The scent of lavender and expensive candle wax filled Clementine's bedroom, a fragrant curtain drawn against the outside world. On the silk sheets of her canopy bed, she reclined like a goddess on her throne, her attention utterly consumed by the glow of her massive television screen. The anime's crescendoing score swelled, the final episode of her week-long binge reaching its climax. A delicate tremor ran through her, not from the show's drama, but from the practiced hands of the maid kneading the tension from her shoulders. Another knelt at the foot of the bed, her slender fingers working in firm, circular motions against the arch of Clementine's foot. Both were clad in nothing but scraps of black lace, a uniform of humiliation Clementine insisted upon, one that pleased her aesthetic sensibilities as much as it asserted her dominion over their scrumptious forms.
A single, high-pitched shriek erupted from the television's speakers as the screen imploded into a pinpoint of light before vanishing entirely. The sudden, jarring silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the frantic thumping of Clementine's heart against her ribs.
The world seemed to hold its breath.
Then, Clementine moved.
Not with the lazy grace she usually possessed, but with the explosive, uncoiled fury of a predator whose prey had just vanished. Her leg shot out, her foot connecting with the maid's sternum with a sickening thud. The girl flew backward, crashing against the polished hardwood floor with a cry that was half-gasp, half-choke. Before she could even process the fall, Clementine was upon her, descending from the bed like an avenging angel of wrath. Her bare foot, perfectly manicured and usually an object of dainty worship, became a weapon. She brought it down hard, her heel grinding into the delicate flesh between the maid's legs.
A strangled gasp tore from the maid's throat, a sound of pure agony that was somehow, horrifyingly, threaded with a note of twisted pleasure. Her body convulsed, tears carving clean paths through the dust on her cheeks as she shook her head in frantic, silent denial.
"Don't you dare," Clementine's voice was a venomous whisper, low and dangerously calm as she leaned her weight into her heel. "Don't you dare look at me with those pathetic, innocent eyes." She rotated her foot slowly, deliberately, drawing another whimper from the girl writhing beneath her. "You were thinking it, weren't you? 'Oh, Mistress looks so happy. Let me ruin her favorite moment.' Wasn't that it, you useless little worm?"
She straightened abruptly, pulling her foot back with a final, dismissive twist that left the maid gasping on the floor. Her head snapped toward the other maid, who had frozen mid-motion, her hands hovering in the air as if turned to stone. "You. Fix it. Now." Clementine's voice was sharp enough to cut glass. "And if it's not working in thirty seconds, you'll be joining her."
"Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid!! It's your fault, isn't it? You're the reason the TV cut off. You unplugged it, didn't you?!" Clementine snarled, grinding her heel deeper into the maid's sensitive flesh. The pathetic creature beneath her whimpered, tears streaming down her face as she frantically shook her head.
"Oh, don't give me that innocent act," Clementine purred, her voice dropping to a dangerous whisper as she leaned down, her face inches from the maid's. "I know exactly what you were thinking. 'Oh, let me inconvenience Mistress while she's watching the finale of her favorite show.' Pathetic."
She straightened up, releasing the maid with a final, vicious twist of her foot. "You," she snapped at the other maid who had frozen mid-massage. "Fix the television. Now. And you," she gestured to the abused maid on the floor, "stay exactly where you are. I'm not done punishing you for your incompetence."
As the second maid scurried to the entertainment center, Clementine circled the one on the floor like a predator. "You know, I was actually enjoying myself before you ruined everything. The show was getting to the best part, and my feet were feeling quite lovely." She nudged the maid's side with her toe. "Now I'm all irritated, and someone needs to pay for that."
She paused, tapping her chin thoughtfully. "Tell you what. If you can make me forget all about my ruined show, I might consider forgiving you. But you'll have to work extra hard to please me." A cruel smile played on her lips. "Or I could just continue what I started. Your choice, really."
The maid scrambled to her knees, her head bowed in a show of submission that belied the fire burning in her eyes. "Please, Mistress Clementine," she begged, her voice trembling with practiced deference. "I'll do anything to make amends. Let me serve you with my body." Each word was laced with the hatred she carefully concealed beneath her facade of obedience.
Clementine let out a throaty laugh, rich with condescension. "Your body?" She circled the kneeling maid, her expensive silk robe whispering against the floor. "Darling, your figure is about as exciting as a straight line. Though..." She paused, tapping her chin thoughtfully, "I suppose even the dullest tools have their uses if applied correctly."
As the television flickered back to life, Clementine turned with predatory grace toward the other maid. "You've served your purpose. Leave us. And do ensure the door clicks shut behind you. I'd hate for our... private conversation to be interrupted." Her voice dripped with the confidence of someone who had never known rejection.
The second maid practically fled, the lock's click echoing in the room like a gunshot.
Clementine's attention returned to the maid before her, her eyes gleaming with cruel amusement. "Well now," she purred, straddling the edge of her ornate bed with deliberate sensuality. "You wanted to prove your worth, didn't you?" She slowly peeled back the lace of her panties, revealing herself with the pride of a goddess presenting herself to a mere mortal. "Show me what that clever tongue of yours can do besides making excuses."
She leaned back, one hand supporting her weight while the other gestured impatiently. "Don't keep me waiting. The anime's paused, and my patience is... limited." Her smile was both invitation and warning, a perfect blend of flirtation and threat. "Impress me, and I might just forget your earlier incompetence. Fail..." She let the threat hang in the air, confident in her absolute control over the situation.
[3 Hours Later]
The syringe caught the moonlight as it descended.
Clementine Bourbon did not feel it enter her neck. She was asleep, genuinely asleep for perhaps the first time in years, not the vigilant half-consciousness she wore like a second skin, but real sleep, silk-heavy and dreamless. She was still smiling at something cruel she'd said at dinner.
The maid's hand did not tremble. That, at least, was something Clementine might have respected, had she been awake to witness it.
She was not.
Consciousness returned in pieces the sensation of standing, of weight, of breath, and then all at once, like a mirror reassembling.
She was somewhere that was not her bedroom.
The space around her possessed the cold, architectural precision of a place that had never been touched, never aged, never accumulated the rich residue of human misery that gave real rooms their character. Everything gleamed. Everything was equidistant from everything else. It was, in short, deeply offensive.
A figure stood before her.
He was the kind of entity whose appearance defied cataloguing; his edges blurred pleasantly when she tried to look directly at them, his form hovering between sharply defined and vaguely spectacular. He radiated the particular self-satisfaction of someone who expected to be stared at in wonder. Clementine had spent thirty-six years perfecting her immunity to exactly that.
She looked him over the way she'd once assessed a painting some lesser noble had tried to pass off as a Renoir: with unhurried, surgical disinterest.
"You've been watching me," she said. Her voice was steady, conversational, the way a blade is flat before it turns. It was not a question.
The figure opened his mouth with the air of someone beginning a speech he'd rehearsed for considerably longer than she'd been alive.
"Clementine Bourbon," he said. His voice resonated not just through the air but through the back of her skull, which she found profoundly rude. "I have observed your life with great—"
"Don't do that." She pressed two fingers to her temple. "Keep your voice in your own head. You're rattling around in mine like a coin in a tin box."
A pause.
"I—" He stopped. "I apologize."
When he spoke again, the resonance was gone, replaced by something almost ordinarily human. It was, she noticed, a much better voice without the theatrical embellishment. Lower. Almost unsure of itself. She tucked that observation away.
"I am the God of Beginnings," he said.
"Are you." She turned her gaze slowly, taking in the crystalline architecture with the same expression she reserved for poorly arranged charcuterie boards. "That explains the décor."
"I've brought you here because—"
"I'm dead." She said it the way one announces rain. A fact, unremarkable, slightly inconvenient. She looked down at her hands, unmarked, the same hands she'd had all her life, and then up at him. "My maid killed me. That miserable, patient little creature." Something moved behind her eyes for just a moment, something that might have been, in another woman, grudging admiration. In Clementine, it emerged as something harder. "I underestimated her timeline. I won't make that particular error again."
"You're taking this very—"
"If you say calmly, I'll take that as a personal insult." She smoothed the fabric of whatever she was wearing, something approximating her usual nightgown, which she found to be a questionable aesthetic choice for a divine realm. "I take everything personally. It's one of my most useful qualities." She turned back to him. "You were saying something about beginnings."
The God of Beginnings gathered himself with visible effort.
"I have observed your soul," he said, and something in his tone shifted, less performance now, more genuine bewilderment. As though he'd opened a door expecting a broom closet and found a cathedral. "In all my millennia, I have never encountered a capacity like yours. Your potential is—" He reached back for words that weren't arriving. "It is unprecedented."
Clementine waited.
"Well?" she said, when he didn't continue.
"I wanted you to be surprised."
"I am not surprised." She examined her nails. "I've known what I was since I was approximately seven years old. It simply took the rest of the world considerably longer to catch up. That's their failing, not mine." She looked at him sideways. "But go on. I'll allow you the satisfaction of confirming it."
He produced, from whatever physics governed this space, a large crystalline sphere luminous, elaborate, and clearly significant.
"Place your hand on this," he said. "It will measure the true magnitude of your soul's power."
Clementine stared at it.
"That's a great deal of ceremony for something I could just tell you."
"Humor me."
She stepped forward and set her palm against the surface. It was cold, briefly, and then not cold at all. The light that erupted from it was immediate and total, filling every corner of the crystalline space, driving the shadows out entirely. Above it, a number burned in the air.
Ten.
The God stumbled backward.
Not metaphorically. His heel caught on nothing, and he genuinely, physically stumbled, one hand flung out for balance that wasn't there. He stood staring at the number with an expression Clementine recognized: the particular blankness of someone whose understanding of the universe had just been quietly, thoroughly revised.
She removed her hand. The light faded.
"Ten," she said.
"In all of—" He couldn't seem to finish sentences. "There has never—" He passed a hand over his face. "This is a ten. A complete ten. That has not happened."
"So you've said." She tilted her head. "And yet here we are."
A long silence settled between them. The God appeared to be experiencing something adjacent to awe. Clementine allowed it. She was, privately, a patient woman when patience served her.
"I can offer you," he said finally, slowly, "a new life. A new world, one that has existed thus far only in the minds of storytellers and the imaginations of children who stayed up too late." He gestured, and a great spinning wheel materialized from the air beside him, elaborate and ridiculous, covered in what appeared to be the names of various fictional worlds. It spun with great importance and stopped. "Black Clover."
She read the name where it had landed.
"I'm not familiar with it."
"It's an anime."
"Then I've been doing you a favor not being familiar with it." She studied him. "You're sending me there."
"I'm offering you the chance—"
"You're sending me there." She said it again, quieter this time. Not a correction. Simply a woman establishing the actual shape of a situation before she decided what to do with it. "You can't send me back."
His discomfort was confirmation enough.
"I am the God of Beginnings," he said, with what remained of his dignity. "Not revivals."
"Of course not." She was already thinking. He could see that she wasn't the kind of person whose internal processes stayed entirely behind their face. There was a quality to her stillness, when she was thinking, that was almost acquisitive. "You can, however, provide certain concessions before you dispatch me to whatever peasant village you have in mind."
"I can grant—" He hesitated. "I can grant wishes. Within reason. Nine of them, to be precise, given what you've—"
"I want to be immortal."
The request was so immediate it seemed to have been waiting, already formed, at the front of her mouth.
"I refuse," she said, "to be dispatched a second time by someone I failed to take seriously. It is, as I've mentioned, beneath me." Her jaw shifted slightly. "Make it permanent this time."
"Done." He said it quickly, as though worried she'd add conditions. "Eight remaining."
She began to pace not anxiously, but with the deliberate movement of a person organizing their thoughts into an order she could act upon. He watched her with an expression caught between reverence and the kind of wariness one develops around beautiful, dangerous things.
"Eyes," she said. "I want eyes that actually function at the level my current ones always should have. Precognition is passive, not intrusive. Analysis. Microscopic and telescopic range. Hypercognition." She paused. "Truth detection. Emotional perception. Language comprehension, immediate and total. And," she added, as an afterthought that clearly wasn't, "let them be violet. The ones I had before were brown. I was never fully satisfied."
The God was making a sound she couldn't quite classify, something between agreement and the vocalization of a man watching a wall of water approach him.
"That is several things," he managed.
"It is one wish. Eyes." She was already moving on. "Magic. I want something equivalent to the Gate of Babylon, access to an armory of infinite depth, called by will alone. Armament magic, we'll call it, since I assume this world has some organizational taxonomy for that sort of thing. Mana to match limitless, fully mastered. I will not spend years learning to control something that should have come naturally." She glanced at him. "If your divine powers are adequate to manage it."
"They are," he said, with slightly too much emphasis.
"Good." She stopped pacing. "My name remains Clementine Bourbon. My appearance remains my own. I've spent considerable time and effort looking exactly as I look, and I won't have your taste, whatever it might be, influence the result." She considered him for a moment. "The remaining wishes, I'll keep."
"You have three remaining, not—"
"Exactly." She smiled for the first time since she'd arrived. It was not, he discovered, a comforting smile. "I'll keep them."
The God of Beginnings looked at her. He'd encountered pride before centuries of it, every flavor, every variation, the brittle pride of the insecure, the hollow pride of the self-deceived, the loud pride of those who'd never been tested. What stood before him now was something different. Something that had been tested repeatedly, and had emerged from each test not humbled but confirmed.
He found he couldn't decide whether it was magnificent or exhausting.
Possibly both.
"Any final requests?" he asked. "Before I send you."
"The maid's name," Clementine said. "I'd like to know it, eventually."
The God blinked. "I don't—"
"It's not a wish. I'm simply noting that I intend to find out." She turned away from him, as though the realm itself had ceased to hold her interest. "You may proceed."
He raised his hand. Power gathered around him in the way it always did, light and gravity and the specific weight of divine will, and he prepared to deliver her to a new world, to whatever beginning awaited someone who approached eternity the way most people approached a negotiation: assuming they would win it, and arranging accordingly.
"Enjoy your life as a commoner," he said, softly, when she was already half-gone.
He wasn't sure she heard him. He rather suspected she did.
The light took her.
The village of Hage existed at the edge of everything that mattered, which is to say it existed at the edge of the map in the way that places with no money and no magic and no political significance always do: noted, logged, and thereafter ignored by everyone whose opinion of themselves exceeded their opinion of honesty.
Three infants were deposited at its outskirts in the gray, particular quiet of early morning, when the light was the color of a decision not yet made.
One arrived screaming. Throat open, absolute, committed to the act of existing with his entire body.
One arrived silently. Wide-eyed and alert, watching the sky with the patient attention of someone who had arrived somewhere and was already making assessments.
The third one —
The third one was also silent. But her silence was not the silence of wonder.
Her silence was the silence of someone who had just been lied to.
Clementine Bourbon opened her new eyes violet, as specified, startlingly clear even in a face that was, objectively, approximately forty-three minutes old, and looked up at the lightening sky above the Kingdom of Clover.
She looked at the rough-hewn cart wheel half-buried in the dirt beside her. At the wailing boy to her left. At the quiet boy to her right.
At the horizon, which was, without question, not the skyline of any city she had ever owned a view of.
A commoner, she thought. He made me a commoner.
Somewhere in a crystalline realm that was growing notably quieter, the God of Beginnings allowed himself a small, satisfied smile.
It lasted, to his credit, almost three full seconds before he began to feel uneasy about it.