Chapter 33 Antagonists #2
“Great, so you’re going to try then,” Em said, risking a step closer to the necromancer. He cringed, but she pulled the dragon relic back to her side. Instead, she held out the broken halves of her precious pen toward him. “You’ll resurrect Inky and, in return, I won’t kill you.”
“Counteroffer, fool,” Kriqir said. “I attempt to resurrect your stupid pen, and you give me the dragon relic as payment.”
“You touch this relic, and I will fucking obliterate you,” Em snapped.
“Killing me would end your questline,” Kriqir retorted, eyebrows raising. “Which, given this entire conversation, I doubt is what you want to happen, fool.”
Em adjusted her grip on the relic.
“I could also torture you,” she said after fighting to find words. “I could write a gruesome, undying sequence for you, full of pain that never ends until you do what I want. I could destroy everything you built up and still leave you alive to grovel in eternal suffering.”
Kriqir hissed between his teeth, eyes twitching behind his mask. His shoulders dropped in defeat, and the necromancer circled her towards his Cursed-But-Once-Uncursed-Tower. Still, he kept his manicured hands raised in a truce, veering as far from Em and her dragon relic as possible.
“You’re a fool.”
Got him.
“And a fucking cruel one at that,” she huffed.
Kriqir flashed his teeth in time with a bolt of lightning. “Ah, so you do accept your twisted soul has fallen from the graces of a Main Character.”
“I can rewrite anything however I damn well want, and you can’t stop me,” Em said.
“So why haven’t you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Why. Haven’t. You?” Kriqir repeated.
Em’s mind replayed the tragedies and mistakes she’d made each time she tried to write.
How badly she failed at it, and how many revisions she’d have to make to fix the consequences of her actions.
The fear and anger on the faces of her ex-friends.
How her sword jerked and tore through Sasha’s flesh.
She shivered, blinking to clear it all away.
“That’s none of your damn business,” she said.
Kriqir hissed, then shrugged, hunching back more in defeat. Like the necromancer was weary as she was by the unfairness of Novella and the meddling of their Great Author.
Stephanie.
A new hole ripped into Em’s soul. A draining, clawing, shriveling feeling at the pressure of having to be both author and character. At the inability to just blame her mistakes in life on the careless writer.
“You want to resurrect your pen-thing?” With a swish of his dark cloak, Kriqir strutted towards his looming tower. He didn’t even check if Em followed, his shoulders squared, and chin raised. He marched along the switchback, weaving toward the open doors.
Em swallowed back her guilt. The moment she set foot into the Cursed-But-Once-Uncursed-Tower, there was no going back: she would truly be embracing the fact that she turned to another villain to get control over Novella again.
I can fix this. She picked up the soaked hemline of her skirts, trudging after Kriqir. If I revive Inky, the pen can help me bring everything back to normal. Then I can make it better.
Doubts hung over her, leering from the stormy shadows of the clichéd villainous realm surrounding her.
Time after time, she’d unsuccessfully tried to rewrite this shitty plotline, to the failure where she killed her own friend.
She was running out of options. Running out of puny excuses.
Just how many more failures did she have left in her before her inner villain took over the shreds of a Main Character left inside her?
Stephanie’s nonchalant voice filled the edges of her memory—haunting and tempting: “I want you to know if it doesn’t work, I can help you undo your mess and fix it. We can try to work through this together, Em… you just have to trust me.”
No. Em shivered, hugging herself. I can fix this.
Free of the pelting, frigid rain, Kriqir led her into the rotten passages of the tower. Everything became twisted and dark as Em felt; the jagged decor, the abandoned skeletons, the cobwebs, the greenish lighting—she clung to the dragon relic and Inky’s corpse for dear life.
Somewhere in the darkness, bats fluttered.
Her soaked skin crawled, and goosebumps rose along her wordy tattoos.
In the shadowy corners, she could almost hear the echoed laughs and cheers of Sasha from their grand escape not that long ago.
It pinched at the stinging guilt boiling inside her.
Everything in her churning gut screamed at her to flee from the cursed tower; that she didn’t belong in this wicked realm. But she didn’t have a choice.
She needed Inky back.
Focus. Em let out a deep breath, steadying herself.
“Hope you like the decor,” Kriqir chuckled as he wove them up a spiral staircase into the higher levels of the tower. His voice echoed all around them. “Because your foolish prophecy claims you’ll inherit my wonderful fortress when you are supposedly going to kill me.”
“It’s lovely,” Em rolled her eyes.
“Matches your new aesthetic,” he smirked over his shoulder at her, pausing on the stairs.
A playful glint caught along the edges of his silvery mask.
His eyes caught on the words tattooing her skin, and his manicured fingers whitened along the banister.
The linger of his stare sent a shiver down her spine.
“Keep walking,” Em snapped.
Kriqir snorted and muttered something under his breath but obeyed—just as Gair might’ve back at the Sanderson School for Main Characters as they bantered with one another over lunch.
Her legs ached underneath her, and a cramp stitched in her side the further into the heights of the tower they climbed. The stench of orc was thicker up there.
“Where the hell are you taking me?” Em demanded.
“My secret lair, of course,” Kriqir chuckled again. “For someone so bent on being original, you ought to have predicted that already, fool. Unlike you, I embrace what I am.” He paused again, shooting her another wicked grin. “Do try to keep up.”
Em balled her fists, huffing, but refused to respond.
After a breathless eternity of climbing the stairs, Kriqir stopped them outside a black door engraved with skulls and necromancy wards. With a flick of his long nails, it opened upon command with a whining creak.
He motioned to her with a mocking bow. “After you, princess.”
Em bit her lip, hesitating in the doorway.
Beyond waited a dark office, covered in wall-to-floor shelves.
Torn maps of Novella were patched along the empty gaps, between books and vials and potions and jars of pickled body parts.
Bones covered a workbench. Surgical tools hung on small racks.
A cauldron hung from the ceiling, bubbling over with his trademarked green mist. The choking reek of musty death clung to everything.
Kriqir slipped in past her, the train of his dramatic cloak swishing along her feet. The necromancer hummed tunelessly to himself, weaving about his lair as he grabbed a random assortment of necromancer junk.
Em observed him, taking in that despite the evil facade and crude name-calling, he was another lost teenager like her.
If it weren’t for his black robes, menacing mask, and sharp nails, he might’ve belonged right beside Roden or Gair in her party.
Even past the disgusting smell, the dim ambience and layout of his lair were reminiscent of her bedroom back on her parents’ camel farm.
These small trinkets on display for simple pleasure, the maps, the books—she rubbed her eyes to wipe the thoughts away.
Focus.
She couldn’t let herself become comfortable with the villain. Not after everything that just happened.
Em traced the ridges along the chunky relic in her grasp. She’d still have to kill Kriqir to complete her plotline. Unless she attempted to redeem him, but that would be too cliché and rather unsatisfying after the complete nonsense the prophecy had forced her to endure.
“Let me see your pen, fool.” Kriqir held out his hand toward her without making eye contact, fully focused on a tome on his workbench.
She passed Inky to him, his icy skin brushing against hers. “Don’t do anything funny or I’ll fucking kill you.”
“I just might let you, so I don’t ever have to see your face again,” he grumbled.
Em shuddered. Seeing Inky in Kriqir’s long fingers, not within her possession, gripped at her knotting chest. She swallowed and fidgeted with the dragon relic. If he so much as damaged Inky more than the pen already had been broken…
“This is a feather,” Kriqir stated.
“No, it’s a quill pen,” Em snapped.
“And you couldn’t just get a new one, fool?”
“I stole it from the Great Authors,” Em said, pride rushing through her veins.
“So, you couldn’t just go back and steal another?” Kriqir scoffed, holding Inky’s halves up with each hand like they were something toxic.
Stephanie.
The writer’s modern apartment with her pinyon scented candle and bubbling fish-tank filters. A hollowness seeped into Em again. A gentle, warm tug. An ache.
Exhaustion.
An emptiness needing to be filled.
This was a different feeling than her Character Separation Attachment Disorder when distanced from her companions.
This was a thin, golden lifeline woven through her soul, awakened at the thought of her Great Author with each passing defeated second.
It flooded like a gleam throughout Em’s ragged consciousness, revealing her unraveling development.
Not in a harsh, accusatory way of a spotlight, but in a soft awakening.
Like her own soul was saying, hey, you’re not okay, but you don’t have to keep fighting anymore.
Em grit her teeth, resisting. She wouldn’t allow herself to be stopped.
Not now.
The golden thread slipped back away in the dark depths of her mind, patient.
“Just fix the damn thing,” she snapped at Kriqir.
“Suit yourself,” he shrugged.