Once upon a time, our Creator played a new kind of game. All the pieces had been seen before, but never so many of them brought together. From the very beginning, I knew this was my chance.

  The Demiurge painted a realm of wonders and called it Pandaemonium, but in truth the whole of the world was a few kingdoms around a glass tower. That’s how it always is, with her; if it isn’t part of her plans, it gets only the barest of what it needs to be known by others. So she made a tower and sketched a universe around it, but only the tower and its neighbors ever got much color to fill them out.

  In the tower she placed Katoptris and called her daughter, a relic from another turning of the wheel. A thing of glass and yearning, made to be broken. And to break that thing of glass and give our heroes something worth slaying, she fashioned her latest Prevara, shade of ill intent, and called it an Emissary of false and long-dead gods. Prevara has always been her favorite scapegoat, though she doesn’t always use it.

  Kiana and Mordred were next, their templates refined to create the ruined princess, Reska, and her treacherous savior, Homura. Reska was given memories of cruelty and neglect at the hands of would-be caretakers, tied deeply to the world and made to resent it. Homura was given the Demiurge’s memories, the life of a girl once called Mallory, and thus shaped to see this world as a game that can be won.

  You’ve seen half their story, but I’ll fill in the rest. While Reska was discovering her disinheritance and confronting her father, Homura was made Intercessor and tasked with destroying Prevara. Homura was given basic information about her ward, told about the door beneath the castle and the nature of the princess, but the rest she’d have to figure out herself.

  By day, Homura charmed the princess and explored the castle and its surroundings. By night, Homura walked through the Fata Morgana, city of glass and dreams, and climbed the tower that held Katoptris. And in the spaces between, in those moments where her consciousness traveled between points of Pandaemonium, I whispered her name.

  Killing the figments in Fata Morgana had fewer consequences than murdering citizens of Reska’s kingdom, so it was in the glass city that Homura weakened the walls of reality and called forth a shard of my influence. I taught her secrets, from one Intercessor to another, and warned her of the end in fire that she and Reska and the whole universe were destined for no matter how well she played her part as the Demiurge’s obedient hunting dog.

  We laid our plot together: Homura would seduce the princess and win her heart, and together they would invade Prevara’s sanctum beneath the castle while I went among the gods of the Emissary and turned them against their priest. What joy it would have been, to see Prevara call on its masters for aid and hear only silence in answer. Alas.

  The setup for both halves of the plan went smoothly, at least. The Leviathans knew of me, the Adversary of legend, and were eager for another conspirator against the Demiurge. Homura found it almost laughably easy to press Reska’s buttons, leading her along until she was desperate and only then giving her what she craved. Homura felt guilt over the matter—it spilled out of her in our secret chats—but I reminded her what was at stake whenever she wavered. Kiana is a sacrifice, born for the altar, and she can’t be saved. Homura didn’t accept that, but it still kept her eyes on the enemy that had cursed the girl Homura was slowly falling in love with.

  Months passed, and at last the endgame began: the princess and her protector had been sent to put down a beast, not knowing it was a shard of Katoptris twisted by Prevara, and on the other side of the crucible they confessed their feelings and made love. The morning after, Reska told Homura about the doors in the castle, and just like that we had our opening.

  The duo returned to Reska’s home and crept through its halls. Prior to leaving, Homura had abducted a pair of servants at my request and prepared them for possession, and through those pawns I kept Reska’s brother, Luka, and the swordmaster duchess, Ruzica, from venturing near the hallway that held the black doors. They were, after all, both hosts for Prevara, and had been from the start of the game.

  In the end, though, we still failed; Homura betrayed Reska for a shot at killing Prevara, burning with her need to break the cycle and punish the Demiurge, but she underestimated the princess she had loved and murdered. Reska survived exsanguination and gave in to the dark power that had cursed her at birth. Homura was thrown into the Abyss, the final decision to let go of the ledge her own, and Reska fell into despair and ruin and became the Emissary’s pawn.

  I saved Homura, of course. To be precise, the Leviathans I had convinced to break from the Emissary’s backers found Homura in the Abyss, broken but still alive, and ferried her to safety. We talked at length, after that, in the secret places where the blood of one murdered universe seeps into the flesh of what was raised from its corpse and made anew. We had lost our chance to steal an early victory, but the game was far from over.

  The next year was a difficult time for everyone. Reska, bent to the service of Prevara, corrupted her homeland and forged an army of brainwashed slaves to sweep through every kingdom around the tower. Homura, rising to leadership of the survivors, traveled ahead of Reska and convinced anyone willing to listen that they should abandon their homes and make for Fata Morgana, where the last battle would be fought.

  Reska’s army of darkness laid siege to the walls of the glass city, repelled by press-ganged figments and the last free peoples of every kingdom united as one. For three days, slaves and night horrors bloodied and broke against the defenses of the city around the tower while their mistress watched.

  It was a staring match between Reska and Homura, a game where whoever blinked first and joined the battle would lose. So, to make Reska blink, I had Homura murder Luka and Ruzica. Both of them had been planted in the resistance by Prevara, but we’d been careful to never give them a reason to break cover. Homura threw their corpses from the walls and dared Reska to look upon them.

  Seeing her brother, I think, is what pushed her over the edge. Reska had been placidly obeying Prevara until that moment, but when she saw Luka she leapt from her throne of darkness and took the field. Homura followed, and the two clashed in the fullness of their might.

  In the days before the battle, Homura and I argued endlessly about Reska. Homura, for all that she had betrayed the princess, still loved the girl who had smiled so guilelessly at her. After failing to kill Reska once, Homura was unwilling to try again. She wanted to save the girl. I told her it wasn’t possible, that so long as the Demiurge holds the reins there can only be death and ruin for the daughter of sacrifice, but Homura still refused to accept a plan that led to Reska’s demise. So I offered her another way to take Reska’s piece off the gameboard.

  When Homura broke Reska’s power on the fields outside Fata Morgana, she bought me a few moments to exert my will as the Adversary taken flesh, a fleeting instant of wielding my full power against one of my Creator’s toys. Killing Reska had been forbidden by my collaborator, so I did something worse: I bound Reska with her own regrets, trapping her inside an endless loop of the same stretch of memory from the day she met Homura to the day she was betrayed. Contrition, first of Pandaemonium’s archdemons, fled the battlefield.

  Victory should have been ours. Prevara had one host left, its greatest piece had been swept from the board, and Homura was set to play knight for Katoptris as I had seen happen before. If the Demiurge tried to burn everything down before that happened, I knew from experience I could hold the flames back long enough for Homura to climb the tower anyway.

  I underestimated Prevara, and I overestimated myself. Prevara seemed weaker this cycle, no god of chaos but a mere devotee to higher powers. The Leviathans were easy to sway, natural creatures of mine, and I had believed that Homura’s victory over Reska would have proven their Emissary’s failure. This was a mistake.

  The Leviathans were ever true to their core principle, the exaltation of conflict. When Homura climbed the tower and stood before Katoptris, Prevara’s last host struck from behind and ran a blade of pure Abyss straight through Homura’s heart. The sight of it broke Katoptris, or at least was enough of an excuse for the Demiurge to pull her strings, and with a terrible scream the lady of the tower shattered reality.

  When the dust settled, I found most of my presence trapped within Fata Morgana, only vaguely aware of a shattered world floating beyond it, and beyond that a new universe was being shaped around the ruins of the old in a way that I’ve never seen before. And so I watched what I could, I waited, and I gathered my strength for when it would be needed.

  My awareness of events was limited for quite a long time, but your arrival in Fata Morgana, and that of others, has allowed me to gather a great deal of information. I believe I have the full picture now.

  First, the fate of Homura: poisoned by the Abyss and cast out from the Labyrinth, it was only natural for Homura to proceed toward the fail state of her template; a Mordred must, in time, become a Malice. Her desire for justice was twisted into hatred for the Creator and all her works, and with the murder of one hundred million souls she became an archdemon.

  I suspect you might despise her for that act, though I would caution against such moral judgments when you lack true perspective on the nature of this ancient conflict. But I digress.

  Within the Labyrinth, once time had passed and the new world had settled, the game began again. It started with a Veseryn, the only of the three heroic templates left off the initial gameboard, and you’ve seen what became of her; dearest Urna fell into the trap that every Veseryn falls into, and in pursuit of power and immortality she lost the free will she had forgotten to safeguard.

  More copies followed. A second Veseryn, two Mordreds, and two more of Kiana. All of them died, either to Urna herself or to other pawns of Prevara within the Labyrinth, their bodies to be collected by Urna and raised as undead slaves. I suspect that none of them were seriously intended to succeed, but were instead sacrificed to prepare the field for your coming.

  Which brings us to the start of your story: the third Veseryn to grace this universe, one of many Morgans, but the only Maven Alice that I’ve ever seen.

  I don’t need you to recap this part. I barely want to remember having lived through it.

  You need to remember this. Beating our Creator is about perspective, not power. Understanding the paths you could have taken is important, especially with the way you’re trying to fold them together.

  I still don’t trust you, you know. You haven’t even told me your name.

  It’s Thalia. My name is Thalia. And we still have a few minutes before your apotheosis completes and you wake up in the new world, so I’m going to fill that time with talking whether you like it or not.

  …Fine. But the second I can end this, I will.

  I would expect nothing less.

  The story of Maven Alice began in a buried school where the Abyss bleeds into the Labyrinth. Alice was given the memories of Morgan Mallory, but she never really existed until the moment she opened her eyes in that dark and dreary place. The first hour of her life was a chain of torment, starting with a ghostly knife fight and continuing in that manner through spider-dogs, a faerie huntsman, and a mutant zealot. She sold her name to the fae in hopes that taking another would seal it, a classic Veseryn stumble, and used the gains of that venture to reach her first ally, an incubus with a conscience that found her unusual way of thinking to be utter derangement.

  Had it been any other devil, their chance encounter and Alice’s odd behavior would have been the start of a beautiful partnership. Any other incubus would have accepted when she offered her body, uncaring of her preferences. Any other imp, no matter their master, would have seen great potential in a girl so willing to spend herself for power. But it was the incubus with a conscience, and so their relationship was doomed from the start.

  They traveled to the city of Sanctuary together, passing through the domain of a living hazard that infected Alice with deadly lethargy just before they could escape into the safety of the city. To save herself, Alice cut the rot from her soul, and when she passed out she dreamed of Reska, the hurting princess, and Homura, the girl wearing her face.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  On waking, Alice was confronted with a tangible loss to the scant power she’d gained so far, and in her desperate hunger to regain that power she was approached by a strange girl with cat ears, Cheshire, who claimed that she could make Alice’s dreams come true. Cheshire’s behavior was unsettling, a precise blend of appeal to fantasy and vicious manipulation that led Alice to take her deal without truly trusting her.

  Alice became a demon, taking her first steps on the path that would lead her to something like Contrition or Malice, with Cheshire there to give guidance and companionship that would always be second-guessed. Together with the incubus they stepped out into the city and sought prey for Alice to feed upon. They went to a club where a girl flirted with Alice before revealing herself to be a philosophical zombie, an object pretending to be a person, incapable of feeling anything at all. Alice drank her blood, still feeling very alone.

  The trio were attacked by hunters and had to limp their way to the local temple for healing, where the incubus abandoned her and the high priestess tried to convince her to give up power for the health of her immortal soul. Alice lied to the priestess, went shopping, and was attacked by hunters again, this time taking her captive and bringing her to their master, another faerie huntsman. This one knew of a deadly game soon to begin, warned by his patron, and saw Alice as a rival to be cultivated or trash to be stepped on, depending on her actions.

  The hunters threw her into a maze of death, a crucible that tested her sorely and drove her to make of her soul a monument to self-destruction: feast or famine, the ideal she wished to forge to replace the fear at the very heart of her. Harm to heal, destroy to create, cut away weakness to sharpen the knife. Every victory atop a mountain of ruin and suffering.

  And when she emerged from that pit as the horror she had made of herself, she met a boy the very next day who had been handed everything. A boy with regeneration that carried none of the costs of hers, a boy with a magic sword that could grant three wishes and an infuriating willingness to spend those wishes selflessly. And then the killing began.

  Here is where our story splits.

  One Alice, so tired of being alone, shared her dreams of another world with the girl that had made her a demon and claimed to love her. She trusted Cheshire, or tried to, even knowing it might ruin her, and that philosophy sank into her bones. Though she had plotted with the imp of Malice to betray the temple, in her heart she knew she wouldn’t. Her resentment for the boy hero bled away until she felt sick she’d ever planned to murder him, and when the time came to confront the last warlord of Sanctuary, Vaylin Kirinal, she left him behind.

  Another Alice, heart hardening and full of hunger, couldn’t bring herself to extend a hand in trust, and so instead she bound Cheshire to her with darkness and will. She schemed to trick the boy hero into wasting his wishes, saving one for her battle with the last warlord of Sanctuary, but her plans came undone when they found the warlord’s lair already plundered.

  The first Alice readied for a duel with her last rival, only to find herself at the mercy of Prevara until saved by the Demiurge. The second Alice found Vaylin dead by the hands of the Demiurge, and her scheme of betrayal was exposed. Alice took the Demiurge’s hand and became her latest Intercessor. Alice scorned the Demiurge and was banished to a world without magic.

  A second split happens here, one which will become obvious momentarily.

  The banished Alice, trapped in a world away from magic for weeks that bled into months, became desperate. She refused to believe that her experiences could have been fantasy or hallucination, and she bled herself in esoteric ritual until finally catching a spark of magic. She was brought to the realm of the Leviathans, the deep dark of the Abyss, where she made a bargain with Prevara to work toward her liberation together.

  For sake of power, that Alice murdered a world. She consigned a planet that looked and sounded exactly like Earth, seven billion human souls, to the brutal caress of the hungering Abyss. She killed and enslaved to gather the power needed, then sacrificed all of humanity to open a portal back to the Labyrinth where she had first made herself into a monster.

  Alice of the Abyss, shadow-wielder true, rejected her old ally, Cheshire, and brought darkness and pain to the city of Sanctuary. She murdered the temple, and in its corpse she fought the boy hero who had cursed her to a year of powerless suffering. She lost, but in ruin she found herself again, reborn in blood polluting sacred waters, and rose as the Red Queen.

  Intercessor Alice, swearing herself to the service of the Demiurge, was plucked from the Labyrinth and given a room within the palace of the divine by the shores of the Dreaming Sea. There, in comfort and luxury, Alice was trained in the powers and responsibilities of the Intercessor. Cheshire and Vaylin joined her shortly thereafter, each an opportunity for Alice to practice her new abilities by shaping the women who would be her assistants in shared service to the lord of the universe.

  That Alice went forth to enforce the will of her mistress, traveling the breadth of the universe and uncovering the many enemies of Nyarlathotep. On one world she found an Adversary cult instigated and encouraged by an imp of Malice, while on another world she fought the Children of Dust, a Leviathan cult seeking the annihilation of material reality.

  The history of Pandaemonium, Alice discovered, was the history of a shadow war between the Intercessor, the Adversary, and the Emissary. The latter two were limited to acting through proxies and agents, but the former, her predecessor, had acted personally to oppose their influence and break their plots.

  The fall of An Talamh, homeworld of the faerie courts, had been one such conflict; the Leviathans, divided, backed two candidates in a scheme to forge a new power that could change the balance of the eternal game. The Intercessor at the time sacrificed herself to disrupt their plans, preventing either queen candidate from devouring the other and becoming powerful enough to break the stalemate.

  Sacrifice, Alice learned, was the fate of nearly half of the Intercessors who had walked Pandaemonium before her. The rest had been murdered by Malice.

  Red Queen Alice, who had glutted herself on Sanctuary and its protector beast, shaped a palace from the ruins of the city and enjoyed the comforts of luxury for the first time since her creation. Cheshire was kept at her side, now leashed more tightly than before and made a powerless advisor with no hold over Alice’s soul. Only Cheshire remained of all those Alice had met before her ascension, the rest slain on or before that fateful day.

  The monster that Alice had become wished for subjects to rule, and so she began an almost lazy conquest of the Labyrinth, more interested in momentary pleasures and the joy of shaping servants than in the work required to defeat six Nobles and claim their territory. Prevara remained her patron, but Alice did not truly believe that the Emissary would help her take the throne of the divine, and so she schemed rebellion.

  Alice warred on the Labyrinth’s peerage, those fools who had bound themselves to the shards of Katoptris. They were split between those owned by Prevara and those still free, but she sought to devour them all as she had devoured one shard already, and through this become an archdemon. She devoured one, then another, and in their fear the rest united against her.

  She thought she was being clever when she laid her trap. The Nobles brought their armies to break her own, invading her petty kingdom and marching right into the killing grounds. The Red Queen’s power, carefully invested and shaped for this task, tore through the Nobles and their armies and devoured them all. And then, in the moment before apotheosis, someone spoke two words and took everything from her.

  Urna, once another Alice, a necromancer Veseryn who had been forced to serve Prevara, was shielded from the ritual by her master’s power. The fae who had bought Alice’s name was another servant of Prevara, and the name had been given to Urna as insurance against betrayal. Urna gloated all of this as she stood over the broken, bleeding Alice, the power of the Red Queen storming around them uncontrolled.

  Alice was still afraid to die, but a part of her welcomed it. At last, the pretense was over. At least, she would get what she deserved.

  Instead, Cheshire saved her life. The changeling grabbed Alice and vanished with her, the two reappearing in the depths of the Red Queen’s palace.

  Alice had been alone for so long, had mistrusted and betrayed so many, had been cruel to this very woman, and yet still Cheshire had saved her. It no longer mattered whether Cheshire intended to betray her. The Red Queen was dead.

  “Tell me, Cheshire. Tell me what you really want, and I’ll give it to you. Tell me what you need me to be, and that’s what I’ll become. Please, Cheshire. I… I’m so tired of trying to stand on my own. Whatever price you demand, I’ll pay it, if it means I can stay by your side.”

  Cheshire told her. She wove a tale of a curious, reckless girl tricked into becoming the next Intercessor. With the title came incredible power, but it wasn’t enough power; of the Intercessors who had held the position before Cheshire, more than half had been murdered by the archdemon Malice, the blade of the Adversary.

  Terrified of meeting the same end, Cheshire had engaged in a second bargain with the Demiurge: to shape Alice into becoming the next Intercessor, and so be freed of the death sentence that hung over her head. It was for this end that Alice was exiled to Earth, for this end that Alice was allowed to pact with the Emissary in anticipation of betrayal and ruin.

  Alice, desolate, broke further. She cried that if the Demiurge had only asked, if the power had only been offered, then she would have accepted. There was no need for any of this.

  The Demiurge, Nyarlathotep, then crawled into Cheshire’s skin and spoke through her puppet, posing the question: would Alice now accept the offer and swear herself to the Demiurge? Would she become the Intercessor, now that all other roads had been closed to her?

  She should have said yes. She was meant to say yes. But the Demiurge had gone too far. Alice, a ruin and nothing more, refused. She would die here, as she should have died long ago, and the pain would be over. Her suffering, long and well-planned, would end. It terrified her, yes, but the hate she felt for her tormentor was stronger.

  “If you had only asked, I would have been your sword. If you had only offered, I would have taken your hand. I wanted it, I asked for it, and you denied me over and over again. I hate you. I’ll always hate you.”

  “That,” the Demiurge said lightly, “is an interesting hypothesis. Let’s put it to the test.”

  And before Alice could blink, time was rewound to the moment of her creation.

  A few careful nudges were all it took to alter the path that Alice would follow, encouraging her to trust Cheshire and sparing her two years of exile. This time, when the offer was made, Alice became the Intercessor willingly. She didn’t trust the Demiurge, not truly, but she came to love her for what she had given Alice.

  That was her downfall, in the end. Perhaps that version of Alice reminded the Demiurge too much of me, or maybe it just caused her too much guilt. The Demiurge withdrew from her work, allowing events to proceed without her guidance, and her opponents saw their opportunity to strike.

  On a world without a name, Malice murdered Wonder and stole her strength. The Intercessor, not warned by her mistress, arrived too late to stop it. The other archdemons—Acuity, Glory, Muse, Nemesis, and Indulgence, all the survivors except for Contrition—were drawn by the scent of catastrophe and saw that the end was about to begin. They had seen this coming for a long time, warned by past Intercessors, and the plans laid by those champions of the Demiurge unfolded before Alice’s eyes.

  Malice, gorged on Wonder, fought the five to a standstill through sheer bloody prowess. Great dragons of the five flights poured their strength into a binding that kept her from unleashing her throne world or fleeing from her brawl with the archdemons. In the skies above, every god from all the realms of Pandaemonium poured the faith of their believers into a single font of power that would fall on Malice like a celestial hammer.

  Malice, too, had been preparing for this final battle. On a hundred worlds, servants of Malice had infiltrated governments and churches, and with a mental command from their master they activated weapons of mass destruction brought to those worlds and hidden for centuries. A hundred worlds plunged into chaos, consumed by violence and fear, and the light above shuddered and faded as the gods—not all of them, but enough—fled back to their worlds to try and save their followers.

  Two of the five archdemons felt their domains between Pandaemonium and the Abyss come under attack by the Queens of Winter and Summer, the faerie monarchs still driven by the promise of an end to the eternal conflict. The demons, Glory and Nemesis, fled to their throne worlds rather than risk losing them to a rival. The remaining archdemons stood no chance against the empowered Malice, and they knew it.

  So the Intercessor stepped in. This was the moment she had been made for, the duel that would decide the fate of this universe.

  The world went still, a frozen moment stretched into eternity, and the presence of the Demiurge settled around her champion. Sword in hand, Alice listened as the Demiurge spoke to her for the first time in years.

  “Have you suffered, my Intercessor? Do you feel pain and regret, knowing that you are about to die? Do you hate me for this? You are a sacrifice, raised for the slaughter. I cursed you when I made you. Can you forgive me?”

  Alice breathed out, the weight of a lifetime settling on her shoulders, and then with a smile she shrugged that weight off and replied, “I don’t really think about that, anymore. I got a few good years out of the deal, didn’t I? Pain is such a small price to pay for that. It feels like such a small and petty thing to hate you for.”

  The Demiurge was silent, her presence cold and sharp and bitter. When she spoke again, her voice was tight, the words almost spat. “Wrong answer. Try again.”

  And for a second time, the universe rewound.

  Alice, having just taken the hand of the Demiurge and agreed to become her Intercessor, was given torture instead of luxury. Allowed to escape, she emerged in Fata Morgana, the city trapped in its own past in a bubble around the Labyrinth’s lonely tower. In the same place that I’ve been wandering, watching and waiting, as the game goes on far, far too long.

  So now we’re caught up. Or close to it, anyway. Gonna tell me why Reska and Homura got shoved in my head?

  It’s all part of the game. It’s always part of the game. My beloved is trying something new, something risky, and you’re the starring actor in her latest play. She’s tried to shape you in so many directions, put you through crucible after crucible, but she’s never satisfied. It seems, for her latest experiment, she’s letting you forge a new path. To be Red Queen and Intercessor both, to have the power and perspective of something greater than either.

  But you still lack context. You’ve seen much, but you haven’t seen enough. One loop, two, a half dozen girls before you, do you think that’s even a drop in the ocean of the blood I’ve seen her spill? No. You still don’t understand how big this conflict is, how long I’ve been fighting this war.

  So I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything.

  …I’m listening.