RE: Monarch

The wind whispered madness, carrying the dust of the endless dead along swirling currents around houses and over roads, traveling the wide gap between us. Her smug face panned the surroundings, evaluating everything as if it was less than nothing—as if a town razed and ruined by the end of the world was practically an everyday occurrence.
Maybe to her it was.
But the ambivalence pissed me off in a way few things ever have.
My hand went to the hilt of the recently acquired sword. I wished I'd had a chance to give it a few practice swings. At the time it was an afterthought, an implement to solve a problem that might not even exist. Now, seconds mattered. The clash, if it happened, would be lightning fast. She was quicker than a viper in the Sanctum, and it'd been years since. There'd been plenty of opportunity for her to correct whatever weaknesses she still held and ascend to the height of her power.
Evaluating her now, though, her equipment seemed a little sparse. There was a small rucksack on her shoulder and a canteen at her waist. A single dagger filled a sheath beside the canteen, while the other remained empty.
I held my satchel out and let it drop to the ground beside me.
Thoth's eyebrow rose.
"Was this you?" I asked. If she said yes, it would answer all the questions that demanded answers, and there wasn't a god or goddess left alive in the pantheon that could hold me back.
There was a long, tense silence.
With that, I picked up my satchel and turned my back on her, my bearing toward the northward road.
Still laughing, she called after me. "What would you do if it was?"
"Breathe a sigh of relief that your aim is as terrible as ever," I called over my shoulder, not bothering to look back.
"Where are you going?"
"North."
"You—" Her expression grew stormy, and rage crept into her voice. "You really think you can just walk away from me?"
My blood boiled, and I spun. "Look at where we are. Everyone is dead. The ley lines are destroyed, and Ragnarok will have its day. Because you failed again."
The accusation hit. Her jaw dropped in surprise. Then her eyes hardened. "Maybe I wanted this."
There were always two voices in my head during a negotiation with someone I disliked. The rational voice that urged me to work toward an amicable outcome, and the irrational voice that sought to blow it all up simply because I couldn't stand them. I'd worked hard to curb that second impulse ever since my coronation.
Maybe it was due to poor sleep the night before, or just general exhaustion, but that morning, I simply couldn't.
"The best part about the end of the world is I don't have to give
about what you want." I seethed, my expression twisting as my voice raised. "You already failed your grand mission—the purpose you're supposedly meant to be using all this power for—yet here you are in
"I'll—" she started, expression still dark.
"
" I mocked her relentlessly, feeling disproportionately satisfied that I was actually getting a reaction. "Oh no. The world has fallen to decay. It burns to breathe, everyone I've ever known and remotely cared about is dead, and every day will be a brutal, white-fisted struggle for the next until I finally greet the end with dust in my belly and blood in my lungs. But please, oh please, all-powerful arch-mage,
"
Thoth cocked her head. Her stare was alien and unrelenting. "I'm not a fool. Games of the mind are pointless. You cannot bait me into letting you go."
"Letting me go… where?" I gestured a line between the two of us, then extended my arms wide. "The fact that you even care about anything that's happening here, in the face of all of this, is too stupid to address. Whatever transpires, none of it matters when neither of us have a home to go back to. It's all fucking gone. And you're still here picking a fight over the corpses."
She leered. "It wouldn't be a fight. It would be a slaughter."
"Like that's somehow better?" I clapped a hand over my face, swooning at the stupidity of it. "It's not even a question. You outclass me in every possible way. Damn well proved it in the sanctum, and probably hundreds of other times I can't even remember. Congratulations. Hundreds, maybe thousands of years to further your skills and craft and you're still overly concerned with the status of someone
"
"Good. You understand the state of things, and you've finally stopped feigning ignorance of the iterations—"
I laid into her hard, refusing to let her wrest control. "—How could I not, when you never shut the fuck up about them? I'd have to be deaf to have not figured it out by now. All the hints about repeating the same events, how we've done this countless times before and it always ends the same way. And yes. Like we established last time, before you slit my friend's throat, I remember a previous life. You were an insufferable twat in that one too."
She watched me, uncommonly withdrawn. "You have no idea what real suffering is."
I went for her throat.
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Immediately, any semblance of an expression was wiped off her face, replaced with perfectly curated calm.
I leered, sensing weakness. "Because I'd already been getting that sense for a while. A memory returned to me. The two of us together for Ragnarok, back when I seemingly knew far more than I do now, when I asked to be removed from the loop. How
and
I was with the bloodthirsty creature yapping in my ear. How desperate I was to be free of you. I
stand to look at you. To spend a single hour longer in your company. Your blood-drenched presence made me sick."
"Enough." Thoth murmured. Again, her reaction was utterly absent of the expected rage. "Do not speak on things of which you have no understanding."
"I'll speak whenever I damn well please, and if you kill me for it, it
be a relief." My voice twisted, grew sharper and more honed like a blade in the dark. Somehow, I knew exactly where to strike—and did so ruthlessly. "Because that's all you can do. All you are. A weapon with no purpose. There's no one left in this world for you to threaten me with. Nothing you can leverage to bring me to heel. Your power is
Her eyebrows rose and her lips parted, forming an ‘o’ of surprise.
I turned my back on her and walked away.
"It can always get worse," she called after me.
"And it undoubtedly will. So long as you still draw breath," I returned, flipping the raven over my shoulder.
Internally, I felt the last exchange might have shifted the balance, and discreetly walked faster. It went without saying that the best way to evade a predator was simply to avoid acting like prey. But I feared I'd gone too far in the other direction. At her core, Thoth was a hunter. Complex, but a hunter just the same. The only times I'd successfully gotten the better of an exchange was when I caught her off guard and refused to show weakness.
But there is a line between strength and hubris—one I'd likely crossed. Making yourself appear bigger can deter a predator, but using that hesitation to repeatedly kick them in the nose is far more likely to have the opposite effect.
I kept walking, past the ruined buildings at the outskirts of town and onto the road, putting one foot in front of the other, expecting a dagger through my ribs or an ice skewer to the neck.
None came.
It took every ounce of self-control I had not to turn around. But I didn't have to. I caught motion out of my peripheral and turned my head to realize, with horror, that Thoth was strolling along the opposite side of the road from me, hands clasped behind her back, stride unhurried, as if she was having a nice summer stroll.
I sped up.
She matched my stride.
I slowed down.
She did the same.
"Why are you following me?"
Thoth looked over blankly, as if she'd only just realized I was there. "I follow no one. It is a wide road. We are simply heading in the same direction."
"Elphion—
you aren't so childish."
She shrugged. "As was so pointedly detailed, I've already failed my mission. It could be years before the surface grows inhospitable—at least, if this apocalypse follows the pattern of cataclysms past." She chortled. "I am used to such things. But you are not. It will be entertaining to observe your struggle. And when the time comes, you will die. Same as always."
I briefly considered cutting my own throat.
The promise I'd made came back to haunt me—that I'd do whatever was necessary to see this through. The fact that Thoth was here at all punctuated the sort of concerns I'd held about my father's plan from the beginning. The arch-mage was supposed to be on the other side of the world, entrenched in her own agenda, yet here she was. Even with continents between us, she'd still somehow traveled hundreds of wingspan and located me in less than a day.
The obvious answer was that she'd flown. I'd seen it myself, her banded boots descending from the heavens like some harbinger of death. But flight simply wasn't that fast. Even if she'd simply beelined from wherever she was directly to me—which I doubted—the forces that attended that sort of speed would have wrested her limb from limb.
I snuck a glance in her direction and found myself rewarded with an annoying carefree attitude. Her hands were in the pockets of her trousers, and her face was entirely uncovered. Because it came back to haunt me badly once, I checked for a shadow.
And found it absent.
Illusions and glamours tended to be most obvious when something interacted with them at speed. A small projectile or piece of detritus given enough speed would go directly through whatever was being projected, leaving little more than a ripple as evidence. The distortion wouldn't last long, but it didn't need to.
I spotted a suitable rock a few paces out, round and no larger than a small bird's egg. Careful to keep a semblance of normal stride, I stepped directly on top of it, then sent it skittering across the road, where it passed directly
her heel.
Immediately I turned my eyes forward, keeping stride, still half-expecting a blade in my ribs that never came.
I could barely look at her without the dug-up casket opening itself in my mind, the corpse within sitting in scathing judgment that there was not already a blade in my hand. The hatred that welled up within me every time she entered my vision could not be quenched. But it could be held back—tempered into something useful. Because she believed I was damned. And as I'd experienced countless times, it could be devilishly easy to unintentionally parcel out information to someone you didn't expect to remember it.
That wasn't to say the way forward was simple. I'd need to end my loop eventually, potentially at any time if I pushed things too far.
I hadn't forgotten the green-glowing knife that accompanied whatever spell she'd attempted the night of my coronation. Whatever the intended effect was, there was no way in hell I was chancing it again.
So long as the iteration ended before Thoth got bored watching me struggle, there was potential for serious advancement. Any crumbs of information she dropped about her previous whereabouts or agenda could be invaluable once I'd left this accursed timeline behind.
I told myself it would be worth it.
A little after sunset, when the clouds overhead finally grew dark enough that night could no longer be mistaken for a burgeoning storm, I made camp. Part of me half expected my unwanted company to simply wander off like an untethered pack animal, but she milled about, staring off into the distance. Eventually, she set up a tent while I struggled to start a fire, a dark silhouette extending out behind her.
I smiled to myself in grim satisfaction.