“Oh hi. Karah,” Vic said. Was she hallucinating? What was she… doing here…?

  “You two… know each other?” the governor said. He sounded ever so slightly like a splinter had just gotten stuck beneath his nail. “…How do you… When would you have…” He faltered. “How if I… may inquire?”

  Karah wasn’t responsive. She was blankly staring nowhere. Vic wondered if she should answer for the both of them. She ended up just shrugging.

  He rubbed his closed eyes with two fingers.

  “It’s not for me to know.” He sighed, like he didn’t care. He spoke more defeatedly then, turning slowly towards Karah.

  “That could explain your improper behaviour,” he added sternly, looking down at Karah. He spoke more quietly, then. “Next time, communicate that you don’t want to be placed here.” Vic blankly stared at the interaction.

  “I don’t need a helper,” Vic abruptly said. The governor stared back at her.

  “You don’t… need a priestess to assist you?” he said. His eyebrows had raised themselves on their own. His smile was like plastic.

  Vic stared back at Karah.

  “No it’s…” she stopped. What could be said? “Not that,” she settled for.

  “Would you need another priestess?” he said. He had a weird expression on his face. “I could find another apprentice.”

  The fact that Karah hadn’t spoken up so far was kind of stressing her out.

  “It’s not for me to decide,” Vic said. She avoided looking at Karah pointedly.

  There was a moment of thick silence then.

  “…It’s fine, your Excellency,” Karah said, breaking it off. Her voice sounded small. “Duty would compel anyone to-”

  “No but what do you want?” Vic interrupted abruptly, intensely looking back at Karah. “Do you really want that? You don’t have to, you can leave if you don’t want to do this. Do you really want this?”

  Karah was looking back straight back at her. Karah’s mouth closed. Vic didn’t speak up.

  “That’s important,” Vic added. Before Karah could say anything regarding how her wishes didn’t matter, Vic continued. “To me. To me, that’s important. Okay? Okay. Right?”

  She saw Karah tense up.

  “It’s not a… matter of wanting…” Karah said, looking away. Vic grimaced. “It’s what’s needed…”

  “My Lady, perhaps you could consider resting as you seem not to feel the urgency of healing the sick for the time being?” he said. Vic brought her hands to her head and strongly scratched her scalp. “There would be another priestess working with you in the morning. Sleeping could be a welcome-”

  “No. NO. No sleep. Not now at least,” Vic said. A taste of ash was in her mouth. “I’m fine. Leave. It. Be.”

  The governor stared down at her. Fuck. Why was this affecting her so much? She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be here at all.

  “If no one’s going to make a real choice, then let’s go,” Vic said. She walked away. She didn’t care if anyone followed behind.

  She firmly closed her eyes when she heard one “I’ll leave you be then, my Lady,” all while someone else’s footsteps followed behind. Fuck. Why did her chest ache that way? This wasn’t the illness. She wasn’t sick from that divine illness. Was she?

  Was that why the back of her head hurt?

  She removed her tense fingers from the back of her head. She activated her shadow armour properly and gained some needed height. A splinter. She needed a splinter. The wooden beams were high up. Should she just… get up there to fetch another one? She’d lost her old one, misplaced it, probably. Should she climb up again like some sort of wild creature and repeat that whole thing all over again? She was tired of repeatedly doing things over and over again. She was just sick of it.

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  “Do you need a needle, my Lady? I’d heard you used one to channel your purifying spell. I have some on me,” Vic heard Karah said distantly. That was a lie. She hadn’t used needles so far, she’d used wooden splinters. Vic opened her tightly closed eyes. She looked back at Karah. There was that taste of bile at the back of her throat.

  “I’m not doing this because I have to. I’m doing all of this because I want to,” Vic said.

  “That’s… good to… know, my Lady,” Karah said. She didn’t sound convinced. Vic stared back.

  A nervous, too long laugh escaped Vic’s lips. “Please don’t call me my Lady,” Vic said. Not this again. “You know my name, right? And I’ve already worked so hard to get the others to drop that snobbish title,” she chuckled. “Come o-o-on…”

  Karah was making a strange facial expression. There wasn’t disgust nor anger there.

  “Vic…” she said. The words seemed to difficultly get out of her mouth. Oh. She was being pitied. “If it’s what you need… I… I forgive you. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t you who did it.”

  “There’s nothing to be forgiven,” Vic said snappily. She wasn’t doing this to compensate for those other deaths that she hadn’t meant to cause in the first place. Karah made a little “huh?”

  She didn’t seem to understand. Vic needed to explain. Explain better. Why couldn’t she ever get things right?

  “No, the only reason this is in any way my fault alone is because of your god’s attempts to repaint what has happened and remove any responsibility- of the part he took in the fight,” she said. Did having power put the blame on her? All she’d done was react. “I didn’t mean to start it. The fight wouldn’t have happened if he didn’t attack first. I wasn’t mindcontrolled. He escalated it after I accidentally bumped against him. All that followed afterwards- was because of him. It’s not my fault, not fully, the blame’s shared, but he keeps pushing that off of him and it’s not fair, it’s not fair that he gets to pretend he’s squeaky clean, and I’m not doing any of this right now because I have to but because…”

  Vic stopped.

  Why was she doing any of this?

  She stared back at Karah, who looked at her wide-eyed. That was a look of horror there.

  “Because I can,” Vic said. “I can and that’s enough, that’s all that matters right now. It’s not like saving people right now will bring back the ones that died, that’s just fucking ridiculous and I never fucking thought that, not once!”

  Vic lazily smiled. A bitter chuckle escaped her.

  “The thought never crossed my mind,” she said. Victorya smiled a little sharper.

  She wasn’t doing this to compensate for the other deaths she hadn’t meant to cause. No. This was about saving people that… would die if she didn’t save them. She was the only one who could do this.

  They were all gonna die if she didn’t do this. And she wasn’t that much of a prick… She was a bit of a prick, but not… not by those amounts. Right? That had to mean something.

  Karah was staring at her. Vic felt a part of her guts twist uncomfortably.

  “No, the only reason this keeps being painted as being my fault is because of your god’s habit. The one of being a compulsive liar. He just can’t help himself and has to remodel truth into his own fabrications. Stories. Stories, that’s all he has. That’s all that fake god of yours has going for him anyway, he’s not a real god, he’s never been an actual god, and if you guys tasted real divinity you’d know the difference, divinity, divinity’s cruel, obsessive and uncompromising and so much more powerful than-”

  Karah wrapped her arms around her. Vic flinched before realising it was a hug. Thankfully there had been the many layers of shadow armour between her and Karah. No actual hug happened.

  “Please. Please stop,” Karah said, despite it all. Vic stared down at the girl. “You’re hurting yourself. I don’t- I do not care what you said. You don’t have to hurt yourself that way. You gain nothing by doing that. You suffer. Everyone suffers. Is that what you want?”

  “There’s nothing I want here,” Vic bitterly said. “Please… don’t hug me.”

  She saw Karah let go. Her arms went behind her back. Her knees gave in, and she was sat down.

  “I’m… sorry, Vic,” she said. Why was she apologizing?

  “You shouldn’t apologize,” Vic said, “You’ve got nothing to apologize for.”

  Karah gave her a complicated smile.

  “Vic… I’m not… prepared for… for this. I’m not a speaker. It’s not my place. But… All I know is that you’re holding a terrible weight on your shoulders. The guilt- even the one I feel hasn’t gone away by doing the right things afterwards, and God knows I tried” Karah said. “I led you to the centre of the city back then. Fated or not, I pushed you into the very place you had to take in order to provoke all of this. Without me… if things had only gone differently… if I’d finished my work earlier and been less diligent, if I’d somehow not been there and never crossed paths with you… Things could have been different.”

  How could she feel guilt for that? She had had no idea of the power Vic had back then. She had no way of knowing what her god was doing and what would happen. How could she feel guilty about things she couldn’t have known?

  Karah looked away.

  “But I realised that wishing wilfully of another outcome was pointless,” she said. “Learning from the mistakes of the past… might not make bearing that guilt any easier. But if the choice was taken from you back then, if your hand was forced, the only way to atone would be to choose to do the right thing from then on. Not to have someone else dictate your actions, but for you alone to choose to help people.”

  “And you are already doing that, Vic,” Karah said gently. “You’re… already atoning.”

  She looked up at Vic. No one should look at her like that.

  “Thank you, too. For healing Tom.”

  “Tom?” Vic said. Who the fuck was Tom?

  Karah blinked. Was he the first guy Vic had healed? The one with the fucked up eye?

  “Oh. I… thought you’d remember. Back when we first met… he was the boy who’d fallen ill? The one Johan had spoken about. Tom had… just gotten that position as one of quartermaster’s attendants in the watchguard but had been put in quarantine? Johan had proposed to put in a good word for you if you wanted to replace him while waiting for the next Novel Spell Contest that would happen six months after the latest one. He was the one that let you enter the contest. The one you… won.”

  “I… see”, Vic said. She didn’t want to lie. “I’d… forgotten about him.”

  “I hope… you can forgive him too. He might have been speaking above the means of his station, but he didn’t know either.”

  Wait, was she not speaking about that “Tom” anymore? Wait, no, right, the other one. She was speaking of the other one. The talkative boy.

  “There’s… nothing to be forgiven. He didn’t know either,” Vic said.

  “No one could have known about your divinity,” Karah said, looking away again. Vic sputtered.

  “It’s nothing like that,” Vic said. “Anyway, was Tom… Uh… Was he the first guy I helped heal maybe?” Vic said. She remembered that one.

  Karah frowned. “I… don’t think so? I started hearing about the healing miracles that were happening by the time I checked on him, and it was some time after that that you healed him.”

  Vic blinked back. She was going to actually die if she heard another priestess mutter something about her doing “miracles”. Miracle worker her ass. She was the bullshittest person she knew around those parts. But how to communicate that effectively? There was no way to properly do it. She didn’t want people to think that she was trying to pretend to be humble. Karah made an awkward smile.

  The silence lingered a little too much.

  “Oh! I have… the needles for your spell?” Karah asked. She was searching through the pouch that she was wearing on the side of her dress. Vic blinked back a bit stupidly.

  “…Yeah, of course,” Vic said.