“Me? A [Princess]?” she asked, confusion and surprise mixing together into a strange cocktail that made her brain fizzle and her belly flutter in excitement as that small, sleeping, little girl, the one she had been long ago, the one she protected with all her might, began bouncing around in that childish desire that all kids have to become the prince or princess of their beloved nighttime stories.

  “Yes indeed.”

  She tried – and failed – to suppress the strange, nearly alien, excitement, a small smile forming unbidden on her lips as she looked for any kind of excuse to justify how impossible what had just been proposed to her was: “Don’t I need to be, like, your daughter for something like that? And, for the matter, wouldn’t I have to be related to you?”

  A smirk formed on his lips, giving him an air of gentle malignance, as if the next words he was about to say would be an affront to all that was good in the world.

  In a way, they were.

  “You know what’s the best part of being a [King], Isse?”

  She didn’t answer, knowing full well that he would tell her himself in but a moment.

  He didn’t disappoint: “[Kings] are the height of selfishness. Sure, one could say that an [Emperor] would beat them to the punch, but I always thought that those who dared to call themselves [Emperors] were just calling Rodar’s curse upon themselves. [Kings] on the other hand? They’ve been around since the dawn of time, people accept the presence, the continued existence, of [Kings]. Because they’ve always been there.

  “So that’s why me and my ilk are the height of selfishness. Because we can be selfish as much as we want, and people will usually accept it. But I digress.

  “The main reason being a [King] is great… is because we can do anything we want. All we have to do is think it through. And this? Turning you into a [Princess]? It costs me nothing, absolutely nothing. And I can do it, because I’m the [King]! Because I make the decisions, because I have the power to turn my thoughts into reality.”

  His smirk only grew, turning into a grin as he rose to his feet, arms held high up towards the ceiling, towards the nighttime sky beyond.

  “I can do anything! So, for example, I could decide that Archie will become one of this kingdom’s [Princesses], and it would come true.”

  He put index to chin, looking thoughtful, then he snapped his fingers and his grin returned: “Actually, you know what? Let’s do just that!”

  He took a deep breath and pointed a finger to the sky, before shouting so loudly she thought his voice should’ve reached the heavens and even the gods themselves.

  Of course, it didn’t. But it had no need to, for he was heard by something much more powerful than them. Something that could interfere.

  “I, [KING] RAVENSPOKEN, WITH MY FULL AUTHORITY AS SUCH, HEREBY DECLARE THAT, FROM THIS MOMENT ONWARD, ARCHIE THE GOBLIN [ARCHITECT] WILL BECOME A [PRINCESS] OF MY KINGDOM!”

  Nothing changed.

  Outwardly, that is.

  Because why would it change? He had merely shouted some words towards a stone ceiling. And yet, with every syllable being shouted, Isse could’ve sworn she had felt raw power dripping out of his mouth. A power born out of decades of hard work, out of a common decision made by the people he ruled over to trust him with this authority. That, more than anything, gave him the right to do what he was doing right now.

  Not inheritance through blood.

  Not a coup to overtake the previous monarch.

  It was his people, and their trust.

  She decided, in that moment, as she watched the man practically ridicule himself in front of her to prove a point in the most showy way possible, that she liked him.

  That, more than anything so far, sealed her fate, as, deep in her mind, in her soul, she decided that she would stay here. That she would give these people her trust.

  She finally let go of the fear and allowed herself to smile fully, a hint of mischievousness mixing in as Siidi activated their favorite Skill, turning them into Issidi, two in one, a single soul halved and yet, for a short while, reknit together.

  “We’re sure he won’t like it.”

  Ravenspoken raised an eyebrow at their use of the word ‘we’ all of a sudden, but he simply shrugged it off: “And what will he be able to do about it?”

  For an answer, they all heard a scream of fury coming from somewhere in the depths of the castle, probably made by an enraged goblin.

  The [Storyteller] turned [King] looked thoughtful for a few, crucial, seconds, before seemingly coming to a decision: “We have under a minute to find somewhere to hide. Wanna join me?”

  He offered them his hand and, after a moment of hesitation, they took it.

  It sounded like fun.

  The twists and turns of the corridors began muddling together after the fifth corner, becoming indistinct and meaningless blurs of gray stone and, initially, windows, and then not even those. Chandeliers with [Light] Spells gave way to sconces with torches, a corridor filled with candles flitting this way and that like fairy fires from a discount store and another where the walls were scrawled with a lightly shining paint in mind numbing patterns.

  “Why is your castle so strange?” she asked as she skittered rapidly by the [King]’s side. The man was jogging lightly, huffing and puffing like a well kept steam engine, neither slowing nor accelerating. She’d asked if maybe moving faster would be a better option, to which he’d answered that Archie had short legs, which meant he could take it slower.

  That had gotten a chuckle out of her.

  “It’s not my fault. Archie built this place. And he can change some things around. That last room with the painted walls? That’s one of the safety measures. Trust me, you don’t want to end up in there if it’s actually active.”

  “What’s it do?”

  “It can cook you alive!”

  “AND YOU JUST MADE US GO THROUGH IT?!”

  “Hey, it wasn’t active!”

  “That is not reassuring!”

  “Why does everybody say that?”

  She gaped at him, mouth so wide open she felt that her jaw should’ve disarticulated.

  “Here!” said Ravenspoken, opening an apparently random door and, while gripping her hand, going in.

  She allowed herself to be dragged in, if only because she didn’t know where in all the torture devices of Airm she was, and found herself shrouded in darkness.

  “Ah, right, give me a moment,” he said. She heard fingers snap, a little light coming to life somewhere ahead of her. It was small, but in the total darkness it was brighter than a lighthouse’s fire.

  “A moment more,” she heard him say, seeing the man’s shadowed form moving around.

  A creak came from somewhere behind the light, the [King]’s figure looking almost monstrous as it towered over the only source of illumination. Something was moved.

  And suddenly the room was bright as a cloudless day in summer.

  What appeared in front of her eyes was a sight both strange and wondrous, if a little creepy: the room they were in was small, if surprisingly tall. The wooden floor looked worn, scuffed even, by years of people walking all over it, a sharp contrast with the cleanliness and general air of ‘new’ that was the rest of the palace so far. At the center of the room, on a small dais, was a wooden table with a big, fat candle, behind which stood a small, rotating, mirror. On the other side of that was a large desk, with two chairs on both sides, looking equally worn but in a more… rustic way.

  Oh, and then there were the walls positively covered in mirrors which, she imagined, were reflecting the candlelight ad infinitum, turning the room into a solarium.

  “What is this place?” she asked, her voice filled with wonder, while Siidi kept doing faces at the mirrors and being miffed that she didn’t have a reflection. To support her soul half’s endeavors, she stuck her tongue out at a nearby mirror and couldn’t help giggling at how childish it was.

  Ravenspoken smiled at the sight, deciding not to comment: so long as she was having fun, there was nothing wrong with it.

  “This is the Glass Scriptorium. It’s where I spend most of my free time. It’s… well, it’s a safe place. Safer than most.”

  Isse wanted to marvel at the strange, otherworldly, beauty of the room, at the way her reflection was repeated and repeated endlessly on, in all the mirrors, as if they were a doorway to other places, to other versions of herself. Perhaps happier ones too.

  Yet, she couldn’t contain herself and commented: “If this is where you spend all your free time, isn’t it also the place where Archie will check first?”

  The man puffed out some air dismissively: “Pish posh, this is all reverse psychology. He knows this is where I like to spend most of my time, therefore he’ll think that I’d be extremely stupid to come here, therefore he won’t think to look for me here!”

  She frowned, while inside a smirk began to form on both her and Siidi’s face: “But what if he thought you’d think that and will come here first?”

  “Ah, but he’ll have thought that I have thought that he’ll have thought that, therefore he won’t!”

  “But what if –”

  “Isse, please, for the love of our sanity, the two filaments of my brain that I have left and our tongues, don’t continue down that path. It’ll end only in ruins, and I have a reputation for beating anyone attempting it.”

  She pouted, but decided to stop there in good grace and table the argument for when Archie inevitably found them – after all, one couldn’t hide inside a building from the one who created it.

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  Ravenspoken took a seat at one of the chairs, relaxing in the comfortable plushness of the cushion laid atop it, and motioned for her to do the same.

  She skittered closer, ready to sit on the ground because there was no way in Airm that these chairs could comfortably contain the bulk of her spider half – without breaking –, and yet, the moment she stepped closer, something strange seemed to happen.

  Her gaze fell on the reflections of the room, because, really, there was no way for it not to, seeing how the mirrors were everywhere. To make it clear, it wasn’t that the walls were mirrors, no: they were covered in seemingly hundreds of them. All different, with different frames – some wooden, some golden, some made out of silver and others of simple iron – carved in the most improbable patterns – flowers, gears, vines, musical notes, dancing people and screaming souls – and of the most disparate dimensions and form. Every time she looked this way or that she noticed new ones, while old ones she was certain had been there were gone or had moved to another location, making her question whether she was hallucinating or if there was something else afoot.

  Nope, there’s definitely Skill shenanigans in play here, told her Siidi, reassuring her, as she always did, that she wasn’t yet going insane.

  Anyways, as she looked at the many mirrors, she saw her reflection, of course, but also that of the table, the chairs, Ravenspoken’s. The entire room, repeated and replicated a hundred times over every which way, the image distorted by the refraction. She blinked.

  And when next she looked back towards the table, deciding that it was better not to dwell too much on the strangeness of the room, she noticed that the chairs had become… bigger. As if someone had just placed a magnifying glass in front of her eyes, one with several imperfections in the glass, because the image that reached her mind felt distorted, not as it should be. And yet there was no lens in front of her, only her sight unfiltered, which was telling her that things were the way she was witnessing them, even though they shouldn’t.

  “What…?”

  The [King] smiled from his enlarged chair, on which he was now lying so very ungentlemanly, legs dangling from one side while he propped his head up with a hand, the other playing with a button on his shirt.

  “Neat trick, am I right?”

  She nodded: “How does it work?”

  A snort escaped him: “Airm if I know. Niv gave me a mirror shard that, if you want to believe her, was given to her by a strange Mountaineer, and told me to put it someplace with lots of mirrors. That’s how this room came to be. It is a surprisingly quiet place, considering it was built around something that comes from those accursed mountains.”

  “And where’s that shard now?” she was curious about this strange development. Maybe she could give it a look with her magic!

  “I’m not too sure. Somewhere in this room I guess. There’s a lot of mirrors after all.”

  “So, what, you fused that shard into one of them?” she asked.

  He raised an eyebrow and looked at her as if asking ‘are you for real’?

  “Ok, yeah, no, I get it,” she said with a sigh. It had probably disappeared inside a mirror.

  She allowed her eyes to roam the strange room again, only this time around she didn’t settle on any of the reflections, looking without looking. A blink later, her vision was filled with threads, only this time… there weren’t any.

  The room wasn’t filled with strings of all the colors of the rainbow and beyond, no, it was a void, as if something had killed the mana in the room. Or eaten it.

  She could only see one thread: a single, thin, line, black as a starless night sky, connecting her to the [King] in front of her. There were others, of course, sprouting from both her and the man, but they were cut off, from the rest of the world outside this room, waving in the empty air like dozens of lost snakes.

  “What is this place?” she asked again, the words coming unbidden out of her.

  “A peaceful place, as I said. One where nothing and no one can hurt us,” answered Ravenspoken.

  Then, surprising both of them, the crow, Huginn, spoke, his voice loud and piercing as always: “‘Tis a reflection! A reflection of that which it once was. Where before there was nothing but insanity and the endless song of Hell, now there is peace and quiet.”

  They both looked up at the crow in curiosity, their gazes willing him to continue, but the damn bird just snuggled back down on the [King]’s shoulder and went back to acting like a normal animal.

  “Huh, he never told me that one,” said Ravenspoken.

  She smirked: “Well, you did say I was special.”

  “Indeed, and I remember you saying that you had no desire to be.”

  Silence fell on the duo, the gears of the conversation’s mechanism grinding to a halt, the clockmaker having dropped his unfinished work on the floor, watching as it lost gears left and right in desperation. The [King] knew that this lull was brought upon them by memories of death and loss and, with all of his heart, he wanted to guide the conversation to brighter subjects. And yet he knew, deep down – or, really, not so deep – that running from the topic, from the memories, was tantamount to psychological suicide.

  So he thought of how to do this best and, after a while, finally, knew what had to be done: “So, you said that to be a [Princess] someone had to be a family member of the [King], or something like that, right?”

  Isse was snapped out of the deep, dark, cramped hole of memories she’d started to fall back into. Nothing showed on her face, but Ravenspoken knew people all too well. Too many of those he kept close had been like her.

  “Yes, I did say that. That’s what always happens in the books, after all. The young maiden wants to become someone important, and then by the end of the story it turns out that she was some illegitimate daughter of the local king or some such bullshit.”

  Huginn made a chuffing sound that reminded her a lot of a barely contained chuckle, while the [King] made a face of utter disgust: “Please don’t tell me about it. Modern stories are all like that and, as a [Storyteller], I feel insulted. It completely devalues the common folk. Instead of crafting a story about how even someone who’s lower on the ladder can ascend to greatness all it does is reinforce the idea that the only way to reach greatness is to be born in it.”

  He shakes his head: “And to think that the System was made to be the perfect equalizer. How did we manage to make even something on the same level as the gods obsolete?”

  “That’s human nature for you. Destroying everything it touches,” said the arachne bitterly.

  Then she seemed to reconsider this and added: “Present company excluded. And Albert.”

  And Tobias and Morra and all the people in Creanza’s bar.

  “By the way,” she continued hastily, trying not to think about the boy who’d made it possible for her not to be the last of her kind anymore and her one friend, “How did you end up indebted to Albert?”

  The [King] froze in place. His hands tightened slightly, then relaxed, and then he passed the thumb of the left over the knuckles of the right, as if trying to reassure himself that they were all there. That the skin was there.

  That, more than anything, told her the answer.

  “I’d rather not say, Isse. Please.”

  She nodded in understanding. It was probably still a delicate subject.

  “Well, you were saying?” she asked, trying to shift the conversation to something less dark.

  In a way, it was a funny scene: this attempt by two deeply broken individuals to communicate with each other, to show off how much they could live even after all that they’d been through. The way they kept walking – and skittering – around those subjects that they knew could and would hurt them, while at the same time trying to tell each other that they understood, that they knew how it felt, and that one was willing to help the other.

  Even though, truth be told, if they were to compare traumas, as dehumanizing and belittling as that may sound, Isse would’ve probably beat the man by sheer quantity.

  “Ah, right, in regards to you needing to be part of this supposed royal family… you could be. A part of this strange family of ours.”

  She tilted her head to the side, confusion clearly written in every crease of her forehead, in the way her lips tilted just so, ever so slightly downwards: “...What?”

  “You could become part of our family. It’s not really an official thing, but our group is tight knit, so much so that more often than not the few people who actually get to see our true selves think we are a family.”

  Confused silence followed this statement as Isse’s mind tried, and failed, to connect the dots, to find the true meaning in those words.

  In the end, Ravenspoken sighed, a small smile curling his lips upwards: “Would you like us to adopt you, little arachne? It’s a meaningless thing, truth be told. A formality more than anything. One that we could make official if you so wished.”

  …

  Isse?, tried to ask Siidi after a near solid minute of absolute silence on her soul half’s part.

  Hey? Everything alright?

  Apparently the silence had become too awkward for the [Storyteller], as he continued: “You know, Archie could be sort of like the old grumpy grandpa –”

  But he’s the youngest of you all, thought Isse, her brain trying to latch onto anything to prevent her from drowning in the turmoil of emotions brewing inside.

  “– while Fred would be the cool uncle. Tiana would be the cool big sister or something along those lines, although don’t tell her, she’d get too full of herself; and – and, yes, well, actually I’m not sure about Henricks, he doesn’t feel like he’d fit in any specific role. Gosh, he really does feel like ‘just the [Cleaner]’ even in these situations. And Nivera, well, for her it really isn’t that hard: she’s already the group’s mother. A very silly mother at times, but one nonetheless.”

  Siidi?, Isse asked for help, hoping that her soul half would know what to do.

  I… I don’t know what to say, sister.

  Neither did she.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” rambled on Ravenspoken, “Whatever you’ll choose, I’ll say this again. If you wish to, you can be a [Princess]. It is all a matter of what you want to do.”

  Their conversation was interrupted by a strange sound coming from outside, not unlike someone moving furniture over a stone floor.

  Immediately the [King] rose to his feet: “Ah, damn, it seems I’ve run out of time. Well, Isse, I’ll leave you to your thoughts. I’m sorry, but I want to keep the joke going for a while longer.”

  He stepped away from his chair, then stopped: “That is, unless you want to come with me. My Skills can take more than one person.”

  Feeling as if she was in a dream, Isse shook her head no: “I… I think I’ll stay here. Think for a while. If you don’t mind.”

  The man nodded: “Of course. I’ll see you tomorrow, my dear. As for us, Huginn: [Shadow Walk].”

  And he disappeared in one of the many shadows of the room, seemingly walking down into the floor.

  A moment later the door to the room was opened violently, a green ball of rage screeching: “WHERE ARE YOU, YOU MOTHERFUCKING BIRD FUCKER!?”

  That was the last straw on the camel’s back, or the last drop in the vase full of water. Whatever, point is, she reached her limit, her emotions having walked up a peak this whole time and now… they’d just jumped off the very top. The sensation of falling was exhilarating. Or, at least, it seemed fitting for the metaphor, because in that moment she exploded in laughter.

  Loud, raw, unfiltered laughter, both in jubilation and sorrow. There was more, naturally, so much more, but during that ascent the many, many feelings that had plagued her had changed, becoming more primal, simpler, reduced to their basest form.

  And now she laughed it all out, to the goblin’s utter stupefaction.

  “Ok, yeah, I’ll admit that’s a creative insult, but was it really that funny?”

  In lieu of an answer, Isse laughed harder, bending at the waist and nearly ending up rolling into a ball on the floor, her only saving grace being how bottom heavy she was.

  Bottom heavy, she thought, another snort escaping her lips as tears began falling from her eyes. As a teen back on earth she’d always been quite self conscious about her curves, or lack thereof. Now though? Well, she definitely could say she had a big ass.

  Laughing was starting to get painful, but she couldn’t stop and, in truth, it was liberating.

  In the end, though, she stopped – to her diaphragm’s relief – and took a few deep, long, breaths.

  When, finally, she looked up at Archie, she snorted at the face he was making, needing to pinch herself so as not to start laughing again, before asking: “Tell me, was this room the first one you went to check?”

  Archie’s face turned even more confused if that was possible, before he cautiously answered: “Erm… yes…? I mean, it is his favorite room, and for all the convoluted thinking that bastard can do he’s also a creature of habit.”

  So in the end the King of Crows’ reverse psychology had been outfoxed by the goblin.

  “Thank you!” she said as she sauntered out of her chair, which, as she blinked a moment later, went back to looking as it had when she’d entered the room, and left the room while telling the goblin [Architect] goodbye.

  The door closed behind her.

  And Archie, still baffled, looked at it as if the wood could tell him what, exactly, had just happened.

  Then he sighed: “For once, I was hoping for someone normal to join our group. Oh, well. Time to find that bastard.”

  And he began his search again.