#than try and rework all the stuff that is already cemented in my brain

[a1ecmcdowell]

i need to wrap up the reaper fic before the soldier boy prequel show comes out bc not a single soul can make me rework everything bc my lore is wrong u CAN'TTRT TUIRKJH U CAN'T.

and again if any of my lore is right i expect a fat check in the mail from eric kripke i know that's right

[ayellowbirds]

Parts 7 & 8 come together, because I got home late and had internet troubles. 

Once again, I’m not adding this on to the original post, because too many reblogs deep, frankly, makes the original post unreadable. And that had links to ways you can help support this project, like:

Keeping your eye on the Cypora’s Guide to Cementing Your Rule as an Evil Queen tag on my blog.

Look back at the tag for the original story, here; the posts from last year of the original, un-edited draft of the story can be found about halfway down this page.

Tell me about your favorite characters from the story—or draw them, if you like! You can find visual references in the art tag, or look at the stuff that inspires me, visually, in the inspiration tag.

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For those who missed it, Part 6 was back here!

So it was that Cypora, her friends, and the assorted dungeon denizens who had gathered together with her—as the novelty of the newcomers had not yet worn thin, and it was still interesting enough to see what might be going on that a crowd gathered quickly—went to see Acantha’s work.

A novice artist normally couldn’t afford a security guard, or at least, not a deterrent like Hashraa. But few of the dungeon dwellers wanted to risk an encounter with the jettatura, and even the rest avoided her nest out of habit. This had resulted in something of an air of mystery about Acantha’s artwork, and the finished scarecrows that she had set up outside the door of the workshop had become akin to a new installation at an art gallery.

Thus, the small crowd together with Cypora grew when it met the small crowd outside of the workshop, and the narrow alley of the dungeon walls became claustrophobic. Cypora and Aletheia vied for somewhere to stand apart from the crowd, and Shiaroc obliged them by taking up extra space with her tail, swishing it back and forth in a wide arc.

“Thanks,” Cypora said, smiling perhaps a little too wide at the lizard-woman.

“Well, you’re living up to your promise,” Shiaroc replied, “it seemed right.”

Cypora cocked her head at that, pausing mid-way between two knocks on the workshop door.

“A more,” Shiaroc began, and paused, searching for the right word, “demanding overlord, one who had not sworn to, as you said, ‘decentralize’ control of the dungeon, would not have tolerated being crowded.”

Acantha opened the door before Cypora could think of a response. A living being doing as she had been might have had disheveled hair and signs of sweat, but the clues of Acantha’s labor were limited to having dressed for ease of movement by partially disrobin*g, and smelling so strongly of herbal smoke that it irritated Cypora’s nose.

“—could open a window,” Hashraa hissed from somewhere inside. Acantha stood in the doorway, leaning on the frame. She didn’t need to sleep, eat, or drink, but she did need to keep smoking . Cypora was very glad it was not tobacco; the stuff irritated her breathing when people smoked it, but Acantha’s herbs of choice were more along the lines of incenses.

A bout of pain struck from somewhere down and to the right of her navel as the reworking of her body continued, and she had to lean on Aletheia again for support. Acantha shut the door and moved forward to help, while Shiaroc shooed the crowd back further.

“I’m fine, it’s nothing,” Cypora lied as the pain of an entire internal organ being magically replaced and gradually worked out of her body continued. “We wanted to ask you something.”

Acantha nodded, and watched as Cypora pointed a slightly shaky hand towards the displayed, completed scarecrows.

“You talked about propping them up to confuse adventurers,” Cypora continued, and murmurs of approval filtered through the crowd. This idea hadn’t made it far beyond Cypora and the two wrought, it seemed. Acantha nodded, and Cypora pretended that she’d been waiting for a response instead of trying to will the pain away by hating it. “Open to other plans?”

As Cypora explained the idea, the three Widows were, in fact, already inspecting the scarecrows. The appreciative noises they made were like autumn leaves rustling in the wind.

Acantha tilted her head, considering it.

“It would make up for the lack of bodies quite nicely,” Qurra said from much too close to Cypora’s ear. When she looked, the monkalb was actually standing several feet away, admiring Acantha’s handiwork. “There will be some demand for more, and we could arrange a fair trade.”

“Part of that being the matter of digging,” Ucsir said, giving Qurra a wary eye.

“Certainly,” she replied, smiling wide. She turned to Acantha again. “But I think we should compensate the artist responsible, as well.”

Acantha nodded, sucking deeply on her pipe. She continued nodding, pulling tight the sleeves of her blouse, presently wrapped around her waist like a belt. She strode quickly back into the workshop—spurring more protests from Hashraa—and returned with a book of draft paper, already writing notes.

Cypora and the other living beings present—as well as Aletheia—watched as Acantha began to inspect and consult with the Widows and other dybbuks that had joined them. It was something like seeing a tailor discussing with a client, although the result would be a whole body to inhabit, rather than a suit.

But Cypora’s attention turned, even with the pain dulling to a low burn instead of a sharp fire, and she considered Qurra and Ucsir. The two were bristling at each other, or at least, she could see that Ucsir was hostile to Qurra. It was far harder to judge Qurra’s half-dead and fully human body language.

She might be the overlord of the dungeon only in terms of the official status conferred by the quadriga, but she still felt a need to make sure things were running smoothly. After all, it would be impossible to fight off adventurers if the dungeon’s inhabitants were also fighting one another.

And then there was the matter of bringing the fight to the adventurers.

*  It was perhaps fortunate that Acantha lacked certain details of human anatomy, as having her chest bared simply displayed a featureless trunk of plant matter. Still, Aletheia stared.

8th of Vernary, 5647 CC—even earlier than before

Scoloaster Spitznogle receded from the presence of the human adventurer Alícha de Matos. It had been utterly lovely to inhabit a mortal body once more, especially one so near to her own age. Or at least, the age she had been when she had passed away. Abandoning her new ride stung even more knowing that she had given up her longest-used one for the chance, convinced by something in the earnestness of the Fossoyeur girl. But she had promised Cypora, and she had a job to do.

First task: take the adventurer as far away from the dungeon and the nearby village of Crossroads as she could manage without losing her own way. Second, deliver the message. It had been mostly a bluff. Yes, Cypora had officially given her the title of Ritermaysterin of Her Majesty’s First Avanturistyeger Company. But there were only seven others who had been assigned to the role of Adventurer-Hunters, and of those, one held the same rank as her.

Back in the shadows and watching as Scoloaster moved out of the sunlight and became more visible again, Ritermaysterin Orangella Fossoyeur revealed her own face.

“Think she bought it, then?” Orangella asked, leaning out of the shadow cast on a tree as if coming up from the surface of a deep pool. The rest of her body was not in the world of humans.

“There is no trickery in my words,” Scoloaster chuckled. “Only in the spaces between them.”

“Hm,” was all the mazik said in response. Where Orangella’s sister Licoricia had the blood of angels, ‘Ella’ was born to a demon mother, and had practiced at slipping out of the world of her human kin and into the otherworld of the shedim. Practically, this meant that she could cut the distance between two points as if folding up a map to make one end meet the other. But Scoloaster could not see into that shadowed realm. The dead might know more things of the living world than the living did, but that only applied to the world of humans, in so much as Scoloaster herself was a dead human.

It was frustrating, and tantalizing.

“On to our third assignment, then, my fellow esteemed Ritermaysterin?” Scoloaster asked, moving to Orangella’s side to look out in the same direction she was. The living, breathing human Alícha wandered off in the distance, still looking disoriented. Well, Scoloaster had made sure she was well-fed. Perhaps a little too much; it had been so lovely to eat again, to need to eat again, particularly something other than what that damned old vampir body craved.

She stopped her thoughts, rising back a bit. She didn’t realize she’d resented it until now. It was queer how something unpleasant could become so familiar and customary that one didn’t realize they disliked it until it was done with.

She’d need to find another body soon. She was sure she’d go mad without one.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Orangella replied, breaking the silence. She slipped down out of the shadow, her whole body revealed. Where Scoloaster had taken on Alícha’s body and acted in her stead—quite easy when that included possessing the brain of a living person, and being able to recall their memories as easily as one’s own—Orangella had followed her and worked on her own assignments. As she settled onto the forest floor, Scoloaster took in the results of that.

The Avanturisyegers had been Orangella’s idea, building on Cypora’s notions of being proactive about keeping adventurers out of the dungeons, and taking back what they had already stolen. The sheer hypocrisy of it, the pretense adventurers made that they were reclaiming things the Icosans had stolen from the people of the land, as if they were redistributing things like some sort of folk-heroes.

It made the fact that Orangella was dressed in things stolen from adventurers all the more delightful. Bits of armor and other equipment, stripped from the few who had been successfully dealt with, at least before they rose as zombies and fled to seek a true resurrection. In a few cases, even things taken from adventurers who had simply met their end in the dungeon, one of whom had zirself risen as a dybbuk, returned from death by hatred of fellow adventurers who had coerced zir into a dungeon raid beyond zir experience, and abandoned zir when things turned in favor of the dungeon.

“Where’s Lináloe?” she asked, and her answer came as a small flock of pigeons fluttered into amongst the trees.

Like Orangella, Lináloe was dressed after the likeness of an adventurer. In fact, she had been one, another left by her companions in the dungeon. But where the dybbuk Menax rose as an immaterial haint, Lináloe had found herself shut in with the dead, and chose to use her hatred to hope for a more physical revenge, calling upon old and forbidden witchcraft.

The zuvembie strode wordlessly into Orangella and Scoloaster’s presence. She had been tall and very strong in life, a proud warrior whose companions had, in the end, seen as only a ‘meat shield’ to defend them. Now, she was withered away beneath her armor and cloak, the gleam of eternal hatred the only sign of life when her movement stilled. Three of the pigeons that preceded her roosted on her broad shoulders, and she brought one arm up to give more of them a perch.

For all her hate, Scoloaster mused, Lináloe was quite tender towards the animals whose loyalty she was granted by undeath. Lináloe looked from Scoloaster to Orangella, and her face contorted into a smile, her lack of recent practice at it showing plainly.

“You found one, then?” Orangella asked, smiling back.

Lináloe shook her head, and Scoloaster watched as the pigeon-free arm rose up to reveal three fingers.

“Oh, magnificent,” Scoloaster said.

Three tasks: get Alícha de Matos away from the dungeon, convince her of the existence of the Avanturistyegers, and finally, set about making the company real. Scoloaster looked into the distance, where Lináloe pointed as her arm swept out towards a town in the opposite direction that Alícha had headed. It was perfect.

“Well then,” Scoloaster said with a grandiose sweep of her phantasmal arms, “shall we Adventurer-Hunters hunt?”