chapter one
When Purple wins, she stands alone.
She wants to still believe that this can be fun. A part of her will always believe that this can be fun—she would not have signed on with the Coven if she believed there would ever be a time when this sort of work didn’t appeal to her. She’s an elite operative. She cannot afford to do something as human as doubt.
All she can do is unmake the world around her until the only remaining outcome of any situation is a victory for the Coven.
The body of a woman lays next to her, her power still sparking in Purple’s hands, bathing her skin the very color from which she draws her name. She does not allow herself to feel remorse. How could she? This is the moment for which she was created. This is her design. To believe otherwise, she thinks, would finally kill her. It would be the moment of weakness in which her enemies would finally strike.
She dusts the rubble from her hands, the little fires igniting at the tips of her fingers finally extinguishing themselves. She wipes the blood off, as well, ignoring how it stains her cloak a brilliant crimson. The Coven will provide her with a new one. They always reward those who make them proud.
Carnage surrounds her. Countless bodies, drained of their power, and yet…the one she longed for still evades her. She caught only glimpses of the other operative as she navigated the world around her with the kind of deftness that Purple only recognized because she herself possesses that same skill. She knows the kind of opponent that could defeat her; it is herself. A replica. Someone with the same primal desire to ensure that their path forward was the only one, perhaps by pain of their own life.
She knows her own weaknesses.
She knows that she is her only weakness.
And in learning that, she knows how to ensure that this weakness is never exploited against her.
Destroy anyone who stands in her way. Take their power for her own and never look back. Use those stolen abilities to rip apart those who they previously benefited.
Lucky for her, Purple hasn’t ever had that many qualms about taking others’ lives. Siphoning tends to have that kind of effect. She had it drilled into her mind from an early age that this power would leave her aching and lonely at the end of the day unless she found something good to use it for. That’s where the Coven came in. They appeared at her doorstep and told her that there was a greater future for her, if she would just take their hand.
And, of course, she took it. How could she not? It was that or spend the rest of her life in solitude.
Purple doesn’t like most beings. It does not mean she wants to be alone.
Still, it always surprises her when someone dares to meet her outright. Purple has a reputation for ruthlessness—a well-earned one, if she says so herself. Everyone fears losing what little power they possess in the first place, and running into Purple is perhaps the surest way for that to happen. Her opponents cower before her, pleading for their life and praying their words don’t fall on deaf ears.
All but this one.
She’s heard stories about this woman before, though as far as Purple knows, they’ve never shared the battlefield until now. It’s said that where she goes, death follows. That she cuts through those who stand against her with an unrelenting cruelty, not discriminating between the honorable and the evil as she sends her victims into whatever lies between this plane and the next. That she likes to play with her prey before trapping it, then torment it even more before she finally consumes it whole.
Importantly, she doesn’t scare Purple. She’s far too good at what she does to believe anyone else could be a threat to her.
But she respects that at least this woman had the audacity to try.
Maybe she finally has a worthy challenger. This could be fun, if nothing else.
So she prowls across the planet, the ground cracking more beneath her feet with every step she takes. Moss grows over the carnage left by the earlier battle, explosions of flowers blossoming in exposed ribcages and swallowing them before they tumble into the widening chasms. The plants wither as soon as they make contact with the foreign matter. There’s something incompatible in the two’s chemical makeup.
Despite everything, it breaks her heart to see something this beautiful die.
Tucked under the petals of one of the few flowers that remains on this dying world, Purple finds a letter.
It stands out. The flower stands tall in pink-petaled rebellion. The other woman must have breathed life into it when she set the planet ablaze. It doesn’t die when Purple touches it—once again betraying that it came from somewhere else. Somewhere familiar. Somewhere it could have gotten used to being treated delicately—so used to it that it trusted its caretakers enough to allow them to use it as a hiding place here at the end of all things.
Purple extracts the emerald-tinted sheet of paper. Across the back of it, in elegant handwriting, are three simple words: Burn before reading.
A sadistic smile dances across Purple’s face.
There’s nothing she loves more than being right.
With the letter pinched between her fingers like it might harm her if she dares to grant it more than the slightest point of contact, she searches for any sign of her rival. The shadows grow bigger as pieces of the world untether themselves from the ground, peeling up behind her like water gathering for a tsunami. She crouches as if she could see beneath the very darkness they cast—as if there is enough space under them for someone to hide in the first place.
She yearns for the moment that she’ll finally get to stand against someone who’s worthy of her full power.
And for when she will get to take that (nearly) equal power and use it for herself and the Coven.
It’s a snare. Of course it’s a snare. Even if it weren’t for the years of training that prepared her for moments just like this, Purple prides herself on her intelligence. She’s been skilled at recognizing patterns since she was a child. This is a piece of a greater game—one that her opponent is orchestrating from afar. Purple knows what happens to operatives who find themselves too fascinated by someone who isn’t part of the Coven. They’re traitors. All it takes is for one of the other soldiers to find her with this letter and report her to the Mother, and that’s it. Everything Purple worked for will have been for nothing. She should set this aside and get off this world before it tears itself to pieces.
But curiosity gets the better of Purple, as it so often does. How can she ever learn if not for the desire to explore? Perhaps it will be the very thing that gives her the upper hand in her future bouts with this fighter. Perhaps, when the Mother finds out how she received this information, she will celebrate her for plucking the bait from the trap without falling in.
She can use this for good. She knows it.
Sparks dance on the tips of the fingers holding the letter. Purple relishes in the way that her fingers hurt as the words go up in flames. She doesn’t drop it until the ashes fall from her hands without her ever truly letting go of them. When she examines her hands, someone else’s messy handwriting scrawls across her palms. She bites back a scoff. She would’ve thought someone with the courage to taunt her would have at least had good penmanship.
Then again, she has always heard that there’s a correlation between intelligence and messiness. Perhaps this is a sign that the woman on the other side of this war is far more formidable a foe than she ever would’ve let herself dream.
No matter. The world is falling apart. She does not have time to sit there and try to decipher messages from her enemy. Purple crawls through the Strands, toward the future the Coven works tirelessly to build, toward the future that she’s helping them construct (she thinks, or, at least, she hopes beyond hope that she’s playing a role in).
As the sun begins to die out, the final cinders left from the rival’s letter flicker their last breaths in tandem.
A lone gunship blocks out the rest of the light, preventing any living creature on the planet from seeing the moment their planet ceases to be.
A seeker leaps from the ship, her feet heavy with the weight of what she sees before her. She tries not to look at any of their faces. She hates the idea that she might recognize a single one of them, that she may find herself overwhelmed with grief before she can accomplish her mission. She does not take a single step without looking over her shoulder or ensuring that her feet fall exactly where somebody else’s once did; though she’s been here before, and knows she was not followed then, she cannot make the same guarantee now.
Another piece of the ground lets out a sickening groan. The seeker pretends not to hear it.
The seeker reaches the remnants of a note. She runs her finger through the soft ashes—she thinks they may be the only soft thing left in this world. She doesn’t have the same luck as her predecessor; she cannot summon flames at will. Still, with as much kindness and as many pretty words as she can muster, she manages to coax a spark out of what was once an inferno.
She dons a glove and plucks a petal from a nearby flower, willing it not to disintegrate the moment it touches something that is not from the world from whence it came. She’s lucky enough for it to stay intact, for now. Once everything is in her palm, she digs her teeth into the skin of her other hand until incandescent blood wells to the surface. It’s not much. She prays it is enough.
She presses the blood into the cinders. As the world stutters its dying breath, she brings something back to life. She whispers soft encouragements to the small thing in her hands, trying to drown out the agonized cries of a planet, trying to ignore the ache in her chest as everything around her creaks and dies and screams for help that she can only give to one thing at a time.
That she selfishly chose to give to this.
But, to the seeker’s credit, at least her choice was worth it. Her effort pays off.
What was once a pile of ash is now a fully formed, emerald-green piece of paper. A signature at the top is the only thing that denotes any form of authorship. Were it not for that, she could almost convince herself that this manifested spontaneously. That it wasn’t left by someone, for someone. That it was the final cry of someone from a crumbling world, an attempt to make themselves heard as a death rattle resounded through the universe.
This letter was meant for a single pair of eyes. To be burned, examined, and destroyed.
As the world dies, she opens it again.