The man’s head hung over the edge of the table so the fact he was missing his lower jaw was the first thing that drew Priscilla’s gaze. His eyes had been gouged out, leaving empty sockets staring straight at them, and the flesh of his nose looked like it had been gnawed on. Strips of his cheek flesh had been peeled but not removed, so they dangled next to the eye sockets like a sick approximation of bangs. The man’s arms were splayed over the edge, hanging in a way that made his lack of fingers all the more apparent, the knobby white of the knuckle bone hanging on by a single piece of flesh.

  His ribcage was spread outwards like the horrible wings of an angel and that was where Priscilla lost her breakfast.

  She turned to the side of the door and threw up everything in her stomach. Priscilla coughed and gagged again when the smell hit her, more bile escaping her throat. Her eyes burned with reflexive tears and when she closed her eyes, all she could see was that man and the way his rib cage had been ripped open brutally as if he was a present and his heart was the prize.

  There was a touch on her back that startled her but it was only Sulaiman, crouching down to rub her back gently. Priscilla leaned gratefully into the touch, letting it anchor her as she tried to calm down her stomach and gag reflex. She didn’t close her eyes because the vision plagued her each time she blinked, and Priscilla just focused on breathing in and out, staring at the garden before her. It was unnaturally still, but it was far better than what was in the house

  It took a few minutes, but eventually Priscilla didn’t think she was going to throw up anymore. Sulaiman had fetched her water pouch from the horse and she ruthlessly used it to rinse out her mouth until the bitter taste of bile was a distant memory.

  “Did you know…” Sulaiman trailed off as Priscilla sharply shook her head.

  “Gods, no,” Priscilla said, pushing herself back to her feet. “I thought maybe…” that they would find an imposter here, one they could catch stumbling into a lie so they could deal with them before they had a chance to work their poison into Kavil’s psyche.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter what I thought we’d find,” Priscilla said. “I wouldn’t have made you open that door if I knew what was on the other side.”

  Sulaiman watched her, like he expected her to shatter.

  That made her stubbornness flare up and Priscilla straightened her spine and looked him straight in the eye.

  “Do you think you can help me bury him?” Priscilla asked.

  Sulaiman’s eyes widened before he looked contemplative.

  “We don’t know him,” he said slowly. “We don’t have any obligation to him, especially when you can scarcely look at him.”

  Priscilla was already shaking her head.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Priscilla said firmly, gathering up her courage and resolving to look back at the man because she knew she needed to if she wanted to stand by her convictions. Her stomach turned over again as she stared into the man’s empty eye sockets but there was nothing left in her stomach to throw up.

  Priscilla knew who he had to be because she knew who had butchered him to steal his identity.

  He had been a person once, a man named Frean who liked to garden and always brought Kavil the best from his garden and told tales from his youthful past of being an adventurer. Frean had been a good man, a simple gardener who enjoyed his slow life after traveling the world. His only flaw was that he lived an isolated life, which made for easy pickings.

  “If I died like that,” Priscilla said softly, “I wouldn’t want my body to just lay there like a monument for the person who did that to me. I would hope that whoever found me might care enough to give me a peaceful rest.”

  Sulaiman turned to look at Frean as well, a thoughtful frown on his face.

  “It’d probably be easier to cremate him,” Sulaiman said, voice quiet, “and then spread the ashes throughout the earth. I’m not very talented with earth magic, but I can at least do that much.”

  Though inwardly Priscilla balked at having to smell burning human flesh and she knew it would work its way into her nightmares because the scariest things were always based on truth, Priscilla pushed that selfish part to the side because what Sulaiman was suggesting was the objectively the better idea. They really didn’t have time to dig up a grave because they had to get to Kavil as fast as possible to try and beat the bandits there.

  It wasn't about her, it was about respecting human dignity.

  No one deserved to lay on a table like a piece of livestock, the choicest pieces of meat picked clean from their bones.

  “We should get him out of the house,” Priscilla said, though her hands shook at the idea of actually touching him.

  “We could just burn it all down,” Sulaiman offered, though his heart didn’t seem in it.

  Priscilla just shook her head, steadying her nerves and took careful steps towards Frean. The smell grew worse as she approached him, and Priscilla had to force bile back down her throat, but she was able to hold it together as she got a better look at him.

  His chest cavity had clearly been rummaged through with carelessness. The only organs that were still remaining was the digestive system, which had shriveled and rotted.

  Bone-deep revulsion went through Priscilla as she knew exactly what had happened to them. Frearn’s organs had been eaten one by one by a doppelganger named Kopica'a. With each organ consumed, Kopica'a gained a deeper understanding of Frean and his life until the doppelganger ate the heart, allowing Kopica'a to taste the shape of Frean’s soul to make their transformation perfect.

  The problem with Kopica'a had slipped her mind with the village’s demise on the horizon, but Kopica'a was a threat that should be dealt with because of their connection with the cult. They had originally been tasked with tempting Kavil to join hands with them by using Frean’s face, which failed since the bandits attacked. When Kavil met with Kopica'a again, Kopica'a had used Kavil’s guilt against him and lured the party into a trap that meant to kill everyone save Kavil, hoping to make the healer feel despair from losing everything again so that he would willingly embrace the church’s ideals.

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  Her fist tightened into something painful as anger ignited deep within Priscilla. The anger Sulaiman had summoned a few days ago was mere child’s play compared to this – this was the type of anger that took down countries and salted the earth for generations to come. The type of anger that burned cold, filling one with rationality and forethought to maximize another’s pain.

  The type of anger that made someone willing to kill and to kill cruelly at that, relishing in each sound of pain their victim made before giving them an ignoble death, leaving their body to sink deep beneath water to be forgotten and picked apart by scavengers.

  When she came across them, Priscilla would make Kopica’a suffer. She would first try to force them to reveal their true nature to ruin their cover, make them feel the pain that Kopica’a feared so much, and kill Kopica’a outright if Priscilla thought she could get away with it. The doppelganger was a dangerous enemy who specialized in infiltration and Priscilla only knew one of their identities. She knew that if they had just eaten the organs, Kopica’a would have enough genetic material to make a perfect replica, but they went farther than that, defacing Frean’s corpse simply because they could.

  Sulaiman coming next to her jolted Priscilla out of her thoughts. In his hands was a blanket from the bed.

  “It isn’t much,” Sulaiman said, “but it’s the closest thing to a funeral shroud.”

  Priscilla nodded, breathing in shallowly.

  Justice would be achieved another day. Now, she had to pay her respects. They decided to use the rest of the bedding to wrap their hands so they didn’t have to touch the body directly.

  Together, Priscilla and Sulaiman carefully grabbed one of Frean’s arms and legs. As they lifted him from the table, the body left it was a wet squelch that made Priscilla flinch. But she kept her grip steady as they lowered him onto the blanket.

  Sulaiman knelt down to adjust Freans’ arms into a more natural looking pose, even though it took some effort due to the body’s stiffness. Priscilla then wrapped Frean in the blanket, tying off by his feet and Sulaiman tied off near his head.

  They carried him outside in silence, placing him down for only the time it took Sulaiman to clear a patch of grass near the garden so they wouldn’t start a prairie fire, and then they placed in the center.

  “May my flames help you find peace,” Sulaiman said, bowing his head towards Frean. Then he raised his hand and Priscilla barely even registered the pain in her arm as she watched Frean’s body catch fire. The flames burned so hot and so high that Frean’s body was barely visible, and though the nearby grass smoldered, another flicker of pain, and it went out, leaving a burned ring around the body. There were cracks and pops as flesh sizzled and bones snapped, unable to withstand the heat.

  But the worst thing was the smell. She was sure it was going to become a staple of her nightmares.

  Because the scent in the air was very similar to one of beef or pork roasting over an open flame.

  Priscilla latched onto the pain in her body from Sulaiman’s magic, letting it anchor herself as she felt unmoored at the unexpectedness of that. This was worse than if the burning body smelled disgusting or if it would make her instinctively gag.

  It was something that she would almost find appealing if she hadn’t been watching the body burn ahead of her and that thought made her disgusted with herself.

  But Priscilla couldn’t look away not until the very last bones turned to ash, committing the sight to her memory.

  This was the level of violence she was living with in this new world. Priscilla could very much get killed if she made the wrong move. But Priscilla couldn’t just let the fucking cult to continue to get away with doing shit like this. Besides, if they succeeded, it was the end of the fucking world and she would die along with everyone else.

  The cult viewed time on a scale much larger than her own; they had a thousand years to build up a follower base and lay out plans within plans to ensure there were no loose ends. The only thing Priscilla had going for her was that she knew many of those plans, at least the ones that seemed to have the most importance. It was honestly harder to pick out a scheme or catastrophe the cult didn’t have at least some sort of involvement with, even if it was only tangentially.

  Priscilla may not be able to speak to anyone about what she knew, but they couldn’t control what she did, and if she coincidentally continued to fuck up the cult’s plans, well, they’d just have to deal with it. They might try to kill her for interfering, but that wouldn’t be for a few years since the cult wasn’t to the point where they made overt moves. The wouldn’t retaliate before she had collected members of Illnyea’s original party and convince them to help take up the fight.

  Sulaiman had been surprisingly adept at hearing what she wasn’t saying, and he was far from the only savvy member who could read between the lines. Many of the cult’s plans affected the original party members and if she could show them proof that the cult was behind it, then they’d be committed to the cause. There were also antagonists that might be able to be convinced to switch sides as well, and Priscilla had a keen insight into just what made them tick and what she might be able to promise them to gain their loyalty.

  Kopica’a was not one of those lucky few.

  The fire went out and Sulaiman placed his palms against the ground. A spike of pain in her toes and then the ground underneath the body turned soft, the ashen remains filtering through and mixing with the dirt until it reached an even, rich brown color and it stopped moving. The surface was perfectly even, like nothing had even happened here if you didn’t find a dirt circle in a field unnatural.

  “I saw a letter on the ground next to the bed,” Sulaiman said, staring at the dirt. “It was addressed to a man named Frean. The sender professed that they wanted to speak with him because they had lost their entire adventuring party and wanted to know how he got over losing his.”

  That certainly was an effective way to get Frean to open up his doors by appealing to his empathy and compassion. Kopica’a probably arrived at the house as a guest who would pass as a traumatized adventurer, probably slipping something into Frean’s tea to paralyze him because Kopica’a liked to think themselves above bashing someone’s head in.

  Sulaiman pressed his hands against the ground again, and the ground shifted to have a small plaque in the center. A phrase was gouged into the dirt, “Here lies Frean.”

  Priscilla couldn’t tell Sulaiman to add anything else to the grave because her tongue locked in place when she tried. She felt a kinship to Cassandra, though she considered her luckier than Apollo’s priestess. Cassandra could speak of the future only could see, she was doomed to never be believed even as she begged and screamed for someone to listen.

  Priscilla could never speak of what she knew, but she had at least one person who believed her, who had chosen to walk alongside her for at least a short while.

  Sulaiman’s hands lingered on the earth, his eyes dark, flinty, and unsatisfied as he examined his handiwork.

  “What was the sender’s name?” Priscilla asked, her throat a little hoarse.

  “Marie Rolland,” Sulaiman said, “but I find it unlikely that is their real name considering the circumstances.”

  The last of the smoke was dissipating in the air, stolen away by the wind.

  “May you find peace in the afterlife you believe in, Frean,” Priscilla said. Sulaiman echoed her words and they stared at the pitiful excuse for a grave for a moment longer.

  As they remounted their horses, something dark, ugly, and true settled in her soul.

  Priscilla was going to become a killer sooner than later, and she feared that she would embrace that title with less hesitance than she once had thought. She was surely disappointing Mr. –– but that pang of regret was easy enough to ignore, because she knew that Mr. –– would want one thing for her above all else.

  Mr. –– would want Priscilla to survive.