Memoirs of Your Local Small-time Villainess

Yamina activated the arrays at the heart of the chamber, and the floor itself sighed open like an eye. Glyph-lines woke one after another, chasing new paths across the marble in patient, concentric rings. Scarlett watched as the pattern gathered itself and settled into deliberate motion.

Soon, the entire space bloomed with hundreds of thousands of floating sigils, their light so intense it was almost blinding. High above, the crystalline structures hummed with the growing energy, lightning lancing between them in wild surges until it became a thunderous storm of raw magic.

At the centre of that mounting tempest stood Slate, perfectly still. If Scarlett hadn't known what she was, she might have felt guilty for placing her there so soon after awakening. But the homunculus seemed already to have grasped the situation and adapted without hesitation.

"This might feel ever so slightly dislocating for a moment," Yamina said, half to Slate, half to Scarlett. "The Forgotten Tower is a fulcrum of realms, and while that leverage is useful to us, it can invite some peripheral phenomena."

"I am aware," Scarlett replied.

"Hmm…well then. Consider yourself warned."

A spellbook appeared in Yamina's hands — the same one Scarlett had seen before. Its pages cracked open and began to turn on their own as Yamina whispered, weaving spells that stitched themselves into one another. New sigils shimmered into being to join the lattice already circling the space, while filaments of mana, fine as spun glass, stretched through the air, braiding and rebraiding into place.

Scarlett folded her arms and watched, focusing mainly on Slate.

Slate cradled [Eternity Made Whole] with a quiet certainty. The black-and-silver scythe looked both perfectly suited to her and somehow alien—too flawless in form, too refined—especially beside the simple blanket covering her otherwise bare frame.

A chime rang out. Pure and mercilessly clear, it swept through the chamber, and before its echo had faded, the platform was swallowed by a starless black. The rest of the room vanished with it. There was only the circle, the three of them, and a darkness that had no surface.

Yamina didn't pause in her work, and Scarlett didn't panic.

The black thinned at its edges and opened into a forest that couldn't decide between dusk and dawn. Verdure pressed in from every side, dappled in gold that filtered from impossibly high canopies while bioluminescent flora pulsed faintly along gnarled roots and winding paths. The air buzzed with a low, musical hum, one that felt foreign yet familiar all at once.

Deep within the dense foliage, something stirred. Something massive. Its shape never fully formed — only suggested by the sway of boughs too vast for birds and shadows far too fluid to be branches. Whatever it was shouldn't have fit among trees, but somehow, it did.

A churn twisted Scarlett's stomach. A subtle vertigo that wasn't physical. As she peered into the forest, she felt eyes meet hers. Eyes belonging to whatever dwelled in that unreachable hollow.

Then the forest was gone.

In its place came a realm of torment. Rivers of boiling black blood carved canyons into the earth until the land looked seamed and suppurating. The sky was a scabbed vault of hazy rust, and far off, figures moved — long, jointed silhouettes, wrong in too many small ways.

The air pressed on Scarlett's shoulders, on the hinges of her jaw, as though the realm demanded a toll for the mere trespass of her sight.

Moments later, that nightmare too dissolved.

Then came more vistas. Flickering past like the blinks of a cosmic eye: a sea of still, pitch-black water beneath a sky with no stars. A city suspended upside down from chains of pale wood. A plain of ribs larger than ships, wind combing sand through the bones while whispering the names of legends long forgotten.

And more.

Scarlett observed them all, keeping a ledger running in her mind. Trying to catalogue what she saw against what she knew. Most, she suspected, were fragments of the Wandering Realm or the Blazes. Alongside the Material Realm, those were the primary cosmological 'anchors' of this world. But she wondered if there weren't perhaps some minor realms nestled within those. Unnamed or unclassified, existing in the gaps.

Not that it mattered to her. Undoubtedly, there were scholars—and entire mage towers—who would give anything for a chance to witness what she had just seen, but her focus remained only on where this would lead.

The flickering of scenes slowed. After the final image faded, the starless black returned. Yamina's spellbook shut with a soft, decisive clap.

Scarlett turned to her. "Is it finished?"

"Mostly." Yamina nudged her glasses higher with a finger and peered into the dark around them as if it might tell her a secret. "How do you feel?"

"I am fine," Scarlett said. "The transition was not as dramatic as your warning implied."

"Hmm? Oh—I wasn't asking about the shift." Yamina looked her way, making a slow circle in the air with her hand. "I meant about what will be done here."

Scarlett raised an eyebrow. "Are you concerned I have revised my position on helping you achieve your goal?"

Yamina's lips curved faintly. "No. That wasn't it." A quiet breath escaped her as she turned to Slate. "Sorry. I forgot you had another perspective on these things."

Scarlett weighed that, looking to the unmoving homunculus as well. "What happens next?"

As if in answer, the darkness began to thin — not opening to another realm this time, but peeling back in curls. It receded until their platform stood in a boundless sea of golden light that stretched in every direction. A single island of existence surrounded by radiance.

"This," Yamina said with a small laugh. "It takes a bit for the liminal weave to settle."

Scarlett looked around, taking in the sight.

They were outside realms again. In this outer space where Fate shimmered, endless and absolute. Where the golden threads of destiny loomed impossibly vast. Where time didn't pass normally. Where the ghost of something ancient still lingered — its corpse, its echo, or both.

The remnants of a long-dead primordial entity.

It struck Scarlett now how precisely the term primordial fit. She'd used it before without much thought, but now the meaning felt very literal.

'Primordial' were the symbols of power the Zuver had built their entire magical system on. It was the same symbols through which the gods themselves channelled much of their divine might. Scarlett had seen them carved into the bedrock of Itris' realm. But their ubiquity inevitably raised the question of where they came from.

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They felt older than the gods. And she supposed they were. They weren't the gods' tools so much as the gods' inheritance.

She had seen—if 'seen' could begin to describe it—what the beings loosely known as Fate and Time had encompassed. What they had shaped and what they had been. Against that backdrop, the gods of this world were very young. Practically infants.

But that was time on a scale Scarlett could barely comprehend. She couldn't make proper sense of it. And those worlds she'd seen no longer existed.

Maybe the primordial symbols here were the sediment left behind from such worlds. Which ones specifically, she couldn't say. It hardly mattered at this point. Whatever authority those worlds held had long since faded. Scarlett cared only enough to ensure that none of their endings would ever befall this one.

"Baroness," Yamina said, drawing Scarlett's attention back to the present. "Would you step into that circle?"

She pointed to a smaller runic circle opposite Slate. Scarlett studied it briefly before nodding and crossing over. Slate's eyes tracked her approach with a cool, unblinking focus.

When Scarlett stopped, she met the homunculus's gaze. She found herself curious.

"What is going through your mind?" she asked.

"Thoughts," Slate replied simply.

"I meant, what do your thoughts turn to?"

"You."

"How, specifically?"

"I am trying to understand you."

"I see. And how is that going?"

"It is difficult."

"And why is that?"

"I don't know."

Slate tilted her head in a motion that seemed to come very naturally to her. It reminded Scarlett of Nol'viz. The two shared a few quiet angles of manner, actually.

"You are Scarlett Hartford," Slate said, as if reciting. "You are a baroness. A noble. A woman. An adult. A daughter. A sister. A mage. A leader. A landholder. An opportunist. An extortionist. A patron. A schemer. A benefactor. A despoiler."

Scarlett blinked, not quite having expected the litany of labels. "…Certainly, some of those can be used to describe me. Perhaps all of them, at one time or another."

Slate tilted her head the other way. "But that is not you?"

It was phrased like a question but carried the tone of a statement.

"Perhaps not," Scarlett said.

Slate offered nothing further. She simply continued to watch her.

Maybe the divide between Scarlett Hartford and Amy Bernal interfered with the girl's ability. Or perhaps it was Scarlett's status as an Anomalous One. Slate's nature promised an innate grasp of the world around her, but there was no guarantee that understanding extended to things beyond this world.

"Tell me," Scarlett eventually said, "do you understand what you are?"

Slate nodded. "I do."

"And what is that?"

"I am the Tribute of Dominion. I am a fixed clause in Fate. I am the crux by which the laws of realms may be revised, and the arbiter that measures their compliance. I am a homunculus. I am a creation of the Second Divinarch, Guardian of Equilibrium, Thainnith the Veilweaver." She paused, then added, "I am Slate."

"And what, exactly, does that mean?"

"That I am the instrument by which this world's end may be decided."

Scarlett regarded her for a long moment. The words were delivered with such clean dispassion that she almost pitied her. Because she knew Slate would obey the first will that bound her, and the girl saw nothing wrong—or even remarkable—about that fact. If circumstances had been different, Scarlett might have taken the time to tell her she didn't have to be just a tool.

For now, though…

"Do you know where your power comes from, Slate? Your understanding?"

Slate considered her, as if gauging what lay behind the question. "From the world. I am written into its premise. What the world is, I partake in; what it knows at my locus, I know. That is the Tribute of Dominion."

Scarlett inclined her head. "Then what do you believe it means that you fail to understand me?"

A faint crease appeared on Slate's brow. "I do not know."

"Then contemplate it. Use your own mind. Shape the thought. Once we are finished here, perhaps you will have understood without needing to understand."

"Are the two of you finished?" Yamina called from the side. She had taken position at the platform's edge within another runic circle. "I don't mind giving you time for conversation, but it does make my things slightly more delicate for me given our current alignment."

Scarlett glanced over. "…Apologies. I am ready."

"As am I," Slate said, the furrow gone.

"Good. Then we begin the final movement. Unseating Fate will require a geas like none other, and for that we need your Tribute." Yamina lifted her hands. Fresh runes budded and spun around her, and in response, the circle beneath Scarlett flared in a clean rush of light. "Baroness, to start, I would like you to initiate a geas."

Scarlett frowned down at the lines beneath her. "I do not know how."

A geas was supposedly akin to a contract with the world itself. Though in practice, she supposed it was more like a contract with Fate's framework. But how was she meant to initiate something like that?

"No worries there." Yamina chuckled. "I've spent years preparing this. I wouldn't have asked for your help if the scaffolding weren't in place. The circle beneath you is keyed to the arrays needed to start the process. Ordinarily, even attempting a geas would require someone violently present within Fate, aligning themselves with its predestined structure. But your unique nature affords us certain liberties."

"I…see. Very well. Will it suffice if I simply channel my mana into these runes?"

"That will be more than enough."

Scarlett took a moment to centre herself, then let her mana pour into the circle. It answered at once, deepening to a sharp iron-red that raced outward across the platform. For a heartbeat, she felt as though she stood at the world's axis — the Fate that lapped at the edges of the platform grew denser, the gold at its fringes seeming to pick up a faint echo of that red.

She watched the reaction with keen focus, parsing what fragments she could as the arrays seized her mana and reshaped it into something formal. This process should theoretically be similar to the geas that had concealed Beld Thylelion, and if she was correct, the last person to attempt something even remotely on this scale had been Thainnith himself.

The runes webbing the platform shifted through a sequence of geometries. With each new transformation, the surrounding Fate pulsed in reply like something unseen answering behind a curtain. A conversation across a veil. Scarlett felt a faint tug somewhere deep within.

"This is to establish a provisional geas," Yamina explained, sending another controlled burst of spellwork into the lattice. "It has no defined predicate yet. We'll soon have to seat it in purpose."

The arrays cycled through a second run of configurations, then tightened. The tug turned harsher, almost contrary. It pushed against Scarlett, as if intent on ejecting an invader.

"Slate, was it?" Yamina motioned. "If you would, please — any moment now."

The tug spiked, turning violent. It came down on Scarlett like a storm, force stacked on force until her teeth clenched. She endured.

"A geas requires a power to underwrite it," Yamina continued, her voice rising above the strain on Scarlett's soul. "We have just named Fate as its own guarantor, anchoring our source of power to Fate itself. Conventional magical theory forbids this. It shouldn't be possible." Her hands blurred as she traced sigils in the air. "So we change the arbiter. We allow the substitution."

The runic circle around Slate struck like a bell. The pressure peeled cleanly off Scarlett and reoriented towards the girl. A corona of white-gold flared around her — and for a breath, it was as if a star decided to ignite an arm's length away, all that impossible force compressed into a single point.

Then the brilliance was divided—neatly, without drama—by the edge of a scythe. The message was wordless but clear: the rules of this world had just been told to change.

Slate didn't move. Within the flare, she remained composed, strange emerald eyes meeting Scarlett's through the light.

Around them, a puzzle began to lock. Piece by piece, the structure accepted its seat, and Fate's resistance ebbed to a steady, reluctant ache.

"Now, Baroness, if you would."

Scarlett looked at Yamina. The woman met her eyes and gave a single nod.

Scarlett looked at the wreath of arrays.

She looked at the ocean of Fate.

She looked at Slate.

Then she closed her eyes.

And she could feel what Yamina wanted her to do next.

The geas had been established. Its source of power had been decided as Fate itself. What remained was its purpose. Something Fate would acknowledge and admit into its own terms.

She had assumed that purpose would be Fate's annihilation, but she saw now that was not a purpose Fate would ever accept. Nor was it the aim Yamina's scaffolding had been built to serve. Yet the geas was open-ended. It would accept nearly any purpose Scarlett could make Fate 'believe' in.

It only had to be vast.

Vast enough that Fate would consume itself trying to fulfil it.

She searched for the right shape. Searched with an intent that was more will than thought. It was hard—brutally so—to form a purpose that harmonised with Fate's nature and yet was grand enough to break its back.

Until she recognised it.

The want that had been waiting for her.

A demand Fate would try to grant, because it aligned with defending against those who meddled with its threads.

A demand she suspected Fate could never truly fulfil.

"Bring me the one who brought me here to meddle with Fate," Scarlett said into the stillness, though the words did not need a voice. "Bring me the maker of the System. Bring me The Other."