LinieBaru Chapter 30: Liniebaru VS Clone: The Last One To Attack (Patreon)

The words left her mouth the way water leaves a cracked jar, without any effort behind them, without any real decision to speak at all, and the chamber answered before she had finished the first line.

"I am the bone of my sword."

She had heard that chant a hundred times in another life, sitting cross legged on a floor in front of a screen, mouthing along with a man in red who never once looked like he doubted himself, and she had always assumed that if she ever got to say it out loud it would feel triumphant. It did not feel triumphant. It felt like something reaching into her chest and pulling out a shape she had been carrying around for three hundred deaths without ever knowing it was in there, and the shape did not match the words at all.

The second line came out wrong.

She opened her mouth to say steel is my body and fire is my blood, and what came out instead was something else entirely, words she had never read or heard, arriving in her mouth already formed the way the understanding of Infinity had arrived behind her eyes.

"Sand is my body," she said, and her own voice sounded strange to her, lower and steadier than it had any right to be with blood in her throat and a wall pressing against her spine. "Death is my patience."

The crushing telekinetic pressure holding her against the stone did not stop. The clone did not stop either, floating there with its palms cupped around a sphere of collapsing light that had begun to bend the air into long grey ribbons, dragging dust and gravel and the broken fingers of statues into a slow spiral around itself. It had no interest in whatever she was doing. It had watched her die three hundred times and it had learned, in whatever cold way a construct learns anything, that nothing she said had ever mattered before.

"I have crossed over a hundred endings," Subaru continued, and the pressure on her ribs began to feel less like a hand and more like a memory of a hand, something happening a long distance away to a body she was no longer completely inside. "Unaware of loss. Nor aware of gain."

She was crying. She noticed it the way you notice weather, with a mild distant interest that did not belong to the moment.

"Withstood pain to create weapons, waiting to return."

The chamber began to come apart.

It did not shatter, and it did not burn, and nothing about it collapsed in the way stone collapses when something heavy hits it. The marble simply stopped being convincing. The pillars thinned out at the edges, the way a drawing thins out when the pencil runs low, and the ceiling with all its old carved gods lost the argument it had been having with the sky for the last several centuries. Light came through the gaps. It was not the cold white light of the chamber lamps and it was not the sick green of the mana in the air. It was low and orange and enormous, the light of a sun sitting a hand's width above a horizon that had no business existing inside a building.

"I have no regrets," Subaru said. "This is the only path."

The wall behind her stopped being a wall.

She fell about a foot and landed on sand.

"My whole life is Unlimited Blade Works."

The last of the chamber went out like a lamp being carried into another room, and the world that replaced it did not arrive so much as reveal itself, as though it had been sitting underneath the ruins the entire time, waiting for somebody to finally scrape the floor away and look.

Desert.

It went out in every direction without a single feature to interrupt it, dune after dune after dune, all of them lying in long soft parallel lines like something had combed the whole world once and then walked off and never come back. The sand was pale gold near her hands and darker where the shadows of the dunes pooled, and it was warm, warmer than the chamber had ever been, warm in a way that got into her knees and her palms and made the ache in her ribs feel briefly less important. Above it the sky held that same enormous low sun and nothing else, no clouds, no stars, no moon, just a long gradient running from burnt orange at the horizon up into a deep bruised violet directly overhead, the exact shade her eyes turned when she was burning.

There was no wind. That was the part that made her skin crawl once she noticed it, standing there on her knees with blood running out of the corner of her mouth. A desert this size should have had wind moving over it constantly, and instead the air sat completely still, so still that the grains of sand her landing had thrown up were still hanging in the air around her hands, drifting down at their own slow pace with nothing to push them sideways.

The clone stood about forty meters away, on top of the nearest dune, holding a collapsing star between its palms.

It had come with her. Of course it had come with her. Subaru's mind, which had gone somewhere quiet and enormous during the chant, came back all at once and started doing arithmetic she did not like the shape of.

She got her feet under her. The sand shifted and then held, packing itself under her boots with a firmness that ordinary sand would not have managed, and she understood, in that same wordless downloaded way she had understood Infinity, that the ground here would be exactly as solid as she needed it to be and not one grain more.

"Okay," she said, mostly to hear a voice. "Okay. That is a lot of sand. That is arguably too much sand."

Her mana reserves should have been empty. She checked them the way you check a pocket you already know is empty, expecting the same thin scraped feeling that had been dragging at her for the last forty loops, and found instead that the question did not apply anymore. It was not that she was full. It was that the world was not asking her to pay. The sand was holding her up and the sun was hanging where it hung and none of it was coming out of her, because none of it was being maintained at all. It simply was, in the way her own arms simply were, and she felt the difference in her teeth.

"Subaru-kun," said a woman's voice.

Subaru turned so fast she nearly put herself back on the ground.

There was nobody there. There was sand, and more sand, and the long shadow of the dune she had landed beside, and absolutely nothing standing in any of it, and yet the voice had come from somewhere very close to her left shoulder with the easy warmth of somebody leaning in to talk over a crowd.

"Don't look for me," the voice said. "You won't find me, not yet."

"Who?" Subaru managed.

"Later. Listen to the terms, because they're already active and I'd rather you heard them from me than found out the loud way." The voice had a smile in it that did not reach very far down, as if excited speaking to her. "This world runs on rules and I only get to tell you them once, so pay attention with the part of your brain that isn't currently screaming about the hole in your side."

Subaru looked down. There was a gash along her ribs she did not remember earning and it was bleeding a slow black that soaked into the sand and vanished without leaving a mark.

"Rule one," the voice said. "Inside your world, your word is law. Anything you build here holds. Anything you refuse here fails."

"That sounds fake and great."

"Rule two exists because rule one is obscene." A pause, and something in the voice cooled. "You are looking at an opponent with more mana in one hand than you have had across every loop you have ever lived. A world like this, thrown up against something like that, is a child locking a door against a landslide. So the world charges you for the privilege. When you drag in something stronger than you are, it gets one hit. One. Free. It cannot be dodged, it cannot be blocked, it cannot be denied, and nothing you do between now and the moment it lands will change where it lands. Your barrier will not hold. Your speed will not save you. The sand will not move for you. You will take it exactly as it is offered."

Subaru stood very still in the warm gold light of a sun that did not exist.

"And after?" she asked.

"After," said the voice, "the debt is paid, and the world stops being polite."

The collapsing star in the clone's hands finished forming.

Subaru had seen it start to grow back in the chamber and had already decided it was unfair then, but out here with nothing to hide behind and a sky that went on forever it looked worse, a knot of dark and white light no bigger than a fist that had begun to bend the sand around itself into long spiralling ridges, dragging the dune under the clone's feet upward in slow ribbons that broke apart before they ever reached the center. The air made a sound around it that was not quite a sound, a pressure against the inside of her ears, the noise a room makes right before a window breaks.

The clone let the sphere go, and then, in a decision that Subaru would spend the rest of the loop turning over in her head, it did not throw the sphere at her at all. It closed its hand and the star folded in on itself and went out, and the clone lowered its arm and looked at her across forty meters of empty desert with its head very slightly tilted.

It had understood something. Subaru could see the exact moment it happened, the same flicker she had seen when the spear split its shield and again when Infinity ate its first beam, that small recalculating twitch of a mind built out of somebody else's talent. It had felt the world change. It had felt the rules change. And it had worked out, faster than anything with a face made of clay had any right to, that the enormous attack it had spent thirty seconds building was not the correct answer to a question it had only just been asked.

It raised its staff instead.

"Oh, that's not fair either," Subaru said, and her voice cracked in the middle of it.

The clone was choosing. She could see it choosing. Out of everything in its arsenal, out of the beams and the fireballs and the crushing invisible hands and the collapsing stars, it was standing there on a dune in a desert that had not existed a minute ago and it was picking the one spell it knew would go through her, the way you pick a specific key off a ring without looking because your fingers already know the shape of it.

Black gathered along the length of the staff. It was not the light of a spell being cast so much as the absence of light being sharpened, a single line of dark drawn down the air and then compressed, and compressed again, and again, until it was thinner than a hair and heavier than the sun above them.

Subaru knew the shape of it. She had died to it first, three hundred loops ago, before she had known anything at all.

She ran anyway.

That was the part she thought about later, sitting with her back to the cold stone and her hands shaking. She had been told, clearly and slowly by a voice that had no reason to lie to her, that the hit could not be dodged, and her body had gone sideways across the sand anyway because three hundred deaths had trained it to move at the exact tightening of that staff and no amount of information was ever going to overwrite that. She threw herself into a hard cut left, kicked off a slope that firmed up under her boot at exactly the right instant, and put a rising dune between herself and the line of the shot.

The dune did not matter.

She felt it arrive before she felt it land. There was a moment, no longer than a blink, where the entire desert seemed to agree with something, where the sand and the sun and the still air all leaned very slightly in the same direction, and then the spell went through the dune without disturbing a single grain of it and went through Subaru's torso the same way.

There was no impact. She had been braced for impact, for the freight train force of the telekinesis or the tearing burn of a beam, and instead there was a cold thin line drawn from front to back, an almost gentle feeling, the way a very sharp knife feels for the half second before the body works out what has happened to it.

Then she was on her knees.

She had not decided to kneel. The sand came up and met her and she stayed there, propped on one hand, and she looked down at herself with an expression that would have been comical in any other circumstance, the face of somebody checking a shopping list they were sure they had put in their pocket.

There was a hole in her.

It sat low and left of center, wider than her spread hand, and through it she could see the sand on the other side, the pale gold slope running away toward the horizon, one small shadow moving as a grain slid down it. The edges were not bleeding. The edges were coming apart, unravelling into fine ribbons of black mana that lifted off her in slow curls and dissolved into the still air, the way she always came apart at the end of every loop, except this time it was starting from the middle and working outward and she was entirely awake for it.

"Huh," Subaru said.

Her voice did not shake. That surprised her more than the hole did.

She turned her hand over and watched her fingers. The tips had gone translucent, the black fraying off them in threads, and the strange thing, the thing she kept coming back to, was that it did not hurt. Three hundred deaths and every single one of them had hurt, the beams and the crushing and the burning and the one truly memorable occasion involving the ceiling, and now that something had finally put a window through her stomach the pain had simply declined to show up.

She looked back up at the clone standing on the dune with its staff still smoking black at the tip.

"S-so that's what one fr-free hit looks like," she said.

The clone did not answer, because it never answered, but it lowered the staff a fraction and its head came back to level, and Subaru had watched that face for so many hundreds of hours by now that she could read the shift in it as easily as she could read a page. It was waiting. It had put a hole through her and it was standing there in a desert it did not understand, waiting to see whether the black mana would finish taking her the way it always had.

Subaru pushed herself up off the sand with one hand and stood, which took considerably longer than standing usually did, and once she was upright she found that she could still balance perfectly well, which struck her as extremely funny given the circumstances.

"You know what," she said, "I'm going to talk. I've been dying in front of you for three hundred loops and I have never once gotten to just talk, so you can stand there and be a clay man about it."

She took a step forward. The sand held.

"I figured out two things," Subaru said, holding up one hand and folding down a finger that had gone half transparent at the knuckle. "One."

The desert seemed to lean in.

"Erfassen evolves. Every time I die."

She let that sit for a second, because she had only worked it out about forty seconds ago and she wanted to hear it out loud to check whether it still sounded true, and it did.

"It's small," she went on, walking closer, sand whispering under her boots. "It's so small that I never noticed it, because when you're dying every four minutes you're not exactly running careful experiments on yourself. But it's been happening since the beginning. First it was just weapons. I hold a memory of a weapon, I get the weapon, and whatever the weapon can do, I can do, because the trick came attached to the steel. That was the whole rule. That was the entire shape of my power and I built three hundred deaths on top of it."

Another step. The hole in her middle had widened by a finger's width and the ribbons coming off it had started to curl upward instead of drifting, drawn toward the sun that was not a sun.

"Then Stark killed me a hundred times and it woke up in the first place: Copy moves… Convert into mana-based motions… with weapons. Then you killed me countless times and it gave me Infinity, and Infinity does not come with a weapon. There is no sword. There is no gun. There is nothing to hold. It is just a thing a man could do because of what he was, and I got it anyway, and I was so busy being happy about it that I never asked the obvious question."

She stopped about fifteen meters out and spread her arms, which cost her another thin curl of black off her left elbow.

"If it can give me something that doesn't come with a weapon, then it was never actually about the weapons at all. The weapons were just the shape it could manage back when it was small. It's been growing this whole time. It grew when Stark cut me down and it grew when you burned me and it grew every single time I bled out on that marble floor thinking I had wasted another one, and now it's grown into this."

Subaru gestured at the desert. At all of it. At the dunes and the low orange sun and the sky the color of her own eyes.

"A world," she said. "I can make a world now. That's what it costs and that's what it buys, and I paid for it three hundred times without ever getting a receipt."

The clone raised its staff.

Black gathered along it again, quicker this time, the shape of the spell forming with the smooth economy of something that had been done many thousands of times before, and Subaru watched it happen and did not move at all.

"Two," she said, folding down a second finger.

The Zoltraak fired.

It was a good shot. Subaru had been on the receiving end of enough of them to have opinions about the craft, and this one was clean, thin, perfectly aimed at the space directly between her eyes, released without so much as a hitch of hesitation. It crossed fifteen meters of desert air in less time than it took her to blink.

And then it was simply not there anymore.

There was no barrier for it to hit. No shimmer, no Infinity, no glass wall for the spell to run headfirst into and forget how to move. The spell arrived at a point roughly a meter in front of her face and the world declined to continue it, the way a sentence stops when the person speaking changes their mind, and the black line went out from the front backward until there was nothing left of it at all.

The clone stood very still.

"Yeah," Subaru said. "The debt's paid. She said the world stops being polite, and I'll be honest, at the time I thought that was a really cool line and not necessarily load bearing, but here we are."

She folded the second finger all the way down.

"Two. I can tell you about Return by Death."

The words came out and nothing happened.

That was the part that stopped her. She had said the phrase exactly once before, in the third loop, back when she had still believed that this whole nightmare was a thing that could be explained to somebody else and solved by a committee, and the world had reached into her chest and squeezed until her vision went white and the air went out of her and something enormous and cold had looked at her from behind time itself. She had never tried again. She had spent three hundred deaths carrying it alone, chewing on it alone, screaming about it into empty stone corridors where nobody could hear a word of it, because the one time she had tried to share it the punishment had been so specific and so personal that she had understood it as a law of nature.

Now she had said it, out loud, in a world she had built out of her own accumulated dying, and her heart was beating normally and the sun had not moved and nothing had reached for her at all.

"For some reason," she added quietly, "it's letting me."

She was quiet for a moment after that, and the desert was quiet with her, and the black kept lifting off her fingertips in slow curling threads.

"I die," Subaru said. "And I come back. That's the whole thing, that's the entire miracle, that's the great cosmic gift I got handed when I woke up in a body that isn't mine in a world that isn't mine. I go back to a point. Right now the point is a passageway with a lamp on the wall, about ninety seconds before I walk through the door and you start killing me. And nobody remembers except me. Not you. You've never met me before. Every single time I walk in there it's the first time we're meeting, and every single time I walk out of here in pieces it's the three hundredth."

She started walking again, slowly, closing the gap.

"Do you know what that does to a person? Actually, no, obviously you don't, you're a very talented lump of clay with somebody else's face on it. I'll tell you." Her voice stayed level, which she was privately proud of. "The first ten, you panic. The next twenty, you get clever, you try everything, you think surely there's a trick, surely there's an item or an angle or a door I haven't opened. Somewhere around fifty you start getting angry, and angry is actually the good part, angry gets things done. And then somewhere past a hundred the anger runs out and there's nothing underneath it, and you just do it. You get up. You walk out. You die. You get up."

Fifteen meters had become eight. The clone's staff had come up again and the black was gathering again, faster and denser than before, and Subaru walked into it without breaking her stride.

"I stopped counting at three hundred," she said. "I want that on the record, because at the time it felt like the most pathetic thing I had ever done, and I've spent the last dozen loops thinking about it, and I've decided it wasn't. Counting was the last thing keeping it a story. Things with numbers have endings. And when I let the number go, that was the first time I ever fought you as somebody who wasn't waiting for the fight to be over."

The Zoltraak fired again, twice in quick succession, and both spells stopped a meter from her without a sound.

"Sorry," Subaru said. "This is my house."

The clone tried something else.

She had to give it credit, and later she would, in the quiet of the inn room with her hands around her knees. It did not repeat itself. It did not stand there firing the same spell into the same nothing like a broken machine. It threw a fireball, condensed and blazing, and the fireball stopped. It reached out with the invisible crushing hand that had ended more of her lives than everything else combined, and Subaru felt the pressure arrive at the edge of her skin and simply fail to be given permission to continue, and the sand around her boots did not shift by a single grain. It dragged an entire dune into the air, tons and tons of loose gold sand rising in a wave that blotted out the horizon behind it, and hurled the whole thing down on top of her, and the wave came apart into a fine still cloud that hung in the air exactly where it had stopped and did not fall.

Subaru walked through the hanging cloud, and the grains parted around her shoulders without touching her, and closed again behind her.

"You're not going to get one," she said, almost kindly. "It's not a defense. Defenses have limits, that's the whole point of them, you push hard enough on a shield and eventually the shield stops being a shield. This isn't that. In here I don't have to stop you,”

The clone lowered its staff.

Its head was tilted again, and it had gone very still, and Subaru realized with a small cold jolt that the expression on that borrowed face was not confusion this time. Confusion she had seen. Confusion was a flicker and a recalculation, the twitch of a system finding an unexpected value. This was flatter than that, and stiller, and Subaru had been looking at the face of the strongest mage she had ever met for three hundred loops and had learned to read it the way you learn to read weather off a sky.

It was the face of something that had run out of options and was standing there anyway, because standing there was all it had ever been built to do.

"Yeah," Subaru said softly. "I know. Believe me, buddy. I know exactly what that's like."

She stopped, five meters out, and looked down at her own hands.

The hole in her chest had reached the width of both palms and she could see a great deal of desert through it now. Her left arm had gone half transparent from the elbow down. Ribbons of black were lifting off her shoulders and her ribs and her jaw, thousands of them, thin as thread, and the strange calm she had been running on since the moment the spell went through her was starting to thin out at the edges the same way she was.

She had maybe thirty seconds. Possibly less.

"Okay," she said. "One power. That's the deal, right?"

The voice did not answer, but the desert seemed to warm very slightly, the way a room does when somebody who has been listening decides to keep listening.

She had felt the rule arrive at the same moment the world had, folded into the understanding like a footnote. In here, she got one. One copy, one borrowed shape, one single thing pulled out of the enormous library of everything she had ever loved and watched and memorized in a life that had ended in another world, and once she chose it that was the whole hand and there would be no drawing again.

It was, when she turned it over, an absurdly generous restriction. Three hundred loops of desperation had taught her to grab whatever her hands could reach and hope it was enough. Now she was being asked to choose, calmly, with the entire catalogue open, and the only requirement was that she pick correctly.

Subaru had known what she was going to pick since the second line of the chant.

"The sheath in my heart," she said, "and the sword in my hands."

Gold came out of her palms.

It did not gather and it did not condense and it did not do any of the slow blooming things that mana usually did. It arrived, the way the sun arrives over a hill, and it was not the pale gold of the sand or the burnt orange of the sky but something deeper and older than either, a light with weight to it, a light that pushed the shadows of the dunes backward instead of falling into them. It ran up out of her hands into the air and the air held it, and shape found it, and where there had been nothing there was a grip, and a crossguard, and then a blade, broad and short and heavy and utterly plain, without a single decoration anywhere on it, humming at a pitch just below hearing.

The light poured out of the blade and washed over the desert, and everywhere it touched, Subaru came back together.

The black ribbons lifting off her stopped, hung, and reversed. She watched her left hand fill back in from the wrist outward, transparency thickening into skin, and felt the sensation return to her fingers a half second after the sight of them did. The hole in her torso closed from the edges inward, not scabbing, not knitting, simply undoing itself, the way a footprint undoes itself when the tide comes back over it, and the last of it sealed with a small clean warmth that spread out through her ribs and drove three hundred loops of accumulated ache straight out of her body. Her cracked ribs stopped being cracked. The gash on her side stopped having ever been a gash. Blood lifted off her chin and her collar and her sleeves in fine golden motes and went out of existence.

Subaru stood in the middle of a desert that was not real, in a body that had a hole in it eight seconds ago, holding the most famous sword in the history of anything, and started laughing.

"Heh," she said. "I always wanted to do this."

The clone moved.

It threw everything it had left in one motion, and Subaru would think about that too, afterward, because there had been nothing mechanical in it at all. Beams and fire and black condensed lines and the crushing hand and a second collapsing star half formed and released early, all of it at once, all of it aimed at the small figure standing in the sand with a glowing blade held low at her side, and the sky above the desert went briefly white with the amount of power crossing it.

None of it arrived.

Every spell stopped at the same distance from her, all of them at once, hanging in a rough sphere in the still air like insects caught in resin, and then the gold light rolled outward from the blade and went through them, and there was nothing hanging in the air anymore.

Subaru raised the sword over her head with both hands.

The desert answered. The sand across every dune in every direction lifted, all of it, the whole world's worth of it rising a hand's height off the ground and hanging there, and the light coming off the blade climbed the sky and turned the violet overhead to white and the sun itself into a dull red coin sitting in the corner of something much brighter. The pressure of it pushed the clone back a full step on the crest of its dune, its robes snapping, one hand rising uselessly in front of its face.

The air stopped being air. It became a column, and the column became a promise, and Subaru felt every single one of her three hundred deaths gather in her arms at once, not as weight but as permission.

"Ex—"

Her eyes burned so bright the sand under her feet went white.

"—calibur!"

The world went gold.

There was no arc and there was no swing that anybody could have followed with an eye. The light left the blade and it did not travel so much as connect, a bar of pure gold stretching from Subaru's hands to the horizon and past it, wide as a house, and where it passed over the desert the dunes did not burn or melt or scatter, they simply ended, the sand vanishing without smoke and without sound, leaving a perfectly flat channel of dark glass running out toward the edge of the world.

The clone was inside it.

Subaru saw it for perhaps a tenth of a second, a small dark shape standing in the middle of an ocean of light with its staff raised in front of it and a shield spinning up around it that had once taken her three hundred deaths to crack, and she saw the shield go, and the staff go, and then she saw the flat calm clay face of Frieren's clone with the light already halfway through it, and the expression on it was not fear and was not anger and was not anything she had a name for.

It looked, for that tenth of a second, like it was seeing her properly for the first time.

Then there was no clone, and no dune it had been standing on, and no horizon behind it, and the light went on for a long time after it was all gone, running out into a distance the desert had never bothered to define.

Subaru held the sword up until her arms started shaking, and then a while after that.

When she finally let it down, point first into what had been sand and was now a long smooth sheet of dark glass, the light drained back out of the sky and the low orange sun came out of hiding and sat there again, exactly where it had been, as though nothing at all had happened underneath it.

"Thank you," Subaru said, to nobody, quietly. "Seriously. Thank you."

The world came apart the way it had come together, without drama, with the tired courtesy of a thing that had done its job. The horizon thinned first, then the sun, then the dunes, gold going grey and grey going into the shapes of pillars and broken statues and the high carved ceiling with its old forgotten gods, and the warmth went out of the air and the cold of the ruins came back into her hands.

Subaru stood in the middle of the chamber.

The marble floor was cracked and scorched and littered with the wreckage of a fight that had taken three hundred loops to finish, dust hanging in the flat white light, one long fallen pillar lying across the center of the room where it had been for as long as she had been coming here. The clone was not there. There was no body, because there had never been a body, and there was no mana bleeding into the air, and nothing hovered anywhere near the raised dais at the far end.

Excalibur was still in her hand. She looked down at it, at the broad plain blade and the light still crawling faintly along the fuller, and while she was looking the gold went out of it from the tip downward and it was gone, and her palm was empty, and the weight left her arm.

She stood there for a moment.

It took longer than she expected for the fact of it to catch up. Some part of her was still waiting for the passageway, for the lamp, for the sharp gasp of air and the cold stone at her back and the whole thing beginning again for the three hundred and first time, and that part of her waited, and kept waiting, and slowly ran out of reasons to.

"I did it," Subaru said.

Her voice came back off the marble, small in a room built for something much larger than her.

"I killed Frieren's clone."

She turned her hand over and looked at the palm where the sword had been, and at the fingers that had come apart into black ribbons and been put back together by a light she had chosen out of a memory of another life.

"I can kill Frieren."

She thought about that. She was not sure yet whether it was a good thing to be able to say, and she filed the question away with all the other questions she did not have room for at the moment, and something in her chest that had been clenched for three hundred loops let go by a fraction.

"And," she said, quieter, looking up at the empty air above the dais where a voice had once leaned in over her shoulder like it was talking over a crowd, "thanks, lady. Whoever you are."

The chamber said nothing back.

Subaru wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, found no blood there, and started walking toward the doors at the far end of the hall, the tall ones with the old carving down the middle, the ones that led to the treasure room.

Cover by the multi-talented guy SiriusIsNotFortuna (she actually is, but let him think otherwise, kek). It's going be default from now on for the main story.

Let me know what you think: about this particular chapter, what it reveals and what answers you’ve got.

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