Season 1: Survival of the Fittest

  Ch 2: A Stranger's Pity

  At some point, Nysera lost them.

  The hen party dispersed like confetti into the misty streets, each woman peeling off into taxis, bars, or the arms of questionably dressed men. One moment she was Queen of the Night; the next, she stood alone under a flickering streetmp, barefoot, tiara askew, clutching a half-eaten kebab.

  The world around her blurred slightly. Her head buzzed—not unpleasantly, but with a looseness she didn’t trust. She inhaled deeply, trying to summon her bearings, her magic, her self.

  The reflection caught her off guard.

  In the dark window of a closed vape shop, a figure stared back at her: brown-haired, rather than her usual gleaming silver. A touch shorter than she remembered. The line of her jaw familiar but softened. Her once-immacute face was streaked with mascara, her eyes smudged with the evidence of the night’s revelries.

  She swayed slightly, frowning at the reflection. Raised a hand to touch her cheek. The stranger did the same.

  For a long moment, the city noise dulled around her, leaving only the hum of the streetmp and the sharp, unwelcome realisation pressing against her mind. This was not her body. This was not her world.

  Nysera—Viscountess Altherys, feared and beloved in equal measure—had ceased to exist. In her pce stood this. A girl with brown hair, in a crumpled bck skirt, barefoot and glitter-streaked, holding a kebab in one hand and a tattered romantic tome in the other.

  The absurdity of it threatened to tip her into hysteria.

  Instead, Nysera exhaled slowly. Smoothed the rumpled skirt with as much dignity as she could salvage. Adapt. Conquer. Reign. Those were her rules, no matter the battlefield.

  She turned from the window, her new face set with grim determination, and marched towards the garish blue glow of the Tesco Express. The sliding doors wheezed open before her like a tired sigh, and Nysera—viliness, queen, now barefoot creature of the London night — stepped forward into her next conquest.

  Inside, the hum of cheap strip lighting bathed the linoleum in a ghastly green hue. A solitary security guard leaned against the wall, regarding her with the weary gaze of a man who had seen too much and no longer cared.

  Nysera drifted past dispys of meal deals and garishly coloured energy drinks, her tiara catching pathetically on a dangling promotional sign. She ignored it. A ruler did not concern herself with such indignities as to fix her own crown.

  She paused before a refrigerated wall of pre-packaged sandwiches, surveying her options with narrowed eyes. Coronation Chicken. Prawn Mayonnaise. Ploughman’s Lunch. All equally tragic.

  She was pondering whether to commit to the indignity of Egg & Cress when a voice cut through the fluorescent gloom.

  Nysera turned, slowly, as if she might be challenged to a duel.

  A woman in a smart bzer, heels dangling from one hand, stood staring at her in horror. Her hair was bedraggled, mascara smudged slightly, suggesting she'd had her own share of the night’s tributions.

  Nysera blinked. Recognition tickled at the back of her mind—this was someone who knew this body. She had called her Mira. A colleague, perhaps. A dy-in-waiting in this grim little court.

  “Oh my God, babe,” the woman breathed, rushing over. “You look—rough. I mean. You look amazing. But rough.”

  Nysera lifted her chin imperiously, clutching the kebab like a sceptre. “I am perfectly well.”

  The woman grinned, looping an arm through hers. “Sure you are. Christ, Mira, when you go, you go. What even happened to your shoes?”

  “They were unworthy,” Nysera said.

  “That’s a mood.”

  Before she could protest, Nysera was steered firmly towards the self-checkout. Somehow, a bottle of water and a packet of crisps appeared in her hands.

  The woman tapped impatiently at a blinking machine, and Nysera was nudged forward to face her own.

  It stared at her. She stared back.

  "Scan your first item," the machine chirped in a ft, mocking voice.

  Nysera narrowed her eyes. Was it speaking to her? Giving her commands?

  Tentatively, she pced the water bottle onto the little gss square. The machine shrieked.

  "Unexpected item in the bagging area."

  Nysera froze. The security guard across the shop shifted, watching her like a hawk.

  "Remove item from bagging area," the machine barked.

  She hissed under her breath like she might at a misbehaving squire. She tried lifting the bottle. Pcing it again, slower. Unexpected item. She hadn't known it was possible to be personally insulted by an artefact, but here she was.

  The woman behind her leaned over, smirking, and with a few blindingly quick motions, beeped both items through.

  "Card?" the woman said expectantly.

  Nysera blinked at her.

  "Card," the woman repeated, slower, as if speaking to an elderly retive.

  Nysera patted down her skirt automatically. Something crinkled from the little battered bag that had come with her — a slim rectangur object. Pstic, glossy, and bearing a stern photo of her unfamiliar face.

  She peered at it.

  A name: Mira Kensington. A chip of some kind embedded near one end.

  "Here," she said imperiously, presenting it like a royal seal.

  The woman ughed and guided her hand down to a glowing pad. "You just tap it, babes."

  Nysera hesitated, then pressed the card firmly against the pad. A blessed little chime sounded.

  "Payment accepted," the machine announced.

  She straightened at once, victorious. As well she should be. It was only proper that even the dead-eyed sorcery of this world would recognise her authority.

  Before Nysera could savour the triumph, the woman grabbed her elbow.

  "Right, c'mon, you're not dying in a Tesco Express on my watch."

  And then they were outside again, the cold mist spping at her cheeks like a particurly rude footman.

  “You’re lucky I found you,” the woman said, fgging down a cab with practised ease. “Imagine expining this to HR on Monday.”

  Nysera tilted her head. HR? Some sort of tribunal, perhaps.

  “I’ll make sure you get home, yeah? You’re gonna be hanging, babes.”

  “I assure you,” Nysera said, as regally as one could while barefoot and carrying a Tesco bag, “I am entirely in command of myself.”

  The woman snorted. “Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, Your Majesty.”

  The cab pulled up with a screech — a squat, ugly thing, like a carriage hastily constructed by drunken peasants. There were no horses, only a grumbling mechanical growl that smelled faintly of burnt rubber and despair.

  Nysera was bundled inside before she could protest, sinking into the cracked leather seat as the door smmed shut behind her. Through a combination of blurry directions and the woman’s confident bossiness, they rattled through the sleeping city towards Mira’s — her — ft.

  Just before slumping back against the seat, the woman patted Nysera’s hand affectionately.

  “See you Monday, babe. Get some water in you. Don’t die.”

  “Monday,” Nysera mumbled, tasting the new word.

  “Yeah, Monday is going to suck.”

  The cab rattled off into the mist, leaving Nysera standing alone on a cracked bit of pavement. The water bottle dug into her ribs through the thin paper Tesco bag. Above her, a flickering streetlight buzzed with insectile desperation. She looked up at the squat brick building in front of her. A row of tarnished buzzers lined the doorway like soldiers who had long since given up hope.

  “Sucks,” Nysera repeated under her breath, vaguely insulted by the clumsy inelegance of the word. Still, it seemed somehow appropriate.

  The keys had been pressed into her palm at some point—she didn’t remember when—and after a brief, humiliating struggle with the door, she stumbled into the narrow, wheezing corridor. The smell of fried onions and damp carpets greeted her like a punch.

  Up two flights of stairs that creaked armingly under her bare feet, and she found herself in front of a chipped door bearing a number that looked suspiciously like it had been scribbled on with permanent marker. She unlocked it and pushed it open.

  The ft was... small.

  A single room with a kitchenette grudgingly appended to one side. A sagging sofa. A bed shoved into a nook that barely fit it. Mismatched mugs piled in the sink. The faint smell of instant noodles and loneliness clinging to the air like a second skin.

  Nysera stood frozen in the doorway.

  It wasn't the new face. She could adapt to that. It wasn't the loss of magic, or power, or prestige. She had survived worse. It wasn't even the humiliation of wandering the city barefoot, glitter-streaked and kebab-stained.

  It was this.

  These small walls. This paltry life.

  This was not a pace fallen to ruin. This was a life that had never risen in the first pce.

  The Tesco bag slipped from her hand, the water bottle thudding dully against the stained carpet.

  "No," she said aloud, voice shaking with fury.

  "No. No. No!"

  In a blur, she unched the tiara across the room. It bounced pathetically off the wall and nded in the kitchen sink. She kicked the Tesco bag, sending crisps skittering under the sofa. The book—To Ruin You Tenderly—was hurled onto the bed, where it flopped open in mute betrayal.

  Nysera spun in a circle, looking for something, anything to destroy, to command, to rule—and found only the humming glow of an ancient mini-fridge and the blinking red eye of a smoke arm.

  Her rage curdled in her chest, bitter and impotent.

  She slumped onto the sofa, which gave an ominous wheeze under her weight, buried her face in her hands, and for the first time in a very, very long while, Nysera let herself have a full, undignified temper tantrum.

  If the ft’s thin walls carried the sound of her furious, muffled screams to the neighbours, none of them cared enough to compin.

  London, it seemed, had already beaten louder, prouder spirits than hers.

  But Nysera was not one to stay broken for long.

  She would learn. She would adapt. She would survive.

  And, by the goddess who had abandoned her, she would conquer.