LIGHTNOVELONLINE Arc 2 | Chapter 40: Food That Isn’t So Gross
The world melted around Emilia. Black blood burst out of the holes she had scratched through it, her red nails dripping, dripping, dripping with the flesh of universe.
She didn’t know how she had done it, but she had. She’d ripped the world apart. Cities crumbled around her, the blood of the aether burning it out of existence. Was it this easy, to end a world?
There were fragments of an old poem, of the world ending in fire or ice—remnants from before wars had burned knowledge into ash. There was no ice here, except in her heart. Empty, as she watched cities crumble. Toxic. This world was toxic and mouldering. Stinking of waste and corruption, spicy and burning everything it touched, and she needed to destroy it.
She needed to, and yet, she cried. She rubbed away her tears, pulled her hand away, black. Bleeding black. Her heart was black ice, untouched by the death around her.
Who cares about the death of AIs? They are nothing but tools and toys and—
✮ ✮ ✮
Emilia gasped awake, heart pounding in her throat. She couldn’t breathe.
It had just been a dream.
Just a dream.
A dream of someone—something—else invading her body. It had felt so real, filled her up so perfectly. She wanted to throw up, purge the feelings of that thing from her body and soul.
She needed to calm down. Breathe. Breathe. Remember how to breathe. She’d gone to therapy for this, learning how to breathe through the panic. It couldn’t fix her fucked up knots, DNA wrapped around itself until her body screamed of trauma and everything was a potential trigger, but it was enough to breathe through it. It had to be enough.
In… out… count to four. Hold on the beat. Every step a four count.
One. Two. Three. Four.
One. Two. Three. Four.
One. Two. Three. Four.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Emilia’s eyes fluttered open, blurry and sticky, and she rubbed away the sleep cracking over them. The bed under her was soft. Not as soft as her own, cloud soft bedding was, but soft enough that they called her back under. She was so tired, her core throbbing weakly within her, begging her to let it rest, just a little longer…
Just a little longer…
Just a little…
Emilia gasped back awake. Core ache or no, she did not want to go back to that hellscape, thanks! She pushed herself up, glaring around the room. Red—shocking—but more extravagant than the other bedrooms she had seen—all, you know, three of them. Long, dark curtains fell around the sides of her too big bed, held loosely back by ropes of shimmering red, letting just a sliver of light suffuse the air. Stars gleamed across the ceiling, mysterious and an almost golden pink. The world outside her bed seemed huge. Chairs and a sofa, multiple tables and the smell of food.
Okay, so she couldn’t see the smell of food, but she was so hungry that she was sure her nose could follow its delicious, scrumptious, mouth-watering—
Emilia slithered across the bed, poking her head out one of the curtain gaps to check if anyone was in the room. No one, not anyone she could see, at least, and she crawled over the other edges. Nope. No one.
Time to find that food~
The source of the smell was several plates of food, hiding under domes, the iridescent red of them reminding her of her sharp fork and—
“Fuck,” she mumbled, looking down at herself. Someone had stripped off her cloak and belt, probably so she would sleep easier, but that meant her forks and dagger were gone—although the latter she had dropped on the floor of the cavern, in favour of that blood orb. Hopefully, whoever’s home this was hadn’t deemed her a threat.
She pushed the thoughts, the slight rush of concern, away—there was nothing she could do about it, after all—and pulled off the domes, grabbing a piece of bread from a platter. It was still slightly warm, fresh from the oven. She sniffed it tentatively. Smelled like normal bread, even if it was red. Felt like normal bread, slightly soft under the crust, and when she took a bite of it—
The resemblance to her world’s bread all but ended. It wasn’t bad, at least, just different. At least it wasn’t the weird, spongy food that bled. There was some of that, on another plate, and she unceremoniously covered it again, the cloche banging slightly against the platter. Unless it was the only option, she wouldn’t be eating that again any time soon.
She yawned as she ate her bread and looked around. It was a nice room, reminded her a bit of pictures she’d seen of Charles and James’ home, in the Free Colonies, the twins smiling amongst their myriad of siblings. That one sibling—one of the only ones she’d never met—always severe and frowning as his younger siblings laughed and played and didn’t have the weight of family expectations on them.
That Free Colony, Charles had told her, was allegedly inspired by some long-lost book. Burned away by time and memory and the Colonial Wars. There were laws that governed how their home country worked, hard to amend, rigid and stifling, and keeping it firmly stuck in the past. Charles had been happy to marry a Baalphorian and never be forced to return for more than brief visits. James had gone back, she’d heard. Broken by the war, just like her—maybe even worse, given what she’d heard.
Everything in the room was ornate and over-the-top. Carvings adorned practically every available surface. Meticulous designs were embroidered into the fabric covering the furniture, precise little threads creating motifs of animals native to this world—or myths. People were big on their myths, even if she’d been raised without any such beliefs. Religion wasn’t exactly popular in Baalphoria, and most of their myths and legends were treated as simple stories, imported from the Free Colonies or civilizations long gone away, just like the founding story of the twin’s home.
She plopped down on the sofa, crossing her legs and ripping into the bread. She eyed up the other options dubiously. They didn’t look quite as weird as the other food did, but she couldn’t say they looked appetizing either. Something about them just… turned her stomach. That wasn’t exactly uncommon in raids—something about how your DNA literally knew what your ancestor’s diet had been. Facing food that your ancestors had never come across sparked an instinct to get the fuck away from it as fast as you could.
Danger.
We don’t know if that will kill us or not.
Do. Not. Eat.
Bread was bread, though. Flour or meal and—more often than not—a rising agent. Sure, different types tasted different, but they were effectively all the same. Yummy goodness. Yummy enough that people spent a shit ton of money knotting out intolerances to ingredients. There were a few foods like that, so good that people were willing to pay out the nose for the privilege of consuming them without, er, bathroom issues.
Emilia chanced a bite of a pale pink slice of something—fruit or candy, based on the flavour that melted over her tongue. “So sweet,” she moaned, grabbing a few more pieces. She’d always had a soft spot for sweets, even knotted herself to handle the sugar better—not that that would help her here, where knots had limited effect…
Maybe she should have mentioned to Payton that she wanted to keep that particular knot? Warn him that if he removed it, he’d have a hyperactive child on his hands when she woke up? Somehow, she imagined he’d either be a wonderful or atrocious child wrangler. No in between, he’d be perfect or horrible.
Oh well, too late now. Worst case, he’d remove it and have to add it back in… assuming she let him. In hindsight, leaving him to decipher her knots and genes without basically any guidance might have been a tad irresponsible. She was a brat, even with the knots. Unknotted Emilia was a fucking menace. Uncontrollable and unstoppable, and oh so traumatized.
Emilia grabbed another piece of bread, unwilling to risk hyping herself up on raid world sweets—she had no idea if that was possibly, but it seemed smart to avoid that until she knew where she was—and pushed herself up, walking towards a window. Light streamed in around the edges, the thick red curtains blocking out most of it. There were stars drawn onto the ceiling as well, she realized, sparser than the ones above the bed, but there nonetheless. They shimmered slightly, just like the sky of the city had, before the light had begun to fade.
Some sort of light control, then, permanently etched into the room.
She swept the curtain open, eyes slamming shut as light blasted into her. Warm, even through the glass of the window—did she need sunscreen here? It wouldn’t hurt her real body, but getting a sunburn would suck.
Wait.
Sun?
Emilia squinted into the world, trying to discern where the light was coming from. Above. This wasn’t just light echoing out of the air. This was the light of the sun. Sunlight stretched across fields of pink and purple grass, rivers of red burbling through it. Trees with white and black and red trunks reached upwards—some so tall they seemed to stretch into the clouds, fluffy and white. Not ominous red clouds, just clouds of cotton candy, lines of delicious pink warping through them occasionally, and the sky above, a light, fluttering red, two glowing orbs shining across it and lighting up the landscape.
It was beautiful, so unlike the world below, where even weeds hadn’t dared grow in the hard packed ground. The city hadn’t had any plants either, only people and buildings and a gorgeous cavern tucked deep beneath it.
A child sprinted across the lawn, hand waving to someone else, another child appearing behind them, their long skirt impeding their escape. She tripped, slide forward into the dirt and came up bloody, palms dripping with blood that she quickly wiped across the grass. The blood sizzled slightly before it sparked out of existence, leaving behind a slightly burnt looking patch of grass.
The boy bolted back to her, hauling her up by a wrist, careful not to touch the still healing scrapes. They both stared at them, unafraid and impatient, until they sealed closed, and they were linking hands and dragging each other away.
Emilia shuddered as the light amusement reached her through the aether, like a child laughing through a closed door. A sound that shot straight to your core and made you smile, except it really was shooting into her core, rubbing against it, close and intimate and not meant for her, just the way the laughter of children playing in her own world was meant only for them.
The children ran and ran, their happiness rising into a wave as they hiked up their pants and skirt, tossed their shoes and socks aside, and stumbled through the river. They weren’t very good at it, red water catching on the hems that were too low, turning the fine fabric—so fine that Emilia could tell, even from here—a deeper shade of red.
They both glanced down when they reached the other side, pointing to the other’s ruined clothes as they argued over who was stupider, their argument rising like a swell around her, even through the window. If they didn’t want to be caught, they had better—
A voice called out to them through the aether, quieter than the children’s ongoing argument, so quiet Emilia couldn’t make out what they even said. The children started, wide eyes turning towards the young man walking lazily towards them, his strawberry-blonde hair rustling in the wind. He stopped at the edge of the river, talking softly to them. They pointed, each shouting about how it was the other one’s idea.
Emilia had never done that when she was younger, pointed at one of her friends or siblings and blamed them when her own plan had failed. Everyone knew it was always her idea, and even on the rare occasion that it wasn’t, adults inevitably knew she had encouraged whatever was happening. She’d always been good at getting an adult involved, when someone was about to do something even she deemed stupid.
When she did, the adults came running and screaming because she didn’t claim she needed help—that someone else needed to be stopped—without a good fucking reason. Even when she’d messaged Olivier, joking and calm about the echo, he had come running, swearing and fully armed because he had known it would be bad.
Across the lawn, the children were scuffing their feet against the rocky ground, pouts written across their faces, and then the young man said something. Their faces lit up, and they were running for a copse of trees, their hands clasped together once more.
The young man turned back towards the house, his eyes clasping onto Emilia’s. The boy from the night before—assuming she hadn’t been out longer than a single night. He smiled, waved.
⸂I’ll be up in a moment.⸃
Emilia tried not to visibly shudder as his voice swept through her, intimate and fucking hell, she wasn’t sure whether to hope his voice was the only one that had that effect on her or if everyone’s did.
