“Must you really?”


    One of her daughters burst apart and was cooked to ashes before Anna had a chance to reabsorb the bloody mess. No matter. She had enough mass to make a thousand more if need be. But so much shared pain began to climb into distracting levels, so she shut it out of herself.


    The music flooding into her was harder to ignore, try as she might to seal her senses to it. It sang in her veins, along the leagues of her spread nerves, clawing its way through her many conjoined brain stems.


    “Girl, see reason.” She spoke through ten mouths just to drown out the siren song. “If I just kill you now, you won’t have to see what I’ll do to your friend. Annoy me further and I may keep your head alive just so you can watch.”


    In this case, it would be years before she’d let her old friend expire, now that she’d allowed her presence in the heart of her Sanctum. The nerve of the harpy! Coming into her home, destroying her work, setting her efforts back by a full decade?! In the outside world manners must have gone to pot.


    Then again, calling for reason had never worked on this particular ill-tempered sorceress. A hundred Summers passed by, and she remained just as obstinate, obtuse and difficult. Her sister must’ve finally given up on trying to wring something worthwhile out of her—


    Odd thought, that. The Amni sisters, let alone the youngest, hadn’t crossed any of her minds in decades. So why now?


    With twenty more daughters raised from the meat of her wombs to occupy the flames of her assailant, Anna turned her attention inwards and studied the firing of her neurons. Or, to her mounting horror, their death.


    Interesting. Tallah Amni. She injected the thought among the electric storm of her mind and watched it spiralling through vast stores of memory, activating synapses and connections she’d not touched in decades. Something caught its scent and chased it like wildfire.


    Ah, there it was. The corruption that ate her thoughts and crushed every barrier she set in its wake. An evil, malevolent cancer spreading through her mind, gorging itself on her… on her, in full, to leave nothing behind. Cell death chased the path of its touch.


    Ugly thing. But then again, what else could she expect from an ash eater like Tallah?


    Invite an old friend into your home, watch them trample your work, offer the chance to explain their actions, and ultimately get cursed for it. So much for gratitude among equals. She definitely won’t be doing anything of the sort ever again. Now, to clean up the mess and start undoing the damage done.


    “That does not hurt me, Tallah,” she said as she drew out of herself and saw the ruination of her children. Flames scorched her precious sanctuary. She doused them in blood. “Do you think I would allow you to walk out of here alive after all this? Your theatrics do not impress. And I’ve dealt already with your tawdry little trick. Lay down and die, please. It saves us both the time.”


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    A bit of bluster in that. It normally took her weeks to grow a fresh body and imprint on it. Her own physiognomy was far more complex than the daughters she threw into the fight, and copying her synaptic map was a long, gentle process that she couldn’t dare rush. But, still, a body was being grown in her own displaced womb and would be ready for imprinting soon. She’d probably not need it, once she force-fed Tallah her own entrails and ended the curse, but it paid to have contingencies.


    Maybe she would preserve the head, so she could scoop out the brain and divine what the dreadful thing afflicting her actually was. Soul magic, for sure. But what form of it?


    Tallah was proving herself more resilient than a bloody cockroach. They’d never stacked well against one another. Fire was, after all, anathema to life. She’d taken plenty of pyromancers into herself, but few had been as fiercely determined as this one. If she had more time and wasn’t chased by the soul-devouring beast within, she might give her old friend’s desperation some more considerate thought. For now, she needed her dead, as much as she’d like to protract the punishment. Maybe end the life, allow for a few moments of brain death to ensure the cancellation of the threat, and then reanimate whatever remained? Barely enough satisfaction for the damage wrought, but one took what one could get.


    Her many-eyed gaze settled on the other two. The male was fodder. Beneath the enchantment he wore there was nothing even worth vivisecting. A skeletal husk wrapped in a conjured piece of armour. Disgusting. Whichever child cut his throat could eat the corpse for all she cared.


    The healer, however… Young enough. Strong. Still fertile. Yes, good for breeding stock. A squirt of aerosolized pheromones marked her for safe capture and preparation. She let the children deal with that without her supervision.


    A fresh wave of pain scythed through her carefully arrayed defences. Two daughters dying. Not dead. The ash eater learned as she fought, leaving the daughters in agonised suffering rather than ending them outright. Hard to avoid all the ways in which pain fed back into her. As many paths as nerves, the art of her craft turned against her. And was Tallah throwing lightning bolts at her? How?


    “You tire, whore,” she crooned as she grew tongues and licked the blood off the floor and walls. “I have your taste. You remember what I can do with just a taste, right?” Her wand, lent out to the daughters for use, made its way back into her own hands. Exposing herself would be a risk, but to fashion an answer to this whole indignity she needed her focus. She’d make a poison fit like a glove for her noble-born old friend, something for a deservedly screaming death.


    “There you are.” Tallah, wounded and bleeding from a hundred wounds, grinned and dropped the half-corpse of a careless daughter. What followed from her was so much more than fire.


    Anna’s world went white. Shadows, children, and daughters were all cremated to ashes. She screamed, the sound burning out of her real throat in peeling sheets of agony. Her skin blistered and burned away. Nerves shrieked. Blood, her own and her Sanctum’s, boiled to vapour. A blow to her real self! It opened her up like an explosion from within, and the beast in her devoured with impunity.


    When the pain burned itself out, the body she inhabited was beyond ruin and the spare nowhere near ready to receive. For the first time in her life she panicked even as coherence slipped away from her. Survive! She must survive.


    Her killer approached on unsteady feet, barely in better shape than she. No more fire. Now she brandished a sword, its edge glistening bloody in the final burning embers of her home.


    One last gambit before it would all be too late. One last daughter had survived. If she had but a few more moments…


    “I’m sorry,” Tallah whispered, the words a gurgling effort. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”


    And she slit what remained of Anna’s throat.