Don’t get us wrong.
There are SO many circumstances, times, days, moments when Alice wishes absolutely everyone was dead.
Except for perhaps a few students, a few people she likes, and some authors who are frankly dead from having lived centuries ago, but it’s still inconvenient to Alice, who would like to speak to them.
She has a dream.
It’s sort-of a nightmare, sort-of not.
There has been another battle. Her own armies were elsewhere occupied and she was forced, for once, to push her abilities to the limit, calling a combination of Hellfire, phlogiston, dimensional bleed, and reversal of gravity all at once, combined with a great deal of lightning out of a cloudless sky.
She sees body after body; she’s flying, looking for a leader who’s still alive to whom she can delegate long enough to have a BLT or something. But all she gets are an endless array of peasants, middle-class, and parasitic nobles.
“Thank the Gods you’re here!” they cry. “What shall we do? We’ll gladly take your orders! Tell us whatever you want! We’ll do it! Be detailed! Micromanage us! Stay here and tell us what you want!”
“I want to be left alone!” Alice attempts, but they never hear her. “Rule us!” they shout. “Rule us!”
Alice once, during her apprenticeship, tented on a mountain that was three dozen degrees below zero, with a Yeti whose body heat could have lite a cigarette. That was a more unpleasant combination of feelings than what Alice experienced whenever this happened.
But not by very much.
The bodies are impressive. The most powerful and famed of royalty, the oldest of families, the wealthiest of oligarchs, the most powerful of magicians, the most pervasive of knights. All have remarkably accurate wounds, as if Alice, in one great explosion of frustration, targeted everyone everywhere with maximum ability to deal out death. It was an excellent piece of work.
And it left Alice completely in charge.
And completely responsible for doing anything.
The yeti experience has always, for Alice, defined “waking up in a cold sweat”, but this dream was worse.
She resolved to order some chocolates for her ambassadors, drank some pink absinthe, and went back to bed.
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