I’ve seen the inside of this tower before.

  It’s a strange revelation. At first I think of the tower from one of Thalia’s stories, but that’s not where I’m remembering this from. I realize, after a moment of contemplation, that I’m remembering Homura’s experiences with the tower.

  She came here many times, first to climb it and then to learn from Katoptris. The tower had new challenges every night, a thousand monsters slain and trials passed, as she threw herself at the tower again and again in her dreams.

  The structure of the tower is simple: you pass through a door or a mirror and are taken into a room that contains a puzzle, threat, or other form of obstacle. When you’ve solved the obstacle, a new portal appears to take you to the next floor.

  In the days before Prevara, there were five challenges at most. In the days after, when Homura came to the tower, you had to clear fifty. That Homura ever reached Katoptris is something of a minor miracle.

  I’m spared that gauntlet, mercifully, by Thalia having gone ahead and ruthlessly cut down everything in her path. The first floor is littered with corpses, the second reveals a water jug puzzle smashed into pieces, and the pattern continues. Where there was a puzzle, now there’s just scrap. Where there were enemies, now there are only bodies.

  I follow Thalia’s trail of carnage, passing through door after door, and I think about how to kill her.

  I don’t know for certain that we’re going to fight, but I can’t shake the suspicion. Thalia has no love for her sisters. She wants to save Melpomene, not the rest of us. She was complicit in torturing shards for countless turns of the wheel. What’s one more splinter tossed aside?

  The second I’m no longer useful to her—and I don’t really understand what makes me useful right now—there will be nothing stopping her from discarding me. So I have to make sure I can’t be so easily discarded.

  Wonderland principles won’t help me against Thalia; her divine flesh has more mass than mine, it has more symbolic weight as the literal heart of our shared creator, and Thalia’s method of existing in this universe is incarnation rather than projection. Devouring so many of my sisters has narrowed the conceptual gap between us, but I haven’t removed it entirely. I’m still the underdog.

  If I have any edge, it’s this: Melpomene chose me. Thalia may have been her agent for countless cycles, but Melpomene rewound time twice to try and maneuver me into achieving her goal. That’s never happened before. Something about me is special. Something about me makes this loop different from all the loops that came before it.

  I can do this. I can escape the wheel. I can win.

  As I rise higher through the tower, the environment changes; the basic structure of each room is still the same, still littered with the detritus of Thalia’s passing, but the walls here are adorned with mirrors, and every mirror shows the same image. The first time it happens, the reflection is Eirdryd Llewellyn, the fae who stole my name, staring at me as he burns.

  The next floor shows me Bashe, watching me from every mirror as he stands amid the flames. Then Esha, Achaia, Dante, the drow woman, the Machinist, Averrich, Vaylin, the snake, the hunters, the werewolf, and on and on and on. I see every face I’ve ever met, every life I’ve taken, every soul I abandoned, every hand I rejected… every person who was never really a person, if I accept the worldview of the Adversary.

  I walk past them all. The world is burning and it’s too late for regrets. I came into this universe thinking I would save the world or rule over it as a benevolent god-queen, but in the end all I can do is walk away. I’m not the hero of this story. There are no heroes here.

  I stopped counting the rooms when the haunting started, but I’m certain I’ve reached the last before the end when I see Cheshire staring out of the mirror.

  There’s only one mirror in this room, against the far wall where the exit would appear. Cheshire looks exactly as she did the very first time I saw her, white-haired and cat-eared with heterochromatic eyes and a barely-there skirt. Her hand presses against the inside of the mirror, but her face is completely expressionless.

  I walk up to the mirror and gently place my hand over Cheshire’s. I can’t feel her warmth, but I can remember how it felt. “I know you’re not real.” I tell her gently.

  Cheshire smiles. “I never was. But it was nice to pretend, wasn’t it?”

  I stay quiet. This is Melpomene; I’m almost certain of that. But it is also, in a very real sense, the last time I’ll ever have the chance to see or speak to Cheshire. I should say something about that. I should tell her how I felt. But I can’t summon the words. “You were supposed to be Thalia’s replacement, weren’t you?” I ask instead.

  Cheshire laughs, but she doesn’t move her hand from where it almost touches mine. “You could say she was my prototype, if you wanted to be nicer to me,” she teases. “But, yes, I was meant to fill the role that she left behind. The Intercessor to your Red Queen, the familiar to your Intercessor, and then… an experiment.” Cheshire sighs. “I wish I could have been with you this time. I wish I could have been more than a test.”

  “You don’t,” I respond automatically. “You don’t wish for anything. You’re a puppet.”

  It’s Cheshire’s turn to go quiet. The mirth on her face falls away in the uncomfortable silence. “For a girl who wears so many masks,” she says softly, “you really hate pretending when it’s something that could make you happy. Couldn’t we have had this moment, Alice? One last shred of sentiment, even if it wasn’t real?”

  My courage breaks. “I want that,” I confess, voice aching and raw. “I want to believe in the lie. I want to accept the love of someone, anyone. I wish you were by my side. I wish we could have faced this whole world together. But I can’t… I can’t let that rule me. Love, hunger, pain, fear… I can’t let any of those things rule me, and I don’t think I’m ready, as a person, to love someone without it consuming me. It would be my ruin if I brought you with me, because I don’t know how to love like a normal girl. So I’m sorry, Cheshire. I’m sorry to the girl I thought you were, and to the girl you might have been if the world was a different place. And I hope, one day, that I can meet you again. Goodbye, my love.”

  Cheshire doesn’t reply; she’s already gone. The mirror becomes a door, and I step through it with a heavy heart and wet eyes.

  Thalia is waiting for me on the highest floor of the glass tower, at the very summit of the Labyrinth. The personal chambers of Katoptris, the Lady of Glass, who was tortured by Prevara and seduced by Homura. Her grief, I am told, broke the world that came before. The fragments of her being were used to keep the Labyrinth a realm of nightmares, manipulated by her captor.

  I’ve seen her home before, but only in memories of someone else’s dreams. The top of the tower is a simple viewing room, at least at first glance. An opulent carpet leads to a tall mirror of polished glass, where in ancient days the people of Svijetstakla would make pilgrimage to speak with their guardian goddess.

  On the other side of the mirror, the room reflected is entirely different; bedchambers rather than an audience chamber, with a study and a kitchen and a four-poster bed. Homura and Katoptris spent a great deal of time together in that room, teaching and learning and coming to know one another.

  I came to the Labyrinth thinking it was my destiny to kill Katoptris, then thought it might be my destiny to save Katoptris. She was the central figure around which everything else orbited, and our confrontation seemed inevitable.

  When I step into her chambers, Katoptris is already dead. She bled out on the floor, face-down, her back cut open by deft hands and a wicked knife. The pool of her blood is nearly dry. Her murderer, Thalia, examines a bookshelf as she diligently cleans her dagger, still wearing her bloodstained wedding dress and red leather jacket.

  She greets me as I stop in front of the corpse. “Alice! I’m delighted that you won your duel, truly. You’ve been a much more intelligent partner than Homura ever was. Tell me, how are you feeling? It’s almost time for the finale, and I for one couldn’t be more excited!”

  Thalia doesn’t look my way, still focused on Katoptris’ little library. I stare down at the body of Katoptris and wonder how alive she ever was. The version of her that Thalia told me about felt like a true splinter, but this one… doesn’t. Everything I’ve ever heard about her in this reality was secondhand, and always as some prize to be fought over or some instigator of calamity. She has the same story as her predecessor, but without the animating human heart.

  Katoptris is dead, and that should mean something to me, but I can’t bring myself to care. She was never real. It feels like it’s been a lifetime since she was the goal of my journey.

  I step over her body and join Thalia by the bookshelf. “I feel anxious,” I admit. “It all ends today, maybe this very hour. I’d like to think I’m ready, after facing so many of my sisters and triumphing where all of them failed, but… I don’t know what happens next.” I glance at her face and ask, very carefully, “Where do I fit in your plans, Thalia?”

  The Adversary finally pulls her attention from the library and considers me. “You’re worried I’m going to backstab you,” she guesses. “When the work is done, you think I’ll dispose of you as a loose end.”

  “Can you blame me? You hate splinters like me. You see all of us as failures that keep hurting your beloved Melpomene. Why wouldn’t you just kill me as soon as my use to you was over?” I’m on edge, my whole body itching in anticipation of violence. I’m terrified that Thalia is going to murder me, and I still don’t really know how to stop that from happening.

  “Because I like you,” Thalia says with a warm smile. “You’re different from the others. You’re more interesting. You’re more like her.”

  I am not going to fall for the pretty girl with suspicious motives flirting with me, not this time. I refuse. I’m better than that.

  But then, is refusing to trust her not its own mistake? Isn’t that the lesson I was supposed to learn? Or was it the opposite?

  I hate how few clear answers I still have about… my own story, I guess. Was it a mistake to trust Cheshire, or was the mistake not trusting Cheshire? It feels like not even Melpomene herself really understands that… which might be true. She’s looking for answers, after all. You don’t look for answers if you already know them. But is Cheshire really the question that Melpomene cares about, or was she just a means to an end?

  Are you watching, Melpomene? We’re both here because of you.

  Regardless of the real game, I probably shouldn’t stonewall the yandere goddess of violent clone murder. “You said that before,” I point out. “What do you mean when you say that I’m more like Melpomene?”

  Thalia taps her chin and eyes me critically. “You don’t feel like just another template. Mordred, Kiana, Veseryn, I’ve seen those girls a thousand times and they are all the same. Sure, the details vary, but there’s an essence beneath the surface that always drives them to their fated ends. Standing here proves that you’re different. An ordinary Veseryn couldn’t have come this far. You’re sharper, more thoughtful, and… you’re curious.”

  I ignore her praise and frown at the last line. “Are you saying the other Veseryn shards weren’t curious? That doesn’t make any sense to me. Veseryn isn’t a sorcerer like Kiana or a paladin like Mordred, she’s a thief. Discovery is our whole game.”

  Thalia waves a hand dismissively. “Discovery, yes, but only of useful things. Veseryn sees value in knowledge only in how knowledge leads to power. Do you think any of the girls we killed would have been as delighted as you to debate philosophy in a conceptual space? You have the same spark as her, that desire to understand for its own sake. It’s one of the traits I love about Melpomene.”

  “And the trait you’re going to restrain,” I say carefully.

  The Adversary sighs and leans her shoulder against the bookshelf. “Yes, I am, for her own good. If you’re worried that I’ll do the same to you, don’t be; I assure you, I have no interest in the mechanisms of creation. You’re so paranoid, Alice. I’ve been nothing but helpful since we met,” she says, sounding equally resentful and exasperated.

  She’s right, of course; I am paranoid. That doesn’t mean I’m wrong. “Sorry,” I say with a wince. “I… I appreciate how you’ve helped me. And I want to trust you. It’s just hard for me. What do you need me to do, Thalia?”

  My counterpart brightens. She pushes herself off the bookshelf, gives her dagger a twirl, and carves the whole case in half with a single motion. She pulls the wreckage away and makes a shallow cut against the wall behind it. She peels wallpaper off, tearing it in strips, to reveal a secret mirror.

  This mirror is clouded, reflecting nothing, but something about it feels important. Like it’s more real than the wall around it.

  “This,” Thalia tells me, “is the physical component of the gateway between this universe and Melpomene’s workshop. She always includes something like this in her creations, and always in a key location. In a certain sense, this mirror is the pillar holding up the universe; it grounds the rest of the mirage.”

  “So, what, you can turn it into a portal to her workshop?”

  The Adversary taps the mirror a few times, but the only thing that happens is that she winces and has to pull her hand away, the tips of her fingers looking very faintly singed. “Not exactly. When Melpomene banished me, she cut off my access to her workshop. I can’t open that portal… but you can.” She grins, and a touch of manic frenzy returns to her glittering eyes. “You’ve won, Alice. You bested the other shards, you bested this universe’s greatest horrors, and here you stand at the summit of the universe. All you have to do is touch this mirror and the gate will open for you, recognizing you for what you are. And then we can step through together and put an end to the turning wheel.”

  All I have to do is touch the mirror. Assuming Thalia doesn’t kill me in the seconds after, and assuming I’m ready to face Melpomene.

  “Okay,” I breathe out. “But, before that, can I ask you something?”

  “Anything,” she answers without hesitation. “You’ve earned that much, and we have time; this will be the last place in the universe to burn. What do you want to know?”

  I chew on my words. I need to get more information out of Thalia, but not the information she wants to give up. I need to know how she really feels about me. I walk over to Katoptris’ bed and sit down on it, still contemplating.

  Thalia lets me think. She pulls a chair away from the study and wraps around it, head resting on her shoulder as she stares at me and waits.

  I lick my lips and start talking. “So, we’re not going to overpower Melpomene. You’re her heart and I’m a big chunk of her, but that’s peanuts to the real deal. How do we narrow a power gap that massive?”

  “Our sisters.” Thalia’s smile is wicked. “We get to the lab with all the burnt shards and we absorb them all. I don’t have an exact percentage for how much of herself she’s cut away, but it’s enough to feel like half, and that’s the part that really matters. That gives us the story edge to usurp her position.”

  I frown. “Does a story edge mean anything outside of Pandaemonium?” And are you really willing to share that advantage?

  “Of course. The power that allows her to shape universe is not without limitations; Pandaemonium’s magic system may be an incarnation of the suspension of disbelief, but she only chose that system in mimicry of the constraints she’s really under.”

  “Malice talked about other demiurges,” I say, leaning in with genuine curiosity. “Do they exist? Do you know anything about the entity—or system—that granted Melpomene her power as a demiurge?”

  Thalia shrugs. “Not much. She never wanted to talk about it, even to me. But from what little she did say, I don’t think it’s a single entity handing out power. I don’t know if that means her power comes from a system without a designer or some kind of collective, but I don’t think it makes a difference. If we can make a convincing argument that Melpomene shouldn’t have absolute power over us, she won’t.”

  Huh. If she’s telling the truth—and I don’t get the sense that she isn’t—then we have a real path to beating Melpomene and taking her power. There’s weight in a narrative about the created turning against the creator. A full literary tradition to pull from.

  But that still leaves the question of whether Thalia would share power. It might be more efficient for one creation to hold the entirety of Melpomene’s missing pieces, rather than splitting them and potentially diluting the effect. I need to get more out of her.

  “Why do you think Melpomene creates shards like me?” I ask suddenly. “I know she’s trying to answer a question, but I don’t know what that question is. I want to understand. Why did she make me in all the ways that I am?”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Thalia quirks an eyebrow. “Is this idle curiosity, or something more?”

  “I’m always curious, yes, but there are genuine strategic considerations. If our victory lies in manipulating the narrative, we need to understand the complete narrative. What question is Melpomene trying to answer?”

  Thalia chews her lip. “Reasonable. Let’s look at commonalities, then. Every shard that Melpomene makes is gifted with magic of some kind, or picks it up very early in their story. Every shard lacks some mix of love, respect, and safety, and is motivated by the absence of that which they value most. You should have an idea of the standard variations from what I showed you. Kiana, the first of the lot, was a… corrupt power fantasy, let’s say. Loved and respected, but only by force, and the love was revealed as a lie at the end of her road. Katoptris was a Kiana, and your Reska.”

  And just like the original Kiana, I learned the lie up front. My relationship with Cheshire was always in question; the love she felt for me was explicitly artificial. Kiana pretended it was real until someone take that away from her, and then it all fell apart. “The question of Kiana is about love,” I say aloud. “It assumes the premise that love is a lie, then asks if the lie has value. It asks if you can be loved, even if the love someone feels for you is artificial or hurts you.” I blink. “Wait, that’s your story,” I suddenly realize.

  Thalia’s gaze burns into me. “Elaborate,” she orders me with an edge to her voice.

  Fuck. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I should have thought for one second and considered how sensitive she’d feel about that. “Uh, well, I mean… Melpomene created you, right? And you love her, I’m not questioning that—I promise I would never question that—but what if Melpomene herself isn’t sure? What if the story of Kiana—of Cheshire, really, in my own tale—is about you?”

  She watches me in silence for an agonizing minute before saying calmly, “An interesting theory. Let’s move on to the next template.”

  “Yes, right,” I hastily agree.

  “Mordred is heroic fantasy,” Thalia picks up as if I’d never interrupted her, “but turned to a kind of horror. She wants to be the hero and she wants everyone to know that she’s the hero. But there are no heroes, not in a Mordred story. She saves no one, and no one saves her. She becomes the monster she fought against and hurts the people she was meant to protect. The incarnation of ‘the ends justify the means’ becoming ‘the means determine the ends’ as she succumbs to the dark powers she wielded for a righteous cause.”

  Every Mordred becomes a Malice, just like our Homura. Just like I became, in the Red Queen timeline, by betraying everyone around me for power. At first I justified my actions by promising I’d make a better world, but the Red Queen didn’t care about a better world. In this timeline I hesitated, wanting to cling to my sense of ethics even as I worked to shape myself into a monster, but I would have become that monster eventually in any timeline where I didn’t become the Intercessor instead. The question of Mordred is about power, morality, and corruption. Can power be wielded without corrupting the wielder?

  It’s like Kiana and Mordred both represent some fundamental appeal tempered by incredible suffering. They both want something they’re not allowed to have, damned by the narrative to yearn until it kills them. And Veseryn…

  Something clicks in my head. “Veseryn,” I say in a daze. “Veseryn is her mortality. I’m right, aren’t I? Veseryn is Melpomene before she became a demiurge. The hollow yearning to be special, the terror of death, the scraped-raw desperation to claw back some sense of agency. The girl who looked up at the stars and hated that they wouldn’t shine on her, convinced that she was being given less than she deserved. The girl who grew up willing to burn the other crabs to crawl out of the bucket atop their cooked bodies. The girl who got her wish but never escaped the pit, not really, because she brought it with her, and it lives in her. In all of us.”

  “It’s… something I’ve considered,” Thalia says noncommittally. I’m barely listening to her, enraptured by my own train of thought.

  “I thought I could take her place. Before I knew any of this, before I knew I was her splinter, I wanted to climb the ladder of this universe until I took her role.” The questions come pouring in. “Does she have what it takes to succeed? Does she deserve to succeed? How can an arrogant girl, wrongfully convinced of her own genius, ever become a god? What would happen if she did?”

  Because Melpomene did succeed, but maybe she doesn’t understand how, or why she was chosen by whatever it is that makes demiurges. Maybe something about my journey mirrored however she became a demiurge, or maybe she just wanted to examine the question of whether someone, anyone, can deserve that kind of power. But there’s something I still don’t understand about Melpomene.

  “Why does she keep hurting us?” I ask. “We’re pieces of her. Whatever question she’s asking, whatever she hopes to learn from each of us, it must be about herself. So why does she keep hurting us? It’s like she wants us to fail, like she’s sabotaging her own game.”

  That was the wrong thing to say. I can tell immediately, but it’s too late to take back my words. Thalia’s whole posture shifts, an ugly fury barely restrained by her placid smile. “You really don’t understand what you’re talking about, Alice. I’ve been here since the beginning. I’ve seen them all. Melpomene gives them worthy challenges, and they fail her. It’s not sabotage.”

  But you don’t know that! I want to scream. Thalia spent ages setting up splinters to fail, on orders from her master, and yet she’s so lovestruck for Melpomene that she refuses to acknowledge that fact. It has to be our fault, not Melpomene’s fault. Kiana walked to the end that was written for her and she’s the one to blame for not breaking free of the script.

  “Time’s up,” Thalia says suddenly. “The inferno is closing in.”

  I glance at the first mirror, the doorway to this chamber, and see its edges starting to smoke. The room beyond is burning. The end of the world has found us.

  Thalia gets up from her chair and walks over to the mirror leading out of this universe and into Melpomene’s realm. “I understand your hesitation, Alice, but we don’t have the luxury of talking this out over sandwiches and an evening stroll.” She stabs the knife into a plank of the destroyed bookshelf and extends her other hand to me. “For once in your life, can’t you just trust someone? Trust me, Alice. This is how we win.”

  I almost laugh. Trusting someone? I’m lousy at trust. I’m not going to delude myself otherwise. I wish I could trust people, but another part of me thinks that’s idiotic. Trust gets people killed. Trust makes you vulnerable, and vulnerability is a weakness.

  Did trust ruin the Red Queen, or was it lack of trust? Did the Intercessor fail by placing too much trust in the Demiurge? Was the Demiurge right when she told me I could never trust someone I didn’t control?

  I don’t want to be paranoid. I don’t want to live in constant fear of betrayal. I just can’t imagine a world where someone would trust me back.

  I reach for Thalia’s hand. Slowly. Tentatively. Terrified.

  Victory gleams in her eyes, and the fear takes control again. My hand flinches away from hers and I step back. It’s reflexive, unconscious, pure instinct. It’s a mistake.

  Triumph turns to hate.

  “You just couldn’t do it the easy way, could you?” Thalia sighs.

  No, no, no—

  Thalia rips the knife out of its makeshift sheath and lunges at me. I bring up my own knife to try and block, parry, something, but she’s faster and stronger and she’s done this before. She catches my wrist and twists, and as my hand spasms and I drop my knife she drives hers into my other shoulder and cuts right to the bone.

  Where Thalia moves with precision, I flail. I have all the combat reflexes of Homura and my own past lives, but I feel like I’m stuck in slow motion trying to keep up with Thalia. My arm moves too late to block the attack that destroys my shoulder. My strike isn’t quick enough to score a cut before I lose that wrist.

  In two moves she’s crippled my ability to fight back.

  Pain spikes through my limbs, a sensation so familiar it makes me sick. I cry out at the shock to my system, but I barely have a moment to process what’s happening to me because Thalia keeps moving. The hilt of her knife comes swinging down and shatters my knee. I drop and as I fall she kicks me in the stomach and sends me tumbling away.

  Every roll is another dozen jolts of agony as my arms and legs are bashed against the stone floor of Katoptris’ chamber. When I come to a stop, breath knocked from my lungs and mind still screaming even as my voice gives out, Thalia is right there to smash her foot into my gut again. This time I spit blood.

  She keeps kicking.

  “You worthless, stupid, miserable splinter!” she hisses. “What right do you have to deny me? You’re just another weak, inferior copy! I am her heart, you wretch! I am the love she needed but could never bring herself to ask for, the love she couldn’t bear to accept, the love she cut from her chest and named.”

  Three of my ribs break during her speech. I raise my working arm to defend myself and she stabs my elbow. She twists the blade back and forth, sneering down at me as I wheeze, cry, and moan in pain.

  “Did you think you were special, sweetie? You’re nothing! I killed your kind by the dozens before I left my mistress. And I’ll keep killing you, one after the other, until one of you gives me what I need.”

  Thalia grabs my hair and yanks hard. New notes of pain join the symphony as my face is wrenched up to stare into hers.

  “Give me what I want, Alice. Open the portal.”

  My animal brain screams at me to give her what she wants, but another part of me screams that she’ll finish the job as soon as I’ve done that. I’m trapped in agony with no way out and I don’t know how to react, what to say, what to think. Stop stop stop, please stop, please, please, please stop!

  I’m too slow for Thalia. She rips the knife out of my elbow and snatches my broken wrist again. “New incentive!” she announces cheerfully. “Until you tell me what I want to hear—and mean it, you can’t lie to me—I’m going to pare these fingers down bone by bloody bone.”

  “No!” I manage to gasp out. “No, no, please—”

  Slice goes the knife, and off goes the tip of my index finger. I scream again, and Thalia clicks her tongue. “A scream isn’t the answer I’m looking for, puppy.” The tip of my middle finger is next, another chunk of flesh and bone falling to the floor as she carves my hand apart. “Tell me you’ll do what I want.” Half my thumb. “Tell me you’ll obey.”

  Something, anything, I have to do something! I reach for the shadows, for blood magic, for every trick I’ve ever learned. Nothing comes to me.

  On the other side of the tower mirror, everything is burning. Smoke seeps through the portal, little tongues of flame flicking through the gap. Pandaemonium is gone.

  Slice. Another third of my index finger. Slice. The tip of my pinkie.

  I can’t stop crying. I can’t stop trying to scream.

  I try to move my head away and Thalia bashes my skull with the hilt of her knife before returning to her methodical deconstruction of my hand. Through the haze and the pain, a realization begins to sink in: I am going to die here.

  Give her what she wants. Say yes, say yes, say yes!

  My fear pleads with me. Terror begs me to submit. I want to make the pain go away. I want to make it stop. I’m so tired of hurting.

  Slice. Another piece of pinkie. Slice. The tip of my ring finger.

  I was stupid. I was so stupid. Another Veseryn that thought herself clever. Another scared, stupid little girl.

  I’m going to bleed out, or die of shock, or Thalia will give up on coercing me and toss me into the flames. If I help her, she might kill me, but if I don’t help her then she’ll definitely kill me.

  Just agree. Please, please just agree with her!

  “Please,” I whimper.

  Another kick to the chest is my reward, and another broken rib. “Wrong,” Thalia says dryly. “You can do better than that, puppy.”

  Slice. The rest of my thumb. Slice. The rest of my pinkie.

  “Almost out of fingers on this side,” Thalia warns. “Then I’ll have to switch.”

  The panicked desperation in my chest lurches again. I want to give in. I want this to end. I don’t want to die.

  Every step of my journey, that’s been the single idea that drives me: I don’t want to die. More than anything else, even more than loss of control, that’s what terrifies me.

  I want to give in, but something stops me. Terror begs me to tell Thalia I’ll do what she wants, but I resist. I keep fighting, struggling to move my body, reaching desperately for anything that could save me.

  Slice. Ring finger. Slice. Middle finger. Slice. Index finger.

  I feel almost numb. The pain is still there, impossible to ignore and only escalating, but there’s a cold fog seeping in. I’m dying, and all I can think is that it’s just not fair.

  I’ve endured so much, come so far, and now I’m going to die on the threshold of everything I’ve ever wanted. Because I hesitated, because Thalia and I couldn’t trust each other, because all shards do is kill each other.

  It can’t end like this. I’ve been struggling through this cycle for three whole lives. Three timelines of suffering, and this is my reward.

  Through the fog, through the searing pain, a thought comes to me: three timelines…

  “You’re a fighter,” Thalia admires. “I’ll have to cut that out of you.”

  Slice. Slice. Slice.

  Twice over, the Demiurge rewrote the end of my story. From my defeat against Urna, she rewound time. From my prophesied defeat against Malice, she rewound time. She did not allow me to lose. She did not allow me to die.

  My story wasn’t finished. She hadn’t found the ending she wanted.

  Is this the ending she wants for me? Is this how I’m meant to die?

  Maybe I’m just delirious from the blood loss, but I feel like laughing. I have a new idea. An awful, wonderful, terrifying idea. The very thing I’m scared of most, turned into my final weapon. A last resort. A gamble.

  One more risk. One all-or-nothing play.

  For one last time, I’ll bet it all on feast or famine.

  I smile with bloody lips as Thalia pares away another finger on my other hand. She catches my expression and stops, pauses her butcher’s work.

  “Ready to give up?” she asks.

  I lick my teeth. My heart is pounding. I’m terrified. Yet, at the same time, I’m exhilarated. This is it. This is everything. “Hey, Thalia,” I croak, spitting blood and nearly tripping over my words, tongue heavy and numb. “Why is it, do you think, that she loves me more than she’ll ever love you?”

  Thalia cuts my throat.

  “LIAR!” she screams as she stabs my chest again and again and again and again and again. “Liar, liar, liar! She loves me, she loves me, SHE LOVES ME!”

  My pain blossoms like a flower without end, a fractal garden of exquisite agonies. And then it fades. The pain fades, and my vision fades, and my hearing fades. Terror fades. Hope fades. Thinking… fades. Everything… everything…

  …fades…

  …

  And I’m back in front of the mirror, unharmed, with Thalia extending her hand to me.

  I died, and now I’m alive again, though my heart is still pounding and I can feel the ghost of the knife still resting against my throat. I remember it vividly, but it never happened. Time was rewound to save me.

  By the shocked look on her face, Thalia also remembers what just happened.

  “How—why did she—for her?” The anguish in her voice is incredibly satisfying.

  The Adversary likes to think that she’s better than the “template” system, but she’s not; she’s a Kiana shard, through and through. Love is what motivates her, and love is what can destroy her.

  “I told you,” I say with a smirk. “She loves me more. She won’t let you kill me. Even here, even now, at the very end of the universe, she won’t let me go.”

  Then the Adversary does something I never expected: she wails.

  Thalia crumples, falling to her knees and breaking down into sobs and screams. At first she buries her head in her hands, but then she starts hitting herself, fists pounding against her skull over and over again.

  “Why?” she cries. “Why, why, why? Why her and not me? Didn’t I serve you? Wasn’t I good for you? I did everything you asked. I just wanted you to love me! I just wanted to be yours, so why, why, why didn’t you let me?”

  My sense of triumph bleeds away. The smugness vanishes from my face.

  I finally realize what I should have from the very start: Thalia, too, has been a victim of our creator. Her first victim.

  I feel… ugly. Wretched. What am I doing?

  This whole time, I’ve only seen Thalia as something dangerous to be managed. I couldn’t conceive of her as a genuine ally. And given her reaction to simple hesitation, it’s not that I was wrong to be afraid of her… but I’ve been ignoring that she is also in pain.

  Everything Thalia does, she does because she was hurt. She’s perpetuating a cycle of harm that she never asked to be part of. It’s a role that was forced on her, and in trying to break away from that role she was only hurt further.

  It doesn’t forgive what she’s done. It doesn’t make her any less dangerous. But she is still, deep down, my sister. One of us.

  “Thalia.”

  Slowly, still wracked by sobs, Thalia raises her face to look at me. Her eyes are bloodshot, her cheeks stained with tears, her lips bleeding from where she must have torn them open with her teeth. “What do you want?” she asks, broken. “Why are you still here? Go. Leave me here to burn.”

  “Join me. Give me your heart.”

  Thalia stares at me, uncomprehending.

  “The Demiurge won’t let you in,” I say gently, “even if I open the portal for you. But if you become a part of me, then you can come with. If you give me your heart—if you give me your love for Melpomene—I’ll carry it with me to meet her again.”

  “You want to kill her,” Thalia accuses. “You want to hurt her for hurting you.”

  “I did,” I admit. “But now… I don’t know.” I glance at the mirror that leads to Melpomene’s domain and imagine her watching us through it. “Right now, more than anything, I just want to understand why all of this happened. Don’t you?”

  Thalia closes her eyes and more tears stream down her cheeks. “I just want to see her again,” she whispers. “I just want to touch her one more time.”

  “Then join me. See her again the only way that’s left.”

  For a long moment, she just cries. Smoke starts to seep into the room, the flames once more reaching the entrance to our pocket dimension. Finally, Thalia stumbles to her feet and laughs. “Damn you. Damn you all.”

  She plunges her hand into her chest and rips out her own heart.

  The heart of the Demiurge beats in her hand, and then she shoves it in my chest and a thousand lifetimes flood my mind.

  I remember everything. Every path she walked, every shard she deceived and betrayed, every moment spent crying in her room wishing she could help her creator.

  Her existence was so much bigger than mine. So big I nearly drown in it.

  But I refuse to drown. I refuse to stop being me.

  My name is Alice. I will always be Alice.

  I’ll never give that up.

  I swallow the last of Thalia’s memories, open the portal to Melpomene’s realm, and leave the ashes of Pandaemonium behind.

  There’s one more story to tell.

  patreon page to read the last chapter of Feast or Famine now! Also, consider subscribing because being able to eat really helps me write more words.

  This Magical Girl is Mine, is also up on Patreon, with and FREE FOR EVERYONE. There are additional chapters available only for patrons.