『I will be coming over in 3 minutes and 71 seconds.』 Drim, who was on the toilet at the time, hurried to finish up and get presentable—unsure if Asset had the dignity to respect the sanctity of the bathroom.

“We have returned from our vacation,” Asset barged into Drim’s bedroom mere moments after he’d gotten settled. “As you can see by our large brimmed hats, it was a successful vacation.”

“Is that supposed to be some measure of how good a vacation was?” The boy was confused but had to admit that Snurtley looked pretty adorable in her tiny sunhat.

“Yes, I believe so,” Asset insisted. “In all the photos I found of people on vacations, those wearing hats with the largest brims appeared to look the happiest. And I brought you a souvenir. I am unsure of what it is for, but it reminded me of Snurtley.” The item in question was a piece of turtle pottery with a hole cut out of the shell that looked like it was meant to hold a drink, or possibly an ashtray.

“Thank you,” Drim took it graciously and set it aside. “But before we move on to your next job, Asset, which I know you really want to get to. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you some questions—some potentially uncomfortable questions.” Asset seemed to understand the seriousness. He went and set Snurtley and his hat down over on Drim’s desk and returned to stand in front of him.

“Let’s go back to when you first started visiting me,” Drim turned back the clock. “Somehow, you were able to get through our barriers unimpeded. So I went and looked into that, and according to our systems, you were never actually here. Of course, you were picked up by our cameras, but the barrier never registered a person walking through it any time you’ve visited. I double checked on the day of the interviews and that was also the case.”

“That’s something that’s certainly weird, but we’ve seen weirder, so we let it slide for the time being. But the last time you were here, my sister happened to be around and noticed something peculiar. Your aura had changed, ‘completely different yet familiar to the day of the interviews,’ as she put it.”

“Now that’s something that just doesn’t happen. Since she’s been a Fiend, there’s never been another case where someone’s aura has changed. It’s like our DNA, our genetic signature that defines who we are. But I’ve gotten a text from her just now, and yours has changed again.”

“I’d ask if you were a different person, an impostor, a synthetic human perhaps since there’s one that already exists. But even they have a defined aura, or so my sister tells me. Now, I haven’t asked her to fully dig into your background with her new power yet—I’m sure she’ll get around to it—but there’s something I’d like to hear from you first.”

“She’s not the only one with a new power, and now I can see something about you that I could never see before.” Drim’s eyes burned with a green flame for a fleeting moment, and the tips of his hair glowed green before they dimmed back to black. “Every other living being has the fire of life in them, without exception. If their fire runs out, they die. That’s been my experience so far while studying this new power.”

“Yet somehow, Asset, you don’t have a fire—not even a little burning ember. Now I don’t think you’re some undead zombie, and your body must be normal or our scientist would have been raving to dissect you the moment she examined you. And there’s one more thing I can see with my eyes.”

“Instead of fire, you have… It’s hard to describe, but I’ll call them threads—thousands of different threads of life in your body, stitching you together like you’re a doll. Each one looks different to me. Unlike every other being whose fire is red, each of these threads is blue, and each one seems to be of a different length or consistency or material. They’re all unique.”

“So tell me, Asset, who, or what, are you?”

For the first time, Drim saw an emotion in Asset’s eyes that he’d never have anticipated: fear. “Before I answer, I have one request.”

“Sure,” Drim shrugged, curious as to what it may be.

“If the nature of our relationship were to suddenly change upon hearing the answer to that question. If you were to have the urge to imprison me or strike me down on the spot. All I ask is that Snurtely finds her way to a good home.”

“Of course,” Drim answered definitively but still furrowed his brow, interested as to where this was going. Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw next, for the gut punch right to his soul. Asset’s body suddenly shifted, morphed into someone else, someone familiar. Drim’s eyes looked on in disbelief, trembling at the impossibility. “...Sim?”

“Yes and no,” the boy now answered in Sim Twelling’s voice. But then his voice changed again, echoing a thousand times. “I… no… We are what remains.”

“Sorry, I’m really not sure what that means,” Drim was still trying to wrap his head around seeing his dead enemy in the flesh.

“If this form bothers you, we can change it,” Asset was uncharacteristically considerate. This time they morphed into a woman’s body, with the same blank, boring expression that his male form usually had. Now it was starting to seem obvious. Sim’s dirt golems had looked equally as bland.

“When Sim Twelling died, we still remained, those who were under his control,” the now-woman continued, still not super helpful. “We are unsure how much time had passed, but we found ourselves in the remains of that castle, all combined into one new body of flesh.”

“Okay, I think I’m starting to get it,” Drim’s mind still ached, but there was at least the basis of logic that he could cling to. “So you’re definitely not made of dirt then? Well, I guess if you were, Ahvra would have had a field day.”

“No, we are not. And we still do not understand how this body came to be. Perhaps Cosmos decided to grant us a boon after all this time as recompense. As for the dirt, both you and Sim Twelling had a fundamental misunderstanding of his power.”

“It was never to control dirt, that was just the medium he first used because it was malleable and plentiful. Small minded as he was, he never tried it with any other materials—self imposed limits because he couldn’t broaden his scope. Dirt control, or any other sort of material manipulation was never his power. His Curse, as you all call it, was to bind and control souls.”

“Souls? Like souls souls? Human souls?” Drim felt that point really needed to be clarified.

“Precisely,” the woman nodded, but then she morphed again, back to the usual Asset. “But not any soul. At his current power, he could only summon souls with nowhere to go—those that have not been welcomed into Cosmos’ light, but neither condemned to the frozen peaks of hell.”

“So kind of like a purgatory?” Drim understood the gist of the metaphor.

“We do not know of such a concept,” Asset shook his head. “But we are souls that have been waiting here, still floating around the planet, waiting our turn—waiting for a very long time. Most of us had entirely lost any semblance of consciousness or self, only brought back to existence when we were summoned by Sim.”

Drim had to put head in his hands for a minute. This was a lot to process. “So that really does confirm that there’s an afterlife, then. We knew about souls because of Fiends, but that they actually go somewhere, I’m not sure I’d ever fully believed that. I suppose that just about confirms that Cosmos is actually real too. But… when you die you have to wait your turn to be judged? Did I get that right? That sounds like it sucks, especially if you’ve been waiting a long time.”

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

“Yes, but we are the outliers, the casualties of a bigger problem,” Asset tried to clear up, but it’d probably only make for more questions. “All of us died during a specific point in history, where there were too many souls to be judged than could be judged. But that was just one event, and nothing of that scale ever came again.”

“Those in power decided the wheels needed to keep turning. Many had been sorted during the lull after our cataclysm, but not all of us. When death began again, those new souls were given priority, so that the system could run as intended. That way, only a few would be relegated to suffering, instead of making all wait for peace.”

“Those who were left in, you called it purgatory, were only judged when there was no one else left in line. So there was always some semblance of hope, but it was only ever a trickle, a handful at a time. We were never so fortunate.”

“How long ago did you all die?” Drim had reached the limit of the philosophical and existential dread he could take, so it was time to find out some more specifics. “It sounds like it was a pretty big extinction event, and the only ones I know of that scale in history were from the bombs my parents dropped. Do you think—”

“No,” Asset cut him off, firm in his declaration. “The amount of time that has passed is unfathomable. Those of us that have retained some semblance of consciousness have not recognized anyone for several millennia at least. It is hard to tell exactly how long it has been, but this world is completely foreign to us.”

“Well, I guess that explains why you’re so weird,” Drim couldn’t stop himself from blurting that out. To move forward from that awkward anecdote, he asked, “Do any of you have any memories from your past life?”

“Nothing specific,” Asset looked sad at the idea. “But our belief is that they will be returned to us when we are judged. Or that is the hope we cling to. However, there is one very odd discrepancy that all of us remember. This world, in our time, was called something else. We can not remember the name, but we know that it was not called Rathe.”

“Okay,” Drim set that aside for now. “Since you can change the appearance of your body, does that mean you have some facet of Sim’s old power?” He guessed it was a longshot, but he had some ideas in mind if that were the case.

“No, we do not,” Asset had to disappoint him. “We can only change into any form that Sim had imagined for us, along with himself. As you can tell, he was not particularly creative. Besides that, we have no access to his Curse. It is a shame, because if Sim had ever fully realized his power, he may have been able to fully raise the dead.”

“We are unsure if that would only be for those still floating around like us, or if he could call a soul from the afterlife. But many of us pined for rebirth, for purpose, for life, and that is why we answered his call. Sadly, our master was not up to the task. However, in this form, we still have been granted a second chance.”

“I guess that brings us to the question of what you actually want to do next,” his employer started acting the part. “First, I have no intention of killing or imprisoning you. Whatever qualms we had with Sim was due to his own actions. As far as I’m concerned, you all were innocent bystanders caught up in the mix. But now you’re free to do whatever you want. I know you all seem obsessed with working, but I do genuinely hope I’ve helped to show you that there’s more to life. So you should choose your own path.”

“No, we cannot do that.” The look in Asset’s face changed—angry and pained. “We are still bound by Sim Twelling’s will.”

“You are?” Drim sat up in his chair, ready to go on the defensive if needed. “Like, to kill us?”

“Not quite,” the man didn’t display any hints of aggression. “We had no specific orders as such when we were bound. Only to serve those who’d command us, those who sought power, with embellished aspirations and need of our strength. Since our master has perished, our instincts have forced us to find those with similar ambition to serve.

“And that’s why you came here,” Drim put the pieces together. “So if I were to stop giving you work, then you’d be forced to find someone else with lofty ambitions?”

“That is our understanding, yes,” the manifestation of so many lives nodded. “Until we perish again, even though we have this new body and life, we will forever be subjected to the whims of another. On that, we are conflicted. Some want to live in spite of that, some want to return to your purgatory to break the spell. But we all just want to be free to make our own choice.”

“What if I said that I might have a way to free you?” Asset’s eyes went wide when Drim made the sudden suggestion. “I really don’t know if it will work, and I don’t have a lot of experience using this power. You might just end up in a new body, or you all might die entirely. I don’t know if you’d go back to your floating souls, or that might move you up in the queue and count as a new death.”

“But if it works like I think it will, then you should be free of Sim’s influence. At the very least, I believe you’d be bound to me instead. I’d certainly be open to giving you as much freedom as possible, or tailoring orders to your specifics. All I can say is that the other being I’ve created lives a pretty damn free life.”

“We need a moment to discuss and consider.” Asset turned away from him, walking over to a corner of the room. Drim then heard thousands of voices all at once, as if each person inside of their body needed to make sure their opinion was heard. But it only lasted a moment before Asset returned.

“We have come to a consensus. We wish to try it. Even if that means our death, even if it means we cease to exist entirely, we will have made our own choice. We will finally be free.”

Drim walked over to the fake human and put his hand to their chest. He took a moment to clear his mind and calm down before he tapped into Asset’s life energy. One by one he began plucking away at the threads of life that were woven into his body. After the first few, they started coming apart of their own volition and were sucked into Drim’s hand.

After the last thread was absorbed, the body of the man formerly known as Asset vanished entirely. But Drim didn’t let those threads of life combine with his own, no matter how much his own fire raged, trying to consume the kindling. If he let that happen, then Asset really would cease to exist.

But now he had a new problem. Each of those countless threads were too difficult to work with. If he was to try and stitch them together individually, it would take him days or weeks at the very least. There was no way he could focus or even stay conscious for that long. Whoever had made the body originally clearly had a lot of time on their hands or was a master with incredible power.

Drim needed something simpler to work with, so he imagined a spinning wheel. Each thread was inserted into the device as it spun, twisting their lives into one single new thread of life. When it was completed, he had a massive spindle, more than enough to get the job done.

But he still needed a base to work with, so he tapped into his nature energy. From there, he created a new body and began stitching the thread of life into it. It was a long drawn out process, meticulous and mind-numbing, but he had to succeed.

When Drim finally opened his eyes, a new person stood before him, opening their own eyes for the first time. The creator hadn’t defined their gender, wanting to let them make that choice, so there was currently no reason to avert his eyes from their naked form.

The being looked at their hands, flexing and squeezing, and then took a long, deep breath. “Asset?” Drim asked them, uncertain if they kept their same sense of memories and existence.

“No,” the person shook their head at first but then nodded. “And yes. We… I am now just one. All the voices of the others are gone, but we are also all here together. One mind, one being. I am all of those who remained. We are now a singular new person, with one will. And I am now free to make my own choices. Thank you!”

The unnamed person rushed forward and gave Drim a hug. “I believe this is a customary sense of appreciation in your society.” They then backed away and fiddled with their body some more. First, they tried altering their appearance, which they could still do, but unlike before, they could have defined facial features and obscure proportions.

“I see. I am now part plant,” they turned their arm into a wooden spike briefly before returning it to a regular hand. The person didn’t seem disturbed by this, but was rather intrigued, almost excited.

“So then, do you want a new name?” Drim asked them since they were a new person after all.

“No, I have become attached to the name Asset,” Asset insisted. “So I will remain as Asset 29. But now I will be an asset to myself, whatever that means. And to Snurtley.” The androgynous human first went and put on their old clothes, and then they went over to their pet, crouching down next to them. “I wonder, do you still recognize me?”

Snurtley poked her head out of her shell, looked around for a bit, seemingly in a panic, until she finally settled on Asset’s face and pushed her own face against theirs. They smiled and picked up their pet. “The first thing I'm going to do is find Snurtley and I a new home, a better home.”

They then turned to Drim, “But someday soon, I expect I will be back for more work. Maybe in the future, I’ll even be worthy to retest for your group, once I’ve relearned what it means to be human. But until then, we are connected. I do not know if you can feel me, but I can feel you. If you call me, I will come.”

The new being of his creation then fled the nest already, beating Drimini’s time by several minutes before she went after her own independence. And once again, Drim felt bittersweet watching them leave.