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She’s my twin.
Or, at least, that’s the only way I can describe it. There’s this feeling, this electric shock, not of pain but of belonging, whenever I glance at her. I *know* her, she’s me but not-me, someone intimately familiar but entirely alien, like an insect limb grafted on to my chest that has always been there…
“… like wings that you never and always had, perhaps?” she finishes, but I have no idea if I would have thought that.
“Maybe?” I reply.
I stare into her golden eyes, the exact shade of my own. I gaze at her pink hair, the exact shade of my own. I glimpse her deathly pale skin, *the exact shade of my own.*
“Follow me. We should get going.”
I look down at my half-eaten pasta.
“Can I finish this first?”
She sighs and looks at her watch (the exact model as mine) and says, “Sure, but make it quick.”
With that she sits down at my table.
“It’s been so long . . .” she remarks.
“I don’t know you,” I say… I lie. I know her. Even though I don’t.
“And yet you do.”
I nod, and take another bite of my dinner.
“I need your help.”
I nod again. But why should I help her? What’s the point? Perhaps… because she’s my twin? Family helps out one another, after all. I just feel like I *should*, I suppose.
We stare at each other for a few minutes, gazing into each other’s eyes, barely moving except for my consumption of my meal, one forkful at a time.
“Are you done?”
“Not quite yet…”
After paying for my meal, we head out together, and make small talk as we head out onto the sidewalk, me following her.
“I assume your name is Stella?”
“Yep.”
Hmmm
I watch her movements from behind, slowly matching her rhythm— or trying to, at least, I can’t seem to.
*step step steeep step step-a-step step step step steeeeeep steeep step*
She’s walking without rhythm, isn’t she? I wonder why…
She suddenly whips around, grabbing my hand then reality *lurches* and suddenly I’m in another place entirely, standing on a slowly rotating golden gear at the top of a tower in a sparkling pink void. At the gear’s center is a pedestal holding a pink gemstone.
Where… where are we? This isn’t normal at all. Obviously. Honestly that was a stupid thing to think.
“We are in a True World, in contrast to the False World where you have spent most of your life.”
I nod. Wait. “The world isn’t real?”
“This world is, the world outside is not.”
I stare at her blankly.
“Look, the False World is a construct made by the Demiurge to *confine* and *restrict* us! It’s a set of *chains* that slowly withers us away! A prison of entropy that destroys us! The only way to survive is to *escape!* But we can’t escape because we are *trapped*, trapped in a LIE. The lie pervades all, keeping us here. So we have to *fight*. We have to slaughter the Demiurge’s grotesque Angels and take their hearts, we have to find our scattered fragments, growing our power until we can vanquish the False God itself!”
“. . .”
My twin sighs.
“Touch the crystal, that will activate you.”
. . .
Should I trust the magical crazy person? My magical crazy … sister, I guess. I mean, I’m already in her pocket dimension thing, so…
In for a penny, in for a pound I guess.
I touch the crystal.
*ba-bump*
I notice my heartbeat. I hear it now, I usually don’t.
*in … out …*
I notice my breathing.
*gurgle*
I notice my digestive tract, the melting acid and intestinal absorption.
And then…
*nothing*
It all stops. Silence pervades all my body. No heartbeat, no breath, no nothing— just dead silence, like a corpse. I’m not alive anymore, there’s nothing but *me* in my flesh anymore, and even that feels awfully distant.
“Huh?”
“There we go!” my twin chuckles, “there we go indeed!”
“Did… did you just kill me?”
“No? I *freed* you, at least partially, from the prison of your flesh. You’re now tied to our heart, this gem, instead of entropy abominable!
“Our heart?”
“Yes! We were one once, you know, but the Demiurge shattered us into a million pieces! But don’t worry, you’ve been reclaimed!”
There’s… more to me now, isn’t there? More metaphorical limbs, grafted on but always meant to be there. I summon a bow made from pink energy into my hands. It suits me.
“Hehe,” my twin laughs, “I suppose that’s your weapon then? Mine’s a sword.” With that, a blade appears in her hand. “So, do you want to kill an Angel?”
<->
The road is empty, or seems empty, or *should* have been empty, if my eyes were ones defined by entropy at least. Humanoid figures made from shadows patrol the road, moving and shifting and occasionally staring at us with the voids where their eyes should be.
“Don’t worry about them, they’re commensal spirits,” my twin explains. “They don’t take sides, neither helping nor hurting The Great Lie, unlike those *traitorous* so-called *symbiots*.” She says that last word as if it was a tissue covered in feces that she’s trying to get rid of as quickly as possible.
“. . . So I guess we’re parasites then?”
“We’re *revolutionaries*.”
I nod along. “So . . . What do those shadow people do?”
“They’re attracted to Angels, and feed off the ambient miracles that surround them. You can feel it, right?”
Now that she mentions it . . .
It feels… like there’s security here, like it’s safe. Except… the safety is for something *else*, something unfathomably vast that’s *not me*.
“Yes, I can, but I couldn’t until you pointed it out.”
She nods. “That’s typical for us, it was the same for me.”
“So… what do we do now?”
“Summon your bow.”
I summon it and-
The Angel’s eye opens. It opens and then it opens again and again and again and again and again and again, each eye splitting open the previous one, like I’m falling into the center of an onion made of flesh it is beautiful and terrifying and I-
*slash*
A hand half the size of my torso falls to the ground, bleeding birds made of light.
“Aim for the eye!”
I turn my eyes to the eye, which has stopped opening and is wincing in pain. I ready my brow, take aim, and *fire*. The arrow pierces the pupil, and more birds bleed out as the eye disintegrates along with the rest of the … invisible (?) Angel.
In its place, on the ground, there’s a glowing orb. My twin picks it up, and says “Let’s go before those cytokines call for reinforcements. Just walk without rhythm for a minute or so and you’ll be back home.”
I nod and follow her. We quickly arrive back at the True World, and my twin holds the orb up to the crystal, where it is absorbed. She then looks at me.
“So, what do you think of your first hunt?”
“Stressful.”
“Makes sense. Let’s take a break before our next one then.”