“Ah John…” I sigh as I see the thieves guild leader running around the hidden chambers of the sewer labyrinth as he explains a convoluted plan to the Old Man.

 

“Grandpa.” I ignore the voice of the Little Girl chastising me for avoiding the family title for him.

 

I was stuck floating around the sewers as an astral ghost as my- our body slowly regained enough mana for me to possess it again. Frank had already departed to parts unknown with a tearful, albeit abrupt, goodbye, his old habit of calling me ‘Boss Lady’ never leaving him.

 

It was perhaps only my nature as a necromancer and my familiarity with the dead that kept me from falling into rage. 

 

Frank was a friend. Perhaps the first friend I ever really made.

 

They tortured him, violated his body and mind to scoop all the info they could out. Ironically it was John’s curse that kept the guild secret. 

 

I smiled thinking of when I first came across this place following the ghost of John’s ex-best friend. Back then the guild was just John and Frank. They got by almost exclusively by utilizing an artifact that let them hear the spirits of the dead, and John’s various ex-hero abilities. They didn’t know but they had ended up getting quite a little fan club among the dead peasants and ex-slaves eager to see the noble elite be taken down a peg. 

 

I couldn’t help sighing and shaking my head in shame a little as I thought about how forceful I was, it was so long ago that my magic had barely formed. Essentially all I could do was operate as a slightly better artifact being able to see instead of just hear the dead. Despite that I still forced John into accepting my demand and sabotaging a powerful noble, even still it just barely worked. We nearly all lost our heads. I was just a magical slave girl then but now… I’m much more and I’m going to prove it.

 

“Now you are Rosie.” I tsked and turned around to face the little spectral girl wearing a sundress and spinning in a circle as a mystical tether led from her body to my own. A magical seal forever linking us as two people now become one.

 

“I’m trying really hard to hype myself up for the battle to come and your outbursts are not helping.” I ranted at her trying desperately to hide my discomfort. 

 

“Our battle. Our outbursts. We think they’re helping plenty. We just also know that we are scared.” The little girl's body shifted slightly to an older form, probably similar to my own age. We shared a dark brown hair color but she retained more angular facial features. She also still had a distinctly girlish figure. Nonetheless I couldn’t help but think that this could be how I looked if fate had taken a different turn. There was no doubt that if people saw us standing next to each other they would assume we were sisters at least. 

 

“I have no reason to fear the battle to come.  We’ll be fine especially as long as The Ol-” I stopped myself as she scowled at me. “As long as your Grandpa is there.”

 

She puffed out her cheeks in a child-like annoyance. “How can you deny how our own magic works? Our status told you as much and we can feel it inside us but you still are fighting it.”

 

I whirled on her in a rage. “I am me. Nothing can take that from me. All those years as a slave, as property, I never gave in. I didn’t even have a name to my sake but I still was able to hold onto my identity. No goddamned spell, based on the whims of a child, is going to strip that away from me! I know that it isn’t finished, that despite everything I still am me because you are here telling me I’m not.!” 

 

She gave me a gentle smile and held my hand in hers. I could feel my magic sparking as we touched, trying to control it was like trying to swim against a typhoon. “Rosie… It’s already happened. You can fight against it but you are only fighting yourself. I’m not her, as I said… I am you. I’m the protection you built so you don’t self-destruct. The longer you put this off the harder it will be to fully grasp your own magic. You need to understand that the little girl who saved you bonded with your soul… she isn’t around at all anymore.”

 

I shook away from her grasp covering my eyes and ears with my hands forcing her words to leave me alone. “No! I refuse to hear you!” 

 

She started to say something but suddenly we were both yanked back to our bodies and I bolted upright seeing the familiar animal pelts and brick walls of the sewer chamber that I had made in my room years earlier. 

 

“Woah. You alright Rosie?” I looked over in surprise to see the Old Man sitting beside me cross legged drinking from a leather pouch I recognized from John Doe’s bin of discarded artifacts. If I remember that one would never stop distributing water. John never used it because he felt distrustful of the magical water. One of his abilities could just randomly summon magical artifacts and trinkets and not all of those had good enchantments so it really wasn’t out of character for him to be fearful of magical water with no apparent point of water. 

 

I guess to the Old Man, getting sick from magic water was the least of his concerns. “Yea, I’m fine. Just had a bad dream…” I wanted to talk to him about my crisis of identity but whenever I started to form the waters I felt the indescribable distance between us. Fate, or the whims of gods, might have thrown us together but that didn’t just make us friends. The facts behind my identity crisis aside, I couldn’t talk to him about something like this.

 

“Oh…” He was quiet for a second before taking a deep drink of the water and letting out a frustrated groan. “If it’s alright with you I’d really like to talk about something before we rejoin your friend out there.”

 

I stayed quiet and just nodded, whatever he wanted to talk about it couldn’t be weirder than my situation so I might as well just nod along and tell him what he needs to know. “Our whole situation here is super weird… we should talk about it. Rationally I know I barely know you but when I look at you I feel like I’m looking at my Rosie. It’s way beyond just a feeling of looking similar. All this magic and monsters and now a fucking thieves guild with even more magic and intrigue. I just don’t know what’s happening anymore but I can’t do anything about all that!” He stood up shouting and I felt like for the first time ever I was able to see him as a person rather than that monster I’d first met. 

 

After a moment he ran out of steam and ended up just falling in place, his almost skeletal bedraggled old body so clearly apparent I felt like I must have been blind this entire time to not see it. I also felt pain, a pain in my heart so clear I thought it might leave me dead on the floor if I ignored it. 

 

I felt memories that I knew weren’t mine but were still so real they were suffocating filled my mind.

 

 A little village in the middle of nowhere with a flowing field of wheat.

 

Parents, Mom and Dad, playing with me as Grandpa scythed the field with perfect experienced movements. 

 

Then summer came. It seemed to just keep getting hotter. Water boiling in well, cattle and boar alike falling on the ground and never getting up.

 

At some point the fields were harvested for the last time. 

 

The our Aunties and Uncles, the village elders aside from Grandpa, left and never came back. My friends started vanishing after that, their parents would take them into the woods and they wouldn’t come back. 

 

Mom and Dad yelling at night as I slept.

 

Dad leaving and never coming back.

 

A man in a carriage coming and picking up Mom as she left me her bracelet, promising she would come back and take it.

 

The tax collector… my right hand… 

 

Grandpa crying and cursing the gods as he helped me lay down in bed for the last time.

 

“Girl!” I opened my eyes that had fallen closed at some point to see the Old Man standing above me, tears falling down from his cheeks. “Don’t die on me again… please…”

 

“What happened?” I already knew but I didn’t want to voice it… I couldn’t call him that… If I did I was worried I’d lose what little bit of myself I still had.

 

“Is that so bad?” I felt the girl's voice in my head once more, as I had in the astral plane, but what terrified me even more than that was that it was clearly my own voice speaking to me. 

 

In a sick frustrating moment I wished I still had the collar on. I think at this moment I’d feel a strange sense of comfort in it’s pain. “Our memories are melding…” After hesitating I finally confessed to him. That I, the Slave Girl, was being killed and possessed by Rosie his granddaughter. This was probably also the cause of his strange attachment to me, it wasn’t to me at all it was to Rosie.

 

We sat in silence for a while before he finally spoke up. “Is there a way to reverse it?” 

 

I looked at him with wide eyes in surprise that his first question was one that saved me and not Rosie. “No… the way the magic works is a one way direction. I stayed alive because of our magic. Even now it’s still ticking away working to ensure our two souls are one. The fact is… I want to live… the magic feeds off that. To stop it I would have to actively let go of that desire to live.”

 

He closed his eyes in deep thought for a while before suddenly opening them and asking a question that surprised me more than all else. “If this spell is taking over you and replacing you with Rosie, then isn’t it killing you?

 

It was an essential question, at the heart of what I’d been struggling with since the moment I met that little girl and my magic had betrayed me. “The magic doesn’t seem to see it that way.”

 

“I’m hesitant to compare my granddaughter to the monster living within me but maybe it's something like my curse?” I raised an eyebrow at his strange analogy as he continued.

 

“When I first transformed it was in desperation, I had to do… things… I would never want to speak of it. My only goal at that moment was to survive. I let myself become a mindless monster because that’s what mattered the most then. As time passed when I was wandering that forest before I met you I realized that if I was to survive I had to accept some kind of balance with the monster. I talk of it like it’s something living within me but I also know that it and I are one in the same.” 

 

I tried to picture that rampaging beast that tore and slaughtered knights as the same figure kneeling in front of me trying his best to offer reason and comfort to my fears. Putting my own wellbeing over his granddaughters. I thought of his sobbing as he helped her go to sleep for the last time, trying to hold a strong face so as not to worry her even while tears streaked down his cheeks. 

 

The two beasts couldn’t be farther apart but none-the-less here he was able to rationalize the connection.

 

“I said yes back then… I was on death's door when she offered me the power to survive and I said yes. I took my revenge on the men who attacked us and I don’t plan on stopping until the entire aristocracy is gone and buried and no one starves in this country ever again free or enslaved… If I can accomplish that… does it really matter who I am? I don’t know magic… I’m just a simple farmer… but at the end of the day isn't  ‘Am I Me?’ a question best left to the philosopher types? All we can do is just keep fighting for our missions right?”

 

I looked at him with surprise before suddenly laughing out loud. “You said all that when your point was just ‘Stop over-thinking it.’ You really are just a farmer aren’t you?” 

 

I noticed him blush and turn away in amusement which just made me laugh even harder. “A blushing old man! A blushing old man!” I pounded the bed and wiped at the tears forming in my eyes from laughing too hard. 

 

“I was just trying to help, forget it.” He clicked his tongue and turned away from me. 

 

I pulled myself up from the bed and rested my hand on his shoulder muffling my laughter at his child like acting. “Come on, don’t be like that. Its funny is all. We met each other under such ridiculous circumstances that hearing such a really basic idea I couldn’t help but laugh.” 

 

I calmed down and offered an exasperated shrug of my own own, “It’s even funnier because… I don’t think you're wrong. Maybe I forgot at some point why I kept doing what I was doing. You know, back when I first met John I was so committed to my mission I repeatedly escaped and let myself be found so I could arrange for slave rebellions. I even let a slave master try to force himself on me so I could bite his dick off when I found out he was raping my little sister. John was the key to the system back then, I’d let myself get caught then John and Freddy would work outside to arrange things in time for a rebellion and we’d work together to get rid of the slave master.”

 

I went quiet in reminiscence as I thought back to how we split out. “Were you not working with John with your last… person.” I could tell he wanted to say ‘master’ but I appreciated his effort to correct himself.

 

“No… We had to split up for a while a few years back. I guess you could say our missions ended up diverging. As people outside of our ring joined the guild and it began to become an actual power people started to ask why they were spending so much time saving slaves, if they weren’t going to sell us and turn a profit. Most of the time the masters had other valuables that could be stolen as well and appease the outsiders but… well that was only most of the time. My mission was always to free my family caught by them. I owed John a lot so when I saw the issues that were showing… I just left.” I didn’t tell him how close John and I had gotten or how much it hurt to say goodbye to the first people who had treated me as a person since I was a child not even old enough to care for myself. 

 

He turned back around to face me and smiled. “At least, to me anyways, it sounds like even if it is a bit difficult to hold on to sometimes your identity is quite clear. Sharing a name with this old man’s grandchild doesn’t change that fact. Come on now and get up, we got a noble to go rob.”

 

I laughed and accepted his offered hand, standing up and feeling as if my heart had lightened significantly, even if we hadn’t managed to come to a clear resolution at the very least I felt as if I was a bit more at peace than before.