Chapter 11 #2
“Not in the stories. He seems to play by his own rules most of the time.” Sasha had spent enough time around Vile to know that much.
The bastard could absolutely cheat at any moment, pull the rug out from under all of them without breaking a sweat.
But where was the fun in that? He lived for the drama.
The tension. The moment right before the knife came down.
“And he said something along the lines of…what was it? When the story is being written, things happen in real-time. He doesn’t read ahead.
He doesn’t skip to the ending. He plays it out. ”
“So you hide the spell-making inside the plot of the story,” Sidney said slowly. “You make it look like you’re just…doing bog witch shit.”
“Exactly.” Sasha pointed at her. “See? Not just a pretty face.”
“Bite me.” But Sidney was almost smiling. Almost. “Okay, so you smuggle a spell out. Then what? What do we do with it? We’re still stuck in a library that’s…made out of everything fiction, apparently. It’s not like there’s a front door with an exit sign over it.”
They both turned to look at Virtue.
He’d been silent the entire time. Which, for a man who looked like he’d been pulled out of the cover of an epic fantasy novel and given a pulse, was deeply unnerving. Heroes were supposed to talk. Heroes were supposed to have speeches and plans and confident declarations.
Virtue was just standing there, staring at the floor, his jaw working like he was chewing on something he didn’t want to swallow.
“Virtue,” Sasha said carefully. “Do you know the way out of the library?”
He didn’t look up right away. When he did, the expression on his face was one she’d never seen him wear before. Not in Peter Pan, not in Sherlock, not in Wonderland. Not even in the months—or hours, or whatever—that Sidney had apparently spent trekking across this story’s countryside with him.
He looked…afraid.
“There are two ways out that I know of,” he said quietly. His voice had lost its warmth, its honeyed tenor. It sounded flat. Raw. “Two doors, if you want to think of them that way. Though they’re not…really doors.”
Sasha waited. Sidney pulled her knees closer to her chest. Dundle had gone still in Sasha’s lap, as if even the little monster could sense the shift in the air.
“They’re…through us.” Virtue met Sasha’s gaze. “Through me. And through Vile.”
It took her a second. But when it hit, it hit like the proverbial Sherlock train.
The books.
The two books that had started everything. The dark one with the intricate V in purple that had been thrown onto her desk at the BPL by a terrified, bruised man who said he was finally free.
And the light one—the white leather with its proud V in yellowish-green—that had appeared in Sidney’s hands in Manhattan like a curse wrapped in a gift.
Virtue nodded, seeing the look on her face. “You’re right. The books. They are us. Or at least…the closest thing to physical form the two of us really have. They are our anchors. Our bodies, if we have ones to speak of.”
Sidney stared at him. “So the light one is you, and the dark one is Vile?”
Virtue nodded slowly. He swallowed hard, and the firelight caught the pain that crossed his features. “The books are the only way back to your world. But they can only be opened from the library side.”
“Can they be destroyed?”
“Yes.” Virtue shut his eyes. “Books can be burned.”
The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on.
Sidney was the one who said it. Because of course she was. Because Sidney never danced around the ugly parts. “So to get out through the dark book, we have to kill Vile.”
Virtue flinched. Actually flinched. And for a moment, Sasha saw something that broke through the hero facade—something raw and real and deeply, deeply sad. This wasn’t a hero talking about defeating the villain. This was a brother talking about killing his twin.
She understood that better than anyone in any world ever could.
“Not kill,” Virtue corrected, though his voice cracked on the word.
“You can’t kill Vile. Not permanently. You can’t kill the villain of all fiction any more than you can kill the concept of darkness by lighting a candle.
The dark is still there, waiting for the flame to go out.
” He ran a hand through his long dark hair, and for just a second, he didn’t look like a hero at all.
He looked like a tired, frightened man. “But you can destroy the book. His anchor. It would…unmake him. For a time. Break his hold on the library, and on you. The door would open, and you could go through. Back to your world.”
“How long would it take? For him to come back?” Sasha asked.
“A long time.” Virtue leaned his back against the wall and slid down it until he was sitting on the floor, his long legs stretched out in front of him.
It was the most un-heroic posture she’d ever seen him in.
“A century, maybe. He’d reform eventually.
So long as people keep writing stories with villains, he’ll always come back.
But the book would be gone. He’d have to make a new one.
And he wouldn’t…be himself, as he is now.
He would be changed. A new configuration you could call it, I suppose. ”
“Has it happened before?” Sasha clenched her fists.
“Yes.” Virtue stared down at the floor. “Once. A long time ago.”
“And you?” Sidney’s voice was small. She was staring at Virtue with an expression that Sasha recognized all too well. It was the same look Sidney got when she was falling for someone and already anticipating the heartbreak. “What happens to you, if we destroy his book?”
The smile Virtue gave her was so gentle, so genuinely kind, that Sasha had to look away.
It was too intimate a thing to watch. “I’ll be here.
I’m always here. Someone has to mind the library while he’s away.
” His smile faded. “It’ll be quiet, for a while.
Lonely, maybe. But that’s all right. I’m used to it. ”
The way he said it nearly broke Sasha’s heart. Used to it. Every hero in every story, and the man was used to being alone.
“But I’ll have stories to keep me company.” Virtue smiled. “Stories where I fall in love and live a happy life. And new ones come to join me every second of every day.”
Wincing, Sasha looked away. She shoved that thought down hard. She could feel sorry for Virtue later. And for Vile? Why did she feel like she was betraying him? She shoved that feeling down even harder.
“It would have to be a powerful spell,” Virtue continued, as though reading the trajectory of the conversation and doing what heroes did best—pushing forward.
“The dark book isn’t just paper and leather, Sasha.
It’s him. His essence. It’s held together by every villainous word ever written.
Every monster. Every murder. Every cruelty ever committed in ink.
You can’t just burn it. Normal fire won’t touch it. Neither will steel.”
“But magic could,” Sasha said. She was already mentally cataloguing the contents of her workstation.
Moon water. Shadow thistle. Something that looked like dried hearts from some animal she didn’t want to identify.
The bones of something that was definitely not a chicken.
“Magic from inside a story. His kind of magic, turned against him. Dark magic. Evil magic. Betrayal.”
“That…might work.” Virtue looked at her—really looked at her—and for the first time in this story, she saw something like hope in his eyes.
Not the performative hope of a hero giving a rallying speech.
Real hope. The kind that was fragile and terrified of being crushed.
“He made the rules of this world. The magic in it is part of him. Using it against him…it would be like picking a lock with a piece of the lock itself.”
“Because he can’t be immune to his own magic,” Sidney said, sitting up straighter.
The color was coming back to her face. Whether that was the antidote working or the excitement of suddenly having a plan that might actually work, Sasha couldn’t say.
“But. A snake can’t poison itself. The metaphor doesn’t work both ways. ”
“Well…close enough.” Virtue gave Sidney a lopsided smile that was so full of affection it made Sasha’s chest ache.
Those two were such a cliché. “The dark magic in this world was written into being by him. If Sasha can fashion a spell from it that targets the book specifically—the dark book—she could unmake it. Like the antidote to the poison of a snake is made from the snake’s venom. ”
“And it would send us home.” Sidney looked between the two of them. “Both of us.”
“Both of you,” Virtue confirmed.
For a long moment, nobody spoke. The fire crackled.
Dundle shifted in Sasha’s lap, made a small “skkhkt” and went back to sleep.
Lundle dropped from the rafters and landed on Virtue’s shoulder, which the man accepted with about as much concern as one would give to a bird.
He reached up and absently scratched the thing behind its mangled front leg. Lundle’s tail curled in contentment.
Of course the creepy little bastard liked Virtue. Heroes and animals. Classic trope.
“Okay.” Sasha took a steadying breath. “So we have a plan. I build the spell here. I hide it in the story’s mechanics—make it look like just another bog witch potion. I smuggle it out when the story ends. And when we get back to the library, we find the dark book and I use the spell to destroy it.”
“That’s the plan,” Sidney agreed, and there was steel in her voice that hadn’t been there before.
The elven princess was finally sitting up straight on the cot, her bare feet on the cold stone floor, her silver-rune dress catching the firelight.
She looked, for the first time, like someone who’d actually been on a months-long quest and had the spine to show for it. “We can do this.”
But even as the words settled between them like a pact—a real one, not some bullshit fictional contract between a bog witch and a shadow king—Sasha felt the other question rising in her chest like bile.
The one that nobody wanted to ask.
The one that had been lurking underneath the entire conversation like a body under the floorboards.
The story still had to end.
Stories always ended. And this was a dark fantasy romance, which meant somebody had to pay. There was always a cost. Always a sacrifice. That was the rule. The genre demanded it.
And Vile had already told her. Someone had to die before they could leave this world.
She looked at Sidney. Her twin. Her mirror. The person who had been shoved into this same impossible nightmare alongside her, each of them on opposite sides of a coin they never asked to be minted on.
Sidney met her eyes. And Sasha knew, without a single word being spoken, that her sister was thinking the exact same thing. Something was going to go wrong.
The question was what.
“There’s one more thing,” Sasha said quietly, changing topics. Yeah. Their overall story was probably going to have a bittersweet ending. But the High Fantasy still had to tie up first. “This story still has to end before we can go back to the library.”
The fire popped again. Somewhere outside the cottage, something howled in the bog, long and low and mournful, as if the land itself understood what was being said in this room.
Virtue wouldn’t look at either of them. He was scratching Lundle’s chin with one hand and staring into the fire like it held the answers to questions he’d been asking for millennia.
“Who?” Sidney asked. Her voice was barely above a whisper. “Who has to die at the end of the story?”
The question hung in the air like a blade about to fall.
Nobody answered.
Because they all already knew the answer.
In every dark fantasy, in every story where the villain had to lose and the hero had to win, in every cliché that Vile and Virtue had ever lived through, there was only one character who was ever expendable. Only one role in the story where death was not just expected, but demanded.
The hero got to live. The princess got to live. That was the rule. That was the trope.
But the witch?
The witch always died.
The villains always lost in fantasy stories.
Sasha smiled. It was a thin, tired thing. “I’ll work on the spell tonight. You two should rest.” She stood up, cradling Dundle against her chest. “We’ve got a story to finish.”
“Sash—” Sidney started.
“Don’t.” She didn’t turn around. She couldn’t.
Because if she looked at her sister right now—if she saw those eyes that were the same as hers, the same face, the same everything except for the soul behind it—she was going to fall apart.
And she couldn’t afford that. Not yet. Not when they were this close to something that could actually work.
“I’ll figure it out,” she said, softer. “I always do. That’s kind of my thing. ”
Walking to her workstation, she set Dundle down on the table and stared at the mess of potion bottles and dried herbs and strange, impossible ingredients that awaited her.
Behind her, she could hear Sidney’s breath shudder, and the quiet, steady sound of Virtue moving to sit beside her sister on the cot.
Good. Let the hero comfort the princess. That was his job.
Hers was to figure out how to break an evil demigod.
Picking up a jar of something that shimmered like captured starlight, she held it up to the fire. It swirled with a faint violet glow. Of course it did. Everything in this world had a little bit of Vile in it. Every spell. Every shadow. Every dark corner of every dark story.
Good.
She was going to need every fucking drop.
I’m coming for you, Vile.
And I’m going to watch you burn.