The Witch of the Castle of Glass

“This is not the story I was meant to live.”

Milly sighed, turning off her five-in-the-morning alarm with a sleepy swipe of her palm. The alarm clock, scavenged from a dumpster and on its last legs, like all her other belongings in her rundown bachelor apartment, gave its telltale faded ring before going silent. Each morning Milly wondered if it today would be its last, yet the stubborn thing refused to quit. And that gave Milly the little bit of extra willpower she needed to keep getting out of bed each morning. She wasn’t about to be shown up by an alarm clock.

She sat upright, her long black hair falling to the small of her back, tangled from the tossing and turning of her night’s sleep. It had not been a restful one. This time, her dreams were filled with the twisted memories of her third foster home, before Social Services had shut it down and her foster father had been arrested.

Milly rubbed the scars across her wrists as she remembered her time there. She had been moved through four subsequent foster homes in the two years after it happened, until she had enough and ran away at sixteen years old. It was not that she had been a difficult child. She simply never seemed to fit in anywhere.

She yawned, swinging her legs off her too-small bed and onto the stained carpet below. She ignored the squelch of dampness as she put her weight on it. She had gotten good at ignoring life’s minor discomforts in the three years since she had run away. Things like soiled carpet, broken heating, and a diet consisting of ramen noodles, potatoes, and frozen peas were small prices to pay for her independence. Right?

“You keep telling yourself that, Milly,” she whispered, her reality popping her attempt at optimism. The truth was, she was little better off now than when she was in foster care. She had a job working at a call center downtown earning minimum wage. It was just enough to afford her slum apartment in the dangerous part of the city, her bus pass, and just enough food to keep her alive.

She lived her life on autopilot. Wake up. Two-hour bus to work. Ten-hour shift. Two-hour bus back. Eat. Sleep. Repeat. Over and over, with no escape and no point except to live to see the next day and do it all again.

She grabbed her towel, quickly stripping off the nighty that was three sizes too big and walked the five steps to her tiny bathroom. The light flickered as she hit the switch, and she wondered whether it would turn on today. It did, though it flickered every few seconds. The bathtub was rusted, and the sink cracked, the latter covered over with a single piece of duct tape that the landlord had placed there six months ago. “It’s on my to-do list, Mildred,” he told her whenever she asked when it would be fixed.

Mildred. She hated her name. She did not remember her parents. Her mother had died of an overdose when she was three and her father abandoned her the next day. Or he was arrested for her murder. Milly never really wanted to know, and no one had bothered to tell her. All she knew was they had left her. All they left her was a failed childhood, a failing adulthood, and her name. Mildred Persephone Brown. A name they must have thought up while in a drug addled stupor watching historical fiction.

“Your thoughts are growing dark again, Milly,” she told her reflection in the cracked mirror. She opened her medicine cabinet, grabbed the bottle of anti-depressants, and swallowed one. She was supposed to be weaning herself off these, but today had not been a good start to the day.

She stared at herself in the mirror as she felt the pill work its way down her throat. She was not an attractive woman in her own eyes. Her hair was plain and frayed. She did not have the luxury of facial cleansers or, sometimes, shampoo, giving her a greasy look. Her nose was a touch too broad and her chin a touch too flat. She was overweight, through it all carried in her legs and stomach. “Not that anyone looks at me that way,” she told herself. Her hazel eyes, the only feature she liked about her body, reflected a sadness that had settled in long ago and never left.

She took a quick shower, this time sparing a bit of shampoo, and tried to let her self-pity slide down the leaky drain like the rest of her filth. As always, it did not work. She brushed her teeth and gave her hair a quick comb to remove the worst of the tangles, then threw on her telltale black hoodie with the broad front pocket and pentagram on the back. She had been lucky enough to buy it for two dollars at the thrift store. It had become her safety blanket, two sizes too large to help hide her weight. She always wore loose fitting clothing for this reason, but the black hoodie did it particularly well. “You’d think that a diet of nothing except ramen, potatoes, and peas would make me skinny, but life could not even do me that favour.”

Her alarm went off again, this time warning her that the bus would arrive in a few moments. “Shit!” she shouted, earning an angry yell through the paper-thin walls shared with her many neighbors. “Sorry, Mr. Dee,” she whispered, feeling guilty she had woken the old veteran. She knew she would get an earful from him when she got home. She rushed out the door, returning a few seconds later for her forgotten backpack, and sped out to the bus stop.

* * *

Milly stared out at the scenery as her bus approached the call centre, located on the tenth floor of 541 Arlington Street. According to advertisements for its many vacant floors, the complex was ‘adjacent to the nice part of downtown’. Milly took that to mean it was decidedly in the bad part of downtown.

Built in the early 1990s by ‘revolutionary’ designer and businessman Robert Castle, the four office towers were built into the shape of a castle, with glass walkways connecting each of the towers along the main floor and a large open-air courtyard in the middle of the complex. The ‘Castle of Glass’, as it was called at the ribbon cutting ceremony, could have revitalized the nearby neighborhoods and businesses. Except shortly after it opened, Mr. Castle was arrested for tax evasion and fraud, having gambled away government financial advances, workers compensation payments, and staff pensions. The Castle of Glass was auctioned off to the highest bidder a year after opening and has gone through over two dozen owners since then.

Consequently, the Castle of Glass was falling apart, with cracked glass panels strewn throughout the towers, only repaired when it reached lawsuit-level potential damage. The open-air courtyard was strewn with weeds, its single tree long since dead. Every tenant willing to pay rent in the structure were packed into Tower One so the other three towers could be left unheated and unrepaired. The only improvement the complex had seen in five years was the tiny shop in the lobby of Tower One, where someone had, for a reason unknown to anyone, opened a coffee shop.

Milly got off the bus, walking the two blocks to the tower, clutching her backpack close to her chest. She always came in through the northeast entrance, the closest to Tower 1, heading straight to the elevator. She stole a look through the window of the coffee shop, watching a young woman in her late twenties with short brown hair matching the color of her apron sweeping the floor and humming to herself, with not a customer in sight. Milly felt sorry for her, but she did not have money to spend on coffee or tea. She had never even tried coffee or tea.

The elevator rang, gears grinding to a halt and doors opening with a screech. She stepped in, eyes flashing up to the safety sticker peeling off above the panel. “Last inspected September 2009,” Milly read aloud as the doors closed with an equally ear-piercing screech.

Her eyes dropped from the safety sticker to the list of occupants in the building. Only the most desperate or cheapest companies came to the Castle of Glass. Government civil servants, the lowest in their complex government hierarchy, occupied floors two through four, their cheap rent part of the deal struck with Mr. Castle in exchange for tax breaks on the land back in the nineties. They made sure that agreement was honored by each subsequent owner.

The next two floors were vacant. They had been vacant for years, and Milly did not anticipate they would be filled any time soon. Milly had once peeked inside in a moment of curiosity, but the emptiness and mildew scent made her quickly leave.

Above those, on floors seven, eight and nine, a start-up soda company, EnergyWave, had set up its headquarters. Milly had heard they were doing pretty good business, if you ignored the pending class action lawsuit due to ‘excessive heart palpitations’. They had given away free samples when they first moved into the building, and Milly had noticed they had a warning on the bottle that it was ‘not to be consumed by anyone over the age of sixty-five or with health difficulties’. So at least there were warnings. Not all soda companies were as forthright.

Milly’s employer came next, occupying the tenth through twelfth floors. Acicenter was an insurance company, but not one of those that you would find in any national ranking system. It never did well on those, so the company did its best to avoid being on any list, including any government list. The call centre filled the tenth floor, employees crammed together in tiny, shared cubicle spaces to maximize space. The only benefit were the big bay windows around the outside of the floor. Milly could look north across four rows of cubicles towards the good part of downtown, its bright spires and lush parks reminding her that there were people out there who did not regularly contemplate whether an excessive amount of people on one floor would cause said floor to give way, crushing the poor drones in EnergyWave’s call centre beneath them. The managers would not need to worry. Except for Mr. Fredrickson, they all had large offices on the two floors above and rarely stepped foot on the tenth floor.

“Ok, so there are two advantages to the tenth floor,” Milly said to the empty elevator.

The floors above them, except for the vacant sixteenth floor penthouse, were occupied by a law firm. One of those that still ran three in the morning commercials on local television because they did not know that doing so went out of style twenty years ago. “Let Legal Eagles fly you to freedom! Caw Caw!” whispered Milly, having spent many late nights unable to sleep and staring at her tiny television, screen fractured in the top left corner. “It’s not even the right bird call.”

The elevator stopped at the tenth floor. She had arrived. Milly took a deep breath, hoisted her backpack up on her shoulders, and strode forward into the chaotic office that awaited her.

* * *

“Acicentre, for all your insurance needs. How may I help you today?” Milly spoke into the phone for the twenty-third time today, according to the productivity counter in the bottom left of her computer screen. God, how she hated this job. But there was not much out there for a high school dropout who had spent three months homeless on the streets and still dressed in hoodies. At least Acicentre had hired her. They were not fussy when it came to their staff. She forwarded the call to the appropriate agent, then leaned back in her chair, and sighed.

“This job would be so much easier if no one called,” said Xavier beside her, completely serious. Xavier was the one light in her life right now. He was a few years older than her, handsome in his own way and completely oblivious to it. As far as Milly could tell, Xavier was obsessed with two things in his life. Working out and playing video games. The former accentuated his handsomeness, rippling muscles and broad shoulders enough to turn the eyes of most women and more men than Milly expected. The second kept anyone but her from spending more than a single minute in his company.

“Anyway, the key to that map is to crouch behind the crates just outside the second spawn point. Everyone looks left first, which gives you that split second to shoot. Everyone calls that strategy spawn camping, but it is a legitimate strategy, and it is not my fault if they cannot adapt to it. That’s why I am one of the highest ranked on the server.” Xavier continued, picking up where he had left off when Milly got the call.

Milly listened politely. She had no idea what a spawn point was, or why camping next to it was frowned upon. Wasn’t this a gun shooting game? Why were people camping? Maybe they were hunting wildlife. She did not really care. She just smiled and nodded, and that was enough for Xavier.

In the six months since they had started sharing cubicle space, video games were all that Xavier talked about. A never-ending barrage describing games of all shapes, sizes, and colors and his strategies for winning at each. He never asked about Milly. Never asked about her past or her interests or even how her day was going. And that suited Milly just fine. Her life was not worth recounting.

Milly was not sure if Xavier was a friend. It seemed awfully one-sided, but then again Milly had never really had a friend before. So one day she had decided that Xavier was a friend within the three walls of their shared cubicle. Which was enough to help Milly keep coming to work each day.

Xavier’s phone rang and he cut off his narration with a frown. He had been saying something about…fortnights? Milly had stopped paying attention again, simply nodding her head and letting her mind drift. Not that Xavier ever noticed.

Xavier leaned forward with a sigh until he read the caller ID. Then he got excited. “It’s my guild. Quick, go stand guard outside and tell me if Mr. Fredrickson gets too close. This is important. We are raiding the golden dragon queen tonight and we need a battle strategy.”

Milly chuckled and did as she was instructed. She did not know what a guild was, but a month ago Xavier had started forwarding his personal calls to his work line, covering off his gaming needs and raising his productivity counter at the same time. It meant more customer calls went to Milly to manage, but she did not care enough to consider it an issue.

“Besides, there are benefits to standing guard,” she thought, staring across the cubicle farm out the broad window that overlooked downtown. She watched the small kayaks paddle along the broad northern river that lazily wound its way through the city, and watched as an ambulance weaved its way though traffic.

She stretched her arms towards the ceiling, cracking her back. Her hoodie rose up her stomach, showing bare skin, and she quickly pulled it down in a moment of panic, hoping no one had seen it. Unfortunately, someone had.

“Careful there, Mil-dead,” sung Calista Gale in a mocking tone, her long red ponytail swaying with her laugher, “No one wants to glimpse your pale skin.” She pushed passed Milly, nudging Milly with her elbow on the way to the photocopier. Milly mumbled an apology. Calista’s high heels clicked on the floor as her short skirt swayed with her hips. Milly’s face glowed red from embarrassment and she ducked back into the cubicle just as Xavier finished his call.

“Skank used to tease me in high school,” Xavier said, having seen Calista walk by. “Second string cheerleader, never good enough for prime time. Now works in a call centre with the rest of us. Warms my heart it does.”

“How’d you get her to stop bullying you?” Milly asked softly.

“Oh, she just found someone weaker to bully and forgot about me. I guess that’s why she bullies you and not me.”

Xavier said it with such casualness, as if it were simply a well-known fact. But his comment stayed with her all day, running through her mind. Xavier thought she was weak. She turned from him, staring at her phone, and let tears fall as Xavier recounted the appropriate min-maxing strategy in the latest JRPG, oblivious.

* * *

Milly arrived back in her rundown apartment well after the sun had set on the city. She had spent the last two-hour bus ride home staring out the window as the neon lights passed her by. Another day alive and another day not lived. Another day put behind her in the unrelenting march towards oblivion.

“God Milly, stop being so melodramatic,” she scolded herself, “I thought you left behind that ‘life is pain’ goth shit when you dropped out of high school.” She looked down at her oversized black hoodie and gave a half-hearted laugh. “Well, maybe you didn’t.”

When she finally stepped into her apartment, after sitting through the expected diatribe by Mr. Dee, Milly ate a quick meal of baked potatoes and peas and crawled into bed. She wondered if tomorrow would be any better. She knew it would not be, as that required an effort and willingness to change that she could never manage to muster. But she could dream.

She could dream.

* * *

The cube rocketed towards Earth, intent on the target Cizen had locked in. Inside the cube, Oracle and Thoth clung to their realities as the world inside the cube formed and expanded. They felt their minds stretched thin, then tear apart, and scattered across the Contest. Memories lost in the chaos.

“Arriving at Destination. On target. Assimilating participants. The God Contest begins in three…two…one…mark.”