It’s me.
But this version of me is in ripped jeans with a hole at the left knee from tripping over Mrs Henderson’s garden gnome last spring, and a green sweater from Rynna with a little snag at the elbow. Bare feet. Her toenails are painted pink, which I haven’t bothered with in forever.
No knife at her hip. No crushing weight of power on her shoulders. Her hands are clean, no calluses from gripping weapons. She moves easily, like she’s never had to watch her back.
Most of all, her eyes are clear. Curious and hopeful, not tired or guarded. She looks like a regular person who’s never had to choose who lives or dies.
“You can have this back,” she says softly. No edge, no tension. She holds out empty hands, but it feels like she’s offering something priceless—something I didn’t even know I’d lost. “Give up the crown. Give up the power. Give up being the slayer. Let someone else carry this weight.”
I take a step back, hand flying to my blade out of habit. She’s open; I’m ready to fight.
“There is no one else,” I say, but my voice comes out weak. “The gods chose me. The crown chose me. I’m the only one who can?—”
“Who can what? Die gloriously in a cosmic battle that isn’t even yours to fight?” Human-me shakes her head, her hair swinging freely—no ponytail, no effort to keep it out of her face, just hair doing its own thing. “There were slayers before you, and there’ll be slayers after. The world doesn’t rest on you alone.”
She steps closer, and I catch that familiar smell: the cheap green-apple shampoo from the village shop and the vanilla body wash I used to buy without blinking.
“You could go home,” she says, her voice heavy. “Back to your cottage, your books, your tea, back to your sister. To mornings spent choosing breakfast instead of which monster to kill first.”
The realm quakes, and through the cracks I see the Devourer looming. But human-me doesn’t even notice. She’s all about the life I might still have if I just reach out.
“I could make tea,” I whisper. “Spend afternoons reading crime novels and arguing over the authors’ detective methods. I could complain about the weather and actually mean it, since rain would just be annoying instead of deadly.”
“Exactly,” she smiles. “Lazy Sundays, Friday-night takeout. Worry about normal stuff, like the heating bills, when to repaint the kitchen.”
Right then, another figure steps out of the dissolving void from behind a half-gone pillar.
Rynna.
My chest clenches so hard it hurts. She looks exactly like I left her—messy bun, that holey vintage band tee, ripped jeans from climbing cemetery walls and sneaking through old buildings on vampire hunts, not from epic battles.
Her trademark grin spreads as she waves a never-empty pint glass mid-story—probably embellishing her latest hunt. Her stake sits casually in her back pocket like she’s headed for a night out, because for her it is—adventure, fun, a chance to prove herself and protect people.
She has no clue about real stakes, about entire realms on the line. Her worst threat is a rogue vampire or a bold ghoul. A sharp stake and enough attitude, and she’s done.
“She’d be safe,” human-me says softly, following my gaze to where Rynna now sits at a phantom pub table, laughing at some joke I’ll never hear. “The slayer line would never pass to her if you simply stepped down. Walked away. Let the Order find someone else to bear the burden.”
I watch my sister—my funny, reckless, magnificent sister—as she leans back in her chair and nearly tips it over, catching herself with the reflexes of someone who’s made this exact mistake a hundred times before. Her laugh is bright and clear, unmarked by the weight of impossible choices or the knowledge of how dark the world can really get.
“Look at her,” human-me continues, her voice soft with the kind of love that hurts. “She’s happy. Carefree. She doesn’t even know what you’ve sacrificed for her already, what you’re contemplating sacrificing still. To her, the biggest supernatural threat is something that can be handled with teamwork and clever planning and maybe a bit of luck.”
The realm shudders around us, more pillars crumbling as the void spreads like spilt ink across white paper. Through the growing tears in reality, I can see the Devourer more clearly now. It’s not just a mass of purple hunger, but something with structure, with intent. It’s pressing against the weakening barriers with the patience of something that has all of eternity to wait for its moment.
“She could stay that way,” human-me presses, her tone growing more urgent as the dissolution accelerates around us. “Ignorant. Safe. Alive. Working in the pub and coming home to complain about the lack of new guys in the village.”
I can see it so clearly, it physically hurts. Rynna, living with me and sprawled on our sofa, stealing the remote and starting arguments about what to watch. Her inevitable failure to do the washing up, leaving dishes to “soak” in the sink until I give up and do them myself. The way she hums tunelessly while she sharpens her stakes, completely off-key but somehow endearing. Her terrible jokes and her worse puns and her absolute certainty that between the two of us, we can handle whatever the darkness throws at us.
“All you have to do,” human-me says, stepping close enough that I can see the flecks of gold in her eyes, “is choose her over them.”
She sweeps her hand towards the dissolving realm, toward the countless lives in countless worlds that hang in the balance. Towards beings I’ve never met who depend on my choices without even knowing I exist. Toward a cosmic responsibility I never asked for but can’t seem to put down.
“Choose the few who matter most to you over the many who are just statistics,” she continues. “Choose love over duty. Choose family over strangers. Choose the life you actually want over the burden you’ve been told you must carry.”
Tabitha stands rigid beside me, and I can feel the order magic pulled so tight around her it’s like standing next to a barely contained storm. Every instinct she has is screaming at her to speak, to guide, to impose structure on this chaos of choice and consequence. But the Judge’s rules bind her as effectively as chains, leaving her to watch in silence as I face this impossible decision alone.
The urge to give up feels like a stabbing pain in my chest, worse than any wound I’ve ever gotten. I just want to drop this weight. Stop being the universe’s last-ditch effort against chaos. Go home and be Nyssa Vale again—not the Wraith Queen, not some Pantheon realm goddess, not the woman stuck choosing between saving my sister or saving everyone else.
“I could spend whole days stressing about nothing more than whether the tomatoes get enough sun.”
