Ava Sheridan is thirteen or one thousand and twenty-four when she finds the only path to her sister’s survival.

  Ava Sheridan is thirteen or one thousand and twenty-four or utterly miserable when she learns that she and Regina can never survive together.

  It starts something like this.

  (It ends something like this.)

  Ava is in that garden again, the one with so many ducks and flowers and peace. The duck she is borrowing this time is curiously bnk, probably because Ava had to fight to see this particur vision, since the thread kept sliding away from her when she tried to grab it.

  She knows, in her heart of hearts, that this will finally grant her the answer she has been seeking.

  She knows that there is a reason this truth was being hidden from her.

  She is still not prepared.

  Regina is an adult woman sitting on the edge of the water and leaning against Artem Alpin as if she could not sit upright on her own.

  Mostly, Ava realizes as she swims closer, because Regina’s body is shaking so hard the tears are spreading far beyond Artem’s shoulder as he holds her against him.

  “I wanted a daughter,” she says between sobs. “I wanted a daughter so badly.”

  “I know dear heart,” says Artem softly. “I know.”

  “I love our sons,” says Regina.

  “I know you do,” says Artem. “They know you do.”

  “Yet I also wanted a daughter named Ava,” says Regina. “I will never stop missing my sister.”

  Ava freezes, as the words wash over her like a bucket of ice.

  “We will always mourn Ava,” Artem says softly, even as he presses his lips to his wife’s brow. “We will love her for as long as we live. It does not mean that you have not been a mother though. Thousands of little girls in Carcosa have benefitted from your love and care. We will not call them Ava, but you have cared for them as your own every day.”

  Regina looks up to smile at him through her tears, grateful and loving even through her tears.

  “None of that would be possible,” she tells her husband, “without you lending me your strength and support,”

  Then Regina looks down again, sorrow coloring her next words.

  “Even so,” Regina says, grief making her voice rough, “it does not repay my debt to my sister. Ava was… was the only love and support I really knew as a child. I know now that my parents and Henrietta and my cousins loved me, but Ava was the only one who could show me that love. I just wish I could repay that love by honoring her further.”

  Ava starts to realize the truth and tries to ignore it, pushing it desperately away from her.

  “When Ava was murdered…” Regina trails off in a tone of grief and rage. “I lost all hope and faith. I was so lost and floating, but it also made me what I am now.”

  No, thinks Ava. No.

  This… cannot be the truth.

  This can not be the truth Ava has hidden from herself.

  “Ava is,” continues Regina mercilessly, “the only reason I am still alive now. I swore to survive for her when they killed her. I… sometimes think that my magic only manifested because I so desperately wanted to find a way to survive. More than that, unknown to myself, I wanted someone who would love me as much as Ava loved me. I owe her everything.”

  Oh, thinks Ava. Well, that would expin things.

  “I do as well,” Artem says gently, cupping Regina’s cheek, love clear in his eyes. “Were it not for your sister, I would have died before you out of loneliness and grief. Her promise that you would save me one day gave me a reason to keep on living.”

  Gently, Artem wipes away Regina’s tears, even as she leans against him for strength.

  “So let us repay her together,” Artem says with a tenderness that is years away from the wounded child he once was. “Let us make duck ponds everywhere in Carcosa. Perhaps her spirit will see our happiness? Near those ponds, let us build schools in her honor. Every poor and orphaned child in our kingdom will be educated because of the gifts she gave both of us.”

  So Artem wants Ava to see their happiness after her own death to grant them that happiness?

  It is, thinks Ava, as the truth settles into her bones, the absolute blood-bedamned least he can do, considering what price Ava has realized she has to pay.

  Before she exits to face the terrible truth, Ava makes a point of biting King Artem Alpin on the ankle.

  ~???~

  In the end, the key to Regina’s survival is so simple, it is a wonder that Ava did not discover it before in her thousands of visions.

  Maybe it is because Ava herself did not want to realize what the truth is.

  Maybe it is because Ava wanted to lie to herself – to pretend they can all have a happy ending.

  Even as Ava tries desperately to see if there truly is no other path, the single thread remains in front of her.

  Eventually, it is the ducks that force her to acknowledge what is obvious through a vision that confirms what Ava already knows.

  At Ava’s funeral, a ten-year-old Regina sobs, her body shaking.

  Later that night, Regina sleeps in her bed without Ava for the first time in years.

  Her tears have already dried and there is a terrible and beautiful resolve in her eyes.

  “I will,” she says, “survive for you. Ava, I will stay alive and always keep you in my memory.”

  Oh, thinks Ava, Lady Quacksalot a sympathetic presence in the back of her mind, that is what I need to do, is it not? There really is no other path, is there?

  It is so simple… and yet, it is so hard.

  ~???~

  All Sheridans with magic must have a focus for their visions and this focus must come from desperate, passionate need.

  Her mother’s focus is the horses she loves to bet on – the horses that her mother wishes she could use to flee from the Sheridan manor with her children.

  Her father’s focus is the merchant ledgers that he consults – the ledgers that he plows money into in the hopes of giving his daughters a good enough dowry to ensure their future.

  Ava’s focus is the ducks that she wishes to be – the ducks that can fly so high and live with a freedom that Ava can only experience in dreams.

  At first, Ava does not know what Regina’s magical focus is, even after Ava has seen dozens of terrible visions of Regina’s future.

  She knows that Regina must manifest magic in the future where she survives, but Ava is puzzled by all the other futures she has seen.

  Though Regina has died so often before, Regina –

  Regina somehow sees nothing in those futures where she dies, even though she should desire the ability to keep living.

  This is when Ava fully understands the terrible truth.

  This is when Ava understands why there is only one future, one thread to save her sister.

  In every future, should Ava live long enough to give Regina love and a sense of security, Regina will never learn to fear the future.

  Instead, with a strange but loving elder sister, Regina believes she will live and expects to be… happy.

  Other families might let their beautiful and brilliant daughter dance through life… but not the Sheridans.

  So Ava is going to have to find a way to make Regina stop dancing.

  Regina has to learn to fear everyone and everything around her if she wants to survive long enough to meet and marry the man who will keep her alive.

  All it takes is a little sacrifice from Ava.

  ~???~

  Perhaps another girl would have been more afraid of death.

  Yet Ava has been strange all her life and so, she resigns herself to being strange until the day she dies.

  That day is simply coming a little sooner than expected.

  Even so, some part of Ava mourns.

  If she could, she would content herself with spending the rest of her life as a young child. She would hide behind her mother’s skirts and have her father bribe and plead for her life, even as she quietly pys with dolls and teacups with Regina in their small paradise.

  Yet there would be no paradise without Regina…

  There would only be the grief of failing a little sister who loves her dearly.

  The only future Ava has is that of being confined with her family forever, forced to marry one cousin or another, only to breed the next generation of Sheridans who will learn fear and pain as well.

  Even if Ava could hide her magic, the future is bleak and long.

  The only future Ava has that holds any happiness is one where Regina lives, because Ava loves her sister above all.

  “I love you too,” Regina whispers, burying her face in Ava’s skirt as the sound of the adults shouting about how wrong Ava is reaches even their distant corner of the garden. “Ava, do not listen to them. You do not need to change anything.”

  Even as such a young girl, Regina is willing to defend Ava. She is so ready to be a champion that it makes Ava want to weep.

  Instead, Ava pulls her little sister in closer and holds her tight, knowing which future will hurt less.

  It is not one of the thousands of futures where Ava lives to breed more Sheridans or other noble children as her sister lies cold in her grave.

  It is the one where Regina lives, where Regina is happy, and where Regina will always love her older sister.

  Regina sobs just once against her shoulder and Ava takes a deep breath.

  “Sometimes,” she tells Regina, “you do have to change. But do not worry, Gin-gin… I will only change what I must so we are all happier.”

  Then Ava truly discovers the consequences of finding a future the world does not want to happen.

  ~???~

  Ava goes to sleep that night, holding her sister’s hands while ready to sacrifice her life for Regina.

  Yet Ava does not dream of ducks, of flight, of the rest of her sister’s beautiful life.

  Ava goes somewhere else entirely.

  Or rather, she is pulled somewhere else entirely.

  ~???~

  ? Watch the following scene as an animated video on Youtube

  There is a beautiful person with blood-red hair standing in front of a House.

  It should be normal.

  Ava has seen so, so much worse in her visions.

  Ava has never been more afraid.

  Yet she cannot look at them.

  She cannot look at the House.

  She does not even know why.

  Instead, she stares down at her body and finds not duck feathers and webbing but human skin and human feet.

  Ava is not a duck.

  Ava is an Ava and that is maybe more terrifying than anything else.

  Ava takes a step forward and the beautiful person looks at her.

  Their golden eyes burn.

  They are smiling.

  The House is wrong. The sky is wrong. Even the ground where Ava is not actually standing is wrong.

  Ava wants to fly, to flee.

  “Miss Sheridan,” the person, the… not-person, in front of her asks. “Did you really think you could change the world without a price?”

  ~???~

  Ava wakes screaming.

  This is not the end.

  Ava still has to sleep after all.

  ~???~

  ? Watch this second scene as an animated video on Youtube

  “Hello,” says the beautiful redhead the next night. “I think we got off on the wrong foot.”

  “I think,” says Ava, “that you want to eat my foot.”

  The redhead cocks their head and smiles.

  “You truly are very clever,” they say, admiringly. “I will restrain myself from your feet however… even if you are making such a mess of things.”

  “I am making a mess of things?” says Ava, blinking. “You have managed to take me away from seeing how to make the best possible future and brought me to this… pce.”

  It occurs to Ava, rather te, that while she is in fact, very very powerful, that whoever… or whatever is in front of her is even more powerful.

  Carcosans are not supposed to learn about the stories of other nds, but Ava’s family had originally been merchants and she has heard more than most, as both a girl and a duck.

  Apparently other nds have beings so powerful that the people of the nds worship them and think they control all that happens within the nds.

  Carcosan nobles, of course, do not believe in such beings because they are those beings who control all through their magic.

  Staring at the one in front of her, Ava wonders if perhaps that had been a horrible mistake.

  It is not the first time Ava has felt fear… but it is the first time she has felt less powerful than the one causing her fear.

  “Do you really think,” says the redhead, “that a child like you should be shifting the path of so many… feet?”

  “I am,” says Ava, indignation overriding her fear, “trying to save my sister’s life.”

  “It did not occur to you,” says the redhead cocking an eyebrow, “that your sister’s constant death is important?”

  “Is this,” says Ava, cocking an eyebrow in return, “your idea of getting off on the right foot?”

  “I do,” says the person wistfully, “have a lot of feet on fish that I can bring as needed, so perhaps let us try again?”

  “Regina is going to live,” says Ava ftly. “I will make sure of it. There is nothing you can do to make me change my path.”

  The strange person dressed in a butler’s outfit… or is that a maid’s outfit?... stares at Ava for many many breaths.

  “You know,” they say slowly, “eventually, that might even be true.”

  “However,” they say and snap their fingers, “are you ready to bear the consequences of that choice?”

  ~???~

  Ava is in another vision. She has never had a vision inside a vision.

  She has never been inside a vision of the future as herself.

  She is not particurly grateful.

  It goes something like this.

  Duke Jason Neville never marries.

  He sits in his study in the Neville manor, holding a portrait of a woman and a boy with grassy hair.

  “My son,” says Duke Neville. “My son.”

  He runs his finger over the portrait as he whispers, “You were the best combination of both your mother and myself, of our temperament, our intelligence, and our powers. No one else could wield both vines and flowers as you did, my son.”

  He makes a strange, choking sob. “I was so close to convincing them that you could be my hei-“

  When the assassins come, he does not let go of the portrait until the very end.

  ~???

  “How tragic,” says Ava dryly as she stares at the redheaded not-person in front of her.

  “You do not seem affected,” says the butlermaid.

  “I will spare my sympathy for someone who was not trying to murder my sister at every opportunity,” says Ava, even more dryly, if possible.

  “Let me try again then,” says butlermaid.

  ~???~

  The Nevilles bring in a branch family so distant they no longer use the Neville name after being expelled for marrying foreigners.

  They are the most powerful Nevilles in existence.

  They are very nearly the only Nevilles in existence.

  “You will,” says the st remaining elder with a sniff, “take on names that reflect the great Neville family.”

  “What choice,” says Do-yun, “do we have?”

  ~???~

  “You are trying to make me care about the Nevilles,” says Ava. “Why, by the blood, would you think that I would care about the Nevilles?”

  “Because they are people?” says the maidbutler, frowning as if they do not understand. “Because they are unhappy to be saddled with power they do not want?”

  Ava looks at the maidbutler.

  “My mind is being destroyed,” says Ava in a voice drier than her grandfather’s well of compassion, “by the infinite power of duck futures.”

  The maidbutler tilts their head. “Point taken.”

  “Also,” says Ava, “their former duke tried to murder my sister.”

  “You are,” says the maidbutler, “a very single issue focused person.”

  “Murder does that to a girl,” says Ava.

  This, apparently, is the magic phrase to end the conversation and send Ava back to her own bed.

  Ava makes sure to note that for future awkward social situations.

  ~???~

  Ava gets a few beautiful weeks of peaceful rest while she contemptes what she needs to do.

  Unfortunately, butlermaids are more persistent even than ducks.

  ~???~

  “You again,” says Ava ftly.

  “You… remember me?” says the maidbutler.

  “You are a maidbutler or a butlermaid,” says Ava. “I am an inbred shut-in with very little excitement in my life. What else am I going to remember?”

  “Things are falling apart faster than expected,” murmurs the maidbutler. “This might not be able to be undone.”

  “Well I should hope so,” says Ava, frowning. “I have spent a great deal of effort trying to find a way to keep my sister alive and no maidbutlermaid is going to stop me!”

  “That is true,” says the maidbutler, “but perhaps you will stop yourself.”

  Ava is annoyed at how easy it is for them to smirk and snap their fingers.

  ~???~

  Ava stares at Do-yun, now Jeremy Neville, sitting in the parlour. There is something familiar about the insignia on the wall and Ava has a mounting moment of recognition, of dread-

  “Your majesty,” says Jeremy Neville.

  “Your lordship,” says King Artem Alpin.

  “The Nevilles,” says Lord Jeremy, “have served Carcosa for generations, both as their major commercial exporters… and as their most powerful military force.”

  “It would be hard,” says King Artem mildly, “to maintain such force with such small current numbers.”

  “I think you will find,” says Lord Jeremy, equally mildly, “that if you kill any more of us that the cost will be higher than you can bear.”

  “I had thought,” says King Artem, even more mildly than before, “that only one Neville had perished under… unclear circumstances after the arrest of Duke Buren. It was very tragic, particurly after the document that he intended to murder my wife was released publicly.”

  “Do you think,” says the new Neville Duke, his skin, his eyes marking him as someone not fully of Carcosa, “that murdering a Duke and doing nothing in the aftermath is not a decration of its own?”

  For the first time in her many visions, Ava sees something resembling… discomfort on Artem’s face.

  “Do you think,” says Duke Jeremy Neville, someone who knows about consequences, both predicted and not predicted, “that the other Alpins will stop at one dead Neville when our nds are so ready to be plucked?”

  ~???~

  “You are still not going to make me care about the Nevilles,” says Ava ftly. “Stop trying to make it happen.”

  She feels a slight twinge of guilt and knows that this is not entirely true, but she is not going to bend.

  She cannot afford to.

  “You are not concerned,” says the butlermaid, “about your sister marrying a murderer?”

  “I am a Sheridan,” says Ava, genuinely baffled by the question. “I have never seen Artem Alpin kill anyone who was not trying to murder him or Regina. He is by far the sweetest man I have ever seen.”

  The butlermaid stares.

  “He is going to name schools after me,” Ava says, not disturbed by how easily she can be bribed. “I think I can forgive a murder or two for a brother-in-w who will do such a thing.”

  “Carcosa could fall if those who hold it up are destroyed,” says the butlermaid.

  “Carcosa,” says Ava, “can kiss my-”

  ~???~

  Well, that was rude, Ava thinks.

  She is not sure why the maidbutler did not want to hear about Carcosa kissing her extremely biased history textbook, but it is giving her a headache to be dumped into so many visions so quickly.

  The Nevilles have built a forest that surrounds their nd and the trees are dancing.

  After Ava sees what those trees do to the ambitious Alpin cousins foolish enough to enter…

  …Ava understands.

  Ava retches and thinks that there is nothing in the world as terrifying as dancing trees.

  Except for the squirrels.

  How the Nevilles got the squirrels, Ava has no idea, but the trail of blood they leave behind them is the least terrifying part of what they can do.

  The new Nevilles, Do-yun and his family, are not interested in what has come before them.

  They are the most powerful Nevilles in existence and they will not let themselves be destroyed.

  Even the Alpins are forced to bend before wood and teeth.

  ~???~

  “Do you understand?” says the maidbutler.

  “Oh yes,” says Ava cheerfully. “All is well that ends well.”

  “I am not sure that most people would call building a Forest of Death a good ending,” says the maidbutler.

  “But you would,” says Ava softly, realizing something as true as every one of her visions. “I would. The Nevilles survived. They survived because they did what needed to be done.”

  The maidbutler says nothing at all.

  “Whatever you are trying to do, whatever you are being forced to do,” says Ava, “you need me to be… false to myself to make it happen.”

  The maidbutler does not flinch but still, Ava smiles.

  She smiles because she is starting to learn just how the maidbutler thinks.

  Whoever they are, the maidbutler is a creature of power. If they can somehow pluck Ava, who is the most powerful Sheridan to ever exist, out of her dreams and into their realm, they have abilities Ava can barely witness, much less understand.

  Yet even if the maidbutler is more powerful than any mage in Carcosa, they cannot act as they please.

  There are rules they must follow, people they must act through.

  If they could stop what Ava is doing themselves, they would have already done so.

  This means that there is something they need from Ava.

  This means that Ava is not as weak against the world as she has worried she is.

  In fact, the longer Ava spends in this creature’s company, the more she learns about the power that she herself wields.

  “I think,” says Ava, warming to her idea, “that you are just convincing me that my actions are right. In the world I will create, the people who harm others are punished and those who come after are better, stronger. The Nevilles have protected themselves and theirs and my sister and her husband are doing better and protecting everyone! I have found the future that makes the world better!”

  “Why,” mutters the maidbutler, “does all that was and is depend on the juvenile philosophy of a teenager?”

  ~???~

  Ava wakes screaming.

  In anger, not fear.

  She has never been more insulted.

  ~???~

  Ava wakes and she immediately stalks her cousins and the elders until she finds out when the current King of Carcosa is due to arrive at the Sheridan estate.

  When Artem Alpin finally arrives where Ava can encounter him, she tells the small, lonely boy a story he will never forget.

  If he does not immediately fall into Regina’s strong arms as an adult, Ava will personally come back from beyond the grave to push him into them.

  ~???~

  Unfortunately, it turns out that strange maidbutlermaids can be just as petunt as an aggrieved teenager.

  Unfortunately, it turns out that strange maidbutlermaids can sense a change in Ava’s priorities that even Ava cannot yet sense.

  ~???~

  “You,” says the butlermaid, “are making it so much harder for me to serve.”

  Well, thinks Ava, that does confirm what she suspected about whether or not this… person was in control.

  “So,” continues the butlermaid, “perhaps it is time to get serious.”

  Ava has a strong feeling that she is not going to enjoy what is coming next.

  This turns out to be her most accurate prediction of the future yet.

  ~???~

  Despite her bravado, Ava knows that she does not understand everything.

  Some things do not have to be understood to know that they are wrong.

  She is standing at the edge of the beautiful pond in the strange new school at the outskirts of the Capital. There are ducks in the pond, as in all Carcosan ponds, and one named Mr. Swimsherd makes a rude noise at her.

  There are also healthy children standing in the yard and Ava wonders if this is one of Regina’s projects.

  She is a little puzzled though as to why the children are all standing in lines, their dark skin glistening in the sun.

  When the strange cloaked figure drops in front of them, darkness spreading out from their feet, Ava instinctively moves backwards into the water, even without her duck form to protect her.

  “You are,” says the cloaked figure, “the future of the Shadowguard, bonded by blood and stone. What is your purpose?”

  “We are,” say the children in chorus, “the shadows in the night, the cloak of Carcosa.”

  Then the cloaked figure looks at Ava and Ava –

  ~???~

  – wakes up, a scream choked in her throat.

  As it turns out, Ava does not need to know much at all to recognize when someone is trying to build a child army.

  Ava has told herself that she does not care about Carcosa, about the nd that destroys those who are not as cruel and vicious as those who control its fate.

  It is a deeply unpleasant surprise to realize that Ava may not care about Carcosa… but she does care about Carcosans.

  For all that Ava has only focused on Regina, she realizes very, very suddenly that she has begun to care about the other people she saw in her visions… especially the ones who had lives as troubled as Ava herself.

  Ava only keeps herself from sobbing out loud when she turns to see her sister, sleeping peacefully beside her.

  That is all that gives Ava the strength to push down her fears… and begin thinking once more.

  The butlermaid, Ava realizes, wants Ava to believe that this… this horrifying vision of the future happens because Ava allows her sister to live and be queen, with Artem as her king.

  Yet could her beloved little sister and her loving brother-in-w truly be responsible for the abomination that Ava saw?

  As queen, Regina will spend her entire life trying to rectify the wrongs done to children and to commoners and to the orphans kidnapped from the North. Ava has already seen this.

  Ava knows her sister will fail at times, even with the complete support of her husband, because the forces against her are so strong.

  Yet Ava cannot believe Regina would ever allow this… or that Artem would betray his beloved wife by making actual children into weapons.

  This is not a future Regina would build.

  So who would do so?

  Ava closes her eyes, determined that even if the butlermaid wishes to hide the truth, she will find the actual source of this path of thorns.

  ~???~

  Ava grimly finds the duck from her vision named Mr. Swimshard, and circles back to the school of children being raised as soldiers.

  As she is preparing to nd, she sees a shock of blond hair and circles lower to confirm all her worst fears-

  -only the blond is not Artem.

  “Have the children been appropriately bound?” says the blond man.

  “Yes, King Arthur,” says the cloaked figure in front of him.

  It is not Artem.

  It is another blond king making poor life decisions.

  Ava the duck/woman/anxious mess stares bnkly at the scene in front of her.

  As she looks more closely, she is not even sure when this school is taking pce, since the building looks utterly unlike any style of architecture she has ever seen.

  Ava wakes with a soft breath and a small exhale of relief.

  If a blond is not her sister’s murderous blond, that blond is not Ava’s problem.

  Ava understands that there is only so much wrong she can correct.

  ~???~

  “You,” says Ava gring at the maidbutler, “are trying to actively mislead me.”

  “I could,” says the maidbutler looking nearly angry for a moment, “still eat your foot.”

  “You would be haunted by ducks for the rest of forever,” snarls Ava.

  The maidbutler blinks thoughtfully.

  “That is probably true,” they say. “However, I do not understand what part of the howling void of misery I am showing you is misleading?”

  “I,” says Ava, “can only care about one blond at a time. If my sister’s murderous flower prince is not causing problems, some random blond king is not my problem.”

  “Oh,” says the maidbutler mildly, “is that so?”

  ~???~

  Ava is expecting to be dumped into another vision.

  She is not expecting what the vision has to show her.

  Arthur Alpin is Regina’s son.

  Arthur Alpin is Artem’s son.

  Unlike his father, Artem has made sure there will be no fight for the throne. The second son, Henry, has a name that does not start with A. Arthur is the only Alpin eligible to rule Carcosa after Artem.

  Arthur is beautiful and blond and smart and kind to his mother and father and brother.

  There is also something deeply, terribly wrong with him.

  “When you first meet your bride,” Artem tells Arthur when he comes of age to be engaged to a noble daughter, “you must be kind and forgiving. Even if she is not what you expect at first, you must make allowances for errors and mistakes…”

  Arthur interrupts with a snort, even as he sullenly looks away from his father and the flock of ducks that surround them outdoors.

  “It is easy for you to say that,” he mutters with the disdain of a growing boy so cherished, he has never had to fear his parents. “You married Mother after falling in love with her at your first meeting. I will not be allowed that kindness. Instead, you have saddled me with a bloody fish!”

  Artem looks torn between being annoyed and being sympathetic before he says, “I am sorry you did not have my fortune, Arthur. However, you should not insult your bride-to-be! I have been in her presence and she truly does not resemble a piece of marine life.”

  Arthur does not look as though that knowledge will convince him to treat his future bride kindly.

  “Your fate could be far worse,” his father patiently adds. “I am told she can even talk about non-fish topics occasionally.”

  “By the blood!” Arthur swears. “Could you not have engaged me to a pretty La Belle instead?”

  “No,” Artem firmly says. “I will not have a family that stupid produce the heir that comes after you. Henry will wed one of them instead. At least the Poissons have some brains to go along with their fish by-products!”

  Then, calming down, Artem adds, “Lady Elise Poisson is a good, kind, and shrewd woman who will cement your rule and make for a fine queen. Far worse marriages have been arranged for royalty.”

  Arthur shoots a look back at his father and says, “Like the marriage between my grandparents? Did the Queen not kill the King eventually?”

  Artem smiles and for once, he shows all of his teeth.

  “You should speak well of your dear Grandmother, who perished with your Grandfather in that carriage accident soon after my wedding. He was far too unwell to escape, unfortunately for him.”

  “Then why does she keep sending us cards from other countries?” mumbles Arthur.

  “Those cards,” says Artem loftily, “are from a dear woman named Batasha, which is very different from the name of my dear mother, Natasha.”

  Suddenly Artem stops smiling.

  “The former King,” Artem slowly says, “found a way to control both myself and my mother. It was cruel and torturous and nearly destroyed both of us before my powers allowed me to remove it from myself… and help my mother find another way to escape.”

  Arthur stills, gazing at his father intently.

  “You must treat those under your power well,” says Artem, almost desperately, almost pleadingly. “What separates us from those who would be monsters is our ability to use our powers to protect rather than to confine.”

  “So,” says Arthur slowly. “There is a way to use our powers to confine… and to control.”

  Ava realizes things.

  Ava does not want to realize things.

  Unlike previously, the being who controls her does not allow her to escape the visions.

  “I am worried,” says Artem haltingly, “about our son.”

  Regina ughs as she gathers flowers from the garden. “Henry will learn how to speak properly to Giselle some day, my love. Though perhaps you should let him know he needs to actually show some of his actual feelings for her to understand.”

  “It is not Henry,” says Artem.

  Regina stills.

  “Arthur,” she says firmly, “is a very good prince. He does everything well and tries very hard.”

  “But is he,” says Artem softly, “a good man?”

  ~???~

  Ava wakes and bites her tongue so hard it bleeds.

  “You absolute son of a bleeding wound,” she snarls under her breath.

  Somehow, somewhere, she suspects that maidbutlermaid is ughing at her.

  Apparently, there are more futures she needs to consider.

  ~???~

  Ava goes back to sleep, blood dripping out of her mouth, because she has things she wants to say.

  As it turns out, so does her arch-nemesis.

  ~???~

  “What are you trying to do?” says Ava, using every ounce of her self-control to not stab the butlermaid with their stupid butterfly pins.

  “Choices,” says the butlermaid, “have consequences. I am trying to make sure you are aware of all of yours.”

  “No one,” says Ava, quite reasonably, “ever has to see the effect of all the consequences of what they do.”

  The butlermaid smiles.

  “If you are going to see all the possibilities,” they say, equally reasonably, “should you also not see all the consequences?”

  Nobody, thinks Ava, should see all the consequences.

  Unfortunately, she no longer can avoid seeing them.

  Unfortunately, she cannot unsee what she has seen. The consequences cannot be removed like an unwelcome dream.

  So if Ava cannot avoid knowing the consequences… she needs to know if she can accept them.

  This is not a thought she would have had before…

  Well, before.

  Ava is changing.

  Well, Ava has fooled her nemesis since Ava’s whole life has been nothing but change.

  She will not be defeated by anyone now, much less herself.

  “What,” she says softly, “does my sister’s son do?”

  The butlermaid smiles and the world shifts.

  ~???~

  “But you helped them!” says the white-haired boy, nearly in tears as he holds the hand of an older white-haired man. “You helped them and they sent Father to die and they have chained us!”

  “Remember this,” says the older white-haired man. “Remember how you feel right this very moment. I stepped down as Duke Kuzey because I was not strong enough to keep our family safe and your father became Duke Kuzey.”

  The white-haired man coughs. “Only your father loved your mother so much he was willing to sell our family to the Alpins to keep her. The son of the man my father saved repaid that chance by making us his dogs.”

  “You do not sell family,” says the white-haired boy, tears in his eyes. “You never sell family, not for anything.”

  The white-haired man smiles and for a moment his face shifts into something grimmer, darker.

  “You are quite right, Adem,” says the former Duke Kuzey. “You are now ready to become the Duke of the North.”

  ~???~

  “Arthur Alpin,” says Ava ftly, “is a very busy man. Apparently, after his father alienated the Nevilles, he decided to try to destroy the Kuzeys.”

  She pauses and tries to pull her thoughts, as unravelled as threads of time or the future, together.

  “Even I know that a strong Kuzey presence is needed to keep the dangers of the North at bay,” she says slowly. “Even if it was not wrong to harm them, that is a dangerous game to py with the country and its people.”

  The maidbutler smiles and says nothing.

  “These are horrible things,” says Ava slowly, “but they are not all that happens, are they? You show me a forced army of children and a noble family held in thrall, but that is not everything, is it?”

  The maid butler says, “It is a shame that you could not be a butterfly and dream of what could and could not be.”

  They sound genuinely regretful.

  Ava has never been more terrified.

  “Yet I am not a butterfly,” says Ava, “so show me what you are hiding.”

  ~???~

  This time, the vision hurts.

  This time Ava stays in the form she knows best.

  ~???~

  Ava is a duck.

  Ava is a duck in a pond in a very familiar pce.

  Artem Alpin stands in a beautiful garden.

  Ava has seen this garden through countless visions, but there is something unfamiliar about it that makes her uneasy.

  Even so, she sees Artem kneel in front of a great tree, reaching far above the walls around it and he pces a… sea urchin? in front of a strange metallic statue.

  He is old, older than Ava’s parents, and there is a peacefulness in his eyes that feels…

  “It will not be long now, Regina,” he says. “I have waited a full week after your funeral. You cannot expect me to wait any longer.”

  …That feels like the sort of peaceful end so few Sheridans have.

  Ava-the-duck slowly makes her way to where Artem is kneeling, moved by a feeling she cannot quite expin. Artem sighs as he sinks down beside the memorial stone and reaches his hand out to…

  ..Ava.

  He reaches his hand out to Ava-the-duck and she waddles towards him as he smiles.

  “It is you, Ava,” he gently asks, “is it not?”

  Oddly embarrassed at his perceptiveness, Ava manages a faint quack.

  Artem smiles, his face lighting up. For a moment, he seems like the young flower prince that Ava knows best.

  “Thank you,” he murmurs, “for being here with me in the end. You are the best possible witness for this. After all, you are the one who gave me a reason to live… and so, you should be here to witness my death.”

  Ava can only quack once again as she slowly climbs into Artem’s p.

  His fingers are gentle as he pats Ava’s duck head, even as he continues speaking.

  “Forty years,” he says softly. “That is how long Regina and I were married. Forty years and even now, though she is gone in body, I can feel her next to me. I can feel her spirit all throughout Carcosa, through the commoners she saved, through the children she cherished, through the kinder and better nd she tried to create.”

  Then Artem’s voice breaks in a way Ava has never heard since he was eight and wondering if he should just die at her hands.

  “Only,” he whispers, “I do not know how long the peace that Regina and I struggled and bled for will keep. Our children… We did our best by our children, even though we barely knew what we were doing. Yet though we tried our best to love and nurture them, they both turned out…”

  Artem gives a hollow ugh, even as Ava sadly nudges him with her duck head.

  “Maybe,” Artem softly said, “there is something to be said about adversity and pain building one’s character. Maybe Regina and I gave them too much peace and privilege in their lives. Maybe they were so protected that they never understood the need that others have for protection. Maybe the ck of pain they faced made them unable to understand the pain of others. So much so…”

  Artem closes his eyes, though the pain in his face is clear.

  “So much so,” he says, “that I fear that many of the reforms Regina and I created will be destroyed by them eventually.”

  However, when Artem opens his eyes once more, Ava sees only gratitude and peace.

  “Even so,” he says, “I thank you, elder sister, for all you have done for us. Even if Regina’s reforms st only to my st breath… even then, they were worth doing.”

  Ava is not really a duck, for all that she feels like a duck.

  This means that she cannot cry in this not-Ava body…

  …but oh, how she wishes she could.

  It is so much worse when Artem continues.

  It is so much better.

  “Thank you for giving Carcosa the greatest queen that this nd has ever seen,” Artem continues. “Thank you for giving me my partner and lover and dearest friend. She lived so well and helped as many people as she could. I will join her as soon as you leave but even so…”

  Artem smiles and it is beautiful and tired and hopeful at the same time.

  “Perhaps this does not have to be the end,” he whispers, his breath already starting to fade. “Perhaps knowing that we tried will be enough to convince someone else to-”

  ~???~

  Ava wakes.

  Ava hurts.

  She runs and runs and runs and finds the darkest quietest corner of the garden to curl into a ball so small she can feel herself disappearing.

  “I need,” says Ava in the smallest voice possible, “to see farther.”

  Then her mind explodes.

  This is no longer a vision.

  ~???~

  Her head aches and her body aches and Ava is a duck, one that a rude other duck is trying to bite. This duck has no other mind; it is only Ava and the other duck cannot bite her because she is just light and air and wind.

  She looks up.

  She is in a forest of buildings that stretch so high they block the sky while strange metallic boxes move between them, screaming as they race.

  Ava blinks.

  One of the ducks who was trying to bite her looks over and sniffs and says, “Come get some food, loser.”

  Ava comes.

  There is a rge pond in the middle of a small space of green in between the grey of everything else.

  There are people, so many people, and they come up to the pond and they leave food.

  Ava eats food.

  Ava eats food and sits in the pond and eventually she does not even hear the screaming of the metal and the thick air that she cannot breathe anyways because she is a duck made of light.

  Ava thinks she might want to stay here.

  People feed her and she does not have to think.

  A duck bites her.

  It should not be able to bite her because Ava is light and emptiness, but somehow it does.

  “You have things to do, loser,” says the duck and there is something in its gaze that makes Ava feel smaller than she ever has.

  Ava looks at the nice food and the grey and the loud and the people who are kissing and nobody is stabbing them with metal and she sighs.

  “I guess,” she says softly, “that I do.”

  She flies up into the air, up and up and up until she is in darkness again.

  There is Regina, torn and bloody and desperate, in a dark tomb with dead bodies and murderers and Ava is there because she loves her sister.

  Even if everything else about Ava is gone, that much is true.

  When Ava takes the knife to her chest of light to save her sister, it hurts.

  Ava is her sister’s keeper and she has done what she can.

  ~???~

  As Ava tumbles, as she moves between duck and woman and ball of light, some things become so, so much clearer.

  Ava has done what she can.

  Ava has tried.

  She has tried to make the only future she can see where this terrible world becomes a little bit better be the future that will happen.

  She has always thought that her life was only about her sister, that she could pretend that the rest of the world does not matter.

  Yet in this moment of falling and tumbling and everything she has seen coming together, Ava realizes the truth.

  Maybe this is not just about Regina.

  Maybe it never was.

  Oh, thinks Ava, as all the pieces finally come together, I understand now.

  ~???~

  ? Watch this final scene as an animated video on Youtube

  “Are you satisfied now?” says butlermaid.

  Ava looks down at her Ava feet and her Ava hands and realizes the ducks are gone forever.

  There is only Ava now.

  There will only ever be Ava now.

  “Yes,” says Ava, “I am.”

  “That was,” says butlermaid, “meant to be sarcastic.”

  “I,” says Ava, smiling, happy, “do not understand sarcasm, metaphors, or people who do not just say what they mean. I am very earnest.”

  The butlermaid blinks.

  “Yes,” they say slowly. “You are.”

  “So let me be clear,” says the butlermaid, and it almost sounds like respect in their voice, “that you need to make your choice now. You have seen what will come, what the future you are building will bring and you must understand what to do.”

  “Oh, I do,” says Ava.

  “So you are going to move forward,” says butlermaid, almost disbelieving. “Even after all you have seen, you will still save your sister’s life.”

  Then, as if it is a word they have never previously said, a strange resonance fills the butlermaid’s voice as they ask, “Why?”

  “Life,” says Ava, feeling something close to joy bubbling up inside her, “is hard.”

  She can see them all now, the future threads shaking as her words gain force, gain power.

  “We tell ourselves stories,” says Ava, “because we do not want to face how terrible our choices can be. We pretend that things are as they should be, that things were meant to happen, and that we can just live with what is to come.”

  Ava thinks about the future threads with their many, many Regina deaths, with their Carcosas that leave their people to suffer and fail and --

  And she snaps them all at once.

  “That,” says Ava, “is stupid and cowardly and wrong.”

  She stands tall, proud, over four thousand years old, not quite sixteen, and she tells the truths that will shape the world.

  “Just because life is hard, does not mean that you let it happen to you,” she snarls. “You take control. You fight for the future you want.”

  “A future that also brings pain and suffering?” says butlermaid.

  Ava snarls harder. “Just because good things are taken away does not mean we stop fighting for them to exist in the first pce!”

  Ava feels the power in her. The ducks are gone but they are behind her, an eternity of ducks powering her words.

  “Regina did amazing things,” says Ava, the truth finally setting her free. “The years of her doing good things were so much better than if she had not done them at all.”

  “I know,” says Ava, “that because those good things existed that someone will come, that people will come to fight for them again in the future, because she proved they could exist.”

  There is a strange piercing noise and something grey and wobbling impedes her vision for a moment.

  When it clears, the butlermaid is smiling.

  It is as if they, too, have made a decision.

  “You are right,” says the butlermaid. “Someone else like Regina will come. There will be others who try for more and even better.”

  They say softly, “So long as they can save the viliness.”

  “Maybe,” says Ava, thinking of her own and of Regina’s lives, “the viliness can save herself.”

  “Perhaps that is a story worth telling,” says the butlermaid. “Just as yours has been.”

  It is the best gift Ava could have received.

  She smiles as she goes back to end her story.

  ~???~

  Ava is but one woman and one story and one piece in a much rger puzzle of people who try.

  She understands what she must do.

  When Ava opens her eyes, she smiles.

  Then, quietly and calmly, she goes to tell her grandfather about her weak, useless power.

  ~???~

  Ava Sheridan dies when she is four thousand and ninety six or she dies when she is fifteen.

  Counting is hard when you live both in the present and the future.

  As the poison spreads through her body, Ava watches the most beautiful and brilliant sister in the world, little Regina Sheridan, scream for help and Ava knows she made the right choice.

  If Regina runs now, she will miss the fire that will start in five minutes in the garden or started forty minutes ago or started three hundred years ago after that duck with the bad attitude tried to bite her.

  Counting is very hard.

  Either way, Ava has made her choice.

  She cannot regret it.

  As she closes her eyes, she can feel the wings under her skin and the sky in her blood.

  Ava Sheridan is thirteen or one thousand and twenty-four when she finds the only path to her sister’s survival.

  Ava Sheridan is thirteen or one thousand and twenty-four or utterly miserable when she learns that she and Regina can never survive together.

  It starts something like this.

  (It ends something like this.)

  Ava is in that garden again, the one with so many ducks and flowers and peace. The duck she is borrowing this time is curiously bnk, probably because Ava had to fight to see this particur vision, since the thread kept sliding away from her when she tried to grab it.

  She knows, in her heart of hearts, that this will finally grant her the answer she has been seeking.

  She knows that there is a reason this truth was being hidden from her.

  She is still not prepared.

  Regina is an adult woman sitting on the edge of the water and leaning against Artem Alpin as if she could not sit upright on her own.

  Mostly, Ava realizes as she swims closer, because Regina’s body is shaking so hard the tears are spreading far beyond Artem’s shoulder as he holds her against him.

  “I wanted a daughter,” she says between sobs. “I wanted a daughter so badly.”

  “I know dear heart,” says Artem softly. “I know.”

  “I love our sons,” says Regina.

  “I know you do,” says Artem. “They know you do.”

  “Yet I also wanted a daughter named Ava,” says Regina. “I will never stop missing my sister.”

  Ava freezes, as the words wash over her like a bucket of ice.

  “We will always mourn Ava,” Artem says softly, even as he presses his lips to his wife’s brow. “We will love her for as long as we live. It does not mean that you have not been a mother though. Thousands of little girls in Carcosa have benefitted from your love and care. We will not call them Ava, but you have cared for them as your own every day.”

  Regina looks up to smile at him through her tears, grateful and loving even through her tears.

  “None of that would be possible,” she tells her husband, “without you lending me your strength and support,”

  Then Regina looks down again, sorrow coloring her next words.

  “Even so,” Regina says, grief making her voice rough, “it does not repay my debt to my sister. Ava was… was the only love and support I really knew as a child. I know now that my parents and Henrietta and my cousins loved me, but Ava was the only one who could show me that love. I just wish I could repay that love by honoring her further.”

  Ava starts to realize the truth and tries to ignore it, pushing it desperately away from her.

  “When Ava was murdered…” Regina trails off in a tone of grief and rage. “I lost all hope and faith. I was so lost and floating, but it also made me what I am now.”

  No, thinks Ava. No.

  This… cannot be the truth.

  This can not be the truth Ava has hidden from herself.

  “Ava is,” continues Regina mercilessly, “the only reason I am still alive now. I swore to survive for her when they killed her. I… sometimes think that my magic only manifested because I so desperately wanted to find a way to survive. More than that, unknown to myself, I wanted someone who would love me as much as Ava loved me. I owe her everything.”

  Oh, thinks Ava. Well, that would expin things.

  “I do as well,” Artem says gently, cupping Regina’s cheek, love clear in his eyes. “Were it not for your sister, I would have died before you out of loneliness and grief. Her promise that you would save me one day gave me a reason to keep on living.”

  Gently, Artem wipes away Regina’s tears, even as she leans against him for strength.

  “So let us repay her together,” Artem says with a tenderness that is years away from the wounded child he once was. “Let us make duck ponds everywhere in Carcosa. Perhaps her spirit will see our happiness? Near those ponds, let us build schools in her honor. Every poor and orphaned child in our kingdom will be educated because of the gifts she gave both of us.”

  So Artem wants Ava to see their happiness after her own death to grant them that happiness?

  It is, thinks Ava, as the truth settles into her bones, the absolute blood-bedamned least he can do, considering what price Ava has realized she has to pay.

  Before she exits to face the terrible truth, Ava makes a point of biting King Artem Alpin on the ankle.

  ~???~

  In the end, the key to Regina’s survival is so simple, it is a wonder that Ava did not discover it before in her thousands of visions.

  Maybe it is because Ava herself did not want to realize what the truth is.

  Maybe it is because Ava wanted to lie to herself – to pretend they can all have a happy ending.

  Even as Ava tries desperately to see if there truly is no other path, the single thread remains in front of her.

  Eventually, it is the ducks that force her to acknowledge what is obvious through a vision that confirms what Ava already knows.

  At Ava’s funeral, a ten-year-old Regina sobs, her body shaking.

  Later that night, Regina sleeps in her bed without Ava for the first time in years.

  Her tears have already dried and there is a terrible and beautiful resolve in her eyes.

  “I will,” she says, “survive for you. Ava, I will stay alive and always keep you in my memory.”

  Oh, thinks Ava, Lady Quacksalot a sympathetic presence in the back of her mind, that is what I need to do, is it not? There really is no other path, is there?

  It is so simple… and yet, it is so hard.

  ~???~

  All Sheridans with magic must have a focus for their visions and this focus must come from desperate, passionate need.

  Her mother’s focus is the horses she loves to bet on – the horses that her mother wishes she could use to flee from the Sheridan manor with her children.

  Her father’s focus is the merchant ledgers that he consults – the ledgers that he plows money into in the hopes of giving his daughters a good enough dowry to ensure their future.

  Ava’s focus is the ducks that she wishes to be – the ducks that can fly so high and live with a freedom that Ava can only experience in dreams.

  At first, Ava does not know what Regina’s magical focus is, even after Ava has seen dozens of terrible visions of Regina’s future.

  She knows that Regina must manifest magic in the future where she survives, but Ava is puzzled by all the other futures she has seen.

  Though Regina has died so often before, Regina –

  Regina somehow sees nothing in those futures where she dies, even though she should desire the ability to keep living.

  This is when Ava fully understands the terrible truth.

  This is when Ava understands why there is only one future, one thread to save her sister.

  In every future, should Ava live long enough to give Regina love and a sense of security, Regina will never learn to fear the future.

  Instead, with a strange but loving elder sister, Regina believes she will live and expects to be… happy.

  Other families might let their beautiful and brilliant daughter dance through life… but not the Sheridans.

  So Ava is going to have to find a way to make Regina stop dancing.

  Regina has to learn to fear everyone and everything around her if she wants to survive long enough to meet and marry the man who will keep her alive.

  All it takes is a little sacrifice from Ava.

  ~???~

  Perhaps another girl would have been more afraid of death.

  Yet Ava has been strange all her life and so, she resigns herself to being strange until the day she dies.

  That day is simply coming a little sooner than expected.

  Even so, some part of Ava mourns.

  If she could, she would content herself with spending the rest of her life as a young child. She would hide behind her mother’s skirts and have her father bribe and plead for her life, even as she quietly pys with dolls and teacups with Regina in their small paradise.

  Yet there would be no paradise without Regina…

  There would only be the grief of failing a little sister who loves her dearly.

  The only future Ava has is that of being confined with her family forever, forced to marry one cousin or another, only to breed the next generation of Sheridans who will learn fear and pain as well.

  Even if Ava could hide her magic, the future is bleak and long.

  The only future Ava has that holds any happiness is one where Regina lives, because Ava loves her sister above all.

  “I love you too,” Regina whispers, burying her face in Ava’s skirt as the sound of the adults shouting about how wrong Ava is reaches even their distant corner of the garden. “Ava, do not listen to them. You do not need to change anything.”

  Even as such a young girl, Regina is willing to defend Ava. She is so ready to be a champion that it makes Ava want to weep.

  Instead, Ava pulls her little sister in closer and holds her tight, knowing which future will hurt less.

  It is not one of the thousands of futures where Ava lives to breed more Sheridans or other noble children as her sister lies cold in her grave.

  It is the one where Regina lives, where Regina is happy, and where Regina will always love her older sister.

  Regina sobs just once against her shoulder and Ava takes a deep breath.

  “Sometimes,” she tells Regina, “you do have to change. But do not worry, Gin-gin… I will only change what I must so we are all happier.”

  Then Ava truly discovers the consequences of finding a future the world does not want to happen.

  ~???~

  Ava goes to sleep that night, holding her sister’s hands while ready to sacrifice her life for Regina.

  Yet Ava does not dream of ducks, of flight, of the rest of her sister’s beautiful life.

  Ava goes somewhere else entirely.

  Or rather, she is pulled somewhere else entirely.

  ~???~

  ? Watch the following scene as an animated video on Youtube

  There is a beautiful person with blood-red hair standing in front of a House.

  It should be normal.

  Ava has seen so, so much worse in her visions.

  Ava has never been more afraid.

  Yet she cannot look at them.

  She cannot look at the House.

  She does not even know why.

  Instead, she stares down at her body and finds not duck feathers and webbing but human skin and human feet.

  Ava is not a duck.

  Ava is an Ava and that is maybe more terrifying than anything else.

  Ava takes a step forward and the beautiful person looks at her.

  Their golden eyes burn.

  They are smiling.

  The House is wrong. The sky is wrong. Even the ground where Ava is not actually standing is wrong.

  Ava wants to fly, to flee.

  “Miss Sheridan,” the person, the… not-person, in front of her asks. “Did you really think you could change the world without a price?”

  ~???~

  Ava wakes screaming.

  This is not the end.

  Ava still has to sleep after all.

  ~???~

  ? Watch this second scene as an animated video on Youtube

  “Hello,” says the beautiful redhead the next night. “I think we got off on the wrong foot.”

  “I think,” says Ava, “that you want to eat my foot.”

  The redhead cocks their head and smiles.

  “You truly are very clever,” they say, admiringly. “I will restrain myself from your feet however… even if you are making such a mess of things.”

  “I am making a mess of things?” says Ava, blinking. “You have managed to take me away from seeing how to make the best possible future and brought me to this… pce.”

  It occurs to Ava, rather te, that while she is in fact, very very powerful, that whoever… or whatever is in front of her is even more powerful.

  Carcosans are not supposed to learn about the stories of other nds, but Ava’s family had originally been merchants and she has heard more than most, as both a girl and a duck.

  Apparently other nds have beings so powerful that the people of the nds worship them and think they control all that happens within the nds.

  Carcosan nobles, of course, do not believe in such beings because they are those beings who control all through their magic.

  Staring at the one in front of her, Ava wonders if perhaps that had been a horrible mistake.

  It is not the first time Ava has felt fear… but it is the first time she has felt less powerful than the one causing her fear.

  “Do you really think,” says the redhead, “that a child like you should be shifting the path of so many… feet?”

  “I am,” says Ava, indignation overriding her fear, “trying to save my sister’s life.”

  “It did not occur to you,” says the redhead cocking an eyebrow, “that your sister’s constant death is important?”

  “Is this,” says Ava, cocking an eyebrow in return, “your idea of getting off on the right foot?”

  “I do,” says the person wistfully, “have a lot of feet on fish that I can bring as needed, so perhaps let us try again?”

  “Regina is going to live,” says Ava ftly. “I will make sure of it. There is nothing you can do to make me change my path.”

  The strange person dressed in a butler’s outfit… or is that a maid’s outfit?... stares at Ava for many many breaths.

  “You know,” they say slowly, “eventually, that might even be true.”

  “However,” they say and snap their fingers, “are you ready to bear the consequences of that choice?”

  ~???~

  Ava is in another vision. She has never had a vision inside a vision.

  She has never been inside a vision of the future as herself.

  She is not particurly grateful.

  It goes something like this.

  Duke Jason Neville never marries.

  He sits in his study in the Neville manor, holding a portrait of a woman and a boy with grassy hair.

  “My son,” says Duke Neville. “My son.”

  He runs his finger over the portrait as he whispers, “You were the best combination of both your mother and myself, of our temperament, our intelligence, and our powers. No one else could wield both vines and flowers as you did, my son.”

  He makes a strange, choking sob. “I was so close to convincing them that you could be my hei-“

  When the assassins come, he does not let go of the portrait until the very end.

  ~???

  “How tragic,” says Ava dryly as she stares at the redheaded not-person in front of her.

  “You do not seem affected,” says the butlermaid.

  “I will spare my sympathy for someone who was not trying to murder my sister at every opportunity,” says Ava, even more dryly, if possible.

  “Let me try again then,” says butlermaid.

  ~???~

  The Nevilles bring in a branch family so distant they no longer use the Neville name after being expelled for marrying foreigners.

  They are the most powerful Nevilles in existence.

  They are very nearly the only Nevilles in existence.

  “You will,” says the st remaining elder with a sniff, “take on names that reflect the great Neville family.”

  “What choice,” says Do-yun, “do we have?”

  ~???~

  “You are trying to make me care about the Nevilles,” says Ava. “Why, by the blood, would you think that I would care about the Nevilles?”

  “Because they are people?” says the maidbutler, frowning as if they do not understand. “Because they are unhappy to be saddled with power they do not want?”

  Ava looks at the maidbutler.

  “My mind is being destroyed,” says Ava in a voice drier than her grandfather’s well of compassion, “by the infinite power of duck futures.”

  The maidbutler tilts their head. “Point taken.”

  “Also,” says Ava, “their former duke tried to murder my sister.”

  “You are,” says the maidbutler, “a very single issue focused person.”

  “Murder does that to a girl,” says Ava.

  This, apparently, is the magic phrase to end the conversation and send Ava back to her own bed.

  Ava makes sure to note that for future awkward social situations.

  ~???~

  Ava gets a few beautiful weeks of peaceful rest while she contemptes what she needs to do.

  Unfortunately, butlermaids are more persistent even than ducks.

  ~???~

  “You again,” says Ava ftly.

  “You… remember me?” says the maidbutler.

  “You are a maidbutler or a butlermaid,” says Ava. “I am an inbred shut-in with very little excitement in my life. What else am I going to remember?”

  “Things are falling apart faster than expected,” murmurs the maidbutler. “This might not be able to be undone.”

  “Well I should hope so,” says Ava, frowning. “I have spent a great deal of effort trying to find a way to keep my sister alive and no maidbutlermaid is going to stop me!”

  “That is true,” says the maidbutler, “but perhaps you will stop yourself.”

  Ava is annoyed at how easy it is for them to smirk and snap their fingers.

  ~???~

  Ava stares at Do-yun, now Jeremy Neville, sitting in the parlour. There is something familiar about the insignia on the wall and Ava has a mounting moment of recognition, of dread-

  “Your majesty,” says Jeremy Neville.

  “Your lordship,” says King Artem Alpin.

  “The Nevilles,” says Lord Jeremy, “have served Carcosa for generations, both as their major commercial exporters… and as their most powerful military force.”

  “It would be hard,” says King Artem mildly, “to maintain such force with such small current numbers.”

  “I think you will find,” says Lord Jeremy, equally mildly, “that if you kill any more of us that the cost will be higher than you can bear.”

  “I had thought,” says King Artem, even more mildly than before, “that only one Neville had perished under… unclear circumstances after the arrest of Duke Buren. It was very tragic, particurly after the document that he intended to murder my wife was released publicly.”

  “Do you think,” says the new Neville Duke, his skin, his eyes marking him as someone not fully of Carcosa, “that murdering a Duke and doing nothing in the aftermath is not a decration of its own?”

  For the first time in her many visions, Ava sees something resembling… discomfort on Artem’s face.

  “Do you think,” says Duke Jeremy Neville, someone who knows about consequences, both predicted and not predicted, “that the other Alpins will stop at one dead Neville when our nds are so ready to be plucked?”

  ~???~

  “You are still not going to make me care about the Nevilles,” says Ava ftly. “Stop trying to make it happen.”

  She feels a slight twinge of guilt and knows that this is not entirely true, but she is not going to bend.

  She cannot afford to.

  “You are not concerned,” says the butlermaid, “about your sister marrying a murderer?”

  “I am a Sheridan,” says Ava, genuinely baffled by the question. “I have never seen Artem Alpin kill anyone who was not trying to murder him or Regina. He is by far the sweetest man I have ever seen.”

  The butlermaid stares.

  “He is going to name schools after me,” Ava says, not disturbed by how easily she can be bribed. “I think I can forgive a murder or two for a brother-in-w who will do such a thing.”

  “Carcosa could fall if those who hold it up are destroyed,” says the butlermaid.

  “Carcosa,” says Ava, “can kiss my-”

  ~???~

  Well, that was rude, Ava thinks.

  She is not sure why the maidbutler did not want to hear about Carcosa kissing her extremely biased history textbook, but it is giving her a headache to be dumped into so many visions so quickly.

  The Nevilles have built a forest that surrounds their nd and the trees are dancing.

  After Ava sees what those trees do to the ambitious Alpin cousins foolish enough to enter…

  …Ava understands.

  Ava retches and thinks that there is nothing in the world as terrifying as dancing trees.

  Except for the squirrels.

  How the Nevilles got the squirrels, Ava has no idea, but the trail of blood they leave behind them is the least terrifying part of what they can do.

  The new Nevilles, Do-yun and his family, are not interested in what has come before them.

  They are the most powerful Nevilles in existence and they will not let themselves be destroyed.

  Even the Alpins are forced to bend before wood and teeth.

  ~???~

  “Do you understand?” says the maidbutler.

  “Oh yes,” says Ava cheerfully. “All is well that ends well.”

  “I am not sure that most people would call building a Forest of Death a good ending,” says the maidbutler.

  “But you would,” says Ava softly, realizing something as true as every one of her visions. “I would. The Nevilles survived. They survived because they did what needed to be done.”

  The maidbutler says nothing at all.

  “Whatever you are trying to do, whatever you are being forced to do,” says Ava, “you need me to be… false to myself to make it happen.”

  The maidbutler does not flinch but still, Ava smiles.

  She smiles because she is starting to learn just how the maidbutler thinks.

  Whoever they are, the maidbutler is a creature of power. If they can somehow pluck Ava, who is the most powerful Sheridan to ever exist, out of her dreams and into their realm, they have abilities Ava can barely witness, much less understand.

  Yet even if the maidbutler is more powerful than any mage in Carcosa, they cannot act as they please.

  There are rules they must follow, people they must act through.

  If they could stop what Ava is doing themselves, they would have already done so.

  This means that there is something they need from Ava.

  This means that Ava is not as weak against the world as she has worried she is.

  In fact, the longer Ava spends in this creature’s company, the more she learns about the power that she herself wields.

  “I think,” says Ava, warming to her idea, “that you are just convincing me that my actions are right. In the world I will create, the people who harm others are punished and those who come after are better, stronger. The Nevilles have protected themselves and theirs and my sister and her husband are doing better and protecting everyone! I have found the future that makes the world better!”

  “Why,” mutters the maidbutler, “does all that was and is depend on the juvenile philosophy of a teenager?”

  ~???~

  Ava wakes screaming.

  In anger, not fear.

  She has never been more insulted.

  ~???~

  Ava wakes and she immediately stalks her cousins and the elders until she finds out when the current King of Carcosa is due to arrive at the Sheridan estate.

  When Artem Alpin finally arrives where Ava can encounter him, she tells the small, lonely boy a story he will never forget.

  If he does not immediately fall into Regina’s strong arms as an adult, Ava will personally come back from beyond the grave to push him into them.

  ~???~

  Unfortunately, it turns out that strange maidbutlermaids can be just as petunt as an aggrieved teenager.

  Unfortunately, it turns out that strange maidbutlermaids can sense a change in Ava’s priorities that even Ava cannot yet sense.

  ~???~

  “You,” says the butlermaid, “are making it so much harder for me to serve.”

  Well, thinks Ava, that does confirm what she suspected about whether or not this… person was in control.

  “So,” continues the butlermaid, “perhaps it is time to get serious.”

  Ava has a strong feeling that she is not going to enjoy what is coming next.

  This turns out to be her most accurate prediction of the future yet.

  ~???~

  Despite her bravado, Ava knows that she does not understand everything.

  Some things do not have to be understood to know that they are wrong.

  She is standing at the edge of the beautiful pond in the strange new school at the outskirts of the Capital. There are ducks in the pond, as in all Carcosan ponds, and one named Mr. Swimsherd makes a rude noise at her.

  There are also healthy children standing in the yard and Ava wonders if this is one of Regina’s projects.

  She is a little puzzled though as to why the children are all standing in lines, their dark skin glistening in the sun.

  When the strange cloaked figure drops in front of them, darkness spreading out from their feet, Ava instinctively moves backwards into the water, even without her duck form to protect her.

  “You are,” says the cloaked figure, “the future of the Shadowguard, bonded by blood and stone. What is your purpose?”

  “We are,” say the children in chorus, “the shadows in the night, the cloak of Carcosa.”

  Then the cloaked figure looks at Ava and Ava –

  ~???~

  – wakes up, a scream choked in her throat.

  As it turns out, Ava does not need to know much at all to recognize when someone is trying to build a child army.

  Ava has told herself that she does not care about Carcosa, about the nd that destroys those who are not as cruel and vicious as those who control its fate.

  It is a deeply unpleasant surprise to realize that Ava may not care about Carcosa… but she does care about Carcosans.

  For all that Ava has only focused on Regina, she realizes very, very suddenly that she has begun to care about the other people she saw in her visions… especially the ones who had lives as troubled as Ava herself.

  Ava only keeps herself from sobbing out loud when she turns to see her sister, sleeping peacefully beside her.

  That is all that gives Ava the strength to push down her fears… and begin thinking once more.

  The butlermaid, Ava realizes, wants Ava to believe that this… this horrifying vision of the future happens because Ava allows her sister to live and be queen, with Artem as her king.

  Yet could her beloved little sister and her loving brother-in-w truly be responsible for the abomination that Ava saw?

  As queen, Regina will spend her entire life trying to rectify the wrongs done to children and to commoners and to the orphans kidnapped from the North. Ava has already seen this.

  Ava knows her sister will fail at times, even with the complete support of her husband, because the forces against her are so strong.

  Yet Ava cannot believe Regina would ever allow this… or that Artem would betray his beloved wife by making actual children into weapons.

  This is not a future Regina would build.

  So who would do so?

  Ava closes her eyes, determined that even if the butlermaid wishes to hide the truth, she will find the actual source of this path of thorns.

  ~???~

  Ava grimly finds the duck from her vision named Mr. Swimshard, and circles back to the school of children being raised as soldiers.

  As she is preparing to nd, she sees a shock of blond hair and circles lower to confirm all her worst fears-

  -only the blond is not Artem.

  “Have the children been appropriately bound?” says the blond man.

  “Yes, King Arthur,” says the cloaked figure in front of him.

  It is not Artem.

  It is another blond king making poor life decisions.

  Ava the duck/woman/anxious mess stares bnkly at the scene in front of her.

  As she looks more closely, she is not even sure when this school is taking pce, since the building looks utterly unlike any style of architecture she has ever seen.

  Ava wakes with a soft breath and a small exhale of relief.

  If a blond is not her sister’s murderous blond, that blond is not Ava’s problem.

  Ava understands that there is only so much wrong she can correct.

  ~???~

  “You,” says Ava gring at the maidbutler, “are trying to actively mislead me.”

  “I could,” says the maidbutler looking nearly angry for a moment, “still eat your foot.”

  “You would be haunted by ducks for the rest of forever,” snarls Ava.

  The maidbutler blinks thoughtfully.

  “That is probably true,” they say. “However, I do not understand what part of the howling void of misery I am showing you is misleading?”

  “I,” says Ava, “can only care about one blond at a time. If my sister’s murderous flower prince is not causing problems, some random blond king is not my problem.”

  “Oh,” says the maidbutler mildly, “is that so?”

  ~???~

  Ava is expecting to be dumped into another vision.

  She is not expecting what the vision has to show her.

  Arthur Alpin is Regina’s son.

  Arthur Alpin is Artem’s son.

  Unlike his father, Artem has made sure there will be no fight for the throne. The second son, Henry, has a name that does not start with A. Arthur is the only Alpin eligible to rule Carcosa after Artem.

  Arthur is beautiful and blond and smart and kind to his mother and father and brother.

  There is also something deeply, terribly wrong with him.

  “When you first meet your bride,” Artem tells Arthur when he comes of age to be engaged to a noble daughter, “you must be kind and forgiving. Even if she is not what you expect at first, you must make allowances for errors and mistakes…”

  Arthur interrupts with a snort, even as he sullenly looks away from his father and the flock of ducks that surround them outdoors.

  “It is easy for you to say that,” he mutters with the disdain of a growing boy so cherished, he has never had to fear his parents. “You married Mother after falling in love with her at your first meeting. I will not be allowed that kindness. Instead, you have saddled me with a bloody fish!”

  Artem looks torn between being annoyed and being sympathetic before he says, “I am sorry you did not have my fortune, Arthur. However, you should not insult your bride-to-be! I have been in her presence and she truly does not resemble a piece of marine life.”

  Arthur does not look as though that knowledge will convince him to treat his future bride kindly.

  “Your fate could be far worse,” his father patiently adds. “I am told she can even talk about non-fish topics occasionally.”

  “By the blood!” Arthur swears. “Could you not have engaged me to a pretty La Belle instead?”

  “No,” Artem firmly says. “I will not have a family that stupid produce the heir that comes after you. Henry will wed one of them instead. At least the Poissons have some brains to go along with their fish by-products!”

  Then, calming down, Artem adds, “Lady Elise Poisson is a good, kind, and shrewd woman who will cement your rule and make for a fine queen. Far worse marriages have been arranged for royalty.”

  Arthur shoots a look back at his father and says, “Like the marriage between my grandparents? Did the Queen not kill the King eventually?”

  Artem smiles and for once, he shows all of his teeth.

  “You should speak well of your dear Grandmother, who perished with your Grandfather in that carriage accident soon after my wedding. He was far too unwell to escape, unfortunately for him.”

  “Then why does she keep sending us cards from other countries?” mumbles Arthur.

  “Those cards,” says Artem loftily, “are from a dear woman named Batasha, which is very different from the name of my dear mother, Natasha.”

  Suddenly Artem stops smiling.

  “The former King,” Artem slowly says, “found a way to control both myself and my mother. It was cruel and torturous and nearly destroyed both of us before my powers allowed me to remove it from myself… and help my mother find another way to escape.”

  Arthur stills, gazing at his father intently.

  “You must treat those under your power well,” says Artem, almost desperately, almost pleadingly. “What separates us from those who would be monsters is our ability to use our powers to protect rather than to confine.”

  “So,” says Arthur slowly. “There is a way to use our powers to confine… and to control.”

  Ava realizes things.

  Ava does not want to realize things.

  Unlike previously, the being who controls her does not allow her to escape the visions.

  “I am worried,” says Artem haltingly, “about our son.”

  Regina ughs as she gathers flowers from the garden. “Henry will learn how to speak properly to Giselle some day, my love. Though perhaps you should let him know he needs to actually show some of his actual feelings for her to understand.”

  “It is not Henry,” says Artem.

  Regina stills.

  “Arthur,” she says firmly, “is a very good prince. He does everything well and tries very hard.”

  “But is he,” says Artem softly, “a good man?”

  ~???~

  Ava wakes and bites her tongue so hard it bleeds.

  “You absolute son of a bleeding wound,” she snarls under her breath.

  Somehow, somewhere, she suspects that maidbutlermaid is ughing at her.

  Apparently, there are more futures she needs to consider.

  ~???~

  Ava goes back to sleep, blood dripping out of her mouth, because she has things she wants to say.

  As it turns out, so does her arch-nemesis.

  ~???~

  “What are you trying to do?” says Ava, using every ounce of her self-control to not stab the butlermaid with their stupid butterfly pins.

  “Choices,” says the butlermaid, “have consequences. I am trying to make sure you are aware of all of yours.”

  “No one,” says Ava, quite reasonably, “ever has to see the effect of all the consequences of what they do.”

  The butlermaid smiles.

  “If you are going to see all the possibilities,” they say, equally reasonably, “should you also not see all the consequences?”

  Nobody, thinks Ava, should see all the consequences.

  Unfortunately, she no longer can avoid seeing them.

  Unfortunately, she cannot unsee what she has seen. The consequences cannot be removed like an unwelcome dream.

  So if Ava cannot avoid knowing the consequences… she needs to know if she can accept them.

  This is not a thought she would have had before…

  Well, before.

  Ava is changing.

  Well, Ava has fooled her nemesis since Ava’s whole life has been nothing but change.

  She will not be defeated by anyone now, much less herself.

  “What,” she says softly, “does my sister’s son do?”

  The butlermaid smiles and the world shifts.

  ~???~

  “But you helped them!” says the white-haired boy, nearly in tears as he holds the hand of an older white-haired man. “You helped them and they sent Father to die and they have chained us!”

  “Remember this,” says the older white-haired man. “Remember how you feel right this very moment. I stepped down as Duke Kuzey because I was not strong enough to keep our family safe and your father became Duke Kuzey.”

  The white-haired man coughs. “Only your father loved your mother so much he was willing to sell our family to the Alpins to keep her. The son of the man my father saved repaid that chance by making us his dogs.”

  “You do not sell family,” says the white-haired boy, tears in his eyes. “You never sell family, not for anything.”

  The white-haired man smiles and for a moment his face shifts into something grimmer, darker.

  “You are quite right, Adem,” says the former Duke Kuzey. “You are now ready to become the Duke of the North.”

  ~???~

  “Arthur Alpin,” says Ava ftly, “is a very busy man. Apparently, after his father alienated the Nevilles, he decided to try to destroy the Kuzeys.”

  She pauses and tries to pull her thoughts, as unravelled as threads of time or the future, together.

  “Even I know that a strong Kuzey presence is needed to keep the dangers of the North at bay,” she says slowly. “Even if it was not wrong to harm them, that is a dangerous game to py with the country and its people.”

  The maidbutler smiles and says nothing.

  “These are horrible things,” says Ava slowly, “but they are not all that happens, are they? You show me a forced army of children and a noble family held in thrall, but that is not everything, is it?”

  The maid butler says, “It is a shame that you could not be a butterfly and dream of what could and could not be.”

  They sound genuinely regretful.

  Ava has never been more terrified.

  “Yet I am not a butterfly,” says Ava, “so show me what you are hiding.”

  ~???~

  This time, the vision hurts.

  This time Ava stays in the form she knows best.

  ~???~

  Ava is a duck.

  Ava is a duck in a pond in a very familiar pce.

  Artem Alpin stands in a beautiful garden.

  Ava has seen this garden through countless visions, but there is something unfamiliar about it that makes her uneasy.

  Even so, she sees Artem kneel in front of a great tree, reaching far above the walls around it and he pces a… sea urchin? in front of a strange metallic statue.

  He is old, older than Ava’s parents, and there is a peacefulness in his eyes that feels…

  “It will not be long now, Regina,” he says. “I have waited a full week after your funeral. You cannot expect me to wait any longer.”

  …That feels like the sort of peaceful end so few Sheridans have.

  Ava-the-duck slowly makes her way to where Artem is kneeling, moved by a feeling she cannot quite expin. Artem sighs as he sinks down beside the memorial stone and reaches his hand out to…

  ..Ava.

  He reaches his hand out to Ava-the-duck and she waddles towards him as he smiles.

  “It is you, Ava,” he gently asks, “is it not?”

  Oddly embarrassed at his perceptiveness, Ava manages a faint quack.

  Artem smiles, his face lighting up. For a moment, he seems like the young flower prince that Ava knows best.

  “Thank you,” he murmurs, “for being here with me in the end. You are the best possible witness for this. After all, you are the one who gave me a reason to live… and so, you should be here to witness my death.”

  Ava can only quack once again as she slowly climbs into Artem’s p.

  His fingers are gentle as he pats Ava’s duck head, even as he continues speaking.

  “Forty years,” he says softly. “That is how long Regina and I were married. Forty years and even now, though she is gone in body, I can feel her next to me. I can feel her spirit all throughout Carcosa, through the commoners she saved, through the children she cherished, through the kinder and better nd she tried to create.”

  Then Artem’s voice breaks in a way Ava has never heard since he was eight and wondering if he should just die at her hands.

  “Only,” he whispers, “I do not know how long the peace that Regina and I struggled and bled for will keep. Our children… We did our best by our children, even though we barely knew what we were doing. Yet though we tried our best to love and nurture them, they both turned out…”

  Artem gives a hollow ugh, even as Ava sadly nudges him with her duck head.

  “Maybe,” Artem softly said, “there is something to be said about adversity and pain building one’s character. Maybe Regina and I gave them too much peace and privilege in their lives. Maybe they were so protected that they never understood the need that others have for protection. Maybe the ck of pain they faced made them unable to understand the pain of others. So much so…”

  Artem closes his eyes, though the pain in his face is clear.

  “So much so,” he says, “that I fear that many of the reforms Regina and I created will be destroyed by them eventually.”

  However, when Artem opens his eyes once more, Ava sees only gratitude and peace.

  “Even so,” he says, “I thank you, elder sister, for all you have done for us. Even if Regina’s reforms st only to my st breath… even then, they were worth doing.”

  Ava is not really a duck, for all that she feels like a duck.

  This means that she cannot cry in this not-Ava body…

  …but oh, how she wishes she could.

  It is so much worse when Artem continues.

  It is so much better.

  “Thank you for giving Carcosa the greatest queen that this nd has ever seen,” Artem continues. “Thank you for giving me my partner and lover and dearest friend. She lived so well and helped as many people as she could. I will join her as soon as you leave but even so…”

  Artem smiles and it is beautiful and tired and hopeful at the same time.

  “Perhaps this does not have to be the end,” he whispers, his breath already starting to fade. “Perhaps knowing that we tried will be enough to convince someone else to-”

  ~???~

  Ava wakes.

  Ava hurts.

  She runs and runs and runs and finds the darkest quietest corner of the garden to curl into a ball so small she can feel herself disappearing.

  “I need,” says Ava in the smallest voice possible, “to see farther.”

  Then her mind explodes.

  This is no longer a vision.

  ~???~

  Her head aches and her body aches and Ava is a duck, one that a rude other duck is trying to bite. This duck has no other mind; it is only Ava and the other duck cannot bite her because she is just light and air and wind.

  She looks up.

  She is in a forest of buildings that stretch so high they block the sky while strange metallic boxes move between them, screaming as they race.

  Ava blinks.

  One of the ducks who was trying to bite her looks over and sniffs and says, “Come get some food, loser.”

  Ava comes.

  There is a rge pond in the middle of a small space of green in between the grey of everything else.

  There are people, so many people, and they come up to the pond and they leave food.

  Ava eats food.

  Ava eats food and sits in the pond and eventually she does not even hear the screaming of the metal and the thick air that she cannot breathe anyways because she is a duck made of light.

  Ava thinks she might want to stay here.

  People feed her and she does not have to think.

  A duck bites her.

  It should not be able to bite her because Ava is light and emptiness, but somehow it does.

  “You have things to do, loser,” says the duck and there is something in its gaze that makes Ava feel smaller than she ever has.

  Ava looks at the nice food and the grey and the loud and the people who are kissing and nobody is stabbing them with metal and she sighs.

  “I guess,” she says softly, “that I do.”

  She flies up into the air, up and up and up until she is in darkness again.

  There is Regina, torn and bloody and desperate, in a dark tomb with dead bodies and murderers and Ava is there because she loves her sister.

  Even if everything else about Ava is gone, that much is true.

  When Ava takes the knife to her chest of light to save her sister, it hurts.

  Ava is her sister’s keeper and she has done what she can.

  ~???~

  As Ava tumbles, as she moves between duck and woman and ball of light, some things become so, so much clearer.

  Ava has done what she can.

  Ava has tried.

  She has tried to make the only future she can see where this terrible world becomes a little bit better be the future that will happen.

  She has always thought that her life was only about her sister, that she could pretend that the rest of the world does not matter.

  Yet in this moment of falling and tumbling and everything she has seen coming together, Ava realizes the truth.

  Maybe this is not just about Regina.

  Maybe it never was.

  Oh, thinks Ava, as all the pieces finally come together, I understand now.

  ~???~

  ? Watch this final scene as an animated video on Youtube

  “Are you satisfied now?” says butlermaid.

  Ava looks down at her Ava feet and her Ava hands and realizes the ducks are gone forever.

  There is only Ava now.

  There will only ever be Ava now.

  “Yes,” says Ava, “I am.”

  “That was,” says butlermaid, “meant to be sarcastic.”

  “I,” says Ava, smiling, happy, “do not understand sarcasm, metaphors, or people who do not just say what they mean. I am very earnest.”

  The butlermaid blinks.

  “Yes,” they say slowly. “You are.”

  “So let me be clear,” says the butlermaid, and it almost sounds like respect in their voice, “that you need to make your choice now. You have seen what will come, what the future you are building will bring and you must understand what to do.”

  “Oh, I do,” says Ava.

  “So you are going to move forward,” says butlermaid, almost disbelieving. “Even after all you have seen, you will still save your sister’s life.”

  Then, as if it is a word they have never previously said, a strange resonance fills the butlermaid’s voice as they ask, “Why?”

  “Life,” says Ava, feeling something close to joy bubbling up inside her, “is hard.”

  She can see them all now, the future threads shaking as her words gain force, gain power.

  “We tell ourselves stories,” says Ava, “because we do not want to face how terrible our choices can be. We pretend that things are as they should be, that things were meant to happen, and that we can just live with what is to come.”

  Ava thinks about the future threads with their many, many Regina deaths, with their Carcosas that leave their people to suffer and fail and --

  And she snaps them all at once.

  “That,” says Ava, “is stupid and cowardly and wrong.”

  She stands tall, proud, over four thousand years old, not quite sixteen, and she tells the truths that will shape the world.

  “Just because life is hard, does not mean that you let it happen to you,” she snarls. “You take control. You fight for the future you want.”

  “A future that also brings pain and suffering?” says butlermaid.

  Ava snarls harder. “Just because good things are taken away does not mean we stop fighting for them to exist in the first pce!”

  Ava feels the power in her. The ducks are gone but they are behind her, an eternity of ducks powering her words.

  “Regina did amazing things,” says Ava, the truth finally setting her free. “The years of her doing good things were so much better than if she had not done them at all.”

  “I know,” says Ava, “that because those good things existed that someone will come, that people will come to fight for them again in the future, because she proved they could exist.”

  There is a strange piercing noise and something grey and wobbling impedes her vision for a moment.

  When it clears, the butlermaid is smiling.

  It is as if they, too, have made a decision.

  “You are right,” says the butlermaid. “Someone else like Regina will come. There will be others who try for more and even better.”

  They say softly, “So long as they can save the viliness.”

  “Maybe,” says Ava, thinking of her own and of Regina’s lives, “the viliness can save herself.”

  “Perhaps that is a story worth telling,” says the butlermaid. “Just as yours has been.”

  It is the best gift Ava could have received.

  She smiles as she goes back to end her story.

  ~???~

  Ava is but one woman and one story and one piece in a much rger puzzle of people who try.

  She understands what she must do.

  When Ava opens her eyes, she smiles.

  Then, quietly and calmly, she goes to tell her grandfather about her weak, useless power.

  ~???~

  Authors' Note:

  “The time has come,” the walrus said, “to talk of many things.” -Lewis Carroll, “Alice in Wondernd”

  It has been a long time in the making, but we have reached the true ending of “The Viliness Wants her Prince to Live!”

  Friends, thank you for following us on this epic fantasy journey. We are grateful for every person who took the time to read, follow, comment, and review this story. It has meant the world to us. We have wanted to write stories about people who find ways to survive and even triumph in the face of overwhelming odds. We are thankful that so many of you have been willing to share your time, your thoughts, and your encouragement.

  You can take a look at our complete Youtube pylist of animated videos (featuring Ava and the mysterious Servant Butler) for this final epilogue here.

  As a special thank you, feel free to ask a question of ANY character in the story - Regina, Artem, Ava, Henrietta, Robin, Regina's parents, and so on! We will update over the next few weeks with replies to questions until we have no more questions to answer. This is our gift to you, our amazing readers, for following us over 150,000 words, a lot of ducks, a smaller number of feet fish, and a great deal of murder!

  If you would like to see Ava's and Regina's work in changing Carcosa continue, you can take control in our upcoming sequel game, Save the Viliness. Our free 3-hour demo is avaible on both Steam (Windows version) and Itch.io (Mac version). This game challenges you to guide a new neurodiverse viliness through an animated visual novel with menacing manors, mysteries, (wo)men, and murder. You can find clues, fight off foes, calm angry feet fish, optionally romance one of five potential partners (including 1 woman, 3 men, and 1 nonbinary character) and escape from eldritch horrors while potentially reforming Carcosa.

  The fate of a new viliness and Carcosa itself is in your hands... if you can escape death first.

  If you would like to follow us further, you can join our mailing list (we send out free cards from Save the Viliness characters every month!) and our company discord server (where we chat with our readers and pyers every night). Come join us to follow our game's development and to learn about new stories ahead of time.

  Depending on interest, there might even be other novels set in Carcosa to share in the future.

  Finally, thank you once again for your support. Creating novels and games for Carcosa has been an epic journey but your support has made it a true pleasure. We cannot thank you enough for giving our work a chance. It has been an honor!