Chapter 39
Chapter Thirty-Nine
I don’t know where I am, but it’s dark. I don’t mean like someone should light a candle.
There’s nothing but black. There’s nothing to smell or feel or hear.
I even try opening my mouth to see if I can taste something, but all I get is the lingering taste of my dinner with Doug on my tongue.
The lack of everything and the strange peace of the environment disturbs me.
Where the fuck am I?
I think back to the last things I remember. I went to the temple to talk to Aphrodite. About what? Khione? No, if I did that, Zeus would overhear. She told me to stick to talking with Alexander about that stuff. Maybe it wasn’t important.
My heart hurts for some reason. Not physically.
Except for the agony on the back of my head, the rest of my body seems unharmed.
However, it feels like someone broke my heart.
Did Guy or Cait break up with me? Is that why I went to Aphrodite?
She is the Goddess of Love, after all. Maybe I wanted her to help me get over it.
Wait! We drank lemonade. We sat in white wicker chairs and drank lemonade. It was just like—Mom? Why does the thought of her hurt so much? It’s hurt ever since she had the stroke but nothing this bad.
Then it hits me. This isn’t heartbreak; it’s grief.
She’s dead.
Doug’s words come back to me. I remember shouting at him, refusing to stay with Cait and Guy, and running to talk to Aphrodite. I don’t know why I chose her to confide in. She’s the Goddess of Love, not the Goddess of Loss.
’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Who said that? I swear I used to know this. Tennyson! That’s right. Mom used to say it when I would ask her about my father, why she wasn’t mad or sad that he’d left before I was born. There’s something I know about him, something new. What is it?
I sat drinking lemonade with a goddess. She was friendly, casual, and sympathetic. We were talking about Mom and…She knew before me, way before me, before I even came to Peripeteia. But how? Mom’s in the real world.
Because Aphrodite was watching her, watching us, before I’d even played Legends of Sacrifice.
I’m her granddaughter.
My head pounds from the swollen bump on the back of my head, but I force myself to think through every step of that painful conversation and then to my journey home.
That’s where everything went dark, but not as black as here.
“Here” is just nothingness, like the space beyond the playable areas of a sandbox video game.
Didn’t Miko say something about how Hekate put her into a world like this? Miko would play her part as an empusa, and when it was time to pause, she returned to her own little pocket of nothingness.
Aphrodite would never do something like that to me, but Zeus would. He’d known I was at the temple right beforehand. The streets of Ismarus were teeming with players, many of whom were pissed at me for breaking the game. How many of them are his worshippers?
Wait, no, not worshippers, not really. The players in the real world are worshippers. All the players in here would have died in the real world like me. The gods brought us here so we could live and bring them an offering.
“I’m so fucked,” I whisper to myself.
“You woke up!” says a familiar voice. It’s the first thing I’ve heard since I roused into this blank world.
“Hello?”
There’s a shuffling sound. It comes close enough that I know I should see whoever it is, but it’s too dark. I can’t even see my own hands, more or less anything else that might exist in this space.
“I was afraid you’d never wake up,” the person says.
There’s a perfect warmth and sweetness to this voice and I realize who it is—Sylvia.
I back away, even though I have no idea if there’s anything or anyone behind me. “Leave me alone!”
“It’s me, Lauren!” Sylvia cries out. “The real me! I promise!”
“That’s exactly what the eidola would say,” I respond.
“It’s gone,” she says. “It escaped Miko and Joshua when they were distracted. Some Zeus worshippers took off my bindings, and the eidola helped them attack you. Once that was over, its job was done, and it left me.”
“You could be making all this up.”
“Why would the eidola want to be trapped in here with you?” Sylvia asks. “Zeus got what he wanted from both of us.”
“What could he have gotten from me he didn’t have before?” I ask.
Sylvia sighs. “The eidola told him about Khione’s lost son. Its job was to tell him what you knew of Aphrodite’s plan and help him kill you.”
“Well, she failed on both counts, then,” I say. “The thing about Khione’s son was a lie, and I’m not dead.”
“Lauren…” Sylvia lets my name hang there for a moment and then continues, “Are you sure about that last point?”
“Dead? If I was dead, we wouldn’t be talking!”
“In a world of nothingness?” Sylvia asks.
“I heard you shuffle to me,” I say. “That’s not nothingness. You have enough substance to create friction and produce a sound. I’m in pain on the back of my head. If I was dead, I wouldn’t feel that.”
“Then where are we?”
I don’t fucking know, but I offer her my best guess. “I think we’re in that little pocket that Miko told us about. The storage closet where gods put us when they don’t want us wandering around Peripeteia.”
“But that was because Hekate turned her into a monster,” Sylvia says and then gasps. “Do you think we’re monsters?”
“Fuck, I hope not.”
As if in answer to Sylvia’s question, all the black around us melts away, revealing a snowy field. In the distance, I can just about make out Ismarus.
Sylvia screams from my left. I turn to see what’s frightened her and jump backwards in terror. There’s a horse with sharp, bloody teeth and wild, red eyes staring back at me. Every impulse in me is to run away, but I can’t leave Sylvia behind.
“Sylvia!” I shout, backing away from the beast. “Sylvia!”
Oh God, did it already eat her?
The horse cocks its head to the side in the creepiest way imaginable and slowly approaches.
“Sylvia!” I shriek, my voice breaking from the effort. If she doesn’t answer this time, I’m bolting.
“Lauren?” the horse asks in Sylvia’s voice.
Oh. Fuck.
“Sylvia? Y-you’re a horse.”
Sylvia nods, which looks odd with her equine head. “You, too.”
“Your teeth—” I start.
“If they’re anything like yours, I don’t want to know about it,” Sylvia says.
We’re monsters. This is what Zeus is doing to us. It wasn’t enough to kill us. No, he has to torture us by having players kill us over and over, with our only respite being time spent in nothingness.
“What the fuck are we going to do?” I ask Sylvia.
“Run,” Sylvia says.
“Yeah, but where?”
“No! Run!”
Something like a war cry grows louder behind me. I turn to see a swarm of players stampeding our way with their weapons raised high.
“Fuck!” I shout.
Sylvia is off like lightning, and I race behind her. There are endless fields of snow around us with nowhere to hide. As I wear out, I realize I can only run for so long and then I’ll be just another objective scratched through on these players’ quest logs.
Now, I understand why Miko was so resigned to us murdering her. Better to get it over with and let them kill me. Maybe if I don’t put up a fight, that will give Sylvia a chance to get away. Hopefully, their quest says they need to kill a horse and not both horses.
I stop running and turn toward my approaching attackers.
These faces are familiar to me. They’re the newbie players I’d helped complete the Orpheus quest the day before.
At their lead is Doug. He’s helping them grind for XP.
Well, I said they should do whatever they could to level up.
How poetic that my first death should be at their hands.
Taking a deep breath, I will my body to hold stock-still. I tremble violently anyway, both from fear and the biting chill in the air. The thought of watching Doug beating me to death terrifies me, so I lower my head to the ground. Maybe if I don’t see it happening, it won’t be so bad.
Their feet rumble closer and closer. Their shouts of violence and preemptive victory grow louder and louder. This is when I realize horses don’t cry. If they did, there would be tears flowing over my muzzle right now.
“Wait!” Doug shouts.
The stampede halts, and the voices lower.
Crunch, crunch, crunch, Doug’s footsteps grow closer. Does he plan to land an incapacitating blow so that it’s easier for the level two and three players to kill me?
“Why aren’t you attacking?” he whispers.
I lift my head to look at him. Doug shudders. I can’t blame him. If I look anything like Sylvia, I must be terrifying. However, he settles and lifts a hand, not to hit but to touch.
“You’re not a monster, are you?” he asks.
“It’s me, Lauren,” I say.
Doug shakes his head. “I don’t speak horse, fella,” he says.
Ugh, of course, I sound like a fucking horse. Just because Sylvia and I can communicate with each other doesn’t mean we make sense to anyone else.
“Can I pet you?”
Pet me? That’s something I never expected my ex-boyfriend to say, but it’s an easy way to show him I’m harmless, maybe appeal to his sympathy.
I rub his palm with my muzzle to show him, “Yes, pet me, I’m totally a nice horse. Please don’t kill me.”
Doug strokes my nuzzle and then scratches behind my ear. “Wow, you’re surprisingly soft for a man-eating mare.” He frowns and tilts his head to study me. “Something tells me you’ve never eaten a person in your entire life, though.”
“Miko, can you come here?” he calls out.
Excitement vibrates through me. Miko is here? Someone else I know. Maybe this is a good sign.
The Druid of Dionysus joins Doug, keeping a wary eye on me the whole time. “What’s up?” she says.
“This is a really tame monster, wouldn’t you say?” Doug asks, as he scratches behind my ear.
God help me, I hate how good that feels. Like, I really needed that. Do you know what it’s like to have a random itch and not have hands to scratch it?
“Could be a cursed player,” Miko says. She steps closer to me. “Hard to tell.”