Ariel trembled as the word still echoed inside her skull.

  Burn.

  Sweat broke across her brow, rolling hot down her temples as though her own body could no longer contain what surged inside. She looked down at her arms in disbelief—her veins glowed faintly, ember-red lines beneath her pale skin. The light pulsed in rhythm with her heartbeat, brighter and brighter, until she felt as if she were a lantern filled with fire. Her breath dragged ragged through her throat, each exhale a hiss between clenched teeth.

  The green fire in her eyes sparked again, but it twisted almost instantly, darkening into red flame. Heat bled from her core and poured into her limbs; sweat traced her spine; her mouth tasted like copper and smoke.

  “Keep talking,” she snarled under her breath. “See what it buys you.”

  The heat surged up her neck, her face lit from within. She staggered forward, jaw tight, her chest rising and falling with labored force.

  Holly walked on, unaware, her eyes never catching Ariel. But Heather—Heather’s posture faltered. Her smile trembled at the edges, her gestures growing stiff. And still, Tyna’s voice slithered through Ariel’s skull.

  “…Look at you. Drowning. Pretending strength when you are nothing. She will forget you, child. She already is…”

  “Shut up,” Ariel spat, voice raw.

  “…You are powerless here. She is mine. She will smile for me, dream with me, love in my world until your name rots away…”

  “SHUT UP!”

  “Say it louder,” the voice hissed. “So she can hear you fail.”

  “I don’t fail,” Ariel shot back, voice gone rough. “I finish.”

  The fire erupted. It engulfed her body in an instant, licking across her arms and legs, wrapping her torso in streams of flame. The heat seared her skin but drove her further, the inferno inside roaring outward as if it had always been waiting.

  Ariel bent forward, growling, every breath a grunt, every exhale like a furnace door kicked open.

  “You’ll never have her!” she screamed, unhinged and wild. “You hear me? NEVER!”

  Tyna’s voice, unshaken: “…Rage is an ember. Despair is the flame. You will learn.”

  “Go to hell!” Ariel’s voice cracked with fury. Sparks rained from her hair as the flames intensified around her. “I’ll burn your lies to nothing!”

  She stepped forward, heavy and solid. The ground shuddered, a ripple of energy pulsing outward from her feet. The fire around her writhed like a storm, then slowly, irresistibly, coiled toward her hands. Her fingers shook as the heat focused, raw power gathering as if the entire street had become tinder.

  Ariel bared her teeth, her eyes twin furnaces, and with a blood-curdling scream she thrust her arms forward. “BURN!”

  The torrent ripped loose. A wall of fire blasted from her hands, a searing wave that bent the air itself, shattering illusion in its path.

  Holly stumbled back with a sharp cry as the blaze tore past, so close she felt the skin of her cheek sting with heat. The world shook for her with the smell of ozone, the scream of air being devoured, and the texture of heat like a hand pressing her aside.

  In the same blink, every ordinary sound cut out and then crashed back in: traffic, a dog barking, someone shouting. Her thoughts weren’t thoughts so much as flashes: fire, heat, impossible, who... Her eyes snapped wide, terror flooding her as she stumbled aside, unharmed but shaken.

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  The fire struck Heather squarely. Holly saw the light explode across a face she’d kissed, a face she’d loved—

  No—her mind snagged and tore.

  Heather’s form cracked, split, then shattered, fragments of her disguise scattering like glass. In her place was something gaunt and pale, skin stretched thin over bones, eyes void and endless. The impact hurled her dozens of feet back, her frail frame slamming hard into the pavement.

  Holly’s breath faltered. This isn’t real, this isn’t real, she tried to tell herself, but the heat on her cheek argued otherwise.

  She stared at the shattered illusion, then turned her gaze, trembling, to the source of the attack. A figure of flame, a woman’s outline inside an inferno, the shape achingly familiar even before her mind supplied the name.

  Standing tall, engulfed in flame, the woman’s face twisted in fury. Holly’s jaw went slack, her lips parting.

  “…Ariel?” she whispered, disbelieving, voice breaking.

  Ariel did not hear.

  “Get up,” she barked at Tyna, voice cracking the air. “Get up and look at me when I end this.” Her focus was locked entirely on Tyna.

  In the space of a blink, Ariel vanished. A crackle of fire, and she reappeared above Tyna, hovering in the air, flame cascading from her body.

  Her voice rolled out, booming with an unnatural timbre that shook the glass in the storefronts; lights along the street flickered and popped, throwing sparks; the illusionary sky pebbled like heated steel.

  “I said…GET! UP!”

  The fire concentrated into her legs as she dropped. She slammed down with such force that the false ground of the illusion bowed, splintering beneath the weight of her strike. Tyna’s body buckled under it, her attempt at a spell breaking in her throat.

  Ariel bent, seized her by the neck, and hauled her upward with one hand.

  “You hide behind a false face and think that makes you a god?” Her breath thundered; the flames guttered and surged with every word. “I’ve bled for what I love. You’ve never held anything that wasn’t stolen.” Flames spiraled along her arm, curling hungrily around Tyna’s throat as Ariel lifted her like dead weight. Her eyes blazed, her voice low and seething.

  “You think you can take her from me? I’ll burn this entire god damned world to ash before I let that happen. I’ll salt the ground your lies grew in.”

  Tyna writhed in her grip, voice a cold filament: “…She will forget. You will tire. All lights go out.”

  “Then I’ll be the last light…” Ariel sneered, and her mouth twisted into something like a smile, savage and wet with tears that sizzled to steam. “...and your fucking reckoning!”

  And with that, she launched skyward, dragging the Acolyte with her.

  Below, Holly stumbled after the retreating trail of fire, one arm up to shield her face from the heat, the other out as if she could catch a piece of what was happening and make sense of it. “Ariel!” she called, stronger this time, voice hoarse. The name tore out of her like a memory rushing to fill a void.

  “Ariel, stop…wait…”

  Holly didn’t know whether she meant don’t leave or don’t kill; both felt true in her mouth.

  Her knees trembled. The place where Heather had stood was a scorched. The shape in the sky was the shape her dreams had been trying to tell her to keep.

  Please look at me, she wanted to say, a prayer without an altar. Fire trailed their ascent in a great red arc as they burst through the fragile ceiling of the illusion, tearing it apart like paper. The street below buckled and wavered; the café windows showed a dozen different reflections that didn’t match the world; the air filled with the sound of something shattering. Holly clutched herself and staggered to the curb as the sky ripped open. Heat slammed into her in waves. The city began to crack and fall away around her.

  Overhead, the fire-thread of Ariel and Tyna vanished into the seam, carried back toward the Hugteikn in a storm of heat and fury.

  Holly stood alone in the echo of it, hand trembling at her mouth.

  “Come back,” she whispered to the empty air, to the torn sky, to the sound of a void opening in all directions. “Please come back.”

  Murder Pizza

  [WLW LitRPG Satire]

  That wasn’t in the recipes!

  What’s on the menu?

  ? Lesbian leads.

  ? Bingeable short story.

  ? Cozy NOM. This is a pizza book.

  ? Tongue-in-cheek entertainment.

  ? System messages with a side of mockery.