The wind on the rooftop had grown colder.
It came in long, slow gusts from the direction of the river. It carried the smell of rain that had not yet fallen, and it tugged at the loose strands of Eunice's dark green hair. Around her feet, the glow of the hexes was fading. The rifles, the swords, and the curved knives that had hung in the air a moment ago melted away into thin green smoke, and the wind scattered the smoke across the old tar roof. Soon the only light left was the pale yellow glow from the city below and the faint shine of the moon behind a layer of clouds.
It was a quiet place. There was a rusted water tank in one corner, a tangle of cables along the edge, and the low, tired hum of an air vent that had been running for twenty years. Far below, the streets were full of headlights and tiny moving people. Across the road, the ballroom windows glowed like a lantern in the dark, and from somewhere inside it, the faint sound of an orchestra drifted over the gap.
Eunice pressed the binoculars against her face again. She did not say a word.
"Anyways, Eunice," Anastasia said.
Her voice was light and easy, as if she had not just been threatened by a dozen weapons. She sat on the edge of the vent with one leg crossed over the other, swinging her foot in the air. The moonlight caught her long blue hair and made it shimmer like the surface of a deep lake.
Eunice did not answer. She kept her focus on the two figures in the middle of the dance floor, a man with amber hair and a girl with a dark gothic dress, still standing close together while the crowd clapped around them.
Anastasia waited. Five seconds passed, then ten.
"Sigh. Hey, don't ignore me," she said. She rested her chin on her hand. "Our dear little obsession is already ignoring us. Do you really want to be ignored by both of us?"
Still nothing.
Eunice was not ignoring her by accident. She was doing it on purpose. She had not forgotten the words Anastasia had thrown at her earlier, the teasing and the sweet poisonous smile, and she did not want to speak to her at all. Every time she opened her mouth, she was afraid that something dangerous would come out.
"Hello~~~~," Anastasia sang. She waved one hand in front of Eunice's face. "Is Eunice Van Emilios still there????"
Eunice leaned slightly to the left, so the hand would not block her view.
"Hello~~~????"
She leaned to the right.
"Ohh, come on, Eunice!" Anastasia threw her hands in the air. "You know what I said is right. We both know it. After what we did during one of the rounds of his regressions, how could he possibly look at us any other way?"
That made the binoculars lower a little. Only a little.
Anastasia saw it, and her smile grew sharper. She jumped lightly off the vent and began to pace along the edge of the roof, with her hands clasped behind her back, like a teacher walking in front of a very stubborn student.
"Let's make a list," she said. "A refresher for your memory. First, me."
She stopped and pointed to herself with one thumb.
"I killed his parents. I did it in the original timeline. I did it in this timeline too. And do you know why?" She tilted her head. "Because he is the lost soul, Eunice. He was never supposed to be born in this world. He doesn't belong here. He is a stranger who walked through a door that wasn't meant for him, and the world has never really known what to do with him."
Eunice's fingers tightened on the binoculars.
"And in the original timeline, I was the one who shot him in the head," Anastasia continued. Her voice did not change at all. She spoke about it the way someone might speak about spilled milk. "So that he would go back to the world he originally came from. That was the plan, at least. A bullet to send him home."
The wind blew between them. A distant car horn sounded far below.
"Second," Anastasia said, and she turned and pointed her finger straight at Eunice's chest. "You."
"Don't," Eunice said quietly.
"You killed Emhyria in his twenty-five-thousand-and-first regression. You did it because he didn't love you anymore." Anastasia's smile did not move, but her eyes had gone flat. "He really did love you once, in some earlier round. But that time, he didn't. And you killed her anyway."
Eunice said nothing. Her jaw was tight.
"So it's only fair that he ignores us," Anastasia said. "Honestly, it's more than fair. And if that bitch Avoinese, who was the first one to kill his lover Emhyria in the twenty-five-thousandth round, were to come and stand next to us tonight, all three of us together, he would kill the three of us on sight. Without even asking a question."
She stopped and clapped her hands together once, as if to wrap up a lecture.
"Anyways! I'm only saying it as a refresher. And you should consider yourself lucky, Eunice. You're the one I decided to approach, not that batshit insane bitch Avoinese. I mean, why would I? I already have a hard enough time dealing with you. I don't want to deal with someone like her."
She said the name Avoinese, and something strange happened.
Her whole body gave a small shudder. It started at her shoulders and rolled down her arms like a ripple on water. She wrapped both arms around herself and rubbed them quickly, as if she had just stepped out of a freezer.
"Uggh," Anastasia said. "Just thinking about her makes my whole body shiver."
Eunice finally lowered the binoculars a few inches. She looked at Anastasia with narrowed snake eyes and a frown. It was a rare thing to see Anastasia afraid of anything. She was a dragon, after all. She had lived for ages and she was not supposed to fear anyone.
"You're a fucking water dragon," Eunice said. It was the first thing she had said in several minutes. Her voice was dry. "How can you be so scared of a woman like her?"
Anastasia's face lit up like someone who had just won a prize.
"Finally! You talked to me!" She skipped over and sat on the vent again, and she looked a little too happy. "Okay, so, here's the thing. Unlike you, who only dealt physical trauma to Syl..."
Eunice flinched.
It was a small movement, and it happened so fast that no one but a person who had been watching for it would have noticed. But Anastasia was watching.
"...to the point that you even had a child with him," Anastasia said, and her voice became a little quieter. For one second, the mocking tone disappeared. "Because you forced yourself on him. Avoinese did worse. Much, much worse."
Eunice did not deny it.
She did not say that it was a lie. She did not say that it was an exaggeration. She stood very still, with the binoculars hanging from her fingers and her yellow-green eyes fixed on a point somewhere far away. There was something in her face that was not quite shame, because Eunice did not know how to feel shame, but it was a close cousin of it. It was the look of a person who knew exactly what she had done and had decided never to let anyone see her flinch at it again.
'I know what I did,' she thought. 'I don't need her to tell me.'
Then she raised the binoculars again.
"How worse?" she asked. Her voice was flat and cold. She was not looking at Anastasia. She was looking at the man with amber eyes, far across the road.
Anastasia let out a long, tired breath. "Can you at least stop looking through those things and look at me???"
"No."
"I'm going to be old because of you."
"You're a fucking dragon," Eunice said. "You can't get old."
"This fucker," Anastasia muttered under her breath. She rubbed her forehead and, after a moment, gave up and went on. Her voice sank lower, and the wind made it even quieter.
"Avoinese did so many things to him, Eunice. She tortured his mind first. Then she tortured his body. She did it for so long that in the end he couldn't even speak anymore. She would sit in front of him for hours just to hear him make a sound and be disappointed when he couldn't."
The air on the rooftop seemed to grow heavier.
"She cut pieces of him away," Anastasia said. "And she fed them to her hounds, one by one, while she forced Syl to watch. She wanted him to look. She wanted him to see every second of it. And when she got bored of his eyes looking at her, she gouged them out. Both of them. She kept them in a box and later turned them into jewels."
Eunice's hands had gone still.
"And she forced herself on him too," Anastasia finished. "She conceived his child, same as you. Both of your children were born from the same horror, and both of you did it to the same man."
A long silence followed.
Down in the street, a bus rattled by. A drunk man laughed. Somewhere very far away, a dog barked. Eunice stood without moving, and the wind pulled gently at the green strands of her hair.
She was a villainess. She had killed people. She had done terrible things, and she had never once pretended otherwise. But even she, listening to the words one after another, felt something cold go through her chest. It was not pity. It was closer to disgust, the kind that comes when you look into a mirror and see something much worse than yourself.
"Seriously," Anastasia said softly. "She is way worse than us. I'm glad Emiliana deleted her from existence and reset her memories, so that she only remembers that she regressed."
Eunice's whole body jerked. The binoculars came down from her face at last, and her snake eyes snapped toward Anastasia.
"Wait," she said. "She also regressed?!"
"Finally!" Anastasia said, and in the same instant she reached out and snatched the binoculars right out of Eunice's hand. "You stopped looking at my poor binoculars!"
She hugged them to her chest like a baby. "My dear binockyu. Don't worry. Mommy's here. I won't let that bitch use you anymore."
"Answer me, damn it!!!" Eunice snapped. The vein on her temple pulsed.
"Fine, fine, geez! Don't get mad, Eunice." Anastasia rolled her eyes and cradled the binoculars to her cheek. "You and your bad temper. No wonder you're the most hated villainess in the eyes of the people in this world. Even Avoinese was idolized by them. Even Emhyria was!"
"I don't give a damn about your opinion," Eunice said. Her voice shook a little. "And I don't give a damn about what the people in this world think of me. So answer me, goddamn it!!!"
Anastasia sighed and flopped down onto the vent again with a dramatic groan. She stretched her legs out in front of her, tapped her fingers against the binoculars, and began.
"Fine. Fine. Where do I start?" She looked up at the clouds. "Okay, so unlike you, who only discovered the power of the true Sylan Armada Von Noctis, the Stigmata of Clockwork that sleeps inside him..."
"The thing Syl used to call Chrono," Eunice said, with a frown. "Like a pet name."
"Exactly. Because he saw it as his own. His companion. His other half." Anastasia nodded. "Anyway, unlike you, Avoinese didn't take it by force. She prayed. She actually prayed to the God Solanus to let her meet him again."
"Prayed?" Eunice repeated, as if the word tasted strange.
"Because she regretted it," Anastasia said. "She really did regret what she had done to Syl. It was during his two hundred and seventeenth regression, you see. There was an execution. Avoinese was going to be the one on the platform. And Syl, our poor, stupid, kind Syl, walked up in front of everybody and offered his own life to be the one who got executed instead of her."
Eunice's eyes widened slightly.
"And that was the moment she realized her mistake," Anastasia said, quietly. "She stood there with the crowd screaming and the executioner raising the blade, and she finally understood what she had done. She understood that he had been protecting her the whole time. And it was too late."
The rooftop was very still.
"As far as I remember," Anastasia went on, "his last words were something like this."
She pressed one hand against her chest and spoke in a strange, soft, gentle voice. It was the voice of a man who had run out of anger and had only sadness left.
"'If there's a next life, I hope we won't meet each other again. And I regret loving you, Avoinese.'"
She let the sentence hang in the air.
Then she wiped the corner of her eye with one knuckle. "Ohh. How tragic. Really."
There was no tear on her finger. She was not even pretending to cry very hard. But there was a strange, bitter shadow in her sapphire eyes, and it was a little too deep to be fake.
Eunice stood in silence. She stared at the ground. She looked as if she were trying to decide whether to be angry or not.
"He did love her?" she asked at last.
"More like he was confused and mistook her for someone else," Anastasia said.
"Who?"
"Emhyria, of course." Anastasia looked at her nails and flicked a speck of dust off her thumb. "Who else?"
"I see." Eunice crossed her arms. A deep line appeared between her eyebrows. "That's a lot of information. Too much, actually. But how the fuck do you know all of this?"
She had been wondering about it for several minutes already. Anastasia had mentioned things that no one should have known. She had named dates, rounds, last words, and what had been said on an execution platform that Eunice herself had never seen. Syl had told no one. Only Syl himself and the people who were there could have known.
Anastasia smiled. It was a slow, quiet smile, and it did not look like her usual playful one.
"The thing is, Eunice..." she said.
She let the words hang for a moment.
"I have the power to control time. I can see every timeline, every branching world, every round that has ever happened. It's the same kind of power Chrono has. But Chrono's power is limited, and mine is not. That's why I can travel to this world as freely as I like, without paying any price. Nobody takes anything from me for it."
She sighed, and her shoulders slumped. "Not that it helps me much here. I can't use all of my powers in this world. I'm bound by two rules, Causality and Plausibility. They keep me small. If I were allowed to use everything I have, I wouldn't be standing on a rooftop arguing with you about binoculars."
For three whole seconds, Eunice did not move at all.
"What..." she said.
Her face went through three different expressions in the space of a heartbeat: shock, disbelief, and then fury. The wind rose around her. A faint green light began to flicker again at the edges of her sleeves.
"You had that power," she said, very slowly, "and you didn't tell me?!"
"You didn't ask," Anastasia said.
"I didn't ask?!"
"No. You never asked." Anastasia shrugged innocently. "You only ever asked about Syl. If you had asked me, 'Hey, Anastasia, can you see every timeline in existence and know what happened to Syl in each one?', then I would have said yes. But you didn't ask."
Eunice pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead and groaned. "Ugghh. So much for a fucking partner in crime."
"I'm a very good partner in crime," Anastasia said, offended. "I brought snacks, didn't I?"
"You did not bring any snacks."
"The thought was there."
Eunice took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly. Then she lowered her hand. Her anger did not disappear, but it settled into something heavy and thoughtful. She walked a few steps along the edge of the roof and then back again, with her fist pressed against her chin.
"Anyways," she said. "Getting back to the point. After what you said about Avoinese, you've just given me an idea. And it's connected to something you told me before."
"Hm?"
"You told me this earlier, before you started this whole shitty story. You said Avoinese killed Emhyria while she was pregnant."
"Yeeeep!" Anastasia chirped. She raised one finger in the air. "She did exactly that. That's why I call her batshit insane. I don't use the word lightly, Eunice. She is the only person I know who earned it."
"Then the other thing you said," Eunice went on. She stopped pacing and turned around. "You said that Syl mistook Avoinese for Emhyria. Why?"
Anastasia opened her mouth.
She closed it again.
She looked up at the dark sky for a moment. Then she looked at the binoculars in her arms, and then at her fingernails, and at the tip of her shoe. It looked like she was searching all of them for an answer.
"That," she said at last, "I don't know. It's still a mystery."
She scoffed it off with a wave of her hand, but the gesture looked a little forced.
"Huh," Eunice said. She tilted her head and gave Anastasia a long, flat look. "So much power, and you don't even know the true reason why."
"Hey! There are limits!"
"Sure there are."
"I can see every timeline," Anastasia said, offended. "I can't see inside people's hearts. That's a very different thing. If I could see inside people's hearts, I would've known how to make you stop being so annoying a long time ago."
Eunice ignored that. She looked up at the sky, and when she spoke again, her voice was lower and more serious.
"But I'll admit it," she said. "She was way worse than me."
Anastasia raised her eyebrows. It was not often that Eunice admitted anything.
"Before I regressed, I really did meet her," Eunice said. "I'm not going to lie. She was far worse than I ever was. She tortured my half sister, Emiliana Van Emilios, the one you call the Main Protagonist of the game from this world. She did it for years, and she enjoyed it."
"The game," Anastasia said, with a smirk. "Yes, yes. The game."
"I still don't believe it," Eunice said sharply. "I still don't believe I'm originally from a fucking game. People aren't characters. We aren't lines of text somebody wrote. I'm a real person, and I have a real life."
"You're a real person with a very unfortunate temper."
"Shut up." Eunice crossed her arms tightly over her chest. She looked away. "Anyways, I wish that next time, I won't have to meet her again. I admit it. She is the most frightening person I've ever met. Even Emhyria, who was called the Witch of Calamity, who could burn whole cities with a wave of her hand, looks like a saint compared to her."
She stopped for a moment. Her mouth twisted.
"A saint," she repeated.
"I can agree with that," Anastasia said, nodding seriously. She patted the binoculars as if to comfort them. "Emhyria might have been called the Final Boss. She might have been the strongest of all. But Avoinese is the one who is best suited to the title of 'Villainess'. The real one. The one that no one else can compete with."
For a moment, the two of them stood in silence, one on the edge of the vent and the other by the low wall at the side of the roof. They were both thinking about the same woman. Neither of them wanted to say her name again.
The wind blew through the antennas and made a thin, mournful whistle. Far below them, in the lit windows across the road, the music in the ballroom changed. It had been a slow dance, and now it was turning into something brighter and quicker. The couples began to separate and spin. Through the glass, Eunice could see Max, with Bell's hand in his, laughing at something she had said.
His laugh was easy and warm. He looked like a man who had forgotten all about the thirty thousand lives behind him. He looked happy.
And that was the worst part. Eunice could stand a hundred wars. She could stand the world ending. But she could not stand the way he looked at that girl.
Her fingers curled slowly into a fist.
Then she remembered that the binoculars were no longer in her hands.
"I agree with you, Anastasia," Eunice said. She held out her palm in front of her, flat, with the fingers open. "Now give me the fucking binoculars."
Anastasia's sapphire eyes went wide. She looked at the open palm. She looked at the binoculars in her arms. And then, in a motion so fast that it blurred, she curled her whole body around them like a mother protecting a child from a fire.
"No, no, no, no, no!" she cried. "This is mine! Mine and mine alone! Buy your own! You almost destroyed my dear binockyu earlier!"
"I'll buy you another one."
"You won't, you liar! You said that about the last three things you broke!"
"I will!"
"No!"
"Give it to me!"
"Never!"
Eunice lunged. Anastasia rolled away with a shriek, and the binoculars flashed in the moonlight as she held them high above her head. She hopped from the vent to the water tank with the grace of a dancer, then jumped to a cable box and back again. Eunice chased her around the rooftop, snarling, with her green hair whipping in the wind.
It was the stupidest thing in the world. Two beings who had lived through countless regressions, who had caused the deaths of hundreds, who held in their hands the fate of a man who had suffered thirty thousand times, were running in circles on a dirty rooftop over a pair of binoculars.
At last, Eunice stopped. She stood with her hands on her knees and her chest heaving. Anastasia had climbed up on top of the water tank and was sitting cross-legged with the binoculars on her lap, grinning down at her like a cat that had cornered a mouse.
"You are impossible," Eunice said.
"Thank you," Anastasia said happily.
"It wasn't a compliment."
"It's still a compliment if I decide it is."
"Ughh!"
Eunice straightened up and pressed both hands over her face. A long, tired groan came out of her, deep from her chest. It was the groan of a woman who had survived a thousand battles and still could not survive one conversation with this particular person.
She was tired. She was so very tired of Anastasia.
No. Not Anastasia. Melusine. The ancient, impossible, childish water dragon princess who had borrowed that name and that body, and who still insisted on behaving like a spoiled brat no matter how many centuries passed. That was the true source of her headache.
"Ughh!"
Eunice only groaned again, and the wind carried it away across the roofs.