I Only Summon Villainesses

[You have received Blood Crystal]

[You have received Aberration Scale]

[You have received a legendary-grade item: Eye of Nyxoth]

I stared at the messages for a moment, though I couldn’t be bothered to check them.

All I wanted was rest. Whatever I’d won for killing an impossible beast could wait, and I let it wait, gladly.

The profane serpent was dead, and the quiet it left behind was the loudest thing in the cave.

I stayed on my knees a while. My legs had filed their resignation the moment the last of the essence left me, and standing was a negotiation I wasn’t ready to open. So I knelt on the wet green-lit stone with Wren gone quiet across my palms, and I let the shaking come, now that there was nothing left to spend it on.

Then, because kneeling forever wasn’t a plan, I took the bill.

Two fingers gone off the left hand, sealed to a smooth grey scar. A cold hole burned through the meat of my side where the unmake gaze had grazed me, and it didn’t bleed, which was somehow worse than if it had, because a thing that doesn’t bleed is a thing that isn’t sure it’s still a wound. A thigh that had stopped arguing and gone to a dull throbbing silence I trusted even less. And behind my ribs, where the well should have been, a dry socket with a thread of water finally trickling back into the bottom of it, so slow I could have counted the drops.

Things were boring now. Dark, cold, thirst, hunger. The long list of small nothings that add up to a body that simply stops. These were the next candidates vying for the chance to kill me.

So I made a list of my own and went down it.

Light first, because I couldn’t fight anything I couldn’t see, and the green glow off the walls showed me the shape of the cave without showing me anything in it. I reached into the socket behind my ribs and drew up the smallest flame I have ever made in my life, a bead of white no bigger than a thumbnail, and I babied it into being over my cupped palm and asked it to do nothing but burn low and stay.

It cost. Everything cost now. Drawing even that much scraped the bottom of the socket, and my hand shook under it the whole time. But a thumbnail of flame cost a drop where a wall of it had cost a river, and I had learned the difference the hard way, and I intended to keep it.

The little light pushed the green back a few feet and gave me a world again. A small one. A shelf of wet stone, a black river tearing past, ledges and hollows in the rock climbing up into a dark the flame couldn’t reach.

’Water next…’

I’d thought the word easily enough. It was the sentence underneath that I hated.

Because there was water. There was a whole roaring river of it, the same river that had folded the serpent and very nearly folded me, and my throat had gone to sand hours ago, and now I was going to have to drink from the thing I loathed most in any world. I have never had a good experience with a large body of water. I was not about to be handed a good one now. The universe has a sense of humour and it is not a kind one.

I crawled to the edge and cupped a handful of the black churn, and it came up filthy, gritted with the ash of a dead god and whatever the flood had torn loose upstream. The grit of it stayed on my fingers after the water ran through them. Undrinkable. Probably poison.

But I had a thing for poison.

I fed the barest breath of Purifying Flame into my cupped palm, white fire that burns corruption and leaves the clean thing under it, and the water hissed and steamed and went, for one held moment, clear. Then I drank it before it could think better of the arrangement, and it was cold and flat and tasted of stone, and it was the best water I have ever had, and I hated every drop of it on principle.

“Thank you,” I told the river, and meant it.

“Now go to hell.” I meant that too.

’You have to pick a side…’

Finally Wren’s voice crawled into my head, tired. And I almost smiled.

’I never thought I’d hear you again…’

’You think I’m going to die? I’m not. Not until I settle my business.’

The words came fierce, all resolve. I didn’t answer her. I could guess well enough what that business was, and besides, there was still the main boss of the list I’d made.

Food was the ugly one. I opened Death Sense, carefully, the way you’d ease a door in a house you weren’t sure was empty, and let it read the cave for life. The serpent was gone from it, that enormous weight simply absent now, and into the space it left came the small things. Faint sparks of life down in the shallows where the river bent and slowed. Pale, cold, dim little lives, blind things that had lived their whole existence in a dark that had never once lifted.

’…Sorry.’

For whatever it was worth from a man about to eat them. ’It’s nothing personal. It’s entirely about me.’

I went down to the eddy. The blind things were fish, near enough, pale as bone and fat and slow in the still water, and I raised Wren over the first of them out of pure old habit.

The thrum that came back up my arm was flat with offence.

’I am White Feather’s daughter,’ Wren proclaimed, with all the dignity a dulled and half-drowned sword could muster, which turned out to be a great deal. ’I have cut down heroes. You will not use me as a fish-fork.’

’…Fair,’ I admitted, and set her carefully aside on the dry stone, and got down on my knees in the cold shallows and caught the wretched things with maimed hands like the desperate half-drowned animal I’d become. The water was so cold it went past aching and into a flat numb burn, and the fish were slick as wet soap and stronger than anything blind and fat had a right to be. It took three tries. It was undignified in a way that the whole night of gods and floods had somehow never managed.

I got two of them, and I did not use the flame to cook them, because the flame was for staying alive and not for comfort, and I ate them the way the dark meant them to be eaten. I will not describe it. We all have our low points. That was one of mine.

’There. Fed. Watered. Only mostly dead. Practically a spa day.’

Shelter last. The river’s spray reached the whole open shelf, and its roar filled every inch of the dark, and I could not have slept beside it if I’d wanted to, which I very much did. So I took my thumbnail of flame and went looking, and up a short scramble of ledges I found a hollow in the rock, a dry pocket the size of a small room, out of the spray, the roar dropping to a dull constant hush that a tired enough man might mistake for the sea. If he’d had better memories of the sea. I did not, so I mistook it for nothing and was grateful for the quiet regardless. The air in it was dry enough that the flame stopped guttering and stood up straight, and that alone felt like a mercy I hadn’t earned.

There was no wood. There was nothing down here that had ever been a tree. So there was no fire but the one behind my ribs, and I set it in a low niche in the rock where it could burn its thumbnail-worth without me, and I lay down beside it on the cold dry stone with Wren bare across my chest where my hand could find her, and I let the eternal dark press in. The stone leached the last of the warmth out of my back and I let it have that too.

That was the thing I hadn’t had time to feel until now. The dark down here didn’t end. There was no grey coming somewhere behind it, no dawn owed, no turning of anything. It had been dark before there were men to call it that and it would be dark long after, and I was a single guttering thumbnail of white in the whole vast drowned deep of it, and there was no day at the far side of this night because there was no far side and there was no night. There was only down here.

I heaved a tired sigh and closed my eyes against a dark that made no difference whether they were open or shut.

’One thing at a time. That’s the trick. That’s the only trick.’