"You're telling me...he wants to...turn you into my mother?!"

  "Yeah."

  We slowly hobbled forward. There was no easy way to say this. No way that made it sound any less depraved and insane than it actually was. At first, I'd considered not saying anything at all, but then I'd seen the resolve on her face. I couldn't lie to her after that. There was silence for a time as we dragged our feet. The silence stretched until I finally broke it.

  “You did this, I’m guessing.”

  We entered a large antechamber. Almost ten small stone golems lay scattered across the room, all in various states of destruction. Most of them had large cavities where a great force had broken through the stone. Many of them had holes. It was exactly the kind of damage one could do with an oversized hammer and a lot of mana.

  “How…the hell did you figure that out?” Violet muttered. Her voice was low. Was she trying to preserve her strength, or wrestling with what I'd told her? Both?

  “Just a guess.”

  Our pace had been slow. Each step was harder than the last. Reinforcing my legs with mana didn’t take much mana at all, and it was probably the only reason I was still on my feet. That bastard’s ritual must have drained me this far. I didn’t think the Godblade could drink this much without crippling me.

  Now and then, there had been a loud banging coming from…somewhere. It was hard to say if it had just started or if I’d only just composed myself enough to notice. More rarely, the walls would shake. That was almost enough to have us toppling over a few times. Perhaps I should have been more curious about the sounds, but right now, I didn’t care.

  “We can still turn back,” I muttered. “You don’t have to come.”

  “This is my problem,” Violet growled.

  We’d had this conversation before. At least she didn’t use a curse word this time, though perhaps that was a bad sign too.

  A part of me did want to leave this girl behind, but how could I? It was her father, and no matter how angry I was, I couldn’t deny that she had the right. Then, there were the memories. Of me trying and failing to kill my other mother. I saw her face every time I blinked.

  Did I see it because she had lived and I had died? It was hard to say. Perhaps it only made sense that I be here right now, a girl who tried to kill her own mother, with a girl who was going to try to kill her own father. How oddly symmetrical.

  “You know….” I murmured as we slowly picked our way through the room, often forced to slow our walking pace to clamber over or carefully step around the shattered bodies of the golems blocking our path. None of these had turned into sludge. “This is probably going to hurt your House. A lot.”

  “That sounds nice,” Violet muttered.

  “What?”

  “Maybe I can be an adventurer or something. He didn’t let me do that. Sounds fucking nice to me. Better than having to sit through another tea party, knitting handkerchiefs. I hope my House collapses into the dirt.”

  Despite the horror of my otherworldly memories, despite the exhaustion and the aches, despite the horrific Artifacts we’d left behind or the grim task we slowly shambled towards, I found myself giggling, just a little.

  “What the hell are you laughing at?” Violet growled, stopped in place, making me stop right with her unless I wanted to fall.

  “Just thinking you’re a very simple girl,” I said. Paused. “Though, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Sometimes.”

  “I can still use my Gift, you know,” Violet said. “It’ll fucking hurt.”

  That was fair enough. This strange girl was perhaps not that strange after all. And I was starting to suspect we weren’t that different either. Not really.

  We were almost at the only other exit to this room. The place where Violet had said Duke Indri and I had come bursting out of. I suspected that’s where we’d find him. His obsession wouldn’t let him just run away, even if he could.

  “Hey, smart ass.”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “What?”

  Violet coughed, cleared her throat. “Don’t want to be pathetic or anything but…I can’t really fucking do anything right now. Don’t think you can either. Not unless you kill yourself with that damn sword anyway. So…what’s the plan?”

  “You think I have one?” I asked.

  “If you’re just dragging me along to your execution, I’m going to burn your corpse,” Violet promised. Somehow, I suspected she would do just that.

  I had been thinking about the problem for some time. It was hard to say exactly how much mana I had left, especially in relation to using the Godblade. I doubted I would last very long either. There really was only one solution here.

  “Hey, how good are you at acting?”

  Meanwhile, elsewhere in the building, Duke Indri wept.

  The last time he had wept had been almost exactly fourteen years ago, when his life had abruptly come to an end. Not in the literal sense, though it very well might have. What use was there in a sky without a single star?

  For years, he had moved through the world as a lifeless puppet. He did all of the things that a body was supposed to do, with none of the intention. The one thing he’d ever found any joy in, his research, felt as pointless as anything else.

  Violet was his only anchor. Duke Indri had tried to give himself to her, but the girl reminded him too much of her mother. It simply hurt too much. Duke Indri was a coward who left his daughter to her own devices.

  His reputation had slowly but steadily fallen. His District didn’t change at all after the Sword God War, even as the other four became unrecognisable compared to their pre-war states. The walls of his existence slowly closed in, crushing him.

  Then, they came to him. Had offered him hints on the true nature of Artifacts. Of Intent. Had left him to pursue it on his own. It was a thin ray of light poking through the walls of his cell. Over the last fourteen years, Duke Indri had clawed at that wall until that ray had become a beam of light. It had taken so long, and then he had finally been sure: he could bring her back.

  It just required…the unspeakable, and quite a lot of it. By then, his obsession had grown until even that didn’t seem like an impossible price to pay. He had paid it. Had been haunted by it every restless night. And for what?

  “It was all worthless in the end.” He muttered, staring at his wife’s beloved warhammer. The last vessel for his wife’s intent, all too little to begin again, and yet it served well as a reminder of his guilt.

  “A fucking Godblade.” He muttered, his face in his hands. The entire point of using children was for their weak Intents, to give his Wife the most compatible vessel possible. How was it even possible for a little girl to bond with the Intent of a God? His Wife’s Intent now fought with that God’s Intent. While Scarlet might have been on the path, she hadn’t finished it. And even then, this wasn’t Scarlet; these were fragmented pieces of her.

  What hope was there for him now?

  Duke Indri had a connection to all his Golems, and one by one, he’d seen those connecting threads snap. The final one had snapped strangely; its recoil had made his whole body tremble. He was fairly certain the barrier outside was broken too. How could that have happened so fast? It didn’t matter. Nothing really did, not anymore.

  “Father?”

  Duke Indri paused, looking up at his daughter. At the girl she was leaning against. Both girls looked like they’d just been through hell. Was that…a gash along his daughter’s side? Their clothes were half-torn; they looked like they were barely on their feet.

  Duke Indri expected to see hatred in his daughter’s eyes. He had resolved himself to that. How would she ever understand what he did, and why, if she didn’t see her mother for herself?

  Violet stared at him. She hesitated, then glanced at Esra beside her before raising a shaky hand to gesture toward her. The movement looked clumsy, uncertain -strange to see from Violet of all people.

  Duke Indri stared at Esra, at the wide red eyes that stared back at him. Not the hatred or anger he had expected there either. Instead, the girl looked…confused? Conflicted? It wasn’t how the girl named would have reacted to him in this moment, and in Duke Indri’s mind, there could only be one possible reason for that.

  “S-Scarlet?” He mumbled, not trusting himself to speak.

  The girl stared at him, somehow managing to both snarl and smile at the same time. A violent smile. The kind he had only ever seen on his daughter’s face for a very long time. She straightened, and that violence reflected in her eyes. It wasn’t quite perfect. It wasn’t quite as he remembered. But it was close enough. This was…this was Scarlet. It had to be.

  “Fucking hell…I didn’t think I’d ever live to see this. You look like shit.” Esra’s words, though, were something his wife could have said. Odd that she said them right now, but Duke Indri dismissed the thought.

  The dam that had been building inside of him cracked. Duke Indri’s breath caught, his legs trembled beneath him. He didn’t understand how. The odds had to be infinitesimal. But…but if anyone could beat odds like that, he supposed his wife could. Somehow.

  The girl, no, the woman nodded, then slowly stepped away from Violet to approach him alone. Duke Indri found himself mirroring the movement, taking steps forward too. Violet stood in the background, hunched over. There was something unreadable in her eyes. Duke Indri didn’t have time to think about that. Not right now.

  Each step felt heavier than the last. Duke Indri had to stoop down to hug his wife, and then the tears came again, fresh and full. He had to do a lot of things now, to keep this peace he’d built from collapsing immediately. But that could wait, at least for a little while.

  For now, he was back with her.

  “I missed you…I missed you more than I can say, Scarlet.”

  He pulled her close, burying his face in her shoulder, smelling the blood and dust. It took all the restraint he had not to just kiss her, regardless of her current appearance. There were so many questions on his mind, and right now, none of them mattered. His wife remained oddly rigid in his embrace. She was likely just getting used to her new body. Duke Indri closed his eyes and basked in the warmth.

  Something , so bright the light leaked through even his closed eyelids.