The Dark Lord of Crafting

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

A friendly reminder. As a newly incarnated hero, your very existence disrupts the fabric of the veil that separates Plana from Bedlam. Lesser entities will attempt to take advantage of this weakness where it is greatest to slip into the world. Fortunately, direct sunlight suffices to banish lesser entities, but you will still have to take care to avoid leaving yourself exposed in times and places where they are likely to appear. Seek the guidance of more experienced heroes in how best to manage this inconvenience.

Reminder? How did this count as a reminder? While I had apparently been correct that monster spawns were not specifically a drawback of my power-set, they were still going to happen. I tapped off my status screen, grabbed my ax, and started jogging to the forest. The sky was still pale around the edges, and the stars were bright. Plana had a moon, but it was smaller and dimmer than the one I was used to, just now rising over the horizon. As far as I could see, there were no interdimensional horrors currently present to jump me. That was a plus.

Insects were chirping, and I heard what might have been an owl hooting somewhere far off. Then came the groan. It was a low, drawn out sound, the noise a person might make coming out of a drugged stupor.

It was about thirty feet to my left. Humanoid, but not human. Everything about it was slightly wrong. The way it was standing, listing to one side, and the shape of its shoulders. It had a bit of a humpback. Nothing against anyone who has physical differences, but everything about this thing was terrifying. I could feel the wrongness in the air as it came toward me.

It was just standing there, so I kept hustling toward the woods. Even if I ran back to my shelter now, I would still be exposed on two sides. I made it to the treeline and tried to keep an eye out for more monsters while I chopped it down. Its trunk was thick enough that harvesting a chunk wouldn’t cut all the way through, so I could control the direction of its fall. I stood to one side as the half of the trunk that was still there popped and snapped. A branch slapped my head as it went down, falling into the open grass, and I blinked away tears at the sudden pain.

Wouldn’t that be something, if I knocked myself out with a tree while there were zombies around. Get it together. The creature was shuffling toward me in no great haste, but even with an ax, I could only harvest a few logs before it was close enough that it couldn’t be ignored.

It made slippery noises as it moved, as if instead of a person, this was just a pile of eels pretending to be a guy for a job interview.

"Stay back," I said, waving the ax, and it was not impressed. Shifting around to keep the felled tree between us, I weighed my options. The zombie was slow and unarmed. I could take it. The fight-or-flight instinct was well underway, and I felt like my heart was in my throat. Its eyes were milky white, and it was close enough now for me to see the jagged teeth in its open mouth as it moaned. The thing was wearing a robe that covered most of its body. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen zombie movies before. You had to hit them in the head. But as it stepped up onto the felled tree, I realized that it wasn’t wearing a robe. Those flaps and folds were its skin, and there were tentacles beneath them. The tentacles had mouths.

As it reached for me, my instincts failed. Instead of chopping off its head, I ran. I held my ax just under its wooden head to keep it under better control as I sprinted, and I was back at the shelter while the zombie was still fumbling around the tree.

The blocks that formed its walls hadn't sealed to the ground, but they were affixed to the planks that made up the ceiling, and the planks held together and to the support poles by the crafting force, so it was relatively stable, and you couldn’t just push the wall over. Sealing it off completely wasn’t an option with the materials at hand, not unless I broke it all down to make myself a coffin, but I didn’t have that kind of time.

After kicking up the grass mat, I crouched down and quickly converted the log coins to blocks and the blocks to planks, trying not to lose sight of the coins as they multiplied. It was enough material to board up the end of my shelter that was facing the incoming zombie, though I had to do that from the outside because the planks were too long to fit laterally in the interior. The monster was still shuffling toward me, now only about twenty paces away.

A one foot square window in the walls wouldn’t be wide enough for that thing to climb through, though I would still have to worry about the tentacles. So I could use a few wood blocks from the walls to make more planks, mostly board up the other end, crawl inside, and block the remaining opening with different materials.

The plan was rushing through my head as I picked my ax back up and ran around to the other side of the shelter, whereupon I bumped into another zombie. It looked about the same as the first one had, though less hunchbacked, and I struck out on reflex. My ax buried itself in the thing’s left arm, and it didn’t even blink.

It grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me in like it was going for a hug. Then it bit my ear. This was not a love nip. Its teeth clamped down on my ear, and the pain was instant and severe. Its arms were around me, and as I tried to pushed it away, I tripped, falling backward with the zombie on top of me. I screamed as the cartilage gave way to its teeth and it took away half of my ear. Blood poured down the side of my face. Its weight was on my chest, and I struggled to roll it off of me. As I did so, a tentacle surfaced out of the fleshy folds of its body, and a lamprey like mouth planted itself on my stomach.

In the bottom left corner of my vision, an image had appeared.

Hearts? Are you kidding me? I scrambled to my feet, and it took away a mouthful of my belly as I got up and stepped back, but I was so freaked out that I barely felt it happen. My new health meter dropped by another half a heart. The zombie was slow to right itself, giving me an opportunity to retrieve my ax and swing it down into the horror's skull. The blade lodged itself in the creature’s head and stuck there. It stopped moving.

For a few seconds, I stood frozen. My thoughts disorganized and sluggish, and all I could hear was my own labored breathing. Then the shuffling footsteps of the first zombie penetrated that haze, and I looked up in time to see that it was only paces away. I grabbed the haft of my ax and tugged it free. My mind was blank, and my body seemed to act on its own as I hacked at the thing’s neck.

It stumbled, but didn’t die, and I hit it again. Then again. I was so intent on making sure it was dead that I didn’t notice the third zombie shambling up behind me, but I definitely felt its teeth sink into my shoulder. I tried to turn, but it had wrapped its arms around my waist, and ended up pulling us both forward before tripping over the other one’s corpse.

Once again, I found myself on the ground, grappling with a monster. The ax was underneath me, and the zombie was on my back, gnawing on my shoulder like it was a chicken wing. It’s not like I’d never been hurt before, but I had never experienced anything like this. Being eaten alive was an entirely new kind of pain, and my mind went blank with panic.

Panting, I fought to get out from under it, all the while feeling its slippery tentacles moving across my body. I reached back with one arm, grabbing at its face, and dug my thumb into one of its eyes. It popped, and eye jelly ran over my hand. The zombie didn’t seem to care, and its teeth sank into my neck.

It came away with a mouthful of my flesh, and was so satisfied with the prize that I was able to scramble out from under it. I didn't get far. Blood was shooting out of my neck. Literally shooting, timed to the beat of my heart.

Oh, crap. My hands went to the ragged wound on my neck to try to stem the tide. It hurt so much that it didn't really hurt. I couldn't feel anything. My body was going numb as I bled to death. Applying pressure didn't seem to do anything. On my knees, blood streaming over my hands, I watched the zombie swallow in slow motion.

Well, that hadn't taken long.

***

My eyes shut tight as I screamed, and my hands went to my neck, but there was no blood, no pain, no wound of any kind. Also, I was standing up, and that was weird. I opened my eyes.

This was not Plana. An outcrop of light brown rock stretched out before me, ending at a sharp point. Beyond that was outer space. Twinkling stars and swirling nebulae, emptiness beyond emptiness. It was beautiful, peaceful, and terrifying. Where the outcrop ended, a gray rectangle floated in the nothing, clearly outlined. A simple phrase stood out from its surface in white lettering.

Quit Game

As my gaze settled on the bar, I experienced a sense of vertigo. I could feel myself tipping, falling, though I was standing still. My heart dropped out of my chest, and I felt the same fear that I had what could have only been moments before as a monster made a meal of my throat.

I turned away from the bar, holding my head as the dizziness subsided. The view behind me was very different from the one ahead.

The platform I was standing on was shaped like a diamond, extending an equal distance in both directions. One end led to the void, and the other, back to Plana. I could see the field around my spawn point, frozen in a still image, obscured as if by a pane of fogged glass.

Another gray bar sat suspended in the image.

Continue

There was also a centaur.

He was standing beneath the “Continue” bar. The part of his body that was a horse had a white coat and tail, as sleek and pristine as a unicorn. His human torso was bare, a lean body on the edge of gauntness. Long black hair framed an angular face, chiseled, with high cheekbones and a full mouth, but only one eye. He wasn’t missing an eye. There was no eyepatch, no empty socket, the eye was oversized, and centered above his nose. This centaur was also a cyclops.

“Ah,” I said, “Uh.”

The centaur regarded me in silence, his expression severe. I had a lot of questions, but I settled for the basics.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“An interstice,” the centaur said, his voice quiet, but clear, “a threshold.”

“Do you work for Mizu?” The goddess had said that when I died, I would go on my way like any normal soul, hadn’t she? There had been no mention of a respawn option.

The centaur frowned. “She is my supervisor, but I do not work for her. My name is Liminus, and I am the entity charged to serve as a guide for those who leave Plana with their souls intact, easing their transition.”

“Does everyone get a respawn option?”

He shook his head and clip-clopped closer. “Your case is unusual. Mizu has decreed that you may go forward or back. I can offer you counsel, but you must decide of your own free will.”

That was good news. A second life that lasted less than twenty-four hours would have been kind of a gyp. But maybe I wasn’t cut out for this. Mizu had given me this chance because a mistake on her part had caused my death, not because I was special or deserved it.

“What happens if I choose not to go back? I’ll just go to the normal afterlife, right?”

Liminus shook his head, his long, dark hair swaying. “I cannot say. To attain what is next, a soul must pass through the celestial forge. Some are annealed, while others are melted for scrap, their essence becoming the fuel of some future life.”

Wait, what?

“Not everyone gets an afterlife?”

Liminus stopped a pace away from me and gestured toward the void. I turned, trying not to look at the “Quit Game” bar, and took in the stars. The longer I looked, the more there seemed to be.

“Infinity is not infinite,” he said. “The stuff of which souls are made is valuable. Life is a test, of sorts, and the reward for a life well lived is to be tested yet again. Those who fail are not worthy of continued existence.”

“Jesus,” I said. “What kind of test is it? What happens if I go forward?”

“Strong souls pass through the forge to enter the Hierarchy. The weak, the dissolute, dissolve.”

“How do I know which one I am?”

He stepped beside me. “It is difficult for one who has lived only a single life to understand. Surviving the forge requires a soul to be solid, defined. Some people know who they are and possess a core of diamond. Others merely think they know, but their core is like a lump of clay, easily molded, easily dissolved.”

Out there, in the darkness, a pink and green nexus swirled, a galaxy vaster than the milky way. Watching it, I did not feel like a person with a core of diamond.

“But I can just go back to Plana? Does that mean I can live forever? I don’t have to worry about the whole celestial forge thing?”

He placed a hand on my shoulder. Its warmth made me realize how cold I was.

“There is a cost.”

Of course there was.

“If you choose to return to life,” he said, “A piece of your soul will be consumed to fuel your rebirth.”

“So if I die again, it will be even harder for me to make it through the forge?”

“Life is life. A soul can strengthen and grow, or it can sicken and shrink, according to its experiences. If you are not ready now, you may be ready when you come to me again. All lives end. It is the condition of the soul when it reaches that end which is of significance.”

“Can you tell me how to improve my soul?”

“I could, but it would not matter. You will not remember our meeting.”

I stepped out from under his hand, turning to confront him.

“That’s messed up,” I said. “Why would I forget this? I remember meeting Mizu.”

His one oversized eye settled on me, and in it, I saw the same void that I was so afraid of meeting.

“I told you that your life is a test. To provide you with the answers would nullify its purpose. I can give you whatever counsel you require in making your decision, but once that decision is made, it will be as if we never spoke.”

“What about normal people? They don’t have a choice to go back. How do you guide them?”

His expression softened. “Some find solace in conversation. Others discover themselves, or what they believe themselves to be, in this place of clarity. Being confronted with infinity puts one’s existence in perspective. This interstice will not make a weak soul into a strong one, but it can provide those who are nearly ready a place to prepare themselves for judgment.”

If there was one thing I knew, it was that I was not ready for judgment. I’d had a lot of advantages in life. I was pretty smart, and I had a wonderful family. It would have been possible for me to lead a relatively happy, productive existence even after dropping out of highschool. There had been plenty of time for me to figure myself out, and though things hadn’t been perfect, there was no excuse for what I had done. I was nineteen when I was arrested, and as I grew up, I had come to think of incarceration as a kind of crucible of its own, an opportunity to make a better version of myself, but I doubted that kind of crucible was anything compared to something a magic centaur was calling the “celestial forge.” After my release, I may not have been an amazing success, but I had been working, I’d been with my family, and I was making better choices. I hadn’t been hopeless.

Mizu’s mistake had cut off whatever chance I might have had at developing naturally, of hardening my soul, or whatever people were apparently supposed to do to prepare themselves for what came next. In that context, giving me a second life actually made sense. All souls were tested, and my test had been interrupted, so Mizu had provided me with another.

Then I had died in a day.

I wasn’t ready to go forward, but I could be. Liminus wasn’t allowed to give me hints because figuring things out for yourself was a part of the test, so extending the conversation was pointless. Stars flickered in their multitudes, beckoning me forward into oblivion.

I turned from the void.