The Demon Queen Wants To Live.

“You lied to me.” Ash stared. The words had come out sharper than I had intended, and yet not sharper than they deserved to. The chamber was empty, and the doors had sealed behind the Inker’s retreating back. It was just the two of us now.

“What?” Ash’s voice was careful. Her hand had extended towards me, and it still hovered there. The confusion on her face was plain enough. She was hurt. I could see it in the set of her jaw, in the way the warmth left her eyes. Good. That meant she was listening.

I held her gaze. “You are deliberately holding yourself back. Did you think that I would not notice? Do you consider me a fool?”

“Lys, I don’t understand what you’re-”

“Your core filled at the same time as mine.” Ash went still. “My mana core,” I continued, “is many times the size of yours. You should have filled yours long before I filled mine. The only way they finished at the same time is if you slowed yourself down. Deliberately.” I folded my arms. “As for this business of forming an Essence Core -it is not that complex. You said you did not understand the method that man explained. I think too highly of you to believe you could not have figured it out. You are the slayer of the Demon Queen. You are not a fool. Do not take me for one either.”

The silence stretched between us. Ash’s hand finally fell to her side. She looked at the far wall, at the crystal walls that held shifting light in their strange patterns. At anything but me. She looked smaller than she had just a few moments ago. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I slowed down.”

“Why?” I pressed.

She did not answer. She did not answer for so long that I pressed again. “Was the pain too much? I find that difficult to believe, given what you must have endured when you-”

“It wasn’t the pain.” Her voice was low.

“Then what was it?”

Ash was quiet for a long time. Her jaw worked. Whatever sat behind her teeth, she was not letting it out willingly. I waited. Heroes were famously stubborn. Even more than Demon Queens. “I didn’t want to do it alone,” she said.

I stared at her. “What?”

Colour rose from her collar. She still would not look at me. “I just…wanted to do it with you. At the same time. You know…like…together.” The last word came out barely above a murmur. She seemed to hear it leave her mouth, and the colour deepened sharply. Her hand found the back of her neck and stayed there. The egg pulsed once against my hip. I noticed and ignored it.

The anger found me. It was a sharp thing, and it cut through whatever else I might have felt. “Do you think I am that weak?” I demanded. “Do you think I need your pity?” My voice had never been sharper. “Who do you think-”

Ash’s head snapped toward me. “It wasn’t pity!”

I glared. “Then what was it?”

“I just told you what it was!” Her voice rose, and for one moment, the Hero’s composure broke entirely. She met my gaze, and her eyes were wide. “I wanted to do it with you. That’s all. That’s all it was. It wasn’t pity.”

My anger died. I rose to my full height and crossed the distance between us. Ash looked up at me, her brow furrowed, her cheeks still flushed. I leaned down and put both hands on her shoulders. Her skin was very warm beneath the cloth. I had not expected that, though I could not have said what I had expected instead. She went rigid beneath my grip. There was little distance between us.

“What- what do you think you’re doing?”

I shook her. Once. Not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to make her head rock back, until her hair covered her eyes. “You are going to listen to me,” I said. “I am going to say this once. I will never repeat myself. So, you will listen, and you will remember.” She stared up at me. My hands tightened on her shoulders.

"You will reach your full potential. You will never hold yourself back on my account. That is an insult to me. It implies you can reach a height I cannot, and there is no such height that I will not surpass." I paused. "If you are presently ahead, then cherish it. It will not last."

This was beneath me. I had shown too much. Ash's lips had parted. She said nothing.

My voice dropped. I looked away from her, at the far wall. “In my time,” I said, “it was always I who left others behind. Every general. Every rival. Every companion I ever had or might have had.” I paused. The next words sat heavy, and I had to force them through. “This feeling -of being the one left behind- is not unpleasant. But do not misunderstand me. I will master this. Under no circumstances will you ever hold yourself back again on my account.”

I met her gaze again. My red eyes bored into her blue ones. “Or I will never forgive you.”

Ash stared at me. She stayed exactly where I had left her for two breaths longer than the moment required. Ash nodded. "Okay," she said.

I held her gaze for one moment more. Then I released her shoulders and stepped back. The distance between us felt different now.

I sat cross-legged on the cool stone and closed my eyes. The marks hummed on my arms -Requiem on the right, Cradle on the left. I drew mana inward and filled my core once more, though it hardly needed the filling. I breathed and fed the smallest threads of both Essences into it. I used too little of each power for it to result in what had happened before. I did not know what the Inker had done to stop me before, but I did not think I or Ash could replicate it now.

The pain came, and the carving began. It lasted all of ten seconds before the two annihilated each other. It happened in the exact same way as before. The Requiem’s carving tore through the Cradle’s, and the Cradle’s tore through the Requiem’s. I adjusted my approach. Perhaps the trick lay in alternating the two. I fed my core the Requiem first, then the Cradle a few moments later. They annihilated each other.

I tried feeding them to opposite sides of the core, keeping them as far apart as I mentally could. They found each other anyway and destroyed what the other had made. My jaw clenched. The pain from each failure was one thing, but the frustration burned brighter still. It died a few moments later. That was new.

Ash spoke from in front of me. Her voice was quiet. “This is the first time.”

I opened one eye. “The first time for what?”

“The first time someone hasn’t minded being left behind.”

I opened the other eye. She was sitting, her arms resting on her knees. She was looking at her own hands. “It happened before?” I asked.

“It has happened many times.” She turned one hand over, studying the palm. “All of my friends when I was growing up. The other candidates, before I got the Hero class. Every party they ever paired me with, before the final one.” She paused. “They all resented me for it. Maybe not at first, but eventually they did. Always. So I learned to be…a little less.”

My gaze moved from her face to her right arm. To the purple Spark that sat there, unchanged. Veil. The mark the System had given her. The power to hide. The anger came, and it was not for her. It was aimed at every fool who had ever looked at this woman and made her believe that her light should be dimmed.

“That is foolish,” I said. My voice was hard. “Even if the entire world resented you, you should never think of such a thing again. There is no point in concerning yourself with the opinions of the weak and the simple.”

Ash glanced at me. There was something fragile in her expression. “How am I supposed to just stop? It’s been…it’s been my whole life, Lys.”

“Because I will never resent you for being excellent,” I said. “Do not forget who you are. You are the slayer of Lysanthia, the Strongest who has ever lived. If that does not earn you the right to stand at your full height, then nothing ever will.”

Ash stared at me. The fragile thing in her expression shifted into something else. “You definitely let me win,” she murmured.

“That final attack made me nervous,” I admitted. Once, I would have never been able to. “It was quite something. You did destroy my castle with it, I would imagine.”

“I think I did,” She grinned. It was small and crooked and entirely unlike a Hero’s smile. I found my own lips twitching in answer. The silence that followed was one of the warmer ones.

“Well?” I said. “Do it, then. There should be nothing stopping you now.”

Ash closed her eyes. She drew a single breath. The air around her changed. Even I, sitting a pace away, could see the mana moving. It was a visible distortion in the air, like heat rising from a forge. It flowed toward her in streams that thickened and deepened with each second. The crystal walls dimmed, and the light almost faded entirely. The air around her tasted different now. It tasted of Separation. Of Hiding. She really was doing it then.

I watched. I also continued my own work, because a Queen did not simply sit idle while her retainer laboured. The stone beneath me had gone cold. I had not noticed until now.

I drew Requiem Essence into my core. Then Cradle. The two met, and the Requiem’s structure collapsed the Cradle’s, and the Cradle’s collapsed the Requiem’s. I tried different approaches. More Requiem. Less Requiem. More Cradle. Less Cradle. Nothing changed, and the pain from each failure never went away. Ash’s face scrunched. It was impossible not to notice, sitting right in front of her. Her shoulders tightened. Her hands, resting on her knees, curled into fists.

My own efforts stopped. I did not choose to stop them. My attention shifted to Ash entirely, and my failed efforts mattered little and less. The mana currents around her grew faster.

Ash groaned. The sound was low and tight, forced through clenched teeth. Her body trembled. The currents raging around her would have flattened a lesser person. I moved through them. The mana currents pressed against me and I did not feel them. I knelt beside her and hesitated. What was I doing?

She groaned again, softer this time. Her body trembled. I reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. Her skin was hot beneath my palm -from the mana, I assumed, or the strain of what was being done to her from the inside. My grip was too tight, and I loosened it. I was one of the Ten Fools. Whatever pain she was going through, a clumsy touch would not-

Ash settled beneath my touch. The trembling eased. She did not open her eyes. I stayed.

Time passed and I did not track it. The egg pulsed faster against my hip, matching something I could only guess at. Once, I reached toward my own core with a thread of Requiem Essence. It went nowhere. I let it go. The mana in the chamber had thinned around us. That was why I could not focus. It had nothing to do with the sound she had made.

Near the end, I saw it. Ash’s left hand rose from her knee. She pressed it flat against her own chest, just above the sternum. Her fingers tensed, and I felt the mark on her left arm flare. She drew her hand down in a single motion.

That was Parting. It had to be. She had…turned it inward, but why? This boundary is an added limitation. That was what the Inker had said, and his words came back to me now. Had Ash….? Surely not.

The precision of it. The willingness to turn your own power against yourself, to cut yourself open from the inside. It was either the bravest or the most reckless thing I had ever seen a person do, and I had done both in ample measure.

There was a mistake the weak always made, when it came to power. They were always drawn to power that came easily. That came safely, without risk. There is no power in this world worth having that comes without risk. The world is made of only two types of people, those who can see this, and those who are fools. I smiled.

Eventually, the currents slowed and the mana settled. The pressure in the chamber eased until the air was just air again.

Ash slumped forward. Her breathing came in ragged, heaving gasps. Sweat ran down her temples, her jaw, the line of her neck where it met the collar of the grey tunic. Past the collar. I catalogued this and moved past it, though the catalogue had grown rather long. Her hands shook where they pressed against the stone. “Did it work?” I asked. I knew the answer.

She nodded, slowly. “I…I think so.” Her voice was raw. “I can feel the mana inside me changing. It’s…” She swallowed. “The Inker wasn’t wrong. It really does feel like something alive crawling through you.” She looked at me. At my hands, still at my sides.

Something crossed her face. The tightening around the eyes. The faintest pull at the corners of her mouth. The shrinking. I had seen it once tonight already, and I knew its shape now. I would not see it again.

Both marks hummed on my arms. The Requiem and the Cradle, still incompatible, still destroying what the other tried to build. The mountain sat before me, still unclimbed. "Show me," I said.

Ash blinked. “What?”

“Your Essence. Flare it like you would mana. It should work the same. Show me what you’ve made.”

Ash hesitated. She looked at me. “Are you sure? I don’t have much of it yet, but still…”

“I am sure.”

Ash closed her eyes, and I felt it. Every instinct I had tensed at once. For a moment, Ash might as well have been a hundred foot tall giant, and I the most diminutive ant. Something inside of me seized. It took all my regal bearing not to simply fall over. My heart pounded in my chest. This was my instinct telling me that the Hero was dangerous, and that I, in comparison, was not.

Ash stopped and her presence vanished. She was on her hands and knees in an instant, crawling toward me, her face stricken. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to- are you-”

I smirked up at her. “What are you talking about, you fool?” Ash froze. I held her gaze.

The smirk did not waver. “That is exactly what I’d expect from my retainer.”