally." The Demon Queen smiled.
It was an odd reaction. Ash paid it no mind as she reached deep into herself for the spell that had been carved into her soul from the moment she had first become a Hero.
It was past her shattered mana core. Past the hollow where her aura reserves had been. Past every blessing the Gods had poured into her over five long years. There was something beneath all of it, carved so deep it wasn't written in mana or aura at all -it was written in her.
The Hero's Requiem.
The fuel for it was simpler than any spell she had ever cast. It burned what you were. Ash reached for it, and something answered.
The first thing to go was a memory. She didn't choose which one. It simply left -pulled from her like thread from cloth. One moment it was there, and the next there was a gap where it had been. She couldn't even remember what she'd lost. Only that she was less than she had been a moment ago.
More followed, faster now. Ash felt her connection to fate unraveling, strand by strand. Her place in the world's story -the thread that had pulled her from a nameless village to the steps of this throne- came loose and burned to nothing. With every heartbeat, there was less of her and more of something else.
Power. Raw and blinding and impossibly vast.
Color poured from her skin. Every color she knew, and some she had never seen before. Some nobody would ever see again. They spilled across the ruined floor, crawled up the shattered walls, bled into the air until the chamber looked like nothing real.
Ash looked down at her own hands and didn't recognize them. They were nothing but light.
"I ask again," the Demon Queen called out. "Does your Role chafe at you, Hero?"
The words cut through the noise. Through the light and the roaring and the loss. Ash understood now. Some small portion of it, at least. The question was simple: whether or not she had regrets.
But Ash thought of Ronan, who had charged first because he always charged first. She thought of Elowen, bleeding on the floor. She thought of Orvyn, still alive somewhere behind her. She thought of every village that had fed them, every stranger who had pressed their hands together and prayed for their victory.
The five years it took to get here all compressed into a single word.
"No."
The word felt heavier than anything Ash had ever said. The Demon Queen's smile widened. Ash could not understand why.
The power gathered in her sword. It glowed with every color she knew, and many she would never know again, many nobody outside this room would ever know.
She looked at the Demon Queen. Her adversary looked back. Something shifted on Lysanthia's face.
It was small, barely a flicker. Lysanthia's weight moved, just slightly, to her back foot. One of her hands twitched at her side. Ash saw it all, illuminated by brilliant light.
It was fear. Fear on the face of the woman who had killed her friend and many more besides. Ash held that image. It was the last clear thing she would ever see. It could have been worse.
"Now, come, Hero!" the Demon Queen roared. Her eyes were wide. "Make this a fitting end to your part in this folly!"
"Die!" Ash roared, stepped forward, and swung her sword.
Glyphs and Runes glowed green across the floor, stretching out to cover the entire chamber. Ash had no time to think about them.
The world went white.
Ash choked, coughed, and wheezed all at once.
She lay in a crater. It was all that remained after her final attack. No -not rubble. There was no rubble. There was nothing at all. The fortress was gone. The walls, the floors, the throne room -all gone.
There was no ceiling above her. There was just the open sky.
She couldn't feel much. Her legs didn't seem to want to move. It was all Ash could do to raise her hands above her. Her left hand was blackened, missing the last two fingers. Her right appeared fine. It was odd. Ash wondered why, even as something inside of her started to slip away.
Ash couldn't feel her mana core anymore, couldn't feel her aura either. Both had been shattered with that last attack. Still, the job was done. And so, the last thing Ash Vale could do was complain.
A figure appeared in view, far off to the side and so very distant. For a moment, Ash's heart felt like it had stopped beating. Then she saw who it was.
It was Orvyn. She looked small from down here. Ash let out a relieved sigh as her friend jumped into the crater, landing with a loud thud. Then Orvyn began to run and stumble towards her.
"Ash!" she cried out, stopping short. "You're…a woman?"
"Y-yeah," Ash coughed out. There was no point hiding it now.
Orvyn slowly nodded her head, and then her hands began to glow with green mana. Ash didn't know why the woman was bothering, not when Ash's fate was already sealed.
"Orvyn… the Demon Queen," Ash croaked out. "Is she dead?"
Orvyn nodded. "She's dead. There's nothing left but ash."
Something in Ash's chest unclenched. She had actually fulfilled her Role, then. The world would be saved. Without their Queen, the headless horde would find that the forces they had gathered were no trifling foes. It was done.
Orvyn's face twisted.
"It's okay," Ash coughed, spitting out blood. "There is nothing you can do."
Orvyn's face was oddly blank. It was an expression Ash had never seen before.
"You will live."
"What?" Ash couldn't believe the words she had heard. The odds of her surviving that attack were slim to none, and yet she would live? To call Ash the luckiest of the Ten Fools would be a gross understatement.
Orvyn's hand reached down and wiped the blood from Ash's cheek. It was gentle, the way she always was after the fighting was done. There had been something there, if only Ash had never hid herself. Too late now. Or at least, she had thought it would be too late.
"Then…that place you talked about. The one by the river," Ash whispered. "You said…you said you would show me. When the fighting was done. We can go now."
Orvyn didn't answer.
"And for Ronan," Ash took a deep breath. "He'd want to rest beside his brother, on that hill." Only then did Ash notice that Orvyn was still shaking.
"Why…why are you crying, Orvyn?" Ash coughed out.
"I did not wish it to be this way." Orvyn reached down, reached somewhere Ash couldn't see. She pulled out a dagger. It was the purest black, such that it seemed to suck in the light.
Ash's breath caught when she saw it. That was not a thing her friend should have had. "Orvyn?"
"I'm sorry."
Ash felt the sting of the blade. She coughed, and this time there was more blood. She stared up at Orvyn. The pain was just a tiny thing. What she felt most of all was the betrayal. The horror. The shock. Finally, the confusion.
Why?
"It has to be this way," Orvyn wept.
Ash stopped listening. Instead, another set of words rang in her ear at her dying breath.
Does your Role chafe at you, Hero?
For the very first time, it did. Ash, the strongest Hero, slayer of Lysanthia, the strongest Demon Queen…died.
And the world was remade.