Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Once upon a time there was a girl and a demon.

Did you know demon was another word for daemon? It’s true. It’s in all the books, probably. You can go read them for yourself, if you can find them. But once there was a girl, and a demon, in the days of old when this place wasn’t yet a kingdom, but just the beginnings of one, a small village protecting itself from the monsters that lurked in the dark. And this girl, Gloreth? She had a knack for sniffing out monsters.

Monster means demon, but it doesn’t mean daemon. Words are funny like that.

Her hair was the color of Dust, a gleaming gold, and with it shining in the wind she lifted her sword, and drove it straight into the heart of the monster that had tried to call her little village its own. The people loved her. Showered her in praise, her and her soul right by her side. They say he was a brilliant white dog, a guardian, large as an ox. He grappled with the monster. With his fur a light to drive it back.

Soul means daemon, but it’s never meant demon. Never meant monster, either. It’s a whole smorgasbord of words. Try drawing that family tree.

The village became a town became a city became a kingdom, enacted a great wall, to protect its people from monsters for generations to come. An order of knights was started up in Gloreth’s name, with Gloreth herself leading them. All of their souls were dogs. The only way to trust a daemon is to trust a dog.

Dog means daemon. But it doesn’t mean soul.

And so on and so forth. Gloreth and that great white-dog soul of hers died a hero, walked on this earth, briefly, as a god, and watched over everyone now from the sky. And her order of knights continued on, for hundreds of years, thousands of dog-shaped souls, setting their teeth and swords to the good of the kingdom. To protect yourself from demons, you can’t ever let your guard down. They could be around any corner. Hidden in any shadow.

But, you know. Technology improved. The people lived. A thousand years passed. The knights had noble souls, for they were descendants of those original knights: bloodhounds, German Shepherds, Dobermans, retrievers, you know the type. Once or twice in a generation you’d even see a big white dog, just like Gloreth: Pyrenean Mountain Dogs, you might know them as. The common people had loyal souls: mutts and mongrels and whatever else in between.

Happily ever after, right?

Tsht. Yeah.

They say happily-ever-after means dog, too.

It turns out losing an arm doesn’t hurt as much as Ballister thought it would.

Not to say it doesn’t hurt, because it does. Excruciatingly. In the dust and chaos of the aftermath, of his shaking hands—hand, now—and his mind still replaying the Queen’s death on repeat, he’s pretty sure he’s only still standing because of the adrenaline, because if he stops, he’ll be struck down. He’s a knight. Was—going to be a knight. He knows what happens to traitors. Human and daemon hacked apart, until neither is a person, and then both are dead.

Ballister has no idea where he is beyond rubble, probably, because that green light that came from his sword went from the Queen’s body up, crashing into the stadium itself, bringing the whole place crashing down. He’s following—something. The last desperate firings of a dying mind. He keeps staggering into things. There’s not as much blood as he was expecting. Maybe the wound was cauterized. Wouldn’t that be nice of Ambrosius.

“Bal,” says his soul, and her voice is faint and weak from disuse as it always is. Human and daemon can talk to each other internally—what’s the point in the soul ever speaking aloud? But here her voice is the loudest thing around him. Even louder than his heart slamming against his eardrums. “Bal, I’m bleeding.”

See, the thing about losing an arm is that your daemon limping is what really hurts.

In the darkness of sparking wires and crackling dead lights, Ballister looks at his soul.

Kiran’s—small. She’s always been small for a knight, nothing like the purebred dogs everyone else has, but she’s his, and he’s always thought she’s been wonderful, from his earliest memories when she was but a puppy. She’s a deep brindle throughout, though with white down her chest and belly, with a single white paw and a stripe across her muzzle. Like him she’s got deep brown eyes, framed by floppy ears.

And right now she is none of those things.

The soul that stares back up at him with her dark eyes glazed in pain is—wrong. Wrong on a level he feels in his chest, and it’s that which makes Ballister weak in the knees, his vision blurring as he staggers against the wall, legs giving out. The familiar shape of Kiran is wrong and monstrous. Small, still, but wrong.

Ballister says, “oh.”

“It hurts,” she says, which is an understatement. She’s bleeding Dust from the underside of her right wing—wing, and she shouldn’t have one of those. No daemon should—no daemon should change like that. But the nightmare is still replaying in his mind. Ha. Nightmare. As if it didn’t happen.

“Change back,” he says.

“I don’t know how.” Kiran’s voice is a wisp of itself. “Everything hurts too much. I can’t see right. I don’t know what happened.”

Ballister doesn’t either. It was—chaos. It was staring at the dead body of the Queen, dead by his sword and yet he didn’t move a single muscle. He thinks somewhere in there Ambrosius cut off his arm. He watched that happen. Watched his own limb thud to the floor. The dead fingers were still gripping the sword that killed the Queen. He didn’t even realize something was wrong with Kiran until one of the knights-to-be waiting behind him—in better times he might say it was fucking Todd, nudge at Ambrosius to get him to laugh—yelled, he’s a demon!

When Kiran pressed against his leg, he felt feathers instead of fur.

The world exploded into noise.

Maybe it’s still ringing in his ears. There’s Dust bled onto his chest when everything comes back into focus and Kiran is pressing her beak to his nose, perched on his chest. Her talons are a dusty sort of orange. She reminds him of the pigeons that mill about cities until they’re shooed away by brooms and swords and spikes nailed into the tops of buildings. He feathers are a mix of blacks and browns like the brindle her coat should be, has always been.

“We should go back,” she says, “someone killed the Queen.”

Ballister says, “they’ll kill us.”

Kiran tucks her wings close. Her sides are stained golden. Her right wing is missing more feathers than Ballister can count. He’s not sure which is worse: the loss of an arm entirely, or the echo of it, pressed into his daemon.

Kiran says, “shouldn’t they? Something’s—wrong with us. We didn’t kill the Queen. But we…” she pokes her beak to her chest. “We did this.”

Ballister stumbles to his feet. “Yeah,” he says, “probably.”

But he keeps moving. Kiran digs her talons into the flesh of his remaining arm, holds herself there, entirely unlike a dog, like a daemon, like a soul.

“Maybe it’s a fluke,” he says, “maybe you’ll change back.”

Kiran grips him tighter. “I hope so.”

They end up hiding out in an old abandoned tower in the shadow of the wall. It’s overgrown and Ballister has to shoo out a group of raccoons living inside, entirely alone with his soul still stuck so wrong, so unlike the brindled mutt they’ve always been, but he manages, and her Dust spills golden onto the floor, where she falls down, lands in it, her talons smeared bloody.

He passes out pretty soon after that.

But he wakes up, again. Figures out what, exactly, he has to work with, in this place. It’s not a lot, but he’s made due with less, before. Kiran closes her eyes and thinks dog, and every time she opens them, she’s stuck still as the same pigeon. But she thinks she might be getting closer—that they’ll work past this fluke.

Ballister isn’t sure what comes after. But for now he tries to figure out a prosthetic for his arm. He’s always been better-than-average when it came to science, and Kiran continues to work more and more to get back to who they were. He manages something like a prosthetic. It hurts, the machinery of it pressed to the stub of his skin, but it works well enough. It’ll have to.

Kiran manages a tail, a paw, to be herself for half-seconds at a time, a mess of feathers tumbling over into brindle fur and droopy ears and wide dark eyes. She’s not bleeding so badly anymore. Ballister attempts to recreate the events of the night he lost everything: the Queen, proud of him, and how his sword unfurled green-magic. Someone killed the Queen. That he can focus on.

At his side Kiran struggles to her paws. She’s missing the end of her tail and parts of her ears are absent like they’ve been chewed off, but her form doesn’t flicker. She stays solid with her right forepaw tucked close to her chest, missing three claws at the end.

“Maybe it really was just a fluke,” Ballister tells her.

Kiran looks sideways. Maybe, she’s saying, in the silent way of all daemons, I hope.

The news continues to report on him. The connection isn’t the best out here, but he makes due. Knows Ambrosius’s number by heart and repeats it for long hours over and over in his head, but can’t ever work up the courage to call. It probably wouldn’t come to anything, anyways. Ballister didn’t kill the Queen, but the entire kingdom saw him do something just as bad.

He remembers impossible talons in his skin. Daemons can’t be anything but what they already are. He watches Kiran and her careful hobble around the tower, and wonders, somewhere he hopes she cannot hear, could she have planned this all out, without me knowing? He wants to believe it isn’t her—they’ve always been good and true and loyal—but in that moment she, as if a monster in hiding, changed. And he didn’t know her at all.

He tries investigating. Doesn’t get much further than printing off pictures of people it could be. It’s not that all the other knights-to-be he trained with hated him—beyond Ambrosius he had no friends—it’s that he can’t imagine why anybody would kill the Queen. They’re the noble knights of Gloreth. They’ve never wanted for anything.

Kiran tilts her head and stares at the mess of loose twine making up their suspect board, innocence wall, whatever it might be called. Lingers longest on Ambrosius in the center, and Ballister wonders if she thinks what he does.

The news calls him the Queen Killer. Todd gets up there and gives an interview, says, I never thought it was a good idea to let a commoner in. There’s a reason all knights are descended from the original noble bloodlines. You never know what sort of monsters can lurk in the soul of a mongrel. His daemon sits at his side, a Doberman with her ears pricked and her lips curled in a snarl.

Ballister shuts it off. Ambrosius hasn’t appeared saying anything, yet. He watches Kiran when he’s unable to sleep, and feels the phantom impression of feathers, and it makes him shiver, that his soul could ever do something so unnatural.

He’s not sure how long he spends alone in that tower, where the days all blend together.

But then someone knocks on the door.

There is nobody outside when Ballister throws open the door. It’s the same messy, overgrown lawn as it was when he first stumbled in here, shadowed at odd angles from the wall and the sun, weeds growing up through the cracked, worn path. Kiran at his side growls low, swiveling her head this-way and that, and Ballister grips the shattered bottle he grabbed in lieu of any decent weapons a bit tighter.

Kiran sniffs the air. Nothing, she whispers to him, internally. Her tail is hooked over her back, the tip of it still missing. The wind?

Sounded a lot like a knock, if it was just the wind, Ballister retorts, but lets the door swing shut. If it is knights come to arrest him, at the very least he won’t let them into his tower. So he turns, Kiran giving herself a shake as she follows, and sees a girl sat on his couch.

Kiran’s snarling in a second, her hackles up. She’s smaller than any of those purebred knights but her snarl makes up for it, coming from deep within her chest. Ballister brandishes his shattered bottle and shifts to try and hide Kiran’s injured leg.

The girl waves. “Yo.”

“How—who—what—”

The girl hops to her feet. She’s—entirely unlike anybody he’s ever seen before. Her hair is cut close to frame her face in the front but buzzed in the back, and it’s pink, vibrant and bright. She’s young, Ballister is pretty sure, though he’s never been great at ages, and, oh, yeah, biggest point: he cannot see her daemon anywhere. No mutt sprawled out at her side, gathered in her arms, just—nothing. Absolutely no dog anywhere in sight.

“It’s great to meet you, huge fan,” the girl says, shaking his hand. Kiran’s growl turns questioning, cuts off entirely in her throat when the girl drops Ballister’s hand to salute to Kiran, too. “So, I’ve got my application right here, and—”

“Your—what?” Ballister manages, nearly dropping the handful of papers the girl shoves in his hand.

“Application!” She bounces on her feet, clapping her hands together. “Y’know, for your sidekick! All villains need an amazing sidekick and you had a spot open.”

“I don’t remember that,” Ballister says.

“Ah, well, you did.” The girl nods at him. When she grins her canines poke out over her lips, and she throws herself across the room and into a chair, that spins with her impact. Ballister feels dizzy just watching her. “And now you have me!”

“Yeah, I…” Ballister’s words fade off into nothingness as the girl practically flips out of the chair to grab a worn mace off the wall, swinging it around to rest its handle up on her shoulder. He hurries to try and take it from her. “Don’t touch than, ten-year-olds shouldn’t be handing rusty weapons.”

The girl turns to look at him blankly. The mace falls backwards onto the ground with a loud clang. “Ten. Dude, really?”

Kiran skids to a stop near his feet, panting. Ballister says, “more or less than ten?”

The girl scoffs and rolls her eyes. “Alright, so, about that application of mine—”

“There’s no—I’m not a villain,” Ballister finally says, snagging the girl by the arm before she can go racing off to some other corner of the tower. She twists somewhat in his grip but doesn’t otherwise try to break free, staring up at him. Bits of pink hair hang in her eyes, dark though they glint in the light.

“Really?” she says, tilting her head. “Sure ain’t what the news has been saying. You murdered the Queen, boss!”

“Not your boss,” Ballister says.

“Naww, I’ll turn you around.” The girl shakes his hand off his arm and hops up onto a table, puffing out her chest. Ballister staggers backwards. Has he ever met anybody this loud? “Oooh, we can do so much crime! Arson! Murder! I’ve got a lot lot LOT of plans, if you’d just look at that application I gave you, ‘cause when I’m your sidekick things are going to rule.”

“These are—” Ballister looks down to the handful of loose papers she handed him. “These are all crayon drawings. Of…murder?”

He flips through them. One of an octopus strangling several knights. Another of a whale crushing several knights. A third of an otter chewing through the leg of a knight.

“Did you see the one of the rhino skewering a ton of knights like a shish-kabab?” The girl snatches the papers from him and flips to that one specifically. “I really think it’s my best one yet. Art really makes a resume pop, don’t you think? Oh!” She perks up and launches herself off the table, bounding over to his string-covered wall. “MURDER WALL! Oh, sick!”

Ballister hurries after her, nearly tripping over Kiran. “It’s not a—”

“Ooh!” The girl taps the picture he has in the center of his innocence wall, because if he knows nothing else he knows Ambrosius had nothing to do with anything. “This guy is your nemesis, right? ‘cause I’ve got plans. Like: shark attack! Who would expect a shark attack, right?” She beams.

Kiran growls at his side, though it’s much more unease than anything else. She thinks to him, how did she even get in? And where’s…?

Don’t worry, Ballister replies, I’m working on that.

“So!” the girl sticks out her hand. “Whaddya say, boss? I can make your villain plans full of murder!” she sing-songs, waggling her hand.

“I was framed,” Ballister says, ignoring her hand and narrowing his eyes. “Where’s your daemon?”

The girl rolls her eyes. “You have me offering to be your kickass sidekick and that’s what you’re going to ask? Yes, Nimona, you can be my sidekick works like, way better. If you were wondering.”

So her name is Nimona, Ballister notes, and continues, “nope. Daemon. You’re too small to hide a dog on your person, even if he’s on the smaller side, and Kiran hasn’t noticed any dog sneaking around after you. So. Daemon. Where is he?”

Nimona scowls. “Oh, you know. Around. Hanging out. Flying somewhere, probably.”

“Daemons,” Ballister says, crossing his arms, “don’t fly.”

“Yeah, well,” Nimona scowls, “they aren’t supposed to change, either. ‘n look how good you did with that.”

Ballister stumbles back, Kiran whining as if she’s been kicked. “You—saw that?”

“Boss, the entire kingdom saw that. It was metal as hell.” Nimona passes him to flop across his chair, again, spinning lazily. “You might be way lamer than I imagined but I’m not kidding about the sidekick stuff, you know. I mean, look at you!” She balances herself against the back of the chair, jabbing a finger at Kiran. “You have proof now that you could be anything, and you’re that? A dog?”

“Daemons are dogs,” Ballister snaps, Kiran bristling up at his side, her fur standing on end. It took a lot, for her to learn to be scary. Hound-type mutts never really are, save for bloodhounds, and of course they’re nothing so big as that. In a class of knights so much bigger than her, she had to get creative. And she did. Not that Nimona even seems to notice; the girl doesn’t even flinch.

“Oh, you’d think that, wouldn’t you.” Nimona scoffs. “What’s your plan if not villainy, then? ‘cause if you don’t have ideas, that shouldn’t hold you back. Sidekicks got that stuff figured out. What, you’re going to go crawling back to the Institute that’s been calling you a monster since you killed the Queen?”

“I didn’t,” Kiran snarls, lunging forward, “kill the QUEEN!”

Nimona rocks backwards in the chair and Kiran’s words hang there in the air. Ballister’s chest is heaving. Kiran’s never—ever—spoken to someone who wasn’t him. It’s not a thing daemons do. But the echo of her words rings in his ears.

“Woah,” Nimona says, a grin splitting across her face. Her canines poke sharp into her lip. “Awesome. That’s a done deal, then! Boss,” she points to him, “sidekick,” herself, “and it’s sealed, you aren’t ever getting rid of me!”

“I didn’t agree to—”

“Nu-uh! You decided!” Nimona spins around in the chair with a cackle. “If you didn’t want me around, you shouldn’t be breaking the law! Alright, boss, what’s our plan? Who are we going after next? Your nemesis guy?”

Ballister pushes past Nimona on the chair, Kiran limping after him, staggering. Every press of her bad paw against the floor sends an electric shock of pain up Ballister’s spine, like his arm is getting cut off, time and time again. He thinks he can feel it still, maybe. Dead fingers on a sword-hilt. He was staring at Ambrosius. He couldn’t read what was in his eyes.

“We,” Ballister says, “aren’t doing anything. I,” he glares at her, “am going to fix this.”

Nimona scoots closer to him on the chair, scoffing. “Uh, what, you’re just gonna go get yourself arrested? Yeah, seems like fixing things to me. You’re a villain! Everyone saw you change up there! Embrace it!”

“I’m going to fix that too,” Ballister snaps. He stares, for a long moment, at Kiran, herself, mostly. Her gait is off. She’s missing parts. Sometimes when he closes his eyes he sees feathers and talons and not his dog at all.

“Oh, right.” Nimona kicks at the leg of her chair. “‘cause you aren’t supposed to like it, are you?”

Ballister ignores her and opens the front door.

“You’ll be wishing you took me on as a sidekick when you get arrested!” Nimona yells, waving. Ballister scoffs and lets the door swing shut behind him. He’ll just—go find Ambrosius. Explain himself.

He didn’t kill the Queen. Kiran changing was just—a mistake. A one-off. A trick of the light.

He’s not going to get arrested.

Ballister and Kiran get arrested.

“You didn’t have to take the arm too!” he yells, but the knights who caught him don’t pay him any mind, and Ballister bites back a growl of his own, slumping against the side of his cell. That’s that, then. Didn’t get a single chance to explain himself. Didn’t even see Ambrosius.

Kiran paces in front of him, her claws clicking against the hard floor. The sound scrapes against his ears. She’s missing fur from where one of the shepherd-daemons bit her hard in the shoulder to drag her into the cage, and of course it had to be her right shoulder, so now Ballister’s own is aching twice as much—his pain and her pain, echoed.

She can’t get too far, of course. With the teeth of one German Shepherd dug into her shoulder the other clamped a thick metal collar around her neck, and its short chain has been connected to the metal pole going up through the center of the cell. Demon, the dog had growled at her, and Kiran had flinched.

No, she wanted to protest, dog. Dog dog dog. Daemon. Like you. It was a mistake. I didn’t want it. I’m a dog. I’ve always just been a dog.

Of course she couldn’t say it. Her voice was stuck in her throat. The knights were strangers to him and their daemons more-so.

Ballister only looks up at the sound of footsteps, and he sees The Director, leader of the Institute and the woman who oversaw the training of all new knights. You’ll show the world who you really are, she told him, moments before he was to be knighted, and he failed her.

“Director!” Ballister calls, scrambling to the front of his cell. It—hurts. Kiran pauses in her pacing only to advert her gaze, staring down at the floor. The Director’s daemon is a large, white dog, larger than the daemons of any of the knights, let alone the general population. His coat has not a single spot of any other color in it, and he watches them with dark golden eyes. A Pyrenean Mountain Dog. A form all others could only aspire to be like.

The Director pauses, as does her daemon. Kiran’s tail tucks under her legs, and she lies down, resting her head on her paws with a whine.

“Director,” Ballister repeats. “You—you have to believe me. I didn’t kill the Queen, I didn’t…”

“You didn’t what?” The Director’s voice is even and calm. “The entire kingdom saw what you did, Ballister.” At her side her daemon parts his jaws in a yawn. “The Queen believed in you, and it got her killed.”

“I didn’t kill her,” Ballister says, weakly, shrinking back under The Director’s gaze. Her eyes are piercing, into his very soul. Kiran rolls sideways. Her claws scrape against stone. “I love the Queen, the Institute, you know this! All I ever wanted was to be a knight, I…”

Kiran huffs out a half-growl, feathers prickling up down her spine. The Director’s daemon curls his lip, takes a step back. Kiran’s breaths come too-quick.

No, she thinks, no no no it’s happening against I can’t control it hurts hurts hurts—

“There is something rotten in your soul,” the Director says, turning away. “I’m sorry, Ballister. There is nothing I will do for you. You already proved you are not who you pretended to be.”

“I wasn’t pretending—”

But the Director is already gone, leaving Ballister alone, again, with his soul pressing her fur into grit and dust, leaving faint golden smears of dusty blood behind. Feathers fall from her ruff. Black-brown brindle.

I’m a dog, she tells him, I’m a daemon. I’m good. I’m a dog. Please. That’s all I’ve ever been.

I know, Ballister says, staring at the feather as it slowly goes to Dust, that’s all I’ve ever been, too.

“Wow.”

Ballister jerks sideways at the voice, sees nobody outside of his cell. Blinks. He’s pretty sure he didn’t hallucinate that voice. Surely he hasn’t been in jail that long.

“Good job slow-running getting arrested,” the voice says, and Ballister spins around to see Nimona, kicking her feet where she’s sat on the cot shoved into a corner of the cell. She holds up her arm where she’s wearing a watch with a bright pink face. “Took you about an hour! I’m impressed. Usually when people aren’t trying to avoid the knights it takes, like, ten minutes, tops. Knew there was untapped potential for villainy inside of you!”

She tosses the watch to the side and Ballister doesn’t hear it hit the ground.

“How did you get…?”

“Anyways! Need a hand?” She holds out his prosthetic arm and giggles when he takes it from her. It looks…mostly fine. Nothing’s been too jammed-up, anyways. Ballister ignores her as she passes him, instead focused on reaffixing his arm. Nimona kneels down next to Kiran.

“Yeesh, they really go overboard with these things.” Nimona scowls. “Uh, can I?” She snaps until Kiran lifts her head to look at Nimona.

“Can you what?” Ballister asks.

“Take the collar off.” Nimona flexes her fingers. “Takes a bitta, y’know, force. Shouldn’t hurt but you people have some cultural taboos ‘n I don’t interact with you enough to remember them all.”

“That’s…worrying,” Ballister says, sharing a look with Kiran. He’s been assuming Nimona’s an orphan—kids with parents do not go chasing after people on the news for killing the Queen—but he assumed she at least lived in one of the orphanages. Now he’s second-guessing that. “And, I ask again: where’s your daemon? Still flying?” He puts the last word in air-quotes. “Because that’s possible.”

“Psht. Yeah. You of all people should not sound so smug about that. Do you want this collar off or not?”

Ballister sighs. “Do whatever. We’re both arrested anyways.”

“Aww, cute, you think this cage could hold me.” Nimona takes the metal collar around Kiran’s next in both hands, and pulls. She’s right in that it doesn’t hurt all that much—other than the faint brush of her fingers against Kiran’s fur, there isn’t much of anything, really. She warps the metal in two until it snaps, and Kiran stands, shaking herself slow.

Nimona tosses the broken metal to the side where it clatters against the wall. “You know, most people would flinch at that part, I feel.”

Kiran shakes her head faintly. Ballister says, “It doesn’t really feel like anything, anymore. They train it out of you in knight school.”

“Knight school?” Nimona says, incredulously, like a joke. She steps hard on the fallen chain, grinding the heel of her boot to it, before heading over to the bars.

“It would be dumb not to use every weapon at your disposal,” Ballister says. “If you flinch, your daemon can’t bite anybody.”

“Huh,” Nimona says, “how interesting. Okay, don’t look.”

“Don’t—”

In the blink of an eye Nimona is outside of the cell. Literally: Ballister blinks, and when he’s done, she’s just…not in the cell anymore. There’s faint wisps of pink sparks like Dust where she once stood, and Nimona on the other side of the bars, grinning sharp-toothed. There isn’t a single dent in the bars, and she’s definitely too big to fit through. Anybody would be. Even the smallest dog wouldn’t manage.

“How did you…?” Ballister trails off, as Kiran’s ears pull back, his daemon limping to sniff at the metallic harshness of the bars.

“I know the code,” Nimona says. She punches some numbers into the keypad lock, and it immediately starts blaring.

“The code,” Ballister says, watching as her grin twitches and she punches her fist so hard into the keypad it begins to spark. “Uh-huh.”

“Shut up.” Nimona grinds her knuckles harder into the keypad, until it finally fizzes out and breaks entirely, and Ballister hears the tell-tale click of the lock failing. Nimona kicks the cell door open and bows, though she beams up at him through the hair falling in her eyes. “Courtesy of your lovely sidekick.”

If she wasn’t being cagey about her daemon, Ballister could almost picture him, tail wagging away—Ballister would pin her down as having some sort of scrappy, terrier-type mutt. She’s certainly got enough spunk for one. He couldn’t imagine having that sort of energy, even if she is…probably more than ten. Maybe. He should really figure that out.

“Go grab your daemon from wherever he’s hiding,” Ballister says, carefully stepping out of the cell, “and then we’ll talk.” He glances around. Thankfully there’s nobody in here with them—otherwise they would’ve been caught a long time ago. They still have an entire castle to get through, but he’s been in here plenty of times before. So long as they’re quiet and quick, it should be alright. “Alright, stick close. Don’t draw attention to yourself.”

“Blah, blah, blah.” Nimona opens and closes her hand as if to mimic him talking. “That’s you. This is all you say. Boss, c’mon! We’re in the castle! This is our chance to wreak some havoc!”

Kiran sniffs the air and begins limping off towards the hallway. “There is no we,” Ballister says, as he follows his daemon. “Hush. Do you want to get caught?”

“Uh, yeah.” Nimona trots after him, making zero effort to hide whatsoever, but at the very least she stops when he does, for Kiran to peer around corners and make sure there’s nobody waiting for them. “I very much do. That’s the fun part! You saw all my murder plans, right? I’m not kidding about those. I’m literally always down for murder.”

“Worrying things for an 11-year-old to say.”

Nimona stares blankly at him.

Ballister tries, “twelve?”

She squints.

“Nine.”

“Okay. You are like, really bad at this.” Nimona hops up onto the skinny slice of detailed molding sticking out from the wall, attempting to balance on it with her arms stuck out for balance.

“Am I at least close?” Ballister asks, ducking one of her arms.

“Funny,” Nimona says. “Can we do a murder now?

“No,” Ballister says, “now be quiet.”

“Oh, boo.”

Internally, Kiran grumbles, I know we aren’t leaving a kid to get caught by the castle, but she is making it very, very tempting. Ballister inclines his head slightly her way in agreement.

Nimona is, as Ballister assumed, no help at all. While he’s ducking behind statues and holding his breath before creeping around corners, each of Kiran’s steps careful so as to not click claws against shiny floors, Nimona just drags herself after them. She touches everything: yanks petals off the palace’s flowers, knocks over candleposts, pours an abandoned cup of coffee all over the keyboard in the security room. But somehow nobody hears her. It’s…actually starting to get a little suspicious.

Somebody should’ve found us by now, Kiran tells him, her tail a stiff line behind her. It smells like knights in here. We know their patrols. Where are they all?

That, Ballister replies, is a very good question. He hurries out of the security room, is nearly about to cut through the break room because it’s a decent shortcut, only for Kiran to peer inside and go stiff, her ears pinning back. Ballister follows her gaze to see the room in shambles, smoking and sparking from smashed coffee machines, unconscious and groaning knights and dog-daemons scattered about.

Nimona coughs and looks sideways when he turns to glare at her. “They were like that when I got here.”

One of the dogs lifts her head, a bloodhound, and her eyes go wide. Her corresponding knight manages to drag himself to his feet and begins trying to grab for the PA system. It shrieks a dying scream when he mashes the button. The knight mashes harder before his daemon throws herself towards the walkie-talkies.

Nimona cackles and advances.

Ballister grabs her by the arm and yanks her back. “No!” he tells her. “No fighting! Running!”

“No fun!” Nimona complains, as Ballister bolts down the hallway, pushes out through a door and skidding his way into the main hallway, where, oh, look, there’s the backup the knight called in. Raising swords and with a chorus of growls, the knights charge. Ballister runs. He’s not stupid. Kiran pelts out in front of him, yelping loud when another squadron joins in, and it’s 15 or so knights against him and Kiran and he is not liking those odds.

“In here!” Nimona grabs his hand and tugs him into a small side-room, slamming the door behind them and knocking over a metal shelf in front of it. She looks around. “Okay, really thought this was an exit.”

“You locked us in a closet,” Ballister says.

“Aww, we’re an us now!” Nimona jumps back when a sword jabs through the wooden door, the metal shelf rattling.

“We’re going to be dead soon!” Ballister yells back, Kiran snarling and clawing at the wall, like they’ll be able to break through to the other side. “This is all your fault!”

“Oh, sure, blame it on me now,” Nimona says, rolling her eyes. She glances between him and the door, knights thudding loudly against it. She knocks another shelf over and shakes her head. “Okay, boss, I can get us both out of here but you need to promise to be cool.”

“About?” Ballister demands, as Kiran presses up against his legs, her tail pinned to his side. There’s hardly enough space to think in here. The shelves clatter. Another sword cuts through the wood.

“Just promise.”

“I can’t exactly promise anything if I don’t know what you’re asking me to do!”

Nimona turns big puppy-eyes up to him. What has to be multiple knights at the same time all slam into the door, and the hastily-made shelf blockades are jostled out of the way. Another one of those, and…

This is a bad idea, Kiran says.

Yeah, but do we have another choice? Kiran doesn’t respond, so to Nimona, Ballister says, “fine. Promise.”

“Promise promise?” Nimona presses.

“Yes!”

“Okay, cool. Get ready.”

“For—”

And then there isn’t a closet anymore. Well, there is a closet, technically. The closet is just a lot of splintered walls and crumbling internal support beams, and Ballister is no longer standing on the ground, but instead flying through the air, on the back of a bright…pink…rhinoceros…

The rhinoceros lands on the ground and knights go flying. There’s a scrap of a dog clinging to her horn and the rhinoceros tosses her head, sending Kiran tumbling through the air until Ballister manages to catch her, clutching his daemon close to his chest.

“What is happening!” is all Ballister manages to say, as the rhino begins to charge, hooves thundering against the ground as she plows through the shaky defense of knights that have managed to get to their feet. Ballister holds on tighter. “Are you—Nimona’s daemon?”

“Not even close!” the rhino says, and that’s Nimona’s voice, but surely that can’t be right, because Nimona was a girl, and this is a rhinoceros, and she is currently crashing directly through walls while knights shout behind them.

“I—Nimona?”

“HI again!” The rhino—Nimona?!—rears back and changes, again, in an instant, into some sort of shaggy-winged vulture that dives at an approaching knight and pecks the guy right in the eyes. Ballister rolls to his feet, still clutching Kiran close to his chest, entirely unable to comprehend what he is seeing.

The vulture pushes off of the fallen knight and goes flying through the air, landing as an otter on another knight’s face. The guy shrieks and begins trying to peel her off, while his retriever-daemon grabs Nimona by the tail. But she just gets a mouthful of fur and Nimona flutters off unharmed.

“Room’s clear!” she chirps, changing back into a rhino, scooping Ballister and Kiran up with a toss of her horn as she resumes running. “Do you know the way out? I’m just sorta going purely off of vibes here.”

“Left,” Ballister says. Nimona swerves to the right. “I said left!”

“Oops. Can’t do the L-trick when I don’t have fingers.” She corrects herself and rams her head through yet another wall. “Pretty cool, right?”

“Are you—a daemon?” Ballister asks, stumbling over his words.

“Nope!”

“A—human?”

“Also nope!” She swings her head sideways to knock over an entire row of old knight statues, the massive stone sculptures slamming down onto their pursuers. Kiran’s claws scrabble for purchase against Ballister’s skin.

“Well—what are you?”

“I’m Nimona!” She leaps hard into a stairwell, and immediately begins climbing them, her hooves skidding into the ground as her sides bash into the walls. “I’m a lot of things. For one, great at going up stairs.”

“No, but—you have to be one! A human or a daemon!”

“I’m a Nimona!”

“So, is that like, a word I don’t know the definition of, or—”

Nimona tumbles out of the stairwell, landing hard on her side. It throws Ballister off of her and he slumps down against the wall, panting. He’s sweating hard. Kiran’s chest heaves as she stumbles up to her paws, her injured one flaring up.

Nimona glares at him with one large rhino-eye. “It’s my name,” she says. “You promised me you’d be cool.”

“That was before you turned into, um.” Ballister swallows. Nimona tries once to stand, huffs, and shrinks down into a cat, giving herself a shake and licking her paw, rubbing it across her pale pink fur. All of her animal-forms have been pink, actually—just like her hair, when she’s a girl. “Am I dead?”

“You wish.” Nimona’s tail waves as she bunches up her muscles and pounces in front of them. “Think we lost ‘em for a bit. Where to next, boss?”

Ballister—doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. People can’t turn into other things. Daemons can’t, humans especially can’t, and Kiran’s got her ears pinned back at his side, and he’s thinking feathers, maybe, but that was a fluke and if he tells it to himself enough times, then that makes it true. The bright pink cat in front of him makes it—harder.

Maybe he’s—dead. Maybe he’s dead, and this is hell.

“What are you?” Ballister breathes.

Nimona’s ears pin flat. “You really want to do that here? Uh, remind me again, who’s the one that, I don’t know, broke you out of jail?”

“Right,” Ballister manages, Kiran pressed to his leg. “right. Um.” He glances around. They’re…on the upper levels, for sure. There should be…barracks, here, maybe? He has no idea how many stairs they went up and he has no idea which stairwell it was. “Let’s just—this way.”

Nimona trots after him as he begins walking the direction he’s already facing. Oh, Ballister realizes, pretty quick, these are—rooms. Wait a second, isn’t this Ambrosius’s—

His suspicion is proved correct when he steps around the corner and sees Ambrosius standing in the hallway.

He’s only half knighted-up, his sword tossed onto the table next to him. He’s running a hand through his hair, though he drops it when he hears Ballister, and his mouth opens but no words come out. At his side sits his daemon, Aizere, the Malinois Ballister knows like the back of his hand. His—once-hand. Aizere ears prick, dark muzzle lifting. It’s in stark contrast to the rest of his fawn-flecked coat.

Ambrosius finally says, “Bal?”

“I—Ambrosius—”

Ballister’s voice cracks. Kiran’s not moved her gaze from Aizere.

“Oooooh,” Nimona says, arching her back and hissing. Her claws flex out. “Nemesis.”

“Bal, who’s—why are you…”

“Ambrosius,” Ballister manages, and—then what? What is he supposed to say? Ambrosius saw everything that happened the day the Queen died. He was right there, and…

The stump of Ballister’s arm throbs. Kiran tucks her injured paw closer to her chest, adverting her gaze.

Behind Ambrosius, a few rooms down, a group of knights turn their way, led by—of course. Fucking Todd. Ballister—jerks away from Ambrosius. Kiran continues to stare at Aizere.

He mutters to Nimona, “think the knights found us again.”

Nimona grins. It’s an expression a cat should never be able to make naturally and yet she makes it work, her long tail wagging slow behind her.

“Coming through!” she yells, charging forwards as a cat, and then growing, until she’s big enough she’s dragging Ballister and Kiran along, too, Ambrosius and Aizere knocked to the side. She slides into the next room and the knights running for them freeze where they are.

Because, you know. Nimona’s a whale. In the middle of the castle. They’re in one of the large indoor training rooms and she easily takes up half the space.

“Huh,” Nimona says, as Ballister clings to her fin, “usually the floor gives out about now.”

Something cracks underneath them.

“Nevermind, here we goooooo!” Nimona’s sentence turns into a cheer as the floor buckles, and they’re sent crashing down one, two, three, four floors, before somewhere in the air Nimona must change form, because on the fifth floor down Ballister lands on the back of a rhinoceros that has been knocked flat to the ground.

“Ow,” Nimona groans, staggering to her feet. “Oh! Exit spotted, boss, hold on tight!”

“Nimona,” Ballister says, pressed to her back with Kiran between them, his poor daemon nearly squashed flat. Ballister’s crushing her tail. Kiran just says don’t worry, hooking one of her paws over his arm. At least we’ll be alive. Maybe. Probably not. Is that a…?

“Yeah?” Nimona vaults over a table and smashes through a stained-glass window onto a balcony several…stories…up.

“Please don’t jump,” Ballister says.

“Too late!” Nimona crows, and jumps.

They fall—far. Right over the edge of the castle and to the forest below it, where rhino slams hard in the dirt but changes into an armadillo, curling herself into a ball. Ballister, of course, just rolls down the hill as himself, hitting sticks and logs and rocks along the way. It hurts. Not that hurting is particularly new. Kiran is the first one to stop, a scrap of brindle fur in the grass, and Ballister isn’t far behind her.

“That ruled!” Nimona rolls to a stop and uncurls, sprawls flat on her back as a girl, again, beaming into the light. In the far distance Ballister can see the castle. Something’s—exploded. His head spins. Kiran doesn’t even attempt to get to her paws, just lies there with her muzzle pressed into the grass. In the glow of the explosion Nimona’s eyes glint with the red firelight, casting her face in odd shadows mixed with the dappled covers of the trees above. “Aww, metal!”

Ballister blinks once. Twice. Drags himself a bit closer to Kiran as the world spins.

And then something hits him in the head, and the world goes dark.

Ballister wakes up to a bright light in his eyes, and his first thought is, I’m dead.

But then he feels a weight on his chest, the scratch of Kiran’s fur against the skin of his arm, and the blinding light softens out into a string of fairy lights stretching over the couch he’s lying on, and as he rubs at his eyes, he realizes—oh. I’m…in the tower.

Kiran, blinking, asks, how did we get to the tower?

That, Ballister replies, attempting to sit up, is a good question. Do you hear that?

Kiran pricks her ears. Dimly, Ballister can feel his arm aching—he’s going to be feeling the effects of…sleeping? Is it sleeping if you passed out? A bit later. But for now he just sits up, lets Kiran slide off of him and onto the couch, resting her good forepaw over the back, where he can see…

She wasn’t a hallucination, Kiran notes, staring at Nimona, who is half-singing along to whatever song she’s hearing over his headphones she’s got on, cooking something in the kitchen. Kiran’s back paws slip against his prosthetic, making a soft click, and Nimona jerks around to face them, holding a frying pan.

“You’re up!” Nimona shakes the headphones off her head and the tinny music rings out into the air around her. “Great! I made breakfast tacos!” She dumps the meat from the pan into the three tacos she’s got on a plate, shoves one in her mouth and trots over to offer the other two to him. She precariously balances the plate on the back of the couch and takes a bite of her own taco.

Ballister blinks down at the tacos. Kiran sniffs them. He says, “these are…very undercooked.”

“I like them rare.” Nimona scarfs down the other half of her taco.

“How—how long was I out for? You said—breakfast? It’s morning?”

“Oh, boss.” Nimona’s gaze darkens. “I’m sorry, but it’s been 15 years.”

Ballister nearly trips right off the couch. “Fifteen—”

Nimona cracks up. “Ha! Your face! Ah, nah, it’s been like, a few hours, I dunno. I don’t even know if it’s breakfast. I was just making due with what you had in your fridge, and it was saying, breakfast.” She shuts off her music, spinning the headphones on her hand before tossing them onto the couch. “Anyways! I dragged you back here, you can thank me later—”

“Right, I was…wondering how I got here.” Ballister rubs his eyes and sighs. Kiran rests her head on her paws with a doggish whuff. “What—happened? The last thing I remember was being arrested?”

“Oh, that might be my fault. Kinda sorta hit your head on a lot of rocks. I walked like, forever, boss. You really should pay me more.”

“I don’t—pay you at all.”

“You should get on that.” Nimona glances down to the tacos that somehow haven’t fallen off the couch. “You gonna…?”

“If you want to eat raw meat, be my guest.” Nimona beams and scarfs down another one. “Okay, so, you broke me out of jail, brought me back here, and are still here…why?”

“Sidekick? Duh? Oh, lemme tell you what I did with the place!” Nimona leaps up onto a table, that is—covered with weapons. Ballister has no memory of half of those. Where did she even get them? “Your evil lair needed some sprucing up, so I organized the weapons by deadliness, put up a bunch of fairy lights I found in a box, threw out all the weird stuff in your fridge—you had like, a really rotten head of cabbage in there, even I wouldn’t eat that—came up with some amazing plans, did—”

“Wait,” Ballister tries.

“—some spring cleaning ‘cause lemme tell you I got bored, fixed your murder wall—did you see all the new drawings I put up there?—oh! And you agreed that I’m your sidekick, forever and ever, non-negotiable, I even have a picture, right here, see!” She throws herself down next to him on the couch, nearly flopping across Kiran, and digs out a polaroid from her pocket. It depicts him and Kiran, clearly still passed out on the couch, and Nimona in front of them, giving a thumbs up and wearing a pair of sunglasses she must’ve found around. With her other hand, she’s made it appear that Ballister is giving a thumbs-up, too.

“I—okay,” Ballister says, as Nimona looks expectantly at him. “First off, this is not an evil lair.”

“Eh,” Nimona says, leaning back to flop across the armrest. “What do I call it then? ‘cause if it’s not a lair it’s just kind of sad and pathetic. Like, a…bachelor pad?” He can’t see her face, but he can almost hear her wince.

Kiran tilts her head. She sort of has a point.

…she doesn’t need to know that. Ballister clears his throat. “Secondly,” he continues, “I very much did not agree for you to be my sidekick. I don’t need a sidekick! I’m not even a villain!”

“That,” Nimona says, “sounds like someone who didn’t look at my additions to their murder wall.”

“It isn’t a—” Ballister starts, but he doesn’t finish. Because Nimona changes, shapeshifts, with a faint trail of pink sparks, into a pink-feathered pigeon, fluttering up from the floor and across the room, and like a sword to the face Ballister remembers everything that happened in the castle—the changing, the shifting, the never-once-being one thing. The impossibility.

There’s—old wives’ tales. Scary stories passed down from orphan to orphan. You better be good, or a monster is gonna get’cha! You know, monsters always go for daemons, first. That’s why daemons are dogs. No animal is more noble than a dog. Dogs can fight them off. Sometimes a monster could get your daemon and you wouldn’t even KNOW. So you have to always behave right.

Brindled feathers, instead of brindled fur. Monsters are really good at pretending! But they always slip up.

“You!” he demands, jabbing a finger her direction with Kiran growling at his side.

Nimona lands on a wooden chair and pokes a wing to her chest. “Me,” she agrees. “Uh…is something wrong?”

“You’re—a daemon! But—you were a human?”

Nimona rolls her eyes. “Boss, you promised you’d be cool. This is the opposite of cool.”

“No, I think I’m being pretty reasonable,” Ballister snaps, Kiran shifting next to him, splaying her good paws to keep her grip as Ballister stands. Nimona’s wings come up bigger, and with it her form grows, too: whatever bird she is now, her talons are much sharper, though she’s not actually all that larger than his hand. “Considering the fact that I’ve only ever seen one half of you. And I don’t even know which half you are!”

“I’m Nimona.” Now her feathers fluff out, and Ballister knows it as fear, because Kiran did it, in that nightmare of a day, and it crawls up his skin like something has died there. He is fine. Kiran is a dog. She’s growling right now, see? Her fur brushes against his leg.

“That,” says Ballister, “is not an answer.”

“I think you’ll find that it is.” Nimona jerks her gaze away from him, her talons digging into the wood of the chair she’s perched on, splintering it. “Look. You can’t get on my case. I saw the news. You’re—”

“I’m not a mons—”

“Oh?” Nimona darts forwards, and all of a sudden there’s a girl glaring up at him, too-close, and he takes a step back. She looks—human, but she can’t be, not if moments ago she was a bird. And he—has absolutely no idea what she is, but she’s been animals, and only daemons can do that. “You’re not a what?”

Ballister puts his hands up. “I didn’t—”

“Mean it?” She scowls. “Yeah. Right.” She turns away from in, hunching in on herself. “Listen. Nobody likes you. Did you see how many people were trying to kill you at that castle? If I wasn’t around to bust you out, you’d be dead right now. And—I guess that was a mistake, huh?” She pushes past him and begins making her way over to the door, accidentally brushing against Kiran as she goes, and Ballister…doesn’t feel a single thing. Neither does Kiran.

“I offered to be your sidekick,” Nimona continues. “That’s like, a once in a lifetime kinda deal, you know. Who else wants to help you? Your nemesis? The guy who I’m like 90% sure is the same one who chopped off your arm on live TV? Arm chopping isn’t a love-language, you know!” For a moment she bristles up, but it drops back down to a slump in a second. “Whatever.”

She pushes open the door.

I’m not a monster, he almost said, with its underlying meaning of and you are. Would’ve, if she didn’t cut him off. And he’s not wrong. He’s got no idea what Nimona is, but daemons are supposed to be dogs, and even if—putting aside a single feather-related nightmare—they aren’t, they can’t be humans, besides. Whatever she is, she’s…

Kiran’s good paw twists against the floor. She did come to rescue us. And when she tried to get the collar off of me—she talked to me. Nobody else does that. Not even…

Ballister sighs, turning to stare at his…not murder-wall. Though with the edits Nimona has made, and the fact that she’s chosen red fairy lights for that area, it’s…looking pretty murder-y. But her pictures are…simple. Like the ones that she called her resume. Crayon-drawings of various pink animals doing terrible things to stick-figure knights, and an overuse of the red crayon.

Like the sort of things a kid would draw.

Kiran says, in her scratchy voice, “why do you want to be our sidekick so bad?”

Nimona freezes in the doorway.

Kiran, Ballister thinks, you aren’t supposed to—

I know, she tells just him, quietly.

Nimona doesn’t turn to face them. But she says, “because I’m bored. And everybody hates you too.”

It really shouldn’t break Ballister’s heart. But her words are so small.

“I’m not going to kill anybody,” Ballister says, “but—before the Queen, uh, died. There was a squire, he gave us all our swords? And he was acting…weird. Really weird. I bet he knows something. And if you wanted to tag along to help me…”

He’s barely finished what he’s saying before Nimona is standing right in front of him, nodding. “I’m in!” she chirps. “But! You have to agree to let me be your sidekick forever and ever after this, and,” she adds, narrowing her eyes, “to not ask any stupid, small-minded questions.”

Oh, this is a horrible idea, Ballister thinks, though Kiran’s tail wags, slightly. Aloud, he says, “alright. Fine. But—we’re going to revisit that sidekick thing.”

“Aww, you can think that.” Nimona wriggles like a dog shaking her tail. “Alright! Shake on it!”

Ballister holds out his hand and Nimona turns into a shark. Just. A full pink shark. Standing on her fins and everything. Ballister takes a breath. “Can you—be yourself?”

“I am myself.”

“Girl you.”

“But I’m a shark.” Nimona clicks her teeth.

“Now I’m even more confused,” Ballister says, rubbing his temples, “because the whale, that was a normal whale. I’m pretty sure sharks can’t walk.”

Nimona waves her fin in front of his face. “Am I your sidekick forever and ever or not?”

“I am going to regret this,” Ballister says, but he sticks out his hand, and shakes Nimona’s fin.

“Her too!” Nimona says, flipping her fin sideways and holding it down for Kiran to reach.

Kiran’s ears prick, her tail wagging slightly.

Huh, Ballister thinks. That’s…interesting.

Yes, Kiran agrees, interesting.

She bumps her good paw to Nimona’s fin.