Euphrosyne had spent the last seven years of her life preparing to go to Aegis University. Now that she was finally standing in Kastri, with only a few miles between her and that goal, she should have felt excited. Instead, she was having a hard time not turning right the fuck back around.
Admittedly, a large part of this was because there was a good chance she was going to die if she went to Aegis, and she did not want to die again.
However, if she was being honest with herself, the biggest reason she wanted to leave, even if doing so meant risking the fate of the world, was to spite Abbess Alke.
That heinous fucking bitch.
To understand the depth of her grievance with Alke, it was necessary to go back a bit.
Until she was twelve, Euphrosyne was a normal girl who grew up alongside a whole gaggle of other orphans in a small village called Pella. The monastery they lived in was overseen by a gentle abbott named Museaus, and he and his collection of kindly monks raised Euphy and the other children in a caring, if somewhat eccentric, environment.
Back then she hadn’t appreciated it. From a child’s point of view her life in that monastery was boring, nothing at all like the high stakes and grand adventures she read about in books. She often wished she could become one of those heroes from legend, and daydreamed a great deal about what her life might be like if she was lucky enough to have a great destiny choose her.
So when she turned twelve, and began to suffer from fevers that gave her visions of living in another world, she was frightened but also very excited. It was common knowledge in Cydonia that gods sometimes rewarded mortals they particularly favored with memories of their previous lives. It was rumored that most of these people became famous or successful thanks to that advantage, and so while the process of having her current mind smashed together with her old one was far from pleasant, Euphy assumed it would be worth it.
There were a lot of useful things a person could do with knowledge from another life. Greater perspective and maturity despite a relatively young age meant a good opportunity to get ahead and make connections early, and it was also possible to strike it rich by selling inventions or knowledge from one’s previous world that had yet to be discovered here. It wasn’t exactly a big adventure or a special destiny, but as her past and present combined, the perspective she gained made the idea of a successful, cushy future sound a lot more appealing than an exciting one.
The only problem with remembering the past was that gods never gave gifts without strings attached. Some god or another almost certainly wanted her to do something for them, and she had no idea what it was.
Still, at least she didn’t have to worry about becoming a Saint, since there already was one. Those poor bastards were responsible for saving the country from Calamities, which was just about the most stressful thing Euphy could imagine. Compared to that, whatever the god wanted from her couldn’t be too bad, right?
So when the last of her memories arrived, and she finally remembered playing Rabbit Heart, and the deal with the Goddess she’d struck post mortem, her reaction to discovering her own Sainthood could best be summed up as:
Oh. Fuck.
Had someone slipped a monkey’s paw into her pocket when she wasn’t looking?
Fuck adventure! Fuck excitement!
Compared to the shit Saints historically went through, a boring life in Pella Monastery sounded practically perfect! The biggest thing she had to worry about was whether she’d gotten all the goats in, or if she’d accidentally pulled a vegetable that looked like a weed!
Now, after a few fevers, she ended up responsible for the fate of an entire country!?
Why had she made that fucking wish!? Was it too late to take it back!?
Unfortunately, it was.
Euphy wasn’t very good at lying, and so her clumsy attempts to pretend her fevers were normal were easily seen through. Even if she had managed to pull that off, the rather dramatic arrival of her divine blessing, heralded by the deafening tolling of invisible bells and sent to earth with a bolt of divine lightning so strong it blasted a crater in the monastery’s courtyard, would have been pretty difficult to hide.
The investigators sent by the Temple to look into her divine blessing got the truth out of Euphy pretty quickly, and realized to their horror that her arrival meant a new Calamity must be coming way ahead of schedule.
Even worse, the Goddess apparently needed two Saints to deal with it!
The country had survived five Calamities to date, but it had been a near thing every time, so the idea that the Sixth would be more terrible than the others was alarming to say the least.
The investigation into Euphy verified her Sainthood, and simultaneously concluded: Shit! Guys, we’re all about to be in big fucking trouble!
This news promptly sent a lot of very powerful people into a very big panic.
In the resulting dog pile, things like Euphy’s comfort and happiness ended up at the bottom of everyone else’s priorities. In their opinion, what was most important was that she be hidden, and trained, and raised into adulthood, so that when the Sixth Calamity happened they’d have her on hand to throw at it.
Their first order of business was to relocate her. So what if she wanted to stay in Pella with all the people in this world she knew and loved? They felt Pella wasn’t secure enough, and more importantly, Abbott Museaus, though he was a holy mage, was not a divine holy mage. The Temple’s policy had always been that Saints had to be mentored by teachers with the same type of divine blessing, and they weren’t about to make an exception to that rule when so much was on the line.
At the time, there were only three possible candidates for Euphy’s new guardian.
Saint Calliope herself obviously qualified, but was taken out of the running because having both Saints in one place risked losing them both to accident or assassination.
Divine High Priestess Hippolyta, who was known both for her prowess in battle and for how fun she was at parties, was the second candidate. Euphy chose her the moment she was given the option, and Hippolyta herself happily agreed to take Euphy on.
Unfortunately, she then died in an ambush by the Order less than a week after that decision.
That left Euphy with no choice but the third candidate, a woman with a notoriously cold reputation known as Divine High Priestess Alke, or as she preferred to be called, Abbess Alke.
Or, as Euphrosyne would eventually come to call her, ‘the worst fucking mentor of all time.’
Abbess Alke lived in Kos, a mountain village so remote and isolated that most Cydonians considered it a myth. The Temple’s leaders felt that was perfect, since even if Euphrosyne's identity as the Young Saint was leaked, the Order would have a hard time harassing her in a village that was nearly impossible to get to.
Unfortunately this also meant that Euphrosyne, who at the time was mourning the people she’d lost in her last life, also had to face the fact that she probably wouldn’t see or hear from anyone in Pella until her training finished.
In this merciless way, her peaceful life as a regular girl in Pella ended, replaced by a high-pressure one as the Young Saint in Kos.
Despite this, Euphrosyne was at heart an optimist. No matter how much grief or frustration she felt, she tried her best to see the silver lining in her new situation.
Abbess Alke did not have a reputation as a friendly person, but Euphy planned to give her a fair chance. After all, she’d read lots of books, and it was pretty common for the hero’s mentor to come off as mean or intimidating at first. Usually it was later revealed that their gruff behavior was just awkwardness or tough love, and that beneath it all they were actually caring and helpful people.
Alas, with Abbess Alke, there was no ‘beneath’.
She was not caring.
Or helpful.
This was because Abbess Alke only believed in self-reliance. She was a big proponent of bootstraps, as in the metaphorical things she expected people to pull themselves up by.
Euphrosyne didn’t understand the chilling depths of Alke’s convictions at first. When she initially met Alke and the Abbess told her that being the Young Saint wouldn’t get her special treatment, that she would need to learn to rely on herself to get what she needed, Euphy enthusiastically agreed.
Even if she was a Saint, she just wanted to be a normal person! Being treated like everyone else was exactly what she’d hoped for.
What she hadn’t understood was that wanting to be normal didn’t make her actual situation any less special.
For example, everyone at Kos Monastery was expected to do chores and pray and study, children and adults alike. However, since she’d one day have to fight the evil cult of an undead god, Euphrosyne also had to undergo rigorous physical and magical combat training on top of that.
The result was a packed schedule right off the bat, but since she knew those skills might save her life one day, she hadn’t protested. In fact, things might have been just fine if Euphy’s special requirements had stopped there.
However, training wasn’t enough. Euphy also had to get accepted into Aegis University to complete her god-given mission, and that meant she needed to learn a lot of subjects that weren’t taught at Kos Monastery, which added extra hours of independent study on top of said packed schedule.
Another problem in addition was that the library there didn’t cover all the subjects she needed, which meant she had to buy or borrow new books.
Surely a simple enough issue to solve, right?
Except, when she approached the Abbess for help, she was rejected.
“It isn’t my job, or the Temple’s job, to solve your problems for you. If you expect everything to be handed to you just because you’re a Saint, you might as well give up now and let Calliope do your mission for you.”
Euphy hadn’t been able to believe it. “Wait, what?”
Wasn’t she doing all of this extra study for the Temple? Did Alke think applying to university so she could fight doomsday-hungry lunatics was her personal hobby?
Alke said, “If you want books, buy them yourself. If you need money, work for it. The healers here could always use an extra hand. Put in some of your spare hours with them.”
“Work when!? What spare hours!? You’re the one who designed my schedule, I won’t even have time to eat, what is wrong with you?!”
“You’ll figure it out,” Alke said, ending the conversation.
Euphy eventually learned that most conversations with Alke ended that way.
Well, Euphy did figure it out. What she figured out was that shipping textbooks to nearly-inaccessible mountain towns was ten times the price of the books themselves, and since she was a foundling in this life, Euphy had no inheritance money to draw from. Even if she worked every chance she had, the Temple paid very little, and the odd jobs she could pick up around Kos were for people who were just as poor as she was. Plus, since she had no family backing, she couldn’t even get a loan without help from Alke, who of course refused to do so!
The result was that, in addition to chores and lessons and training and independent study, Euphy worked a whole fucking lot.
What was free time? What was recreation, what was socialization, what was sleep? Those were things for people who weren’t in the clutches of a madwoman!
And try as she might, there was no escaping it.
If Euphy tried to leave Kos then Alke would track her down and drag her back. If Euphy tried to send letters to the Temple or Abbot Museaus for help then Alke would destroy them. If Euphy told anyone in the monastery or the town what was going on they’d just say something like: “Oh, dear, you’ll appreciate it when you’re older.”
To which Euphy would reply, “Oh? Then you come appreciate it with me right now if it’s so great! No? Then shut your mouths, you useless fucking roaches!”
Ah, but what about the tuition for Aegis? A sky-high cost that Euphrosyne could not make even if she worked for two lifetimes, surely that would get covered, or at least, subsidized, discounted… anything!?
Alke said, “Your education, your responsibility. I wouldn’t pay to send any of my other monks to such an expensive university, so why should I pay for you?”
To which Euphy, who at this point had dealt with Alke’s shit for a few years, replied, “You crazy bitch, in what world is that the fucking same!?”
She couldn’t understand it. What was wrong with Alke? Why wouldn’t you help someone if it was easy to do so? Especially someone working for the same organization, towards the same goal, as you? Was it meant to be a lesson? If so, what was the lesson? That life was hard and no matter who you were and no matter how many people were around you still might end up on your own?
Well, she’d already learned that lesson! She’d lost all of her friends and her family and the place she’d grown up in twice! So why did everyone in Kos act like it was so wrong to want things to be a little easier just once in a fucking while!?
No, more importantly, what the fuck had the Goddess and the Temple been thinking, leaving Euphy with this woman!?
Without financial help from the Temple, the only way Euphy could get into Aegis was on scholarship, and the only way to do that was to get grades high enough to qualify for them. This meant that not only did Euphy have to pay for books so she could study to pass the entrance exams, she had to fucking ace them!
Exams she also had to pay to take!
Fuck!
But no matter how long or how loudly she argued, Alke stubbornly refused to give her assistance.
Alke felt that paying for anything at all would be a handout, and Alke did not do handouts.
Alke felt that if something was worth doing, then you ought to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and do it yourself, even if you were a literal child.
Euphrosyne, who as a result of this belief was then worked to emotional and physical exhaustion from ages thirteen through nineteen, said to Alke after her final bootstraps-themed lecture:
“Fuck your bootstraps! You want bootstraps, how about I strangle you with my bootstraps, you sadistic son of a bitch!?”
She would have said more, but by that point the other monks knew to drag her out of Alke’s office.
Still, she’d done it! Sure, she spent her teenage years transforming into a paranoid, under-socialized, money-obsessed workaholic, but she’d fucking figured it out, hadn’t she!? She’d gotten the books, she’d gotten the highest score on the entrance exams, she’d gotten the scholarship, and she was ready to finally get the hell out of Kos when at the last minute she received some troubling news.
Those scholarship funds she’d been awarded, the ones she needed to pay for her transportation to Aegis?
They’d been registered in the wrong name due to a clerical error, and thus she couldn’t access them from what passed for a bank in Kos. Even worse, the moment the issue was discovered, the amount of money meant a potentially serious fraud case, so the university’s bank automatically froze those funds and filed a report with the judiciary. If Euphy could have afforded a lawyer then that lawyer could have worked things out on her behalf, but since she couldn’t her only option was to go to the university’s bank in Kastri with her baptismal amulet and personal records to correct the error in person.
Kastri, coincidentally, being the city Euphy needed that money to get to in the first place, on account of it being across the entire fucking continent!
Her dad from her past life used to say if he ever met God he’d probably try to fight Him.
Euphy, a former agnostic who’d originally taken being chosen by the Dread Lady in stride, now understood where he was coming from.
If she ever saw Her again, she was going to give Her a piece of her mind, and also her fists.
When she told the Abbess what happened with her scholarship, she hadn’t bothered to ask for help.
By then, she knew better than to try.
Anyway, the Abbess’ only response was to laugh.
Euphy laughed too. Then, she went back to her cell and laid down on the floor and cried for a few hours because come on!
When it was time to leave Kos and head to Kastri, Euphy said goodbye to everyone except Alke.
The one bright side to traveling across an entire continent with almost no money was that she never had to see Alke’s face again if she did it.
Anyway, she didn’t need anyone else’s help, did she?
It wasn’t like she had anyone to rely on even if she did.
Two weeks and a thousand plus miles later, she finally stepped off the ferry from Eleusis and into Kastri. Her stomach was empty and her head felt light since she currently had no money left for food. The capital city had eaten up almost all of what she’d managed to earn on her trip, and the ferry ticket had taken the rest.
Despite this, she felt too happy to let it bother her. All she had left to do was go to the university’s bank, resolve the scholarship issue, and then she could finally wash her hands of seven years in hell and go eat a really, really big breakfast.
She made it to the bank, and there she took a close look at the paperwork that’d caused her so much trouble.
She’d always thought it was strange an issue came up with it at all. She’d filled that form out herself, she’d triple checked it to make sure she’d done it right, and her handwriting was very neat and easy to read. So what could have caused the problem?
Well, it turned out that someone had used ink just like the one she wrote in to edit a few of the letters. Nothing huge, just a few additions here and there to make some important spellings impossible to make out. Whoever did it must have done it after she’d sealed it into an envelope herself, because the mana seal she’d put on it was broken, and the envelope was carelessly re-sealed with cheap glue, like they hadn’t cared enough to even try to hide it.
She knew who’d done it, of course.
The entire time she’d been in Kos, only one person had ever tampered with her mail, and only one person would be insane enough to think hiking alone down a continent was a reasonable thing to force on a teenager.
She resolved the issue with the bank, apologized for the confusion, and went back out into the street. Standing among the tall marble buildings of Kastri’s business district, she looked down the wide open road and at the beautiful turquoise sea rolling beyond it, and wondered:
Hey, should she just fucking quit?
Surprisingly enough, she’d never considered rejecting the Goddess’ mission before. After all, people’s lives were on the line, and as a girl who’d wanted to be a doctor in her last life and had gone on to become a healer in this one, she cared a lot about saving people.
However.
Everyone had a limit, right? As awful as it sounded, leaving Cydonia to its fate really was an option. Nobody, god or mortal, could make her save the stupid country if she just left.
Anyway, if Alke was right and Euphy was too irresponsible to be the Saint, then Alke could just fill in for her! Alke could also explain to Saint Calliope and the other Temple leaders why the Young Saint had quit on the eve of their newest apocalypse. She was sure Alke would probably frame it as Euphy being a coward or something, but she couldn’t find it in herself to care.
In fact, she couldn’t seem to feel anything at all. She finally had money to eat, but she no longer had any hunger. All that was left was a cold, sinking weight in her gut, and somehow at the same time a weird sensation of impossible lightness. It was as though she’d been pulled down to earth so hard and fast that she’d shot right back out of her body, and her soul was now drifting along behind herself, in danger of just floating away altogether.
No, wait. If she dug beneath that and looked, really looked, she could see that she still felt something.
It just turned out that the emotion in question was pure, unbridled fury.
In this life and the previous, Euphy hadn’t always been good at handling her anger. Her brain tended to pick up any unfamiliar complex emotion and go, ‘Is this rage?’
However, she’d gotten a lot better at that over time. She’d been through a great deal of therapy, and she’d learned techniques and processed a lot of stuff that helped her resolve or control the majority of it.
Too bad none of that seemed to be helping her now.
She wanted to destroy something, she wanted to hurt someone, but more than anything else she wanted to kill Alke.
She didn’t normally want to kill people, but she couldn’t help but feel like revenge, in this instance, was appropriate. People could tell her she’d been manipulated and mistreated for her own good until they were blue in the face, but that would not change the fact that she was genuinely horrified by the idea that the madwoman she’d finally left behind could still reach into her life a thousand miles away.
At this point, killing Alke felt less like murder and more like self defense.
And what could the Temple do if she did it, anyway? Even if they arrested her, they’d still have to solve their stupid Sixth Calamity on their own. She’d cheer for them from prison, then write a memoir about all the bullshit she’d been through just because those incompetent assholes had handed her over to a monster.
Even if it meant she had to admit they’d only done so because the Goddess who’d chosen her had also chosen that monster.
The Goddess was a good person, right? If so, why had She done that? Was it because Alke really wasn’t that bad, and Euphy’s feelings were just an exaggeration? Everyone she’d talked to said it was for her own good, so did that mean she deserved to be treated like this? That she was being ungrateful to feel so upset over it all?
More than anything, she wished she had someone to talk to.
Going to college wasn’t supposed to be like this, and she knew that because in her old life she’d planned it all out. She and Joseph were supposed to get into the same school so they could face the stress of semi-adulthood together. Her dad and Auntie Maria would have driven them to—well, not Aegis, probably the University of Arizona or something like it—and even after they’d dropped them off, she’d know their help was just a phone call away.
It didn’t feel fair that all those people were gone now, that they’d been gone since she was born into this world, only she hadn’t known that until she’d gotten those goddamned fevers.
Sometimes she thought it would be better if she didn’t remember.
If she didn’t know that somewhere else there would have been people on her side, people who’d support her and love her unconditionally, would it have felt as painful to miss it?
Despite her anger, she did not leave.
In the hours it took to walk out of Kastri and up the mountain to Aegis, fury became fatigue.
She regretted not forcing herself to eat earlier, because now her stomach clenched painfully and her focus was extra scattered. People who used a lot of lunar magic tended to need more calories and to eat more often than normal people, so the effect of missing breakfast and then doing something strenuous like walking up a mountain was hitting her harder than it would most.
The road she was on now was framed by thick forest on either side. When she looked out into it, she could see the occasional solemn metal pylon, the near-invisible shimmer of wards slung between them. Pausing, she licked her lips and considered leaving the road to find something to eat. There were no rules about hunting or gathering on unwarded land, so nobody would stop her if she slipped through and poked around for breakfast.
However, unwarded land was unpredictable. She might run into monsters, or mana scars, or spatial distortions, and while she felt like she was capable of handling most of the things she might encounter, doing so on an empty stomach seemed like it might be worse than finishing her walk.
Plus…
She looked down at herself, frowning. Her tan skin, which had darkened further over weeks of travel, was glistening with sweat. Every inch of her, from her worn brown boots to her faded yellow robes, was covered in travel dust.
Did she really want to add blood to the mix? Sure, her lunar blessing helped her hit stuff really hard, but one of its conditions made her terrible at cleaning cantrips. If she tried to use one anyway, there was a chance she might accidentally disintegrate some of what she was wearing again, which wouldn’t be embarrassing as long as she was too deep in the woods to be seen, but…
She only owned three outfits!
Could she really justify having to buy new clothes just because she’d been too impatient to wait for a bath!?
Hey, Celestial Eight-in-One… why’d you guys have to give me such an inconvenient restriction…?
She was too pissed at the Dread Lady to pray to Her right now, but Euphy and the Eight were still cool, Their weird blessing conditions aside. How the gods of the moon were supposed to help her out of her current situation was unclear, but that didn’t stop her from complaining to Them.
Ahh, I just want to eat and take a bath! What jerk decided to put this stupid school on top of a frickin’ mountain? Eight, I already walked a continent, seriously you guys, take pity on me or I’m gonna go to your altar and cry…
She gave a pitiful sniffle, then resolved to suck it up and endure. As soon as she got to campus, she could find food, and her room, and soak in a bath for a few hours minimum, and then… oh god, she had to check in with her new guardian, didn’t she?
For a moment, all the feelings she had about Alke that had faded from fatigue came back. This time her attempt to convert her anger went a little better. After all, her new guardian was from Rabbit Heart, so she knew a lot about him already. Plus, in the game he’d been very sweet and helpful, nothing at all like Alke.
Worst case scenario, even if they didn't get along, she could just ignore his personality and admire his pretty face.
By the time she made it to Aegis’ gates, her long pink hair had plastered itself to her skin in all the most inconvenient ways possible, and she was feeling hungry enough to wonder if it might be worth it to chew on the leather strap of her bag.
Despite her poor physical condition, she was actually in a better mood now that she’d started thinking of the game.
After all, going to Aegis wasn’t just for the Goddess, it was to meet Her chosen Heroes too. It felt a little weird to know so much about a bunch of people she’d never met, but at the same time, it also sort of felt like Euphy already had friends waiting for her.
She just wouldn’t tell them that, because she felt creepy for thinking it.
More importantly, she wasn’t the only one going through a hard time! Their lives also sucked and she was going to help them with that, damn it! The Temple and the Goddess might have botched her life but she wasn’t going to let their incompetence fuck over her new friends! Good endings only for everybody!
Now she just had to figure out a way to politely explain to a bunch of pseudo-strangers that she knew some of their possible futures and also their deepest darkest secrets without freaking them out!
On second thought, she was going to stop thinking about that problem because it was making her anxious.
Anyway, none of the game’s meet-cutes with the Heroes were supposed to happen for at least a few days. That meant she’d get some time to settle in! Surely after everything she’d been through, a few days of relaxing wasn’t too much to ask?
It wasn’t, right?
As she came through the gate, she noticed a person walking swiftly towards her. She tried very hard to un-notice them, just in the off chance stress and hunger was making her hallucinate, but it didn’t seem to be working.
No. Come on.
Goddess!?
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!
The woman heading towards her was hard to confuse with anyone else. The long blood-red hair, the eye patch, and the cold face that’d haunted Euphy’s nightmares since she’d remembered Rabbit Heart were pretty unmistakable.
Her brand new nemesis looked like she was about to tackle her. Shocked, Euphy flinched and took a step back, and so Ianthe grabbed onto her arm instead.
Wow. All those years of combat training were totally useless, huh? The moment the villainess actually appeared she froze like a damn deer in the headlights, and try as she might, she couldn’t seem to get her body to move.
Wasn't this a little unfair!? This definitely hadn’t been in the game!
Confronted by the villainess before she could even get in the damn school, could things get any worse!?
“Alphonse?” President Ianthe asked, the intense stare of her one uncovered eye boring into Euphy’s soul. “Do you recognize me?”
Oh. Oh, okay, so it could get worse.
Her mistake.
New title for my personal memoir: ‘I was Dead-Named by the Villainess’, Euphy’s idiot brain chattered in lieu of doing anything useful.
The woman’s grip tightened on her arm and she pulled her closer, looking down at Euphy as she demanded, “Do you know who I am!?”
Euphy thought a few useless things in quick succession:
Firstly, shouldn’t Ianthe be taller? It looked like she only had a handful of inches on Euphy, who was a shrimp herself. Somehow, despite also being short, her initial reaction to a shorter-than-expected Ianthe was the disappointed thought that she’d have been scarier if she’d been tall enough to loom properly. This was exactly the kind of scenario high heels were made for, but it looked like Ianthe was in flats for some reason.
Secondly, was it just her, or did Ianthe look like she’d been through the wars? In the game she always appeared as an impeccably elegant woman with a perfect appearance, but this Ianthe was wearing no makeup, her skin was waxy, her clothing wrinkled, her hair messy and poorly braided. Looking at where Ianthe grabbed her, Euphy couldn’t help but notice that even her fingernails had been bitten to the quick. The only part of her that looked alive was her eye, which was burning with an almost feverish desperation… or maybe with just an actual fever. Euphy’s healer instincts were pretty confident Ianthe was sick.
Thirdly, destined enmity aside, there was something strange about Ianthe that Euphy couldn’t put her finger on, an uncomfortable dissonance between her expectation of Ianthe and what was actually in front of her. Clearly this was the woman who planned to kill her—no, not just her, all of the good guys from Rabbit Heart, and countless innocent Cydonians who’d get caught in the crossfire!
So why did realizing Ianthe was sick make her feel a little concerned?
Euphy, who’d been gaping soundlessly like a fish this whole time, finally snapped out of it at that last thought.
What the hell? Who gave a shit if the villainess was sick, that wasn’t Euphy’s problem! More importantly, how the hell did she know that name!? What the fuck did that mean!?
She had to get out of here!
“Of… of course I recognize you,” Euphy said, trying for a polite smile, but her helplessly twitching lips landed her closer to a tortured smirk instead. “You must be Aegis’ famous President? To what do I owe the honor…?”
“You…” Ianthe trailed off, her eyebrows furrowing in anger. Perhaps realizing she was accosting a random student in full view of everyone else, she suddenly let go of Euphy and took a step back. “I… just wanted to talk to you about something, if you could come to my office…”
Nope!
Not happening.
There was no way Euphy was going to a second location with fucking Ianthe of all people!
“I—I’m sorry, I think you have me confused for somebody else, and I really need to get going.”
“Wait! Just give me a few minutes to explain," Ianthe said, but Euphy was already moving, and she quickly dodged around her.
“Sorry! I’m late for something. I hope you find who you’re looking for, bye!”
She’d hoped she wouldn’t have to make it obvious that she wanted to get away from Ianthe, but she gave up on that now, and her fast walk quickly turned into an outright run, because…
Holy fuck!
Shit! Damn! What the hell!?
She headed for a crowd of people and tried to disappear into them, and then she turned a corner and slipped into the first door she saw. Unsure what building she was in, she didn’t slow down, just changed her run to a frantic fast walk, her hands threatening to break the straps of her bag in their white-knuckled death grip.
How did Ianthe know her dead name from her last world!? She hadn’t even told the Temple investigators that name, she’d never even written it in her diary, and it wasn’t like Ianthe could have just guessed since it was, in no shape or form, a Cydonian name!
That probably meant Ianthe knew she was a Saint, right? Why else would she have approached her? It also meant Ianthe might know about Rabbit Heart, and if that was true, didn’t that mean she and the rest of the country were totally screwed?
While she never intended to forgive Alke for her bullshit, Euphy had to admit that she’d been so focused on surviving the attention of one crazy woman that she’d kind of forgotten about the danger posed by the other crazy woman. Such as the fact that, in all of the game’s endings, Ianthe tried to sacrifice Euphrosyne to summon a world-ending titan. It was a scenario that was upsetting on multiple levels, because not only did it involve someone murdering her, but if she wasn’t able to avoid that fate, her death would then result in getting everyone else in the country killed too!
Now that she was here, millions of lives depended on every single choice she was about to make, and somehow she was already fucking it up.
Earlier that day, Euphy’d thought to herself that everyone had a limit.
At the time, she’d believed Alke was that limit.
Nope! She’d been wrong.
This? This was her limit.
She emerged from one building and headed toward another. A quick check around her showed that Ianthe didn’t seem to be following, but she wasn’t willing to slow down. She needed to find her dorm, and fast, so she could lock the door and hide until she could figure out what to do.
She also realized with some alarm that she wasn’t feeling very well. She was breathing too fast, those breaths were too shallow, and the lack of oxygen was making her dizzy. She knew she needed to calm down, but there were too many people around her, and that was making her even more anxious.
Ahead of her, shining like a lighthouse in a storm, was the dorm she’d been looking for. She charged into it, dodging random people as she blinked against the little black spots now swarming her vision.
As a healer, she had a more objective view and a deeper level of control over her body than normal people. She tried using magic to calm herself, and managed to regulate her breathing a little, but there wasn’t much she could do to address the one-two punch that was low blood sugar and a severely freaked out amygdala.
Luckily, she located her room pretty quickly. Though she couldn’t think very well, she was sure it was correct because she’d been so anxious about the idea of walking into the wrong room on her first day that she’d practically engraved that number into her soul. She grabbed the handle, pulling the door open easily, if rather loudly, and walked right into the empty room.
Thank goodness.
She was alone.
Now she could freak out as much as she liked.
She dropped her bag, paused, and was surprised to find that she seemed to be falling backwards into darkness without actually moving.
Huh.
Her body caught up to her mind and relocated itself to the floor without her permission.
So this is what fainting feels like?
She’d never fainted before. It was floppier than she’d expected. Also, strangely relaxing, like falling asleep while still being half awake.
Wow, she thought. I’m never skipping breakfast again.