The second floor is dark. And small. One square room, only a handful of feet to a side, with the spiral stairwell from below taking up most of the floor space. The light from below doesn't reach you, and either everyone below you is being unusually quiet or it muffles sound too.

But it's free of notifications. Free of people. Just a cool, dark space. Your eyes drift shut again as exhaustion ebbs and flows.

Know woman! Good fuck! Never tasted her meat.

You shudder as the alien thoughts that were yours intrude again, force your eyes open. Strip away a bit more of what makes you you.

Want fight!

You retch as the taste of kobold meat, so wet, so tasty, comes to you – your mind rebelling against itself, but not even bile comes up to wash away the taste. You long since ran out of anything to bring up.

You're not sure how long you've been up here. It took a while for the shaking to stop, but it could have been any time since then. The leg and arm you're been lying on are cramped, but you can't force yourself to roll over.

Your eyes drift shut again.

Fire! Pain!

And again.

Prove Superiority!

Between one long blink and another, you must have slipped into a few minutes of exhausted sleep. Because when you open your eyes again you're not alone. A pale radiance, just enough to pick out the edges of the space you're in, shines from a twist of leather and bone hanging from one of Amanda's hands.

The light, a faint blue-green, picks out the lines of her face too. Catching her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. It gives her an almost skull like cast. With her eyes closed, and if you ignore the slow rise and fall of her chest, she could have been a corpse.

Your guts shift again, and you focus on the other hand. The one resting against your neck. The warmth. If you focus, you can feel her pulse. So fast compared to your own, so vital, so alive.

“Did you know that monsters and NPCs think differently? Like, on a very base level?”

Her voice is as soft as the light, but in the silence of this tiny room you can hear her clearly.

She opens her eyes and turns to look at you. The light catches her hair, illuminating individual strands. The white of her roots seems to almost drink the light, shining from without. Her eyes are the opposite. Grey-black pits that bore into your own.

You realise that you're staring and pull your gaze away, shaking your head.

“When I had a player, it was like... of course I'd do that? It makes perfect sense that I'd shout at David, and even that I'd call him Dave. That he'd know my name before I'd ever met him and that he'd want to take me off into the woods to level me up. It was always hard to differentiate her actions from mine. It still felt like that was me, doing those things. And it was only by examining those memories, dispassionately, removed form it, that I could see when things didn't make sense.

“Maybe if things had been different I would have grown to care more. Even like her? But then I wasn't a Hero any more. I was an NPC. And when you're an NPC, questioning things just doesn't... come into your mind.”

She falls silent for a moment, and you pull yourself up. The clink of glass from your feet has you look down as an empty potion bottle rolls away from you. A quick inspection has you confirming that you've been treated. Most of your wounds are gone or well on the way to recovery.

“You know I'm pretty sure my childhood never happened? I have memories that my mind is telling me are real. But...”

She laughs, and there's a note of bitterness to the sound.

“It's just words. It's a page at most, and not small writing. 'I grew up in a small village in the mountains'. I don't know which village. And I never thought of that as strange. 'I apprenticed a herbalist, and then was taken in by a convent'. Why? If I'd been trained in the village, why would they send me away?”

Her voice becomes even smaller.

“It's a lie. And not even a good one. I was created as a puppet hero, and my history was created just enough to satisfy my idle thoughts, to justify why I know what I know. Why do I know about plants despite living in the city? Easy. I was apprenticed to a herbalist. Not even a name.”

She falls silent again, leaning her head on you as strength returns to your limbs. You sit in the quiet darkness for some time before she speaks again.

“Once I was free of her, it was like... the world exploded. I could actually make choices. I could... I could act out, I could have sex, I could walk to the shops and buy something. Only something small, but I could. I could do anything. Anything at all, but actually think.”

Silence.

“And I only realised that when I died. When I become a monster. When I was finally, finally, allowed to think.”

It falls into place then, why she is telling you this.

“You know what it's like for the system to take control of your thoughts.”

She nods, and you can feel her silent tears splash against your scales.

“I've known almost nothing else.”

You rest your head on top of hers, scaled cheek against white hair, and mull over her words. You hate what you did – or rather... you hate how you did it. You know a little of what Sapphire put up with in the city at the summit – when she found you she was, perhaps not willing, but broken enough to accept trading sex for a place to stay. She as good as told you that her status as a runt had caused her to be passed around the tribe, and you told her that one day you'd help her get vengeance. But mindless ravaging, flitting around the city starting a few fires and eating a few kobolds wasn't what you had in mind.

And the feeling of your mind shutting down, losing yourself, knowing you were less but not knowing how or even caring...

After several minutes of rumination, Amanda shifts, cutting through your increasingly dark thoughts.

“It's not your fault, you know.”

You laugh, once. A forced thing.

“It really is.”

She shakes her head, still resting on your shoulder.

“Mercy told us what was happening. You'd been gone for a while and she was getting worried. She did some spell that would let her see what was happening around you. What she described... That's not you.”

You pull yourself away a little, twisting to look her in the eyes.

“It very much is. All I lost was mental stats. I didn't get some 'angry' de-buff. That is, apparently, what I am when you take away the intelligence. A violent beast. But that's-” you shake your head as she goes to speak and she subsides, a troubled frown on her face. “That's not what I meant. It's my fault because I didn't open the notification that would have told me what was happening. I wanted to go for a fly, a proper flight, and decided that anything that came up could wait until I got back.”

You pause for breath, and Amanda watches you in silence.

“What if it had been something else? Something worse? What if it had been a notification that the lair was under attack? What if it had been a warning that I was going to have another black-out?”

You let out a sigh, letting just a wisp of smoke escape your lips. With it, you let out the unaired worries. What if Killworthy and his strange menu-magic comes back and takes you from me? What if Tranquillity comes to our doorstep? What if I've somehow annoyed the gods?

You let the tension out with the smoke. You both know it's a deflection, asking these questions. Away from the horror of losing yourself. But Amanda lets you change the course of the conversation without complaint.

“Then you would have dealt with it, just like you always have.”

You sit in silence for a little while longer. Something unsaid has passed between you, in the green lit room at the peak of your domain. The silence is comfortable as you both draw on each other's presence.

Finally, after another indeterminable amount of time, you feel something akin to peace. Acceptance. This is the life that you chose for yourself when you first tricked the woman sitting next to you.

As if she can read your thoughts, Amanda giggles. “I still can't believe you tricked me into thinking you were a talking tree. A tree of all things. My first ever actual choice and it was to... you weren't even that convincing. How did it go again?” Her voice talks on a higher pitch, a caricature of her own words. “'Are you a talking tree?'”

“That would certainly seem to be the case.”

You both laugh for a moment. She's right, you really hadn't had to try very hard.

“Oh tree, how can we help each other?” her voice is throatier now.

“That is not how you said it and you know it.”

Amanda pulls away from you, spinning on her butt to that she's facing you fully, one leg on each side of you. She raises an eyebrow at you, and then pouts.

“Oh very well,” you say with a theatrical sigh as heat begins to gather between your legs. “If you could be as good as to help me with an...” You shift around yourself and lean forward, making her lean backward. Her pout shifts into a smile. “Itch... I can get you home.”

“And...” She leans back further, putting her weight on her elbows and shifting her hips. “Just where is this curse?”

You pause in your slow advance. “I never said it was a curse, this time round.”

She stops too, craning her head to the side as she tries to remember what you've said so far. “Damn. Oh well. Now come here *censored*”