My Sister Is The Villainess

I used Moon’s Door once the corridor outside had gone quiet. The cold swamp air hit me, and then the firelight, and then Sera’s glare, which arrived about half a second before her words.

”You look unhurt.”

”Disappointed?”

”A little.”

I told them everything. The dinner at the black table, the hesitation I had performed so well that I deserved an award, the rumor of two hundred Twilight Order members marching on the palace, and Captain Daniel walking up the stairs to repeat it to the King himself. When I finished, nobody said anything for a moment.

”So Culex knows now,” Mary said at last. ”He knows about the Twilight Order, and he thinks it’s real.”

”He knows about our lie,” I corrected. ”Which is better than the truth.”

Arthur clapped his hands. ”We are famous! Two hundred people! I did not know we had so many friends.”

”We are six people and have a very large imagination,” Lee said, poking the fire with a bone.

”That is what I meant.”

The advice came in the usual order. Lee told me to keep my ears open and my mouth shut, because rumors only grew when nobody saw who watered them.

Mary asked me to watch how Culex reacted, not what he said, because a king’s face tells the truth even when his orders lie.

Arthur told me to eat as much as possible while the soldiers’ food lasted, which was the most practical thing anyone said all night.

Sera waited until the others had finished.

”Be careful,” she said.

”You said that last time.”

”And you did not listen last time.”

”I came back, didn’t I?”

”That is not the same as listening.”

She had me there. I raised my wrist, the bracelet glowed, and the door opened.

”Do not die,” she said to my back.

”It’s becoming a tradition.”

The palace corridor swallowed me whole, and soon I was in my own room, leaning on the wall as the weakness settled into my bones. It passed faster than before. The fragment in my spirit temple was doing its work.

I peeled off the green uniform piece by piece. The tight shirt with its high shoulders and its pitiful single star, the black pants, the belt with Fury hanging from it.

I hung them over the chair. Then I went into the bathroom, turned on the shower and stood there until the hot water had washed the dust and the lies off my back.

A real shower.

In the Realm of Evil. I wondered if I should feel guilty, then remembered the guests squatting over a hole in the floor, and I felt guilty, and then I stayed under the water for five more minutes anyway. I was only human.

When I came out, I put on my pajamas. They were soft and grey and they had cost me four coins, and I would have fought a Devil for them. I crawled onto the mattress, which accepted me like an old friend, and reached for the book waiting on the side table.

Enthopi.

It was the first volume of a series called The Journey of Mysthenion, and I had found it in the small market on the ground floor, buried under a pile of cheap pamphlets. The seller had wanted two coins for it. I had pretended to hesitate, because Peter was careful with money, and then paid him with a trembling hand.

I opened it to the page where I had stopped.

The story followed a man named Mysthenion, who had lived in the year 500 of the Fourth Age, roughly seven hundred years ago.

He was also the narrator, and according to his own account, he had a very strange problem. He kept finding himself in places that the eyes of normal people could not see. He did not choose them. He simply stepped through a doorway, or turned a corner, or fell asleep, and the world would quietly change its mind about what it was.

In the Chapter I was reading, he had walked into a tavern to drink a cup of ale. He had walked out into the land of the fairies.

I snorted.

The tale spread across all five kingdoms, from the mountains of Valemont to the harbors of Nuesak. Scholars could not agree on what it was. Some said it was fiction, a clever fantasy written by a bored genius to entertain nobles at dinner parties. Others swore that every word was true, and that Mysthenion had simply been the most curios man who ever lived.

’Somewhere in the middle,’ I thought, turning a page. ’Probably true, but exaggerated.’

I had my reasons. I was sitting in one of them.

The Realm of Evil had been exposed to the real world twenty-five hundred years ago, and the connection between the two had been growing stronger ever since. Nobody knew why.

Some said the Gates were spreading. Others said every Awakened who crossed over weakened something in the wall between the worlds, though no one could tell you what that something actually was. It was the sort of mystery that scholars spent their whole lives on without moving an inch.

So maybe Mysthenion had been special. Maybe he had been born with a talent for stepping into the realm’s gentler corners, the places that were not full of Ferals, Fiends and kings in crimson palaces.

The good parts of this world, if there were any.

’A fairy land inside the Realm of Evil,’ I mused. ’I would love to see that. After I kill Culex, obviously.’

I kept reading. A few pages later, the book mentioned a deity.

Mysthenion said that he had met many deities during his journeys, some kind, some indifferent and some who had looked at him the way a man looks at an insect that has learned to speak.

One of them was called Ruhubar. In the text, Ruhubar had leaned down to the trembling traveler and said a single sentence.

The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky...

I read it once. Then I read it again.

The line made my skin prickle, and I had no good reason why.

It sounded like a poem. It sounded like a prophecy. It sounded like something that wanted to be remembered, and had been placed in a book so that no one could say it had not warned them.

’There is a deeper meaning here,’ I thought. ’There has to be.’

I tried to chew on it.

Dark moon. Dancing gods. Terror in the sky. My eyelids refused to cooperate. The day had been long, the soldier’s bed was too comfortable, and my spiritual power was still recovering from the Door.

I closed the book, set it on the side table, and blew out the lamp.

”Tomorrow,” I muttered into the pillow. ”I’ll think about it tomorrow.”

Sleep took me within a minute.

...

One hour later.

The palace was silent. Even the torches in the corridors had burned low, and the bells had not rung in a long while. In a small room on the third floor, a young man lay on his back with his mouth slightly open, his breathing slow and deep, his pajamas twisted around one leg. Still sleeping.

Something stirred outside the window.

It rose from the dark, slow and soundless, until it hung against the glass. It had no face that any human would recognize. It had eyes. So many eyes, dozens of them, each one a different size, each one opening and closing in its own rhythm. They were blinking in no order at all. All of them were turned toward the bed.

It watched the sleeping boy for a long while.

The glass did not fog. The air did not move. Not a single sound came from the window.

Then, far away in the sky, lightning cracked.

The room went white. The shadows jumped across the walls like startled animals, and for the length of one heartbeat, the window was a blazing square of light.

When the darkness returned, the creature was gone.