When Heroes Die

“And so Triumphant warned: ‘Servants of stillness, bound by chains not of your own making, know now the doom that encroaches. No unearthly scavengers shall give rise to your corpse. Even memories of your civilizations will long be ground to dust before I have had my fill. Understand what it is that you face. Kneel, or be utterly annihilated.'”

— Extract from the Scroll of Dominion, twenty-fourth of the Secret Histories of Praes

Dark.

Dark all around me.

I couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear. Couldn’t feel.

I tried to open my mouth, then realized that I didn’t have one. I tried to reach up with my hands, then discovered that I didn’t have any of those either.

What… what’s going on? Am I dead?

To my senses, the world had become the kind of absence I felt when trying to remember what my own face looked like twenty years in the past.

I knew that I would be feeling the onset of a panic attack if I had a body to experience one.

How long had I been in this state? Were the others alive?

I felt the angels bury me in a hug.

It was the only emotion that I could feel at all.

The only impression of the world that remained to me was the vague inhuman sense that I had gained upon arriving at Calernia. Not that it helped me much. It was as if I was trying to judge what was happening on the opposite side of the ocean by the vibrations in the water of a local river.

Was everybody dead? I didn’t feel cold, or hot, or anything else. Instead, I had an almost clinical understanding that this situation wasn’t right. I knew that I should be feeling panic, isolation, loneliness, and a whole host of other feelings. Rather than experiencing them, it was like reading the names of the emotions off of a list on a page.

That knowledge, more than anything else, was unnerving in how not unnerving it was.

There were louder silences at funerals. The sense of nothingness was all encompassing. I had no idea how much time had passed at all since my defeat.

I attempted to reach out and change the world. My will found no purchase. I tried again and again. I should have felt anger, frustration, and fear. Instead, I felt nothing. If I could breathe, I would have been hyperventilating.

I had known in theory that I could survive my body being destroyed. Roland, Max and I had speculated on it in the past, and it certainly made sense with the information we had at the time. I hadn’t wanted to ever put it to the test, but this was certainly confirmation enough. I didn’t know how I was still able to think. While knowing the answer might have been fascinating in other circumstances, right now I couldn’t even muster the curiosity to properly care about it.

Could I recreate my body? It wasn’t as if I didn’t know it intimately. I prepared to make the attempt. I started to reach out and try to impose my will on the world.

Nothing. It was like grabbing at smoke.

I focused and tried again. Once more, I was met with no success.

What does this mean?

I had almost certainly blacked out before… discorporating. I wasn’t willing to call this dying. Not having a body but still being alive was normal, and it wasn’t as if anyone could tell me otherwise.

I lost awareness for some time, which meant that I couldn’t influence the world as a direct result. I didn’t know how long it had been since then, but it hadn’t been a full week.

Laurence and Yvette could be dead.

No, no, they weren’t dead and they hadn’t abandoned me. I wasn’t willing or able to believe that. They were somewhere nearby, and I just needed to find them.

Find them… without any real senses other than a diluted sense of self.

No, that wasn’t accurate. In fact, I could immediately tell that Laurence was alive and with me. I would have noticed sooner, if I wasn’t so stuck in trying to make sense of my own circumstances. I could feel the sword, the infinitely sharp blade cutting into a part of me. It was positioned almost adjacent to the centre of where I was.

Gods Above, I presume that I hate that I can’t hate this.

She was still uncomfortable for me to be around. I wanted to be glad. It seemed that at least my sense of danger hadn’t been entirely stripped away along with everything else. She was a sword, a sword that cut through everything. The absence where she stood was far more noticeable than it was usually without other senses to distract me. For once, it was what I imagined should be a relief. I was reminded that I was not alone.

What else could I find?

I could feel the Ratlings. There were so, so many of them. I had been vaguely aware of them in the background before, but with no other sense to pay attention to, they were far easier to focus on. The Horned Lord was still around. At least, I thought it was the Horned Lord. There was a giant ravening maw of Hunger far above Laurence that was busy consuming smaller expressions of the same essential concept. The Horned Lord’s bundle of consumption grew an infinitesimal amount with each Ratling it devoured.

Was that it, or was there more?

With nothing else to distract me, the movement of the smaller Ratlings was almost mesmerizing. They ran back and forth frantically through a complicated tunnel system dug into the ground in patterns that were pleasing to the eye. It was as if I was observing the Ratlings orchestrate a grand performance to the benefit of no audience. One that spanned an area larger than my entire range.

It struck me then that I couldn’t even see a fraction of it. I wasn’t certain of how enormous it truly was.

Could I do anything to help Laurence and my daughter? I needed some way to remain useful. I required a purpose, else I wasn’t sure that I would still be sane by the time I was able to influence Creation once more. Actually, was that even true?

No.

It was just something that I was telling myself because it seemed like the kind of thing that I would believe in other circumstances.

On reflection, I was convinced that I could remain like this forever and not find any problem with it, if only because I didn’t have the capacity to feel otherwise. I wouldn’t become mad, because I couldn’t become mad. The same held true for boredom or any other emotional responses.

That, more than anything, told me that this was a major concern. If I wanted to remain human by the time the week ended, then I needed to hold onto human-like thoughts.

I suspected that if my Grace did not restrict my actions, my body would have immediately reformed after falling apart. Any death at all should trigger a reformation. My identity was so strongly entrenched in having a body that I couldn’t imagine myself without one. Well, I couldn’t until now.

Is there anything that I can do while this restriction is in place?

There… was. Without having my senses stripped from me, I wasn’t certain I would ever have been able to even contemplate it. The idea was one that I felt that I should be uncomfortable with.

There were many opponents who had contained me during my time in my new world. The experience had always been unpleasant. I had felt as if I had been metaphysically squeezed through the holes in a cheese grater. I didn’t know if I was able to do this to myself on purpose, but I was willing to make an attempt at it.

Yvette was certainly able to detect me. Even if I hadn’t taught her how to, she had spent so much time studying me that she would have figured it out on her own regardless of my help. Maybe if I changed the shape of my imprint, I would be able to communicate with her? It was worth trying. It wasn’t as if there was anything else that I could attempt to do.

Is this dangerous?

I didn’t think that it should be. It had been done to me many times before without any long-term damage. It was probable that the sense of caution that I currently didn’t have would have put me off experimenting with this. I weighed the decision in my head for a while and then decided I would follow through with it. This was a choice that I didn’t think I would make if I was being influenced by my emotions, but I held it to be the correct one.

I need to restore my survival instinct as soon as possible.

I started to experiment, I tried to pull myself inwards. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to achieve the result that I wanted. It took multiple attempts before innovate started to assist. Figuring it out seemed to take longer than I would have expected, and I flinched only moments after my first success.

That was something that I could feel. Despite not having a body, it was just as uncomfortable as I remembered that it should be.

Do I continue through with this?

It felt like asking myself if I should do something stupid. Wouldn’t it be smarter to just leave this alone? Surely this was a danger sign? A warning not to hurt myself. The only real survival instinct that a demon as a demon would have.

Without emotions clouding my decision-making, I didn’t have any real attachment towards Laurence and Yvette, or anyone else, really. Couldn’t I choose to remain like this forever? Everything would be able to continue without me. Taylor with a body would find this decision horrifying, but Taylor with a body was dead and gone. Taylor without a body was fine as is.

No, don’t think this way.

I was about to discard the idea entirely when I paused. I couldn’t trust any decisions I made without emotional context. Right now, it was as if I was divorced from reality.

“What do I do?”

The words were not spoken. Instead, I thought about them in the general direction of my angelic family. I was certain that they could read my thoughts. I couldn’t trust my own judgement. Being temporarily bereft of a body made me too inhuman to make any proper decisions. Ironically, that put me in a similar position to the angels. Despite that caveat, I did trust their opinion on the subject of my own sense of self.

They would know if I was about to hurt myself, and their nature made it so that I knew through logic alone that they had to have my wellbeing in mind.

They weren’t capable of doing anything else.

I received a strong sense of approval in response. Taking it as a sign of encouragement, I continued with my experimentation.

It took a while from my perspective — although that didn’t mean much, I had no reference for time — and the process was extremely uncomfortable, but the essence of me slowly became more concentrated. The Hunger moved to fill in the space I was vacating. I suspected that it would rush away hastily if I were to release myself once more.

What next?

I had compressed myself down to a much smaller shape. It wasn’t something that I would have done to myself without encouragement, and it didn’t really feel like any progress had been made. My family sent me another impression. This one dredged up a memory long forgotten… a memory from my past.

“You will need a tether, an anchor. It can be an idea, a physical thing, a place, a person, a goal. Right now, it will not seem so important, but it will. When all is said and done, you will either be dead, and this thing will be a comfort to you in your last moments, or you will be powerful, and it will be all you have left. Decide what you will hold on to.”

The circumstances weren’t the same. Being stuck in this position was unlikely to make me any more powerful, but it was the context that mattered. It was apparent that my body had been my only tether to my humanity. Without a physical representation of myself to anchor my existence to, the pattern of my thoughts was starting to decay. Without the experience of humanity, I was becoming less human.

An immeasurable amount of time later, and it occurred to me that I had a problem.

I didn’t currently have the capacity to even make emotional connections to people. The Choir of Compassion was an exception to that, but not one that was helpful. I couldn’t use them as an anchor, because I was trying to hold onto my humanity. As nice as the angels were, they weren’t human. I would likely be the demonic expression of compassion by the time I could recreate my body if I used them as a reference point. I wasn’t sure what that would even mean for me, but I doubted it was a good idea.

Was there anything wrong with being a demon of compassion? Yes, yes, there was. People are more than just a single virtue expressed, that wasn't an acceptable outcome..

How do I choose?

Narrative. I had said that I would adopt Yvette. The bond between a mother and her daughter was about as strong as one could become. I hadn’t imagined being in this position when I had decided to adopt her. If I had understood more of the details surrounding this specific thread of story, then I certainly would not have counted existing as a disembodied phantom for a week as being a safe story to stick myself into.

I would need to be far more careful when evaluating stories this way in future.

Either way, I had made that choice once as a human. I decided to make the same decision again in my current form.

I felt surprised when I heard my daughter’s voice. Then I felt surprised that I was able to feel surprise. My concentration on the task of compressing myself almost lapsed. I refocused on it for the last few moments and prevented my effort from being undone.

“-though Taylor’s head is caved in, and her legs are a mess, I’m certain that she’s not dead. She promised she would be my ma. She promised that she wouldn’t leave me, and I believe her. Besides, she’s still alive, I can feel her. She isn’t human like us. Just wait a little while longer, and she will be back.” a voice murmured.

It was Yvette. Her voice sounded odd, like the running of water down a drain.

With nothing else to listen to, it was easy to follow her speech. It was uncanny hearing her and being able to make out what it was that she was saying.

I couldn’t hear anyone else. I could only hear Yvette, but for now that was acceptable. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than the situation I was in before. All of a sudden I could feel emotions again and that was more relieving than I could possibly imagine. Reviewing my memories of the unknown amount of time since I had woken up scared me. I didn’t know how long had passed since my physical demise, but it certainly wasn’t long. If I had remained like that for a full week, there was no telling how alien I would have been by the end of it.

Most of my senses were still essentially non-existent and that was terrifying, but at least I had one anchor to hold onto.

I’d do my best to… live with this nightmare. I would experiment and hope I that found a way around this. There was no way that remaining in nothingness would be good for my mental health. I prayed that waiting wasn’t the only way out of this.

“Just because she’s not human doesn’t mean she’s evil. The elves exist, and they are a Good race. Think about all the good she’s done, does that seem like the kind of thing an Evil person would do?”

I wanted to give Yvette the biggest hug possible, if only because she might have saved my sense of humanity. It did mean that for now my ability to experience emotions was tied to her continued existence, but I could live with that.

Actually…

“She’s chosen by an angelic choir, and you aren’t. If anything, that makes her-”

There was nothing stopping me from giving Yvette a hug. The Choir of Compassion certainly hugged me plenty, and they didn’t have a body for it. I scrunched myself up further.

“— better than you. So, if we're using that as a scale, she’s the hero, and you’re the Evil monster who doesn’t do anything except judge people unfairly and swing a sword. When have you ever built anything? She helped rebuild a whole city-”

I had a sense of where Yvette’s body was now. The sense had appeared at about the same time as I was able to hear her talk. It was like proprioception for somebody else, except without the ability to puppet them. That was enough. With great effort, I scrunched myself up further, changing the space my essence occupied until it was roughly humanoid in appearance. Then I hugged her tightly from behind.

“— oh look, ma’s woken up,” the pitch of her voice raised and evened out. “I told you that she was still alive. Can’t you remake your body like you transmute everything else, then we can leave afterwards?”

If I had a mouth, I would have frowned. I wasn’t sure how to communicate with her.

I couldn’t talk to her. At least, I couldn’t talk to her yet. Was there a way to work around that restriction? I could reshape myself. Was that good enough? She could — at least vaguely — see what I was doing. I started to reshape myself into words.

It was much harder than I would have liked, especially because the local alphabet was different and there wasn’t an equivalent for cursive. I needed to connect all my letters in a way that they were still readable. I couldn’t just split myself into multiple parts.

Can’t. Limited.

I was going to have to figure out how to… not walk, but whatever my current equivalent of walking was as well. There was a lot that needed investigating once I finished catching up with the other two. I had understood on some level that I didn’t need a body to move around, but until now I hadn’t been forced into a position where I needed to figure it out. In the past, it had been hard to experiment with when I was distracted by every other sense at the same time.

“Why can’t you? I can tell that you’re the same. Do you require help? I’ll do my best, but this might be beyond me. I’ve never transmuted the environment into a form as complicated as your body before. Please tell me you can do this on your own?” Yvette whined.

I started the process of reshaping myself once again. Compared to the rate that Yvette was speaking at, this was agonizingly slow.

“Ma is perfectly safe to be around. If she wanted to be a villain, she certainly wouldn’t have come up north. I don’t think villains would care about how safe my magic is, either. She also wouldn’t insist I go to sleep early, or be anywhere near as concerned as she is about what I have to eat.”

One. Week.

“What do you require one week for? Oh, is it like when you do something hard, and then you can’t change things for a while? That makes sense. How did you even mess with time anyhow? It gave me a headache just from looking at.”

There had to be an easier way to communicate than this. Being superimposed on top of the world but unable to directly affect it was frustrating. How about… if I did the reverse of what I was doing at the moment. I expanded once more. The further I stretched, the more relieved I felt. Then, I started to reshape the part of me closest to Yvette. I pulled parts of myself out.

“Yes, I remember your story about the Salutary Alchemist. If ma wanted to do something like that, she wouldn’t need to go to nearly this much effort. I’m certain she can mind control people. If we start killing everyone just because of what they could do in theory if they were villains, then you would be near the top of that list.”

It worked. Not only that, but it worked well. This was far better than what I was doing before. I was communicating by my absence instead of by my presence.

Unless I find a solution, I’m stuck like this for one week. I’ll try to come up with a better idea. What happened? Are you safe?

“I’m fine, and so is grumpy grandma over here. She’s worried that you’re some big evil monster who's going to kill everyone, but that doesn’t even make any sense. Unfortunately, Sisyphus didn’t survive the fall, but the two of us did. Grumpy grandma caught me and then ran on air, somehow down to the ground.”

Her voice was quieter now that I was less concentrated, but I could still make it out. It took a while. I needed to wait impatiently for her to finish speaking her sentence. The experience was downright bizarre.

Be more respectful of Laurence.

I wasn’t entirely sure how Laurence would respond towards being called a grumpy grandmother, but… the idea left me with more than a small amount of trepidation.

“I would be polite to her, but she’s been rude to you. You would think that she would realize the angels wouldn’t choose you if you were Evil, especially not the Choir of Compassion. What, does she think you fooled them or something? That doesn’t even make sense, if you could do something like that then you could squash us li-”

Where are you?

Best to cut her off before she says something that upsets Laurence even further. The Saint didn’t like wizards at the best of times, and I didn’t want my daughter to antagonize her.

“There was a big ravine below the arena that the Horned Lord dropped us into, but the roof has unfortunately sealed over since then. The Saint wants to cut her way out, but I think it's a bad idea. What if it's still there? It almost beat us when you were there as well.”

I expanded further, stretching out to my full range. The Horned Lord was still feasting on other Ratlings. It was almost as if it had gone into some kind of Hunger possessed madness.

I hadn’t expected to feel pity for a hundred-foot tall Horned Rat. It was hard not to. The Ratling was clearly not stupid. What would it be like, being chained to a compulsion like that? Being forced to eat no matter your own desires. The Horned Lord might be a monster, but I suspected it wasn’t entirely by choice.

It helped to contextualize the Chain of Hunger. The more time I spent here, the more depressing it was to see.

Laurence would almost certainly want to resume the fight. I didn’t think it was a good idea without taking more time to prepare. The first encounter hadn’t gone so well, but now we had a much better understanding of what the Ratling could do. I wasn’t sure if she would be willing to put it off until I was able to help or not. Could I lie to her about this or manipulate her in some way?

It was possible that I could, but from the perspective of stories, I suspected that it would not end well for me. The alien entity that lies to people wasn’t a good story to fall into. Neither was the one that deceives people using the truth. That was just setting myself up as one of the Fae down the line. So I’d tell the unvarnished truth, and hope that she would be willing to listen to reason.

That was when I noticed the movement of many of the smaller Ratlings change. They were beginning to approach this part of the cave system.

Compressing myself once more, I started to speak to my daughter once again.

The Horned Lord is still up there. I can’t help with it at the moment. Smaller Ratlings are approaching. Can you two escape and survive long enough for me to recover before we make another attempt?

Yvette conveyed my words to Laurence, then she repeated what Laurence said in return.

“The Saint wants to know if you can guide us out of the caverns safely. We still need to eat and drink, and we can’t stay here. You can still sense all the other Ratlings, right? That means you can help find the way out of here for us.”

That was a good point. I didn’t know the shape of the caverns, but I didn’t need to. I just needed to follow the trail of the Hunger and guide them with it. It was also a clever use of my rather limited circumstances. It would mean guiding them into trouble, but… there was no avoiding trouble now.

She doesn’t trust her own senses?

“Not since the Horned Lord can manipulate them. She wants to rely on yours instead.”

I can do this. Tell Laurence thank you from me. I don’t like feeling helpless.

It was nice to know that despite how much the two of them appeared to be failing at getting along, Laurence was willing to trust me. I suspected that Yvette might just be misinterpreting something that Laurence had said. The decision made no sense otherwise.

“She says it’s not a problem, but she wants to have a long talk about what you are and where you came from the moment that you can.”

That’s fine.

It would have to be.

“Then we’re ready to go. You can lead the way, unless there is something else you want to talk about first?”

Remember to take whatever supplies you can off of Sisyphus.

“We can do that.” she paused, she sounded uncomfortable when she resumed talking. “We’ll burn your body too. Is there anything else you want us to take before we leave? The Saint looks like she wants to swing her sword at something.”

My daughter was far too disrespectful about the Saint of Swords.

My Robes, my journal, and the notes I made on Ratlings. Be polite to Laurence.

“Right, so we’ll take what we can, and then we’ll leave. Unfortunately, some things will have to be left behind, but that isn’t unexpected.”

I noticed that she had declined to comment on my reproach of her poor manners. She was going to be receiving a talking to about not mouthing off dangerous people when we were in a less urgent situation.

I stretched myself out once more, then started to feel around. It took a few moments to build a mental map of what was occurring around us before I scrunched myself back into a tighter ball.

This way. Keep talking to me, Yvie. Don’t stop.

I was relying on her to distract me from my situation while I started to experiment. Hopefully, it would be enough. The others began to follow my directions. I hadn’t wanted to learn just how inhuman I really was. Unfortunately, it seemed like I was going to have to. I was praying that there was enough for me to hold onto. I was praying that by the time I escaped the confines of my prison, I hadn’t been driven insane.