FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFU—

  Melpomene dashed through the narrow streets surrounding Kingsblood Square, tearing through masses of Percival’s weird flesh monsters with every step and stride.

  —CKFUCKFUCKFUCKF—

  She’d hoped that the slaughter would distract her from the pain of getting her soul pulled apart and ground down into a million motes of dust, but…

  —UCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK—

  It wasn’t working.

  A crimson golem swung at her. The strike was fast, but far too telegraphed to be effective. Melpomene would’ve normally just struck down the idiotic construct before its own strike could gain momentum, but she’d been caught slightly out of position. Having just cut through a dozen of those smaller flesh creatures with a running slash, she couldn’t bring her scythe back around quick enough.

  Tears streaming down her face, Melpomene tucked her legs and slid, dodging beneath the construct’s sanguine blade. She was planning on getting around the thing and striking from behind, but as she slid by, the blade’s pommel grew a maw and vomited a spike of blood straight for her throat.

  Melpomene slammed the butt of her scythe into the cobbles at her side, lodging it there to transform her slide into a lateral swing. The spike of blood — unable to account for her sudden shift in momentum — stabbed into the street behind her.

  The golem was turning to bring its other bloody weapon to bear, but Melpomene was faster. Carried by her swing’s momentum, she planted her feet against a wall and twisted her hips, dislodging her scythe from the ground and bisecting the golem from groin to shoulder in a single fluid swipe.

  Like all of Percival’s monsters, the golem was wreathed in an ethereal halo of shattered gold. Upon death, the gold would become real and actually useful for something beyond being an ugly accessory, but despite getting cut in half, this creature wasn’t dead quite yet.

  Instead of becoming real, the golem’s halo began splitting into three. The golem’s bloody weapons each lost their shape and splattered to the ground, but already they were reforming into independent monsters of living blood. Slithering out from the golem’s destroyed shell came a third of their kind.

  Melpomene had been surprised the first time she saw this happen. Despite being passé, the second time was a bit interesting too. The third time had just been annoying.

  And now? Now she was pissed.

  “I don’t have time for this!”

  Before the slain golem’s halo could split into three, Melpomene drew [Subtlety] and [Discretion] from within her robe and unloaded a salvo of incendiary rounds into the nascent creatures. The trio died shrieking, but Melpomene didn’t have the bandwidth to care.

  One hand recovered her scythe while her other snatched the shards of shattered halo from the air. With a flex of her will and a flash of light, Melpomene annihilated the gold, and in its place appeared a naked man gasping for air and choking on smoke.

  The weight crushing Melpomene’s soul lightened, but only by as much as a pebble thrown from a mountain.

  She beat her wings to clear the smoke and extinguish the pools of flaming blood — it’d be a waste to have the poor sap she’d just revived die of asphyxiation — and without further delay, she dashed away to continue her slaughter.

  Eurymedon, please hurry!

  Jeremiah awoke to fire and pain.

  He gasped for air, but all he managed to choke down was a lungful of fumes. The smoke sent him into a full-bodied coughing fit, and every cough made his aching muscles tear themselves apart.

  This hurts like Hell.

  The last thing he remembered was a lance crashing through his chest, but he was in too much pain to be dead.

  Am I in Hell?

  He blinked clear his eyes, and before him, he saw Death.

  I am in Hell.

  Death looked just like Jeremiah’s mother warned it would, only worse. The demon’s solid-grey eyes bore right through his soul. Its ink-black wings made him feel like he’d never see the sun again. Worst of all was its expression. Rivers of tears ran from each eye, framing a grimace that seemed to promise, ‘I have suffered, and so shall you!’

  The demon reared back its wings, and Jeremiah shut his eyes, expecting the worst.

  A wind washed over him. The fire’s heat dissipated. Cool air rushed into his lungs, fresher than a peach pulled from a summer tree, and at last, he could breathe.

  Jeremiah’s eyes shot open. He looked for Death, but all he caught was a glimpse of its form rocketing away and disappearing down a bend in the road.

  Time passed. Melpomene had no idea how long she’d been at it. [Command Relay] had expired some time ago, but whether it’d been a moment or an hour, she could not tell. Each second stretched into dozens, and every minute was forever.

  She kept slaying monsters and reviving people as she went, but it did little to ease the burden on her soul. Her only option was to endure, but already she could feel herself fraying at the edges. She needed to be rid of her burden entirely, and she needed it soon.

  Finally, the signal came. A flare whistled through the air and burst into a shower of purple sparks, perhaps only a few kilometers away.

  “AT LAST!” she screamed, her tears of pain becoming tears of joy.

  She crushed a bone archer under her boot, and a chunk of scapula popped into the air. She swung at the bone shard with the butt of her scythe, batting it straight into the barrel of a cannon trying to snipe her from the other end of the street. The cannon backfired, exploding into a hail of shrapnel and causing half of a four-story building to collapse.

  Melpomene took to the air and bolted for Kingsblood Square.

  FWWWWWwwwwwwhp—POP!

  The many-eyed Daemon — Daemon, not Demon, apparently — shot a bundle of purple magic into the air, and it exploded into a shower of sparks so pretty-looking that Jeremiah knew he’d remember it for the rest of his life.

  Any other day, he would have been frozen in awe, but he’d already seen so many once-in-a-lifetime things this night that it was all starting to feel normal.

  He went for another sip of his broth, but he missed his mouth. He knocked the rim of his bowl into his upper teeth and sent a splash of soup up his nose. He spluttered, sending a splattering down his shirt. None of the backwash spilled into his bowl — thank the heavens for that — but it was a close thing.

  He went for another sip, and this time he took it slow. He focused. Steadily-steadily-steadily he brought the lip of the bowl up to his own, and for all his effort was rewarded with a scrumptious, sumptuous, and some-other-’S’-word slurp of flavorless soup.

  He smacked his lips together. Needs salt, he thought.

  He was having trouble getting his muscles to work with him. If he were being honest, he was feeling a bit discombobulated up in the noggin too. How much of this he could blame on being tired and how much he could blame on that whole “revival shock” thing the doc had told him about, he couldn’t be sure.

  Over the last hour or so, Jeremiah had gone through more whiplash than a weathervane in a blizzard. First he’d died, and then he’d woken up to find Death saving his life. After that, a group of Daemons rounded up him and a few other un-killed soldiers, given them all blankets and clothes, and started ushering them towards Kingsblood Square.

  The Daemons could only speak bits and pieces of broken Solarian, and they were ‘bout as talkative as chopped wood to begin with. Not knowing what was going on, Jeremiah and his fellow soldiers assumed — like any rational group would — that the Daemons were gathering them up for torture or sacrifice or something. Scary stuff. Lucky for the lot of them though, their guess couldn’t have been further off the mark.

  Turns out the Daemons were part of the good guys now? Well, maybe and maybe not, but anyone helping Percival fight against the [Hollow King] couldn’t be all bad.

  And that was how Jeremiah came to find himself sat on a bucket beside the Torr Royale, just outside the medical tent. He was warm, safe, fully clothed, and sipping soup. Couldn’t complain.

  He and his fellow “revival shocked” soldiers were just sitting around trying not to get in anyone’s way, but all about Kingsblood Square there were Humans, Fae, and Daemons all working together as if they hadn’t just been killing each other for thousands of years. They were helping each other put up barriers and they were teaming up to fend off those rabid beasties that kept showing up every now and then, but what really caught Jeremiah’s eye was the huge pile of treasure everyone was putting together. It was already piled up bigger than one of those Fae elephants, and it was only getting piled up bigger by the minute.

  No matter how many of the [Hollow King]’s gross monster things died, they just kept showing up — they were coming because they were attracted to the treasure and all the people, the doctor lady in the medical tent had told him — but all they managed to do was die and make the pile of treasure even bigger.

  Seeing all of everyone else’s workings and doings was a lot to take in, and it was starting to make Jeremiah feel perhaps maybe just a little bit more than a tad useless. He wanted to get up and do something, but the doctor threatened she’d tan his hide redder than a beet’s bum if she found him scuttling about instead of resting like he ought to.

  But then again, she also told him to focus on feeling better, right? And the thing that always helped him feel better was working with his hands, sooooooo…

  Jeremiah went for another sip of his soup, but he found his bowl empty. That gave him an idea.

  He looked around, and he didn’t spy a soul looking his way.

  Doc wouldn’t mind if I get up and ask for more soup, right? And if I just so happen to stick around and help stir the pot? Nothing wrong with that. And if someone catches me doing nothing wrong, I’ll just say I was warming my hands by the fire.

  Slowly, Jeremiah levered himself up to his feet. His muscles were already screaming at him to sit his butt back down, but he decided to ignore them. The mess tent was nearby — just over on the other side of the pile of treasure — so walking there on his own hardly counted as “going anywhere unsupervised,” at least by his own reckoning.

  He draped his blanket over another injured soldier dozing on a stool, stumbled a bit as he got his feet sorted out, and then he was on his way! The only thought on his mind? Soup time!

  A hobble, a slip, and a trundle away, the mess tent was made up of a bunch of smaller canopies set up beside each other, closer to the Torr Royale than the edge of Kingsblood Square. Most of the space was taken up by the overflowing dining area. The cooking area was a lot smaller, just few cook-fires and tables set up by a whole hoard of wooden crates and boxes.

  There were only three people working the back, but the soldiers waiting for a meal were packed in tighter than summer wheat on good soil. Leadership must’ve wanted everyone to grab a bite before getting rotated back out, which made sense. Fighting’d already gone on for hours longer than expected, and who knew how much longer it’d go from here?

  When Jeremiah made his way up to offer a hand, the chef didn’t waste time asking questions.

  “Great! Finish chopping these turnips ‘bout yea big and put ‘em in the bowl. Same with the carrots. When the pot’s boiling, throw ‘em in. Keep it stirrin’ or it’ll burn. Got it? Thanks for the help!” Without waiting for Jeremiah to respond, the portly man stepped away to tend to one of the dozen other things that needed doing. “And don’t forget to wash your hands!” he threw back over his shoulder.

  Jeremiah cracked his knuckles, winced at the pain, and got right to it. Before long, he lost himself in the work. His muscles protested every chop of the knife and stir of the pot — and he had to pause every so often to keep his balance — but doing something useful sure beat sitting on a bucket.

  An alarm went up on the side of the square closest to him and people started yelling, but Jeremiah’s half-fogged mind figured he didn’t need to worry. Worrying was someone else’s job. Jeremiah’s job? Chop the veggies, don’t chop his fingers, and keep on stirring.

  “To arms! To arms!” someone shouted. “Something big is coming!” All the soldiers eating or waiting for food went for their weapons and started running toward the action, but Jeremiah just kept at it.

  Jeremiah took out one last carrot from the little wood crate the chef had shown him. Well, Jeremiah was pretty sure it was a carrot. All the “carrots” had been redder than the purple ones he was used to, and the texture was a bit weird too. But hey, the chef called them carrots, and who was Jeremiah to disagree?

  “Nice!” he cheered to himself. “Last one.”

  He put the tuber — Carrots were tubers, right? — on his cutting board, lined up his knife, double checked he didn’t have any fingers in the way, and cut through it with a satisfying Thwunk!

  Pleased with his work, he lined up a second chop and was about to press down, but then the ground shook. He lost his grip and the carrot rolled away.

  “Oh get back here, you!”

  Jeremiah fumbled for the carrot and managed to grab it before it rolled off the table. He placed it back on the cutting board, and this time he made sure to hold it firmly in place. A few careful chops later, he was done, and the pot had a nice rolling boil going.

  He unloaded all his chopped vegetables into the pot, but then the ground shook again, stronger this time. A bit of broth splashed over the rim of the big ol’ pot, sizzling against the wood fire below.

  Grumbling beneath his breath at the inconvenience, Jeremiah carefully lowered himself to make sure the fire was still burning evenly.

  THWHIIIiiiw!

  Bent down as he was, Jeremiah was oblivious to the stray lance whizzing right through where his head had been a moment earlier.

  Satisfied that the fire didn’t need any tending, Jeremiah got up and smelled the soup. Quirking an eyebrow, he grabbed a spoonful to steal a sip… and it was just as he feared.

  “Bland,” he muttered. “Hey chef?”

  FWHUuuuu!

  An arrow of bone whizzed by his ear, unnoticed, as he turned around to ask the head chef a question, but there was no one else in the mess tent. Why there was no one in line, Jeremiah could understand — they’d just been called to arms, after all — but why wasn’t there anyone else making soup?

  “Must be on break.”

  BOOM!

  The ground shook for a third time, and Jeremiah was starting to get annoyed, but it wasn’t like there was anything he could do to stop it.

  “B?????W???A?????R???R????G????H????A????H????U???G????H?????!?????”

  A monstrous, incomprehensible scream tore through the square. The sound of it roiled around in Jeremiah’s guts like soured milk. He looked toward the edge of the square.

  A something longer than a prayer and taller than a steeple crashed in through a barricade. It looked like a centaur, but it was way too big with way too many… well, everything. Too many legs, too many arms, too many hands — but none of the thing’s hands were on its arms. Its arms all had a bunch of weapons sticking out the ends, and all its hands were stuck together on its back, stacked and fanned out like feathers for its wings.

  The only thing Jeremiah couldn’t see on it was a head — its eyes were in the middle of its chest-ish area — and neither could he see a mouth. Not having a head, he could understand, but for the mouth he figured it must be hiding under one of those hundred little armor pieces sewn onto its skin. Otherwise, how could it’ve screamed?

  Charging in alongside the thing were a whole host of the other monsters he’d seen earlier, as well as a whole bunch of others that he hadn’t.

  Jeremiah took another sip of the soup. “Yup. Definitely needs salt.”

  If it were any other day, Jeremiah would’ve reacted a bit more strongly to the monstrous beasts heading his way… but it wasn’t any other day. He’d already been surprised too many times to feel surprised anymore. And besides, it seemed like everyone else had the situation more or less under control.

  The Daemons and his fellow Humans wasted no time in reinforcing the lines to keep the centaur-y thing from getting any deeper into the square. The Fae were popping out from every rooftop and hidden corner to snipe at the beast, loosing a flurry of arrows and colorful magics. The Daemons’ fiery horse-dog-ox-lizard things were charging in from another side and… and that’s when Jeremiah stopped paying attention.

  He couldn’t waste time watching the battle. He had soup to make!

  “Chef wouldn’t mind if I make it a bit tastier, right?” he asked himself. “He never said I couldn’t…”

  Jeremiah cast about for spices, but he didn’t see any out on the prep tables. He smacked his lips in disappointment, but then turned to glance at the piles of small wooden crates stacked up a little ways behind him.

  He picked his way over, careful not to trip over his own feet, and got a closer look —

  CRASHHHHH!

  SHWIIIIIIIIICK!

  BOOOOOOM!

  — completely oblivious to the boulder, the torrent of blood, and the small explosion that tore up the abandoned prep tables he passed by.

  The crates all had what looked like Daemonic writing on them — same as the boxes of strange-looking carrots and radishes, now that he thought about it — but since he didn’t know how to read Daemonic, he didn’t pay it any mind. What he did notice was that someone had already saved him the trouble of prying open all the crates, and there were some mighty interesting smells wafting out!

  He methodically went through the first small crate of what turned out to be sour smelling leaves, but he quickly got bored of doing things all slow and careful-like. From there, he just followed his sniffer around to whatever tickled his fancy, and he grabbed whatever he thought might go good in a soup.

  A bit of this, a stick or two of that, a bundle of those, a jar of these…

  A short while and a few crates later, he had his arms stuffed fuller than a lord’s belly. He started stumbling his way back to his pot when—

  “A????G????H????H?????R?????A???R????R???A????G?????H???!?????”

  —another roar shook the air, and his legs went wobbly. He wumbled and fumbled about, trying to keep the dozen-or-so different ingredients in his arms from spilling out, but a spiky orange fruit hopped out from the pile.

  “Wups!” On instinct he tried catching it with his foot. Good news: he caught it! Bad news: the fruit’s spines stabbed him right in the toes.

  “Oh blasted teat of a—!” Jeremiah hopped around on one foot, cursing, but before he could finish whatever he was going to say, he lost his balance. “WAAH!”

  He landed on his ass, and a lance of pain shot up his spine. The ingredients he’d so non-painstakingly gathered scattered all around the floor — all except for the spiky fruit still stuck to his toes.

  Jeremiah stared ruefully at the fruit, but he couldn’t stay mad for long. He plucked the fruit from his toes, winced at the pain, and set about regathering his fallen ingredients. He took it slower this go around, depositing the assorted foodstuffs onto his prep table a few at a time instead of trying to carry them all at once.

  There was a bundle of sweet-smelling peppers that made his nose tingle, a sheaf of transparent parchment-thin gelatinous squares, square jars filled with what looked like whole and crushed spices of every color, a lemon—

  BOOOEEEEEUUUGHSH!

  “““AAAAA—”””

  “West side! West side!”

  —a few hard sticks that smelled pleasantly earthy, fresh-looking leafy greens that sweated red mucous when he touched them, a big lemon—

  “Close the breach! Ready the—EUkghHhh!”

  “Captain! NOOO!”

  “G????H????H?????E?????E?????U???G?????H????H?????R???R?????U????E?????H?????!???”

  —a string of dried mushrooms that smelled how a hug felt, a small bag of purple rice-like grains that reeked of mint, and last but not least, an even bigger lemon.

  “B?????R????O???U????E????U?????G????G?????G????G?????H????H?????A????H????!????!?????!????”

  His ingredients all reassembled upon the table, Jeremiah placed his hands on his hips and let out a breath of satisfaction.

  PWEUSCH—CRASH!

  A chunk of rubble thrice as wide as Jeremiah was tall flew through the mess tent, taking out half the remaining kitchen and reducing the pile of crates into a spray of splinters and scrap.

  “Oh ship!” Jeremiah screamed, a panic filling his veins. “I forgot to stir the pot!”

  He rushed to the overboiling pot and got to stirring, and lucky for him nothing smelled burnt. He snuck another taste just to make sure, and much to his relief, it still tasted okay.

  “Phew!” Jeremiah picked up his knife and started prepping his new ingredients. The rice and gelatinous sheets he washed and threw straight in the pot. The whole spices he placed in a bag to steep, and the crushed spices he threw in a few shakes at a time, using nothing but his intuition — and a few extra sips of the broth — to gauge the right amounts. The greens and mushrooms and peppers he chopped and threw in too.

  As for the lemons, he was planning on juicing them to add some acidity, but none of them smelled particularly lemony when he cut them open. The smallest was so spicy the fumes stung his eyes, the big one was like a field of flowers shoved up his nose — dirt and all — and the biggest one smelled like beef.

  Shrugging, he dumped all their juices into the pot anyway. He took another taste, and—

  “Whew!” The flavors hit him like a brick in the chest, but in a good way. It was savory and exciting and warm and bracing and a dozen other things all at once, but rather than muddling together, each sensation was distinct. It tasted almost perfect…

  “But it’s still missing something.”

  Jeremiah looked back to the pile of crates he’d grabbed ingredients from, and only now did he notice it was smashed to bits. He wondered why that was, but again decided that worrying about non-soup-related tasks wasn’t his problem.

  He turned back to his workstation, and his eyes alighted on the one ingredient he’d forgotten to add. Tucked amongst half-spent spice jars was the spiky orange thing that’d stabbed him in the foot; except for some reason, it’d changed color to a bloody red, and its prickly spines had withered into brown curls.

  “Ah! There you are.” Jeremiah tried reaching for the fruit, but he missed. His hand swiped through the air several inches above the table, and he blinked in confusion. He tried again, but more slowly. He managed to grab the fruit this time around, but he had to brace his other hand against the table to keep from falling over.

  He hiccuped, and his vision went… Well, it didn’t go blurry. Quite the opposite, actually. It felt like he had a pair of those fancy jeweler’s loupes where his eyes should be. His body, meanwhile, felt ready to lift a mountain!

  He tried placing the fruit onto the cutting board and missed so badly he slammed his forehead into the table.

  …If only he could remember how to use his arms.

  Jeremiah collected himself and got ready to try again, but then he got hit in the chest by a brick — in a bad way.

  “UGHCK!”

  All the air got knocked out his lungs, and something inside him went Crack!

  He flailed his arms and reeled backward several steps, ultimately losing his balance and falling forward onto his knees. He tried breathing but choked on his blood. Something in his chest felt sharp.

  He coughed and spluttered and hacked until finally a spray of red goop shot out his throat.

  He breathed. It came wet and strained and thick with the taste of iron, but nonetheless he breathed.

  He looked up toward the rest of the square and saw that the battle lines had gotten blurry. The three-part coalition was still holding off the wave of monsters as best they could, but it was like trying to hold back a flood with sheets of burlap. The monsters had gained quite a bit of ground, and the Fae were forced to chase down and snipe the buggers that’d soaked past the lines.

  The monster responsible for most of his fellow soldiers’ trouble seemed to be that centaur-y looking thing. It was leading from the front, pushing back the defenders with every swipe of its barrel-thick arms. At first Jeremiah thought the beastie was headed right for him, but after looking more careful-like, he realized it was actually headed for the big pile of treasure off to his side.

  “Huh. Maybe this is my problem,” he said. The talking made him feel nauseous, and soon enough he was hacking and spluttering all over again.

  He clutched his chest. Everything hurt, and it hurt bad… but not ‘I’m gonna die!’ bad. Just ‘I should really get this checked out’ bad.

  “Doc is gonna kill me,” he muttered. Slowly, Jeremiah got up, making sure to keep an eye out for any more rubble headed his way. “But not before I finish making this soup. Now, where did I…? Ah! There it is!”

  Jeremiah cast his eyes around and spotted the hairy red fruit sitting under a table a little ways away. He must have flung it there when he got hit by that brick. Silly him!

  He gave the pot a quick stir, paused to wince when he moved his arms the wrong way, and then walked — not hobbled! — over to the fruit to pick it up.

  He bent down under the table to grab it and—

  “Oh, hey little guy!” Jeremiah said, a little surprised at what he found. “What are you doing here?”

  Curled around the fruit was one of those winged eyeball monsters, except this one looked injured. It had one hand-like wing curled covetously around the fruit, and its other seemed to be missing. It kept bopping its eye against the fruit’s skin as if trying to bite it, but it didn’t have a mouth. It must have snuck up to the fruit while Jeremiah was busy stirring.

  “Sorry, but I need that back. So… go on. Shoo. Get.”

  Jeremiah grabbed a stirring spoon off the floor — he’d left his own by the pot — and tried poking at the creature to make it fly away, but the thing was stubborn. It snapped its wing at him menacingly and hissed. How exactly something without a mouth could hiss, Jeremiah didn’t know.

  “Oh, none of that now! I’ve got a job to do, so go on, shoo.”

  Jeremiah tried batting at it a bit more aggressively, but the monster only doubled down. It hissed even louder, and then its eye split open at the pupil to reveal a set of sharp teeth.

  “What in the sunny duck?” On reflex, Jeremiah jerked away from the monster, and it took that opportunity to sink its new jaws into the fruit and fly away — well, kinda fly away.

  Fortunately, the eyeball thing was pretty shite at flying on account of its missing wing. Unfortunately, Jeremiah was equally shite at running.

  “Hey! That’s mine! Get back here, you!” The eyeball bounded and flapped along the ground, and Jeremiah stumble-jogged after it like a drunken heifer balancing on half her hooves.

  The eyeball bounced over a smashed ale barrel — such a waste — and Jeremiah was in hot pursuit. He tried hurdling over the barrel, but his back foot got caught and he fell forward onto his shoulder. Miraculously, his momentum carried him into a roll and he popped back up onto his feet without knowing how he did it.

  “I said get back here!”

  Not wasting an instant to marvel at his own luck, Jeremiah resumed the chase. The eyeball was flopping its way right toward the fighting, but not even that gave the injured soldier pause. He was determined to finish his soup, or die trying!

  Perhaps a small part of his mind recognized how absurd this conviction of his was, but if indeed any shred of his self-preservation remained, it was far too concussed to be of any use.

  BOOOOM!

  All around him, Terra shattered like a pane of glass. The ground beneath his feet — already sticky-slick with spilled blood and ale — became part of an enormous shard of stone pitched steeper than a noble’s nose. He slipped onto his back and began sliding.

  “Oof!”

  His slide picked up speed at an alarming rate, and the ride was getting rough. He clutched at his chest, the jutting cobbles jostling his injuries and grating at his back as he tumble-slid atop them. “Oh flea-shucking milk-watered goat of a—!”

  The ground shook once more.

  “G?????H?????H????H???A????A???A?????A???H????!????!???!????”

  The centaur monster right in front of him — When did it get so close? — bashed all its arms against the ground. The blow sent all the stone shards around it — including the one beneath Jeremiah —tumbling away end-over-end, catapulting the would-be soup maker and every other soldiers near him — When did they get there? — backwards and away.

  Having been so close to the monster, Jeremiah was launched at an especially steep angle. Cold air whipped at his cheeks and scoured at his eyes, and it was a miracle that he managed to grab onto the waist of his pants before the wind stripped him nude.

  He was, of course, screaming his lungs out, but he ran out of breath long before he ran out of momentum. It felt like he spent years flying up higher and higher until finally — cross-eyed and heaving for breath — he floated into the apex of his arc.

  And then, for the briefest of moments, there was wonder.

  He was paned as a church window and colder than the taxman, but he was also really high up! As high as the tip-top of the Torr Royale! So high up that he could see the whole of Soleil laid out below him.

  By the light of the full moon — low now on the horizon — Soleil was beautiful. Her avenues — apparently straight when standing on the ground — spread out from her center in a slow meandering spiral. A thousand-thousand flickers of torchlight twinkled all about her, shimmering through her streets like the stars shimmering through the sky above.

  Jeremiah wasted absolutely zero time appreciating her splendor.

  “There you are, you peeky bollard!”

  Below him he spotted the eyeball careening through the air, the stolen fruit still in its maw.

  Jeremiah flattened his arms to his sides and dove headfirst toward his quarry.

  “You aren’t getting away this time!”

  The chill pre-dawn air scraped at his face something fierce, but he kept his eyes on the prize.

  The eyeball — spiraling helplessly as it tried to fly with its one wing — spotted Jeremiah diving toward it. It started waggling in a way Jeremiah thought might be panic, but there was no escaping a man on a mission — especially when that mission involved soup.

  Jeremiah slammed into the monster, somehow coordinated enough to grasp it with both hands.

  “Ha! Got you now, you—!”

  The two of them got smashed by a wall of wind filled with arrows.

  By some miracle, Jeremiah only got hit by two of the bone arrows — one in his left shoulder and one in his same side’s calf — but the wind itself smacked into him like a runaway cart. His chest felt like it wanted to split apart, and he lost his grip on the eyeball.

  He tumbled through the air, clutching at his chest while trying — unsuccessfully — not to jostle the pair of arrows stuck halfway through him.

  PWUPHHKKKK!

  Jeremiah landed onto the canopy of the mess tent and tore right through it, his momentum and posture such that he just so happened to land perfectly on one foot.

  He flailed his arms to keep balance, placed his other foot — the one with an arrow in the calf — on the ground, yelped in pain, and fell flat on his ass.

  As if on cue, the eyeball creature landed in front of him a dozen paces away, the fruit no longer in its mouth. A chef’s knife landed next the monster, and next to Jeremiah landed his spoon — the one he’d picked up earlier from the ground, not the clean one he used for stirring.

  Shaking off their daze, the two of them locked eyes… er, well, locked eye.

  As if on another cue, the red fruit fell through the canopy, tearing through and bouncing to a stop perfectly between them.

  Jeremiah grabbed his spoon. The eyeball chomped onto its knife’s handle with its pupil-maw.

  Ignoring the pain, Jeremiah carefully rose to his feet. The eyeball rolled over onto its hand-wing, using it like a set of legs.

  They stared each other down.

  On some unspoken signal, the two sprinted for the fruit — or as close to sprinting as they each could manage. Jeremiah shuffle-hopped and the eyeball skitter-sprung forward.

  Jeremiah was a hair faster.

  “Aha!” He batted the eyeball away with his spoon and grabbed the fruit for himself, but the eyeball wasn’t about to give up that easily.

  It darted back in and stabbed Jeremiah in the toe, causing him to yelp in pain and drop the prize. It hopped up into the air to grab it. Again Jeremiah smacked it away with a glancing blow — but in doing so, he accidentally struck the fruit full-on. It sailed away from them both, flying outside the mess tent entirely.

  “Men!” screamed a [Nameless Revolt] soldier. “Intercept the beast! We can’t let it reach th—UGHCK!” The soldier’s words were cut off by a lance through the chest.

  The bulk of the fighting was upon them now. The centaur thing tore through the front of the mess tent with one great sweep of its arms. Its legs shook the ground like rolling thunder. It beat back the soldiers before it, and from its wake surged a tide of corruption.

  The red fruit landed amongst the feet of some [Nameless Revolt] soldiers. It bounced and rolled and got kicked between them, and then an unlucky shot sent the fruit flying right into the arc of the centaur’s next swing. The fruit impaled itself upon a random spike on the creature’s arm and stuck, holding fast as the monster battered line after line of soldiers in its advance toward the pile of treasure.

  The eyeball tried speed-galumphing toward the fruit immediately, but Jeremiah barred its path with his spoon. The eyeball creature sent a quizzical look Jeremiah’s way, and Jeremiah sent a look of his own right back.

  “Thirty second break,” he demanded. “I need to stir the soup.”

  The eyeball eyed him suspiciously.

  “Tell you what. I can probably made do with about half the fruit. You wait for me, help me get it back, and you get the other half. Deal?”

  The eyeball further narrowed its gaze at him. Ultimately, it scrunched back its thumb and pinky knuckles in what Jeremiah assumed was a shrug. Jeremiah nodded back and turned toward his pot. He rested his spoon against one shoulder, and the eyeball hopped onto his other, still holding its knife.

  The two set off.

  Pandemonium surrounded them on all sides, but no one seemed particularly focused on either of them. A swarm of eyeballs swooped low overhead, so Jeremiah ducked to let them pass. He walked around the path of a dark-looking golem charging into battle, and it didn’t pay him any mind. A horse-looking thing with a mouth where its guts should be got knocked toward him by some kind of wind magic, and Jeremiah hopped above it as it slid underfoot.

  So long as he kept an eye out for trouble, it didn’t seem too hard to keep out of harm’s way.

  He was about to take another step forward when the eyeball creature slapped the flat of its knife against his chest.

  Jeremiah let out a yelp of pain and stopped short.

  “What was—?”

  SWHWWWUUCSCH!

  A frozen wind filled with cut-up bits of monster flesh blew across his path, an inch away from his nose.

  “Ah. Never mind. Thank you.”

  The eyeball let out a low gurgling roar into his ear that Jeremiah took to mean “You’re welcome, idiot,” but he could overlook a bit of rudeness. They were working together now, after all.

  Jeremiah kicked off from his solid ground and slid over the icy cobblestones remaining between him and his prep table. There, he took up his clean stirring spoon.

  His left calf was doing pretty okay despite the arrow sticking out of it, but his shoulder was another story. It hurt whenever he tried moving his left arm, so he had to stir the big pot one-handed.

  It hadn’t been too long since he’d last stirred the pot, but holy birch tips, the aroma’d gotten so mouthwatering it could end a drought!

  The eyeball on his shoulder was staring at the pot greedily, and Jeremiah could hardly blame it.

  “…I guess we should give it a taste to make sure it’s doing alright.”

  The eyeball shot a look of surprise at the cook, but it quickly switched to nodding as if scared Jeremiah would rescind the offer.

  Smiling to himself, Jeremiah spooned a bit of broth into a pair of small bowls sitting on his prep table. He ducked beneath a stray rock that would have otherwise brained him, and the eyeball hopped from his shoulder to sit beside one of the bowls.

  “Cheers!”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “Scree!”

  Jeremiah lifted his steaming bowl up to his lips. The eyeball bit onto the lip of its bowl and leaned back. They each slurped up their soup with gusto, and then—

  “Foley Huck that’s good.”

  “SCREEE!”

  If before the soup had been a choir of flavors each singing their own heavenly hymn, they were now beginning to harmonize. Every flavor was still its own, but they were finally coming together to become something greater than the sum of their parts. All they needed was a director, a guiding flavor, to help them reach their full potential.

  Jeremiah looked to the eyeball, and from the sparkle in its gaze he could tell it was thinking the same thing. Together they turned to look at the rampaging centaur and the blood-red fruit impaled on the creature’s arm.

  “Let’s do this.”

  “Scree.”

  The two set off, and Jeremiah felt invigorated like never before. Whether it was the soup or the adrenaline or both, he couldn’t tell, but neither did he think it mattered. The arrow in his shoulder still ached but it wasn’t bothering him too much anymore, and he felt like he could run a mile naked through the snow!

  They made it two steps forward before everything went wrong.

  BOOM!

  An explosion of darkness went off a dozen paces away, and they were thrown backwards by the shockwave. Jeremiah’s couldn’t hear anything but a sharp ringing in his ears, and he could see nothing but the afterimage of that all-consuming blackness burned into his eyes. He could feel the punch of jagged cobbles digging into his shoulders as he was blasted onto his back. He had the wherewithal to wrap his arms around his head, but his existing wounds didn’t appreciate the impact.

  He blinked rapidly and rubbed at his eyes in a daze, but his senses were slow to return. The first thing he heard was a faint scree scree scree that slowly grew louder and louder, and when he could finally make out shapes who-knew-how-long later, what he saw turned his blood to ice.

  His pot was on its side, and the soup was on the floor.

  “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

  It took him a moment to realize the scream was his own.

  He scrambled on hands and knees toward the pot, but he knew he was too late. The entire pot was ruined and— No, wait-wait-wait a second.

  The pot wasn’t flat on its side. The eyeball had wedged itself beneath the lip of the thick cast-iron pot, straining to keep the vessel just barely aloft while getting crushed beneath its weight.

  Jeremiah’s body moved faster than his mind. Before he even understood what was happening, he found himself thrown forward by his legs and wresting the pot aright.

  “Ship!” he cursed, pulling his hands away from the scalding-hot iron. Ignoring his injuries, he bent down to the side of his fallen comrade.

  “No! Stay with me!”

  The one-winged eyeball, all its energy spent, lay motionless on its side. Its entire form was red and puffy from being doused in near-boiling soup, and the pot had burned a line so deep into the monster’s wing that Jeremiah could see blackened bone.

  Carefully, Jeremiah scooped up his newest ally. Its eye was closed, and it wasn’t stirring.

  “You have to hang on!”

  No response.

  “We’re not done yet! We had a deal!”

  No response.

  “We’re finishing that soup, and you will taste it! You have to! Please! Please!”

  The eyeball twitched, and Jeremiah’s breath caught in his throat.

  “Buddy?”

  The eyeball cracked open its gaze. It looked into Jeremiah’s eyes, and something electric yet unspoken passed between them.

  It spent some time mustering its strength, and then it nodded, its expression blazing with a fresh determination. Jeremiah cracked a smile and gave the creature — no, his friend — a determined look of his own.

  He placed the eyeball on his shoulder, and together they rose, battered and unbroken.

  The eyeball tugged at Jeremiah’s ear to grab his attention. It gestured to the pot, and Jeremiah got the message loud and clear. He transferred what remained in the pot to a saucepan, and then he fastened its lid shut with a strip of torn burlap.

  “Let’s finish this soup.”

  “Scree.”

  They set off at a lightning-fast limp toward the treasure pile where they would face the centaur. Every breath was a hail of knives in Jeremiah’s lungs.

  “Scree!”

  Jeremiah ducked, and a bone-chillingly cold spear of flesh flew past, passing mere inches above his head.

  All around them was the tempest of battle, and they charged through it together like a tortoise and a gnat struggling against the squall. Arrows, fire, darkness, shards of blood and splatters of bone — all this and more flew around the square like raindrops carried upon the wind. The Human as the legs and the Monster as the eye, Jeremiah and his newfound friend worked together to navigate the storm.

  Their failure was inevitable.

  A frazzled soldier let slip his arrow before he’d set his aim. The eyeball screeched at the unseen threat, but this time Jeremiah was too slow to react. The wind caught the missile just wrong, and it curved through the air to pierce right through the back of his left knee.

  “Geuh!”

  Jeremiah fell to the ground. His freshly punctured leg splashed into a pool of swirling blood he’d meant to avoid, and his flesh began to dissolve.

  “AAEUUGH!”

  He slammed his arms into the ground — sharp bits of stone and debris scraping and digging into the tender meat of his forearms — and barely managed to pull himself away before his calf was burned to the bone. The open air stung his wound like fire.

  He fought past the pain and found his feet. A worried screech cooed in his ear, but he smiled, putting on a brave face to let his friend know he was alright. He doubted the look was convincing.

  They continued on, this time hobbling three-quarters the rest of the way before something else went wrong. The eyeball screeched, and an explosion went off on Jeremiah’s right. He barely turned in time to take the hail of shrapnel to his back, the soup held protectively — almost covetously — against his chest.

  The blast threw him to the ground, but again he mustered the will to rise. Not the rise of a [Hero] bravely setting his feet against impossible odds, but the rise of a peasant — delirious, inelegant, and stumbling so badly he nearly put face to pavement all over again.

  Slowly, shakily, steadily-steadily-steadily, Jeremiah made his way forward. One foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other. He focused on nothing but the work left to do, and the world disappeared. He ignored the pain. He tuned out the ringing in his ears. He didn’t hear the warning screech.

  Jeremiah reached the foot of the treasure pile. The centaur, little more than a dozen paces away, parried a flying arc of light and just-so-happened to deflect the attack right toward the hapless cook.

  Before he knew what was happening, Jeremiah found himself falling to the ground. He landed chest-first atop his saucepan. The lid’s handle dug right above his stomach, knocking the wind out of him. He lay curled face-down against the saucepan, breathless, and with a smoking stump where his right thigh had been.

  Jeremiah opened his mouth to scream, but he hadn’t the air. He was frozen there, unable to gasp, his jaw locked wide in a silent, never-ending cry. A hollow pain ripped up through his chest and down through his guts to the leg that wasn’t there.

  “Scree scree scree!”

  The eyeball clinging to his shoulder screeched at him worriedly, and this time Jeremiah heard it. The creature shook him as best it could, and though it wasn’t much, it was enough to snap him out of his shock.

  “HEEEEEEUUUUUGH—!”

  Jeremiah sucked in a breath so quick the air cut at his throat. Before he had time to recover further, Terra quaked, and his eyes shot up.

  The centaur pierced a Daemon dragon — the last of its enemies in the immediate area — out the air with a lance-riddled arm and flung it off into the distance. With the final defender of the treasure pile gone, it let out a roar of victory so loud Jeremiah felt his bones shake.

  It threw itself forward to gorge upon the horde. Its torso bent low, and every one of its weapon-tipped arms dug into the pile to fling masses of gold, art, and gems in the general direction of its mouth and down its gullet.

  Its teeth didn’t move in unison. Rather, its jaw articulated each tooth individually, undulating them in continuous waves so that it never had to pause between bites. Noxious gas smelling of rotten eggs and putrid meat rolled out its maw in a visible miasma of stink.

  The sight and smell of it — especially this close up — was disgusting, but the worst part was the sound. The squishing and squelching and smacking of its lipless gob and bleeding gums; The slobber of every breath sucked down between the ceaseless chittering chomps and chattering clicks of its abdominal maw.

  Jeremiah felt the urge to vomit, but that would’ve been a waste of soup.

  Grabbing tighter onto the saucepan still in his hand, he steeled himself and began crawling closer to the monster and the fruit still impaled on its arm. He was close, so close that he couldn’t give up now.

  Inch by agonizing inch, he pulled himself along the foot of the pile, trying to stay out of the centaur’s sight. How he would crawl up the creature’s arm and retrieve the fruit, he didn’t know, but that was a problem for later.

  Lucky for him, he reached the arm sooner than expected! Unluckily, it was because the centaur noticed him.

  His eyeball friend tried screeching a warning a moment before it happened. The arm sprang at him like a snake. The flesh coiled bonelessly around him, its spikes stabbing into him like a pincushion. He couldn’t breath. Some sort of noxious oil coating the monster’s slime-slick exterior sank into his wounds, burning into him with invisible fire.

  Jeremiah grit his teeth, and the creature lifted him into the air. Any reasonable soldier would at this point be consumed by fear, pain, or any other of a dozen different despairs; But in this moment, Jeremiah was not a reasonable soldier. He was a soldier with a mission, and his objective was impaled on a spike and bleeding red mere inches away from his face.

  The fruit was right there! Right in front of his nose! If only he could reach out and take it!

  He could feel the hand-wing of his eyeball friend still on his shoulder. It shrieked in his ear, but he could barely hear the little fella over the sound of the centaur’s maw getting closer and closer.

  The monster brought him up to its eyes, and this close up Jeremiah was able to notice something disturbing — Well, more disturbing than what he’d already seen, at any rate.

  Wherever it closed its teeth, its skin grew to close the gap over its mouth. Whenever it pulled its teeth apart, it also pulled apart the freshly grown skin. Because its teeth were constantly working up and down to swallow as much treasure as it could, there was a constant spray of fine red mist shooting out from where its lips should’ve been.

  A lot of the blood got onto Jeremiah’s face, and it burned something fierce.

  “Goodness,” he rasped, not enough air in his punctured lungs to manage a whisper. He tried repeating something his brother’d once told him — Yer pretty as my backside, and you smell twice as sweet — but all that came out was a strained “yerpraicgh… meba… sah…”

  The centaur’s mouth was getting bigger.

  Or maybe I’m just getting closer.

  A fresh puff of stink smacked Jeremiah in the face as a Jeremiah-sized gap in the monster’s mouth stretched open. Looking inside, he couldn’t see a tongue. All he saw were waves of tooth-covered flesh churning like an angry tide.

  I’m about to be eaten alive.

  SHIIIIIIING!

  Before the horror of his situation could hit him, a curved blade flashed before his eyes, and he felt himself beginning to fall.

  “Not one more soul!”

  It wasn’t a voice Jeremiah knew, but it felt familiar.

  He fell to the ground, his fall broken by the now-severed arm wrapped around him. Whether the impact hurt or not, he couldn’t tell, but his whole body already felt like it was on fire.

  “Not one more step!”

  The centaur — half its arms still shoveling gold into its mouth — threw itself at the black-robed figure that’d appeared from nowhere. The creature screeched its war cry as it had before, but the sound was cut short by the whistle of a blade through air.

  SHIIIIIIING!

  The torso, relieved of its legs, fell to the floor. A mixture of gold dust and crimson blood gushed from its wound, spilling upon the ground. A speck of it got into Jeremiah’s eye.

  The centaur’s severed legs charged at the Daemon, and each of its arms sprung at him like a striking snake — including the one wrapped around Jeremiah.

  Jeremiah flew through the air, his lifeblood streaming out behind him from what felt like a thousand different wounds. He landed on his back against a hard cushion of gold, upside-down, halfway up the treasure pile.

  His eyes were drawn back to the duel going on before him, but he couldn’t make sense of what was happening. It was all too fast. He saw little more than bits of blood, flesh, and gold flying every which way. Wound after wound after wound appeared on the centaur, but Jeremiah couldn’t tell if any of its own flailing blows connected. The black-robed Daemon was little more than a blur.

  “Not one more second!”

  Death appeared meters off the ground, wings outstretched, and scythe poised to strike.

  The centaur’s chest — now with but a single arm left to defend itself — tried turning to meet its attacker, but its effort was wasted.

  “Now, you PAY!”

  The scythe sliced what remained of the monster in half, right between the eyes.

  As it died, it could not scream.

  Each of its disparate limbs exploded into a rain of golden shards. The first rays of dawn crested the horizon, and the air shimmered like a vision of paradise.

  All around the square, though Jeremiah could not see it, the monsters of the [Profane Fleshtide] were stunned by the recoil caused by their leader’s death. Most died on the spot as the square’s defenders capitalized on the opening. Those with the wherewithal to flee were chased down and would soon be slain.

  “…scree…”

  The weak cry wrested Jeremiah’s attention away from the glittering dawn. His companion was laying beside him, moments from death just as he was. Already Jeremiah could see the cracks of golden light leaking from his friend’s iris. Any moment now, it would burst apart and they would both be dead.

  But they still had a job to do.

  The eyeball unfurled its one wing, and within its grasp lay a cut and battered sliver of the red fruit they’d been chasing this whole time. Beside them, half its contents spilt away, lay the now-lidless saucepan holding what little remained of their soup.

  Jeremiah tried saying something, but all that came out was an airless yet determined grunt.

  Let’s do this.

  Together, they mustered their strength. With great effort they hefted the fruit just barely over the lip of the saucepan and let fall a single crimson drop.

  The rest of the fruit fell from their grip and rolled down the pile of treasure. Jeremiah’s arm collapsed from the effort, and the eyeball lolled, exhausted, into his palm.

  They locked gazes, and with their last moments of life shared a look of pride.

  They’d done it.

  The soup was finished, and they could each pass on with a smile.

  The eyeball gently faded into specks of gold that were carried off by the breeze. The soldier closed his eyes, content.

  For the second time in too few hours, Jeremiah died.

  SHIIIIING!

  “Not one more soul!”

  Melpomene cut off the creature’s arm before it could finish squeezing another soldier to death. If this dumb monster thought Melpomene would just let it kill more people for her to revive, it had another thing coming!

  “Not one more step!”

  Melpomene slashed again, separating the creature’s torso from its legs in case it felt like running away. She couldn’t waste time chasing it down if it chose to flee.

  Thankfully, the beast chose to fight. Every part of it — including the parts she’d already cut off — flung themselves at her with abandon. Incidentally, the soldier she’d tried saving got thrown through the air, and that really ticked her off. With all the blood he was losing, he’d be dead for sure! And that meant another soul to weigh down her already-overburdened self!

  She felt fit to explode in more way than one.

  Her pain, her suffering, her frustration; all of it, all this time simmering there in the back of her throat. All it took was this one tiny setback, and suddenly she was on the precipice of an all-consuming, white-hot rage.

  The Autarch clenched her teeth.

  Master thyself, lest thou become a master of none.

  The words came to her faster than thought, cutting through the noise to give her an instant of clarity. Anger was but a single form of passion, Melpomene knew, and she was a Daemon who knew her passions well.

  Midair, she set her stance and narrowed her eyes. She tuned out the world, and the world disappeared.

  All that remained was her pain, the monster, and her desire to see them both gone.

  The monster was upon her, and she moved.

  There was no distinction between mind, body, and soul. She was aligned fully and completely with herself, every aspect of her bound together and striving towards the same end.

  Her thousands upon thousands of hours of experience made themselves known. Wherever she needed to be, she was. Whatever she needed to see, she saw. However she needed to strike, she struck.

  The monster leveled a dozen blows her way, and she returned the favor a hundred fold. She flowed past its every attack, but she was more than a ravening tide. She blazed past its every defense, but she was fiercer than a wildfire. She was indomitable, but she was beyond even a storm.

  She was inevitable. She. Was. Death.

  “Not one more second!”

  She reared back, a stream of blood and ichor trailing the edge of her scythe. All about her were suspended a million droplets of red flying in a thousand different arcs. Even though her pain made her feel as if she’d been in this battle for a decade, scarcely enough time had passed for the blood drawn by her first blow to hit the ground.

  A light sparked in the back of her eyes. A thin sheen of something azure-blue coated the blade of her scythe, so faint it could have been a trick of the light.

  “Now, you PAY!”

  She cut the torso of the beast in half, right between the eyes, and she knew it was done. Each of its disparate parts — every one of them but an instant before brimming with life and acting on their own — died as the blow was struck.

  Every piece of it exploded into a shower of gold, and the first rays of dawn crested the horizon to shine upon the bullion — so brilliant it was blinding.

  She reached out a hand and grabbed but a single shard of gold.

  Reviving a soldier took sacrifice. All it required was treasure and time. One could be substituted for the other with diminishing returns, but using a proper anchor was the only way to increase the task’s overall efficiency.

  Or at least that is what most believed.

  Melpomene closed her eyes. She felt the weight of far too many souls pressing down and pulling away at every inch of herself, and she embraced the sensation.

  Any lesser [Liege] would have fallen apart long ago, and even the gods — were any still alive — would consider what Melpomene was now attempting to be suicide.

  But she was no mere [Liege], and if any godly prick had the gall to appear before her now and call her a fool, she would spit in their face and suggest they suck on a toad.

  She was Melpomene, fifty-fourth [Daemon Autarch] of the [Despoiled Legion], and she would succeed.

  She flexed her soul like a muscle, and upon each and every tether, she pulled.

  The temptation was there, she’d have to admit, to just let go of all those souls that were not her own people’s. It would be so easy to just let those tethers go and just… fade away.

  But she didn’t. Because she was a Daemon of her word.

  The gold in her hand, the gold in the air, and the treasure in the pile below her all began to shine like the blood of Terra erupting from the earth. It was an enormous bounty, but not nearly enough to finish the job before Melpomene would be shred to dust. She would have to make up the difference herself.

  Already she’d been frayed at the edges from simply holding onto the tethers for so long, and her present effort only served to hasten her demise. Like the fibers of a muscle struggling against a weight too great to bear, the individual fibers of her soul stretched, strained, and finally snapped.

  More sharply than ever she could feel herself becoming undone, but so too could she feel her task nearing its end. Whichever would come first, she couldn’t at first tell, but the passing of each interminable instant only served to make the truth clear:

  She was going to fail.

  As her soul broke down, she grew weaker. Unable to hold herself together, she unravelled faster and faster. Unable to pull with all her might, the speed of the resurrection slowed and slowed.

  Her eyes were closed, but she could feel the winter sun’s light strike her face, mocking her.

  And she was so godsdamned close.

  All she needed was one last burst of strength. A breakthrough, an ally arriving in the nick of time, even divine intervention — any of it would’ve been enough, but Melpomene knew no help was coming her way. That was just the way of things.

  In all the histories and stories and songs that had ever been or could ever be, the fate of the [Villain] was always the same. The [Hero] fought for some almighty universal truth while affecting the attitude of an underdog, whereas the [Villain] needed to don the guise of unstoppable power so that they might garner enough support to change the world. While the [Hero] was handed all they’d ever need on a golden platter by the powers that be, the [Villain] had to scrape and cheat and steal every bit of luck they could find; And when the final moment came, the [Hero] would always prevail, and the [Villain] would always be robbed of their well-earned victory.

  No amount of preparation, expertise, or trickery was ever enough. Reality or Destiny or Terra herself — whatever the bards wanted to call it, ‘the way things ought to be’ always reared its bastard head to crush the [Villain]’s dreams.

  But this time, Melpomene refused to play along.

  The gods were dead! Melpomene was free to forge a destiny all her own! The only reason she’d been able to kill Arthur a year ago was because that victory had been a personal defeat, but this time — this time for sure — this time, she could have it all.

  The souls of her fallen mentee’s soldiers were heavy on her soul, but she refused to let them go. The golden shards left from Percival’s mutated monstrosities were too much to use all at once, but she refused to back down. Her soul was breaking apart, but she refused to give up.

  She would succeed, or she would die trying.

  She readied herself for what would likely be her final effort, but suddenly, her load lightened; Not by much, but by enough to matter.

  Melpomene cracked open her eyes, tears streaming down her face, and she locked her gaze with the Daemon who’d been by her side since the very beginning. Eurymedon shimmered along the edge of perception atop a building at the end of the square, hidden to all but their [Liege]. They stood at ease, but there was a tautness in their stance that betrayed the strain on their soul.

  Leveraging their bond to Melpomene, Eurymedon pulled alongside their [Liege]. Much of their effort was wasted due to their indirect connection to the fallen souls, but they nevertheless brought their strength to bear.

  Unconsciously, Melpomene let a smile slip across her face. She was not alone. She could do this.

  Melpomene heaved. The treasure’s glow became blinding. Her soul shattered within an inch of annihilation… but she held on.

  FWHOOOOSHH!!!

  Melpomene’s vision went white.

  Her body went numb.

  She couldn’t hear a thing.

  All she could feel was her soul, diffuse and on the brink of breaking apart. All that held her together was a gentle, six-armed embrace.

  Melpomene examined the innumerable threads tethered to the scattered bits of her soul, and knew them all to be alive. The resurrection was a success, but her work was far from over.

  Without hesitation, Melpomene severed every connection given to her by her late mentee. The strain on her soul lessened instantly.

  Free of her burden and with her promise fulfilled, Melpomene began the slow, delicate process of pulling herself back together.

  Jeremiah had no idea where he was, but he knew he’d been there before.

  It was the hill overlooking his family’s little hut and the field they were responsible for, but it also wasn’t. It couldn’t be, because the real thing had burned down about a year ago when the war broke out.

  Still, it all looked the same. It even smelled the same — earthy, fresh, and with just a little hint of shit from the fertilizer.

  But it wasn’t the same, Jeremiah knew. It was too still. Too quiet. Too ideal, like his memory of the thing rather than the thing itself.

  It had taken him longer to realize it the first time around, but this time he had experience on his side.

  “I’m dead,” he spoke aloud, his tone more matter-of-fact than anything else.

  He looked down at his waist, and there it was — a tether tied ‘round his hips and fading off into the distance. He just needed to wait for a tug, and he’d rejoin the land of the living, his memory of this place forgotten until he came back again.

  He breathed deep and stretched his arms out to the sky, basking in the light of the afternoon sun.

  “Ahhhhhhhh~~~!” He let out his breath, and the weight of the world fell away.

  Time was weird here; he knew that much. He had forever and he had no time at all, so he wanted to make every second count.

  He strolled down to his hut and opened the door. It almost smelled like home. He smelled hot stew simmering over the fire, but he couldn’t smell his wife’s hair. He saw the notches in the doorframe where his daughters and son marked their heights every midsummer, but he didn’t see the mud and scuff marks they left behind like breadcrumbs wherever they went — much to his and Rebecca’s mild annoyance.

  The kids had been getting better at not leaving a mess, but Jeremiah missed seeing the dirt now that it wasn’t there.

  None of it was there, if he were being honest with himself. But it was nice to pretend while he could.

  He ran his fingers across the wood, across the letters etched beside each mark.

  He smiled, but he forced himself to turn away. He’d healed enough to remember this much, but he wasn’t ready for more just yet.

  He left the hut and found himself back at the top of the hill. He didn’t remember walking there, but there he was.

  He still had a smile on his face, but he wished he weren’t so alone.

  And then he wasn’t.

  There was a bird on his shoulder. It’d been there the whole time, but it also hadn’t. Jeremiah decided not to worry about the details.

  “Hey friend,” he called to the bird, but the bird didn’t notice.

  He couldn’t figure out what kind of bird the bird was. The more he looked for details, the more the details changed, so he decided not to worry about this either. All he knew was that the bird only had one wing, and it was missing an eye.

  “Buddy, don’t you remember me? After all we’ve been through?”

  He tapped the bird on its head with his little finger, and the bird finally took notice of him. He flashed the lil fella the brightest smile he could muster.

  “There you are!” He held out his little finger. The bird looked puzzled at the gesture, but then it nuzzled up against his digit for just a moment before pulling away.

  Understanding the message, Jeremiah pulled his hand back to give the bird some space. “I’m sorry we never got to try that soup, lil pal. If we both make it back, maybe we could try tracking down those ingredients again?”

  Jeremiah’s smile turned sheepish and he scratched the back of his head. “Not sure if I can remember all I did though. My head was a bit fuzzy at the time.”

  “Chirp?” The bird stared at him in confusion. It flew off his shoulder and pecked at his wrist.

  Jeremiah wondered what the bird was doing, but when he brought his hand up, he saw that he was holding the saucepan with the soup. It’d been in his hand this whole time. It was mostly empty — over half of it spilled back in Kingsblood Square — but there was still some soup at the bottom.

  “Huh. Maybe my head is still a bit fuzzy!” Jeremiah said with a laugh. He looked down at his hut. “Just a moment, please! I should have some clean bowls down there.”

  He took a step downhill, but then his bird friend flew up and pecked at the top of his head.

  “Ow! What was that for?”

  “Chirp!”

  The bird hovered in front of his face and then landed on… a table? The serving table back at the mess tent in Kingsblood Square to be precise, and suddenly, they were there.

  Jeremiah looked around. The square was bright, clean, and devoid of life. High up in the sky was the same afternoon sun as there’d been back at his home, warm and kind.

  “My first time seeing it during the day,” Jeremiah marveled, admiring the architecture of all the buildings surrounding the square. It was all so understated and refined, built to complement rather than distract from the splendor of the Torr Royale — at least that’s what his brother’d told him once. Taking a look at it all himself, he couldn’t help but agree that the simplicity looked nice.

  When he looked behind him to see the Torr Royale, however, it wasn’t there. Where the tower should’ve been, all he saw was a large patch of grass lined with some intricate-looking paving stones.

  Jeremiah shrugged. Not his problem.

  He set down his saucepan and grabbed a bowl, ladling in a nice fat scoop for his birdie friend. It was almost all the soup he had left, but he didn’t mind. He could always try making more when he got back, and his friend deserved the treat.

  Jeremiah took in a deep whiff. It smelled mesmerizing, and he could tell from the bit of steam coming off the top that it was at the perfect temperature too.

  “Soup’s up! Here you go.” He placed the bowl in front of his friend, but the one-eyed bird had its gaze set elsewhere. Jeremiah tried tracing the bird’s eyeline, but it didn’t look like the bird was staring at anything but bare cobblestone. “Whatcha looking at, buddy?”

  The bird turned to him and extended its wing in the direction it’d been looking. “Chirp chirp!” it cried, gesturing worriedly at the empty patch of square.

  Jeremiah was confused for a moment, but he knew his friend could see better than he could. He decided to trust that there was something there to see, and suddenly there was. It’d been there the whole time, in fact.

  It — or rather he — was a wretched thing; a young man — perhaps just a boy — with his face twisted into a rictus of pain. His bones all jutted from him at odd angles, like arrows trying to fly from his flesh in every direction. His muscles were twisted and knotted so badly that Jeremiah could see the individual fibers straining through the poor lad’s skin. He was dressed in nothing more than rags.

  The sight instinctually made Jeremiah take a half-step back, but he knew that was wrong of him.

  The boy was weeping, weeping so loud that Jeremiah wondered how he possibly could’ve missed him up ’til now.

  Jeremiah and the bird shared a look. They turned down to look at their only full bowl of soup. They looked back up to each other, and they could each tell from the other’s gaze that they’d come to the same conclusion.

  Perhaps they could divvy up whatever scraps they had left in the saucepan afterward, but that was a worry for later. Right now, that boy needed soup, so soup he would have.

  Jeremiah picked up the bowl and a spoon, intent on walking over to the lad, but the lad was suddenly right in front of the table. Neither of them had moved, and Jeremiah decided this was just another thing to add to the list of things he didn’t have to worry about.

  “Here you go, lad!” he said, and the boy looked over. “A fresh bowl of soup, just for you.” He held out the bowl, at first worried that the young man wouldn’t be able to feed himself, but his worry was soon proven unnecessary.

  The twisted boy unwound an arm and reached for the bowl slowly, as if scared the wood might burn him. He poked the bowl with a finger and quickly pulled away, testing it. Finding himself unharmed, he repeated the test, this time holding the back of hand against the bowl for a whole half second before pulling away.

  Jeremiah waited patiently, a smile of understanding on his face, and after a few more tentative pokes, the boy worked up the courage to reach out with both hands and take the bowl.

  Slowly, carefully, cautiously, the boy lifted a steaming spoonful up to his mouth and blew on it. He sniffed it, and a new emotion spread across his face.

  Surprise? Anticipation? Nostalgia? Jeremiah couldn’t tell what this new emotion was, but neither was it his place to ask. All that mattered was that it diluted the boy’s look of pain and fear, and Jeremiah’s curiosity would have to be satisfied with that.

  The boy took his first tiny little sip of soup, and stars shone in his eyes.

  He slurped up what remained in his spoon, and then he went for another. This time he slurped straight from the spoon without blowing, and he did the same with the spoonful after that. He tried some of the vegetable chunks, and soon he was chomping down bites of carrot and turnip with gusto.

  Jeremiah knew it was rude to stare, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away. He was afraid that the bowl wouldn’t be enough for the lad, but by some miracle the bowl remained half-full long after it should have been emptied — either that, or maybe Jeremiah was just bad at judging how much soup the boy ate with each spoonful. Probably the latter.

  With one final pull from the lip of the bowl itself, the boy polished off his meal and let out a great sigh of contentment. It came out raspy and thin, but the sound was unmistakably one of joy.

  The boy was still pained, that much was clear. His muscles were still in knots. His bones still jutted from his skin. There was still strain in his eyes. But now, there was joy there too — the simple joy of a warm gut filled with good soup.

  “…th-thank-k-k… you…” the boy managed, his eyes misting with tears.

  “Our pleasure,” Jeremiah replied, a bit embarrassed to realize he’d just been eyeing the poor chap this entire time. He nudged his bird friend who’d hopped back onto his shoulder, and the bird gave a bow. “Glad we could be of service!”

  “…thank you… both…” A smile on his face, the boy turned and hobbled away toward whatever came next. He shimmered for a moment, and then was gone.

  Jeremiah held out his finger to his bird friend, and his friend bumped it with its wing.

  “Chirp!”

  “A job well done,” Jeremiah agreed.

  He made to divvy up what was left in the saucepan between him and his friend, but then a thought struck him. He took another look around the square, but it was still devoid of life.

  “Chirp?” his friend asked.

  “Oh, I was just thinking. Not my strong suit, I know,” he joked, his smile turning sheepish.

  “Chirp?”

  “Well, thinking that if there was one other person here…” He gestured vaguely to the rest of the square, unsure how he should finish the thought.

  He narrowed his eyes, puffed his cheeks, and scrunched his lips. What exactly had he been thinking? What did he expect to see?

  He let out a long, slow breath, and then he took in another. Following his intuition, he opened his eyes — he hadn’t realized they were closed — and suddenly, they were there. All of them.

  All around the square, thousands upon thousand of people, each twisted or torn or broken or battered or all of the above in their own uniquely horrible way. Some shambled about aimlessly. Some curled up on the ground, crying. Some stared into the distance. Some shivered. Some screamed.

  It was too much to see, too much to hear, too much to even think about.

  He’d noticed too much. Judging by the way the friend on his shoulder chirped in alarm, so had it.

  Jeremiah looked down at his saucepan. It was nearly empty, perhaps only enough for a single mouthful each between him and the bird.

  The two of them deserved at least that much, didn’t they? After everything they’d done?

  Before he knew what he was doing, he slammed the lid back on the saucepan, scared that one of the poor souls had already caught a whiff and would come asking for a bite. He held what little remained of the soup tight against his chest and started speed-walking away, doing his best not to draw attention in his rush.

  The bird on his shoulder started chirping worriedly, so Jeremiah tried calming it down.

  “Don’t worry, it’s just… There’s not enough for everyone!” he hissed, stepping carefully around a pair sobbing on the floor, their flesh sewn together. “We have to get away!”

  Where was the exit? Where was the exit?!? He couldn’t see a thing through the crowd.

  “Chirp!”

  “We’ll get away from here and then we’ll split what’s left! But we have to get away first!” Jeremiah ducked beneath someone’s leg. What that leg was doing jutting from their face was none of his concern.

  “CHIRP!”

  “Then they’ll have to fend for themselves! They’ll find a way. What do I care?”

  He tripped over someone, his foot sliding over something wet, and he fell to the floor. He kept a death grip on the saucepan, bashing his shoulder and the side of his face into the ground rather than use his hands to break his fall.

  He got up and brushed himself off, picking up the pace. He was running now. Why was he running?

  Where was the way out? Where was the way out? WHERE WAS THE WAY OUT?

  “CHIRP!”

  “BECAUSE THAT’S NOT MY JOB!”

  Jeremiah stopped dead in his tracks. He was panting. He was sweating. His heart felt cold.

  He took a moment to catch his breath.

  “But this is my job, isn’t it?”

  He took a few steps forward, and he found himself back at the serving table. He put down the saucepan and gently removed the lid.

  “This is my job,” he repeated. He braced both his hands against the table and stared down at what little remained of the soup. There was practically nothing left.

  “Chirp.”

  Jeremiah shook his head. He looked up at all the thousands of souls each writhing in their own pains, and he looked back down to the nearly depleted soup.

  “This is my job, but what am I supposed to do?” He fell to his knees and let his head hang limp. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “You do what you can.” The young man’s voice came from nowhere, but Jeremiah didn’t feel startled when he heard it. Quite the opposite, actually. It made him feel warm and safe, like a heavy blanket wrapped snug ‘round his shoulders.

  And for some reason, it sounded familiar.

  Jeremiah looked up, but he couldn’t see who spoke. His bird friend was also looking around, apparently having heard the voice too.

  And then another voice spoke, gruffer and deeper than the first.

  “You do what you can, and that’s all anyone could ever ask.”

  The old man’s voice thrummed pleasantly through Jeremiah’s chest, familiar, just like the first.

  Jeremiah tried getting up… but he didn’t. And he didn’t know why.

  He felt more spent than a coin in the till, but even exhausted as he was, getting to his feet shouldn’t have been a challenge, right? He was strong enough to stand — he could feel that he was — but for some reason, he just couldn’t.

  There was a disconnect somewhere along the line. He wanted to get up, and he could get up… but between the wanting and the doing, there was a chasm he just couldn’t cross.

  Well, maybe ‘chasm’ wasn’t the right word. Chasms were hard to get across. Whatever was stopping him from getting up would be a lot easier to overcome. It was just a branch on the road he had to move out the way, a broken bridge over a stream shallow enough to ford, a row in the field he only had to till that little bit more ‘til he was done.

  He was trying to get up — or at least he was trying to try — but he wasn’t moving an inch.

  The worst part was the knowing. He knew he could find his feet, and he knew it’d be easy.

  But that knowing only made him feel all the guiltier that he hadn’t done it yet, and that guilt only made existing as he was all the more exhausting.

  A branch barred his path, but he was trudging uphill yoked to a wagon growing heavier by the moment. The river was shallow enough to ford, but he was half an inch tall, treading water, and forgetting how to swim. The row was nearly tilled, but Terra herself stretched beneath him, expanding in all directions so fast he had to sprint just to remain where he was.

  And he was in Kingsblood Square. His knees were on the ground. His hands gripped to the table above him. His head hung low. All he needed to do was find his feet, but he was so lost he couldn’t find his nose. He wanted to breathe, but he was too busy gasping for air. He had to pull himself up, but the ground pulled him down, promising an endless, sleepless rest, if only he would lay his cheek against the cold, hard stone.

  It was beginning to feel like he’d never rise again.

  His hands released the table, and he felt himself fall.

  “CHIRP!”

  Jeremiah slammed his hands against the ground, cutting his palms against the cobblestones.

  “Chirp! Chirp chirp CHIRP chirp chirp.”

  Jeremiah smiled. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said, addressing the friend who’d been by his ear this whole time.

  “Chirp,” replied the bird with perhaps a bit more good-natured sass than absolutely necessary.

  Jeremiah pushed himself off the ground, rocking back to sit on his knees. “Yes, yes, I know,” he shot back with a laugh, “but you don’t have to be so smug about it.”

  He re-gripped the edge of the table and pulled himself up.

  Now that he was actually doing it, the act of standing was even easier than he thought it would be. He felt a pang of shame knowing that’d it taken him so long to do something so simple, but he also knew he wasn’t being fair to himself.

  He swayed on his feet, lightheaded from having stood too quickly. He nearly stumbled back a half step, but a hand pressed against the small of his back to keep him balanced, its steadying touch so light Jeremiah might’ve imagined it altogether.

  He looked around, but he could find no one to thank. His bird friend looked at him quizzically, but Jeremiah just shrugged and shot back a smile.

  He breathed deep, and he felt suddenly lighter, as if a weight he hadn’t realized was there had all at once disappeared. With his head held high and his feet planted firmly on the ground, the task ahead no longer felt impossible.

  “Do what we can, huh?”

  He and his friend looked at each other, down at the nearly emptied saucepan, out to the square full of souls, and then to each other once more.

  “Would you mind calling one of them over?” Jeremiah asked, his smile turning bittersweet. “Might be enough left for someone small if they ain’t too hungry.”

  The bird nodded and took flight, surprisingly stable despite its one wing. It fumbled its way through the air toward the closest soul, and Jeremiah washed his hands to prepare the soup.

  He tilted the saucepan at an angle to ladle out as much of the broth as he could, and he was pleasantly surprised to find there was more than enough there to fill an entire bowl.

  “Huh. More in here than I thought.”

  Jeremiah looked up to see the bird guiding a woman with three arms, one leg, and no eyes to the table. “Hey birdie, we might have enough for another bowl. Can you get one more person please?”

  The bird gave him a puzzled look but obliged, flying away as Jeremiah finished guiding the woman to her bowl of soup. He scooped up a second bowl of soup, but when he was done, there was still a bit leftover.

  Jeremiah quirked an eyebrow, a suspicion crossing his mind.

  “Hey birdie?”

  “Chirp?”

  “Just keep bringing them over one at a time, please. Let me know when you need a break, and I’ll let you know if we need to stop.”

  His bird friend, still in the middle of helping someone shamble over, looked to Jeremiah and tilted its head, obviously confused. The two locked eyes, and an unspoken message passed between them. The bird nodded, and Jeremiah turned back to his work.

  “There should be some more bowls around here somewhere…”

  A pair of helping hands placed a stack of bowls at his table.

  “Thanks!” Jeremiah grabbed a bowl to fill, and then paused. He looked around to see who he’d thanked, but could find no one.

  Curious, he inspected the bowl in his hand and found it prettier than a pig at the market. It was a bit worn — a few small nicks and scratches here and there — but the wood gleamed like a new copper coin, and its grain felt fresh-scrubbed and oiled.

  Jeremiah shrugged. Whoever’d done this, they’d done a shining job.

  Birdie arrived with a new soul. Jeremiah put on the warmest smile he could muster and filled up his bowl. “Soup’s up!”

  Time melted away like butter out on a summer sill. Jeremiah served bowl after bowl of steaming soup with a smile. Birdie led soul after soul to the table. Most of their patrons weren’t much for conversation, but those who could talk were happy to exchange a few words, and those who couldn’t seemed to appreciate the warmth.

  As the moments turned to minutes turned to hours, neither Jeremiah nor Birdie seemed to tire. Jeremiah once worried that his bird friend might be pushing itself too much — it was hopping and flapping all about the square without a break, after all — but just like Jeremiah himself, the work seemed to invigorate the little feller more than it drained. Whenever Jeremiah looked down at the saucepan, there was always just a little bit more than he expected to find.

  Every once in a while, Jeremiah thought he saw those hands again — the ones that’d placed down the bowls — but he only ever caught them out the corner of his eye whilst his mind was busy with the soup or a soul.

  Though he never got a good look at them, he couldn’t deny the hands were a load of help. Dirty dishes, little spills, fresh kitchen rags, a cup of water when he started feeling thirsty — problems disappeared and aid arrived all without him noticing or needing to ask.

  Eventually, Jeremiah decided to stop worrying about it and just lose himself in the work — and funny enough, that made it easier to notice the ones who’d been helping him.

  “You were never this helpful back at the abbey, old man!”

  “And you were never this rude!”

  A pair of laughs rang out as an old man’s hands placed a fresh stack of bowls on the table. Jeremiah didn’t know the story behind the overheard banter, he couldn’t help but chuckle along at the camaraderie.

  More time melted away. Jeremiah took more pride and more care in his work, garnishing each bowl with some green onions he kept chopping on the side and pre-breaking up the stew chunks for those who looked like they might have trouble chewing.

  A few souls stuck around after they’d been helped in order to lend a hand. Some took over Birdie’s job of guiding their compatriots. Others spoon-fed the armless, set up tables and chairs, or tidied up little messes as they happened. Some stuck around for just a little while, and some others for a little while longer. Birdie hopped and chirped and flapped along, puffing up its chest as it gladly took up the role of organizing the volunteers.

  Jeremiah ladled out another serving from the pot — not a saucepan anymore — making sure to swirl and scoop from the bottom to get a good mix of all the ingredients. He swiped a rag across his brow and grabbed his ladle to serve another, but a hand gently stopped him.

  “I think that’s enough for now,” said the old man, a hint of pride in his voice. “You’ve done good. I can take it from here.”

  Jeremiah tried to protest, to say that he was ready to do more, but when the old man took the ladle from his hand, he found himself too tired to resist.

  The old man gave him another once-over, and Jeremiah only then noticed the other man’s striking blue eyes.

  “I take it back,” the old man went on. He put a hand on Jeremiah’s shoulder, looked him straight in the eye, and gave him a father’s smile. “You’ve done more than enough. Good job.”

  Jeremiah stumble-stepped back, more than a little dazed, as the grandfather-grey soul took to the work like a bird to the breeze. The man’s hands were defter than Jeremiah’s ever were, serving perfect portions at twice the speed. For each troubled soul, he flashed a smile twice as warm and spoke words twice as comforting as Jeremiah ever could.

  As the old man struck up a conversation with another soul — a young boy with a cloth tied over his eyes and a small lion-pawed bird cradled in his arms — Jeremiah for a moment wondered why he’d even bothered helping when there existed someone so much more capable than him, but he dismissed the thought easily enough. Twice the hands bore more than twice the burden, after all.

  “Hot stew! Coming through!”

  Jeremiah heard the familiar voice and stepped out the way as if he’d done it a dozen times before — which, he realized, he had.

  The young man — younger than Jeremiah — came through with a smaller steaming pot of stew. He stepped up beside the old man and carefully poured his load into the larger serving pot, just as he’d done every time the soup ran low.

  Wondering where the soup had come from, Jeremiah turned around, and there they were: a dozen happy faces and twice as many helping hands working the kitchen. They stirred and chopped and chatted away, bustling about the outdoor kitchen like friends as their many to-dos got rightly done-did. Some of their faces were familiar, but for some reason Jeremiah couldn’t remember any of their names.

  They’d been helping Jeremiah this whole time — or maybe it’d be more accurate to say Jeremiah had been helping them — but he’d been totally oblivious of their presence until now.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” came the young man’s voice.

  Jeremiah turned again to find the other man standing there beside him, an empty pot at his hip and a gap-toothed grin on his face. His mud-brown eyes — same color as his worn-out robe — were trained on the people working the kitchen, and then they turned to rest on Jeremiah.

  “Helping others is all well and good, but you’ve got to make the time to let others help you too, Jeremiah.”

  Jeremiah blinked. “You know my name?”

  Lord Percival — for indeed, this man could be none other than the Barefoot Saint, and Jeremiah mentally berated himself for not recognizing his [Liege] immediately — gave him a light punch to the chest and smiled. “You’re a good soldier, and an even better man. Least I could do is remember your name.”

  Jeremiah felt a tug at his hip, but he ignored it. “My [Liege], please let me help out a little longer. I can keep going.”

  Lord Percival gave him a look that he couldn’t read. The Saint’s gaze turned elsewhere, and Jeremiah turned his own gaze to follow. Together their eyes roved over the kitchen, the serving area, and the entire square.

  Jeremiah wasn’t entirely sure what he was supposed to be seeing, but in the middle of it Birdie hopped over and climbed onto Jeremiah’s shoulder. Together, they waited patiently for the former monk to break his silence.

  After a time, Lord Percival spoke. “Charity is weird,” he said.

  Jeremiah didn’t know how to respond to that, so he just stayed quiet.

  “Not to get all philosophy with you, but I’ve done a lot of thinking about it,” Lord Percival went on. “I know helping others is a good thing to do, but sometimes it feels like I only do it because it makes me feel good. And doing something just because it makes me feel good? That’s just selfish, isn’t it?”

  Jeremiah scratched his head, confused about where this conversation was going.

  “Chirp! Chirp chirp,” Birdie opined.

  Jeremiah puckered his lips to chew on the idea, and Lord Percival turned to the bird to give it a thoughtful nod.

  “That’s a good point. Being selfish doesn’t have to mean good or bad, so who’s to say something good can’t be selfish too? I hadn’t thought of it that way.” The Saint nodded again.

  “I never had the words for it, but I guess that’s what I’ve always done — do my best to make sure being selfish doesn’t get in the way of doing good. And I do that by every once in a while asking, ‘Am I doing this because this is what the other person needs? Or because I just want to feel good about myself?’

  “The answer doesn’t always make me comfortable, but hey, that’s why I ask the question. Sometimes I realize the other person doesn’t need or even want my help, and I just wanted to feel the [Hero]. Other times the person does need and want my help, but not in the way I wanted to give it, and that’s tougher.

  “But do you see the problem with all this?”

  Jeremiah paused, considering. He tried giving the question a proper think, but after a dozen seconds, nothing he judged worth saying aloud came to mind. “I’m sorry, my lord. I don’t,” he replied lamely.

  Lord Percival nodded, a comforting smile on his face. “The problem with only ever asking what others need is that sometimes, I forget to ask what I need. I’ll be the first to admit that forgetting myself every now and then can be all well and good, but it’s a poor chef who sharpens their knives by dulling their wit. So tell me Jeremiah, and tell me honest: What do you need?”

  “What do I need?” Jeremiah repeated, caught off guard by the question.

  His first thought was to wonder why someone as high and mighty as a [Liege] would worry about him, but then he remembered he wasn’t talking to just any [Liege]. He was talking to Lord Percival Commonblood I, the Rebel [King], the Pauper Prince, the Barefoot Saint. If anyone cared, it’d be him.

  Jeremiah looked down at himself. At first he thought he was fine — aside from the whole ‘being dead’ thing, of course — but like so many other things that day, all he had to do was realize there was something to look for, and then there it was, clearer than day.

  Jeremiah looked, and he saw his hurt.

  He bled from dozens of holes scattered about him like leaves beneath a yellow oak. Some wounds were shallow, and some wounds ran so deep he saw bone. He was also missing a leg. Above all else, he was tired, so very tired, and he wanted nothing more than to be off his feet — well, foot, he supposed.

  He spoke without thinking. “My lord, I need a break.”

  Birdie hopped off his shoulder. He felt a tug at his hip, and this time he let his tether carry him away.

  As he was pulled away from wherever he was toward wherever he was going, the last thing Jeremiah saw was Birdie and Lord Percival waving him goodbye. Jeremiah waved back.

  “See you la—!”

  “—TUUUUGH!”

  Jeremiah sucked in a breath so sharp it felt like breathing needles.

  He was alive, covered in dried blood, and more than a little confused. The cold morning air nipped at him through every hole in his clothing — not so much ‘clothes’ as ‘rags’ now, if he were being honest — and the winter sun shone bright in the early morning sky.

  He brushed through his memories, trying to remember what he was doing here, and it felt like brushing his fingers through a tanglebush. Little bits of recollection would snag here or there, but just as quickly snap away before he could understand what he was feeling.

  It took him… He didn’t know how long it took him because time was a bit too confusing to keep track of at the moment, but it took him something like a few ounces — maybe even half a pound — of time to realize that everyone around him was cheering. Like, cheering really loud type of cheering. Cheering loud as… loud as something that was really loud.

  Jeremiah looked around, wondering what all the hullabaloo was about, and then he saw Death.

  Death was standing pretty close to him, but that type of standing that birds did in the air with their little wings — except Death’s wings were bigger than a bird’s because he was bigger than a bird.

  Frippery, Jeremiah remembered. That sounds like the right ward.

  Death was frippery-ing in the air, just a whistle away from Jeremiah, tears shimmying down his cheeks. The sunlight hitting his face and chiming off his grass-cutter looked awful nice. Real [Hero]-like if Jeremiah did say so himself.

  Was everyone cheering to make fun of him for crying? That wasn’t nice of them. And a lot of the people cheery-ing were naked, Jeremiah noticed now that his eyes were getting butter at fur-seeing. That was also when his hearing started getting cleaver-er, and he could finally make out what everyone was screaming.

  “““[Hero]! [Hero]! [Hero]!””” they was all chanting.

  Oh, they’re not being mean, Jeremiah realized. That’s nice of them.

  Jeremiah kept looking around to catch his bears, and that’s when he saw something that made it all come rushing back — his saucepan.

  Last thing Jeremiah remembered, he and his eyeball friend just finished the soup, and then they’d died. It made Jeremiah real sad that his friend would stay dead, but that just meant that he’d need to enjoy the soup for both of them.

  Jeremiah reached out for the saucepan, but his muscles felt like a peck of pigeons was pick-packering at him with every twitch he tried to move. He fought through the pain, and with one final burst of effort he grabbed onto the pan that lay an entire fingerslength from his eyes.

  He heaved for breath, more needles in chest, and dragged the saucepan closer to his face. He tipped it over to look inside, and within lay a single drop of the most beautiful amber broth he’d ever seen.

  Most of it must have spilled out when he’d fallen, and yet that drop remained. Just enough for a taste, but a taste was all he’d knead.

  Fighting through the pain, Jeremiah dragged the saucepan closer and closer to his face until finally his lips touched the cold metal. Not trusting his ability to hold anything still, he flopped the entire saucepan over his face and laid his head on the ground, allowing the heavenly liquid to roll itself down onto his tongue.

  It splashed against his tastebuds, and Jeremiah—

  “Cough! Heuugh! AAAaagEUHkhh—”

  Jeremiah gagged and sputtered. His own saliva — trapped by the saucepan — splashed all over his face. Some of it got up his nose, but he felt too weak to do anything about it.

  “…the fruit…” Jeremiah whispered, realizing his mistake.

  What the soup had needed was a conductor to tie all its flavors together. What it got was a rabid squirrel with a xylophone.

  “…I… messed up…” His voice sounded tinny in his ears, but all around him he could still hear the sound of cheering.

  For some reason, he couldn’t help but find the situation funny. He started laughing. The laughing hurt like a squirrel cracking his ribs with a mallet, but he laughed all the same. A big, dumb grin spread across his face.

  “The soup tastes like shit!”

  Mini Character List:

  Melpomene: Our protagonist, under the impression that the [Hollow King] was Percival, and that Percival was a Fae-aligned anti-Percival soldier.

  Jeremiah: The most rational soup enjoyer. Heavily concussed.

  Eurymedon: The [Daemon of Eyes] who sticks by their [Liege] through thick and thin.

  Eyeball/Birdie: The second most rational soup enjoyer. Less concussed.

  Percival: Deceased [Paragon of Charity] and leader of the [Nameless Revolt].

  Gregory: An old man happy with the life he lived.