An excerpt from a secret project!
Whom of your enemies do you wish to see in the surface of the water?
# "Weller Snow, the inquisitor."
I am a vulture, awake later in the night than I’d like, my belly empty and my eyes wild with desperation. I circle the border between Dornsleath and Chesaprie, where much blood has been spilled in the past.
Weller Snow arrives at the border by horseback. His steed is as black as his uniform, and they both blend into the darkness of the night. The checkpoint tower erupts with a warning flame. The message to Weller is clear: stop or we’ll chase you down.
His steed skids to a halt. Mud kicks up. A single checkpoint guard raises a torch to him, bleary-eyed from his shift. “Evening, inquisitor.”
The horse huffs, as though it too knows the checkpoint is only a formality. Weller dismounts. His hand rests at the sword at his hip. “A carriage was meant to arrive carrying a prisoner under the name of Garrie Berg. Did the carriage pass through this checkpoint?”
“Yeah,” says the guard. “Not long ago. Some trouble on the road, but those are the times we live in. My old man told me to take this job because he said it was money for nothing. If only he were alive for me to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. Times have changed. It’s tough out here.”
Weller rolls his eyes. “You haven’t lived through a war.”
“Neither have you, kid.”
“The memory of the Divine Right is long and crystal clear. There were times of war before us, and there will be times of war again. Garrie Berg is being taken to Fort Morne, am I correct?”
“Unless they’ve taken a detour.”
“Thank you. May the seven gods light your path.”
“I’ll stick with a torch,” says the guard, immediately regretting his dismissive words, but Weller doesn’t make mention of it.
With a grunt of appreciation, Weller hops back on his horse and takes off down the road.
The guard ambles back up to his mate. “You know him, don’t you? They call him Snow. Him and his wife, the Snows. She’s the demon hunter. You’ve heard the stories, haven’t you?”
“She’s too good for him.”
“You seen his boots? That’s a man who’s never had to work a night shift.”
“Must be so easy for him.”
I sail on my vulture wings back towards the base of the mountain ranges, where food is more plenty and I can find some rest.
# "Sylar Snow, the demon hunter."
Deep in the forests at the base of the mountains of Chesaprie, in the middle of the night, Sylar Snow finds a circle of sprouting white-and-red mushrooms, equally quaint and deadly. She strips off her inquisitor’s uniform and her undergarments until she stands, shivering, in the center of the fairy circle.
An owl watches from above, and Sylar thinks that the owl may be watching her until it swoops down, ever silent, and snatches me up in its claws, a vole with crusted fur and scars across its eyes from other owl attacks. The owl carries me up to a branch nearby and tears at my skin with its talons, but I am no vole, and the owl will go hungry tonight.
Instead of an owl, Sylar is visited by a shuffling raccoon. The raccoon’s hands are uncomfortably human, twitching and signing and gesturing. Sylar stares at those hands long enough that they cease to be attached to a raccoon and are attached instead to a woman, old and bent like a dying tree.
The witch is as naked as Sylar. The night is warm, but her voice is cold. “Sylar, my dearest.”
“I come seeking your guidance.”
“Your husband’s ambitions need not be your own,” she says.
“No, they need not be, and yet they are. But that’s not why I’ve come.”
The witch cranes her neck. Each of the mushrooms lean to the side along with her. “Oh?”
“I wish to hunt a demon.”
“You have hunted many.”
“This one is different. It doesn’t have a physical form.”
The witch cackles. The trees rustle. The owl with its talons in my fur keels over and lies still, its heart silent. I watch, frozen, my eyes and ears locked in place. The witch’s voice is loud and cruel. “All this time, you have simply been removing the demons’ physical forms? Foolish girl! A demon is more than its body. You could no more kill a demon by destroying its body than you could kill a man by destroying his clothes.”
Naked, shivering, and afraid, Sylar says, “Then what truly kills a demon?”
“Asks the demon hunter!” laughs the witch. The bodies of mice rise out of the dirt, rotting and squirming with ants. “You have made it your profession to kill demons and yet ask a poor old woman in the woods for advice! My favourite and dearest human girl, Sylar, you are no wiser now than you were when you first came to me all those years ago!”
“Just tell me what to do. Just tell me how to stop this thing before it hurts anyone else.”
“The demon spared an innocent from execution, and you assume that they wish only to hurt others?” The witch reaches out with a wicked owl’s talon and presses the tip of the claw against Sylar’s forehead. A single drop of blood runs down the bridge of her nose. “First learn what the demon wants, and then you will understand its weaknesses.”
“I will try.”
“Let not my teachings go to waste, dearest girl. If you’ll excuse me, I am freezing and would very much like to return to my fire.”
“It’s a warm night,” protests Sylar, trying to mask her own shivering. “Stay. I miss you.”
The witch pauses. Her expression of contempt softens. “I miss you too.” A raccoon with too-human hands shuffles away into the darkness, and the mushrooms shrink back into the ground.
Sylar collects her clothing. The dead owl on the branch beside me returns to life, never dead at all, just sleeping, and its talons sink deeper into my neck.
I dissolve into sap and leave the poor owl with nothing.
# "Magus Chiron, High Priest of the Divine Right."
“You did this to me,” says Chiron.
I slither around the bannister of his railing. Since the first time we met, Chiron has aged twenty-five years, and in that time, he has come into immense wealth, power, and influence due to his position in the Divine Right. He has gotten married, he has had five children, and all five of his children and his wife have died.
Now, he stands at the top of the stairs of the entrance hall of his manor, dark and lonely in the night-time, as he is swallowed up by the enormity of his station. Just a man, getting older, in his sleeping cap and pajamas, barking at a snake.
“You did this to me,” he says. “All those years ago, you told me I’d never felt the pain of loss. Well, now I have, a hundred times over! Are you satisfied? Have you finished with me?”
No.
“No?! What do you mean, no? Haven’t you taken enough?”
No, I didn’t do this to you.
“Don’t lie to me! You took my family from me! It was you, all along, wasn’t it? Watching, and waiting, and haunting me!”
I didn’t kill your children. I didn’t take Esmee from you. I slither through each rung of the bannister until I’m right next to his ear, and I whisper, while he is frozen in fear, I didn’t put her last words in her mouth.
He lashes out at me, but I’m not real. I’m just a demon. His hand smacks hard against the railing and his wrist bends the wrong way. He breathes sharply and squeezes his hand as it throbs. “F–fuck. Fuck you. I should’ve killed you when you were in chains.”
Yes, you should’ve.
“Next time I see you, you’ll face those chains again.”
Your anger is misplaced. I did nothing to you. Welcome to the end of life, Magus Chiron, when the world moves on without you. You’ve suffered immense tragedy, and yet the only one who cares is me.
His face is scrunched and snarling like a rabid dog. “You don’t care. How could you?”
How many others dare to ask if you are okay?
His wrist throbs. His head pounds. His heart races.
“I am not feeling okay.”
I smile in the way that snakes smile, bearing venomous fangs, and then I’m an empty bottle of scotch bouncing down the steps. I crash at the bottom. Glass shards scatter into the folds of the carpet.
Chiron realizes he is drunk. He has been drinking all night, just like most nights, the dangerous way that lonely people in giant mansions drink. He stumbles to his bedroom to sleep without dreams, and by the time he wakes up, he will have forgotten that I was ever here.
… I found the choices you gave to be inviting, almost all of them too enticing for me to make a proper choice. If there was a save system, I’d use it to explore them all.