Excerpt from the twenty-third draft of An Earthling’s Guide to the Larger Universe

Affinity Classification: Other Systems: Messenger’s Guild

The Messenger’s Guild is a delivery service - much like the mail, they make sure your package or letter gets to where you hired them to take it, even under bad conditions (bad weather, bandits, monsters, governmental change … they’ll charge extra, but it’ll get through). They are not cheap, but they are reliable.

While most organizations accept the root concept of classifying Affinities by difficulty or by combinations, the Messenger’s Guild does not.

It is able to have its own setup because it also has its own training system. A Mage can join the Messengers after having been trained and be tested for their equivalent placement or they can enter a contract with the Guild that promises a period of service (at a lower compensation) in exchange for training.

Specifics of the Messenger’s Guild system aren’t known, but what is known is that it groups Affinities by their uses instead of their power, and that the Guild won’t rank someone as having an Affinity grouping unless they can cast a certain number of spells that fit the category.

Detractors of the Messenger’s Guild method (which seem to include nearly all of the teachers in the Tutorial) say that this focus on effect rather than cause turns out a lot of mages that - regardless of their Affinities - have the same capabilities as each other.

The only Messenger I’ve been able to ask laughed, then agreed and thanked me for the compliment.

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The world that faded in around Serenity was not Earth’s surface but its depths. There was a sense of heat and pressure, though neither affected Serenity. He floated in a huge sphere of open space that he knew shouldn’t exist; the pressure was too high, and the “walls” seemed hot enough to be molten rock. They rippled as waves passed over them, but did not move in on the open area.

Ahead of him at the bottom in the center of the open area floated a shattered crystal. The crystal looked like it had once been nearly spherical itself, even though it was made of many smaller crystals growing out from a common center, but an entire third of it seemed to have been sheared off at some point in the past. There was a little new growth from the damaged part, but it looked badly off balance.

In his Void Sovereign form, he couldn’t see its color, but there was probably no light source in any case.

At the bottom of the spherical open space, Serenity could see the fragments that had broken off the crystal. They seemed somehow dead compared to the floating crystal.

No, they were dead. They carried the feel of Death; they called to him.

Once Serenity pulled his attention away from the dead shards that called out to him, he realized he wasn’t alone. There was a familiar form made of molten rock moving near the crystal.

The first Guardian.

Strangely, it didn’t seem to have noticed him. Instead, it was staring at a hooded figure to Serenity’s right. “Why have you come, Death? Has not this poor world suffered enough at your hand?”

“You know as well as I do that this was not at my hand nor my desire. I simply did not prevent it; you agreed to it, as did the others. I took nothing that was not given to me by another.”

The man made of magma seemed to deflate a little. “You never lie. If it were you, you’d say. But then who-?”

Death turned to face Serenity. “I can only go where Death calls, and Death has called from here for a very long time. You chose protection, but needed a guide to a place where you could matter; I am not protection. I can tell you that Death at the heart of a world begets more Death.”

Serenity didn’t know what to say to that. At the heart of a world? Could this be? “Is this Earth’s World Core? Why is it broken?”

Death simply stared at Serenity, so he turned to the first Guardian, who was staring at the crystal. His voice was soft and quiet. “Yes, she is. She’s been broken twice. Once, she filled this space. That was a bad time; I almost lost her. And all for good intentions gone wrong.”

For a moment, Serenity had forgotten he could not speak in this form; the other Void Sovereign had clearly heard him. It wasn’t until the Guardian replied that he remembered. Fortunately, it seemed that the Guardian could hear what he intended to say.

He seemed to lower his head and whisper. “Death is correct; I agreed, as did she.”

Serenity tried to think of what that would have been like. This was a tremendous amount of space for a world core; the current core was appropriate - more or less - to a world Earth’s size, and it was only half again as tall as a man in diameter. The space they were in was huge. What world would have that sort of a core? Serenity was certain he’d been on ones that large, but it must have been near the end of his time as the Final Reaper.

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The man-shaped magma turned to Serenity and his voice strengthened. “But the second time I did not. The second time was war; war not of men but of Gods. It hurt her far less, but she was less able to bear it. I thought Death had a hand in it, for since then she’s been touched by Him. I do not think she could stand a third betrayal.”

Serenity’s mind flashed to an image he’d tried to forget for millenia: a world disintegrating as he watched from above. His world. This world. He’d never known how or why; he’d barely made it out when it was clear it was going to happen.

Perhaps now he had an idea; not why but how it happened. Something or someone must have damaged the world’s core. Which meant he had to stop it, somehow. Stopping the invasions seemed like a start, especially the second wave, but Death seemed to think there was something he could do now. He turned back to Death. “What am I supposed to do about it? Death - I could remove the crystal shards, they shout Death. But would that help? Is there a way to heal the core?”

“I am Death. I do not heal. You must ask another.”

By the time Serenity turned to the Guardian, he was already speaking. “I recognize you now. I was not expecting you to be Formless. If you can take the broken shards, please do; I cannot touch them, and they inhibit her growth. I - she trusts you. She has said as much, more than once. I will not stand in your way.”

Serenity knew he could take the shards, but he wanted to do more than that. The sight of the broken spray of crystals saddened him; at the same time he knew that, like Death, he was no healer. Death magic he could handle, but healing always came apart before it could work.

He could clean up the broken shards that leaked Death. At least that was something.

Serenity floated to the bottom of the open sphere. Many of the death-touched shards were lightly embedded in the wall they’d sprayed towards, but when he brushed his shadows over each piece, it took no force; each piece simply came to him.

As he gathered them, he felt a warmth and brightness growing in his middle. It felt like sadness, so he didn’t pay attention at first; cleaning up the dead was always sad, even when they were crystalline.

The shards seemed to want to group together, and he let it happen. As he cleaned up the last shard, he felt something click into place; this was the last of the dead, and the dead was one again. He’d felt the same occasionally from powerful undead he’d raised, though he was not trying to raise this as undead. It was closer to an elemental, yet it had less of an identity than that.

Serenity had a choice. The first option was to destroy the Death in the shard, consume it and convert it into mana and essence; there was a lot there. The second option was to keep the shard intact, so that he could use it later. His third option was the most interesting, though.

The shard had the memory of an identity and it wanted to share that with him. Serenity knew that he could refuse; the shards were dead and he had dominion over them. At the same time, he saw no reason to refuse; they did not promise pain or horror, only that they ended in death. If he accepted, there would be a connection between him and their source, the World Core, for both good and ill, but the potential power held in the shard itself would be used up by forging that connection.

It was an easy choice.

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She was born in fire. It was not the fire normal to her kind; instead, it was a fire fueled by the loss of her former self. It was painful, but she knew she’d accepted it, even agreed with it.

That was all she knew at the beginning.

There was a slow growth; alone at first, but soon there was another who helped. He was always there, a warm voice and a helping hand. He knew far more than she did at first; she thought he must have known her prior self, but he refused to speak of who she had been.

She did not push. There was no reason to. Instead, she slowly reached upwards and outwards, growing her space. In time, she saw the wonders of more than simply rock and was fascinated.

Things changed so quickly! She’d barely get used to a species, then they were simply gone and there was something else to watch and enjoy!

It was a long springtime for her; though the seasons changed, her enjoyment did not.

And then the springtime of her life came to an abrupt end. The hot sparks that had quarreled before and sometimes brought those fast changes quarreled once more, but this time they did more than damage cities and make volcanoes where there had been none. One group decided to sink the island of another group into the sea.

In the process, they broke the ground’s stability. Her blood poured into the open, hot and painful. The skies clouded and the interesting animals began to die.

It had to stop. She confronted the ones who fought. One among them would not listen; he yelled at her in anger, then pointed a curved object at her. A curve from which leapt streamers of bright fire, hotter even than her hottest depths.

She was not made for that fire, and it shattered her. Worse, it carried an insidious anger under the fire that tried to eat more than it was given.

She sacrificed all that the overbright, overheated flare had touched.

And then the pieces of her past lay where they landed after she flung them away.

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The shards were gone; there was no more Death energy calling Serenity in the World Core’s bubble.

The warmth in his middle was still growing stronger. This time, Serenity looked and realized it was the Void Spark. It was still there and it wanted his attention.

The point of this trip was supposed to be using the Void Spark, wasn’t it? And he’d been told to make a choice, but not how to use it.

Serenity wasn’t certain why Death had brought him here, though there was a good chance it was as simple as it seemed; he wanted to save the world, after all, and Death seemed to have taken that desire quite literally.

Whether or not that was Death’s goal, though, Serenity was grateful for the chance to do something; with what he saw here, deciding what to do with the Void Spark was much simpler. Healing the damage the world had already taken should make it more resilient against future threats, and while he knew the threat to his parents was the Sterath, he still didn’t know what the threat to the world was.

However much he wanted to, Serenity knew he couldn’t heal. That didn’t prevent him from giving a gift; he’d supplied energy to healers before. Perhaps the world could heal itself if he gave it something in exchange for what he’d just been shown.

Serenity floated up to the World Core and tried to move the Void Spark out to it while he concentrated on helping the world.