Once upon a time, and then again and again and again, a bitter and lonely woman cut a piece of herself and named it. I was the first.

  Senses came to me in waves. Taste and smell brought the iron tang of fresh blood to linger on my tongue. Someone had bled to create me, and I knew her name before I knew my own: Melpomene, my Creator, my source, my everything.

  Touch was next. I could feel fabric on skin, a cool breeze, and solid ground beneath my feet. I was standing. Melpomene—I would always know her touch, no matter the context—had her hands on me, dextrous fingers pressed to the side of my throat and playing with my hair. Her touch was soft and pleasant, yet oddly cold. Then, hearing.

  “Okay, vitals seem good, not that those really mean anything for a homunculus like this. No, we’re not calling it a golem! Homunculus is way cooler, shut it. Refocusing. Hair is very soft, we did great on that. Should we have made her base appearance stranger? No, you’re right, it’s good to connect the base form to the template. Damn, I’m good. Shut it!”

  Something shifted, footsteps echoed, and those soft, pleasant fingers moved to my back. I opened my eyes for the first time and saw the stars above, a thousand points of light casting a bright glow amid the endless darkness. Pillars of white stone stretched toward the firmament, plain and unadorned. The marble tiles beneath my feet alternated in black and white, a chessboard the size of infinity. A throne, gleaming gold and set with every gemstone, sat empty in front of me.

  “It’s not ego, it’s logic! And we’ve had this argument already! This will be good for me. I will drown you in drugs and alcohol, you miserable little parasite. This is my head now, and this delightful creature is going to help with that. If you wanna stick around, learn to play nice. And I know you can learn, because you’re me, and I’m very smart. So get with the program or get bent, my sweet passenger.”

  I raised my hand to look at it, splaying my fingers and wondering at the sensation of blood pumping through my veins, the little hairs on my arm, the trillions of nerves in my body lighting up and sending information. Behind me, a gasp.

  “Oh shit, she’s already awake. Wait, fuck, can she hear that?”

  My Creator, perfect and majestic and divine, darted out from behind me and scrambled to climb onto her throne. Her movements were awkward and ungainly, the stumbles and skitters of a woman who had never known coordination in her life. As she settled into place, wriggling to get comfortable, I found myself thinking that she looked too small for the throne, not a woman but a girl, like a child playing queen. I loved her for that.

  Love, love, love. It pulsed in my heart and filled my being, the only thing I could feel as I absorbed fresh sensory data and made sense of it. I loved this strange, childlike goddess. My Creator, my source, my everything.

  Though she took the throne and posed upon it with regal airs, Melpomene was still dressed very casually. She wore simple jeans, a dark shirt with some kind of rose-and-moon pattern, and a beige cardigan hanging loose. Her glasses were big and round, her cheeks soft, and her bright brown eyes were speckled with gold. Her lips were raw and flaking, dry and gnawed, and so were the tips of her fingers, around the nails. The handle of a medical scalpel—I knew the sight of it as intimately as I knew her name—stuck out of one jean pocket.

  Melpomene licked her lips, right hand twitching where it rested on the arm of her throne. She bit off a scrap of lip skin, chewed it, and swallowed. Stared at me. Hesitated.

  “Creator,” I greeted her, smiling. “I love you.” It felt like the right thing to say. The only thing I could say.

  Melpomene relaxed visibly, her hand fidgeting a final time before going still. She grinned, eyes twinkling, and she said, “Yes. Yes, that’s right. I made you, my Thalia, and you love me. I like it, will like it, when you tell me that. It’s one of the things I made you to do. Part of your purpose. I gave you life, and in return I expect great things. You will love me. You will serve me, my Intercessor, and carry my will to the worlds that I shall shape. You are now, and will always be, my greatest creation. Never forget that, and never forget your love.”

  She laughed, the sound coming out raw and ragged, her upper body shuddering with the exertion. The light in her eyes had turned manic, and I loved it.

  I dropped to one knee, head bowed in deference, and with exultant joy I told her, “My Creator, my ruler, my Melpomene, I will always love you. I am yours, and I shall always be yours. Yours to use, yours to control, yours in love forever. Your will be done.”

  As Melpomene watched me swear myself to her, the frenzy in her eyes spread across her face, widening her smile and stealing her breath, and as soon as I closed my mouth another wild roar of laughter ripped its way out of her throat. Her whole body shook with it, clean peals of joy crumbling into hacking, wheezing coughs. She kept shaking and shuddering, draped over one arm of her throne, until it finally lapsed into heavy, ragged breathing.

  I stared at her with growing concern, though I didn’t leave my kneeling pose. “Creator? Melpomene? Are you alright?”

  “Never,” she gasped. “Have been, will be, never. But I’m here. Untouchable. I won, Thalia. They can’t take that from me, won’t. I won, and now I’m here.” With a final bout of hacking laughter, Melpomene pushed herself up and straightened her back, tilting her chin to adopt an imperious presence. “Now rise, my creation, and I shall tell you the third purpose that I ask of you.”

  I rose, smooth and swift, hands clasped tightly behind my back as I waited for further instruction. I took pride in being her creation. I took pleasure in being molded by her hand.

  “I have need of an aide in my work. From this throne, and from the halls of my palace below these checkered tiles, I wish to craft worlds. I will fill these worlds with laughter and sorrow, with violence and intrigue, with every delight that I can dream of. I will make something glorious, Thalia, and my audience—the lights in the sky, the starry eyes of the watchers beyond the veil—shall applaud my works and love me for it. But… creating alone is a lonely endeavor, and prone to intrusion by undesirable voices. So I have made you, Thalia, to accompany me. You merely need to listen and ask questions as I shape my creations, so that I may develop a more complete understanding of what I am making. Like a rubber duck for me to exposit to,” she added with amusement, “only this duckling can talk back and offer praise.”

  And so that’s how we proceeded.

  Melpomene set the boundaries of a new universe and sketched an outline of its history, focusing her efforts on a ravaged planet with six lush moons. Ideas came to the Creator in scattershot fashion, out of order but slowly coalescing into a coherent timeline.

  In the beginning, the world was whole and six peoples lived in peace and harmony, each tribe or clan (the details of their organization were never deemed important) wielding a single primordial element—fire, water, earth, air, light, and dark—in concert with the elements of other groups to forge incredible wonders together. Their perfect harmony was disrupted by the arrival of an outsider, a foreign entity from distant stars. The entity’s name was Prevara, and it proclaimed itself a giver of gifts, but its true nature was a god of chaos and cruelty that sought to bring ruin to the world and bind all six elements to its will.

  Prevara set the elementals against each other, manipulating them into conflict over what had been shared without qualms before its arrival. It raised a champion above all others, a darkness elemental by the name of Kiana, and used her to advance its goals of total domination. On the precipice of the entity’s victory, Kiana turned against her master and imprisoned it deep below the surface. Prevara’s last free act was to lay a curse on the whole world, and on Kiana in particular. In the years following its imprisonment, the elementals would retreat from the broken world to the moons above. In time they would return, drawn by old ruins and lost relics, and by the whispers of the imprisoned god.

  Kiana would follow her people to the moon of Nyx, their new home, but died shortly thereafter, taken by the curse. She was forgotten, her story and the story of Prevara lost to time.

  And then, hundreds of years later, Kiana would be reborn. Reincarnated into the new age with no memory of her past self, she would grow up a prodigy, able to control not just darkness but the other five elements as well. Through her mastery of the elements she would learn how to regenerate her flesh, how to fly, and even how to influence the minds of other elementals, binding them to her desires. She would believe herself a natural talent, unaware that all her great gifts were echoes of the powers that Prevara had granted her predecessor.

  The process of creating a world is very abstract. Melpomene doesn’t go into the new universe and shape stone and sea with her hands, doesn’t sculpt every soul with knife and clay. The sole planet and six moons of the elemental universe were projected onto that universe from a complex orrery within one of the rooms of the Creator’s palace. Painted metal, that’s all those worlds really were. Prevara, god of chaos, was in truth just a plastic figurine hidden inside the central sphere. Just a toy.

  Kiana’s creation was different. In a room with sterile tile flooring and cold light strips, a metal autopsy table awaited its pound of flesh.

  “I’ve used this place once before,” Melpomene told me, “when I created you. It puts me in the right mindset, being here. Though, I’d rather not get too used to this place.”

  I was nervous, though my love outweighed any fear. I had been told, in the simplest of terms, what we were there to do: to cut my Creator open and carve a piece of her into our Kiana. It disturbed me, but I had to trust that she knew best.

  Her casual attire was gone, replaced for this important moment by a clean white lab coat draped over her otherwise naked body. She liked it when my gaze lingered on her curves, subtle as they were, and didn’t like it when she caught me looking at the scars, of which there were many. I was fascinated with her body, an intended product of how she had programmed me, and it was only the clinical tone of this procedure that kept me from vocalizing the desires that her bare form inspired in me.

  “I did it alone, that first time. Needed to. I could have made lesser servants do it, but it had to be my hand that brought you to life, every step of the way. This time I can afford to do it the easy way, which means having you do it. Self-surgery is a real pain, even if godhood makes it a lot more feasible than it’d be for your average Jane. I mean, this is gonna hurt like a bitch, but your hands won’t be shaking like mine were. Should be faster and cleaner.”

  Her confidence didn’t assure as much as I think she hoped it would. Any amount of pain was more than I wanted to inflict on my Creator. Still, I’d been given a task, so I would perform it to my utmost capability.

  Melpomene laid back on the table, lab coat falling further away from her body to expose more of her pale skin covered in paler scars. All but one were recreational, their thin width showing how shallow the incisions had been. The sole exception was the long scar across her chest, right over her heart. Where her heart would have been, if she hadn’t cut it out.

  She handed me two scalpels, clean and fresh and of differing size and shape, and with the blades she’d given me I cut my maker open. I parted skin and carved past fat and muscle until her left lung was visible, and then I sliced off a corner of it with one clean motion. I plucked the severed organ meat with delicate, gloved fingers, and placed it on a tray off to one side. Her respiratory organ continued to perform its function as if it was not missing a chunk and bleeding, and I knew that even if the whole lung were removed my Creator would have no more trouble breathing than was normal for her. After all, what kind of a god had need of a heart, lungs, a liver, or even nerves?

  I folded the skin flaps closed and her flesh sealed without need for stitching, a new scar forming to mark the vanished incision. Melpomene rose with a wince and rolled her shoulders. “See? Easy.” Her lazy tone didn’t watch the pain I’d seen cross her face while I worked.

  Melpomene pushed herself off the table, then took the piece of lung and set it where she’d sat. The flesh lived, oozing blood and flexing erratically. My Creator snapped her fingers and the lung scrap convulsed before falling into a steadier, more natural rhythm.

  “And there we have it. I’ve anchored the ‘Kiana’ thoughtform to my severed flesh, so the physical version that develops on Nyx will have genuine growth potential and an internal world. She’ll be more ‘real’ than the rest of her universe, in a sense. That’s necessary, both for the experiment she represents and so I can have the narration follow her thoughts.”

  I nodded to show I was listening, but she’d already explained all of this before we started. I suspected she was talking to herself more than me; that was usually the way, with her.

  “I may need to work on the piece, make a few cuts here and there to shape the mental construct further, but that should be easy enough.” She paused, and then she drummed her fingers against her leg. “Thalia,” she addressed me directly, eyes bright and keen. “You’ve now seen how you were made, or something like it. You’ve participated. How does that make you feel? What do you think about what we’ve done, and about what I did before in making you?”

  How did I feel? It was a difficult question for me, at the time. I knew I was a full, true intelligence, a piece of my Creator in a very real and meaningful way, but until that question I had been mostly content in my role as her follower and servant. It wasn’t my place to feel something unless I had been told to feel that way, and that had felt appropriate. But if Melpomene wanted to hear my thoughts, was that really an acceptable answer? The way she had asked, the shift in her body language, I could tell that this wasn’t a loyalty ritual or said just to hear her own voice; she was curious in the manner of a scientist checking up on her experiment. An obvious, thoughtless answer would be disappointing.

  So, I thought about it, and I voiced those thoughts aloud in order to give my Creator more insight into what she had created.

  “Relief,” I started. “I am relieved that the process is over, because I do not like seeing you in pain. I am grateful that you entrusted me with this task, even if it unsettled me. I… I don’t know how to feel about what we made here, about this ‘Kiana’ girl. I hope she gives you everything you want from her. And about myself…”

  I hesitated, unsure, and my eyes drifted back to the scrap of flesh. I looked around the room, the lab largely empty—no, entirely empty except for this one table and its one red meat. If that was Kiana, then where was the flesh called Thalia?

  “Creator, you told me that I was made from the flesh of your heart. Where is it now? Is my anchor in another part of the palace, somewhere I haven’t been?”

  Melpomene grinned. “No, not quite. In fact, you’ve never been somewhere my heart wasn’t, not a single time.”

  I grasped the implication quickly, though the truth of it shook me. “You mean… your heart is inside me?”

  “It beats in your chest, pushes blood through your veins. Your indestructible core. Well, nearly indestructible. Beside the point! Yes, Thalia, my whole heart is inside you, the anchor for your form that you’ll take with you wherever you go.”

  Her heart was my heart. Ah, what a wondrous thought. The beating of that heart within my chest gave me new comfort and joy. I didn’t know, couldn’t know, if my Creator loved me like I loved her, but just the teasing thought of it was almost overwhelming.

  Melpomene twined her hands behind her back, leaned forward, and gave me an impish grin. “Why, Thalia, you could almost say you’ve stolen my heart.” She blinked, then added, “Well, okay, I guess you can’t really say that when I gave it to you, but—oh, I could say that instead! Although, does it work as a double entendre if it’s just literal? Hmm. You’ve captured my heart?”

  Even now, I love her. How could I not? What a delightful, adorable creature. I smiled, true and adoring, and I told her, “My heart is yours, Creator. Always.”

  And together we set our first story into motion, the story of Kiana and the elementals.

  Prevara and I each had our part to play in Melpomene’s script. Prevara nudged Kiana from afar and set itself up as the monster behind every mystery. I took the closer role, playing the part of her closest friend, the healer girl Clary.

  Our starting scenario was simple: Kiana, blessed and chosen, believed that she deserved more than to be just another cog in the machinery of empire. The council that ruled her nation believed her to be a dangerous tool, a crude weapon unfit to lead and inspire. In search of even more power that could allow her to force the issue, Kiana ventured into a mysterious labyrinth with her only friends, myself and a warrior named Alak, following.

  In the depths of that labyrinth, a creation of Prevara and Melpomene tormented Kiana. It was a mirror creature, taunting Kiana with her own insecurities and failings. And, before she killed it, the mirror demon reached out to Alak and weakened the spell that kept him bound.

  The next day, Alak broke free of the spell entirely and tried to kill Kiana in the middle of their regular sparring practice. He lost, and she tore his mind to pieces to keep him controlled. Another step on the path we’d charted for her.

  Kiana was brooding when she returned to the house we all shared. It was then that I made my move, my part in the dance.

  “Hey, Kiana,” I said shyly, the bookish healer with button nose and doe-like eyes. “Do you think we could go for a walk? Just the two of us?”

  Living shadows curled around her feet, Kiana’s immense power unbridled and seething, but with a visible effort of will she brought the shadows to a halt. “A walk?” she asked. Her tone was sharp and she immediately winced, squeezing her eyelids shut as if to banish something from her mind. “Yes, yes let’s do that. I could use the fresh air and a chance to clear my head.”

  Together we left the house and aimed for the woods just beyond. As we walked, we made small talk, and Kiana seemed eager to get her mind off the events just prior.

  “It’s all going so poorly,” she lamented. “I’ve shown my new powers to the council and it’s still not enough. The role I’m after, they’ve all but given it to that worm of a man, whatever his name is, that we met the other week. Short of killing them all I don’t know what I can do.”

  That was exactly what we wanted her to do, but we needed to lead her there carefully. Kiana needed to think of herself as a monster in order to do monstrous things.

  When we reached an open glade, a gentle stream running through, I asked for a stop. I made myself look as nervous and hopeful as I could, stealing glances at Kiana and worrying the hem of my shirt. She smiled at the sight, and I smiled back.

  With a deep breath, I began. “Kiana, I have something I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time now.” I bit my lip, took another deep breath, and said, “Kiana, I… I love you. I’ve loved you since the day we first met. Would you… would you like to g-go on a d-date with me?”

  I looked up at her with desperate eyes, hands clasped tightly behind my back and an ocean of innocence on my face. Her face told a story of its own: the pleased curl of her lip, the sparkle in her eyes, and then a hesitance that passed over her whole body, and something like horror stealing her smile. She took a step back, hand twitching, looking unsure of herself for the first time in her life. “I…”

  She needed another push. “Kiana?” I asked, putting fear in my voice and making myself shiver. “Are you—I mean, did I… did I do something wrong? I-I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry. Maybe… maybe I should go.” I turned to leave, to flee.

  It was like I’d stabbed her. Kiana let out her breath in a wounded gasp and sucked in another. “No, wait!” She reached out a hand, then pulled it back, more complex emotions darting across her face and passing just as quickly. “This isn’t—I’m not—you’re not… it’s not real.” She spoke those last words like delivering her own death sentence.

  I turned back around, all clueless curiosity and nervous shyness. “Not real? What do you mean? Do you—do you think I don’t really love you?” My voice cracked on the L-word and I hugged myself tight. “Would I really lie to you like that?”

  Kiana’s shadows were swarming around her, the living darkness seeping into the soil and ripping up roots. A stray tendril lashed out at a tree and cracked it in half, branches scattering. She clenched her fists and tried to speak, but nothing came out. A second try, a third, and finally she had her voice again. “You don’t understand. I made you love me.”

  I blinked in confusion. “What do you mean?”

  A bleak, ragged laugh. “Hells, am I really this pathetic? Am I really faltering now, at something I’ve planned for so long?” She laughed again and ran a hand through her hair. “Clary, I’ve been controlling you for years. You and Alak both. The mirror demon, when it said I had my strings in you, it wasn’t being abstract; I cast a spell on your mind the day we met, when you turned away from me because you didn’t like how I acted. I wanted you to like me. I needed you to like me. So I put strings in your head that made you fall in love.”

  I stared at her with my best shocked expression. “You… made me this way?”

  “I don’t even know how much of the original you is left,” she muttered before barking another desolate laugh. “I know nothing’s left of Alak now, after today, but you… the hooks were always deeper. You were my personal project. Molded for me. Made for me. I created the person you are now. I created your love.”

  We both went quiet. I let my face fall into contemplation, gaze pointed down at the forest floor. I chose my next words carefully. “Even if you did… can’t it still be real?” I looked up to find her staring at me with eyes wild like an animal’s. “I mean… it still feels real, to me.”

  “I put that thought in your head,” she snapped. “I crafted those feelings.”

  “But I still think them, and I still feel them,” I said softly. “I still love you. If it’s you, Kiana, I don’t mind being controlled like that. I don’t mind that you made me love you, because I like loving you.”

  Kiana was in agony, the anguish writ on every part of her face. “But is it real? How can it be real, if I made it with a spell? Can I… can I really be loved? Do I deserve it?”

  I stepped closer to Kiana, and she didn’t move away. I drew closer again until I could reach out and lay a hand on her cheek, holding her gaze with mine. “It doesn’t matter,” I told her simply. “I don’t care. It feels right to love you. It feels good to love you, Kiana. Maybe feeling good is all it needs to be.”

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  I kissed her, and she kissed me back. My hands wandered across her body, and hers across mine, and we made love on a bed of velvet night.

  Hours later, as Kiana slept soundly, I slipped away to watch the stars. The words of our conversation still echoed in my mind. I had played my role perfectly, had pushed her toward the desired outcome, but something lingered. A stray thought, crawling beneath my skin.

  If someone is created to love you, can their love ever be real? And if it isn’t, can you still be loved?

  I wondered to myself, alone in the dark, whether that scene was for Kiana, for me, or for Melpomene. The role I’d played for Kiana was false, just a mask I’d put on as my maker’s loyal Intercessor. But in another sense, it was true; I had been created to love someone, and Kiana had been created from that someone.

  Did Melpomene lay awake at night wondering if I really loved her? Did she think that she couldn’t be loved, or that she didn’t deserve to be loved? I couldn’t really know, I supposed, any more than she could. But maybe, if I played my role well, I could make her believe.

  In the morning, Kiana returned to the capital and broke the power of the high council, dominating those she could control and killing those she couldn’t. Declaring herself empress of a new world-spanning empire, she began a great crusade to conquer the six moons and the ravaged planet beneath them. I was at her side, her confidante and consort.

  The months that followed grew repetitive quickly. The Shadow Empress would lay the groundwork for invasion of a moon by abducting key players and brainwashing them. She enjoyed turning a country against itself, stirring rebellion and factionalism before swooping in behind her favorite pawns to reunite the nation as a vassal state. She only ever took the stage at the climax of each conflict, wary of letting her enemies learn too much about her capabilities.

  In the time between battles, I tended to my empress. It was an opportunity to practice before returning to the woman I loved, so I took to it with enthusiasm. Kiana had been shaped from my Creator’s flesh, so it stood to reason that her preferences would align. I learned what made her smile, what made her hungry for me, what made her moan—

  You can skip some of these details. Really. I insist.

  Ahem. I played the role of a lovestruck consort well, encouraging her and supporting her in all the ways she desired. My time apart from Melpomene made me miss her more and more, and that midnight stargazing became a clockwork occurrence for me. I was already vastly more of a person than I had been when I cut Kiana from her flesh, and I yearned to show Melpomene my progress.

  It took a year for us to reach the final battle of Kiana’s war. An alliance of elementals from all six moons, united in their defiance of the Shadow Empress, made their stand around an old temple buried deep within the earth, protecting their leader as he performed some ritual that they believed would save them all. Kiana followed, and I with her, knowing the trap that was about to be sprung.

  In the heart of an old god’s prison, elements clashed and chaos erupted. Prevara emerged, all its pawns having served their purpose, and all its gifts were ungiven, returned to their sinister source. The temple crumbled, Kiana barely escaping, and on the surface above she found all her minions freed from her control, armies disintegrating as sometimes half their number wailed in rage.

  None of them drew her eye. None of them mattered. The moment she realized what had happened, Kiana turned to me, her stalwart companion for a long year of tribulation, and she wondered about a conversation we’d had in a glade, and the nature of love. She hoped that I would stay. She hoped I would forgive her.

  I let horror and anguish cross my face, and I ran. I said one word: “Monster.”

  In the days that followed, the endgame began. Prevara began seizing control of one moon after another, stealing the apparatus of empire that Kiana had left for it. Kiana, broken and hurting, learned of her past life and the role she had played twice over in damning her people. And then she found me, having fled back to Nyx, and told me everything.

  “What should I do?” she asked quietly, hugging her knees on the floor of Clary’s bedroom. “What can I do? Everything is awful and it’s all my fault.”

  I sat on the bed and watched her, for once not bothering to perform any emotional responses. I was still and silent and cold, and that made it sharper for her. I asked her, “What do you want to do, Kiana?”

  “I don’t know!” she wailed. “I thought I wanted to be powerful and important, to change the world, but I was wrong about all of it. Everything I did only made things worse. And I just… I just wish I could go back to how it was before that day.” She stared at me with haunted, desperate eyes. “I wish I could fix everything I broke.”

  “There’s no going back,” I told her calmly. “Maybe, if you went to Prevara and begged it, you could be its champion again. Maybe it would give you back the spell that let you control me. But even if I was back under your thrall, you’d know it wasn’t real. You’d know you can’t be loved. And I don’t think you can live with that, anymore.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?” she begged me. “Please, Clary, help me.”

  “I think you already know,” I murmured, “but you’re afraid. Because your past self invited Prevara in, gave it a foothold in all our souls. You sealed it, you unsealed it. And when it got out, it took away your power but it didn’t take everything. It didn’t kill you. It needs you, Kiana. If you go to it, if you fight it with all you have left, you’ll win. You’ll save the world… but not for you.”

  The light left her eyes. “A sacrifice. Is that what it takes, to atone? Is that redemption?”

  I smiled. “I don’t know if I believe in redemption, really. I don’t know if I care about it. But you’d be saving me, Kiana, if you did that. And I think that’s what I’d remember. It’s what I’d choose to remember. So please, Kiana, do it for me.”

  I pushed myself off the bed, walked over, leaned down, and kissed her. She wasn’t expecting it, and at first she stiffened, but then she leaned into it like a drowning woman. I held her close and let us stay like that for a long, quiet moment, and then I broke away. She looked at me with her broken heart bare on her sleeve, but didn’t try and stop me.

  “For luck,” I told her. “For the good times. For what you’re about to do.”

  I walked away, leaving the house behind, and when I stepped around a corner I vanished from the world entirely and returned to Melpomene’s palace. My task was done.

  A year of toil, a year of lies, and finally it was over. I’d learned a lot in my time as Clary, but as I stood before the Creator’s throne I shed that mask and once again wore the face that my beloved Melpomene had given me.

  A quick glance around the summit of the palace confirmed the absence of my Creator, her adorable form neither resting on the throne nor wandering the checkered tiles. She was probably below, inspecting her work as it reached its final moments. I’d find her soon enough, but her absence gave me an opportunity: I squealed.

  “I’m home! I’m finally home!” I twirled around the throne room, hopping and dancing and hugging myself in glee. “Melpomene, Melpomene, Melpomene! My Creator, my beloved, I’m finally back! Oh, the things I have to show you! The stories I can tell! Oh, how I missed you, how I yearned!”

  When enough of my wild glee was expelled that I could move normally again, I hastily went about reshaping my appearance. My extensive experimentation with Kiana had given me what I hoped was a reasonably accurate profile of Melpomene’s tastes, and it was those tastes I hoped to appeal to with a new outfit of my own unique design.

  Once I was satisfied with my look, I descended into the palace proper and searched for Melpomene. My first guess that she was in the orrery chamber proved correct, as I found her staring at the turning orbs of the model system.

  I curtsied on entering the room, still brimming with energy. “I’ve returned, Lady Melpomene. Everything is as you requested, and I have a full report written and prepared for you to peruse at your leisure.”

  “Thank you, Thalia.” Something was wrong. Melpomene sounded tired, almost weary, and she didn’t turn away from the orrery.

  “Creator?” I inched closer, my excitement bleeding away into nervous concern. “Is something wrong? Did I make a mistake?”

  “No, Thalia,” she said quietly. “The mistake was mine. I caught it too late. Like always.”

  And then, with careless grace, Melpomene snapped her fingers and the orrery burst into flames. Paint peeled off and smoke rose from melting metal. The connecting bars fell apart and the orbs representing the moons and planet fell to the floor and made a puddle of paint and metal and burning.

  I stared at the pyre in shock and horror. She had worked on that world for so long, had poured her love and excitement into getting it just right, and now she was destroying it. “Why?” I asked aloud. “Why did you burn it?”

  The divine architect watched the fire and didn’t answer. When the pile was more ash than orrery, Melpomene finally turned to face me. Her eyes were bloodshot, black liquid staining her cheeks like she’d been crying ink or oil, and the lines on her face had deepened.

  My heart ached for her, and I longed to comfort her, but I didn’t know how. I hadn’t expected any of this. I wasn’t prepared.

  “Let me tell you a story,” my Creator said. Her voice was still tired, still painfully soft, but as she wove her tale a bit more life crept back in.

  “Once upon a time, when I was young and foolish and fresh to my role, I made a world and filled it with people. They weren’t like you, they weren’t pieces of me in the same way, but they still held many of my dreams and desires. I pulled their strings and set them dancing, and then I broke their world and flung them to another. I broke that world, too, and turned the whole universe against them. I drove them to a point where the only answer, the only path that would free their fates from the forces arrayed against them, was to burn their universe down to ash that a better world might rise from it.

  “I was merciful. When they sacrificed their lives for their phoenix gambit, I let them reincarnate into the new world. I gave them new identities, new adventures, and new lands to explore, new companions to meet. And then I took it all away, drowning that world in darkness and ruin as I had the first and the second and the universe. It ended in fire, and again I shaped something new from the ashes.

  “I thought I could get it right, that time. I moved my pieces and refined them, sharpened them, remade them. I stretched out their stories, gave them more power than ever, I tried with all my being to delay the inevitable. But still, just as quickly, it all turned to rot. I needed to hurt them. I needed to break them. And they just couldn’t satisfy me. So I burned them all, one final time, and scattered the ashes to the void outside this palace.

  “And then I made you.”

  My eyes widened at the revelation of just how much had come before me. Entire worlds that she had made without my help. I hesitated, curious to hear more of my predecessors, but there was another question that took priority. “What went wrong?” I asked.

  Melpomene sighed. “I don’t know. I’m not omniscient, just omnipotent. I can make anything, but only if I understand how to make it and what I’m making. I can tell when I’ve failed, but figuring out why I failed is a far greater challenge. I’m a blind god.”

  My chest clenched, my face falling. She was in pain, and her pain was mine. Her sorrow like knives, her grief a well to drown in. I needed to make the hurting go away. “How can I help? That’s what you made me for, wasn’t it? Please, Melpomene, let me help you.”

  Gratitude flickered in her eyes and pulled at the corners of her mouth. “Thank you, Thalia. It means a great deal.” With a wave of her hand, Melpomene gathered the ashes of her latest creation and vanished them, scattering them in the void as she had three times before. “I just have to keep trying. We’ll make another world, then another clipping, and this time I’ll get it right. It’s just a matter of time.”

  It wasn’t.

  We made another world, another orrery of brass and paint, and I sliced another gobbet of flesh from my Creator’s divine form. We burned that one, and the next, and the next.

  Dozens of times we made a princess, in name or in fact, and gave her power but denied her love. We pushed her to make the wrong decisions until they led her to a dead end, her destiny ever the altar. Prevara or something like it was my assistant in most of those worlds, another template repeated but retaining no continuity. Only I was allowed knowledge of the cycle.

  In some of those worlds I took the stage as a close friend or object of desire, but in others I played the mentor or the nemesis. The roles were just a means to her end. Every time, I hoped that something will change, that Kiana will be more than what we made her to be. Every time, I was disappointed.

  I started to hate that girl. I watched her fail again and again and again, and every time it ended with another burning world and more charred meat in the lab. Her failure meant I had to cut my beloved open again and rip out another piece of her flesh, had to see the pain wrack her body and the sorrow pool in her beautiful eyes. Kiana’s failures were killing Melpomene, and I started to revel in hurting the girl who was hurting my love.

  It wasn’t always Kiana, of course. Between attempts at her template we experimented with others, two of them rising to become regulars in the cycle.

  We made Mordred to be a response to Kiana, not quite an opposite but at least a foil. Where Kiana craved love, Mordred craved justice. Where Kiana was a sacrifice, Mordred was a murderer. She was a warrior, a killer, and a zealot. We gave her conviction, that most dangerous affliction of the mind, and it drove her to awful, terrible ends.

  The story of Mordred was the story of a girl who tried to make things better and only ever made things worse. With sword in hand, time and again, Mordred cut away everything she should have cherished for a world that would never be. Time and again, she became unrecognizable, became the kind of monster that her starting self would have murdered without hesitation. We called that monster Malice.

  Malice, too, was a failure, and so we burned her worlds like Kiana’s. In ruining herself, she brought ruin to my Creator, and I hated her too. I had to watch Melpomene bleed again and again, with less and less of her left each time she went under the knife. The bags deepened under her eyes, her motions listless and apathetic when not in the frenzied throes of making a new world. She wouldn’t look at me, too busy obsessing over the girls that kept failing her.

  Our third template was Veseryn, and she cut Melpomene the deepest. Veseryn was a thief, a schemer, and a fool. She began each loop of the cycle, each instance of her being, thinking herself clever. My job was to thoroughly disabuse her of that notion.

  Where Kiana was blessed with many gifts and Mordred was given great skill and aptitude, Veseryn was given nothing. Less than nothing, for we populated her worlds with people like Kiana and Mordred, the blessed and the talented, and her lack of either scraped Veseryn raw. Born with nothing and hungry for everything, Veseryn bared her teeth and fought for every advantage she could claim.

  Dark bargains and reckless gambles were Veseryn’s game, and they always doomed her. Every victory was bought with sacrifice, every gain accompanied by loss. Inevitably, the costs added up, risks didn’t pay off, and desperate deals led her to calamity. She pledged herself to devils and horrors for just a little more power, and in the end they took her name and soul and made her their hollow puppet.

  A corpse, a monster, a slave; these were the ends of the girls I helped torture.

  Again and again I cut the flesh of my Creator. Again and again we gave life to splinters and put them through hell. Again and again we scattered the ashes and started over.

  After one failed cycle, the lab filled with metal tables and charred meat, Melpomene broke. She screamed and raged and tore through the palace, destroying rooms and burning books, smashing glassware and bending pans. The moment her outburst faded, the energy leaving her in shuddering breaths wracked by coughing, she ordered me to fetch the knife and start cutting. We didn’t even have a world to put the splinter in, but she insisted.

  I begged her to stop, to wait, to rethink, but she wouldn’t listen. She hadn’t listened to me for a long time, too busy playing with her other toys. Too busy destroying herself for the sake of girls that always failed her, always hurt her, always stole her attention away from the only one who had been by her side since the beginning. The only one who deserved her.

  In the moment my scalpel met her skin, I had already made my choice. To save my darling Melpomene from the cycle of torment she was forcing herself through, I would do anything. I would make her listen, even if it made her hate me.

  I loved her too much to let anything stand in my way.

  The next loop of the cycle was another Veseryn world. In a world full of magic, her only power was the ability to usurp control of magic items. The start of her story was structured to mirror a previous work, with Veseryn bargaining for the means to become a lich and botching the ritual thanks to a curse from the entity she had bargained with. She drowned herself in a bottle, sold what was left from the attempt, and had a minor breakdown over a mall barista remembering her usual order.

  Boiling on the inside with complex emotions, Veseryn made her way to the roof of the mall and leaned on the railing. Her breath fogged in the chill winter air.

  She mused aloud, “I really do like the cold. I think it’s about control. You can’t really control heat, you just relieve it. When the sun blisters the land, you can drink as many cool drinks as you want, sit by a fan, go swimming, but the heat is always there, that hateful star always burning down on you. Cold, on the other hand, is something that can be tamed. Cold can be bargained with. Throw on thicker socks and a pair of gloves, drape yourself in a blanket, sit by a fire, and the cold becomes somewhat pleasant. I can control the cold in a way I can’t control heat. Or anything else.”

  Then she growled at something only she could hear. She laughed darkly, and then with a soft sight she combed a hand through her hair, straightened up, and said, “I am nothing. In the grand scheme of things, I am nothing. I’m a nameless face in a sea of strangers, I’m a nobody of a girl whose greatest claim to fame is being remembered for her predictable drink order.”

  She started pacing, hands gesticulating wildly as she ranted to an invisible audience. “To the eyes of the world, I am nothing, and that’s entirely my fault. My superpower is niche, specific, and limited, but it isn’t useless. I prattle on and on about being cheated by fate and the gods, but I have a gift that the greatest mages in the world would be jealous of if they knew it existed. I’ve been so scared of reprisal that I’ve sabotaged my reputation and kept myself confined to the lower rungs of everything. They all think I’m just a common thief wielding stolen trinkets, a fool’s artificer.”

  Veseryn sneered. “And I am a common thief! That’s how I’ve been acting. If I tried, if I applied myself for once in my fucking life, I could be a villain like no other. But here I am.”

  She clenched her fists and looked out over the city, watching the cars and the people and the distant clashes of superpowers. Then she released the tension in her arms, stepped away from the roof, back to pacing, and let something else come over here.

  In a voice cold and scornful, she asked, “If we had become a lich, what would we be doing right now? Would we be down there fighting heroes and terrorizing civilians? Robbing banks and raiding vaults? Or would be curled up on a pile of blankets, hiding from the cold and obsessively refreshing social media?”

  Veseryn scowled and bit back, “If the ritual had worked, I could have done anything, could have stood toe-to-toe with dragons and dragonslayers, could have carved my name into the collective unconscious of this whole damn city and bent it to my will. I could have broken gods and demons and worse with a wink and a smirk.”

  “But would you have?” she asked herself.

  Veseryn flinched. “Of course I would have! It’s what I’ve wanted for years. Do you think I would have attained ultimate power and then just sat on it? Would I have wasted godhood?”

  She stewed in silence, broken only by a bitter, joyless laugh. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I would have stayed a little nothing girl. What does that make me? Can I ever be anything more than a failure and a mistake?”

  I jumped down from my perch above the stairs, plunged a knife into her back, and whispered in her ear, “No, you can’t. But I can.”

  Veseryn tried to scream, but my other hand was already moving to cover her mouth and keep her quiet. I pulled the knife out of her back and stabbed her again. She struggled, but I was stronger. She reached for her satchel and all the magical trinkets stored inside, but I cut the strap off her shoulder and kicked the bag away. She clawed at me, tried to bite my hand, but she was a frail little thing.

  Then she bit something else, and her whole body turned to smoke. The cloud of Veseryn blew just out of reach and reformed, the girl staggering and coughing up blood and oil. The wounds in her back were closing, and the pendant around her neck shattered and broke, another artifact used up to save her skin.

  Veseryn whirled on me and the ring on her finger glowed blue as great spikes of ice erupted from the ground in my direction, but with a snap of my fingers the ice melted. I held the knife at my side, loose but ready.

  With a moment’s reprieve, the girl should have run, or even just vaulted herself over the ledge and trusted in whatever protective items she had left. Her curiosity got the better of her, as I knew it would. Her gaze darted over my body, taking in cat ears, white hair, and eyes of blue and gold. She spat out another gob of blood and asked, “Why is a changeling trying to kill me?”

  I knew it was a mistake to answer; every extra second spent killing the girl was another chance for Melpomene to catch me in the act and put a stop to my plan. And yet, in all the years I’d been her Intercessor, for all the monologues I’d delivered on her behalf, I’d never made those cutting speeches with my own words, my own thoughts and feelings. It surprised me how much I craved it.

  So I told her, “It’s not really about you. You’re just a symptom of the greater problem. But you’re still part of the problem, and so I have to kill you. But, don’t worry about the life you’ll leave behind; I’ll be taking that too.” I smiled. “You see, I’ve figured it all out: I’m the only one who ever gets it right, so I just need to play all the roles. Once I’ve killed you, I’ll become you, and then I’ll finally make her happy.”

  Veseryn reached for another trick up her sleeve, but I was faster. I crossed the distance between us in a blink and drove my knife into her throat. Her eyes went wide and she grabbed at the knife, but I tore it free and slammed it into the side of her head. She went down in a heap and I followed, knife at her throat to stab and stab and stab until the last gurgles stopped and her body went still.

  There was work to be done, so I didn’t waste any time savoring my victory. I crouched by the body and took her dead hand in mine. With a whisper of will, I commanded the flesh and blood of her form to slough from her body and flow over mine. Skin, muscle, fat, cartilage, all of it tore from her bones in slow-moving masses that crawled up my arm.

  The meat of her body sank into the meat of mine, and in just a few moments my catgirl visage was replaced by a perfect replica of Veseryn. I disintegrated the bones and rose to full height, getting a feel for my new proportions.

  The next step was to follow her role in the story, at least superficially. As the changeling, I was supposed to push Veseryn off the roof of this building. As she fell, a portal would open, and she would pass into another world. There, the next chapter would begin. “And this time,” I murmured to myself, “it’ll work. I’ll do what none of those other girls could. I won’t fail like they always do. And then… and then Melpomene will really, truly love me.”

  “So that was your plan,” Melpomene said from right behind me.

  I lurched in surprise, pushing back against the roof’s edge and turning to see my Creator in the flesh. Melpomene always used proxies, always some guise to keep her distance, but in that moment I saw her as she appeared to me in her own realm, with flaking lips and soft cheeks. Her eyes were dark and gold, weary and haunted.

  “You’ve betrayed me,” she spoke softly, gingerly, almost disbelieving. “Why?”

  My first instinct was to deny my actions, but I took that cowardice and snapped it by the neck. The plan had failed, but something could be salvaged. “I was trying to save you,” I told her. “You wouldn’t listen, so I had to act.”

  The sky above crackled and boomed with thunder and lightning, and rain fell all around us. Melpomene, the storm in her gaze, said, “You were made to serve, not save. You were made to love me.”

  “I do love you!” I shouted. My grip on the knife tightened. “I love you more than any of those stupid little girls who keep hurting you! You obsess over them, but I’m right here! Look at me! Love me! I am the only one you need. If you won’t make the right choice, I will make it for you. I love you too much to let you keep doing this.”

  In the distance, the skyline burned. The world was already falling apart, smashed to pieces by its dissatisfied maker. Melpomene took a step forward, flames licking at her feet and sizzling in the rain. “You speak of usurpation, my sweet Thalia. You would bind my hands.”

  “I just want to help you,” I pleaded. “You’re killing yourself, my heart. You can stop all this, you just have to let me in. I can be all you need. I can be your answer, your solution, your salvation. You don’t need any of those other girls, you just need me. Please, let me do this.”

  And for a moment, for a single glorious moment, I could see that she was tempted. Part of her, some part of her, wanted to accept. Wanted to give it all up and be with me. She hesitated. But the worse side of her won, the dark voice in her head. “No. I can’t. If I’m not a maker of worlds, then I am nothing at all. If I don’t keep hurting my splinters, I’ll never understand. You can’t be my answer. Love can’t be the answer.”

  “Melpomene!” I cried, and ran towards her, but with a wave of her hand I was gone.

  Another world burned, and the ashes rained down on a place outside the universe. The graveyard of worlds, an ashen void. There were stars above, glittering in a vast and empty darkness, but they were dim and muted, swallowed by falling ash.

  I was alive. I had been banished from my beloved’s embrace, cast out from her worlds and her palace, but I was alive. Melpomene couldn’t bring herself to kill me. All the other girls, they died and they burned, but I was still alive. Standing there, among the ashes.

  It almost didn’t feel real, what I had done. I had rebelled against my maker, my goddess, my divine Creator. And yet, there I stood. Alive, and whole, and loved.

  Because she had to love me, to spare me like that. None of the other girls ever got that grace, none of them were allowed to survive the burning of their world at the end of their tale. We gave them life and we brought them death, a thousand times, and only I was different. Only I was spared. There could be no other explanation: Melpomene loved me.

  I could still save her. The thought of it filled me with overflowing relief. My love was not gone forever, just out of reach for the moment. I could wait, and gather my strength, and find a way back to her.

  I wandered the void, alone and lost in thought. The ash coated castle ruins, broken swords, the detritus of a hundred worlds raised and ruined. I plucked fragments from the ash and reminisced about their origin, sought to harvest whatever remained of the divine impetus behind them. With one eye, I looked beyond, past the palace of the Creator and into her new creations. New worlds, made without my help, that inevitably joined me in the land of falling ash.

  Melpomene would continue, if I did nothing. She would work herself to the bone, scraping away even gristle to perpetuate a doomed cycle. Even loving me, even wanting me, she couldn’t defy her nature. She could not make the right choice, so it would have to be made for her. I would have to take away her choices, all of them, to save her.

  The moment I chose to act against her, even for her own good, I had ceased to be her Intercessor. And as I walked the graveyard of worlds, plotting my next steps, I became something else. Sometimes, to save a goddess, a girl must become a devil. To save my love, I would become her Adversary.

  In the years since that day, I’ve learned how to meddle with my maker’s worlds. I’ve slipped whispers past the veil, found splinters willing to listen. I’m trying to end the cycle, and I know that this time, this time I’ll succeed. Melpomene has invested too much into this world to burn it just to keep me at bay. For once, just this once, she’ll let me win.

  And that brings us to you, Alice. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe you gained the ability to end this connection several minutes ago. And yet you’re still here.

  …So I am.

  Then I think it’s time we finally talked face-to-face.

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