Zero.

  There’s nowhere to belong.

  That’s the problem when one is a person who exists in a state of vague, total, encompassing grayness.

  It’s what happens when one is likable enough in their personhood to be accepted when it comes down to it, but not remarkable enough so that others might let this particular person linger in their thoughts after these chance encounters. It’s what happens when the work that one does is good but not life-changing. It’s what happens when this particular individual is not easily identifiable as being uniquely charismatic, but when this person is still normal enough that… people just sort of don’t pay them any mind at all.

  Sure, nobody crosses the street when they walk down the road towards them, but nobody makes eye contact or goes out of their way to say ‘hello’ either.

  It’s what happens when a person grows to become a unique piece of a puzzle that just doesn’t fit into the rest of the almost-filled combination that it lies atop.

  With eyes that always feel tired, despite the amount of sleep that this person might find, this individual might only watch as the others around them are slotted neatly into place, fitting into the rest of the game as good matches, until eventually, the puzzle is fully completed, and for some reason, there’s just an extra piece laying around that doesn’t even seem to be missing from the whole.

  For this piece, there’s nowhere to belong, and so, once this game has been completed and the metaphorical puzzle is glued over and framed, or taken apart again, this extra is simply discarded or lost.

  It’s unnecessary.

  It doesn’t fit.

  It has zero places to belong.

  This is the amalgamation of thoughts that fills his head, but not as something that he’s aware of thinking about in the present, as a clear, active thought at the forefront of his mind. No, instead, it is the very base on which all of his existential principles are made. This knowledge that he exists in the world solely as a thing that is extra is, indeed, the very foundation of every action, thought, and feeling that he has, so much so that he doesn’t even realize it.

  — He turns his head, looking across the gray apartment that light is trying to enter, sneaking past the bottoms and sides of the closed curtains. Rays of sunshine streak across the dumbbells and the vacuum cleaner, sat positioned to the side of the room to be used, but the light only reveals the dust collecting over them and the cobwebs in the back corner further behind them.

  He wanted to get up early today.

  His eyes drift over to the clock on the microwave that he can see from his bed, the sheets of which feel oddly damp and gross. It’s a small one-room apartment.

  The time displayed on the device doesn’t really reveal if he managed it or not, but he knows that he didn’t because of how bright it is outside.

  The unset clock just blinks, repeating a series of four identical numbers over and over. The power must have gone out during the night.

  — Zero.

  A sigh escapes him as he sits upright and then gets up, as he does every day. He makes his bed, as he does every day, and then he goes to brush his teeth, take a shower, and so on, as he does every day.

  Then he walks back out and stares at the note that he himself had pinned up on his calendar, a motivational nudge that signals that today is supposed to be the day he starts over. It is a little yellowed, glued scrap of paper that hangs on the calendar just before the year, and it says only one thing, meant to symbolize the day that comes before the first day of tomorrow.

  ‘Zero’.

  He clenches his fists and feels himself firing up again as something bubbles inside of him that is strangely different from the full melancholy that his life might signal to an outside observer. Maybe it’s self-loathing, or maybe it’s a desire to simply be more that has somehow managed to survive this long — he understands every thought that he had before, but that doesn’t mean he accepts them as gospel. Those negative thoughts form his lowest, most base nature, but he hates that they do, even if he is unable to clearly identify the problem of his non-existence.

  He rips open the curtain, letting in the sunlight that is brighter than he had hoped it would be, and then rolls his shoulders, dropping down into a series of push-ups and exercises as he starts his day.

  Just because he’s something that doesn’t exist in anyone’s mind doesn’t mean that he’s resigned himself to that final judgment. Just because there’s a voice in his head telling him he obviously isn’t good enough to belong to anyone or anything, doesn’t mean he’s taken that hissing word as a creed. He rejects it as if it were its own misaligned thing that has no connection to him, even if it has successfully imprinted itself as something as obvious as the rising of the sun and the falling of the moon.

  Imperfect as he is, he works on himself in every way he can manage, even if the demon of total, objective normality has already consumed him whole.

  Because today is day zero of what’s to come.

  Just like it was yesterday, and just like it will be tomorrow.

  He doesn’t know why he does it, but he knows that he has to. If he stops, if he gives in to the total blankness that life so desperately wants him to have, there will be no coming back.

  “Zero,” he counts, doing his first push-up of the day, which is a remarkable feat for someone who doesn’t exist — at least in the context of the world beyond his home. Perhaps he is delusional; perhaps he is simply desperate. It is hard to say.

  Her breath escapes her, visible in the cold air.

  She had a plan.

  Acacia sits down on the floor with her back against the wall, listening to the dull rumbling that comes from above as a heavy, full cart is rolled down the hallway in another room. It shakes the walls of the tiny, half-underground space that she’s in and rattles the now empty glass vials that lie scattered around the floor. Pink droplets fill a few of them.

  The medicine is expensive, and she used a chunk of what she had saved to buy the room itself too, thinking it would be a good investment. The other half of her ‘go away and die somewhere else’ money went to her tuition. After all, she’d be in this town for a few years until she completed her training to become an adventurer, someone who earns their own living by fighting monsters and plundering dungeons, at the local magical academy — in theory.

  However, ‘room’ is a very generous term for what the space is. It’s really just an old storage closet below the back of the city’s adventuring guild, with some bare bedding laid on the floor. An adventuring guild is a central structure of any city of note, where adventurers gather to find people to work with, to sell their gathered items, to find jobs, or to buy equipment. It’s sort of a central-node for anything adventuring related.

  In the little room, there are two small windows at street level, high up, that are only big enough to maybe stick an arm out of. But it’s not like there’s anything to see through them anyway, except the drab alley behind the structure.

  However, the space has a bed, a door, and at least four walls, so that’s a start. It was really exciting, actually, finally having something that was ‘hers’. She was extremely excited about being able to buy this little nook, as unusual as it was in comparison to the very high standards that she had grown accustomed to during adolescence.

  As for the noise coming from above, every day, all day, the people who work at the business above, the guild, use the corridor that is over this tiny space to move large amounts of useful materials that they buy from busy adventurers, who had just come back fighting monsters and harvesting their parts.

  Given the number of people who walk in and out of the building every day, it’s a considerable amount of raw materials, and so they use carts to move it all to and from storage.

  — The walls shake, a little dust falling down from the rafters.

  Somehow, there always seems to be more dust that can fall from them, even if this happens dozens of times a day.

  But she doesn’t feel like letting it bother her today, honestly.

  The girl sits there, her back against the wall, knees up, and her feet almost touching the opposite wall of the space. Her hands are clenched loosely together as she stares down at the piece of paper down between her feet that the dust from above has landed on as she looks at what her plan for continuing her life after her banishment from home has amounted to.

  The girl lets out a tired exhalation, her foggy breath visible in the cold underground room, scooting her legs forward to let her feet push against the opposite wall. Glass rattles as some of the empty vials roll away across the floor.

  Now what?

  The academy was her plan. She was supposed to study there for a few more years and earn money along the way with the other students. But she didn’t last long. It turns out that she just… doesn’t have much of an ability. She doesn’t know if it’s because of her spoiled upbringing, but she just doesn’t have any useful talents or life-skills at all. She was useless, essentially.

  Acacia picks up one of the empty vials mid-roll, looking at it. The small, empty glass ampule is hardly larger than one of her fingers, but they’re very expensive. For the standards of a noble, the price is laughable, but for a common-person it’s… it’s doable.

  — But it’s not sustainable.

  It’s a losing race against the clock that can be fought for a while, but eventually one runs out of energy or fate intervenes. Falling sick and not being able to work for a week, having an accident, or maybe even just a bad streak in the dungeon — all of these things are already enough to fall behind on the money collection needed, and that begins the cascade.

  It doesn’t take long until the savings just aren’t there for the medicine. One does what one can, perhaps stretching the medicine out or skipping doses, but this, of course, leads to poor results, which means that future doses need to be stronger and subsequently more expensive.

  There is no way to win.

  You either stay on the ball or you slowly drown. That’s it.

  And she has fallen off the ball.

  Acacia plays with the vial, trying to spin it between her fingers as she looks at her reflection in the glass.

  The thin glass clumsily slips from her grasp and strikes the floor, the fragile container shattering immediately.

  Her eyes stare at the shards.

  Now what?

  The walls rattle again.

  Her only options now are to sit down in this basement and slowly die, to try surviving in the dungeon by herself, or, as maybe her next best shot, to enter the military. They pay well.

  She didn’t even come close to passing even a single year in a private adventuring academy since she can’t really do much of anything, apparently, but because of her noble blood, she’ll be at least allowed to enter the military, right? She obviously can’t tell them about her real status, but surely having noble blood of any tier will open a door at least. With the war going on, they’re desperate for warm bodies, and they surely aren’t asking many questions about any applicants. It’s not what her plan was for her life. But she’s not going to die without a fight, even if it all feels so bleak right now.

  Acacia sighs and gets up.

  She won’t give her family the satisfaction of her vanishing into nothingness.

  ‘Zero sugar!’

  The man smiles, grabbing the soft drink can on the shelf and placing it into his bag as he walks through the grocery store. It’s convenient to go shopping in the late morning when one knows the right hour. Everyone else is at work, but all of the elderly people have finished their shopping already in the earlier part of the day, so now there is a quiet lull in the store before the lunch hour rush.

  Previously, he would just go in the middle of the night, when it was always empty. But he’s been working hard to adapt to a new routine, hoping that crafting a highly disciplined lifestyle might do something about the total, full emptiness that he feels mostly every day. Routine has become his religion.

  He walks down the aisles towards the registers, grabbing a few miscellaneous items that he doesn’t actually need but that he feels like normal, functional people have in their homes — things like those little gel-dispensing clips that you put on the inside of a toilet or dusting towels for one of those long, extendible mops with a telescoping shaft. He doesn’t actually have one of those, but he figures he can just use the towels as they are to wipe stuff off.

  A little while later, the man leaves the store, content with having a total that summed up with exactly three zeros at the end. In a way, it’s his favorite number. He knows it's kind of childish and silly, but the lizard pattern-recognition segment of his brain has latched onto the number after a particularly bad day when he had a manic snapping moment of sorts, and since then, he’s been seeing it everywhere.

  Now, of course, this isn’t exactly too crazy. Of course, the number ‘zero’ is everywhere in everyday life, just like any other number from it to nine. However, he has nonetheless clasped onto it in particular, and it brings him comfort everywhere he goes. It’s like a tiny sign from the universe, telling him to keep going — this is it; this is finally the right path to take to get to a place in life that is better and brighter still.

  For the first time in a while, the man hums as he walks home.

  He carefully looks across the street both ways, checking if there are any cars. There’s a truck in the distance, near the horizon.

  So he patiently stands there on the sidewalk and waits.

  And waits.

  And waits.

  And then the truck passes him by, a gust of wind tussling his hair. He watches it drive off towards the horizon and then checks the road again before crossing successfully.

  Pedestrian safety is a very serious issue. One shouldn’t take it lightly.

  He continues on his way home, walking past many familiar corners and roads. He walks past comfortable houses that he has seen for years since he’s always lived here. He walks past beautiful trees that have grown together with him. He walks past a few odd groups of people, talking to each other about this and that. He even walks past a little cat that meows at him until he stops and pets it. Eventually, he gets close to his home, crossing over the little pedestrian bridge nearby.

  The wind reaches him, a sudden gust gently touching his face like a soft hand, and, immediately, as little sense as it makes, the goodness of this morning is entirely erased by the cold shift that had just removed all the warmth he had felt prior, just like that, as if a switch had been flicked.

  He lifts his gaze, staring at the tall apartment building that awaits him just a little further down the road. Home.

  Zero lights burn in any of the windows, as if it were the empty hull of a sunken ship.

  Zero doors sit open, with a welcoming person standing outside and waving to him, waiting for him to come back to them.

  Zero days have passed since he hasn’t felt the total crushing of the absolute void that has taken hold of his core.

  — Something honks. His head snaps to the side in a time-frozen second to look at the truck that has sharply veered off the road on its way back in a panicked effort to avoid the stray cat that was crossing the street in its path.

  The heavy vehicle catapults over the sidewalk, smashing directly into the man and careening off of the bridge with him being crushed under it.

  He, obviously, dies.

  And in the weeks to follow, nobody comes forward to try and find a missing person. Nobody misses him, and the scattered bag of groceries sits there on the sidewalk, having been launched out of his hands, its dull contents rotting against the railing, because nobody bothers looking at it, assuming it is simply seen as garbage that some inconsiderate person had left there until the city sanitation workers eventually find it and throw it away.

  — In essence, the same happens with his body after it is recovered from beneath the truck.

  But exactly zero people care.

  “YOU’RE DRIVING ME CRAZY!” yells a voice in the total darkness that surrounds him. “SHUT UP! SHUT UP!” it screams. “SHUT UP!”

  He feels himself being shaken over and over, and the man who had just died opens his eyes to look at a strange collection of colorless arms that have grabbed hold of him. He feels a burst of sudden terror after all, but something covers his mouth. He’s bound fully, his arms and legs as tightly compacted as his voice is.

  He looks around himself in confused terror, staring at the total emptiness that he finds himself floating inside of. Why is he here? He was just buying groceries and then…

  And then…

  — He died?

  The man realizes that he’s dead.

  Why the hell is he dead?! He didn’t want to die! He was just on his way home to make some dinner, clip in that weird toilet-bowl thing, and then watch some self-improvement videos on his computer.

  His eyes move in terror toward the thing that has him in its clutches.

  He floats in total darkness, yet moving out of it are many, many wraithly thin arms of the same lightless tone that he is able to differentiate. They hold him from all angles, stemming from no coherent body. Rather, it’s as if all of this — the void, the empty space — as if all of it together were one singular body that he was floating inside of as a parasite. It is as if it had dug into its own flesh with its hands to rip him out like one would do with a worm from their own eviscerated bowels.

  “If I have to listen to you say my number ONE MORE TIME!” says the voice, threateningly. “Do you know how often you’ve thought or said ‘zero’ in the last three months?!”

  It releases a shadowy hand with fingers so long that they were wrapped around his skull from front to back.

  “Why am I here?” he asks. “What is this?!”

  The darkness around him slithers, incomprehensible shapes sliding over themselves, as if he were trapped inside a serpent that had coiled around and around itself a thousand times over, eating its own tail. “I killed you so that we could have a talk,” says the voice. “You need to get off my case,” it says accusingly.

  He stares at the darkness. “What?!”

  “- Every single day it's zero. Zero. Zero.’ And you know what? It was cute at first,” says the ancient entity. “I thought it was kind of charming, actually.” The things holding him slide off of his body, releasing him. “But I’m over it now. You need to stop,” warns the voice from the darkness. The man continues to stare in confusion, blinking.

  He’s dead?

  He’s really dead.

  He tries to pinpoint some direct area of focus, like a pair of eyes or a face that he can communicate with, but there really is nothing here. “I mean, everybody likes hearing their own name, right? But I am just sick of it. Shut up!” exclaims the voice.

  “It’s my favorite number,” he replies, not too sure if he understands. “It’s what I use to keep myself going,” explains the man.

  “Yeah, and that’s quaint and all. I appreciate it, really,” explains the voice with no source. “But I think we’ve now moved on to a point of codependency that is very unhealthy for us both,” explains the cosmic being. “I can’t be the sole force in your life that keeps you going. It’s too much responsibility. I don’t want to deal with it, and quite frankly, it’s very unfair of you to unload your suffering on me like this.”

  He tilts his head in marked confusion. “…Are you God?”

  “Sure, sure… uh, let’s go with that,” replies the voice. “Anyway, good talk. We’re on the same page now, right?” it asks.

  It is quiet for a while.

  “Uh…. no?” he replies after a moment of consideration. “I have no idea what this is. Put me back into my life!” yells the dead man.

  “For what?” asks the voice. “So you can just sit around, letting your thoughts drift into my head a thousand times a day while you live your sad existence?! No!”

  He leans in toward the void. “It wasn’t sad. I was getting better!” explains the trapped man, pointing at the darkness with his freed hand.

  It shifts, stirring. “Oh yeah?” asks the ethereal voice. “Then what was your plan for food today? Plain rice, plain noodles, or… dare I say it… plain oats?”

  He crosses his arms, staring defiantly at the void. “I bought ground beef today at the store,” he explains.

  It’s quiet for a time.

  “And ketchup,” he adds on.

  The silence remains absolute, spanning on for aeons of total darkness throughout the eternal void.

  “Ground beef and ketchup? Plain?” asks the creature with no body, face, or presence other than its grasp on his immortal soul — the avatar of the void beyond life and death itself.

  “I would have salted it,” he remarks, lifting an eyebrow. “It’s cheap, and it has a lot of nutrients that are important for good mental health. Take a fish oil tablet with it and you’re golden.”

  The silence remains eternal.

  “This is too much.” The darkness shifts, apparently awkwardly, given its strange movements. “It’s just sad. I can’t… I just… I can’t do this anymore. We need to make some changes.”

  “Yeah,” agrees the man, nodding. “Put me back!”

  “Get a grip. You’re dead,” explains the void in a dry voice. “No big loss. I have an idea about this. I’m putting you somewhere where I can’t hear you anymore.”

  “Put me back, or I’ll say it again,” he warns.

  “You better not!” warns the cosmic power of the true void.

  “ZER-” A hand shoots out of the darkness to cover his mouth, and he fights against it, saying the word over and over in his muffled voice.

  The total, encompassing nothingness around him spins in his world-view as several dozen hands grip him from all sides. The hand over his mouth folds inwardly, fingers gripping the inside of his cheeks. An instant later, it rips through his face. The thousands of hands tear off his limbs and rip out pieces of his torso as he, very painfully, is broken down into the very same nothingness that he drifts inside of.

  “Get out!” yells the voice from the deepest reaches of metaphysical emptiness. “And if you ever, ever say that number again — EVER,” it warns. “I’m not putting you back together a second time!”

  Whatever spiritual essence of the man might remain, he spirals through the eternal darkness, flying towards a place that is distant from his old world in more than one way, a place where the emptiness that represents ‘zero’ might have some peace from his nagging. As he is flung through the total emptiness, he flies past what he can only assume is a child’s doll and some old armor, but he can make sense of neither before he ceases to not unexist.

  Acacia laughs an awkward laugh, looking at her smoking fingers. The military recruiter, sitting at the table next to her, lets out an awkward cough.

  She turns her head. “Sorry, I’m a little tired,” she explains, turning her head forward. As an initiate in the magical academy — or at least, formerly so — she hasn’t specialized in any magical class of spellcasting in particular. But she still has access to some basic magical spells — in theory, at least.

  The problem is that her magic just doesn’t work. Sure, once in a while she’ll fire off a spark. But it really seems like a game of chance, no matter how much she practices. The sickness carries with it a lot of varying troubles. Even the instructors at the academy that she’s apparently been expelled from had no idea what to do with her, saying they had never seen magical inability before to this degree. For the first few days, they took pity on her and were extra nice, but that didn’t last forever as she fell behind the rest of the class and ended up getting less and less attention and sympathy. She has the feeling that eventually all of that sympathy vanished and they just viewed her as a burden, which squares with what most of her classmates seem to have thought as well.

  Fair enough. It’s not like she was good at group work. As someone of her royal title — in theory — people should be working for her. She shouldn’t have to work with them.

  Acacia exhales and focuses on sending the energy in her body to her hands as she looks at the wooden target at the end of the hall. Magic surges through her body, flowing to the tips of her fingers that almost tickle with energy, as if they were warming up in water after being icy cold on a winter’s day.

  — And then nothing happens.

  She turns her head to the heavily mustached man behind the table.

  He just shakes his head and then stamps over her application formula. Acacia’s eyes light up — did she get approved?!

  The girl clenches her fists in excitement, leaning in to look as he slides the sheet back to her.

  ‘Rejected’ is stamped over it.

  “Come back in a year or two,” says the recruiter. “We’re not looking to babysit a useless noble’s daughter.”

  The smile begins to vanish from her face. However, she tries to keep it there, if only for appearance’s sake, but it feels harder than it did a moment ago. Acacia rubs her arm. “Oh…” she says, taking the form and lowering her head. “Thank you for your time!” she replies, not even getting angry at the insinuation anymore. It hurts a bit, but she’s used to keeping a straight face in such situations. As a noble, the importance of never looking undignified is hammered into you from day one.

  She turns to leave, looking down at the form as she goes, doing her best to look very interested in reading its contents with a faked proud, happy smile as she walks out past the other dozens of applicants who watch her leave.

  They saw the whole thing.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  By blood, she is the youngest born princess of the nation and the very last in the line of succession after all of her older brothers and sisters. One would think that this would allow her a life of comfortable luxury; however, times have changed.

  After the king, her father, passed and the neighboring nation took this opportunity to strike while the kingdom was in disarray, the social life of the royal castle was not what it was before. Her oldest brother had taken the throne, and she was essentially thrown out onto the street with a small allowance that was only given to her for the sake of appearances. In essence, she was disowned. This is the money she wasted on traveling from the capital city, her tuition, and her little room.

  She can only assume that her brother’s intent was for her to vanish into obscurity. Her other siblings are all healthy and useful. She’s the only one with the sickness, the only one who can’t really do much.

  Yes, the formal title of ‘princess’ is theoretically available for her to use and display within the system that governs the world, allowing her to prove her identity as a true royal, but even if she’s useless, she isn’t stupid. Showing something like that down here, in these streets, in this neighborhood, is beyond unwise. If there’s anything that she learned back in the castle, it’s that one should never flaunt when around people who have less, because they’ll get aggressive about their lower status, but also to never flaunt when around someone who has more, because they’ll get aggressive, feeling as if you’re trying to usurp their higher status. A fish of any size should always stay within its own pond.

  Now, this may be the lesson that only she in particular has learned out of all of her siblings, because she was always the youngest and the weakest, but it’s stuck with her.

  So, down here in the real world, she’s just Acacia, and as for the last name, it isn’t too exotic. Lots of noble families carry the name Krone because of the complicated nature of family trees. This all comes together so that she can just blend in well-enough.

  What this all amounts to is that she may be a princess by birthright, but in reality, she’s disowned, unemployed, living in a basement closet, and dying of a lifelong illness that she can’t afford to treat.

  Acacia folds the rejection paper together and stuffs it into the pocket of her robe.

  — It’s not that she wants to keep it. But she can use the backside of the paper if she ever needs to write anything down. She can’t afford to buy her own paper.

  The girl clears her throat and wipes her undignified eyes, which have become a little wet, breaking proper social decorum. She turns her head down the road, following the street that leads towards the dungeon inside the city’s heart. Snow falls around her. It is currently the heart of winter and it is deathly cold outside.

  Becoming an adventurer without the magic academy’s training is her last shot, then.

  She got kicked out of the academy, so nobody there will team up with her to fight monsters. But maybe she can find a group in the adventurers’ guild to join with? Even if she can’t do much, she can carry things for them, right? Maybe she can make an arrangement with some group to carry their stuff, do dirty work, and provide simple help like that for a smaller than usual cut. That sounds fair, right? It could be an idea.

  She’s not giving up yet. She only needs a little momentum to get started. She’s willing to put in the sweat and get dirty to prove herself. They say the start of any new thing in life is always the hardest part, so surely that applies to life itself as well. She only needs one shot — one chance to show that she can do something.

  You just need to get past zero, and then you’re already at one. How hard can that be? This is all hard and frightening. But she’s sure that if she keeps pushing, she’ll get there. She’s not going to give up.

  Acacia nods, a little worn down but not beaten yet.

  She heads back to the adventurers’ guild.

  She’ll do anything to get going. If she has to dig through monster corpses with her bare hands and carry dirt back and forth all day, she doesn’t care.

  Acacia steps to the side, the winter slush at the side of the road crunching beneath her boots as she watches several military carriages that are pulled by large, bipedal birds with long, feathered tails — anqas — barrel down the street in quite a hurry.

  Talk of the war fills the building, though some people have discussions about their days and other such mundane topics.

  “We’re not interested in a leech,” snaps the elf who Acacia was talking to, sitting at the table. She sharply whips her head to the side. “Get out of here!”

  Acacia lifts her hands, trying to keep things calm. “I’m sorry. Thank you for your time,” she says, stepping away from the woman’s glare and the other bothered faces sitting at the table that don’t even bother looking her way. Instead, all of them look stiffly straight ahead, as if they were actually going out of their way not to look at her.

  She steps away, listening to the elf tsk at her as the table starts to talk. Acacia does her best to ignore them. Noble society was also always very… snippy. So she’s used to it. Talk was the only weapon available in the castle, and the people of the court became masters at it. She was mostly shielded from all of that because of her young age. But she still learned a thing or two here and there about surviving in such places.

  It’s not over for her yet, though. There’s still a whole guild's worth of people to ask. She’s only tried two tables so far.

  “Pardon me, excuse me,” says Acacia, walking over to another table. “I’m looking for wor-”

  There’s a heavy thunking sound, and her head rings with a sudden jolt of pain.

  A mug clatters to the ground at her feet, having been thrown at her head. Its contents run down her face and front as Acacia tries to orient herself in the loud laughter that erupts around the tavern that makes up the front-room of the adventurers’ guild.

  Hurt, she looks up just as a hand places itself on her shoulder from the side.

  Acacia, dripping wet, turns to look at the receptionist, the woman who works the front counter of the guild and handles all of the paperwork and day to day stuff.

  “Miss, you should leave,” says the receptionist, nodding her head toward the door. “We don’t need someone causing problems here.”

  Acacia blinks and then looks around the room, seeing that, given the expressions present here, this is indeed what everyone seems to think she is doing.

  She doesn’t say anything and simply walks out of the door.

  It is late and growing colder and colder by the minute. Thick flocks of snow fall from the dark sky, blue moonlight being captured in the drifting flakes, illuminating them as if they were stars in the great emptiness, drifting down to the ground from the night above her head.

  She coughs, feeling a slight, familiar pressure inside her chest. Acacia sits there on a bench; the wet patch on her outfit has frozen, but the smell of beer sticks to the stained fabric. She doesn’t have many clothes. She’ll have to wash this down by the river, she supposes, now that she can’t do her washing at the academy any more.

  Should she just go home? It’s late. She’s cold and… suddenly, just very tired.

  The exhausted girl turns her head to the side, staring down the side-road. She isn’t sitting on the main street, worried that the adventurers from inside the guild would see her again on their way past. She has instead opted for a quieter bench off the first intersection from the main road. It’s a nice place; there are lots of bakeries and stores here in this part of the city, but they’re all closed for the night.

  — Not that she can afford anything.

  Life is hard, isn’t it?

  Her eyes wander over the darkening street, illuminated by the orange glows that escape from many windows, inside of which must be hidden a warmth that feels very distant to her right now.

  What’s left for her to try?

  This really is the worst, but she hasn’t given up just yet, has she? Acacia thinks about it for a while. It feels like she wants to, honestly. This last experience was something entirely new to her. She’s suffered many slights and such things over her life, many rejections and letdowns, but this was the first time that she’s gone through this sort of targeted hostility for… being useless. In the royal world, useless people are mostly politely ignored when it comes to matters of serious note. However, down here among the lower class, it seems like those who are found with empty hands and loadless backs are actively hated.

  — A troop of soldiers runs down the road, looking like they’re in sort of a hurry.

  If the military doesn’t want her and nobody at the adventuring guild wants to take her, then her last options are to either find a physical trade to work in or to enter the dungeon by herself and simply try her best to kill a few monsters.

  The result of failing this latter effort is, however, death and likely being eaten — the being eaten part could also happen before her death, actually. Monsters don’t play games, and the dungeon is full of them. Even if the monsters on the first floor of the dungeon are weak, if her magic fails her there too, as it likely will, that’s it for her.

  But what options are left?

  After her poor results today, she’s confident that she won’t find a position as any tradesman’s apprentice, and that leaves only the dungeon as her choice.

  This means that she can either stay home and die in the next few weeks of hunger and sickness, or she can go to the dungeon and give it a shot. It could work, right? In the worst case, she’ll die there, so the end result will be the same, but with a small chance of success.

  Acacia inhales for a moment, feeling a tingling in her throat, and then exhales again as she does her best to settle her nerves, which, after the kind of day today has been, are rightfully rattled.

  She gets up and nods her head, even if she feels very tired right now.

  Anything is better than doing nothing. She can go to the dungeon and fail there, if it comes down to it. But she’s not going to settle for having accomplished exactly zero things in her life. She only has to succeed once. Just once. If she does that, she’ll be past zero and be able to find some strength to keep going. She only needs to kill one or two monsters in the dungeon to earn food for the day. This isn’t anything too new for her to do, right? She’s killed plenty of monsters before with a party from the magic academy made up of other fellow initiates, but still, she was there when it happened.

  She just needs to do the same thing again, but alone this time.

  Acacia nods and turns to go to the dungeon. What else can she do?

  Her eyes follow the street that she wanders down, the ice coated road glowing with the heartwarming shine of light that leaks out of the dozens of windows of many homes, watching as it suddenly flares in a burst of intensity. The snow, lightly aglow only a second ago, sets fully to light as if the rising sun were casting its full shine upon it.

  — A roar shoots through the world, everything from her bones to the houses around her rattling and shaking as snow slides off the many roofs in a small avalanche that crashes to the sides of the road, causing her to fall down as it hits the ground all around her legs.

  Confused, she looks back towards the source of the noise from behind herself. The night sky is burning with fire and smoke. The light of a huge explosion is only now starting to fade.

  Then more come.

  The city erupts, a quake carrying through the ground as magic of many colors begins to fly through the sky, cast from several sources from everywhere that she can see from this narrow road. Spells collide in the air, setting the starlit darkness aglow in swathes of many hues, yet it stays dominated by the orange pressure of fire that fills the emptiness. Piled on snow falls off of the rooftops all around the street. Acacia scrambles back up to her feet, watching as everything in the city changes all at once. Explosions fill the night, the ringing in her ears accompanied by that of bells all around the city from towers in churches and temples, signaling danger.

  Is this the war?! Did the enemy push all the way to this city already? How is that possible?! Sure, this city isn’t the capital — she left it after her banishment — but this place is still pretty deep in the heartlands of the country, far from the borders. There’s no way the enemy came this far!

  Acacia starts to run, slipping a little but she catches herself as she scrambles away.

  — The house in front of her to the left explodes from the inside out; glass and stones violently careen through the night, and she stumbles gracelessly overly the slippery road, catching herself and then speeding down an alley towards the right that leads back to the main hub of the city. What’s going on?!

  Dozens of soldiers break in through the smoke of the fresh explosion, which pours out of the ruin like vapor from a dragon’s mouth. She only catches a glimpse of them in her escape, but their armor is light and sharp, their cloaks are colorful to identify each other in the chaos, and their face-covering and helmets are unique in design, made to look like a wolf’s open maw with a face covering veil held between its teeth — they’re clearly the enemy, having already breached the walls.

  One of them sees her just as she vanishes.

  Acacia runs down the street in a panic, not sure where to go. The adventurers’ guild? There are strong people there, right? It’s safe, isn’t it?! Even after what happened. Or the academy, maybe? No, it’s too far.

  The church?

  Acacia stumbles through the full alley, pushing past a stack of crates that the local business had stored there, blocking much of the way, as she breaks out to the main street and trade plaza of the city, stopping.

  Screams born of anarchy fill the air; people, even in this midnight hour, run in every direction. Soldiers clash, fighting against each other in the deepest sanctuary of the city. Buildings explode like shattering mountains as wayward spells shoot in through windows and walls, bricks and rubble fly through the air, and more than one person is caught in the crossfire.

  Acacia stumbles as she watches as a shard of window glass flies through a man’s chest, severing his spine. He falls down immediately, landing dead on top of the woman next to him and crushing down on her with his weight as the world around them burns. People covered in those very flames hang out of the windows of homes, wailing as they’re consumed by the hungering red. A soldier of her nation screams as his opponent parries his strike and then blasts him into a fountain with a spell. He thuds against the ornamental statues, breaking them, his body bent, and he falls into the water at an unnatural angle.

  Acacia covers her mouth, feeling a deep nausea pushing up through her from inside her core. She knows that she has to keep running, but her legs seem to be ignoring her desire for them to do so, and she can only concentrate on the visions shown to her by her shaking eyes.

  “— RUN!” barks a voice next to her. Acacia feels herself being forcefully shoved, and she turns to look at a city guard who is pointing down the main road. “GET TO THE CHURCH! FIND C-” yells the guard at her, turning around to jump into the fight in the heart of the main plaza in front of the adventurers’ guild that is burning. A second later, a blue light flashes past Acacia’s eyes, a hissing gust shoots by her ears. The guardswoman, who had just shoved her, falls down dead; a large, sharp prong of ice, covered in blood, sticks through her head from back to front.

  Acacia looks behind herself, a cold crackling filling the air and clicking in her head as she looks back into the illuminated alley that she had just come through during her escape. The enemy soldiers who had seen her before are moving through it, darkly silhouetted by the flames behind them — one of them with a glowing, blue aura around his hands. The sharp flanges of their helmets, the radiance of the magic and fire reflecting in their eyes, and their coordinated movements as a pack all come together to create silhouettes that, in her feverish mind, resemble a pack of wolves, coming together with the screaming howls that fill the air.

  Acacia runs, moving out of the way just in time as the ground where she was standing freezes over, shackles of ice trying to grab her before she could escape.

  People stream down the road, everyone trying to escape the violence, but fights are happening everywhere. With elite shock-troops, the enemy has pushed in with a coordinated assault. She has no idea how they managed this so quickly and without warning, but considering that she has no military experience, it’s not really something she would know anyway.

  Panicked survivors push and shove, fighting against each other as they stampede, trying to escape the violence all around them. Explosions ring out, filling her ears.

  Suddenly, the rushing crowd turns as something blocks their way down the main road. Acacia watches through the gaps in the people, trying to escape, as a formation of enemy soldiers creates a barrier, blocking the way out with their magic. A prismatic, glassy wall covered in runes and sigils shines to life, spanning across the street from one side to the other, fully blocking off the way.

  In panic, the crowd turns and diverts, moving any way they can, which involves pressing into the nearby alleys and breaking into the nearby houses’ windows — they divert as if they were water, flowing past a blockage by going the only ways it could. Acacia tries to shove her way through the crowd, but she isn’t exactly strong or large, and she’s quickly overpowered by the mass of people who pay her zero mind. In their terror, they simply fail to notice her existence at all.

  Only barely able to stay up on her feet and seeing that she won’t make it with them, she tries to turn around and fight her way back, but has just as little success as the horrified crowd presses against her, and, through their packed bodies, in the brief micro-moments of sight available to her, she catches the silhouette of wolves, the enemy, approaching from down the road.

  — There’s a fresh crackling noise, and Acacia screams, feeling the cold air rise up around her as the magic condenses. She hits the people around her with her fists. They have all jammed themselves into a real mess. Fighting against them is all she can do to not get crushed between them, let alone beneath them. Her cries of the word ‘move’ are, however, drowned out entirely in the voices of the screams that fill the night, her words reaching exactly zero people.

  The spell finishes. Ice rises up around her, growing up her legs and holding her in place. Spires of frozen water rise up, pressing everyone close to her away with sharp prongs. People in the stampede are shoved into the spires by those behind them, blood pouring down all around her as the people of the city impale themselves on the blades in their efforts to make their own escape. The crowd forces their way away, nobody bothering to look at her or to try helping her as she tugs and strikes against the ice that has grown around her legs to little avail. Warm blood runs down the ice, trickling onto her body from the impaled creatures dying on the ring of blades surrounding her.

  All around Acacia, faces begin to vanish as everyone makes their escape; the numbers rapidly dwindle. The world is radiating with the light cast by the enchanted barriers blocking the main road, the shine of hundreds of fires, the splendor of starlight, and flashes of violently explosive magic coming together to really paint the essence of the world for her to see with a clarity that she has been doing her best to avoid seeing until now. However, there is simply no alternative left but to look at it in the brightness of it all. The truth revealed to her by the grace of this glow is that it’s all just empty.

  The faces of the people here, the city she’s been trying to call home, the shell of dreams that she has created for her new life, even the own cavity that she feels inside of her chest — it’s just fully void and blank. There’s nothing there.

  She’s been thrown out of every place that she has ever been, so essentially, even now, in this street, surrounded by hundreds of people who are in the same exact situation that she’s in, she is alone.

  She is a thing that just…

  — Why isn’t anybody helping her?

  Acacia lets out a scream, breaking off a piece of the bloody ice with a fist.

  …She is just a thing that has nowhere to belong.

  How can it be that everyone, literally everyone except her, has somewhere to be, something to do, or something that they’re good at or even just capable of being good at? How is it that everyone can have a slot somewhere in this world that they fit into in some sense, and she’s just… just a thing that’s extra? How can it be that a person is even capable of being someone who absolutely does not belong anywhere at all?

  How can it be that a person is just a total zero from start to finish? How is that even possible?

  The crowd finally clears out, leaving her trapped there by herself. Acacia lifts her gaze, looking at the small group of enemy soldiers approaching — the ones who had been hounding her this whole time from the alley.

  She lifts her hands towards the approaching footman, the ice caster, who does not seem impressed by her threat.

  What a mess this whole life of hers was. What the hell was even the point? What was even the point if every day of her life, every effort, every action, every hope, and every dream she had were calculated together at the end for a full, total, grand sum of zero?

  Anything.

  Anything is better than never having done anything at all in life. Even a scrap, even a tiny little glimmer of defiance, is all that she wants to have before she dies. She needs there to be more, anything at all, just one thing. She just needs one thing before she dies. It has to be more than zero. It has to be. It has to be.

  A cold, blue light encapsulates the soldier’s hand that is pointed at her.

  Acacia screams, filling the full, total void that makes up not only the darkness of night, the emptiness of people’s hearts, but also her own spirit during this midnight hour with a howl that never seems to stop as she casts a spell, any spell at all, as long as she does something, literally anything that is more than —

  “…Zero…” whispers Acacia, the word that leaves her lips with the foggy, warm vapors of her breath traveling through the firelit anarchy as a weightless presence. The hollow sound creeps and crawls through the wretched cries that fill the night, differentiating itself from the endless stamping of boots and the clashing of metal as it slides in between those crude noises, which are caused by the rough material world — it being born of something entirely immaterial. Yes, it was her lips that spoke it, which are as physical and tangible as the rest of her body is, but the word itself stemmed from the core, hollow pit that she feels not in said corporeal form but rather within her spiritual essence — her soul. The whisper strings along, winding its way through the city, through thousands of people, animals, and houses, all of them stuck in that single time-frozen moment. It slithers and crawls like the strange, cold thing that it is as it looks for something that is not there, until that single word which she spoke eventually creeps and meanders its way up to the sky, floating on towards, not the stars, but instead to the full void that that they hang in.

  The single word, the simple statement of the universal, fundamental truth of her existence, connects with its own likeness, vanishing into the crushing emptiness that is beyond everything that exists, just as it had been waiting for her to do for ages now long forgotten.

  “Do not move, Your Highness,” says the enemy soldier with a strong accent as the ice grows around Acacia, rising up from the ground with round, thin walls that grow to encase her in a domed cylinder, in an eggshell made of thick ice.

  Acacia leans forward, hitting her hands against the prison and then her head, leaving it to rest there against the barrier as she just finally allows herself to give in and cries.

  “Zero…” she repeats to herself, finally realizing that this is really all that she is. Her vision of the outside of the icy cylinder is foggy because the material isn’t clearly translucent, so she can only see vague shadows and blurs moving around on the other side. The inside of the small prison that she’s trapped inside of is lit alight by the refractions of so many various lights that are caught inside of it together with her, entering only to illuminate the presence of a true nobody with so many spectacular colors, refracting through the prism of the ice onto her. “Zero,” she repeats, thunking her head against the wall hard enough that it hurts.

  It doesn’t look like she’s going to be killed. It looks like they’ve come to capture her. It appears that the enemy knew that she was here in this city, unguarded. But why would she even need to be guarded? After all, what is here that is worth guarding?

  — Nothing.

  She’s an absolute, total, final depiction of a person whose whole value as a creature can be tallied up to a grand total of zer-

  “- I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” says a strange voice, interrupting her broken thoughts.

  Acacia’s eyes open wide, and she stares and then lifts her gaze, looking around the tiny bubble that she’s trapped inside of. The voice just now — it was close. “Take it from me,” it says — he says. “If you think that number too often, well… Just don’t, okay?” Acacia looks around in confusion, not seeing anything else in her prison. Is one of the soldiers talking outside?

  The bubble that she’s inside of moves, being lifted off the ground. Ice crackles beneath her feet as her prison is made mobile.

  “No,” replies the man, as if reading her thoughts. “Anyway, where the hell am I?” he asks. “Oh.”

  Acacia figures that’s a good question. She can’t see anybody else here with her in this tight space; only the dark, dancing silhouettes can be seen through the glassy walls. “Hellooo~?” asks the man’s voice, echoing as if coming from somewhere dark and far away.

  — She feels pressure in her body. Acacia clenches her chest as she looks down in horror, seeing something bulging against her stomach from the inside.

  “Oh,” says the man’s voice. “This is… this is not what I expected when I left to go buy grocer-”

  In indescribable terror, Acacia immediately vomits, feeling a sensation of wildly confused body-horror. She purges, her chest heaving as black, vapory smoke pours continually out of her mouth, running through her throat and over her tongue, leaving a taste of metal as it goes, flowing out to the frozen ground at her feet as its overflow leaks out of her nose. She heaves again and vomits more of the smoke out, but it doesn’t feel like the weight in her gut is becoming any less. Her body continues to pour the creature out of itself, but the ice-bubble only begins to fill up with the heavy smoke that gathers around her feet, pooling as if someone were pouring black water into her prison from above, intent on drowning her in it.

  It never stops. This keeps going until the smoke is at her knees, and then it's at her waist, and she tries to scream in terror, but only more of the tar escapes her mouth, rather than words. The heavy, cold, wet smoke is at her chest, and soon after that, she drowns in it, unable to vomit any more of the blackness out because she is already fully swimming in it, suspended in it. It surrounds her like a pool of ink, smelling vaguely of… nothing. It’s just blank.

  “Well, this has been a very new experience,” says the man’s voice. The smoke all around her moves, condensing a little on one side as he presses against the ice. “So, nice to meet you,” he says. “I think we have the same favorite number. That’s nice, right?” he asks. The smoke condenses a little and flows around the prison, testing the walls of the wobbling construction. “I heard your thoughts from the other side. I’d say sorry for invading your personal space, but, uh… you know,” says the voice, leaving it at that. “You should have some breakfast tomorrow, maybe.”

  “What are you?!” screams Acacia, her words muffled by the smoke.

  “Good question,” replies the entity. “I guess I’m nothing,” he explains, as the shadow seems to coil around and over itself.

  Acacia’s eyes go wide, and she leans her back against the ice, her feet still trapped, as she impossibly tries to get away from it. But she’s submerged fully inside of it, just as it is still inside of her. Even with all of the vapors that have been removed, she can still feel more of it in her gut, writhing around in the emptiness as if it were a parasite so massive that one could never fully finish extracting it.

  “So, a princess, huh?” he asks. “Wild stuff. What a world. But hey, magic is real; that’s neat, right?” he asks. “Don’t mind me. I’m kind of in your thoughts. It’s uh… it’s a thing.”

  Acacia screams in horror, flailing her arms around herself wildly in panic as she tries to bat him away, but to little avail. He has no body, no shape, and no form. ‘He’, this thing, is nothing but a thick, dense smoke that she can never really touch, despite it being here with her.

  “…Yeah, I got that a lot in my old life too,” sighs the man. “It’s not easy being nobody, is it?” he asks.

  Hearing that question, Acacia suddenly stops, her fist still hanging inside the smoke that drifts through her clenched fingers like flowing water, and the heavy vapor swirls around the prison. Slowly, she lifts her gaze, looking at the emptiness that surrounds her and that fills her. She’s terrified and confused; everything feels wrong, and she’s broken in spirit and mind. “…I just wanted to be something,” she mutters, not sure why exactly she’s talking to the entity, what it is, or even if any of this makes sense. She’s past all of that. But it does feel vaguely familiar in a way she can’t explain. “It didn’t have to be much,” admits Acacia. The darkness moves around, writhing. “Just… anything. Anything at all. Just more than ze…” She stops herself as the shadows condense, rippling. “— More than nothing.”

  The smoke moves, swirling around her as it tests the ice. “Yeah, I feel you,” he replies. “Joke’s on me though; I guess I got my wish… sort of.”

  “What are you?” she asks again. “Are you a demon? A ghost?”

  The emptiness pulls itself together, condensing into a singular mass rather than staying as a cloud that fills the ice-bubble. “Nothing,” it repeats. “As I was, I am, and apparently I will always be.”

  “Are you strong?” she asks.

  “I learned to do thirty push-ups in two months. I like to think that I'm in the game," he replies.

  It’s entirely out of place, given the context, but Acacia can’t help but laugh at that ridiculous statement. The girl laughs and laughs, clenching her tightly compressed gut as what may be either a small break in the insanity of the day or an escalation of it takes full hold of her. It’s hard to say for sure.

  “If I were something… Well…” begins the voice as she slowly quiets down after a very long moment. “Hey. I know we just met, but I have a weird question,” it says. “If I were anything at all,” starts the voice that comes from the emptiness all around her. “What do you think I should be?” he asks.

  Acacia looks at the darkness, wiping her eyes. She likes that question. It’s actually, in a way, something she wishes she could ask someone too. “I guess the farthest thing from what you are now, or?” she suggests. “Anything is better than nothing.”

  “The farthest thing…” mutters the shadow, confused. It swims around like a fish in a tank that is much too small, circling with nowhere to go. “Just hypothetically, what would that be for you?” he asks, the faceless shape turning her way.

  Acacia stares for a time, her terror having dissipated. She knows that she just wished to be asked that only a second ago, but now that it's come, she’s actually unprepared for the question. Of course, her thoughts dance between thousands of things. If she could be anyone, she would want to be someone who is cherished, revered, wanted, strong, kind, noble, just, and every other quality that a human on the search for perfection might strive towards. Full. Not with the bounties of the material world, but with those of the spiritual. Loved, whole, and perfect.

  “Go crazy,” encourages the voice. “I don’t know you, and you don’t know me. No shame.”

  Acacia, without embarrassment, looks at it and nods. “I’d be the queen,” she explains, pointing at herself. “I’d be the queen,” affirms Acacia resolutely. “And I’d make a world where nobody ever had to feel this empty.”

  “Oooh, good answer, Your Majesty,” replies the man, perhaps sarcastically, perhaps not. “Let’s do that.”

  “Huh?” asks Acacia, blinking.

  “I always wanted to be something,” explains the shadow’s voice. “Well, I’m here now. Magic is real, apparently, and I’m a horrible monstrosity, so how about we play pretend?” he suggests. "You and I." The shadow moves towards her, looming over her head as it comes into a form that is almost in the shape of a man, but not quite. “You play the queen,” he explains. “- and I’ll play the knight. We’ll make it a thing.”

  “I don’t think life works like that,” replies Acacia, maintaining a smile for the first time in a while. It’s almost a cute idea, if it and this entire situation weren’t both horrifying in their context. But apart from that, it’s, awkwardly enough, a little embarrassing. She hasn’t been asked to play pretend in a long time.

  But playing pretend is better than nothing, isn’t it? At least pretending is a step over full emptiness, isn’t it?

  “Why not?” he asks. “You got anything better to do?”

  Acacia looks around herself. It’s certainly an absurd question, but all of this is absurd. She looks back at the creature and then shakes her head.

  “No, good Sir Knight,” she replies, ready to join in on the game. Why not?

  Really. Why the hell not? She was going to die today anyway. Why not have some fun for once? Sure, she’s clearly losing her mind, but why does that have to be an unfun thing?

  Acacia, covered in ash, blood, and grime, grabs the sides of her tattered, ripped, and blood-soaked dress as she lowers herself into a formal curtsy, as one would expect of a noblewoman of the court — as best as she can in the confined space, at least.

  The shadow creeps around, crawling and prodding through her head, and she can feel it doing so, tingling and tickling the back corners of her brain as it searches for something, anything, that would fit as a piece of this new puzzle that they’re making, and it apparently finds it.

  It finds an old, washed out, faded memory of a childhood story that flashes before her eyes — a children’s story of a brave knight and a princess. A priest told her once that it was based on a real legend, a prophecy, but that was so long ago, so old and forgotten, that in this nation, only the tiniest scraps of the fable remain as children’s stories.

  The ice begins to split as the shadow takes on a coherent shape, forming a gestalt that will clearly be much too large for the bubble that they’re trapped in once it is complete.

  “Let’s do it,” says Acacia, looking at him. She points at the entity, fully diving into this makebelieve, pretend game of theirs now that she has thrown away her senses of embarrassment and fear. If she’s nothing, she has nothing to lose. If she has nothing material, nothing tangible, nothing real to show or hold onto, then she will create the next best thing. “Brave Sir Knight, I order you to bring me to my throne!” yells Acacia, having nothing left to lose. Her voice cascades around the icy bubble back and forth a hundred times over, ringing out all around her in varying intensity and chime as it bounces across the ice.

  — The ice cracks as the immense pressure of a rising spirit wells inside of it, violently shattering the magical prison into a thousand pieces. Shards of jagged ice fly everywhere all at once, soldiers flying back from the force of the blade storm. The frozen chrysalis is abruptly dropped to the ground, shattering.

  The hulking shadow of a gigantic man rises up from the icy pedestal, the total darkness of nightfall coming together into a coherent shape to form the ghastly presence of a creature. Darkness makes up the body contained within his armor, which is fully crafted of shadow-work, and his regal cape, flowing in the chilled winds of midnight, is made of nothing but total, full void, which contrasts the promising starlight shine of the massive blade that gleams in his hands.

  Voices scream in terror in languages not spoken in this land as the specialist group of enemy soldiers quickly recovers from the shock, rising back to their feet only to find their eyes locked in place on it — him.

  They mutter, whispers carrying through the scream-filled night.

  Acacia looks at the familiar silhouette of the ice-caster.

  “Der Schwarze Ritter…” whispers the man in fear, speaking the language of the enemy tongue. ‘The Black Knight’.

  The massive shadow lunges forward, consuming the many new screams to come in its depths as he barrels through the enemy, the great sword cutting through a dozen men at once, filling the emptiness with the first vivid color she’s seen in a while as the entity follows the instincts of the creature from the legend rather than its own. His cape, full not of color but of the pure night sky itself captured in fabric, obscures the vision of the carnage for a moment, as if it were all swallowed by a living nightmare, crawling free from the depths of slumber.

  — Red.

  And it falls from the sky, landing at her feet as the magical ice that has trapped her breaks, the blood droplets staining the cobblestones as if they were forming a carpet, decorating her coronation ceremony.

  Acacia steps down off of the platform, watching, as for the first time that day she feels right. For the first time, as she watches the monster cleave men in half and throw others through windows and walls, their blades and spells not even coming close to harming it, she feels content. She feels like she’s more than nothing. She should feel horror. She should feel terror. She should be screaming and running for her life, holding onto the bit of her coherent mind that remains.

  — Blood splashes against her cold face as she watches the carnage, mixing in with a happy tear that feels so wildly out of place. She has never seen death on a scale like today, and yet she feels happy.

  It’s all so absurd.

  Finally, something happened.

  Sometimes, even in the heaviest, most crushing moment in life, even if it’s the entire antithesis of what has happened to oneself, it can be good to remember that a new day will still come tomorrow and, even if it feels like today will never end, to remember that one is still able to play pretend long enough for the moon to fall and for the sun to rise once more.

  Because maybe tomorrow is going to be better.

  Or maybe not. Maybe it won’t be.

  But no matter what, doing anything at all is still better than doing nothing — even if that something you had to do was to pretend that everything is alright.

  Acacia stares at the window that had appeared before her in disbelief, her vision fading as all of the stress of the day finally catches up to her now, in this moment out of all moments, and her sickness raises in severity.

  Her vision goes dark as she falls over, watching the silhouette of the heroic knight cut through the emptiness as she collapses.

  He’s never killed people before.

  He’s also never been a disembodied spirit thrown into another world before either, so there are lots of things that are different today, actually. However, despite whatever has happened to him, he can feel something changing and writhing inside of himself. Maybe it's the atmosphere, maybe it's this pretend game that they’re playing, or maybe it’s the armor — they say you should always dress for the job you want and not the one you have, after all — but whatever has initiated this change in his perceptions of the world doesn’t even make him feel that bad about the death — his own as well as that all around him in this moment.

  Even more surprisingly, he quite apparently knows how to fight, even if he, in that old life of his, had never been much of a fighter. The enemy soldiers seem to be rattled, of course. By all accounts, he should be too. However, he simply isn’t.

  Following his base instinct rather than any skillful training that has been mastered over years, if not decades, of dedication, the heavy knight swings his blade, the star-hewn sword cutting through the metal that it meets, lifted in fear to block its strike. The enemy’s weapon, much like the faltering man behind it, fall to the ground — both very much not in the shape that they were in before.

  It’s not shocking for him. It’s not grotesque or frightening; it doesn’t scar his mind or soul, as the digging nails of a person fighting for life in the grasp of a predator would scar the body. He wasn’t a hard man in his last life, he’s pretty sure. But this almost feels… mundane. It’s no different than when he left his house to buy groceries. It just feels like it’s his daily routine. It’s…

  — Well, he hates to say it, but fighting and killing these people in what should be the greatest rush of his existence is just kind of empty.

  He plunges the massive starlight sword down into the next man’s chest, who had been knocked onto the ground on his back from the exploding ice. The pierced man grasps the edge of the blade that presses through his broken ribs and down to the stones beneath him, screaming as his arms flail. The sword that is plunged through him and into the world below reaches from just below his neck down to his navel.

  The knight twists the sword, and the man falls silent, his arms landing limply on the ground.

  He doesn’t know how long it has been, actually, since he was the man who went to buy food in that other world. He had done so and died on the way back home, encountering the cosmic entity, whom he cannot name. But after his dismissal by the creature, the god, the demon, whatever it was, he simply ceased to be for a time, as far as he is able to tell.

  He was truly nothing in the deepest sense.

  A sword plunges itself through his chest from behind.

  The knight turns his head, looking at the shaking man standing behind him with his hands still on the hilt of his weapon. Sir Knight places his armored palm flatly onto the tip of the blade and simply slides it back out of himself, pushing it out through his back from his front as he stares at the soldier.

  The sword slides free out of his back without a drop of blood on it and falls to the ground at his feet, between the two of them. The soldier steps back and then screams, running off, vanishing into the chaos.

  — At least that sense of him being lost was the case until he heard the girl’s whisper, reaching and calling out into the eternal void, a word connected to someone’s soul. He had grasped hold of that spiritual string of fate as if it were a lifeline, pulling himself along this metaphysical cord until he had yanked himself all the way down out of nothingness and into her soul, which exists in a body that exists in the very physical, real, material world.

  And so he himself, by using her as a vessel, had become a physical, material thing once again.

  In a manner of speaking.

  — But there may be a catch. After all, he’s tethered to her now. He has become physical and real, but only because she is so. They’re tied together.

  He can tell as much because of the sensation in his chest, his torso nudging to the side as if someone were pulling on him. Sir Knight turns his gaze, looking at the two enemy soldiers who scoop up Her Majesty, who has fallen over incapacitated from her illness, and are in the process of carrying her away.

  The man arcs his arm back and hurtles his massive sword off towards them, the blade spinning in the air, connected to his arm by a black string made out of pure lightlessness. He yanks the cord back as the blade slices through both of their necks. The flying sword launches back towards himself as both of the men fall over together with their load, both now a little lighter than they were before.

  His metal gauntlet lets out a heavy rattle as the hilt of the ethereal weapon lands back in it, its force pushing him back a step as the night falls quiet apart from one last sound.

  — Ice crackles all around him, the air hissing in excitement as it grows heavy and cold. He lifts his gaze, looking up to the sky that is filled with hovering icicles, glistening in the night as if the heavenly stars had fallen down low. Instinctively, he lifts his cloak, throwing it over his shoulder and letting it billow through the air as he jumps and looms over the girl, shielding her and himself from a barrage of sharp, razor icicles crashing down all around them. Hundreds of them shatter the stones at his feet, shards of rock and frozen-wet flying all around the air, but hundreds more simply vanish into the cloak as if they were being plunged into a body of water, never to return.

  The spell ends, and everything turns quiet.

  He lowers the cloak.

  Sir Knight, as is apparently his new name, turns to look over the chaos that remains. Houses are on fire, and corpses lie all around him. People watch from the nearby windows, and soldiers, who he can only assume are from this nation, stand in a circle around them, having watched the one man that he is fight against these dozens of, apparently, elite enemy troops without having felt the desire or need to intervene. He isn’t sure which.

  He only recognizes as much because he was in the girl’s, Acacia’s, thoughts before, having been connected to her soul during his escape from the void. That connection has imprinted a lot of memories and knowledge of this world on him. Not everything, but enough to grasp the situation. This is another world, separate from the one he came from, just as he himself is an entity, separate from the creature he once was.

  Dutiful Sir Knight lifts his shining sword and wipes it off on his billowing cloak, then returns it to its scabbard. The ethereal blade, made out of otherworldly blankness, compresses as he stores it away.

  One or two of the enemies had escaped during the ice-caster’s spell, but that’s fine. The fight appears to have come to an end. Vague stragglers might still be scouring around the city as they organize their retreat, but they’ll dissipate soon enough.

  Given the distance of this place from the front line, it’s likely that this was a special operation meant specifically to kidnap the former princess. They don’t have the forces here for a sustained onslaught now that the element of surprise has faded.

  Sir Knight rises to his feet, rubbing his helmet as he tries to understand how he knows so much about the world and its happenings. It’s a real twist for his thoughts, and even if he’s pretty much on board with the strange happenings of fate that have brought him here, it’s still all kind of a lot and very sudden. He really could use a minute to catch up.

  As the fires crackle around him, the last shards of glass falling from the broken windows as if they were flakes of snow, he looks down at the dirty, bruised creature down at his feet. There are marks of ash and blood all over her, her wrists and arms smeared with grime, and a welt growing on her forehead where something hard had struck her earlier in the day, the smell of alcohol still lingering.

  — He looks around the area.

  Dozens of curious faces, belonging to guardsmen who had not bothered to interfere in his fight and to the people of the city, staring out of homes and alleyways, look to meet him, and he realizes now that the sound he hears isn’t the crackling of fire and screams.

  It’s cheers and claps.

  He’s really not used to hearing that.

  Sir Knight bends down, lifting Acacia off the ground as the people of the city move in, running towards him with feverish glows in their eyes.

  A hand claps his shoulder. “That was amazing!”

  “What level are you?!” asks an excited woman, tugging on his wrist and shaking Acacia’s head by doing so.

  A young man steps in before him, looking in awe. “What’s your name?!” he asks, blocking the way. Sir Knight walks forward, and the man moves before he’s crushed.

  “Hey. We could use you in the guard,” says an older guardsman, holding out a small advertising slip.

  “Forget that! Hey, you want to join my party?” asks an elven woman. “We’ll give you double-rates!”

  Somewhat confused, Sir Knight looks around at all of them as he walks. They’re like tiny birds, chirping up at him for something, and he can’t quite understand what they want. Nobody ever approached him like this before in his old life, so why would they do so now?

  In a way, he knows that it’s because he’s strong now and that his presence is imposing. But the newness of this sort of attention… He looks around at them, and he can’t help but wonder if anyone would bother to look at him if this wasn’t the case, if he was just a nobody.

  — Of course, he knows the answer to that.

  Their attention, affection, and desires are contingent on his uniqueness and strength. His being useful, physically or socially, for them is a firm requirement for them to pay him any kindness or mind.

  He lifts Her Majesty higher up so that they don’t touch her in their efforts to prod him.

  In all of them, even if they don’t know it, beyond the glimmer in their eyes that yearns for survival and thriving, there is just nothing.

  They’re empty.

  And in a way that is so deeply ironic at this point, he finds that disgusting. Of all the places to be empty, behind one’s eyes is the worst.

  Sir Knight does his best to escape from them all, vanishing into the night. His cloak flows over the bodies of the dead enemy soldiers as he walks over them; the dark, all-absorbing fabric drapes over them as would a burial shroud in the wind, and, by the time he passes, the dead are stripped of their armor and weapons, the equipment and their possessions having been absorbed into his inventory.

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