Young Writers Society

Everything had happened so fast that Télos was struggling to keep up with it: finding Tiberius/James, seeing the vampire queen, Estelle dying, two members of their group attacking the queen, and another attacking the nearby guards.

Second and Lorcan both stood motionless nearby. Neither one of them were that old, but they both had looks on their faces that clearly said they weren't new to violence like this. Télos wasn't sure if he should be worried about that or not. They had to be around his brothers' age, but...

He shook the thought away.

A new thing had happened: Tiberius/James was trying to get in the way of the attack. Télos had been part of a war - even though he had only been there for the end. Some lives couldn't be saved. No matter what Tiberius/James tried to do, he wouldn't be able to stop at least one of the attacks.

So instinct kicked in.

A strand of gold appeared around his waist, yanking him back towards where Télos was standing. A strand of condensed water did the same too; when Télos glanced over at Kaito, he saw that he was trembling and staring at the queen.

...Had Kaito ever seen something like this before?

"She...She killed her," he whispered, right as the spear met its mark and teeth bit into flesh. "Essie was just a kid. How...How could she do that?"


...The queen had miscalculated.

She had expected a little bit of backlash from the death, but hadn't expected anything like this. Either the little girl had them all wrapped around her finger, or there was something else going on. But the adrenaline from the fight with Tiberius had never really ended, and her mind was still racing to come up with the best way to win this battle.

When she was confronted with the attack, there were two things she could do: she could take it or she could try to get out of the way. Getting out of the way would be messy. One of the bystanders could get hurt by the spear. So she let the attack come.

The spear pierced her heart, and teeth successfully sunk into her ankle. It wasn't just a halfhearted attack, either. Her heart had stopped, and her ankle was hanging by a thread of skin and muscle.

She went still.

Her body staggered. All of its senses were shutting down, and it wasn't like her balance was going to stick around. But then her heart started pounding and sending blood out to the rest of her body.

She caught herself.

Balancing precariously on her one good ankle, she reached a hand up and grabbed onto the spear. Her fingers were itching to break it, but she took the smarter approach and yanked it out of her heart. That was better.

Shaking her smaller attacker off of her, was a little harder, but she managed. She did have the extra advantage of manipulating light underneath her belt. She made a tiny concentrated pillar of light and pushed the girl back away from her.

Once her ankle was finally free, it was finally able to heal - it was only a matter of seconds before her foot reattached itself to the rest of her body.

Last but not least: she had a body she needed to get.

Someone had picked it up after the fighting started. She had also taken out the guards - rest in temporary peace - and was clearly someone to see as a threat. But not too much of a threat. If Tiberius was a baby compared to her, this girl was just a newborn.

Her light wasn't usually meant to blind - that was her brother's style - but she wasn't restricted. One painfully bright burst of light that would blind everyone but herself and a well-placed strand of light later, she had the body in her arms.

"I'll be taking that," she said, giving a small smile.

She didn't think she still needed the body, but it was good to be on the safe side. She'd rather have it on her than have to go chasing it down.

She made a staircase out of light, rushed up it, and let the stairs all fall away so she was on a light platform in the air. It would be easier defending herself from attacks like this.

"Hey, Tiberius," she said. "I know we had a deal, but I technically let you win - and I think I need answers more than you do right now. Are you from here?"

Considering that the two men behind him were holding him back with gold and water, she seriously doubted it. But it was hard to tell in situations like this what was real and what wasn't.

James didn't even make it to the fight before it started, and by the time it had started, it was already ending. If he hadn't already felt like he was looking down at everything from afar, the moment his body got yanked back with a rope around his waist he felt like he flew out of the picture.

Was it even worth fighting anymore? He didn't know what he'd done to deserve getting tied up by a rope of light, or water, or whatever, but it held him back, and that was that.

Whatever happened next was like a blur, but the queen had escaped the attacks and had the body of the dead girl in her arms.

Maybe Estelle wasn't who they thought she was. He didn't know what to believe anymore.

He stood quiet for a second, looking at the queen with vacant eyes that looked past her, at nothing. He blinked.

He was so tired of the games. Pretending to be a vampire had been fun until Estelle. Until the bloodbath. Until weapons were involved.

"No," he said, his voice cold as his eyes finally focused on her.

There was a pause.

The queen - who had been doubting it all along - was instinctively ready to give a fist pump at the moment of victory, but she restrained herself when she realized she might accidentally drop the body in the process.

"I knew it!" she exclaimed. "You showing up out of nowhere had nothing to do with the plot - especially when you asked me a question. And that's how you knew about the barrier, too. The spells prevent people here from knowing about it, but they don't apply to you."

She glanced down at the body in her arms.

"...It looks like this intruder caused more trouble than she was worth," the queen muttered. After a pause - realizing that her crown wasn't really needed anymore - she took it out of her hair with a free hand and threw it down to the ground below.

It clattered and went still.

James blinked. The plot? The barrier? Things didn't apply to them?

He felt like he'd been thrust into a story that was not his own. Why had the queen been granted such other-worldly awareness? How did she know there was a plot to follow? His mind was spinning. Nothing was making sense. He looked down at the crown on the ground.

Was she really the queen?

"...Yeah," he said flatly. "I just want to go home."

Rage burned in Kate's eyes and sharpened her movements as she snatched a sword from a bumbling guard who wasn't paying enough attention, kicking him to the ground. His helmet rolled across the floor, and his head soon joined it. No one was paying enough attention to her to care.

"Listen up you pompous bitch," Kate shouted up at the woman. Did these vamps have blood? Kate would find out when she tasted it raw from the veins. This fucking killer deserved nothing less than savagery. A clean death was too good for her. "You better start spitting out explanations or I'm gonna start tearing you apart." I'll fucking feed you to my girlfriend. Lully likes the taste of flesh once in a while.

Kate's bones felt...weird. There was a tightness in them, like they were being wrapped in increasingly tight rubber bands. Her body wanted to change, she knew the feeling, just not this much before.

She fixed her gaze on the pompous bitch. She'd deal with her own issues later.

Adrid backed off.

She saw the strings of hacked heartflesh tie themselves back together, ribs lock back into place, skin knit back over, flesh, bone, and tendons grow back from shredded buds. It manifested pillars of solid light.

This was no beast. This was an abomination.

Sweat poured and bones shook, as Adrid waited for retribution, gripping her spear not as a weapon, but as a pacifier. She waited, and she kept waiting.

The queen never gave her a second glance.

It was only concerned with its machinations, and why they had been interrupted. And still, even within those concerns, there was no visible anger towards her, or towards anyone. Adrid could not even go so far as to say that the queen seemed annoyed.

Only... curious.

Like a child pulling the wings off a dragonfly is curious. Like a tiger cub playing with a mouse is curious.

They all had the same chances as the child that lay in its terrible arms.

Adrid took another step back.

______

Siren had no need to remember any training. It was all in her blood. Bite once to stop the thing from running, and bite a second time to kill it. If it keeps moving, bite it more until it stops. This discipline did not cover contingencies such as magical healing and bursts of light, but it did not need to.

The second the black blobs started looking people-shaped again, she leaped at the shape that smelled right with her teeth bared wide and a war shriek erupting from her throat.

Paige froze when the child was taken from her arms, even dead, the queen couldn't leave her be. An innocent child. She felt her emotions leave her, almost draining out of her replaced by an icy coldness in her body, like the first real day of winter when you weren't quite sick of the snow yet. She fixed the queen with a hard glare as frost spread from her feet.

"I'll make you burn."

When the frog-like girl lunged at her, the queen's instincts kicked in and pushed her back with a well-aimed wall of light. Then she realized the frog-girl could seriously get hurt by slamming into a wall of light, so she improvised and made a cushion for her to land on after slamming into it.

Then there were the other two girls.

There was something up with the first one - the one who had insulted her - but she couldn't see souls like her uncle or his best friend. She'd have to wait and see what her deal was. In the meantime, the second girl was making ice appear at her feet.

"...I don't want to be the bearer of bad news," she commented, "but there's ice at your feet. Not fire. I think you have the wrong element in mind."

She paused.

...Antagonizing her probably wasn't the best thing to be doing right now. She had explanations she needed to give. And, going off of the tempers of everyone present, it was probably better to do it sooner rather than later.

She held her hands up in mock surrender, a beam of light wrapping around the body and holding it in place in the air.

"I'm not really sure where to begin," she admitted. "I don't even know where you're all from. The last time something like this happened with one of Cate's creations, the people were all from different realities and places."

She sighed and plopped down on her platform, feet dangling over the edge as she kicked them back and forth. She leaned back and rested her hands on the platform behind her.

"We're in a story," she said. "I think that's the way she'd put it, anyways. I don't know if these words mean anything to you, but think of it like Dungeons & Dragons - or the holodeck from Star Trek, if that's more your thing. None of you are supposed to be here right now."

She grinned and pointed at herself.

"Besides me," she said. "We're in a magical pocket reality right now, created by the goddess Hecate. This is her story. The only people who were supposed to be in it were her friends - me and some of the other Greek gods-"

"Wait," the man with the blue hair interrupted. "You're a god?"

The man with the braid looked over at him. "I'm a god-"

"But she's a Greek god," the blue-haired man whispered. "Like in Percy Jackson!"

"Who's Percy-"

She cleared her throat.

The two fell silent.

"As I was going to say, something messed up the story. It brought in people who weren't even from our reality, but it got greedy and decided it wanted in, too."

She gestured back at the body.

"And when it did, it took over that. So I killed it. I'm not sure if it's actually dead, since you're all still here, but..."

She shrugged.

"I got it out of the way for the bit, at least."

She fell silent, finished with her explanation.

...Right until she realized there was one thing she left out.

"Oh!" she added. "Almost forgot - I'm Artemis."

James stared at the Queen as she began to explain their situation. They were in a story. They were brought there by accident. He couldn't help but feel like it was some kind of joke, even if it wasn't. That, and apparently "something" had taken sentience in the form of the child and messed up the story.

Thankfully, Kaito and Telos had let go of him with whatever magical ropes they'd used to pull him from the fight while Artemis spoke. He took a few steps away from them as he looked up at Artemis on her levitating platform of light.

"Okay. What is it exactly?" he asked. "The thing that you say got greedy and turned into the girl."

Artemis shrugged.

"I don't know," she said. "All I know is that Hecate was going to start up the story when something went wrong - roles started filling up, even though none of us were playing. My role was the only role still left."

There was a pause.

"...So you stabbed a little girl?" a voice quietly said. She looked over to see the white-haired boy watching her with a look she couldn't quite place.

"You're making it sound worse than it is," Artemis sheepishly admitted. "For one, she's supposed to be a NPC. She'd pop up again at some point if I really had killed her. And for another, I just knew it-she was the problem. Stabbing things is usually how I solve my problems."

She hopped down from the platform.

"She's not really a little girl, anyways," Artemis said. "It's like she's a...weird collection of magic? I can't describe it. I just know she's been corrupting things. She's probably responsible for some other things that have happened with Hecate's creations lately, too."

James stared blankly at Artemis - well, through Artemis. The explanation was fine. So, the girl was like a malignant tumor. A sickness. A virus. A fault of the magical system that just so happened to take the form of a young girl, gaining the sympathies of everyone in the room but the goddess who actually knew what was going on.

He could accept that.

He hummed, barely, in the back of his throat before he began to turn away. Artemis had done all of this explaining but had yet to return them to their homes. That meant she didn't know how, had to contact Hecate first, or they were stuck there for a while. The worst option to consider was she didn't want to send them home yet or didn't know how to.

If he was a benevolent goddess who'd just stabbed a not-child without question he'd probably wait too. It wasn't like everyone else in the room had lives to return to. That would be silly. Selfish, really, to consider.

His vacant gaze fell to Siren, who was still inconsolable.

He approached her slowly and sat down a little ways from her.

"Siren," was all he said quietly, having no desire to shout or draw attention to himself, or her, as the "queen" continued to answer questions.

And the moment arrived when Adrid's mortal terror had finally been exhausted. Now she was mortally... pissed. She blinked so slowly, and heavily, it was almost indulgent.

"So, stabbing is your first resort, yet the child is not a child, therefore you are in the right, and we take your word for it lest we also be stabbed. I suppose that works." Adrid purred flatly.

---

Biting it once didn't work. Biting it twice didn't work. This was a bad day.

Siren huddled closer to James, and to stop her lip from quivering, she bit hard into the cushion. Feathers spread pitifully onto the ground, and scattered about equally pitifully in the breeze.

"Well...yeah," Artemis awkwardly said. "I am in the right. That's why I stabbed her - I don't go attacking people without reason."

"...You were attacking Tiberius when we arrived," the vampire with the long unbraided black hair pointed out.

"He was the one who asked for the duel. I just accepted his request," Artemis replied. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, resting the body gently down on her platform of light.

There was an awkward, tense pause.

"...So are you going to kill us if we go against you?" the blue-haired man asked.

She shook her head and raised her hands in mock surrender again. "I won't. It wouldn't be a good idea to go against what I say to do - I have the experience right now - but I wouldn't stab you for it. It would just makes things difficult."

The man with the braid took a hesitant step forward.

"What happens now?" he asked. "You took care of..."

He faltered when he caught a glimpse of the body on the platform.

"...the reason we're here, but we're all still standing in front of you. Doesn't that mean that she's still here?"

Artemis froze and slowly glanced back at the body.

She couldn't see souls like her uncle, and couldn't make out magic like Cate could. She had thought the issue was taken care of, but he had a point. If she really had taken care of the source of them being here, why hadn't they gone anywhere?

"...She must have gone somewhere else," Artemis guessed. "Maybe she became another person, or is lingering around in the air. Either way, it looks like we're going to, er, be here for awhile..."

She looked back towards the body.

The platform of light disappeared from underneath it; Artemis caught the body before it could disappear and gently laid it up against the wall. Now that the thing was gone, hopefully the actual NPC would get up. She wasn't entirely sure if that was how things worked, but Artemis had decided she wanted to be hopeful.

James only half-listened to conversation following. He was watching Siren, who didn't seem to quite understand what was going on, and was very (understandably) discouraged.

He moved so he was sitting beside her and rested his hand lightly on Siren's back, patting her.

"Hey, you'll be alright," he said quietly, just to her.

He overheard that they might be here for a while. He didn't know how long "a while" was. Apparently Artemis didn't either. Fair enough.

"For however long we're stuck here, you can stick with me, okay? We'll look out for each other," he whispered, leaning his head down a little so she could see him if she chose to look up.

Siren looked up at James. None of this made sense. None of this was fine. But as long as he was here, it would be alright. She dropped the mutilated feather pillow from her mouth, and let it fall in her lap.

"I'm hungry." said Siren.

__

"Hey. Abomination," said Adrid, now committed to throwing her life away a little more defiantly. "If you aren't behind whatever stole me from my home and corrupted my humanity, I don't see anyone else around here with godless arts as powerful as yours. Issue your ultimatums, or direct me to a fouler creature that will, and let us be done with it."