Chapter 1: God of Death

I’d like to think that I have very normal thoughts about sex and death. Sadly, I have too much self-awareness to ever say that with a straight face—not that there’s anything straight about me.

Look, I won’t mince words. I’m something of a loser. What else would you call a perverted lesbian in her thirties living alone in one of the gayest cities on the west coast? Every day I suffer through my shitty job in retail, read fanfiction and yuri manga to feel less lonely, and spend an hour before bed thinking about how nice a knife would feel pressed against my throat.

I bet it’d feel pretty good, y’know? Cold metal against warm skin, that thrill of danger to get the heart racing, blood pumping, all your senses working overdrive. That’s the kind of thing that could make a girl feel alive again.

Or the kind of thing that makes the cutie you’re flirting with over Discord block you and tell all her friends that you’re a freak (derogatory). The fixation you can’t share over coffee. The secret desire that no one will ever understand.

I knew someone who did understand, once. A girl I could tell anything. We met through a roleplaying guild in an MMO called Heroes of Telvaria. Momo was her handle. She introduced me to fanfiction and ERP and a world beyond anything I’d known before her. She made me so much worse, and that made me want her like crazy.

The night I told her I was in love with her, we were roleplaying a vampire turning scene in our DMs. We kept getting distracted talking about the lore of the game, gossiping about guild drama, and making dumb jokes, so we never even finished the scene. It was an amazing evening. When I confessed my feelings, she admitted that she’d been dropping hints for weeks to test if I was interested.

We talked about meeting in person. Going on dates. Moving in together. We could be Momo and Cat, the inseparable duo.

That was the last time I ever heard from her. The last time anyone did. None of us in the guild had known where she lived or even her real name, so there was no way to track her down and find out what had happened to her. She was just… gone.

The six years since have been the loneliest years of my life.

*

“Just put the fries in the bag, bro.”

I stare at the high school kid who just interrupted my explanation of a book’s premise and appeal—a book that he had explicitly asked me to sell him on, being as I am a cashier at a bookstore. The book is still in my hand. His friend is filming on his smartphone and giggling like a moron. No one else is in line.

These idiots aren’t going to buy anything, are they? They’re just wasting my time so they can post a video on TikTok and show it to their friends. You’re lucky I can’t set you on fire with my mind, fuckers.

I keep staring at the first kid. I force myself to blink slowly and deliberately, eyes locked, saying nothing, until he starts to get visibly uncomfortable. When he opens his mouth to needle me again, I cut him off with a deadpan, “Bags cost extra. Do you have an account with us?”

It’s a pretty normal shift. After the brats leave (without paying for anything, of course), I deal with the usual assortment of pointless complaints, willful ignorance, and silent judgment. It’s amazing the levels of illiteracy you can find in the customers at a bookstore.

When a lull hits and I have nothing to do but stock and organize, I daydream about killing them all. I’d never do it, obviously, but it’s satisfying to fantasize about. The guy who was blatantly ogling my tits doesn’t really need his eyeballs, and scooping them out by hand would make such interesting noises. The woman with the pretty nails and three separate price disputes, what would her blood look like splattered across the pavement outside?

“Cat? Have you taken your break yet?”

“Huh?” I look up from shelving fantasy novels and see my manager peering down at me. “Probably not. No, definitely not. Wait, what time is it?”

Outside, night has fallen. I’m definitely overdue. I wince, mutter quick thanks, and zip away to the breakroom.

Yuri time. I open up my latest otome obsession: a manga about romancing wicked villainesses. The protagonist of the story is a commoner being made a pawn in the games of the nobility, preyed upon by three noblewomen of varying rank and temperament. The marketing plays up the predatory qualities of each villainess, but their behavior in the actual manga is something of a disappointment; all of them tend to balk right before actually doing anything evil, and the story keeps cutting away to their tragic backstories and their doubts about taking advantage of the protagonist. It’s kind of lame, but the art is good, so I haven’t dropped it.

The otome genre has been my guilty pleasure since Momo introduced me. The original examples were Japanese dating sims aimed almost exclusively at straight women, but they paved the way for a sprawling field of games, manga, and novels all sharing a focus on a romantically desirable heroine, often in a fantasy world. Frequently, that world is a crude facsimile of Renaissance-era Europe, and in a lot of modern otome stories the protagonist is a girl from modern Japan who gets reincarnated into that other world as the heroine or villainess of an otome game she played in her old life.

It’s that portal element—the isekai in otome isekai—that makes the subgenre so appealing to me. There’s still a childish part of me that wishes I could escape to another world and leave this grueling hellscape behind. In another world, another me, maybe I could find true love with a fairytale princess or a dame in crimson armor.

But the fantasy is fleeting. Soon enough, I’m back on my shift, and after a few more hours it’s closing time. Some of the others carpool home, but I live in the opposite direction.

My eyes stay glued to my phone as I make the walk to my tiny apartment. I know I should be looking around more and staying vigilant, but I really don’t care. I have villainesses to seduce! I have girls to admire! I have my next fix to look for!

So I’m not really paying attention to my surroundings when I hear the blare of a horn. When I look up, the truck bearing down on me is already so close and moving so fast that I probably couldn’t get out of the way if I tried. I crossed the street without bothering to check the lights or any signs of traffic.

Oh. So this is how it ends. Well, it wasn’t a great life anyway. Make it quick, Truck-kun.

Then I die.

*

Death feels a lot like drowning.

Drifting, falling, sinking. My world is endless black and the weight of an ocean. In the dark, in the cold, I am dragged down into the deep.

I remember who I am, but my life feels distant. I know that I am Catherine Rosemary Bird, that I died at the age of thirty-two, and that I never found the love and adventure that I was looking for, but those are just… facts. Recited trivia. There’s no weight, no meaning, no resonance. The water drowns whatever I’m meant to feel.

Far, far below, light shimmers in the dark. Warm and welcoming, cold and forbidding, fiery and frostbitten. There is a crack in the bottom of the world, soil and stone torn asunder, and something on the other side is calling to me.

If I was alive, I’d be panicking. Crushed by pressure and gravity, lungs screaming for air, my mind would fray and splinter until numbing warmth stole away my consciousness. Here, in death, all I feel is numb.

“Not yet. I have a use for you.”

A soft, clammy hand wraps around my wrist and tugs. A second pulls on my ankle, and then dozens of hands are digging into my flesh. I should be terrified, but I can’t feel anything.

With a final yank I’m torn from the light entirely. I break the surface of the endless ocean, and then I’m not in an ocean at all. I shiver on hands and knees against checkerboard marble, perfectly dry but still feeling soaked through. Above, stars glitter in vibrant, unnatural colors—greens and purples alongside reds and blues. Below, the marble tiles I’m sprawled on extend only a few feet farther before dropping away into bottomless black.

Awareness surges into my brain like a dozen plunging knives. I died, I know I did—I remember the moment the truck hit me, my flight through the air, and a sudden splatter—but this isn’t the oblivion I was expecting. Is this hell? Purgatory? A reincarnation waiting room? What was that light, and what pulled me away from it?

“Rosekitty!” A shockingly familiar squeal sets my neurons firing an instant before I’m slammed to the ground by the full force of a woman tackling me. She squeezes me, face pressed to the back of my head. “I missed you,” she whispers.

My brain short-circuits. I never thought I’d hear that voice again. I’d know it anywhere. “Momo?” I whisper back, hope fighting past bewilderment. “Is that you?”

She pushes off me, releasing me from her grasp, and after a second of disoriented scrabbling I manage to roll over and sit up. I stare into the face of the girl I’ve dreamed about for six lonely years.

The same pink, full lips. The same soft skin and hair like black silk. But the eyes are different—pools of molten gold, big and bright and glistening—and the wings are definitely new—black-feathered wings that stretch behind her, blotting out the stars. I think she’s a full head taller than me, maybe more, which definitely wasn’t true of the Momo that always complained about getting carded for being too short.

“It’s really me,” she says, soft and sweet and lovely, and I believe her.

Tears well in my eyes. “I thought about you constantly,” I tell her, voice weak. “About what could have been if you hadn’t—if we could have been together, like we wanted. I tried to move on, tried to find someone else, but the hole in my heart was shaped too much like you. I kept working on all our projects—the fanfics, the otome story—wishing one day you’d show up on my doorstep and I could show you everything. I wanted—”

Momo kisses me. My surprise lasts for barely a heartbeat before I lean into it. My hand wanders to the back of her head, my arm snaking around her waist, and I shove my tongue inside her mouth with ravenous enthusiasm.

There’s so, so much that I want to do to her now that we’re together again—together in person for the first time, but after so many wonderful nights staying up late and laughing over voice calls. So many transparent attempts at flirting in the manner of hormonal teenagers trying to find themselves, sharing kinks and talking about candlelit dinners with the same energy and awkwardness. She made me feel alive.

Now I’m dead, but my heart still quickens from the taste of her perfect lips. I wouldn’t trade this moment for anything.

The kiss must, inevitably, break. When it does, Momo sighs dreamily. “Wow. That was everything I’d hoped it would be. I love you, Cat.”

My breath catches. “You—” I bite my lip, unable to find the right words. Disbelief courses through me, blindsided by her sudden declaration. I never got to really know you. You haven’t seen how I’ve changed. There’s no way you could love someone like me.

She giggles at my reaction. Her eyes are warm and inviting. “I guess that’s a pretty silly thing to say, given back on Earth we only dated for an evening. But I’ve been waiting so long to see you again, Cat. I’ve been dreaming of the adventures we’d go on once we were together, fantasizing about the day my knight in shining armor would show up to whisk away the princess from the tower. And it’s finally here. That day. Our eternity. I love you.”

“I love you too,” I say without hesitation. I laugh. “I mean, how could I not? You broke my brain, Momo. Hell, like you said, we only dated for one night, but you still stuck in my mind so much I moaned your name while a girl was going down on me. God, that was embarrassing.”

Momo cackles and claps her hands together excitedly. “O-M-Squee, that’s so cute! Wait! Oh my gosh, Cat, we get to have sex!! I’ve been writing so much smut up here, you have no idea, there are so many things I want to try.” She lowers her head so she can look up at me with puppydog eyes. “I mean, if you’d like that.”

The fact that I only want to fuck her more after hearing “O-M-Squee” clears any remaining doubts from my mind. “Of course I’d like that, you dork,” I tease her. “You wonderful, beautiful, perfect dork. I love you.”

She pulls me in and I bury my face in her shoulder. We hold each other tight. Momo is warm and soft, but more than anything she’s comfortable. I feel at home in a way I haven’t for a very, very long time.

We found each other again. Even if it had to be… wherever here is.

Reluctantly, I draw back from the hug and look around. The checkered platform we’re on is one of many floating beneath the colorful stars. They’re clustered around a larger platform—a chessboard for giants—connected to this one by floating marble stairs.

“So, where are we?” I ask. “I have no clue what’s going on, except, I’m pretty sure I died. I feel like I died, but, here I am.”

“Oh, you definitely died,” Momo assures me. “And so did I! But when our souls were about to pass on—bam! We were snatched up and saved.”

“By who? By what?”

Momo grins wide. “D’you wanna meet her?”

She stands up and pulls me to my feet, immediately confirming the reversal in our height difference. My guesstimate of a full head taller might even be selling Momo short. She’s like a gangly goth beanpole with tits. The black toga-like gown she’s wearing flatters her figure nicely. Something about her appearance jogs my memory in a new direction, but we’re moving before I can figure out what. The wings? The eyes?

Momo leads me up the floating steps to the larger platform. The black and white marble tiles cover a vast space, one that I can’t wrap my head around; it feels like it can’t be more than a football field, but I can’t find an end to it on the horizon, and I don’t know why my brain insists on it being so constrained. It’s endless, but it isn’t. It’s a small, contained space, but it’s the world and all beyond.

In the center of infinity, two lines of marble pillars and braziers of green flame serve honor guard to a black throne. Upon that throne sits the spitting image of a devil.

Her skin is a sickly, pale green. Horns curve inward from her forehead, decorated by golden jewelry. An arrow-tipped tail flicks to one side. Her face is framed by red hair, cut shoulder-length on one side and shorter on the other, and kept messy. Her eyes are dots of golden light swimming in a sea of scarlet sclera.

Her sharpened nails tap rhythmically against black stone, her hands almost disappearing into the voluminous sleeves of her flowing red robes trimmed in gold. A high-collared, sweeping cape falls over her shoulders and pairs with her low-cut dress to form a narrow window of cleavage. Her lips are black, her teeth pearly white, and her mouth is curled in a smirk that I somehow know to be near-perpetual.

Although Momo and I had only just reached the edge of the platform, in the blink of an eye we’re standing right in front of the throne, surrounded on all sides by endlessly repeating tiles, the green flame casting us in unnatural light.

Momo bows deeply and gestures to the woman on the throne. “It is my pleasure to introduce the most estimable Nyarlathotep, highest of the Lucid Circle and the master of many worlds. She is known as the Crawling Chaos, the Mother of Demons, and the God of Death. It was her noble hand that plucked us both from the grasp of oblivion and brought us here, to her home amongst the stars. I’ve stayed here for a year in her gracious care and never had a reason to complain. Thank you, my lady, for saving our souls.”

Nyarlathotep shifts to one side, props her chin up on her palm, and looks down at us with amusement. “The pleasure is all mine. It’s not every day I meet a soul worthy of saving. Welcome to my palace, Catherine Rosemary Bird. You must have many questions.” Her voice is regal, drawling, and just the littlest bit mischievous.

I clear my throat, nervous before what I’ve just been told is a god in the flesh. “Yes, a few. About death and here and what’s going to happen to me now, but, also… your name is Nyarlathotep? As in, the messenger of the Outer Gods? The Lovecraft character? Is that—were those stories real?”

The goddess waves a hand dismissively. “Real enough, somewhere out in the infinite. But I am not the Nyarlathotep of those stories, no. If it helps, feel free to call me ‘Nyara’ instead; I find it’s quite a bit cuter.” Nyara winks, then continues, “My compatriots and I named ourselves after entities from the Mythos as a symbolic act—a representation of our beliefs about the nature of reality and our place in it, liberated by the absence of a true cosmic order. We are the Lucid Circle, comprised of myself, Hastur, Atlach-Nacha, and Tindalos. We are not the gods that Lovecraft dreamed, but we sit upon their thrones all the same. We are the weavers of worlds, anointed by a blind idiot god to rule as we see fit. More broadly, our kind are known as demiurges. We alone have been granted the power to create realities on a whim and wipe them out just as carelessly. And, within our domains, we hold court over life and death. So it was that I came to pluck your soul, Catherine, and that of your darling Momo, from the brink of the ever after. In a word, I’m your God.”

I feel lightheaded. “That’s… a lot to drop on me at once. Okay. Then… what happens now? I died, and now I’m here, and Momo was saying something about going on adventures? What… if it’s not rude to ask, uh, Lady Nyara, what do you want from me?”

“Oh, well that part’s quite simple; I want you to sell me your soul.” She drums her fingers along her chin and muses, “I suppose that’s more Satan than Allah. Momo, what do you think?”

“Devils are really sexy,” Momo says seriously. “You should lean into it, boss.”

Nyara snaps her fingers and a scroll of parchments appears in front of her, suspended midair, and unrolls until it’s traveled across the infinite chessboard and fallen off the side. The text of the scroll—a contract, I intuit—glows an infernal red. “So! Make a deal with a devil and sell your soul, satisfaction guaranteed. All the cool kids are doing it.”

Momo bounces up and down on the balls of her feet and waves a hand in the air. “It’s true! I sold my soul and it’s been nothing but great!”

I’m so out of my depth. I look between Momo and Nyara in hesitant confusion. I’ve dreamed about falling into a fantasy story for years, but that doesn’t make me qualified to negotiate over the fate of my immortal soul. Should I be terrified? Excited? I wouldn’t expect a real devil to have such a laissez-faire attitude about a deal like… well, like what?

“What am I selling my soul for?” I finally ask. “And why do you want my soul, anyway? Don’t you already have it?” That last one feels like a dangerous question to ask, but I think I’d be in more danger if I didn’t ask it.

Nyarlathotep leans back in her throne and steeples her fingers. The golden dots glint in her opaque red eyes. “Materially, yes; you reside within this palace at my leisure, and if I so chose you would find yourself back in that abyssal depth, being pulled into the light. Putting ownership to paper is a… formality, in a sense. I do not need your consent to do with you as I wish, but it smooths certain hurdles that might otherwise arise. And, it should be said, I imagine you would appreciate some agency over your own eternal reward.”

That gets my attention. “Eternal reward?” I glance at Momo, who nods eagerly.

Nyara says, “You possess the most valuable trait in all of infinity, Catherine: potential. If you accept my dominion over your soul, I shall nourish that potential to the heights of greatness that have occupied your dreams all your life. You could be a legend, Catherine. A hero, or villain, as takes your interest.”

I shoot a wary look at Nyara. “What potential? I was a cashier. I accomplished nothing with my life.”

“But now you’re dead,” she says calmly. “And in death, you have come to me: a granter of wishes and architect of worlds. Your humble origins are not a mark against you, Catherine; to rise from nothing is quite traditional in such tales as these.”

Momo sidles over and clings to my arm. “It’s like we dreamed of, Cat,” she says, breathy and starry-eyed. “She’s going to let us live out all our stories. The adventures, the romances, all of it. We get to go to Telvaria.”

“What?” My gaze snaps back to Nyara, who preens and chuckles.

“I was delighted by your ‘Heroes of Telvaria’ and the stories you made within its world. In collaboration with my peers in the Lucid Circle, I have woven a reality in the image of the one you spent so much time playing in and writing about—with, of course, a few minor adjustments to make it our own. Consider what your dear Momo reminds you of and you’ll understand what I mean.”

With a frown, I glance over at Momo. The wings, the eyes, I knew there was something about her, but—

Reaper, I realize. She looks like an angel of death from Heroes of Telvaria, the valkyrie-coded “reapers” that served—that served someone I can’t remember, but I look at Nyarlathotep, God of Death, and she slots right into place. Whoever created the reapers in the game world, they’ve been cut out and replaced by Nyara.

The full gravity of what’s being discussed starts to sink in. “You made a world,” I breathe. “You’re a god. I’m—I’m talking to a god about the fate of my soul. Holy shit.” I lean on Momo, taking comfort in her presence.

“You have been chosen,” Nyara says, leaning forward. “All that you desire can be yours—power, love, sex, adventure—if you only sign your name. Promise your soul to me, Catherine, and I shall make you the star of my greatest work yet. I shall grant you an eternity with Momo at your side, exploring the world I’ve prepared for you and living your new lives to the fullest. The world you came from tried to reduce you into another mindless cog in the machine of capital. They told you that you were nothing, that you were worthless, that you could never rise above your station—they were wrong. Sign your name and realize your destiny.”

A quill appears in my hand, dripping with ink. The contract rolls back up, shrinking as it goes, until it’s the size of an ordinary document. The signature line is clearly marked.

Momo squeezes me. “This is our chance, Cat. We can have a life together.”

The offer is tempting. Equally, I know there are a billion stories out there about Faustian bargains and how they never work out—though, in a few of them, the proverbial Faust can get one over on their Mephistopheles. But I don’t have any kind of plan, and I barely know the terms. This is as open-ended as a contract gets, really.

It doesn’t matter. I don’t see any other options. I move to sign my name.

A dozen tendrils of tar-like darkness pierce the contract, rip it to shreds, and retreat from whence they came in the span of a single blink.

“So what do you get out of this?” asks a new voice. “Or is owning women just a hobby for you now? Finally living up to the ol’ namesake, Nyara?”