Intermission pt.7 This is the final chapter where everything goes well and no one dies :) (Patreon)

Since that day, Simel had tried to be glad for his current existence. What else could he do?

Even if he escaped somehow, it was exactly as Holly said. He had nowhere to go. Even leaving the city would be impossible. So, he tried to make the most of it, and he tried never ever ever to think too deeply about Kitty. He didn’t think about how Kitty now held him just a bit tighter than before, or that Kitty never seemed quite comfortable to leave him alone. Even when they sat in the garden, Kitty always had one eye over his shoulder, making sure that Simel stayed right where he was. 

Simel liked being alive. He liked being alive very much. 

He had no reason to fear Kitty. He had no reason to fear the arms that held him when he slept. He had no reason to fear the hands that caressed him, running down the back of his head, across his neck, combing through his mane. 

He loved Kitty very much. Because Kitty was his friend.

Simel never thought about the little leatherbound book in his cupboard. 

Simel liked being alive. 

When Simel slept, he slept well—deeply and through the whole night. He did not spend any hours during the night, held in arms he couldn’t escape, breathing quicker than he ever allowed himself to breathe in the daytime, thinking thoughts that would otherwise be heard, worrying about what would happen if Kitty ever stopped loving him. 

Simel didn’t toss and turn fretfully, because he couldn’t. 

But it wasn’t on such a night that it happened. 

No, surprisingly, it happened on a restful night, a week after his meeting with Vann and Holly, one wherein he had simply been too exhausted to not sleep, where rest had taken him with too much force to resist, and the night had consumed him. He had gone to bed thinking only of what to draw the next morning and dreamt nothing at all, his sleep so deep that when he woke up, it felt as if no time had passed at all. 

But the room was dark. He blinked at it, letting his vision adjust to the faint moonlight coming from the window. Kitty wasn’t moving at all, merely snoring softly against his chest. 

He didn’t know, then, how he had woken up. It hadn’t been a nightmare. It hadn’t been a stray thought, it hadn’t been anything at all like that. No, as a matter of fact, rather than waking up on his own, it felt more like…

He saw it. Hovering over the bed, a shadow at his side, stood a person. Too tall to be a goblin, only their outline visible against the inky darkness of the room. Simel drew a sharp breath. His heart stopped still. Too afraid to even blink, he stared up at the silhouette, not knowing when it had arrived, or what it wanted, or if it was even a person to begin with. 

It shifted. He saw the gleam of moonlight striking an eye, and then the silhouette stepped away from the shadows, moving as soundlessly as a ghost over the floor, until its body entered the full moonlight streaming in from the window. 

Simel blinked at her. Holly, in return, held up a finger to her lips, shushing him. Then, saying nothing, she took the rib lying atop the desk, and brought it to him, pressing it into his hand. He furrowed her brows at her. She rolled her eyes and gestured for him to leave the bed. For him to go. 

Go where? Do what? Couldn’t she see the position he was in? Asking him to leave Kitty… What in the world was she thinking?

And still… That old vice of his, that dragon named curiosity, it reared up. It stood on its tippy-toes, grinning and chuckling, demanding to know what could possibly be so important for her to infiltrate the very deepest sanctum of the god of hope, something so forbidden she couldn’t let Kitty know, something she needed Simel for, and no one else. It clapped, it danced, and it cried for answers, knowing that Simel—the weak goblin he was—could do nothing but play along.

Simel grit his teeth. He hated it. He hated his own weakness. 

And yet, by the light of the moons… She seemed so worried. None of that fakeness he saw a week ago. Now, all she held was genuine care, hoping that he would make the right choice, that he would join her, even if it was a lot to demand. 

Without making a single noise, Simel contorted himself, bringing the rib to his lips. A kiss, a murmur, and the rib lit up, showing that the hope Simel held for escape was enough—that he’d be able to slip from Kitty’s arms without being found. And so, rib in hand, he did just that, stepping off the bed and padding softly across the room, all the way to Holly. Mere feet away from her, he looked up, meeting her gaze evenly. She gestured at his desk, and at his cupboards. 

It was then that the reality of the situation truly sunk in for him. She’s asking me to grab my things? Why? What does— 

It struck him like a slap across the face, and he spun to face her, his eyes shining with incomprehension and pathetic hope. She’s here to save me? 

She gave no response, aside from gesturing at his things again. Take them, she seemed to say. Or leave them. The choice is yours. 

For what felt like minutes, he couldn’t move even a single muscle. It didn’t make sense. None of this made sense. Only a week ago, she had told him that no one would save him. That escape was futile. That the world outside would reject him. Yet, here she was, telling him that it had been a lie, that… 

He turned to look at the bed. There, Kitty laid, happily drooling into a pillow. 

Of course, he thought. Of course they couldn’t tell me. Then he would’ve known.

Mind blank, body moving robotically, he went over to his cupboards and silently got changed into his blue robe, making sure the leather-bound book and his journal were both in his pockets, and then… 

He looked down at the rib in his hand. Just above him, over by the door, Holly shook her head. Nodding back at her, he placed the rib back on his desk, and with the few things he owned in his pockets, he tiptoed over to her. She opened the door for them, perfectly silent, not even a single creak. The dark sluice yawned open before them. 

Simel shot one last look at Kitty. Once morning came, he was sure to be heartbroken. But… This would’ve happened eventually. The past week had proved as much. With every day that passed, his paranoia had only intensified, the lack of answers only serving to worsen his already tenuous mental state. 

Most importantly, although he loved Kitty, he no longer trusted him. 

But Holly… He could tell that she was to be trusted. He couldn’t even imagine how much preparation had gone into this. 

So, though it hurt not to be able to say a proper goodbye to Kitty, with his mind made up, Simel turned his back on the sleeping god, and followed Holly into the sluice, and into the bright new tomorrow. 

The guards operating the sluice only gave them a single look and a nod before closing the door behind them. Holly nodded back to them, and then off they were. They continued down the hall, and after a few minutes, finally, Holly turned to him and said, very politely, “Sure took your sweet fucking time grabbing your stuff.”

“I’m sorry,” Simel said, keeping his voice low. “I didn’t exactly get much time to prepare myself.”

“I know. I wish we could’ve told you this was happening, but… Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Simel echoed. They passed a guard. He did nothing but nod to them, and then he walked on by. “This… You’re really doing this? Saving me?”

“Yeah.”

“...Why?”

She glanced back at him. The moonlight shining through a nearby window lit her face just enough for him to make out her eyes. They were infinitely strong. Never had he seen such a famished need for justice, not even in the most valiant of judges. “It’s the only right thing to do.” She turned back towards the hallways, walking with wide steps, not running, but not lingering either. “Back when you were a tyrant… This was fine. Letting the mad god keep a tyrant as a pet was acceptable. With the war, you’d made yourself deserving of such a fate. But… Not anymore. Not when you’re like this.”

Simel reeled where he walked after her. “What do you mean, mad god?”

She perked a brow at her, like he was the crazy one. “What, you haven’t figured it out yet?”

“Figured what out?”

“That he’s a fucking lunatic.” The absolute frankness with which she said the words did nothing to hamper the sheer confusion that washed over Simel. He didn’t even have time to ask her to elaborate, as she returned her attention to the hallway before them, and continued, speaking with complete sincerity, saying, “This might come as a shock, since he’s been treating you like his personal teddy-bear for so long, but that man is… Fuck, dude. He’s a child-eating mass-murdering cannibal, but even that doesn’t really cover how messed up he is. That’s just his cover letter. The really disturbing part about him is that now, even though he’s got manners and he’s polite and he sometimes even seems downright nice, he’s still a fucking freak who’ll kill people for looking at him the wrong way. So, to answer your question, that’s why people are afraid of him. That’s why we tip-toe around him like he might disembowel us on a whim. Because he would, and has.”

Simel stumbled on the edge of a carpet, falling to his knees. He breathed thickly, staring down at the mosaic on the carpet, feeling the fibers beneath his skin, mind whirling and swirling with—

“Dude, get the fuck up, do you want him to catch us?” Holly said, gripping him by the arm and dragging him to his feet. He stumbled into her arms. “Dude, I’m sorry, but we don’t have time for that shit. Come on.” Snaking her arm around his shoulders, she pulled him along. “I need to tell you this shit, even if it sucks ass, because you need to know it. Like—like, that prayer book?” She pointed at the front of his robe, where the leatherbound book pressed into his chest.

“Prayer… book?”

“Yeah. That’s what it is. For the past months… No, years, you’ve been praying over that book daily. Until this last month, at least.” She clicked her tongue, and when he looked up at her, he saw, by the light of the nearby window, as a look of unfathomable disgust and anger morphed her face. “He told you that you were a tyrant. But he never told you why, did he?”

“No,” Simel said, turning away, not daring to look at her face anymore. “He didn’t.”

“That’s because it was him. Every fucking part of it. That prayer book isn’t a list of the people you cherished—it’s a list of his victims. He slaughtered Acheron. He slaughtered Oran. And now, most recently, he slaughtered Kingfist, leaving only those foolish or clever enough to praise him for it. And you hated him for it. You hated him for burning Acheron. You hated him for killing the last emperor of the sun. You even—” She barked a laugh, desperate and disbelieving and pathetic all at once. “It’s awful! Oh, God, he even had you like this before.”

“Had… me…?”

“Yeah! Fuck, he’s so stupid! Years ago, I don’t know how, you two crossed paths, and like the fucking lunatic he is, he kept you as his pet for, fuck, I think it was months? Close to a year? You didn’t mention that time often, only when you got really smashed, but those few times… Holy shit, man. I genuinely don’t know how you survived.”

Once before? Simel’s mind repeated dumbly This happened once before? “And you… You let him…?”

Her face twisted in anger and pain. “Yeah. Yeah, we did. I’m not going to excuse it. We thought he’d kill you within days. That’d be the humane thing to do. But then he just… kept you with him. Like some fucking prize, or—or a pet rock or whatever. We’d already agreed to let him keep you, so we couldn’t exactly change our minds. But then he went and did this,” she gestured at him, at his face, at his very mind, “and we couldn’t. Not anymore.”

Simel’s mind, which had until now simply swallowed what he’d heard, drinking it in with the thirst of a question unsated, now found itself choking on the words she’d said. In a single movement, acting beyond his own instincts, he threw her arm off of his shoulders, stumbling out of her grip. “No,” he said, first muttering. And then, once he’d gotten his chest into operation, with full force, “No! No, I can’t—you can’t just say these things and expect me to believe them! Kitty is… To accuse him of such things…”

On the other side of the hall, mere feet away, Holly gazed back at him, silently. She looked down the length of the hall, and then turned back to him. Her lips tightened into a line. Saying nothing, she raised her hand, pointing at his chest. “That prayer-book,” she said, “is yours to bear. I have never carried it. Although I have been physically close to Kitty, he has never hurt me in the ways he’s hurt you. I can’t tell you to hold on to hatred, or to run from him, or anything else. That’s your choice to make. But, I will say, if your choice is to stay and play house with the guy who burnt Acheron and literally ate babies, then I’m going to consider you stupider than you ever were as a tyrant.”

The world swayed beneath his feet. His body shook, knees made of water, but throughout it all, there was one true weight, one solid thing that anchored him to where he stood, keeping the world beneath his feet and not over his head. 

Reaching up, he let his hand run over the hard outline of the prayer book. 

“...Okay,” he said, finally. “Okay. I’ll… I’ll go with you.”

“Good. Now get moving before he turns us both into a midnight snack,” Holly said, but despite the harshness of the words, her eyes were soft, and a smile played across her otherwise stern lips. 

Keeping their pace steady, they continued through the hallways, mostly in silence. Simel was glad for the silence. It let his mind and heart try to catch up to one another—no matter how impossible it seemed.

He liked Kitty. Kitty was his friend. 

For him to have done such things… For him to have done such awful things to Simel…

It simply wouldn’t sink in. No matter how he tried, when he thought of Kitty, all he could see was his smile, the gentle way he held him, how affectionate he was, asking to be petted… It was silly, and yet, he couldn’t help it. But he couldn’t listen to his heart, either. The truth of Holly’s words had been proven through her actions. There was no doubting it. And yet, when they exited the castle through the back, stepping cautiously down the stairs to the back driveway, Simel still couldn’t really understand the need for escape. In his mind, yes, but not in his heart. He supposed, eventually, once they were well away from the city, it would sink in, bit by bit. There was no hurry. Eventually, everything would be alright. 

Side by side, beneath the light of the moons, the world shaded partially by the rows of rustling trees standing beyond the castle walls, they walked down the driveway. 

And they walked, and they walked, and they walked, and they walked. The driveway seemed to stretch on forever, with no driver or carriage to be seen. As they went, Holly clenched her teeth, speeding up her pace, little by little the further they went.

The wind howled above them, warning of a summer storm brewing. Yet, it was bright under the moons. 

Bright enough to see, just up ahead, beneath a couple trees, right next to an outcropping of the castle wall, a pile of something. Something so white it seemed to glow under the pale moonlight. 

Side by side, not pausing even a second, they continued walking, all the way there, until they stood just in front of it. 

There, laid across the cobbles in a big mound, the wind occasionally pulling away one or two of them, letting them flitter through the air, was a pile of white flower petals. There were so many of them. Enough to fill a full carriage, or even more. In fact, it looked as though, until just now, there had been a carriage here, complete with drake and driver, but that it had been replaced by a pile of beautiful shining flower petals, whiter than the moons above, slowly being scattered by the winds.

They both froze in place looking at it. Neither one moved.

Then, high above, a thick cloud crawled across the sky, like a big fat tarantula, blocking out the moons one by one, eating them with its girth, until only a final one—Lolum—remained. A final reaching crawl snuffed out that last moon, plunging the world below into darkness, thicker than night, thicker than pitch, a thick as coagulated blood, and in that darkness, the only things that could really be made out was that pile of petals, too unreal to be comprehended. 

There was a rustle, and suddenly Holly pulled Simel close to her, holding him in place, summoning her spear into her other hand and pressing the sharp tip of it against his neck. “Don’t move!” she barked at the darkness. “Don’t fucking move!”

He saw them now. He hadn’t seen them before, because the flowerpetals had been so obvious. But above them, beyond them, high up above, sitting atop the castle wall, as calmly as a perching drake, were a pair of shining white discs. As small as pinpricks. It almost seemed as though one had poked holes through the fabric of the night sky, and now the light of the daytime was poking through, shining and all-seeing. 

“Well, isn’t this a pickle?” 

The arm holding Simel quivered. Her spear trembled against his throat. 

Simel didn’t recognize the voice. For the past month, he had heard Kitty talk every day, often every hour. He knew Kitty’s voice. It was soft, a little high, and always just a bit awkward. Like he didn’t trust himself to speak, for fear of what he might say. He’d come to enjoy that voice, because it was the voice of his friend. 

This wasn’t that voice. 

This was something else—some sort of parody of Kitty, just a bit higher, with the inflection of someone sing-talking to a baby. No true melody, nothing to really recognize, but… Musical. 

He hated it. He hated that voice and he hated the discs and he hated the warm summer wind that crossed between them.

“Stay back, Kitty,” Holly said, somehow keeping her voice steady, even though her whole body was trembling. “Wouldn’t want me to hurt precious Simel, would you?”

The discs didn’t move. They sat there, looking down at them, as unblinking as the stars themselves. “Holly, I know we’ve had our moments, but I never took you for an idiot. You literally know I can read minds.” In a single moment, the discs blinked out of existence, and then there was a thump, and now they stood at the foot of the wall. A few more steps, and they moved out of its shadow. Above, the fat clouds briefly rolled over, letting one of the moons peek through, its brightness shining down, showing that the shadow was only Kitty. He looked annoyed. “Why even play these charades when we both know you’d never hurt him?”

“I have to,” she bit out. “I have to do the right thing.”

“Even when it’s completely pointless? I mean, come on. You must have known the chances of you actually pulling this off were astronomically low. And even if you did do it, what then? Keep him in the Acheron castle instead of this one? You can’t actually believe the rest of the delegates here would be fine with that.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

The clouds swirled above, forming a thick spiral in the sky, around and around and around. 

“What was the plan here, Holly? I can read your mind. I know you never thought this would really work. So, what then? What was your brilliant idea for what to do when we came to this point?” 

He took a step closer to them. Holly drew back.

His eyes gleamed. “Plead with me? Beg me not to do it? Pray for me to spare you, to let you go? Was that it, Katarina? I thought you knew me better than that.”

“No,” she ground out, still holding Simel, still clutching onto her spear, even when it was less than a toothpick to the god that loomed before them. “No, I’m not that stupid.”

His bare feet stepped onto the flower petals. The smell of rain hung thick in the air, but there was no hint of any drops falling. The swirling of the clouds only grew stronger and stronger, the wind intensifying with it, tearing the leaves from trees and making his hair whip in the wind. The discs of his eyes moved. “You came here, knowing you would die?”

“Not knowing,” she said. “But I accepted it as a possibility.”

“That’s stupid.”

“You’d think so,” she said, her grip tightening on Simel. “You wouldn’t understand it. You can read my mind, but you can’t make sense of what you see. That’s the kind of animal you are, Fennrick.” The clouds froze above, mid-swirl, jittering back and forth in place. “You can’t fathom the idea of dying, simply because to do nothing would be a betrayal of one's morals.”

“Don’t call me that,” he said, his voice small and weak and suddenly Kitty’s. “Please, don’t use that name.”

“Do you even understand what you’ve done to him? The severity of your sin? To kill him would be only that. That’s an acceptable way to treat a prisoner of war. It’s not good, but it isn’t against the very notion of human dignity. What you have done to him… You have stolen everything he is. And why? Why do something so horrendous?”

“I had to,” Kitty said, pathetically. “He was in pain. He couldn’t keep going. He wanted to kill himself. I had to do something. I had to—”

“Don’t be an idiot! You did it because you wanted to! You did it because you wanted to play house, and you couldn’t do that when your toy was broken and couldn’t return your desperate, disgusting affection. That’s all this is. Don’t pretend it’s something noble when we both know you’re too fucking egoistic to think about the feelings of someone else.”

Something cold and wet hit Simel’s cheek. Reaching up, he touched it to find a little raindrop. Another soon followed, and when he looked up, he found that the clouds had continued, thick smoke in the sky, coalescing and twisting and turning, the only thing keeping light from abandoning them being the eye of the storm, high above them, letting the light of a single moon pass down unto them. There was a distant rumble of thunder. 

“Face it, Kitty!” Holly cried, turning the tip of the spear away from Simel and pointing it at Kitty, where he stood. “All you’ve ever wanted Simel for, ever since the fucking beginning, was to keep him to yourself! To have him as your fucking pe—”

Lightning flashed overhead, and suddenly, Kitty was right in front of them, his fingertip pressed against Holly’s forehead. Simel blinked up at him. 

The spear fell out of Holly’s hand, clattering to the ground, and then Kitty stepped out of the way, letting her fall into the pile of flowerpetals. A cloud of the little white flower petals got knocked up before being taken away by the whipping winds, a few of them settling on top of her prone form. And then, she just laid there, face-down, unmoving. “Holly?” Simel said, looking down at her. “Holly, are you…?”

But she wasn’t moving, and he couldn’t even really see her breathing, and the rain was starting to smatter down, bleeding into her clothes.