Chapter 3: “Ocean Handle”

We traveled by night. The Gremlin machine sped along paths much swifter than a horse ever could. Its glass eyes shone out a light ahead of us, and I tried watching the scenery pass for a time. But I found it dizzying. With my muddy corporeal senses, I did my best to inspect the conveyance’s interior instead. The array of knobs, displays, and switch-buttons was confounding. If I were to discover Azwold’s motorcar came from another world, I would feel no less bemused. Much of his talking convinced me of his alien nature.

For the moment, the strange man beside me did not talk. Neither did I, thinking that Azwold must focus to maintain control of the careening motorcar. Now a passenger, I tasted a fleeting pang of… empathy? What was it like for travelers on my graveyard road? I neglected to spare a care for their odds of survival. While I hunted their minds for memories, their skin and squishy viscera were at stake. Ah well.

“I think I know how you died,” Azwold broke the silence.

Surprised by the change, my thoughts flitted away. I waited for him to say more.

“Do you want to know how?” he gandered at me.

I shook my head, negative. Instead, I reached up to clutch the rectangular looking-glass. I had noticed Azwold glance into it periodically. In a moment of mettle and spine, I turned it toward myself. I saw the hollow gaze of a charred skull and neck bones entwined in dark vine. My visage was horrifying. I looked away, anxious, and began inspecting the rest of my skeleton in glimpses. Periodic moonlight broke through the shadows of evergreens blurring by us along the roadside.

I discovered more markings on my arm bone, etched in a faded amber. So my legs were not the only bones defiled with writing. The driver noticed me scrutinizing my humerus.

“Those were not easy to find,” said Azwold.

I saw no point in speaking. Instead, I waited for the man to volunteer more. He did; “There’s a big landfill on an island. A place where people send all their ‘trash’ items. In this place, there’s a cobbled-together village. Its chief is an Animun Oracle. She was using your leg bones to prop up the entry to her hovel. I traded her something valuable, and that’s where I got your femurs.”

Upon learning this, I felt both honored and offended; a befuddling mixture of the sacred and profane.

The forested road became more winding for a time, and the mage paused his talking. Then he continued; “You’re lucky they were stolen with purpose, or they might’ve stayed lost forever. The way you died, well, it made your limbs quite valuable to certain practitioners of magical arts. I’m paraphrasing the quest text there. Anyway, the arms were much harder.” He lifted his left arm up, keeping his right on the wheel. “This one I found in a collector’s manor, woven into a grizzly wall trophy, hung between two silk tapestries.” He mused. “Weirdly avant garde patterning of warp and weft for how old they must’ve been. I imagine whoever crafted the tapestry must’ve maxed out Weaving. This one,” he swapped arms, “was part of the walking staff of a Hill Shaman I met in a field.”

His explanations were unsatisfactory.

“The outline of the oubliette,” the mage steered his talking back to our task, “is only discernible within three nights before or after a full moon. The day/night cycle takes about half the time as outside of game, so we’ll be inside that window tonight according to my calendar.”

The Gremlin car slowed and turned down a dirt road. We rumbled along as trees tapped our windows, their twigs leaning in as if to inspect our passage. The going was jangly. I clutched at a handhold above my door. Azwold called it an… ‘Ocean Handle’?

We rounded a smooth bend, and I saw a sweep of moonlit ocean in the distance. Something deep-seated ached. A memory threatened to return. I knew I loved the sea.

I breathed in, though I had no lungs, just honeycomb stuff. The air palpitated with the glow of remembering more. Almost. But the past seemed a hair closer. I felt a thin thread of comfort.

We arrived at a clearing in a copse of wind-stunted pines. The Gremlin stopped and its mechanical rumble dimmed to a low hiss. Azwold exited, and I reached for my own door handle. The mage watched me fiddle with the mechanism long enough to become vexed, then strode over to open it from the outside. I clattered out onto dirt.

Since becoming reanimated, I had yet to experience any discomfort based on temperature. I might have shivered otherwise. Some senses felt dulled or missing. And my good ones seemed to exist supernaturally.

Azwold looked down at me. Again. He likely doubted a skeleton’s usefulness. And maybe he was right. The sentiment annoyed me.

I made myself less like a pile of bones, stood, and leaned back onto the flat metal of the land-boat’s bow. I gazed down a ravine of trees and saw a ribbon of beach below. In the almost-full moonlight, I weighed the odds of a successful escape.

Azwold kept eyes on me, aware that his grisly experiment was in a quandary. He produced a ring of keys from inside his thick coat and undid a mechanism at the car’s arse. The glass hatch creaked upward. He didn’t speak, and I suspected whatever he was doing, he did out of view on purpose.

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I shambled around to the mage. “Do not play… at secret-keeping. My patience. Long spent.”

Azwold cleared his throat with a gruff chuckle. “You’re dead for hundreds of years, but bored with relaxing already?”

I growled.

The spectacle of the motorcar’s rear interior was no less astounding than the control panels and helm’s wheel. I could make little sense of it; an array of contraptions and a strange hodgepodge of items. The mage was also a craftsperson or inventor of some skill… and perhaps an occultist?

He retrieved his black leather-bound rectangle.

“C’mon,” Azwold resealed the glass hatch and lead me around front. He set the thing on the green metal and opened the cover like a book. The night of my Spirit Tree’s burning flashed back into my mind. This was the cursed tablet from which the mage read his horrible spells.

I screeched.

“Can you stop wailing and growling? It’s too… stereotypically undead of you,” he snuffed.

I parroted a silent screech at him, for spite’s sake.

Azwold’s brow furrowed, but he otherwise ignored this. He tapped the object’s secret corners and slid a finger around on its smooth surface until it illuminated to life. Mystified, I staggered at the sudden dazzle.

Azwold snorted amusement. “Yeah, I guess there’s gonna be a lot of things you’re amazed by. The things my magic screen can show us would make your head spin.”

As he manipulated the thing’s surface, a dizzying cascade of images appeared. It was a window into a land of colors and shapes and inexplicable ordered chaos.

“I get that it’s a lot to take in, but I’m gonna show you something from your own era of lore. Maybe it’ll jog some memories.”

Intrigued, I tried to focus.

The mage tapped the magic screen a few times and several rectangular shapes zoomed about, trading positions. He picked a particular one, and it popped up to the fore. It looked like a map. A lambskin map.

I saw now that the black rectangle was an information tool. Not just a spell book.

“What is it,” I said, gravelly.

“It’s a map, but I think you know that,” he replied, eyes intent.

“So it is.”

“I bribed a museum docent. You’d be surprised how many players want to spend time doing things an NPC could do. Lore buffs. I can respect it. Anyway, he didn’t know much about it. Neither do most lore-keepers, actually. They’ve been studying it for years without the right kind of eyes.” He looked at me while pointing down at the screen. “They had the map rolled up in a scroll case locked away, but still refused to let me borrow it. My bribe only bought us a picture.”

My expression, as always, was blank.

“We have devices which can capture images,” Azwold elaborated, squaring his fingers like a frame in front of his eyes, “like painting a whole painting in an instant. A screen shot.”

“Hmmmm…” I attempted to digest this. The way he spoke of his gadgets, they just seemed like a different kind of magic to me.

“Well look at it,” he gestured to the screen again. “If you were your hand, where would you be? Where should the X be? Tell me what you see here.”

I did not know. I had seen maps like this one before, but staring at it told me nothing useful.

My blank stare tested Azwold’s own patience.

“Do you know the amount of research this one map photo took me? They designed this questline to be grueling. You can easily spend 100% of your game time on it with all the side quests and materials and stuff. Nobody’s even completed it yet! I doubt anyone’s even halfway. It’s hard even when it’s not all buggy. And you… you don’t seem to grasp the importance of what we’re doing here.” He put his face in his palm. “Of course you don’t. You’re a spirit mage pet. Why would you?”

“So… let us go,” I said, as the logical course. “The beach… awaits.”

“Yes,” he said with a weird look. “Okay. Let’s.” Azwold opened the Gremlin’s door and hefted a coil of rope onto his shoulder. He grabbed the scepter, slammed the door, locked it, then nodded as he stashed his keys away. Azwold turned to walk away, his long purple coat whipping an echo of his decisive twist.

“You can’t get away from me, by the way,” he said over his shoulder. “Even if you wanted to. The scepter’s enchantment has a limited range. How limited, you wonder? Not sure, to be honest. We’ll find out.”

I remained silent, but emanated an aura of anger.

“It’s only a warning,” the mage said, blowing a dreadlock out of his eye. “There’s no point in trying. Even if you jumped off a long, loooong cliff, two things could happen: 1) if you’re in range, it’ll be the pick-a-fragment of skeleton to inhabit situation, or 2) you’re out of range and your ghost would just show back up in here,” he brandished the scepter. He clapped the metal head against his palm a few times. “Then I’d have to collect your fragments from the jagged rocks… but kings, horses, men,” he shook his head, affecting pity, “no matter. The bone puzzle can’t get put back together again. Not as you were before, anyway. You don’t want that.”

I wondered if he hid lies in his words. It was hard to tell. My tolerance for the astounding seemed to increase by the hour. “Where… did you… get that?” I asked, pointing an accusatory finger bone at the [Hive Scepter].

Azwold frowned. “Somewhere?”

I sneered internally. “Tell me... the scepter’s story.”

The Spirit Mage stretched, yawned, and shook his head. He pondered a moment. It may not have been in his best interest to over-share, though he tended to anyway. So it surprised me very little when he began:

“It might’ve been an angel flying through,” he linked his thumbs in front of his face and flapped his fingers like a shadow puppet seagull. “Or aliens and UFOs. Maybe a scientifically complex phenomenon like sparkly weather balloons powered by rare swamp gas. You name it; however many eyes saw it, that’s how many versions of the story you’d get.”

I was puzzled, but did not bother to express it.

He looked at me, looked through me. Azwold continued: “Something extra-dimensional and interested in cleaning up darker aspects of existence, something benevolent. Depends on your spec., though. All Spirit Mages get a [Hive Scepter] early on. Oops. I broke character. Backstory, continued: The being bestowed me with the scepter, among other gifts, to help me in my work. I was schooled in the arts I know now. As my ancestors before. Et cetera. We’re all about making the baddies go nite-nite.” He scowled at me, trying to blink away looming sleep.

“I see,” I said. The mage harbored vengeful aspirations, too, it seemed.

“Another bonus; you don’t need sleep.”

“What fortune… shines upon me,” I grumbled. “Sleep is… for the weak.”

Azwold offered a single ‘hah’ and then grew quiet. He pressed on his tablet’s screen and several objects appeared on the ground. He began to craft something and a sort of progress bar appeared above him. It filled as he worked. A tent took shape. Another odd sight among a sea of oddities. I turned away to ignore it.

Of course, he must know I would attempt to learn the scepter’s range whenever he succumbed to slumber. He had little reason to think otherwise. He likely planned to test me, to watch somehow, to see what I might do. I did not care for tests.

He spoke much, but how much of it was true? If I was his minion, why did he speak like we were companions? I lacked his parlance. This made me yearn for my lost hand. If the mage was to be believed, then reunion with my lost bones may bring some truth. And more local vocabulary, I hoped.