The square was silent, the kind of silence I had once commanded with a thought.
The boy's mother held him against her chest. His eyes were open, but they saw nothing. His breathing came in thin, shallow gasps. The black veins had left no visible marks on his skin, but whatever they had touched beneath it was not the same.
I looked at the Inker. He stood over his instruments with perfect composure. He had watched this before, would watch this again many times. The soldiers flanked him with the same indifference. The Inker's smile had not changed.
"Next," he said.
The crowd stirred -nobody moved forward. The children had all received their marks. The ones who watched no longer bounced on their feet. They stayed back, horrified. One girl was crying. It wasn't Sara. The Inker's gaze found us. It settled on me first, then Ash. "The adults, then." His voice carried across the square. "Unless they've reconsidered."
It was a challenge. One he perhaps wished we'd take him up on. Ash's hand found my wrist. "Are you still going through with this?" she whispered.
I did not pull away. "Are you?"
She looked at the boy and then at his mother. She looked at the needle the Inker was already cleaning with a cloth. "Yes," Ash said. I said nothing. She took that for what it was.
Ash stepped forward and the crowd parted for her. I watched her walk, back straight, stride steady. It was not the walk of a Hero towards death -there was a grace in that, unearned or not. This was the walk of men toward the hangman's noose. She knelt before the Inker without being asked. Something inside me clenched as I watched her.
I did not pray, but I did hope.
"Arm," he said. She extended it -the man didn't take it gently. The needle dipped into the vial and the ink shifted. The Inker pressed it to her skin.
The needle was cold against Ash's skin. Then it wasn't anything at all.
The world went away, the way it had when she'd used the Hero’s Requiem. One moment she was kneeling in the square, and the next she was somewhere else. There was complete darkness, all around her, stretching in every direction unto infinity. Ash had been here before, not this place, but places like it. The space between one breath and the next, when the Gods reached in and measured your worth. Where the [System] saw you. She wasn't surprised, not after what she had felt just moments prior.
Ash had given her life once already. That was the thought that came first, unbidden. She had given it in the throne room of the Demon Queen, had burned what she was and had called it victory. All of her had been fed to a spell carved into her soul. And then Orvyn had knelt beside her in the rubble, with tears on her face, and had taken what little was left.
Ash had died once. She had not feared it then. She feared it now, and she did not know what to make of that.
The Hero’s bone deep bravado was gone, or nearly so. Something in these last few days had loosened its grip. Was it the river or the fire? Perhaps it was a demon sitting across from her in the dark, asking questions she'd never thought to hear. Perhaps it was as simple as the sting of betrayal being sharper than the death itself.
Still, the willingness to be consumed, to step into something that might destroy her so that the one behind her would have the chance to run -that was still there. It lived in a part of her that no betrayal could reach. A hero doesn't choose who needs saving.
She thought of Lysanthia, standing at the edge of the crowd, watching her walk forward. She thought of the way Lysanthia's jaw had tightened -just barely. If the Ink killed Ash, Lysanthia would know. Lysanthia could run. Ash hoped she wouldn't. For what it might mean for this village, and all the people in it, yet she didn't want Lysanthia to die either.
How strange, that she wished Lysanthia live, when she had killed her in the first place. Ash did not understand the contradiction herself.
The darkness shifted, and something appeared. It was a screen -blue and transparent. The way a System screen should be. The way it had been, and yet not. It flickered before her like an ember in the wind.
Ash knew this. She had seen it every day of her life for twenty three years. The System had been as constant as the sky. So, it was here after all, and now it used this Ink, for some reason.
The screen was wrong. The edges were frayed, as if something had been tearing at them for a very long time. The blue was dimmer than she remembered -black lines cut across it, covering some of it. Text appeared on the screen, crawling across its surface slowly, slower than Ash remembered.
[Assessing...]
[Calculating Potential...]
There was a pause as the entire screen flickered.
[Gaining Insight...]
Then the errors came.
[WARNING: Mana signature predates current index by 984 years.]
[WARNING: Residual connection to Fate detected. Status: SEVERED. Echo strength: EXTREME.]
[WARNING: Soul level modification detected. Origin: Hero's Requiem. Classification: UNKNOWN.
[ERROR: Potential exceeds assessment parameters.]
[ERROR: Recalibrating...]
[ERROR: Recalibration failed.]
The screen shuddered and for a moment Ash thought it would shatter. It held, barely, and new text scrolled past. There were no errors now. Instead, there were titles, each slowly scrolling from the bottom of the screen to its zenith.
[The People's Champion]
[The Selfless Blade]
[Winner Of The Endless Fight]
[She Who Walked Willingly Into The Dark]
...................
Ash watched them scroll past. She did not need to think of what the titles meant or why she had them. She'd sooner have to think of her own name. The screen went still. Then, one final line came.
[The Last Hero]
The words sat in the dark for a long time. Ash stared at them. The Last. Not the greatest, or the mightiest. Her throat tightened and her hands clenched.
The screen flickered again, and new text formed. The assessment was done.
[Marks: 2]
Two. The Inker had been rather confident everyone would only receive one.
[Sovereign Mark: SEVER]
Ash felt it settle into her left arm. It was a point of heat, like a blade pressing against her skin from the inside out.
Sever: a simple word that meant cutting and separation.She understood this one immediately. It was what she had always done. She had cut through hordes…cut through generals, cut through the Demon Queen herself.
And in the end, something had cut through her. It was honest. She could accept honest.
[Cipher Mark: VEIL]
The second mark settled into her right arm. This one was softer, almost gentle. Veil: this one meant illusion, or concealment.
The sadness came so quickly she had no defense for it. It rose from somewhere deep and pressed against the back of her eyes.
It finds. That's what the Inker had said. Ash had not believed it then and she refused to believe it now. The screen flickered one last time and went dark. The world came back.
There was lanternlight. She was back in the square, back with the crowd. The Inker was standing over her, and his face had gone white. His hands were trembling. The instrument he held was shaking so finely she could hear it rattle. He had felt it.
Ash doubted he'd felt the true weight of it, of the System, but perhaps the man had felt its echo. That was enough to rattle him so.
Ash looked down at her arms, and there was a single dot on each wrist. No, the word had been Spark, right? The Sever was black, and the Veil was purple. They were so small she might have missed them, but she could feel them, warm beneath her skin. It was likely suddenly getting new fingers. Feeble fingers, but still.
She looked up at the Inker. He stared back at her. Ash smiled, and it was not a Hero's smile. Just a tired woman's.
"It seems I was found worthy after all."
"Sovereign!" The Inker's voice cracked on the word. He had to say it twice before the crowd understood. "And Cipher!"
The silence that followed was more than just reverence, there was fear there in equal measure. Only the Gods could say which of the two was stronger. I watched the silence move through them in the form of widened eyes and open mouths. The soldiers shifted their weight.
The Inker steadied himself and I watched the effort it took. His hands were still trembling when he turned to me. "You," he said. "The half-demon."
He had regained his composure, or most of it. It might have been an act, and if it was, the man was quite the performer. The sneer was back. Ash had shaken him, but he was recovering.Ash passed me on her way back and our eyes met for just a moment. She didn't speak and her arm lightly brushed mine, though she could have easily walked without touching me at all.
I stepped forward. The crowd watched me the way crowds had always watched me. With fear and with fascination. This tasted different, though I did not understand why.
I knelt. It was easy to bend this time and not because I had grown accustomed to it, but because what came next would either kill me or make me something more than what I was now. Either outcome was acceptable. Either was better than being weak. I told myself that was why.
I extended my left arm and the Inker took it -his grip was rough. "If the Ink rejects you," he said quietly, low enough that only I could hear, "I will not mourn."
"If it rejects me," I said, "I will not care either way."
The needle pressed against my skin. It was cold, and then the coldness was gone. The world fell away. I stood in darkness. It was vast, and it was not empty. Something lived here, something old enough that even I, who had lived for so very long, felt small before it.
A gaze swept over me. This weight was heavier than the one I had felt during Ash's Inking. It pressed down on every part of me at once, as if the weight of the sky had been condensed into a single stare.
My skin prickled and my teeth clenched. I knew this feeling. I had felt it once, millennia ago, when I had been little more than a child. When the path of my life had been set. When I had first been given that mighty class. I had not known then that it would culminate in the role that it did. I suspected this thing that watched me now had known it all along.
The System, or what remained of it. So it had been waiting for me after all.
A screen appeared, blue and transparent. It was cracked at the edges and smaller than I remembered it being a thousand years ago, when it had first touched my soul and told me what I was. Black lines ran over it in no pattern I could discern.
And it was afraid of me. I could feel it in the way the screen flickered. In the way the light in it dimmed and brightened. "Perhaps you have your regrets too, you bastard," I whispered to the darkness as text appeared.
[A-Assessing...]
The screen shuddered before me.
[Calculating P-Potential...]
I could feel the gaze pressing harder -whatever was behind it needed to look deeper and did not want to.
[Gaining Insight...]
Then the screen cracked more, and the light inside it fractured, splitting into jagged lines that raced across its surface. The errors did not come one at a time.
[WARNING: Mana signature predates current index by 984 years.]
[WARNING: Mana core capacity exceeds current era maximum by factor of-]
[ERROR: Value overflow. Cannot display.]
[WARNING: Soul-level reincarnation detected. Method: SELF-AUTHORED. Classification: IMPOSSIBLE.]
[ERROR: Subject has been assessed before. Prior assessment date: ??? CORRUPTED.]
[ERROR: Prior Class detected: DEMON QUEEN. Status: ERASED. Residual authority: EXTREME.]
[WARNING: Connection to divine entities detected. Status: HOSTILE.
[WARNING: Two (2) divine terminations attributed to subject.]
[ERROR: Potential exceeds assessment parameters.]
[ERROR: Recalibrating...]
[ERROR: Recalibration failed.]
[ERROR: Recalibration failed.]
[ERROR: Recalibration failed.]
[Potential: INCALCULABLE.]
The screen was shaking now. It did not want to continue but it continued anyway because that was its purpose. Its Role. Even this thing had always had its chain. I almost pitied it. There was more text, and it came fast.
[Godkiller]
[The Scourge of Stone]
[She Who Broke the Pantheon's Spine]
[The One Who Brought the Endless Night]
[Slayer of the Great Dragon Ozriel]
[She Who Burned the World Tree]
[Tamer of the Great Serpent]
These were titles. These were names the world had given me -a summation of my long life writ plain. A weight settled with each line, and this was heavier than the gaze. More titles came and went, I did not look at them, not until we came to the last one. The screen paused -longer than any pause before it.
[The Last Demon Queen]
I stared at those words. The Last. Not the strongest, though I was. Not the cruelest, though I had been. The last.
There had been Demon Queens before me. Scores of them, stretching back to the beginning of recorded history, each one a link in a chain that had bound my kind since the Gods first forged it. I had broken that chain.
The screen dimmed. The errors cleared and what replaced them was simple.
[Marks: 1]
[Sovereign Mark: REQUIEM - The Ending]
It settled into my right arm -a point of cold so sharp it felt like a blade had been pressed against my soul.
Requiem: the power to unmake.
I knew this mark -not its name, but its nature. It was me. The woman who had ended civilizations. Ended Gods. Even in a new body, in a new world, the core of what I was had not changed. I had hoped it would have.
The sadness surprised me. I had not expected it and had not known I was capable of it, not for myself, yet there it was.
The Requiem...the ending. Those words tasted like ash. Of course, what else would Lysanthia receive?
[ERROR: New Turning Detected.]
[REASSESSING….]
[Marks: 2]
[Sovereign Mark: CRADLE - The Beginning]
I froze as the second mark settled into my left arm. It was warm -something I had never felt before. The feeling was gentle, almost tender.
The Beginning.
I did not understand. I had never begun anything. I had only ever ended things. Even my own story was an ending -the last Demon Queen. What beginning could the Ink possibly have found in me? No, what beginning could this thing have found in me?
I thought of a vase made of mud and then of a flickering flame. No. I shook the thoughts away.
The screen flickered one final time and the light behind it guttered. The gaze withdrew, pulling away from me the way a hand pulls away from a flame. The darkness receded and the world came back. There was lantern light, and the Inker stood before me.
He had dropped his instrument. It lay in the dirt at his feet, ink pooling around the tip like dark blood. His face was white. His own marks were flickering, both of them. His mouth moved and no sound came out.
I looked down at my arms. One small Spark on each, left and right. They were so small, so insignificant to look upon. The left pulsed with warmth. The right pulsed with cold. Between them, I felt something I had no name for.
The crowd was silent. The Inker's lips finally moved. "Sovereign," he whispered. Then, because the word alone was not enough, "Both of them. Both how-"
He did not finish. His hand found the edge of his case, steadying himself. One of the soldiers took a step forward. Another put a hand on his arm and stopped him. I rose from my knees slowly -the way a queen rises.
I looked at the Inker, at the soldiers. at the crowd of small, frightened people who had fed me and sheltered me. Most of all, at the little girl, who had accepted something from me that hadn't been worth taking. I looked at Ash. She stood at the edge of the crowd watching me.
Something in my chest unclenched. The same thing that had loosened in the forest, when I had first seen the sky.
"It seems," I said quietly, "that I might be worthy too."
Nobody answered and nobody moved. The lanterns flickered in a breeze that came from nowhere. On my left arm, the Cradle pulsed warmth and on my right, the Requiem was pulsed cold.
And between them, the world was silent.