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Mongrel laid her head on the Dowager’s lap, indulging in the one place her restless soul could find peace. Her adoptive mother and liege lord would have destroyed most anyone else daring to touch her while she contemplated the Well of Udr. She gently ran her hand through Mongrel’s hair and then rested her palm against her knight’s cheek.
The asps that were the Dowager’s fingers coiled themselves around Mongrel’s face and neck. It was while in their comforting embrace that Mongrel looked into the Well of Udr. Mongrel lacked the wisdom and madness required to understand infinity and so for her the nexus of worlds and possibilities that was the Well was usually some interesting lights to look at as she went to sleep. The nap she wanted was about to take her when images in the Well resolved themselves before her half closed eyes.
Before her left eye was a mess hall, sized to support the small number of soldiers the empire would see fit to dedicate to its most distant and unimportant outposts. Even in the cramped confines of this mess hall, one nervous soldier managed to isolate himself. He’d found a table at a corner by a window where he didn’t have to share a bench with the other men. They allowed him this, they knew he was not useful for conversation or banter. He was not one of them, no matter how well groomed the beard he kept to hide that fact was.
The moment Mongrel saw him, her anima banner flared, her caste mark appeared on her forehead and blood began flowing from beneath her fingernails. A soldier shouted uselessly about anathema. Mongrel was in the room with them.
And she was also elsewhere, in another room with another possibility that she saw from her right eye. It was the bedroom of a woman that worked as a clerk and often brought her work home with her. A chest for clothes, a bed for sleeping and a small desk by the window to handle paperwork. The woman the room belonged to had been writing by candlelight and then Mongrel had appeared, covered in blood and flowing with a baleful light.
In the mess hall soldiers attacked Mongrel, their blades opening wounds that bled in every reality Mongrel was in. She barely paid them any mind as she stepped towards the clerk. She was between the woman and the door. The window was two stories too high to be jumped from. The woman, in a desperate search for escape, brandished a knife meant for opening letters at Mongrel.
Mongrel casually swept the woman aside, sending her flying. The woman’s head cracked against the wall, denting it. She slumped over, alive but bleeding heavily.
The paperwork at the desk didn’t interest Mongrel. What did was a pressed carnation laying on top of a letter. She picked up the flower with her thumb and forefinger, holding it gently to sniff at it. The gentle scent of the flower was still there. She didn’t have to know anything about flower language to understand that this was a gift created and given with love.
Mongrel knew who the woman was with as much certainty as she knew who the nervous soldier was. There was a resonance of their souls against her own. Beyond any visual similarities in their hair and skin color, it was this resonance that confirmed to her that they were all paths of the same person.
She ate the flower, chewing it slowly as she massacred the soldiers. Swallowing it when there was just the nervous soldier left. He had a sword clasped tightly in his hand but was too full of fear to move. Mongrel turned her back to him. He was not someone that mattered. He’d long since been hollowed out into an empty person. He had been nothing more than a name that Mongrel had freely given up to Dowager, a name that had been stripped from him the moment Mongrel had appeared.
The clerk was still awake, although not able to do much more than groan in pain. From her point of view the massacre had been an inscrutable dance. One that ended with the terrifying anathema staring at her.
Unlike the soldier, this version of herself had a name. Not one that had been given, as Mongrel’s was, but one that had been chosen. There was a lot that this woman had chosen for herself. Mongrel could tell from the woman’s body that she’d invested in elixirs to deal with the incongruences and she guessed that there were minor operations to eliminate the beard. It was less effective than everything Dowager had done for Mongrel but still impressive on a clerk’s salary.
She wanted to ask the girl her name and perhaps the name of whichever woman the flower had been for. Unfortunately the woman was too far gone to talk. She looked towards the desk, the letter that was almost certainly a love note could satisfy her curiosity.
She walked back to the desk, as she reached for the letter to read it the nameless soldier stabbed her in the back. He pushed his blade forward with a scream, stabbing right through her heart and covering the letter in her blood.
Mongrel turned and ripped the soldier's head from his body. She also managed to knock over the candle on the clerk’s desk. The soldier’s body fell and the clerk passed out never to wake up again. The letter was the first thing to be eaten by the fire of the candles.
Mongrel was a little disappointed but didn’t feel any sorrow. The woman’s chosen name wasn’t particularly important to her, it had just been idle curiosity.
She felt the twin pinpricks of fangs against her neck and then the familiar sweet taste of the Dowager’s poison. Her mother was calling her home.
She looked up from the Well to see her mother’s face, looking down at her fondness. She was covered in Mongrel’s blood. They both were. She opened her mouth to apologize but the Dowager started running a hand through her hair and the words stopped.
“You handled that well, pet.”
Mongrel smiled at the praise. She didn’t envy those other lives, she had been given perfection.
“Rest now,” her mother commanded, putting a hand over her eyes. Mongrel obeyed and slept.