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Fall Semester, Sophomore Year
“At least think about the medication. Talk to your parents about it, hmm? They might have some helpful insight,”
Kipperlilly begrudgingly grabbed the pamphlet Jawbone was holding out to her. She didn’t need fucking medication. She just needed to be better than Riz.
She was seated in Jawbone’s office like she had been doing every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday since the middle of freshman year. It was complete bullshit—what, just because she broke into her parents’ email she suddenly had to meet with the guidance counselor three times a week?
He tried to make his office a comforting and safe space for the kids, which somehow made her even angrier. The poster of the kitten hanging off a tree with the text “ Hang in there! ” made her want to scream, and the smiling cartoon Owlbear saying “ Kindness is the best! ” mocked her as she sat in the office spitting out insults about the Bad Kids.
She hated them more than she had ever hated everyone—which was saying something.
It was unfair how many things had been handed to them. They had so much shit that had happened in their lives, of course, they were going to have all the attention on them. The students and the faculty all talked about how inspiring they all were, and how they were such heroes despite all of the hardships they had had to go through. It wasn’t fucking fair. She tried just as hard, but she was never good enough.
Lucy tried to make her feel better, telling her that she shouldn’t focus on other kids and should just spend time on their party. That she was smart enough and talented enough that one day she was going to be a great adventurer, and she could do whatever she wanted to do if she just focused on herself.
But Lucy didn’t get it. She didn’t get the fury that Kipperlilly felt when she heard another kid talk about how impressive Riz was, or how cool Fig was, or how inspiring Kristen was. She didn’t understand the rage that festered in her when she thought about how no matter what she did, nothing ever seemed to be enough to compete with them.
“Same time on Thursday, okay kiddo?” Jawbone said with a reassuring smile on his face, snapping her out of her thoughts.
“Fine,” Kipperlilly said quickly, hopping out of the chair and leaving his office as fast as she could. She didn’t want to spend any more time there than she was forced to. She tightened her ponytail and squared her shoulders before walking out into the hallway, her armor back up—the illusion of having her life together.
She got a pass to leave class early to meet with Jawbone—it’s not like her History of Halberds class was actually useful to her.
“Jawbone’s not great at understanding anger, is he?” a deep voice said next to her as she walked out the door.
She jolted, her head snapping sideways. Porter Cliffbreaker leaned against the lockers, his arms crossed.
She narrowed her eyes. “No, he’s not. Why do you care?”
“I’m the Barbarian teacher, I have some experience with harnessing rage,”
“Right. Don’t you have a class to teach right now?” Kipperlilly sneered. She turned to walk away, done with this weird conversation, but he called out after her, making her stop in her tracks.
“I could help you with that, y’know. The rage. The anger . Better than Jawbone can, promise you that,”
She turned back around slowly. “Really?”
He nodded. “Jawbone doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I understand rage, how to really use it. He wants to try and get rid of it, right? Suppress it?”
Kipperlilly nodded. “Yeah, he said that it’s not productive and it's not ‘serving me’. Which is stupid,”
Porter scoffed. “He’s a barbarian, you know. Don’t know how without understanding rage in the slightest, but maybe that’s why he’s a guidance counselor instead. I could help you harness that rage. Show you how to make it serve you, how to use it to your advantage. How’s that sound?”
Her eyes glinted with something manic. “That’s a better offer than what Jawbone’s trying to teach me,”
“I thought so. If you want to stop by my office after school lets out, we can talk about it,”
She frowned. “I’m supposed to meet with my adventuring party after school,”
He waved her off. “They can live without you for a day, hmm? I promise, in the long run, this is gonna serve you way more than they will,”
Against her better judgment, Kipperlilly nodded. “I’ll see you after school.”
“Good. Now get to class, Ms. Copperkettle,”
Kipperlilly turned sharply, the gears in her brain turning with all the possibilities ‘harnessing her rage’ could have for her and her party.
Behind her, Porter smiled as well, but if Kipperlilly could have seen it then, it would have made her stomach drop. It was the look out of someone’s nightmares—it was the smile of someone whose plan was coming to fruition.
***
Soon Kipperlilly’s complaints to Lucy about Jawbone lessened. One day she mentioned that Porter had talked to her about rage, but it sounded a lot more appealing than anything she had talked about with Jawbone. That maybe, finally, they’d be able to start coming up to par with the Bad Kids.
“He said that it’s not a bad thing,” Kipperlilly said, crossing her legs and adjusting on the couch in Lucy’s basement. She was honestly over at the cleric’s house more than her own, preferring to spend time with Lucy than her own parents. “I don’t know what the fuck Jawbone has been talking about,”
Lucy sighed. She loved her best friend, she did. And she trusted her. But sometimes she let her emotions get the better of her. “Kipps, I don’t think Jawbone thinks that it’s a bad thing. I think that he wants to help you manage it so you aren’t as, I dunno, angry all the time.”
“But that’s the thing, Porter said that it doesn’t have to control me if I control it,” Kipperlilly said, trying to get Lucy to actually listen to her. She didn’t understand it, not really. Lucy liked everyone, she just wanted everyone to get along. A pushover . A voice in her head said. She tried to ignore it. “He’s been telling me so much, we met for like, three hours yesterday,”
The cleric frowned. “You stayed after school for three hours with Porter?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Nothing,” Lucy said, scrunching her nose and trying not to spend too much time harping on it. When Kipperlilly was interested in something, there was really nothing that anyone could say that would stop her. “I dunno, he gives me weird vibes sometimes,”
Kipperlilly sighed. “C’mon Luce, it’s fine. I’m learning a lot from him! Plus, he’s Mary Ann’s teacher, so he can’t be weird , she’d tell us if he was.”
“If you say so,” she said, chewing on her lip. She really wasn’t sure about that. But, at the end of the day, she had to trust her best friend to have faith that her gut instinct was right. Even if Lucy’s instinct was a little more wary of the whole thing. Who just approaches a student that’s not in their class and offers to personally tutor them?
But then they went back to their discussion about the latest episode of Solace’s Got Talent, and Lucy forgot all about the voice in her head telling her that something was wrong.
Kipperlilly would give Lucy updates about what she was talking about with Porter, but it was always a little too vague. The cleric pushed for more information whenever Kipperlilly talked about it but she waved her off and told her that she wouldn’t understand it, that she would tell her more later. But later never really seemed to come.
Until one day it did. One day, when they were supposed to be having a normal sleepover, she finally got Kipperlilly to spill about exactly what she had been doing three days a week after school that was more important than hanging out with their friends or trying to figure out what their spring break project was going to be.
Kipperlilly mentioned that Porter had started telling her about this God, that she sounded really interesting but they didn’t know her name. Lucy hadn’t really heard of the dead God they were talking about—which made sense given that she was dead—but Kipperlilly seemed really fixated on it. She asked Lucy if she knew any places where the name could be written since Porter had mentioned that she thinks the God may have existed up in the Mountains of Chaos. As a devout cleric of Ruvina, Lucy knew a lot about the history of her Goddess, but she had never heard about the writing of a forbidden name.
Lucy tried to get her to talk about what she had been discussing with Jawbone recently—since she was still required to meet with him—but Kipperlilly brushed past it and continued to obsess over everything that Porter was teaching her.
The fall semester continued, everyone getting busier with classes and homework and projects, and their group was beginning to become more divided because of it. One day in late October, Ivy and Oisin came to the group and told them that they thought they should change the name.
Kipperlilly immediately blew up, telling them that changing the group name meant changing the group as a whole, and they didn’t need changing. She said that if they changed the name it would be like starting over, and she thought that if they just kept pushing they would get better and stronger.
Lucy, of course, backed her up. She would always back her up, even when Ivy and Oisin gave her shit for it. They called her Kipperlilly’s pet cleric, something that made her angry, but she knew that they were just being mean to get under Kipperlilly’s skin, to prove that they would always be able to have something over her.
But, like Oisin and Ivy, Ruben also loved to get under Kipperlilly’s skin, to make her mad, so he voted in favor of the new name. Mary Ann didn’t care either way, so she sided with the group that seemed to be the majority. And that’s how, despite of Kipperlilly’s insistent protests, they changed from the High Five Heroes to the Rat Grinders.
Kipperlilly slammed her locker shut as she ranted to Lucy about it for the fifteenth time, saying the same things that Lucy had heard over and over again. But she was never going to stop the rogue from saying what was on her mind—she needed someone in her life who would listen to her.
“I don’t know why the fuck we’re even still friends with them,” Kipperlilly growled, stomping down the hallway, her Mary Janes clicking against the floor.
Lucy sighed. She didn’t necessarily agree with the statement—she did really like her other friends—but she knew that if she started defending them Kipperlilly would feel like she had lost her too.
“I think that we’re all going through a lot of changes right now, so it’s hard,” she said instead, hoping that it was at least kind of the right answer.
Kipperlilly rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sure. The only change that’s happening is that Ivy’s decided to be an even bigger bitch than normal,”
Lucy frowned. She could let Kipperlilly rant about them, but that was just mean.
That was something that she had noticed recently, too. In addition to her constant discussion about her lessons with Porter, Kipperlilly was becoming, for lack of a better word, meaner. She would defend her best friend to a fault, but there was something that had been especially off with her in the last couple of weeks.
Eventually, Lucy tried to talk to Kipperlilly about it, growing tired of the constant back-and-forth she had to have between her friends. But when she tried to bring it up, she was met with backlash. A lot of backlash.
The Rat Grinders were all used to Kipperlilly talking back to the rest of the party, but not Lucy. Never to Lucy. So the day she snapped at the cleric for worrying too much, for suffocating her and not wanting her to reach her full potential, the entire party was a little thrown off.
She stomped off, not even coming up with some haphazard excuse of why she had to go, and the other five sat in silence for a moment.
“She’s just having a bad day,” Lucy said finally, breaking the tense silence.
Ivy groaned. “Come on , Luce! That’s bullshit, and you know it. She’s been a colossal bitch lately, even more than normal, and this just fucking proves it.”
Lucy opened her mouth to respond, to once again defend Kipperlilly, but the ranger kept going. “No, you don’t get to defend her anymore. I’m so sick of you defending her to a fault, she doesn’t deserve it. She’s not worth it. We would be a fine party without her, why don’t we just cut the fucking cord on this and let her do whatever she wants to do. We don’t need to be involved,”
“She’s being a jerk, but I don’t know if we should totally cut her out of the party,” Ruben said with a frown, fiddling with the shells on his necklace.
Oisin sighed. “I dunno, Ivy. I think that…maybe we should just try to actually talk to her about it?”
“No, I’m done talking about it!” Ivy cried out.
Lucy’s lip quivered, but damn it, she was not going to cry. “I don’t think that it’d be fair to—”
“Lucy, really , do you think that this is a friendship worth saving?” The ranger snapped, looking over at her with an anger that, honestly, resembled Kipperlilly’s.
“I don’t care what we do,” Mary Ann said flatly, not taking her eyes off her phone.
Ivy scoffed. “Of course you don’t,”
“Hey!” Ruben said with a frown, coming to Mary Ann’s defense.
Lucy looked around at all her friends, at the relationship and party she could tell was on the verge of crumbling. She shook her head and quickly muttered that she had to go, turning around so they couldn’t see the tears that had started streaming down her face.
Ivy called after her, clear concern in her voice, but Lucy ignored her.
She was sitting in her room that night, curled into a ball on her bed, letting the tears flow and wondering what happened to her best friends and the happy group they were last year. There was a quick rap on her window and she didn’t even need to look up to know it was Kipperlilly.
“What?” She called out, her voice breaking slightly.
The window slid up and Kipperlilly sat there, a guilty look on her face. “Can I come in?”
“What do you want?” Lucy asked in lieu of an actual answer. But it wasn’t a no, so the rogue hopped down off the windowsill and closed it behind her.
She walked closer to the bed, clearly hesitating, not wanting to say or do the wrong thing. “Um, I’m…I’m sorry,”
Lucy looked up then, her bloodshot and tear-filled eyes making Kipperlilly feel even guiltier. “You’re sorry ?”
She always forgave Kipperlilly too easily. Granted, she had never yelled at her before, but even when she was clearly in the wrong, Lucy was always quick to come to her defense.
The rogue nodded. She looked to the bed and raised her eyebrows, a silent question on whether or not she could stay. Lucy sighed and moved over, making room for Kipperlilly. She sat carefully on the edge of the bed.
“Yes, I’m sorry. I…I shouldn’t have yelled at you. You didn’t deserve that, and I shouldn’t have done it, and I’m sorry that I did. But it’s just that—” she stopped herself, taking a deep breath. One thing she did remember from Jawbone was that, when apologizing for something, it was best to not try to defend yourself in the process. “It was shitty. And I’m sorry,”
“You were a real jerk,” Lucy muttered.
Kipperlilly nodded. “I was,”
“It was a shitty thing to do,”
“It was.”
“Please don’t do it again,”
“I won’t,” Kipperlilly said immediately. “I promise, okay?”
Lucy nodded then. And maybe it was against her better judgment, but she scooted over even more, the rogue smiling and coming to sit next to her, immediately resting her head on the cleric’s shoulder.
“If you really promise, then fine.”
“I do. I promise, I never want to do anything to hurt you, okay? Please trust me on that,”
Lucy hummed. “I do,”
Kipperlilly fidgeted with the band of her watch, looking down. “And you’ll always come back, right?”
Lucy frowned and glanced down at her. “What do you mean?”
The rogue shrugged. “I dunno,”
“Liar,” Lucy said with a laugh. She knew her best friend, and she knew that right now she was trying not to let her anxiety overtake her. As complicated as she was, she knew that Kipperlilly wasn’t some heartless monster. Not her words, that’s what Ivy had called her on multiple occasions. But none of them got Kipperlilly like Lucy did. No one knew her the same way—she had an extremely hard exterior, an armor that was hard to break, but underneath that, Lucy truly believed that Kipperlilly was a good person.
“You will come back though, right? You won’t leave me?”
“Yeah, of course,” Lucy agreed, bumping her head against Kipperlilly’s. She honestly didn’t really know what Kipperlilly meant, but she did know that they would always be best friends. The rogue kept fidgeting with her watch band and Lucy sighed before taking that hand in hers, lacing their fingers together. “You’re my best friend, you’re stuck with me for life,”
Kipperlilly grinned, her smile radiant. “Oh no, whatever will I do,”
Lucy snorted. “I dunno, that sucks for you,”
They sat there in a comfortable silence then, Lucy finally relaxing. She would figure out a way to get the party to get along again—she did truly love all of them. They were her best friends, she’d do anything for them.
Kipperlilly felt a calm in that moment she hadn’t felt in weeks—no matter what happened, Lucy was going to stick by her. They were a team, and she knew that what she was going to do was going to be a good thing for both of them.
***
Spring Semester, Sophomore Year
Lucy didn’t know why they were going to the Mountains of Chaos for their spring break. The Bad Kids were going to the Forest of the Nightmare King, the Seven Maidens were going to the Red Waste, and they still didn’t really know the details of their quest. The Mountains of Chaos had originally seemed exciting, but now that they were here, it seemed anticlimactic. Something felt off.
They had to have a teacher chaperone, which seemed kind of lame given that she didn’t know any other parties that did, but she liked Mr. Stardiamond enough. They didn’t have a sorcerer in their party, but he had always been relatively nice when she interacted with him in the hallway, or when he taught one of the general courses she took on cantrips.
Kipperlilly seemed off. She had been whispering with Jace the entire way up the mountains, glancing back at the group from time to time. Eventually, she hung back to hike with Lucy again and brushed her off when the cleric asked what they had been talking about.
“It was nothing, just a clarification question about our grade,”
Lucy hummed. “If you’re sure,”
Kipperlilly was quick to change the subject, and Lucy only found it a little weird. She was such a one-track mind, it seemed strange that she would be so all over the place right now.
Eventually, they made their way to a large temple at the top of one of the mountains, the building seemingly carved out of the mountain. There was writing on the top of it but it seemed to be scratched out. Lucy could read a few words, and she quickly realized that it was in Giant.
She glanced over at the rest of the group, all muttering to each other and checking their weapons and materials. Kipperlilly was whispering with Jace again and Lucy was starting to really not like it.
They stepped into the temple and she immediately felt her connection to Ruvina waver. It was like all the sirens started going off in her head. Danger. Bad. Get out. Not safe. Something is wrong.
She looked around at the rest of her friends in slight panic, wanting to tell them that something was wrong and she didn’t think that they should stay here. But before she could say anything, Kipperlilly grabbed her arm and yanked her back while Jace cast a seventh-level ‘Chain Lightning’ on the rest of the group, and with a scream, they all instantly dropped to the ground. Lucy was too shocked to say anything, simply watching as Jace and Kipperlilly moved to slit her friend's chests open and shoved angry, red stars into the cavities.
“Kipps, what—”
Her friends woke up then, snapping into consciousness and sitting up. Ivy coughed and went on instinct to hit her chest, freezing when she felt something jagged embedded in her skin. She blinked then, looking around as if seeing the room for the first time.
Oisin, Mary Ann, and Ruben were waking up as well, feeling their chests and looking at each other as if in a confused haze.
Lucy looked at all of them, a thousand emotions running through her head, but above all else there was shock. She looked at Kipperlilly, at her best friend who had just seemingly assisted in killing all of their other friends. And she just didn’t understand.
“Alright, let’s go,” Jace said, wanting to move on from this and go back to Elmville. The temple still creeped him out a bit.
Kipperlilly crossed her arms. “Porter said we’re supposed to wait here,”
And so many things suddenly made sense.
“Don’t talk back to me, you’re not the one in charge here,” Jace snapped back, a sneer on his face that Lucy had never seen before.
The rogue rolled her eyes. “Neither are you ,”
“No, but unlike me, you’re just collateral,”
“Please,” Kipperlilly said with a scoff. “There are plenty of decent spellcasters on the faculty, I’m the best rogue in this fucking school, you two need me,”
Jace smiled at Kipperlilly then, a venomous one that sent a chill down Lucy’s spine. “I think that if you asked anyone who the best rogue in your class was, they’d have a different answer,”
Kipperlilly’s hand twitched, moving closer to the dagger strapped to her side.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Jace said, glancing down. They stared at each other for a moment, and if Lucy wasn’t so confused and overwhelmed and scared she would be shocked that Kipperlilly was mouthing off to a member of the faculty.
“Fuck, fine ,” Kipperlilly spit back. “But if we’re actually supposed to stay here and Porter comes and we’re all gone, that’s not going to bode well for you,”
“Just go check in on your friends, hmm? Maybe they’ll be less of a bitch than you were when you died,”
She groaned and stomped away from him, going toward her party members, who were by this point all standing again, looking down at the glowing stars in her chests.
Lucy grabbed Kipperlilly’s arm, not able to hide the look of absolute fear on her face. “What’s going on?”
Kipperlilly’s expression quickly shifted then from the annoyance she had had with Jace to one of concern over Lucy. She frowned and grabbed onto the arm that Lucy had put on her. “Hey, it’s okay, hmm? This is good,”
The cleric shook her head. “I don’t know what—”
“Luce, it’s fine. I told you to trust me, right?”
Lucy nodded, and Kipperlilly smiled then. “So just trust me,”
And because Lucy was loyal to a fault, because she still had so much faith in her best friend and believed that she was a good person who wouldn’t do anything to hurt her, she agreed.
Kipperlilly gave the cleric’s arm a reassuring squeeze before turning back to the rest of her party. Her face quickly shifted then, giving them all a look that was dangerously close to pride. “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen—”
***
Soon enough Lucy was following her friends into the Far Haven Woods behind the school, watching them all easily kill rats and wincing as she followed suit. She found out why Kipperlilly had been talking to Porter so much.
She put in a request to change her God and cried as she filled out the form.
She cried even harder when she snuck back out to the woods after everyone had left for the night after they had debriefed with either Porter or Jace and gone home. The guilt was eating her alive—she went and revived all the rats they had killed, taking them away from the clearing to a place by the lake where they would be safer. She started talking to them afterward. They were the only ones who would actually listen to her, the only ones who weren’t unrecognizable.
For weeks she lived in the cycle of trying to pretend everything was normal at school, going over to Ruben's house to meet with the party, and going to the Far Haven Woods at night to fight the monsters that Porter brought them.
Then one day she decided that she had had enough. She wasn’t going to give up on Ruvina because a teacher told her. So she went back into the office and asked to transfer again, or rather, un-transfer. She filled out the paperwork again, but this time the paper wasn’t wet with tears.
She felt like she could finally exhale. Felt like the weight was finally off her shoulders, a heaviness that had been crushing her since even before spring break.
She hadn’t told any of her friends that she had reversed the forms. She didn’t know what they would have to say about it, but she knew that she had to take back at least some agency in her life. That night when they went into the woods, something felt off. More off than normal, because everything had been feeling off in the past few weeks, but it might just have been because she was keeping her transfer from her friends.
But she also wasn’t really sure these were her friends anymore. They were just hollow shells of the people she still thought of as family.
Everyone was acting weird . They weren’t talking to her and Kipperlilly hadn’t looked her in the eye all day. They got out to the woods and met with Porter like always, but this time he pulled Kipperlilly aside and talked to her privately. Lucy tried to talk to the others, talk to her friends , but none of them would say anything.
Eventually, Kipperlilly left Porter and walked up to Lucy, her hands shaking.
“Are you okay?” Lucy asked, noticing it immediately. She leaned in closer, bending down slightly. “We don’t have to stay here, Kipps. We can go,”
Kipperlilly shook her head. She looked up at Lucy then, her eyes red, tears threatening to come out. “I’m sorry.”
Lucy put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, it’s okay, I know that you didn’t mean for all of this to happen. But we can still fix it, we don’t have to do anything we don’t want to, okay?”
“No, that’s not…” Kipperlilly choked out, shaking her head as tears ran down her face. She took a deep breath and looked Lucy in the eyes again. “You promised me that you’d come back, remember?”
“What?”
“You promised that you wouldn't leave me. You said that we’re stuck together for life, right?”
Lucy frowned then, glancing around at her friends, who still weren’t looking at her. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m sorry,” Kipperlilly said softly.
And then she slit Lucy’s throat.
***
When Lucy didn’t come back they had to drag Kipperlilly away from her body, the girl crying and yelling at all of them that she promised she’d come back. That she promised she wouldn’t leave her. That they couldn’t go yet because Lucy was going to wake up.
Even though their shatter-star hazes, the rest of the Rat Grinders had to look away for a moment as Kipperlilly held Lucy’s body and sobbed. Eventually, Porter yelled at them to fix her and Mary Ann had to burn through a rage holding Kipperlilly back as Porter, Jace, Ruben, Oisin, and Ivy buried Lucy’s body deep in the woods.
When they came back Kipperlilly’s sobs had calmed down, but now she was standing there with a thousand-yard stare, Mary Ann’s arms still around her—whether they were to hold her back or comfort her, they didn’t know. Oisin put an arm around Kipperlilly’s shoulders and guided her out of the woods. Silent tears streamed down all of their faces as they left the body of Lucy Frostblade buried deep in the woods.