A LESSON IN DYING
Chapter 1
"You fool!"
"Oh shush you dimwitted tart! If it wasn't for her it wouldn't have even gone off!" Falksi shied away from the finger that pointed at her in accusation.
Kakashi glanced up at the partially demolished house again, her face still red from arguing with Xovious. Then she turned to Falk.
Falksi was set and ready to bolt, but Kakashi's face softened in sympathy as she saw her expression. "I'm sorry my house blew you up."
"Uh, sorry for blowing your house up," Falk responded, most uncreatively.
There were a few moments of silence in which Kakashi and her looked at each other awkwardly. Then Xovious spoke.
"Well, you really shouldn't ha- AGH!" Xovious's reprimand was broken off as Kakashi kicked his feet out from under him. He landed on his arse, grunting in surprise.
The few people who had gathered to watch the argument unfold gasped. Xovious lifted himself up from the ground, pulling his sword out so it filled the space between him and Kakashi. Almost as if the sword didn't exist, the brave (albeit reckless) Aurulian stared straight into the leader's eyes, even having the gall to smirk. She obviously knew that Xovious wouldn't hurt a town member purposefully unless he was given no other choice.
Xovious, still glaring at Kakashi, spoke, and it took Falk a moment to realise that it was directed at her. "Falksi, you are expected to provide the materials to rebuild Kakashi's house. From your own inventory, not the warehouse."
Falk sighed, but was resigned to the punishment. After all, she had exploded herself along with the entire top portion of the house.
"And Kakashi," he growled, "Don't place end crystals on top of your house as decoration, you twit. Next time I will personally go there and explode it for you."
Kakashi curtisied, giving the leader of Auru a sarcastic smile. "I will be looking forward to the blood spatter covering my walls."
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THREE DAYS LATER...
The last few hours of the day, Falksi spent poring through shelves of books and scrawled notes. There were no specific accounts that fit what she was looking for, but she found some that lightly skimmed the surface. She flipped open one of the large black books in the stack by me and tracked her finger through the names within, searching for one in the midst of many.
You know he's not coming back.
Falk grunted in acknowledgment to her own thought, a habitual response that she had never gained control of entirely. Some people found it strange when Falk spoke or made agreeing sounds to the air, so she tended to do most of her thinking in the Historians' Guild where nobody hung around. Her death a few days ago had disturbed past memories again, and she found consolation in the musky scent of parchment and age old texts.
I died three days ago, but the Artifact saved me. So why did the Artifact fail with my father?
"To be fair," Falk pondered, "it did fail with Harlum, the father of Computern. Do you not remember? The Outlaws slaughtered him once and he never came back. He simply disappeared from this world. In fact, so did countless others."
Falksi could feel her unspoken words hovering on the surface, a silent threat to her sanity.
So did your father.
"But there must be an explanation!" she replied aloud, restlessly snapping another useless book shut an tossing it aside.
"There's always an explanation," a voice spoke, accompanied by the soft footfalls of a person.
"Jed!" Falk exclaimed, caught off guard. "I-I didn't know you were still here. I had assumed you went home by now."
The woman didn't respond, choosing instead to pull up a chair next to where Falk was wading in literal piles of books and paper. She gently picked up a book from the ground, brushing it off and inspecting it before placing it onto the table. "What has you interested in the Artifact so suddenly?"
Jedoi's eyes then skimmed over the three piles of obituaries towered on the desk. "And deaths," she added, her voice lowering an octave.
Falksi was suddenly aware that Jed had probably been alive long enough to have experienced most of the deaths firsthand. It must have been painful to see them live on as a mere statistic. Her fingers traced over the cover of the book the Jed had placed onto the table. The Artifact Vol. II: Theory of Interconnectivity. Written in Sudkuste. The book had spoken of studies performed in Sudkuste on why the Artifact brought the inhabitants of its worlds back to life. It had delineated a sort of connection between people and the Artifact.
"Life stems from life. If we're all part of the greater whole that makes up life, wouldn't it make sense for us to never really die?"
The quote made sense to her when she had first encountered it, but the more she reread it, the more it struck her as plain wrong. If somebody loses life, they would hold no more connection to the Artifact, contrary to the quote. They were at a lack of life, unless their soul was singularly considered a part of it.
The only part that seemed to stick with her was the concept of connections. Falk believed there was a special connection or bond between the Artifact and the residents of every world, but she also believed that the connection wasn't quite the same for everyone; different to the point of not working.
"Jed, where do people go when they die?"
The Guardian looked at Falk, confusion written across her face. "They return back to Aladra, of course."
Falksi nodded, expecting that answer, but her curiosity was still unsatisfied. If all the missing people were still truly alive, and headed off to a continent as nomads, statistics would dictate that eventually someone would run into them. And when they did, the rest of the world would know. But, out of the hundreds of people who went missing, only a few dozen ever came back. Logically, unless there was some hammerspace part of the world where they congregated, the missing people were truly dead, and the Artifact wasn't as perfect as people wanted to believe.
"What about people who have left this world forever? The deviants from the pattern?" Falk pointed to the obituaries to emphasize her point. The names of thousands of people lived in those pages, never to be seen again.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, what about the people who never returned? Those who mysteriously disappeared from their homes and towns, never to be seen again. We list them in our obituaries, but are they really gone?" Falk paused for a moment, thoughtfully stroking the book on Artifact theories before looking up at Jed again. "If the Artifact never fails, then where do they go?"
Jedoi glanced at Falk with an expression she couldn't pinpoint, and for a moment Falk got the disconcerting feeling that she could read her thoughts. For all Falk knew, she could. There was no telling what a person with that caliber of power was capable of.
"I really don't know what to say on this, Falk. I've always just assumed they got lost on an adventure and never found their way back before we sliced our way to the next worlds."
"That makes sense," Falksi said, nodding, "but it doesn't explain how nobody has reported sightings of any of the hundreds of people that have already gone missing in this world. After all, there are only so many places they can be."
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Hatt was dead.
Of course, Hatt wasn't sure if he was even dead, just certain of the single fact that he was "not alive". He couldn't say he was disappointed. In fact, he was quite relieved. Even in the partial state of subconscious that he was floating in, he knew he wouldn't have wished for anything else.
Perhaps some intermediary state of being, he thought to himself, conflicted by his impression of death and ability to function properly.
Out of the nothingness that clouded his mind, however, a shape appeared. It closed in on Hatt, and stopped before him, it's red eyes only inches from what must have been his face.
"Another one?" it hissed, tone rising to form a question. "What world do you hail from, child?"
Hatt, overwhelmed by the sheer redness staring him in the face, swallowed nervously. He must have ended up in some twisted hell to have been approached by a creature like this.
"Am I dead? Who ar-"
"Where are you from?" the red eyes hissed, more insistently this time.
"Uh-"
"SPEAK CHILD!"
"Loka!" Hatt forced out, genuinly terrified.
The demon, crimson eyes bleeding with satisfaction, backed off from Hatt, giving him room to recover. He gladly took the time to ease his own shock and wonder if there was a way out of hell. He didn't quite fancy spending the rest of his afterlife floating through through a cognitive abyss and being followed by a monster whose name he didn't know.
"Very good. Very good indeed," the demon crooned, ignoring Hatt's presence completely now that he had gotten his answer. "The child's soul shall act as a fine passage."
Hatt's heart stopped (although it certainly shouldn't have been capable of that if he was really dead) and he stepped back, away from the monster with it's evil eyes and voice. His foot hit something hard.
"Where might you be going child?" a voice spoke into his ear. Hatt stiffened, his breath now coming out in gasps.
"Who are you? What do you mean by 'passage'?"
"I have some ends... that require meeting," the monster said. It shifted behind him, but Hatt dared not move. "I assume," the demon said, smirking, "you would like to know the name of your killer."
The knife was in Hatt's stomach before he had time to register its appearance. He gasped and folded in over the newly formed wound, confused on whether he was able to die a second time in this strange transitional realm.
"Some call me Preksak. Of course, you won't need to call me anything after I'm done with you." The demon, Preksak, lowered its voice gleefully. "The soul is trapped, and the Knife is complete..."
"This will work well," it said, twisting the knife impossibly deeper into Hatt. When it removed the weapon at last, it glistened in the lowlight of the intermediary, its light akin to that of Preksak's eyes. Hatt fell to the ground, eyes dull, and Preksak moved forward to begin the process of latching onto the soul gate.
"Watch out little Lokans, this monster is coming out from under the bed."
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FIVE WEEKS LATER...
Falk rolled out of her bed. The sun shone straight into her eyes, so she had to blunder until she was able to reach the curtains and pull them down.
"Nnghnn," she groaned, returning to her bed and lying down again to ponder. The alcohol must have fueled her dream to be extraordinarily terrifying that night. She thought she remembered something about a demon and being in a body that was far to bulky for her.
The headache pounding at her brain also reminded her of the detour that she took the night before when heading home from the shooting range. She'd been trying her best to improve upon her archery skills, but her arm could hardly pull back the string on the generic War Guild bows, much less aim and shoot an arrow. The disappointment as she left had been overwhelming enough that she ended up stopping into the tavern for what she promised herself was going to be a "light sip". That light sip eventually became half of the tavern's running storage and Falk had stumbled between houses until she passed out somewhere on the street. Someone must have noticed her lying around, and brought her back to the bed in her small abode behind the Alchemy Guild.
Falk stood up, trying to hold back the nausea that threatened her stomach. She made her way shakily down the stairs. Dogs swarmed around her feet all the way, and she had to avoid stepping on a few tails here and there. The headache seemed to be fading quickly, most likely attributed to her heightened immunity to alcohol. There were some perks to alcoholism in that, but it was constantly contested by the symptoms she suffered the next morning.
You sort of overdid it last night, don't you think?
"I'm fine."
You're not fine.
"Fight me."
I'm in your head, dumbass.
Falk sighed wearily, and the voice quieted itself, obedient to her unspoken plight.
A knock suddenly sounded at the door, followed by furious yelling. Among the cacophony, Falk could pick out the voice of Tyrriel and, surprisingly enough, Iyo. She didn't peg him for one who would start up an argument, much less participate in one.
"-you really expect her to know? Wouldn't someone more...," the voice paused momentarily, but resumed again, this time too quietly for Falk to make out. She threw a nervous glance at the mirror she held above her crafting table, noting her frazzled bed head and awkwardly protruding vines, but moved to open the door.
Iyo and Tyrriel froze when Falk threw open the door. The sunlight from the right bit seared her eyes for a bit before she adjusted to the change in lighting, and her headache greedily took the temporary discomfort as incentive to start up again.
"What the flippin' farts are you doing out here at this time and why are you so damn loud?" Falk practically yelled, gesturing to the ever bright sun rising over Auru's wall in the east. Fortunately, both men had the decency to look ashamed, and Falk lowered her voice.
"I wasn't sleeping anyway," she amended.
Iyo spoke and his deep voice took a concerned tone. "Someone died."
"So?" Falk responded, confused. "Someone's always dying"
"No, someone has died... for good."
Oh.
"They were found by the Artifact a few days ago, a stab wound in their stomach", Tyrriel added, but Falk wasn't paying attention.
Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead...
"Falksi?"
Dead, dead, dead, dead...
Fingers snapped in front of Falk's face, breaking her mantra and bringing her back to reality.
"We came to you first since you have the most experience with... situations like these." Tyrriel awkwardly trailed off, knowing that he was dangerously close to a sensitive topic. Most who were close to Falk were aware of the unusual disease that had claimed her father for good. If anyone was experienced with death, it was her, especially having spent the last few weeks holed up in the Historians' Guild building reading documents and past obituaries.
"I-I'll check it out. Where is the body?"
"Uh, here's the thing," Iyo said, expression darkening. "The body... It's gone."
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