Do you have any enemies?

Of course, if someone got cursed, if someone had received a fatal injury that couldn’t have been an accident, that was the first question to ask them. If not the very first, then at least one of the earliest ones. It truly was obvious.

Someone out there in the world had spent their time and resources and efforts inflicting a terrifying curse on Emika, and maybe that person was still out there, and that’s where she needed to start. If she found the person that had cursed her, she could maybe find their notes; find out why it had happened, how it had happened, and perhaps, how to reverse it. 

And yet, at that very moment, Emika realised that nobody had ever asked her that question before.

If Emika actually had any enemies she was aware of, it would probably have occurred to her to check out that trail by herself. If she had a person in her life that hated her guts, wanted her dead, wanted her destroyed, she might have made that connection on her own.

But wasn’t it truly peculiar that nobody who’d ever offered help with her curse had asked her about her enemies before? Had asked her about her friends, her family, her surroundings, her life?

It’s because Viktor and Durand and Dr. Haur had never seen her as a victim, they’d seen her as a threat. They had all approached the situation based on the assumption that it was Emika who had threatened and killed people when in reality, the murderer was the one who’d cursed her.

But the one who’d cursed her was a person, and she was a monster. People were protected, and she was not.

In other words, why would they care about the one who cursed her? When they could instead just get rid of Emika instead. 

People like her — or rather, beings like her — weren’t meant to exist. They weren’t meant to walk the earth. Weren’t meant to breathe.

Maybe it was the same for Melisande, too. Melisande had apparently committed crimes in the past, and been thrown into jail because of them, but for all that Emika knew, Amagdala, Melisande’s maker, had gone scot-free. Amagdala had not been the one in prison and had not been the one facing death, despite having dropped off Melisande in that cruel manner back then.

In the end, Emika didn’t really care about the details. Maybe Melisande had done something truly horrifying, and maybe none of it had been Amagdala’s fault, but if Emika took her own experiences as a sample case, she really doubted that.

If anything, her best guess was that Melisande had acted in self-defence some 200 years ago and would have then been killed off, and only Amagdala’s interference had saved her.

And the Wish Demons, too. People thought up their wishes, and instead of creating a world where those wishes were no longer needed — where those people could be happy — instead they went after the Wish Demons and tried to kill them for being nuisances.

Of course they did. None of this was news to Emika.

And yet, seeing it all before her like that, it shifted her perspective slightly.

As her thoughts kept running wild in her head, the discussion with Blaike continued, but she was mostly tuning out and answering on autopilot.

No, she didn’t have any enemies. She just had her friends and her little life with her little trees before it had all gone belly-up. After that, Blaike started asking the kinds of questions the others had also asked; how her curse functioned, what the timeline had been, and other things like that.

Emika tried her best to answer, but couldn’t help derailing into further thoughts in her mind at every possible opportunity.

So, people like her weren’t meant to exist? Sure, maybe she wasn’t the most empathetic, and maybe she wasn’t really all that nice. Maybe she was selfish, too, and perhaps it was a bit of an issue that she involuntarily killed and sapped energy from everything around her. That last part though was done to her.

As such, she wouldn’t just stand by idly and accept her fate.

That curse had killed all her friends, and it was killing her too, albeit much more slowly. In other words, somewhere out there, her very own murderer was walking around. The person that killed her, and Reiko, Taara and Sam… and Mina and Eva.

All of it was that person’s fault.

So now, Emika needed to make a choice. And it was a very tough choice.

She only had a few weeks or months left to live. How would she spend them?

Option one was to break out of this place, return to Melisande, and spend her remaining time with her, in peace. Even if it would be tragic, and even if her mental capacities would further decline over time — the idea of returning to Melisande and just living that life was oh so alluring.

The other option was to go with what she’d initially decided to do; to find a cure. Maybe pursuing the one who’d cursed her would help with that, but truth be told, she wasn’t sure how to go about it. Her curse was strong enough to kill a Cursebreaker, which should be an impossibility on its own. It was so strong that other mages were likely very unhappy with the idea of operating on her or using magic that could help her, for fear of getting killed off by the curse in retaliation.

In other words, Emika could spend her time trying to find a cure, even though there was no clear path to it.

And her very last option, the one thing that had now revealed itself to her, was revenge.

She could avenge her own murder. The murder of her friends. She could tell the world that screwing with her was not going to fare well. All she needed to do was find whoever did it to her, and rip them to shreds.

And, in a way, to some extent, options two and three followed the same path, up to a point. Finding her murderer was helpful in finding a cure, she figured. So, she could pursue that option, and decide on the details later.

But… What about Melisande? With what Emika now began to understand, the chances of surviving this curse were dwindling. Was it time to accept it? Time to give up?

Emika felt her own skin crawl at the thought. The idea of letting her murderer roam free, it just did not compute with her brain, and at the same time, not spending her remaining time with Melisande was just as terrifying.

She’d always operated under the assumption that she’d be able to do both; that she’d find a cure and then go live with Melisande forever. That it would somehow work out, and that everybody who had told her she was going to die to this was wrong.

She just wanted to tear this whole world apart now. This entire world that had allowed this situation to happen in the first place; that had let her get cursed, that had ignored the cause, that had strung her along from one irredeemable situation to the next, and now forced her to make an impossible choice.

Before she caught herself, her curse had run wild in the entire room. It hadn’t protruded far enough to touch the others, but it was getting pretty close. A warbling mass of anger overboiling, squirming branches, evergrowing into different shapes, like a convulsing swarm of worms with leaves.

“Everything alright?” Epse’s voice echoed through her mind and brought her back.

“Yes,” Emika answered, and pulled her curse back into herself as best she could. “I’m sorry. Talking about this upsets me more than I thought.” Emika sighed. “Let’s continue later, if that’s okay with you? I was told that there’s phone signal on the ‘Front Lawn’, can you maybe tell me where that is? Or can someone escort me there?”

Living her life with Melisande, or avenging her own death? She couldn’t make a choice like this on her own. It wouldn’t be fair to choose on her own.

She needed to make that choice together with her.