Elrick’s ghost form allowed him to move forward and backward in time. Just as he could move across vast distances by willing it, he could also move through time. With serious limitations.

The first limitation was his time of death. He could not go back before he died. He was able to see everything that was happening around him starting from the moment after he died, but it was impossible to go even one second before Hunter’s hammer had crushed his skull.

The second limitation was much more nebulous. The further forward in time Elrick went, the harder it was to hold focus. As a ghost fighting against the pull of the void, focus was everything. He was certain that if he just let go and let his focus completely drift, that the void would suck him in. When he tried to go further forward in time, mostly to track Hunter and his band, it became harder and harder to get any useful information from what he saw. It felt like being in a dream, suddenly remembering it’s a dream, and having that realization slip away even while fighting to hold onto it.

Elrick managed to track Hunter for about a day, watching his band go back into the forest and make camp. Even when he tried to listen in to a conversation just seconds after his death, he couldn’t understand a word. It was even more impossible a day after he died. He couldn’t read their faces. He’d summon all his will to focus on ten seconds of a conversation, trying to read Hunter’s body language—Hunter never took the helmet off again—he must have known Elrick might be watching. The void would spill in, and Elrick retreated back in time, to moments after his death. This was the only point in time he could stay in without having to exhaust himself from holding focus. Even travelling a few hours past his initial point of death was taxing.

He found himself at the cathedral, just at the moment of his death. He let time crawl forward, less than a second at a time. As time moved, so did a series of lights. Elrick moved through the wall, following the light.

A woman in white robes with gold embroidery stood on an elevated platform. Around her were dozens of men and women in similar robes, minus the gold. Their hands pulsed with white light.

Elrick let time run faster, and he watched as naked bodies materialized out of the priests’ hands. He ran time forward and back, realizing it took hours to resurrect a single person. The naked people gasped and fell to the ground. The priests helped them up, covered them in a plain robe, and apprentices scurried over to shuffle the newly resurrected out of the cathedral.

Elrick followed one of the newly resurrected men as far into time as his focus allowed. It was a muscular man. His eyes were wide and awestruck in the first minutes of his new life, but a gloom settled over him as he was ushered from the cathedral.

Waiting outside for him was a man in a pointed hat and frilly clothes. He had an oiled moustache. He grinned at the resurrected man, who stood up straight, sighed, and bowed his head to his new master.

The master snapped his fingers, and two of his men chained the man’s legs together. The master’s men kicked and shoved the newly resurrected man onto a large ship at port. The moustached man stopped shortly in a guild hall, it looked to be some kind of Trader’s Guild. The last clear image Elrick could see was the resurrected man churning oars, beside hundreds of other slaves.

Elrick snapped back to the cathedral, and back to his time of death.

How could he kill Hunter if he was a slave? How long would it take to pay off the resurrection debt?

Soon, a priest approached him. Elrick looked up. The priest was looking right at him.

The man spoke, and Elrick could almost understand. It was too fast. Elrick was letting time flow at a normal speed. He slowed it down.

“I am a speaker,” the man repeated. “There are too many souls, and not enough of us. Guild members have resurrection priority.” He nodded toward the dozen or so other priests. “This cathedral is full. There are hundreds of ghosts here, so you’ll have to go elsewhere.”

Elrick understood. If each ghost was anchored in time to within a day or so of their time of death, then a cathedral like this could only resurrect a finite amount of ghosts. If the cathedral was full, it wasn’t as if Elrick could just wait until it wasn’t full. Those who died at the same time as him needed to be resurrected, and there was more demand than supply. He could only wait a day, or not even, because it would take longer than that to resurrect him. They’d have to start working to bring him back even earlier than the limits of his time if he were to have a chance.

“What do I do then?” he asked the speaker.

The speaker spoke even faster, already looking away as he spoke. “There are several choices available, but I don’t have time to go through—”

“I want the one that gives me the least debt,” Elrick said. “I’m a skilled Coppersmith and Miner. I can do more than dumb labor.”

He didn’t want to get shoved onto a boat as an oarsman.

The priest nodded. He opened a book and held it up. “Place your hand on this page.”

Elrick did as he was asked.

The moment he touched the book, a location entered his mind. It was vague at first: A river and trees. Some buildings, and a wall. The image sharpened. Trees surrounded the river, and obelisks towered over the city, similar to the ones in Antia, but not as tall. Guards dressed similarly to those in Antia stood outside a building. It had stained glass windows, but it had only three panels. The cathedral in this other city was much smaller than Antia’s. The three panels simply depicted birth, death, and resurrection.

The river flowed past the building, and all the land around the river was lush and covered in thin forests, but everything beyond that strip of fertile land was barren desert. Beyond the eastern desert were mountains.

“Few can make it so far,” the priest said. “But if you do, you’ll be free.”

“Yes,” Elrick said. “I’ll risk it.”

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“Lock the image in your mind,” he said. “Don’t let it go.”

The image became crystal clear, and Elrick held it. He held and held. There was no real sense of movement, but he knew he was moving a great distance. Just as there was a limit to how far in the future he could travel, he felt the strain of distance as the void threatened to overwhelm him. The further he moved away from Antia, the more the void pressed in on him.

The land fell away as he left the shore of Antia. He followed the river out of Antia until it spilled out into a great sea, and then he began floating—racing—across the surface of the water. The image of his destination began to fade as the void attacked his consciousness, and panic flooded his incorporeal body. He’d moved very far from Antia already.

He summoned all his will to keep the image sharp. He tried to imagine he was really there and back in his body. He imagined what it would feel like to be there with all five of his senses returned. He focused on the sandstone bricks of the cathedral he’d seen when he’d touched the priest’s book. The sun was a big golden disc in the sky, and Elrick felt it on his skin. The breeze from the river cooled him, offering relief. The shore was mostly sand, but soon it was patched with grass. Elrick felt the sand between his toes, it was hot beneath the burning sun, but then he imagined the coolness of the grass as he walked further into the city.

The void struck back. In one moment of exhaustion, the void purged all the details from his mind. Those vivid feelings of the place were suddenly gone, and for a chilling moment Elrick felt nothing. Time didn’t work the way it did when he was alive, so it could have been a moment or an eternity. It took all the last of his strength to pull back a shred of the image, to again see the silhouette of the obelisks and buildings beneath that bright, golden sun.

Then he was there. It wasn’t just an image. He was there. It was late though. It wasn’t the time of his death. It was much later. Distance and time were somehow connected, and travelling so far meant he had spent a lot of his time. He wasn’t sure just how long he’d lost, but he found he couldn’t go back any further. If he stopped focusing for a few moments, the void lashed at him without mercy.

He moved into the cathedral. He followed the lights.

There was only one priest, and he was busy with another ghost. His hands flared with white light, and he flicked his eyes toward Elrick as he entered the cathedral.

“They shouldn’t have sent you!” he shouted, looking back down at the ghost he was bringing back. “Idiots!”

Elrick looked for a speaker, but realized there was none. This was a much smaller operation than the one in Antia.

“I just started with this one,” the priest said, sweat beading on his brow. “I don’t know how much time you have left, but you’ll have to wait.”

Elrick knew it would take hours, and he was spent. Being in Antia near his time of death, he could likely have lingered in Antia’s cathedral for what felt like a long time. Time as a ghost was entirely subjective, as it couldn’t be measured in any objective sense. Still, he felt he could have moved through all corners of Antia, several times over, and even spent some time outside the city walls. He could have checked in on the Alchemist’s guild, and seen the aftermath of his escape with Elise. He’d have had “time” to do many things before the tide of the void pulled him in.

His long journey to this new place had drained him. He had no anchor point now. He couldn't go back to his time and place of death to recover his strength. Another trip across the sea would be the end of him.

He held on. Minutes passed. Soon an hour. The priest sweated bullets—was he working faster than usual, or was he just less skilled than the priests in Antia?

The void nearly swallowed Elrick up twice. The first time, he clawed his way back to the world, and the fear of nearly having been lost jolted him back to reality with a renewed intensity. That soon faded, and the next time he lost focus, he didn’t even know how he made it back.

When he saw the priest again, white light poured from his hands like an ethereal waterfall. The light filled the space in front of him. Slowly, the light gained opacity, even as the priest’s arms trembled.

Elrick knew he couldn’t lapse again. He could feel it deep in his soul: If he lost focus one more time, he wouldn’t come back. He thought about Hunter, and how bad he wanted to kill him. That held him anchored and kept the void away.

He focused on the materializing shape. Bones formed, becoming fully solid. Muscle and veins and tendons came next. It was like watching a dissection in reverse, and soon skin coiled around and snapped taut. It was a young girl. As her hair spilled down and her eyes opened, he recognized her. It was Elise.

She fell to the ground as the light pulsed down. The priest collapsed right behind her, falling to his knees. He gasped and wheezed, and his arms trembled.

He looked again toward Elrick. He’d not even acknowledged him since he told him he’d have to wait.

“I need to gather my strength,” he said, “but I’ll do what I can for you.”

Elise narrowed her eyes, looking around. She said something, but Elrick couldn’t understand her.

The priest threw off his robe and covered Elise with it. Beneath it he wore a light tunic—it was soaked through with sweat. He mouthed something to Elise, pointing toward a door. She nodded to him and walked toward the door, but she looked back over her shoulder just before leaving, not quite at Elrick, but in his direction. Then she was gone.

Losing sight of her, the void attacked with sudden urgency. He was drowning. He’d gone under, but light exploded, pulling him out.

He felt something touching him. As his sight returned, he saw the priest’s face lit by his own magic. He was drenched in sweat still, but no longer trembling. He held his hands out solidly, pressing against Elrick’s ghostly form. As time passed, Elrick could feel his touch. It was a vague suggestion of touch at first, and he wondered if he’d imagined it. Soon it was unmistakable, and Elrick felt the world of the living touching him again, or maybe he was already halfway there.

He no longer needed much focus to keep the void away. He likely could only have lasted a few more minutes, but now that the priest had begun resurrecting him, he acted as an anchor back into the living world.

The pain of his bones and muscle reforming was excruciating. He’d felt nothing as a ghost for so long, and the first true feeling of being back was burning pain, as if his entire body were on fire. The first thing he heard was his own scream, though he didn’t recognize it as his own until he’d already collapsed.

The ground hit him hard, knocking the air out of him before he’d even taken a true breath. His skin was still on fire, and both his legs convulsed in muscle spasms, from his toes to his calves to his thighs.

Every muscle in his body cramped up at once. The need to vomit hit him with intense urgency, and he went to empty his stomach, but there was nothing there but acid and bile. It came out through his nose, making him want to let out even more. Thankfully he was empty.

The pain subsided, though the mere memory of that pain was worse than the experience of any physical pain he’d felt on Earth. He doubted he’d ever forget it.

He looked over and saw the priest on the ground beside him, his eyes only half open.

“Are you dead?” Elrick asked.

The half-open eyes rolled toward Elrick, answering his question. “Just halfway there,” the Priest said, panting.

“Thank you for saving me,” Elrick said, forcing himself to stand, though his legs felt like rubber. He reached a hand down to help up the priest, but the priest waved the help away.

“I need a few minutes here,” the priest said.

“The girl you brought back before,” Elrick said. “And the people in Antia I saw resurrected...none of them…” he was going to say “Screamed like a baby” but that felt needlessly self-demeaning. “My skin was on fire. It felt like my muscles were going to snap my bones in half.”

The priest laughed. “I barely had enough strength left to bring you back, lad. Not enough to soften the landing.”

Elrick nodded and extended his hand again. The priest took it this time, and Elrick helped him up.

“Where is the girl you brought back?” he asked.

“She left hours ago,” he said. “Did you two know each other?”

“We died by the same hand,” Elrick said.