Z3ke (Original Poster)

  All three of us just stood there and watched the fire finish eating Corva. None of us said anything. I don’t think any of us even knew what to say. It felt like we’d hit the point where the world had officially gone off the rails and we were all just trying to come to terms with the new reality. A few hours ago we’d been an expedition group meant to prove a theory about the emergence of magitech in the Deadlands. Now we were three exhausted idiots who were trying to process the fact that we’d escaped a valley filled with dead soldiers still fighting a century-old war, we’d outrun a walking mountain of bones, and somehow ended up with two corpses sprawled out on the ground and both of them were Corva.

  Eventually the flames died down and Wren broke free from our little gathering. He limped a few steps away and fell to the ground. Cole followed, a hand pressed against his stomach where Corva’s blade had caught him. I tried to make it over to them, pretty proud of myself for making it as far as I did before my body decided it had enough and just folded to the ground.

  We all just sat there, nursing our wounds as I dug into my dimensional storage space and pulled out some bandages. I gotta be honest and say that I had no clue what to do with them. I’ve only ever been really injured once in my life and I think I told you all about it.

  I’d been in my apartment, standing on a chair and I fell and got beat up by the ground. I remember laying on the floor afterwards, my arm screaming at me. The only thing my brain could come up with in that moment was, “hey your arm is broken” and then it kept showing me that scene from Lethal Weapon where Mel Gibson slammed his shoulder into a wall and popped his arm back in place.

  I remember seriously considering doing that because that’s the type of idiot that I am. Thankfully, pain and a small voice in the back of my mind warned me against slamming a broken shoulder into a wall. Instead, I walked my way to the hospital a couple blocks away. All that is a long way of saying that I was not the guy you wanted doing first aid.

  But we didn’t have a better option. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold the bandages. I started with Wren because he seemed the most injured out of all of us. Every time I tried to pull the wrap tight my arm pulsed and a shit ton of pain ran through me and my hands would slip and I’d have to start all over again. He was a trooper though. Didn’t complain at all with my fumbling attempts at first aid, just stared off into the distance with his jaw clenched like one of those movie heroes who casually walks away from an explosion while smoking a cigar.

  When it came time to deal with my arm, Cole helped. Or at least he tried to. He was gritting his teeth the whole time, trying not to swear as I bled all over both of us. I definitely wrapped the bandages around my arm a little too loose. Or too tight. Or somehow both at once. It was a mess.

  None of us knew what we were doing. First aid had been Corva’s job. He could have fixed us up in minutes. But instead…his two bodies were lying a few feet away after trying to kill us, dying, getting back up, and trying to kill us again.

  By the time we were done we looked like extras from a Revolutionary War painting. Bandages were everywhere and blood was soaked through half of them. Cole had his head wrapped to keep the gash on his scalp from leaking freely. The only thing we were missing was that one dude playing a fife while we staggered off into history.

  With all that done I noticed a notification pop up in the corner of my vision, letting me know I got a new skill.

  Skill Gained: First Aid - Rank 1

  I actually laughed at that. Not because it was funny, but because of course I got the skill after we all finished making a mess of things. I pulled up my skill sheet and checked out everything that I’d earned since coming to this world.

  First Aid - Rank 1

  Basic emergency medical care. Stop bleeding. Stabilize injuries. Reduce the chance of immediate death.

  Puzzle Intuition - Rank 1

  You’ve begun to see the threads of life. Increase awareness of non-linear patterns.

  Simple Melee Weapons - Rank 2

  You’ve learned basic, unrefined skills related to handheld weapons like batons, knives, and improvised weapons.

  Performance *

  Instrument Mastery *

  Persona *

  Strangely, my three class skills were starred but they didn’t have any ranks or descriptions next to them. They were just names, sitting on my skill screen like they were waiting for me to do something. I don’t know if I was given the descriptions for the other skills because I’d earned them the hard way, or because class skills worked differently, or maybe the system just hated me specifically. Either way, that was a mystery for later.

  Once we were all bandaged up and no longer in danger of bleeding out, our survival instincts kicked in. We were out in the middle of the Deadlands, and that’s somewhere you don’t want to be when you’re weak and beat all to hell and you’d just lost two people from your expedition. So we did the practical, ugly thing and we inventoried the bodies to see what could help us survive.

  Pell was first. It felt wrong to go through his things and loot him, but we were exhausted and miles from anything remotely resembling safety. So we got to it. Wren crouched down by Pell and carefully pulled his revolver from its holster. He checked the cylinder and then grabbed the spare ammo tucked away in his jacket. Miraculously the bullets hadn’t cooked off when Cole had burned the body earlier.

  Cole grabbed Pell’s scouting kit. It was a whole bunch of gadgets that I had no clue how they worked, but Cole seemed to know a bit. He pocketed the items that hadn’t been damaged in the fight.

  I didn’t take anything. I couldn’t. I told myself it was because the others could make better use of what he had, but that’s not the whole truth. The man had saved me. If he hadn’t physically put himself in between me and Corva, I’d be the one who was dead on the ground with everyone picking through my shit. It just felt…wrong to loot him.

  But Corva? Him I was willing to take everything he had. Wren knelt by the body and pulled the hand axe free from his belt. He looked it over and tested the balance before handing it over to me. It was the same axe that I’d used against the jackal runners earlier in the expedition, and it was a much better weapon than the dull knife that I’d been carrying around.

  Cole grabbed the small carving knife that Corva had and slipped it in his bag. Wren handed me a couple odds and ends that he found. It was mostly drifter junk like utensils and twine and little scraps of leather already punched with holes. It was the kind of stuff that you would toss in a packet drawer in your apartment because it might come in handy later on.

  Once that was done we stopped being gentle. We tore into the rest of Corva’s coat, ripping seams and shaking it out, and that’s when we found the ankhs. There were so many of them. They’d been shoved into pockets, stitched into the lining, and tucked in random places. It was a bit unsettling to say the least. Who would need so many ankhs? And why hide them like that?

  We spread them out on the ground and noticed that every single one of them was broken. They’d been cut, but not neatly. Each of them had jagged edges and splintered wood, like something had torn through them violently. I crouched down and picked one up and immediately dropped it when my chest flared with pain. It didn’t hurt as bad as the first time, but it was more than enough to make me hiss and clutch at my burn mark.

  After we took everything that looked even remotely useful, Wren straightened up and stared down at the two identical bodies lying in the dirt.

  “What the shit?” he muttered.

  That about covered it. I didn’t have anything helpful to add, and Cole didn’t answer either. He’d crouched down next to Corva’s body and started sifting through the broken ankhs, turning them over one by one. After a moment he slipped one into his pocket and stood, muttering under his breath.

  “Animancy?”

  “I thought you said that was storybook nonsense,” Wren said. “Back when we first saw those echo things in the valley.”

  “I did,” Cole sighed. “And I still mostly believe that. But…” He gestured at the bodies. Both of them with the same face. “We all saw what just happened.”

  He exhaled slowly and, after a moment, noticed that Wren and I were boring into him with our eyes, waiting for him to explain. “Animancy is folklore. It’s campfire stories. It’s not real. Theoretical mages have spent lifetimes trying to prove even a scrap of it exists, and they’ve all failed. But, I mean, what else can explain what just happened?”

  Wren and I exchanged a look. Neither of us knew enough about magic to even pretend to contribute. Cole wasn’t really talking with us anyways. He was simply arguing in his head out loud. He rubbed a hand down his face and then winced when his fingers brushed the bandage around his scalp.

  “So…what’s with the ankhs?” I asked, hoping that Cole could give me anything.

  He sighed in resignation. “If animancy is real and not just complete bullshit, then it probably follows the old theories. The ankhs would be something like an anchor for the soul. Or maybe batteries. Or safeguards.”

  “A safeguard?”

  Cole looked over at me and then down at my chest. He reached out and gently tugged my burnt-to-hell El Pedro’s shirt off to the side, exposing the burn on my chest. The mark was ugly and raw and shaped vaguely like the ankh that had burnt me.

  “Hmm,” he mumbled. “That might explain why it didn’t work. But what about the knives?”

  He paced for a few minutes, muttering, his eyes bouncing between my chest, the broken ankhs on the ground, and the Corva’s wooden knives that none of us wanted to touch. He paced for a good five minutes or so until I finally broke.

  “You’re gonna have to share, man.”

  He flinched and scrubbed a hand through his hair. “I’m trying to make it all line up in my head. None of this sits right.”

  “Just tell us what you’ve got so far,” Wren said.

  “Okay. Then the first thing you need to understand is that every school of magic has an end goal. Call it…an ultimate expression. It’s what students obsess over. It’s what we all dream of achieving, even if most of us never admit it out loud.”

  He held up a finger. “For Alteration, the goal is true creation. They don’t want to reshape what already exists, they want to make something from nothing. Pull matter straight out of the void.”

  A second finger. “For Restoration, it’s resurrection. The ultimate expression is dragging someone back from death itself, provided the soul hasn’t gone too far.”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Wait,” I frowned and looked over at the corpse that used to be Pell. “Resurrection is real? Is it…could we-”

  “No,” Cole said immediately. “No. It’s theoretical. It’s the dream, not the reality. Most restoration mages learn pretty fast that they can’t save everyone.”

  He hesitated before lifting a third finger.

  “Animancy has its own version of that. If it’s real, and looking around right now I’m starting to think it might be, then animancy is all about the soul. Restoration magic can only go so far. You can fix flesh, mend bone, even haul someone back from the edge of death. But souls…they wear out. They fray. Eventually they reach the end of their thread and move on. There’s a hard limit on how long anyone gets to exist.

  “Animancy’s promise is that you don’t let the soul wear out. You repair it. Reinforce it. And when the body fails, you move on to the next one. You push your soul into a new body, again and again and again. The ultimate expression of animancy is immortality.”

  Silence settled over the three of us. Wren and I understood what he was saying, but it felt too big. Immortality is…look, I’ve played enough video games and watched enough tv to know all about liches and necromancers and people trying to become immortal. But, that’s all fiction. It belongs in Skyrim and the Lord of the Rings and One Piece. It’s not something that can actually happen. And yet, now I’m in a world where I guess it can happen.

  “That ankh Corva gave you,” Cole said, pulling me out of my thoughts.

  My hand drifted to my chest automatically. The burn throbbed like it remembered the whole thing.

  “I think it was a link. A tether.”

  “Between…?” I asked, even though I already knew.

  “Between him and you,” he said. “It was a way to tie your souls together.”

  Wren’s jaw clenched. “You’re saying he was planning to, what, ride him like a meat puppet?”

  Cole nodded at that. “Yes. Something like that. He would have pushed Zeke’s soul out and taken over his body. Well, actually more than that. If he had succeeded, he would have gotten everything that is bound to your soul. That includes your dimensional storage space. You have to know by now that your talent is something that people would want for themselves. Wren and I can’t take it off you, it’s wrapped up in your soul. But for Corva…”

  “Holy shit…” Wren stared at me.

  I shook my head weakly. “But the ankh didn’t work. It burned me and then I was able to toss it away. He didn’t-”

  “No,” Cole agreed. “It didn’t work. And I think that’s why he snapped.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When we got out of the valley, you remember how injured he was? He was bleeding everywhere and we couldn’t really help him. My guess is that he planned to activate the ankh, switch bodies with you, and then kill the rest of us so we couldn’t divulge his secret.”

  Wren’s eyes went wide at that. He obviously hadn’t pieced that together, but it made sense. If you could take over someone’s body, you wouldn’t want that getting out.

  “But it didn’t work,” continued Cole. “He got really angry when you said that you earned a class. You did earn a class, right?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “That’s probably why the ankh failed and why he’d given it to you in the first place. Classes don’t just grant skills. They have a strengthening effect on your soul. One of my teachers at the academy called it anchoring. A class binds your soul more tightly to your body. When you gained your class, Corva couldn’t displace your soul anymore.”

  He looked down at the scorched body. “When you first joined the expedition, you were classless. You were a nobody who somehow had a dimensional storage space. From his perspective, that must have felt like winning the lottery.”

  I stared at Corva’s face, burned and twisted and unrecognizable, and tried to reconcile all that with the man that I’d slowly begun to trust.

  “What about the knives?” I asked.

  “This is still just a theory. I don’t want you thinking this is settled fact,” he said.

  Wren snorted softly at that. “Given that neither him nor I even have a theory, anything you got is better than nothing.”

  Cole shot him a look, then sighed. “If Corva couldn’t displace your soul cleanly because your class anchored you, then he’d need another method.” He pointed towards the wooden knives, one of which had been reduced to blackened embers. “Those aren’t normal weapons. They’re not even normal enchanted weapons. Wood’s a terrible medium for combat magic. It doesn’t hold a charge well and it degrades quickly. Which means this wasn’t purely a combat enchantment.”

  He seemed to go internal, mumbling to himself, so I snapped my fingers to pull him back.

  “But,” he said slowly, “wood and bone are effective in old rituals. Those favor organic materials and things that were once alive. My guess is that the knives were enchanted to interact directly with the soul. They might have been made to specifically cut into someone whose soul was anchored by a class.”

  Wren went still. “So he tried the ankh method but then found out that Zeke earned himself a class. When the ankh didn’t work, he tried cutting him with that blade.”

  “Yes,” Cole nodded. “Pell would have been…the backup plan. Corva knew he needed to kill all of us. He was on his last legs. He stabbed Pell and kept the knife in him, knowing that if we managed to kill his original body he would be able to jump over to Pell’s body. But Zeke was the one he wanted.”

  The conversation kind of ran out of steam after that. There just wasn’t anything left to say that wouldn’t just make us all feel so much worse and confused. The theories were all laid out, the bodies were cooling, and all three of us were left alone with our own thoughts.

  Cole went quiet, looking like a man chewing on a problem. He was probably rethinking everything he knew about animancy. He was thinking about all the times that he’d dismissed it as fanciful thinking and lining all that up with what just happened. It was an entire branch of magic that wasn’t supposed to exist, and yet it was suddenly looking very real.

  Wren…I don’t know what he was thinking. He just stared out across the Deadlands with his jaw tight and his eyes unfocused. Maybe he was thinking about Corva. Maybe he was thinking about Pell. Maybe he was thinking about how close we’d all come to dying in the dirt.

  That’s what I was focused on. I couldn’t stop thinking about how close I’d come to getting killed. This wasn’t a game with a checkpoint or saves or reloads. If Corva had been a little faster, or a little luckier, or if I hadn’t earned that class when I did, this would all be over. I would have been killed. And it wasn’t just that. It was the fight with the echoes and the bone mountain and everything else that had happened since I fell into this world. Thinking about all of that, it scared the shit out of me.

  I needed to get stronger. I needed better gear and better skills and better everything. Luck had carried me so far and I knew that it would start turning on me soon.

  Eventually the three of us forced ourselves to move. None of us wanted to even glance in the direction of the Valley of Echoes again. Skirting around it was going to add extra time and distance to the trip back to The MIZ, and that was even if we were in top shape. But that was a trade-off we were all more than happy to make. No one said it out loud, but we were all thinking the same thing: no way were we going to tempt that place again.

  Cole was the one who laid out the plan as we limped along. According to him, there were established caravan routes in the region that curved around the valley. Traders, pilgrims, and scavenger crews all knew better than to march straight through a cursed battlefield. Over the years, paths had formed naturally where people skirted the danger of the valley.

  “If we can hit one of those,” he said, gesturing vaguely west, “we can get passage back to The MIZ. Someone’ll pass through eventually.”

  It sounded simple but it still took us two full days to reach one of those paths. By the end of the first day, all the adrenaline that had taken us out of the valley was completely gone. The only thing left was pain. Every step we took pulled at our wounds.

  Wren’s leg was stiff and swollen, the bandages pulled tight enough that I was starting to worry about circulation. Cole’s stomach wound kept reopening whenever he twisted the wrong way, and every time he did he hissed through his teeth and I’d have to reset the bandages. My arm throbbed constantly. The bandages became stiff with dried blood no matter how often I swapped them out, and there was a deep ache in the bone that made me worry that something worse was going on there than just getting stabbed.

  I did what I could which, to be clear, wasn’t much. I rewrapped the bandages and smeared salves all over everything. I leaned hard on every scrap of knowledge my rank 1 First Aid skill gave me. It helped a little, but we clearly needed something more. Mostly it just made me aware of how screwed we were. I couldn’t stop thinking about infection and what would happen if one of us went down and couldn’t get back up.

  By the time we finally got to one of the caravan paths cutting through the desert, all three of us were wrecked. We were filthy and exhausted and running on fumes and the vague hope that someone would come along and help us. Even then, reaching the caravan path wasn’t the end of it. We still had to wait.

  We’d settled into an uncomfortable sprawl near the road and I was getting ready to cook us all lunch - having taken on the Corva role for our group - when I heard the sound. It was a deep, uneven rumble that made the ground vibrate and got me looking up and squinting into the distance.

  Let me admit something real quick. I knew that there was technology in this world. I’d seen plenty of it. Wren carried a rifle, and now he had Pell’s revolver too. I’d used a computer back at the Glens and again in the MIZ’s library. I’d ridden a train. I’d seen tram and clanking automatons and infrastructure that clearly didn’t belong in some medieval fantasy setting. Hell, I’m writing this now on a Tech Slate that reminds me of an ipad.

  But after spending a bunch of time marching through the Deadlands, and then spending a day in the valley getting chased by echoes swinging swords and spears, and all that talk of magic and ancient battlefields and shit like that, my brain had quietly slid this place into the fantasy category of worlds. It was something like WoW or Lord of the Rings. It was all about magic and elves and low-technology.

  The caravan that approached us cured me of that delusion instantly. Four vehicles crested a rise, rolling in nose to tail. They were cars. Actual cars. Or…at least what used to be cars.

  They were wrecks with their frames bent to hell and paint flaking away entirely. Their windows were long gone. The fiberglass shells were the only reason I could still recognize them for what they’d once been. The roofs had been cut clean off, turning them into something like open-bed wagons or half-trucks. Seats were bolted where dashboards used to be. Crates, barrels, and tarps were lashed down with ropes and thick cables, everything secured tightly.

  Oh, and none of them were being driven. Instead, each vehicle was hitched to a massive metal…thing. I don’t know what they were. They were shaped like animals with thick bodies, broad shoulders, and low heads. But every inch of them was steel and iron. Plates overlapped where muscles should have been, layered and scuffed from years of work. Their joints hissed softly every time they took a step. Heavy ropes and cables stretched from their harnesses to the cars, creaking under constant strain, and every few seconds steam puffed from vents around their heads.

  I just stood there staring at the new sight. It looks like someone had taken a bunch of Mad Max cars, smashed them together with an Oregon Trail wagon train, and then handed the whole mess over to a whole bunch of redneck engineers with too much time and no safety regulations.

  Wren let out a low whistle beside me and Cole took in the scene and smiled like he’d planned this all along.

  The lead vehicle rolled to a stop near us and a guy hopped down. He was lean and sunburned with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He raised a hand in greeting and gave the three of us a slow once-over.

  “Y’all look like hell,” he called out. “You headin’ for The MIZ?”

  “Yea, that’s the plan,” said Wren.

  The guard snorted. “Figured. Ain’t much else out here worth walkin’ toward.” He jerked a thumb back towards the caravan. “Name’s Harker and this is my group. You folks got coin, trade, or skills?”

  Cole straightened a little, even though it obviously hurt him to do so. “Coin and skill,” he said. “Security and general problem-solving.”

  Harker’s eyebrows climbed at that. “General problem-solvin’” he repeated, like the words offended him. “Sounds useful in a city…probably not much call for it on the road.”

  He took in Wren’s rifle and the revolver at his hip, then glanced at Cole and me. We probably didn’t look like much, but he shrugged his shoulders.

  “We’re runnin’ light on guards. Had a pair peel off at the last stop. If you can shoot and don’t plan on stabbin’ us in our sleep, might be we can come to an agreement.”

  Cole nodded. “Well, he can shoot. I’ve got some magic.”

  “Well come on then,” Harker said, waving us closer and motioning towards the second car. “Let’s go and talk to the boss.”

  The “boss” turned out to be his wife. She was a larger woman who was seated sideways in what passed for the driver’s seat of the second car, her boots braced against a crate. Oil-stained gloves were tucked into her belt and a scarf was pulled down over her hair.

  Cole did the talking for us. He laid it out plainly, explaining that we were three able-ish bodies who were familiar with Deadlands threats, willing to pull watch, walk the perimeter, and deal with any problems that cropped up. In exchange, we wanted passage to The MIZ and basic care.

  She looked us over in silence and then sighed. “You’re all a mess.”

  “Recent circumstances,” said Wren.

  She snorted at that. “Yea, well, as long as those circumstances don’t come back to bite this caravan in the ass.” Her gaze flicked to Wren’s rifle and then back to Cole. “We could use the extra eyes. And if you drop dead, that’s on you.”

  Cole shook her hand, and just like that we were part of a convoy headed back to The MIZ.

  One of the other members of the caravan helped us up into the third car and settled us in among crates of scrap, water barrels, and various trade goods. As soon as we were seated, another figure climbed in after us. She had gray hair, a weathered face, and dirt-stained clothes. A symbol that I didn’t recognize hung around her neck. It was silver and bone and worked into something that looked like a spiraling tree.

  “I’m Maribel,” she said as she leaned in to get a look at me. “And you’re bleeding.”

  “Yup,” I agreed weakly.

  She huffed and her eyes glowed a faint blue as she took me in. “Who patched you up?”

  “I did.”

  That earned me a look of disappointment. “Well, we’re gonna have to fix that.”

  She took off all my bandages and wiped clean all the salves that I’d used. As she worked she murmured under her breath and I couldn’t think of anything to say to her that wouldn’t instantly earn me a bunch of anger at my weak first aid skills. She used some magic and it wasn’t a flashy thing. There was some warmth and it felt like things in my body were sliding back to where they belonged. The constant throbbing in my arms finally eased and the pain that had wracked my body and which I’d grown used to over the past few days finally slipped away.

  When she was finished with me, she moved over to work on Wren, cleaning up his leg and drawing down the swelling. Then she closed Cole’s stomach wound and patched up the cut on his scalp. After she was done healing us, she told us off for doing a terrible job at first aid, warned us not to push ourselves or reopen the cuts, and then hopped out of the car to deal with something else.

  The caravan started moving again not long after that. The metal beasts leaned into their harnesses and lurched forward. Steam drifted off of them as the cars started going forward. The desert rolled by in a slow, dusty blur.

  That night we took watch in shifts. Thankfully nothing attacked us because, if it had, I don’t think any of the three of us would have been much use.

  And that’s where things stand now. We’re on a caravan, we’ve been patched up by someone who actually knows what they’re doing, it’s a couple days until we get back to The MIZ, and I’m riding security.

  Seems like a good place to stop for now. I’m gonna log off here, mostly because I know what’s coming. A bunch of you are gonna complain about everything I did and didn’t do. You’ll argue about Corva, about my class, about every decision that I made and all the actions that I took. And honestly? I don’t really have the patience for all that right now.

  I almost died about half a dozen times and I don’t think I can take it if people start being assholes on the forum. I’ll let you all get it out of your system and check back in a day or so. I’ll read everything, so if some of you can calm down enough to offer actual advice for when I’m back in The MIZ, I’d appreciate it.

  Aslyipp

  Of course he leaves. I think this is a good time for me to drop out too. This story was fun when you were in the House, but now you’re stomping all over characters that people absolutely love and I’m done. It was fun while it lasted.

  LittleBoPeepers

  Samesies.

  MushroomCleric

  | I’ll let you all get it out of your system and check back in a day or so. |

  Oh Zeke…you have no idea what you’re gonna come back to.

  https://www.patreon.com/c/elterrible00