Chapter 15: A Beginning.

I stood, and my body objected. I stepped forward, barely steady. My ribs ground against each other with every breath.

Martha’s dress hung off me in scorched strips. The skin beneath it was raw where the blast had struck my chest, and some distant part of me noted that the pain was rather extraordinary. I had taken worse. I had taken far worse, in a body that could shrug off worse. This body could not.

Both marks hummed. The lines on my forearms were warm and cold at once, pulling in opposite directions. Each wanted to drag me somewhere the other refused to go.

The phoenix stood in the wreckage of the village square. It had four wings now, each one wrong -two gold, two black, meeting at joints that bent in directions no bone should permit. Its five mismatched eyes stared at me.

The villagers hadn’t managed to run yet. I could hear the yelling of adults and the crying of children, and the guard yelling over all of them, begging them to move. Sara was somewhere behind me. That was what was important. I took a breath. My ribs told me not to take another. I took another, as I stepped beside the Hero.

Ash did not ask me if I could fight. She looked at me for half a second, at my arms, and then her gaze focused forwards, on the beast. “I can last a while.” She said. Her sword did not glow anymore. There was no aura behind it, no divine light. It was just steel and mana. It would always be thus, I suspected. Ash charged forward.

She fought with little elegance and even less form. She aimed for a wing joint and pressed her thumb along the flat of the blade as she struck.

Sever.

The wing fell, as clean as it had before. It hit the ground, caught fire, and rose as ash. It returned to the creature’s body and sprouted back, thicker than before. She was buying time. I had done the same for her, once. I did not think of it then. I was thinking about it now. A burst of black flame caught Ash’s side. She rolled and came up with her teeth bared and her sword arm shaking. She did not retreat.

Of course she didn’t.

I stepped forward and extended my right hand. The Requiem answered. A black flame flickered from my fingers, crossed the distance, and struck the phoenix’s side. The scales greyed and cracked. The rot spread outward from the point of impact in a widening circle, each feather curling and blackening beneath the decay. The phoenix screamed and fire roared across its body, burning the rot away, replacing it with fresh scales before I could draw another breath.

I had not used the Requiem this way before, and yet it felt natural. Instinctively, I knew the range -three meters. I knew the cost -a not insignificant amount of mana with my reserves. The Requiem’s black flame only had the appearance of fire. It was a darker color than the one the phoenix used. It was…an absence in the world. A cessation of all that was and could have ever been.

The phoenix screamed. Ash swung at it before it could turn to face me. I extended my hand again -more skin blackened under the darkness, cleaned a few seconds later by golden flame. In the moment of contact, I saw something that came through the mark.

A sky, impossibly wide, and wind that held no corruption. It was the memory of flight before the black had come. Then the black had come, and it had not stopped coming. It poured into the memory the way ink pours into water, and the sky that had been blue became something else, and the wind that had been clean became something else, and the creature that had been whole became something that burned and burned and could not stop burning.

I staggered. My arm flickered with that unending darkness. The vision left me, but its weight did not.

I pushed again and another tongue of black fire leapt from my hand. The Requiem bit into the creature’s shoulder this time. There was more grey, more rot, and more golden fire to swallow it clean, and again the sensation came -deeper this time, because I was looking for it.

The corruption was not the creature. The black feathers, the wrong joints, the extra eyes -all of it was something forced upon it, the way my Role had been forced upon me.

Beneath the black, I could feel only gold, faint and guttering, like embers buried under smoke. Like a small, pathetic campfire refusing to go out. The original beast was still in there, still fighting simply to exist as what it had once been. It was losing. Had been losing for longer than I could measure. That was why we were all still alive, because this creature was fighting not to kill us. The phoenix screamed again. I pulled my hand back and my fingers trembled.

I had been caged. For centuries, I had raged against a prison that no one else could see -a Class that told me what to think and want. I had broken free. It had cost me everything I was and everything I had, and I would pay that price again without hesitation.

This creature had not broken free. It had no mad gambit and no reincarnation spell. No hero to be its unwitting key. It simply burned, and burned, and burned, and destroyed everything it touched. I knew this. I knew it the way one knows one’s own face.

Ash was slowing. Blood ran down her left side where the talon had caught her. Her sword arm was shaking. She was running out of the old mana now too, the way I already had.

I sent another flicker of black flame at the phoenix’s face. The fire hit one of its golden eyes. The eye greyed, dimmed. The creature’s head snapped toward me, and Ash used the opening to trace her blade’s point across its leg.

The leg fell. It was already reforming before it hit the ground. The beast struck with its head, knocking Ash to the ground. Fire gathered in the phoenix’s throat. I could see it building.

This book’s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Move!” I shouted. Ash threw herself sideways. The blast scorched the earth where she had been. She hit the ground on her shoulder and picked herself up slowly.

I looked at my hands. Left and right. Warmth and cold. Two Lines on my skin, each one humming with a power I had barely begun to understand. The Requiem could kill this creature. I was certain of it now. I had felt the shape of the thing through our connection. If I poured everything I had left into the Requiem, the phoenix would die. All of it – the corruption and the creature it consumed.

The ending would be clean and final. I had done this before. To cities. To races. To Gods. Clean and final endings were all I had ever known. The Requiem was ready.

My mana, what little remained, sat poised at the edge of the mark. One sustained push and the creature would cease to exist. It would have been a mercy. A quick ending to a thing that had suffered far too long. I almost did it.

An old woman had refilled my bowl without being asked. A Hero had shown me how to wet my hands. A girl had made me a vase from mud, and I had broken it, and I had spent an afternoon on my knees in the dirt trying to make another one that was worse in every measurable way, and the girl had held it to her chest and smiled.

Those were all beginnings. Of what, I did not know.

I chose not to do as I had only ever done. Not because I couldn’t. Not because the marks demanded otherwise and not because some higher power stayed my hand.

I was tired of only bringing endings. I did not yet know if I, the most despicable Demon Queen in history, deserved it. I only knew I should not be the only one.