You could make some monsters to guard the passageways.
Deals with the devil, petitions, contests, feats of daring and demonstrations of talent, ugh, why? We give the dead a place to spend eternity. “I will take some of the meetings, and you will take the ones I do not take.” She’d sealed up the passages from the world of the living because she valued her privacy, and she’d stopped acknowledging the rituals of necromancers because she found them distasteful, but she shrugged. Marla’s hair was chopped short and ragged and she wore a ratty, old, dark purple bathrobe with white lining inside. We should be open to prayers and petitions.” “I am supposed to remind you what it means to be mortal, but it has been so long since I was born and thought about dying that I’ve forgotten how to remember to do the reminding.” Zufi’s blonde hair was swept up into a crown of braids, her lips were a shade of purple borrowed from a sea anemone, and she wore a dress of delicate seafoam lace. “We’ll be overrun by idiot mortals on idiot quests.” Marla was sipping bitter coffee and she made a face to match. Still, Zufi was bored enough to look across their breakfast table (which resembled the ugly stump of a huge, petrified tree because it was Marla’s turn to choose the décor) and said, “I’m going to open the pathways and passages and secret trains.” She broke the yolk of her egg and watched it run across the plate toward the rosemary potatoes and waited for her wife’s long silence to break. In the mortal world above, crab apples and briars thrived, geese attacked cats without provocation, and dark clouds gathered ominously only to spit a few halfhearted drops of rain before dispersing.Įach queen was sure the other should apologize first, but queens are stubborn by necessity and neither was ready yet to swallow pride in exchange for peace. The demons and psychopomps who served them stepped lightly (or floated above the ground entirely, if they could) and the dead were uneasy even in their personal paradises. Marla and Zufi, the reigning queens of Hell, were eight years into a meaningless spat, living more as roommates than lovers, and as a consequence, Marla was irritable and Zufi was bored.
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