“You know that I died three times, isn't it? That...”

“Yeah, everybody can be resurrected two times per year by an angel. The other deaths do not count in the main statistics; only the angel resurrections do!” - countered Spartacius before I even came to explain more; however, this info took White Flower by surprise as she wondered:

"Really? You can be resurrected by an angel? Really? I mean, you can buy an angel's resurrection? Care to tell us more? There are many rumors, but I haven't seen an angel yet."

Alice's eyes were round like saucers, but she did not say a word. I almost could see little wheels turning inside her head as she was rethinking some events in the new light.

Meanwhile, Tina admonished Spartacius for the interruption:

“Stop interrupting, Sparty!”

“Sparty?” - he harumphed but then continued - "Three times is actually a surprisingly low count in your very long life, by Mephisto's standards."

White Flower called them to order:

“Tina, Sparty! Let her tell her story!”

Unbelieving that an NPC would give him a nickname, he raised his brows, looking now a bit irritated at White Flower.

“Sparty!?”

The Lynx coughed: "Ahem!". Alice kept silent, watching me intensively.

I sighed. There was finally silence, so I continued. I turned to White Flower:

"I don't think that everybody can do it. I could not buy resurrection for Alice from any temple, but players can."

"Why that?" - wondered Tina furrowing her brows

"I don't know. The high priests in the silver temple simply refused the request."

"I suppose this is a player's perk." - said Spartacius

I saw that White Flower refrained from further questions, so I continued:

"So, if you pay the high fees for an angel's resurrection, you may be resurrected, but only two times per year. It is a truly fascinating experience. Some people let themselves be killed from time to time just to experience the feeling. Beautiful, silver-gold angels come. They collect your poor self and treat you in their golden hands. You feel like... No, you are clay being transformed into a living being. You feel their soothing touch everywhere; divine magic penetrates and washes over you, like a pleasant crystalline river flowing over you, the river of life. Where and what it touches, life sprouts. That clay becomes alive. This is what an angel's resurrection is."

I sighed and continued:

"Well, if a player dies a third time in one year, he is being collected by Tenebra. She is also an angel and yet different from the others. She does not have that golden look; she looks more like those mobs, the dark angels, those killing machines around the dark magic node.

Tenebra, the angel of death. She does not come instantly. She lets you wait. She lets you hope that she will not come, that you may somehow cheat her and survive. And then, all of a sudden, everything dims out. As if the sun loses its power. Shadows descend over you. You are a ghost; you do not feel cold, yet you feel the chill in the air.

That shadow that envelops you is not a simple shadow but more like a presence. Then, she takes you away.

She does not grasp you with her hands, yet you are trapped. You cannot move; you cannot hide. She takes you up like a giant bird picking up a small rodent for lunch, and she brings you to the so-called hero's chamber. Well, hero's chamber... This chamber is practically a giant graveyard where all you can do is review your past existence. You can ask the angel for more info about some events; for instance, who was the one that sent that arrow that killed you? She may answer and show you more details, but she is not compelled to do so.

OK, whatever. So I died a third time, and it was during the same year. I should be dead.”

I turned toward Alice and looked into her eyes:

“You need to know it was not me, Dolores, here inside Cala at the time. It was Markus.”

She hugged me as if she would be pardoning me. Pardoning me from being Markus?

"How could you risk dying a third time? That was stupid!"

"Well, Spartacius," - I sighed - "there is a guaranteed way how you could survive Mephisto: you do not play. Anything else includes a bigger or smaller risk of dying. You stay in an inn, and the inn could be attacked. You stay in a city, and the city could be raided. You know, I once walked the tunnel that links the denka republic to the dwarfen enclave of Stara. There was an earthquake, and I was almost buried alive under tons of rocks. I escaped by opening a portal scroll and jumping through the portal at the last moment."

"Oh! It is a low-level area. How could such a thing happen?"

I shrugged and continued:

“There was some explosion in one of the dwarfen mines. Shit happens. Everybody has his strategy and theory on how to survive. You cannot win all your fights, so you cannot live long in this fucked-up world without having a worked-out plan on how to be resurrected when needed. Most people try to do this in groups. They look for safety in numbers. They need a healer who learns the resurrect spell, which can be learned only at a relatively high level, and then they go together. They may even have several groups helping each other. They build guilds or clans. They must, however, protect their healers, and the groups are leveling slowly.

Remember our Terri? That's about the level where a healer learns the resurrection spell. She did not know it, but she could do remote healing. It was probably a trade-off, and she preferred to learn remote healing instead of the resurrection spell, so you need another healer in a stand-off of about that level that resurrects. There are also some limits to how damaged a body is to be able to resurrect the person, but those limits do not apply to angels."

I sighed and continued:

"Well, OK. Leveling as a lone player is faster but riskier. This was the way Markus chose. He did not work well with other players but with NPCs."

"Enpisis?"

I turned towards Tina and looked into her eyes. I sighed. It stayed on my tongue, and yet I could not tell her the whole truth: non-person characters. Uh. Non-person.

"It is what we players call the spawns of this world."

"You players?"

"Yes, I am a player, like all those who come from the other world to play inside this world."

"Play?"

White Flower chastised her:

"Tina, let her tell her story!"

"But..."

After one look from Alice, she refrained from further questions. Yes, this had been Alice's question some time ago too. I shíghed again, trying to find my thread:

"Markus had an arrangement with Awala, a druid NPC."

They looked at me, and I corrected myself.

"A spawn. She was a high druid of Nohekhta, the green Goddess of the Woods. Markus had once saved her life even before she became a high druid. They were good friends. There was a lot of luck involved and a strong friendship. OK, I will not bother you with details.

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When Markus died, his body was retrieved by his... spawn friends and brought to Awala. Everything needed to happen within less than five minutes. In some cases, it was Awala who was ported and resurrected me there. You know Alice, you also did this a couple of times.”

“But you were not dead, you only... you told me that your soul stays for five minutes and...”

I looked into her eyes. She understood better now.

“Well, he told you... I told you that I'll survive for five minutes. That's the same thing, but yes, technically speaking, I was dead. Resurrection is a thing here. Most spawns do not really know. Some know, some think it is divine intervention, but you could resurrect anybody within the short time frame of five minutes. You know this, Alice. It is a kind of magic CPR in this world, and you need to have your own ambulance doing it in time. OK, the arrangement did cost some money, as you needed to have the portal scrolls, prepare the option to break the fight and run retrieving the body, and have the druid ready to resurrect you, but it is a good option that works. As the last backup, you have the angels.”

“Oh! But that is cheating!”

“Cheating... That's a hard word. Using the rules is not cheating."

I sighed:

"Anyhow, those rules have changed; with time, they made it more and more difficult. Fewer classes can resurrect now, and the spell can be learned only at higher levels. Now, you cannot open portals to many places but to towns. If you want to port someone, you need at least two people from your team to do it, plus a specialized mage or a warlock, and so on. Now, I had what I called two accidents last year, and two times I had to be resurrected by an angel."

"Two accidents?"

"Yeah. First, the portal scroll malfunctioned. It simply exploded and almost killed Master Koro, who wanted to cast it. He survived, but I was not resurrected in time, and an angel had to do it.

Two portal scrolls were prepared the second time, but Awala's temple had been attacked, and she could not come.

Two fucking accidents!

Markus was becoming very careful. He took only very safe jobs, bidding his time, but as Murphy's rules go, shit happens when it can cause the most damage, I was attacked on a safe road by some wandering high-level mob. It was the third time a fucking accident happened. It was not inside the same calendar year, but less than a year since the first death, and worse, the mob did camp long enough over my body to make any resurrection impossible."

I shrugged:

"So, I died. Definitively... or almost."

"Stupid! Sorry but your Markus was stupid. After you died two times, he should have taken a break and waited for the year to pass." - said Spartacius - "Play a different character! Was it so difficult?"

I sighed. Many noobs make this error. Maybe I was not clear enough before. I shook my head:

"If you log out and leave your character on the server, it plays for you. If you remove your character from the server, that time does not count. It does not count! You just delay the happening. As I said, you can leave your character in an inn and hope that you are lucky." - I shrugged and continued - "Well, my soul was collected by Tenebra, who, surprisingly, proposed me a deal. You know Tenebra is some kind of a sponsor for the black church, the assassins' temple. She said that she had followed my work for some time. My work... Sometimes I have seen her collecting souls. You know that assassins have improved senses. Or maybe she wanted to let me see."- I laughed and shrugged -"You can say that we knew each other. She said that it would be a pity to remove me from this world while I was bravely serving her. She would resurrect me if I promised to do a job for her."

I made a short break to take some air, then, with a sigh, I continued:

"I promised, and she did resurrect me. Well..." - I pointed at my eye - "Yes, she did resurrect me. I did not specify before that I wanted it to be perfect. Ach, whatever. The problem was that, as the angel of death, she could not rebuild my body perfectly. She lacked the skill, exercise, or talent to do so. That's about what she said. She did, however, patch me up, see there was an arrow in my left eye, and one sword had cut my chest. It did cut deep. There was another cut that had severed my head. You know, I was dead.”

I did point again at the respective scars. I shrugged.

“She did promise she would fix everything once I did my job: kill Isera, the green angel. That's what she wanted me to do. Kill an angel."

I let them grasp for a moment the enormity of the task then I continued:

"She did help me. To help me succeed in my future mission, Tenebra did a little tweak when she resurrected me. She gave me high resistance to divine magic and life magic, but to achieve this, I lost any resistance I had to shadow magic. Even worse, I got a weakness to shadow magic.

She promised everything was temporary. Yes, temporary. The question is, what do angels understand by temporary?”

"Angels can be killed? Are they not in many different places at the same time?"

I looked at White Flower, surprised that she knew this much about angels.

"Yes, that's what I thought, but I learned from Tenebra that they have one presence, the only one that matters, at their magic node. There is an altar there, and the true angel is there."

“So you killed an angel? How could you do such a thing? How could you be so cruel?”

Tina was shocked. I shrugged.

“It was my ticket to survival. You know, I went to the library in Phalos and read about angels before doing it. I learned that angels can be resurrected too. Their high priests can bring them back to life at their altar. I thought that it would be a temporary death for her. There must have been some quarrel and trouble between the two angels. What I did not understand at the time was that Isera was the angel protector of Awala's temple. With the angel dead, Awala's temple was raided, the altar destroyed, and Awala and the other high druids were killed. There was no angel to resurrect the high druids and no temple to revive the angel.

I guess that raid was also helped to happen by an angel's hand. Somebody gave it a nudge or so. It took me some time to understand all these. Maybe there are still things that I missed, but as much as I understood, it does not paint a pretty picture."

I sighed. Tears came to my eyes: Awala had been my friend. I hugged the furry leg tightly. A wave of shame and self-loathing washed over me.

"Wait!" - said the Lynx - "You said the green angel, Isera, would have resurrected Awala?"

"Ahm, yes?"

"But she was an enpisi? Awala?"

I watched him with my mouth wide open: I hadn't realized that. And he used the enpisi word!

"True that!"

"So, we also have a soul!" - said the Lynx with a wide grin.

I haven't thought about all the implications of this resurrection business. He continued.

"Maybe you should have gone to Isera for Alice? You could have talked with Awala about it?"

I felt suddenly shocked and ashamed. I did not even try, even if I knew Awala would be resurrected by Isera. Even if it had not worked, I could have tried. I was saved by Spartacius:

"So this Tenebra arranged for the demise of Isera?"

I sighed.

"Well, not only that but what do I know? All are suppositions on my side. A couple of times, I thought I recognized her scent. You know, once you have met her, it is impossible not to recognize her or her traces. It is not a smell, and yet it is something comparable to the smell of decay. So yes, I do think I 'smelled' her when I checked that blasted portal scroll or the ruins of the temple. Tenebra has had her fun, and I got my anklet as a reward. This is what she called fixing my problem with the scars. It made the illusion that was cast over me tangible, palpable. Tenebra did also cast the illusion. My scars were covered with a smooth, perfect illusion. You could touch me and feel the smooth skin, caress my brow, and not feel the scar. I could even have asked somebody to put a new illusion over me, and I could have acted as that person. I could have been Marilyn Monroe or Donald Duck. The anklet was cool. The perfect tool for an assassin."

I sighed again and continued:

"At first, I did not know about Awala's demise, so Markus did not know either. He only later discovered that he lost the resurrection option he so carefully maintained during his game life. Even worse, he found out that no other angel would ever resurrect me; because, for them, I was dead. Tenebra did not answer his calls, and I was left with this weakness to shadow magic. This is too big a weakness to fight any shadow priest or other shadow-magic user. See, this is why I said that Tenebra fucked me. Besides this, the three deaths. I should have known before. I suspect those things did not happen by pure happenstance. Markus was too careful to let it happen, all the years before nothing and then three, one after the other. I suspect some divine help was involved in making them happen. Tenebra needed a hangman.”

“You mean an angel tricked you? They have limited powers, and they don't have much levy over this world. Did you not realize that she was maneuvering you?”

“Well, yes, in retrospect, it is easy to see, but when it happened, I had no clue. It was too late when I started to understand that she was playing some game." - I sighed - "In addition to it, with the shadow magic weakness, I was fucked. I could not take any more jobs against villains. I was pushed into a corner and would have been forced to kill only holy or divine high-level mobs. I was perfect for this job. Realizing this, Markus left, but he was too much in love with Cala to let her die or just gather dust in a corner" - saying that, I laughed and added - "even if I wanted to kill myself."

I said that fast so that I was not sure that they understood, but that was a thought that had haunted me for weeks when I realized what I had done. Tenebra! I'll find a way to get you... but I was afraid even to voice that thought. This was my purpose, but I knew it will take time. Maybe I'll fail, but I will work towards it.

I wet my lips and concentrated back on my story. Where was I? Ah, Markus!

"He did what best he could; he gave me over to Dolores. Yet I still remember him. It is strange and a little frightening.”

I shrugged and hugged the furry leg. I got a kiss on my temple from Alice and then a swipe from a raw tongue.

“OK, OK, I am good, enough with the tongue!”

I laughed, pushing him back and getting another swipe from the giant tongue.

Mount!? He is worse than a Saint Bernard.