Vail was dead.

Not in a physical way. Nor socially, mentally, or even metaphorically. None of the standard concepts associated with the term applied, but that did not change the truth.

Vail was dead because the world decided so.

The impossibly dark scars stretching from thumb to mid-forearm of both hands were not something one could hide from. Despite the bright sun scorching the temple’s inner sanctum, the jagged, branching marks were blacker than the deepest crypts beneath his feet. They were a perfect window to the nothingness of death. The nothingness now part of Vail.

In the hours since he awoke from meditation, the death marks alone consumed his attention. And in that short time, they grew twice what they were. If the analogy wasn’t so antithetic, Vail would compare the spread of death to a juvenile plant sprouting roots in the seedbed of his skin.

Natural, yet ever so wrong.

He welcomed the announcement of his death with about as much grace as anyone could expect. The destruction of finely carved marble pillars and beautiful feats of architecture would matter little with Vail no longer around to appreciate them.

This shouldn’t have happened. Vail should have had another half-dozen decades before the world noticed. His predecessors certainly had more time before the same death mark struck them. And he was on the cusp of a revelation, too. Vail just knew it.

Now, Vail had no choice but to share his findings with those that could continue his work. Vail’s time was up. No matter how frustrated he was that his time came sooner than any Academic before, he could only hope the advancements he’d made could eventually lead to their freedom. If the world decided to punish him this early, then it could only mean Vail was on the right path.

Gripping the dimensional string, Vail looped a knot around himself and teleported into the neighbouring chamber. There were no doors in this temple. None besides himself or the other Academics were welcome, and the easiest way to keep the unwanted out was to make passage impossible.

Vail donned a coat and pulled on a thick pair of leather gloves to hide the dark scars, but the instant they settled in place, death spread. Any material obscuring the blackness withered and rot before his eyes. The world marred Vail for his defiance, and all who saw would know.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Tossing the gloves, he left the tattered sleeves of the coat as they were and teleported down into the upper crypts, where he released all the living test subjects back into the wild. Preferably, Vail would have had someone to leave all his in-progress experiments to. But of the three he know to be capable enough to take over his work, none could do so in the next few years. They had their own research to complete.

The experiments in the lower crypts could stay where they were. Most of those would survive a decade left untouched, and those that wouldn’t… well, it was a good thing they were so deep beneath the surface.

With another elegant weave of the dimensional string, Vail appeared outside the temple. The land, which had been little more than a desert wasteland when Vail had been a child, now homed a flourishing rainforest. Massive trees grew over long abandoned sandstone buildings and through ancient paved roads.

The temple itself was massive and stood centred in the forgotten city. A true relic of the first generations to arrive. One that Vail had marred ever since he returned and reformed it into something better suited to his study of the dimensional string.

A quarter of the sky held the fractured remnants of the planet Vail’s ancestors once called home. Now, only a ball of magma and a ring of orbiting debris stood to remind them of the prosperous land they once inhabited. A constant warning that this moon beneath their feet was not their sanctuary. It was their prison.

With Vail’s death already a truth, there was no longer a need to be concerned with repercussions. He gripped the dimensional string. With careful movements, Vail threaded it into a rope longer than one limited to the natural plane could reasonably conceive, and connected it to the planet one-point-three-nine degrees below the brightest star of the southern sky.

The location of their salvation was something they’d known since before they’d abandoned their planet, but actually reaching it remained impossible.

Vail’s rope stretched impossible distances in an instant. Light itself would quiver in envy of such speed. But as his rope connected and a momentary sensation of the planet plump with soulstones rippled back to Vail, the rope severed. In the sky above, a shimmering aurora shattered the image of the stars and planet beyond.

The world’s loathsome, gorgeous cage showed itself.

Colourful strands of light lingered for the next few minutes, and when they were gone, nothing remained to indicate its presence. The original tragedy, and every subsequent attempt to fly into space had resulted the same; a terrible crash. Every ship or primitive rocket sent to reach orbit had slammed into that barrier. Nothing could penetrate it.

But Vail still believed there was a way. Vail, and every other Academic, dedicated their lives to the freedom and survival of their people. The world had decided he was now dead. Before this dead man could no longer speak, he would spread the knowledge that would save his kind.