FEAST OR FAMINE


    ACT ZERO


    Allow me to set the stage, one final time, as the curtains rise on a bonfire soon to blaze.


    THE GIRL IN THE TOWER


    Once upon a time, in a land of dreams and demons, there was a girl in a tower that wished for a hero to save her.


    The girl and the tower were both made of glass, but the girl was cracked and smudged and cut to shambles. She had been alone in that tower for a very long time, and had come to resent the soft and dreadful quiet, but the thought of leaving on her own was too terrible to imagine. She was not trapped in that tower, though many monsters and mechanisms barred the way to her chambers from below. Or, rather, she was indeed trapped, but only by her own hand and the trembling of her thoughts.


    The sky above her tower held neither stars nor moons nor the changing of seasons by which to track the time, but the girl knew that she had been in that tower for a very, very long time. Long enough to see great cities of brass and emerald rise from the soil and return to it. Long enough to see the soil itself swept away, pulled beneath the waves of the expanding sea. Once, her tower had proudly watched over golden fields and the little smudge-ants that tended to them. Now she could only see salt-spray and scoured rock, the storm-tossed cliffs of a land crumbling away.


    In days gone by, when the world was still bright and colorful and the people still sang to their children of wandering knights and virtue-crowned kings, the girl lived in that tower with her mother, the Empress Eternal who was master of the world and all that lay within it. Her mother taught her of dreams, demons, and the very nature of their world, a world that the Empress called Pandaemonium.


    Dreams, which could also be called figments, were shaped by their environment. Of the hundreds and thousands that made pilgrimage to their tower to see the Empress and her beloved daughter, all but a few were mere figments of living imagination. Though these phantasmal figures could have lives, families, ambitions, and regrets, they existed at the whims of the world. A loving farmer could have the role of a hateful killer forced upon him without the slightest chance of resistance, made to murder the family he had toiled for simply because someone with real power had told him to.


    Demons, the Empress told her daughter, were those who shaped their environment. It was these rare figures who were special, who mattered to the world, and wherever they went the world listened and changed. A demon comes to a fishing hamlet, peaceful and serene, and sees only the shadows cast by her own paranoia. The fisherfolk, who before that day would never think of harming their neighbors, become consumed by the demon’s fears and plot against each other, jumping at every sound and keeping knives in their boots and sleeves. The skies over the village darken, and the bounty of the sea dries up and rots. The killing begins not long after, and the demon leaves the hamlet with her perceptions reinforced, wandering off to spread her curse of ruin.


    Only their tower was exempt from this, for it was the domain of the Empress, master of the world, whose control of Pandaemonium was absolute. Demons who came to their tower found themselves just as mutable as the dreams surrounding them, so great was the power of the Empress Eternal. But her daughter was destined to play a different role.


    “My child, I curse you, and I hope one day you will understand why I have done this. I name you Katoptris, the demon of mirrors, and where all other demons shape the world by their perceptions, it is your fate to shape the world by the perceptions of others. You will be the reflection of each soul that comes to you, their shadow and their glory. You will show hatred to the loathing and desperation to the anguished. All shall come to you seeking wisdom and leave knowing torment, for torment is the sigil inscribed on every breathing soul.”


    And thereupon her mother bound her to a great mirror at the very height of the tower, a thing of silver and glass that stole the whole wall of the final chamber. Katoptris was to remain in that mirror, a phantom reflection of whosoever stepped before it, until the day came that a demon saw fit to free her. And then the Empress left the tower, and the city of brass and emerald, and she never returned.


    The young Katoptris, now trapped behind glass, did not understand at first what her mother had done. The mournful came to her and she wept for them, young lovers came to her and she swelled with joy, and all this felt only natural. Her reactions had grown more intense, and the tower itself seemed to groan and shake with her exclamations, but this could be explained merely by her mother’s absence. Few left her tower satisfied, but then she never claimed to be panacea.


    And then a wicked and hateful thing came to darken her home, and at last she understood why her mother had called it a curse.


    A demon came seeking audience, and she wore a radiant smile. She waited patiently for her turn to stand before the mirror, and she spoke gentle kindness to the girl in the mirror. But when she did, Katoptris found herself struck with a deep and terrible loathing for the girl. This thing that stood before her was worthy only of her contempt and hatred, and the longer they spoke the more that Katoptris began to hate herself just as deeply as she loathed the abomination before her.


    With a final cry of wretched, miserable odium, a cry of pure malice, the girl in the mirror demanded everyone in the tower to descend upon the demon that stood before her and shatter it to pieces. And so they did, heeding the command of their ruler’s daughter. Knives held by a hundred hands bit deep into soft, unresisting flesh, and they carved the interloper piece by piece, paring her down to bone and gristle. They ate what was left, scraps of skin and rotting blood, until nothing could be seen of the monster that had come to the tower.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.


    Still the tower’s mistress shivered and shuddered, wracked by disease taken root in her mind, and when the crowd’s work was done, their knives still wet, she called for them again. Katoptris begged and pleaded for their touch, and the mass listened to her. Bloodied hands were set to a new task, blades bashing against silvered glass.


    The mirror shattered, and with it broke the tower and all the tower’s guests. Twisted, frenzied things escaped into the city and kept killing until they were put down, and the very land and sky around the tower became warped and rotting. The rot spread, and spread, and spread, until brass walls and emerald palaces and golden fields all gave way to graying mulch.


    And in the rot, in the silence and the solitude, the girl in the tower tried to put herself back together.


    Katoptris, demon of the mirror, daughter of the Empress who was goddess of Pandaemonium, found that she could not bear her own reflection. Each shard of glass, each piece of her, was a reminder of her every flaw and failing. Her weakness, her cowardice, her ignorance. The whole of her being, she came to believe, was a mistake, or something crueler, by the hand of her mother and maker.


    So she took her shards and flung them from her tower, letting them drift away on sudden gales, scattered to the corners of the land of dreams and demons, unaware of what they would become. And then she was alone, and alone she would remain for a very long time.


    Visitors still came to the tower, drawn by promise of answers and audience with a shadow of the divine. But the tower was no longer welcoming, now filled with traps and monsters and trials of unbending spirit. The tower resisted all intrusion, unwilling to allow any to see its sole occupant.


    In the old days, when the tower stood amid shining city and the curse had not yet seeped into its very bones, hundreds came to see the heiress of the world. In the waning days, as the city crumbled and skies stilled, that number trickled to dozens, then a handful, and then no one at all came seeking Katoptris.


    The world moved on without her. But stories still carried, across the endless expanse of Pandaemonium, of the girl in the tower, the mirrored daughter of the Empress. And eventually, someone new set out to climb that tower and save the demon of glass.


    A wandering knight, a demon with feline eyes, traveled the winding paths to the old tower with sword in hand and shining plate. She had a name, but like the name of the hateful thing before her it does not matter and I will not repeat it here. You may guess at their names, if you like, but it changes nothing. This is not their story.


    The knight passed unscathed through traps that had slain the careful, put down monsters that had claimed the mighty, and overcame tests of character that had vexed the righteous. She was untouchable in her conviction, that burning desire to climb the tower and save Katoptris.


    The tower resisted the knight with all it had, twisted by grief and loathing, but at long last the tower had me its match and been surpassed. Nothing could stand between the knight and her damsel.


    Katoptris had lost all hope of rescue from the prison of her own making, and even in the face of her rescuer she struggled to accept that her isolation was at an end. But she did not resist, when the knight carried her back down the tower and out into the world beyond, and wonder crept into her heart at taking her very first steps outside. And when she asked the knight why she had done this, why she had endured such challenges for a girl she’d never met, the knight answered simply:


    “Because I love you.”


    The pair of demons traveled together and came to know one another, though it was a slow and fearful process for the girl so long alone. The knight was overwhelming in her lust for life, the hungers that kept her moving. Good food, good travels, the stars in the sky reflecting in placid waters, all these drove the knight and all these were given to Katoptris.


    Their journey was not without incident as they passed through a world ravaged by the demons that had come before them, those walking calamities of horror and dread. A plague of lovesickness carried through falling petals, a town turned to flesh-grafting for fear of isolation, all manner of monsters of knives and lies and teeth. The knight cut down every threat to her beloved, for the horrors of the world seemed drawn to her like moths to flame, but Katoptris herself could do nothing but watch. And so again she asked her savior why she had done this, and again she was told the same simple answer:


    “Because I love you.”


    The castoff of demons did not remain their only opponents. In time, the demons who had left that detritus sought them out, full of scorn and hate and the burning need to prove their reality, the world of their eyes. They died to the knight, same as the rest, but their words sank into Katoptris like barbs in her flesh, the demon who had no world to prove, no vision that must be seared into all others. Again, as one more demon fell to her savior, Katoptris asked the knight why she fought for a girl as empty as she was. And this time, the knight answered:


    “What does love want for reason? I love you because I am love. I love you because I have chosen to love you. I love you because it is my nature to love you, writ in my bones and burning through my veins. Why must love be reduced to causality? Perhaps I only love you because you need me to love you, or because I need someone to love. Would that make my love any lesser?”


    And hearing those words, Katoptris at last accepted the love of her knight and came to return her love tenfold. And it was together, strengthened by love, that they faced even greater trials. The demon of hatred that had broken Katoptris was still alive, and its dark influence had been what drove so many other demons to seek out the pair and strive for their destruction.


    That monster nearly broke them, but in the end they cast it down and set it aflame, burning away every trace of it. But in its burning end, the demon of hatred cast one final curse: it told them who had made it, and why.


    The Empress, mother of Katoptris, was mother to this monster as well. All that Katoptris had suffered was by her maker’s design.


    The pair traveled further than they ever had before, deep into the heart of Pandaemonium, to the court where the Empress held sway. A court, but really little more than a throne by the shore of an endless, starlit sea.


    And there, as the knight and the princess came before the Empress on her throne, the Empress murdered the knight with a single word and told her daughter a simple truth: “My daughter, my darling, know that love will always be a lie.”


    Katoptris cradled the husk of her beloved, wailing and weeping, and Pandaemonium shuddered with her grief. In tears, broken and wretched, she asked her mother why she had done this, why she had caused her own daughter so much pain and suffering. Why was any of this necessary? What was the point?


    And the Empress answered, “Because I still haven’t found the answer that I’m looking for, so I need to keep hurting you. All of this must happen again, and again, until I finally have it.”


    But the grief of Katoptris was not the answer that the Empress had been looking for, and this world had run its course as so many worlds before it. So the world burned, burned to ash and quiet cinders, and from the ash the Empress fashioned something new, and a new face to go with it. As she had before, and would again. Again, and again, and again.