Chapter 14 #2
Then she was alone.
She went to the cabinet and pulled out a bottle of something strong. Poured herself a glass. Sat down in the chair by the fire.
And waited.
It was hard to know how much time had passed in the story.
Weeks? Months? It didn’t matter.
It was just the blink of an eye for her.
Sasha heard them before she saw them.
The sound of a mob.
Then she saw the fire.
Torches.
Dozens of them, their orange glow smeared and distorted through the mist like the eyes of something enormous and many-headed moving through the marshlands toward her. The sound of boots squelching through mud. The low rumble of voices—angry voices—growing louder.
Sasha set her glass down on the table beside her. It was still half full. She’d been nursing it slowly, savoring it, because she had a feeling it would be the last drink she’d ever have in this story.
She’d been right.
Funny that she’d only had it half-drank but the story had progressed.
Continuity error.
That made her laugh despite what was about to happen.
Standing, she moved to the now-fixed doorway.
The fog was alive with torchlight, and the shapes of people were resolving out of the murk like ghosts taking form.
Villagers. Farmers. Soldiers. Men and women with pitchforks and rope and the kind of righteous fury that only existed in stories where good was good and evil was evil and there was nothing in between.
And at the head of them, golden and terrible and beautiful in the firelight, was Virtue.
He wasn’t Virtue right now. He was the Hero. Capital H. The knight who had slain the Dark King’s forces, who had stormed the mountain, who had driven the darkness back to the edges of the map. He was everything the story needed him to be.
And he was coming for her.
Sidney was behind him, somewhere in the crowd. Sasha could feel her there more than see her. Could feel the weight of her sister’s grief pressing through the fog like something physical.
She was the beautiful Princess, probably riding some white horse, probably a Queen now, bathed in purity and moonlight and perfection.
The mob stopped at the edge of her garden. What was left of it. The torchlight painted everything in shades of amber and shadow, turning her little patch of herbs and roots into something sinister.
Something that belonged to a villain.
Virtue stepped forward. His new armor—because of course he had new armor now, gleaming and polished and perfectly golden, because the story demanded it—caught the torchlight and threw it back like a second sun. The Golden Blade was sheathed at his hip.
He looked at her.
And she saw it. Behind the role. Behind the Hero. Behind the face the story was making him wear.
I’m sorry.
She gave him the smallest nod. One he could pretend he didn’t see, if he needed to.
When he spoke, his voice carried across the marshlands like a bell. Clear. Resolute. Heroic in the way that made you want to follow him to the ends of the earth.
“The Dark King has fallen!” A cheer rose from the mob behind him, feral and hungry. He raised a hand, and they quieted. “But the darkness lingers still. It festers in the hidden places—in the bogs, in the shadows, in the hearts of those who served him!”
His gaze hadn’t left hers.
“I cannot let any evil remain in this land!” His voice didn’t waver. It should have. She wanted it to. She wanted some crack in the performance, some fissure that would tell her this was as hard for him as it was for her. “No matter the cost.”
A murmur from the crowd. Sasha caught a glimpse of Sidney’s face in the torchlight. She was crying. Silently, furiously, her fists clenched at her sides, letting the story do what the story had to do even as every part of her was screaming against it.
It’s okay, Sid. It’s okay.
Sasha could have run. She could have fought. She could have brewed something quick and desperate and flung it in their faces and disappeared into the marshlands where even the Dark King himself had trouble finding her.
But then she saw what they were building.
A pyre.
They were throwing logs into a stack—
They were going to—
No. No, no, no—
The mob surged forward.
Oh god—
Hands grabbed her. Rough, calloused, righteous hands.
She screamed. She fought. She kicked and shouted. “Wait—wait!” The mud of the bog sucked at her feet as they pulled her through her own garden, crushing her herbs, scattering the things she’d grown and tended and cared for.
“Not this, please—not this!” she begged. Pleaded. But it was no use.
She was a witch.
And witches burned.
They lashed her to the stake with rope that bit into her wrists and her waist. The wood beneath her feet was dry despite the damp of the bog—another impossibility, another concession the fiction made to the shape of the ending it demanded.
From the stake, she could see everything. The mob. The torches. The ruins of her cottage. The fog rolling over the marshlands like a living thing.
And Virtue. Standing at the front of the crowd, torch in hand, looking up at her.
Their eyes met.
She could see it now. The crack. It was there, buried deep, hidden behind the armor and the role and the demands of the narrative. A tremor at the corner of his mouth. The way his fingers gripped the torch just a little too tight.
Tears streaked her cheeks. She dropped her head. There was no point in begging for mercy. This was just how the story ended.
Evil was defeated.
The evil witch was put into the fire and died.
Sidney had pushed to the front of the crowd. She was being held back by two villagers, struggling against them, her face twisted and wet. She wasn’t screaming. That was somehow worse. She was just looking at Sasha, memorizing her, the way she had when they’d hugged in the cottage.
Sasha smiled at her.
Not the terrible smile from before. A real one. Small and crooked and a little sad, but real.
See you in the library, Sid.
Virtue lowered the torch to the pyre.
The wood caught instantly. The flames climbed. They were hot—impossibly, immediately hot—racing up the sides of the pyre as if the fire itself was in a hurry to finish the story.
Heat enveloped her legs first, then her waist, then her chest.
It was nothing like what she expected.
It was everything like what she expected.
It was pain beyond description.
Yet somehow, it was familiar, because she’d died before.
And she’d die again and the worst part—the absolute worst part—was that she would remember every second of it.
The world turned to flame.
The last thing she saw was Sidney’s face.
And then—