Chapter 46. Down.

The kingdom of Winstead continued to reign as the mightiest power on the continent. A land where power was held in the hands of a small but dangerous aristocracy whose command of magic through their elemental familiars made them all a force to be feared. These merciless overlords clung tenaciously to their power and ruthlessly purged anyone who resisted them. In that sense, Winstead could be called a paradise for the strong and a hell for the weak.

Everly had been reborn into this world sixteen years ago after concluding that life on planet Earth was no longer suitable to her needs as a future tyrant. She wanted a place where she could flourish and truly spread her wings. And in this new world, she found it.

She still remembered the first time she touched magic. The excitement of experiencing harada. The pleasure of claiming her first kill. It had all been so glorious. She'd never felt so complete before…

Everly? Are you going to stay in bed again? Titania asked her uncertainly.

Everly ignored the voice of her most trusted servant and pulled the blankets back over her head. She was tired and didn't want to do anything today. That was all.

It was a strange malaise that had come over Everly recently. Like nothing she'd ever before experienced. Everly was someone who had never experienced a moment of doubt in her life. She shunned weakness in all its forms and scorned those who succumbed to it. And why shouldn't she? Suffering was a core aspect of the human experience. Having the will to overcome your troubles and return stronger than before was what separated those who were meant to rule from those who were meant to be ruled. Everly was strong. She was better than this.

Yet, despite her resolve, for the last two months, Everly had been unable to leave the room she'd been renting at the Wayward Leaves Inn, at the very edge of Belsar county, where her birth father, a high-ranking member of the nobility ruled. She'd come into the inn, despondent for reasons she found difficult to articulate, and mentally dominated the staff into giving her a room free of charge. Then she went to bed and refused to leave.

Everly strongly believed in the principles of survival. The strong lived and the weak perished. That was an immutable law of nature that existed long before she'd come along. Why should she spend even a moment second guessing the decision she had made?

Why did the expression Fenneth wore as she died haunt her so much?

I didn't even know her. She was nothing to me. I didn't do anything wrong.

Despite how often she told herself that, it never seemed to ring true.

As time continued to pass, the collection of friends and servants she'd acquired during her new journeys began to grow concerned. Everly had never been like this before. To be fair, she was an awful person. Someone who refused to learn from her past mistakes based on the nebulous logic of being perfect and therefore incapable of making them. More than once she'd blasphemously declared herself to be a divinity who deserved the right to rule over all others because they were too weak to stop her.

But more than anything else, Everly was a relentless gadfly who couldn't resist the urge to rile up other people and watch them explode into anger for her personal amusement. She was a remorseless, terrible human being.

Her servants loved her very much.

"What can we do for her?" Titania asked fretfully, one night in the memory palace.

"We have to shake her out of it," Eris said. "Our Empress must not be allowed to continue this miserable decline. She hasn't done anything wrong! Why should she suffer like this?"

Carter and Grail said nothing. The two of them were more experienced in the ways of the world than the elemental sisters and already knew that some wounds only healed with time.

"She'll bounce back eventually, right?" Titania asked. "I mean, nothing keeps her down. She just needs to be left alone, that's all."

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One morning, Everly surprised everyone by crawling out of bed and coming to the inn's main floor for breakfast. She was still in her night clothes and her hair was a tangled mess, but this was the first time she'd left her room in weeks. She stumbled her way to a table and sat down ungracefully. Then she raised her arm to gain a servant's attention.

Throughout the bustling room, people turned to give her snide looks and to make unfriendly jokes at her expense. Everly paid them no mind. She just wanted a heaping portion of whatever it was she smelled wafting through the air to her nostrils.

"What are you making for breakfast?" she asked the young maid who came to take her order.

"Fresh biscuits with mushroom and sausage gravy," she answered politely.

"Gimmie four plates and a pitcher of pressed apple juice," Everly mumbled.

"That's a lot of food, Miss. Are you sure?" The waitress asked.

Everly made an impatient gesture with her hand and the maid quickly set off to fulfil her request. When her food arrived, she tore into it with animal gusto; shoving it into her mouth and swallowing it as quickly as she could, searing her tongue with the heat of it and licking her plate when she was finished. Everyone who saw her eat was both amazed and repulsed.

"Damn, little girl," snickered a middle-aged man sitting at a table adjacent to hers. "You must have some swine in your ancestry to pack away a meal like that."

The three other men seated with him chortled nastily at his stupid joke.

"Maybe I do," Everly said absentmindedly as she raised a hand to signal for more food. "It must be how you recognized me."

"Hmm?" the man asked in reply. "I'm afraid I don't follow you."

"Shouldn't swine recognize their own kind? I'm grateful for your acknowledgment, Elder Pig."

An ugly frown creased the brows of the men sitting at that table. Elder Pig in particular began to redden with anger.

Once the maid returned to Everly's table, she was quick to sense the mood and tried to calm the situation down before it could escalate.

Everly paid her words no mind and told her to bring her more food. Her highhanded manner seemed to incense Elder Pig and his friends even more. She didn't care.

When she received her food and resumed eating, the other men began commenting on how disgusting she was, and how repulsive her manners were. Her genuine indifference to their presence began to offend them even more than her imperious mannerisms had.

Finally, Elder Pig himself slammed his hand on her table and angrily told her to leave. "Get out of here!" he ordered her. "The way you eat is making our drinks taste bad."

Everly turned to regard the owner of the hand that had placed itself at the center of her table. "It's a little early in the day for that, isn't it?" she asked him.

"What are you implying?" he demanded to know.

"That you're an unemployed drunkard," Everly said indifferently. "No one with any pride in themselves would indulge in day drinking if they had any place to go. You're too young to be retired, so you're either too lazy to find work, or you're too stupid to keep it when you have it. You're also a grown man picking a fight with a teenage girl, so you clearly lack dignity as well."

Everly sopped up the remainder of the gravy with her last biscuit and swallowed it with one bite. Then she wiped her mouth on her sleeve and continued. "Is this really where life has brought you? Was this all your dreams amounted to? It's so pathetic, I could cry. Elder Pig would you please become my mentor? Would you teach me everything I need to know so that I'll never end up like you?"

It was a sincere offer. Everly never made them solely for the purpose of crushing another person's spirit. That was merely a pleasant bonus. While it was true that Everly believed herself incapable of making mistakes due to her status as a superior being, she still enjoyed learning from the missteps and misfortunes of others. If Elder Pig possessed genuine wisdom, she would have rewarded him lavishly for his services with gold. She would have built him a peerless mansion that even royalty would have envied. If it was lust that motivated him, her necromantic abilities could create peerless beauties of whichever gender he preferred that would have mindlessly existed for no purpose other than to bring him pleasure.

All these things and more could have been his if Elder Pig had only possessed the grace to humble himself before her, say yes, and offer himself to her in eternal servitude. Instead, he allowed his pride to be rankled by her cruel words. Instead of recognizing her patronizing tone and dismissive attitude as the supreme right bestowed upon her by destiny itself, he chose to be offended and slapped her across the face.

Everly blinked in surprise. Had that been the reaction that she'd intended to provoke? It was difficult to say. These last two months had been hazy and bleak. Even on her best days, she barely understood herself and her desires. Lately, she understood herself even less.

She rubbed her cheek gently where the fool had struck her and smiled warmly. She'd been so absent-minded lately that she hadn't even bothered maintaining a shield of harada to protect herself. His clumsy blow had hurt her, which was…nice. Pleasant, even. For far too long, she'd been wallowing in emotional turmoil over what she'd been forced to do to resolve a dangerous situation brought on by a certain someone whose face and name she refused to recall.

How nice was it to realize that she didn't have to live solely in her head to experience a little suffering? She could just get it the old-fashioned way. "Do that again," she ordered Elder Pig once the stinging in her cheek had subsided. He stared blankly at her in dumb confusion, uncertain of why she was reacting like this instead of breaking down into tears as he'd expected.

Everly was annoyed by his reluctance to commit to his role.

"I want you to hit me again," she explained to him with exaggerated patience. When he gave her another bewildered look, she seized control of his body and forced him to do it herself. First, he slapped her. Then he punched her. Then he threw her from her seat to the floor and began madly pummelling her while she squealed and laughed through her bloodied teeth at the relief his fists brought her.

His friends eventually pulled him off her but not before he grabbed her head and slammed it brutally against the floor and smashed her into unconsciousness.

For the first time in two months, Everly slept restfully, wearing a contented smile on her battered face.

__

When she awoke the next morning, Everly was surprised to discover herself locked away in a cell, lying on a filthy floor surrounded by other wretched people. This certainly wasn't her comfortable bed, which she assumed she'd be carried to. Instead, she was apparently being jailed. She wondered what crime she'd committed. Sleeping too soundly or waking up refreshed in an offensive manner? The laws which governed others could be mystifying at times. Which was why the only laws she ever respected were the ones she created herself.

"Ah, there she is," said an unfamiliar voice. Everly looked up to see a handsome, lightly armored man sitting behind a desk in front of the cell where he could closely observe his prisoners while remaining comfortably seated. "Welcome back to the living, Princess."

"And what exactly am I doing here?" Everly asked her jailer as she slowly climbed to her feet.

"Funny you should ask," he smiled at her. "The local constabulary received word yesterday that a young girl had provoked a tavern goer into beating the light out of her. He left her halfway dead was what the poor maid that reported this indecency said. You are supposed to have a broken face and jaw. By all rights, you should be wheezing or dead."

Everly raised her eyebrow. "You said, the local constabulary. Are you saying you're not one of them?" she asked the stranger.

"I'm afraid not," he replied with a smile. "I'm just a knight on my way to Count Van Belsar's estate to pay my respects to his mourning wife. The tale of your little misadventure reached my ear when I stopped by the inn for my lunch."

"And what tale is that precisely?" Everly asked him.

"The story of a mysterious girl who's apparently been living at the inn free of charge for months, although no one can remember signing her in. Apparently, she had the staff under her spell up until the moment she was beaten into unconsciousness by an unemployed lumberman. They're calling you a witch, girl. And your pretty face with nary a bruise or cut is all the proof they need. Which honestly squares with my own theory. You're a runaway, aren't you?"

"Your meaning, Sir?" Everly asked with a frown.

"Don't be coy. Van Belsar County is very close to the first border with Oldstead. Your sort is commonly hunted down here, desperately trying to seek refuge in that nation of traitors. Too bad, I happened to be here, or your little game could have gone on indefinitely."

Now Everly understood. The Republic of Oldstead was a breakaway nation formed primarily of citizens of Winstead who'd been enslaved by the kingdom's nobles for possessing magic without being a member of their social class. Mages who weren't nobles must either serve them or perish. That was the law in Winstead.

That meant this fool believed that Everly was some runaway commoner seeking her fortune in Oldstead before she could be chained by servitude to her betters.

Everly smiled wickedly to herself. Now that was the sort of interesting background story that a devoted lover of roleplaying such as herself could really sink her teeth into! Why pretend to be a wandering adventurer when she could instead be a persecuted weakling in search of freedom? That would lend her all kinds of sympathy from the audience who now wouldn't be so quick to judge her. It would be like how Magneto from the X-men comics would sink naval ships and drown hundreds of innocent sailors when he was having a snit but would instantly get a free pass from the readers by mentioning that he was a holocaust survivor.

Everly was in. She loved it. She decided at that moment that she wanted to be a downtrodden victim too. Co-opting the suffering of others for her own amusement and profit sounded quite villainous, and she was now in the mood to once more be bad.

"W-what are you going to do with me?" she sniffled in fear.