Meat.

As Hal stared at his daughter’s still body on the floor, the horrifying thought spawned in his mind.

She looked like meat.

It was terrible. He loved his daughter more than life itself. How could he think of her like that?

But his mind refused to see what it didn’t want. It translated the scene unfolding before him into the most familiar and normal setting it could. Just another day in his butcher shop. Just some meat that fell on the ground. He couldn’t remember dropping it, but it wasn’t even skinned yet, so a little bit of dirt wasn’t that big of a deal.

Hal could only watch in morbidly professional curiosity as to how he would try to salvage the corpse in front of him. It would prove to be a difficult task for sure. Just from an initial glance, he deemed the arm to be mostly impossible to turn into something sellable. The blunt force that had hit it would have likely exploded the bones inside, scattering it into a complex puzzle of shard and shooting the pieces deep into the flesh. The same would probably apply to the collarbone, and parts of the ribcage, but those were less obvious on a superficial level. He would have to cut it up to make sure.

If it was up to him, he would probably just throw the entire thing away. Too arduous to clean. Even if he could get most of the bone shards out of the meat, all he would be left with were scraps, and even those he wouldn’t sell to any customer, in fear that a missed shard of bone would cut up their tongues when they tried to eat it. Unless there was a shortage of meat, he probably wouldn’t bother with it.

The world moved in slow motion, silent, save for a high pitched ringing in his ear. He had the vague feeling that he was in a nightmare, but with his vision hazy, he wasn’t quite sure what it was about.

He must have been tossing and turning in his sleep, with how bad this dream was, and he idly wondered why his wife wasn’t waking him up. He looked down, noticing her standing right in front of him, clutching at his shirt. Oh. That was why. She was here too.

He tried to tell her that everything would be okay, that it was just a dream, but no words came out. He wrapped his arms around her, but he couldn’t feel her. He couldn’t feel anything really.

He wondered where Lena was.

He looked up, and saw her, lying in front of him on the wooden floor. Silly girl. Her back would be stiff once she woke up, especially with her horrible sleeping posture. Hal reminisced about her childhood days, how she would often fall asleep in his arms, her head lolling back like it did now, sleeping like the dead.

Hal blinked twice, and a wave of nausea overcame him, the vomit in his stomach only held back by the chilling horror that froze him in place.

“No,” he said, though he didn’t hear it. “No, no, no, no.”

Hal sank to his knees, bringing his wife down with him. He could vaguely feel her rocking violently in his arms, and hear her muffled cry in his ears, but he didn’t know how to respond. His hand automatically raised up to her head in an attempt to comfort her like he would with Lena when she was younger, but Arina’s violent rocking made it impossible to run his fingers through her hair.

Hal thought he heard Lena’s name, and he looked up to see the small red haired girl grabbing the Otherworlder’s collar and screaming at him, though he couldn’t make out what she was saying, aside from the occasional mention of his daughter’s name. The murderer barely seemed to notice her presence, staring blankly in front of him.

The murderer’s eyes wavered, and for a moment, Hal locked eyes with him. Dark, emotionless, entirely inhuman. The murderer broke eye contact with him, his gaze wandering upwards.

In a trance, Hal followed the murderer’s eyes to his fist, still raised in the air, still crimson with the blood of his daughter.

Hal felt a surge of anger run through him, and he stood up and reached into his pocket and drew the fillet knife that he’d stowed inside.

His lungs burned as he let out a battlecry that he couldn’t quite hear. He charged forward, stumbling on something and falling to the ground.

Not willing to stop, he scrambled forward and lunged awkwardly towards the murderer.

The knife struck true and the entire blade slid into the monster’s flesh.

The animalistic rage in Hal let out a howl of victory, but the brief flash of elation lasted only for a split second. The murderer remained standing, not even noticing the knife stuck in his stomach, as he continued to stare at his own fist. He barely moved, even as the red haired girl reached up to slap him across the face.

“Fix her!” she screamed, pulling herself up so she could stare directly into his face. “Fix her, you dumb bastard!”

The murderer finally blinked, and his gaze snapped to the red haired girl.

“O-oh yeah,” he said, his voice wavering. “Yeah. I can do that. I can fix her.”

Hal perked up. What did he just say?

The murderer walked forward towards his daughter’s body. From the floor, Arina cried out and lunged over Lena’s body.

“No!” Hal shouted, reaching out and pulling his wife off of their daughter.

He didn’t know what had come over him, to put his trust in the very monster that had murdered Lena in the first place, but he was desperate. Arina screamed at him and violently flailed in his arms, but he refused to let go of the sliver of hope that he hadn’t known he had.

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He looked up at the boyish figure in a new light, and he couldn’t help but hear his late father’s voice in his head as he talked about angels, harbingers of both death and life, powerful and apathetic to all but their whims and the words of the lord above.

Hal clasped his hands in prayer, in hopes that this one would choose to be benevolent.

The boyish figure raised his hands above Lena’s body. Hal’s heart clenched as a flash of bright light forced him to look away.

---

It was a strange feeling, being dead.

I had no body. I was just a consciousness, floating in a formless sea of nothing.

It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, nor was it an unpleasant one. It just was.

Honestly, it wasn’t what I expected. I wasn’t religious like my father was, and my assumptions on what happened once you died hadn’t been very influenced by his faith. I hadn’t believed in an afterlife. I always thought that when you died, you just ceased to exist.

Apparently not.

I still existed, albeit in a strange alien way. I was disconnected from reality, yet I was connected with all of it. I knew everything, but my mind was still surprisingly human and completely unable to comprehend the vastness of the information being presented to me as I floated around in whatever this was.

I wondered when I would eventually begin to lose my sense of self, but some time in my musing, though time works strangely when you’re dead, I noticed something. Something I hadn’t seen in quite a while, now that I thought about it.

[Lena] is dead.

I didn’t quite “see” it, since I had no eyes, but I was aware of the blue box’s presence.

Its very unhelpful presence. It might as well not show up if it was going to give me such obvious information.

It disappeared, even if I didn’t have any way to tap it to dismiss it.

Even without a proper sense of time, I felt like it took a while for another blue box to appear again.

[Lena] has assimilated into the realm of Aether.

Ah. New information. That was nice. Ultimately useless, since it didn’t change the fact that I was dead, but it was intriguing in more ways than one. Why was the Guide even interacting with me in the first place?

The blue box disappeared, replaced with another.

[Lena]’s quest: Guide

While the [Lena] has left the side of the [HERO], his quest is not yet over. Directionless and uncertain, he must be guided towards his ultimate destiny.

Objective: Guide the journey of the [HERO].

Rewards: Wish fulfilment.

[ACCEPT]

I stared at the blue box, not sure if I could believe what I was observing.

None of it made sense.

In front of me, the text box changed.

[Lena]’s quest: Guide the [HERO] (Jamie Campbell)

The [HERO] (Jamie Campbell) must accomplish his ultimate desires. Upon the acceptance of this quest, the [Lena] will provide guidance and tools to the [HERO] (Jamie Campbell) to allow him to achieve his goals.

Objective: Guide the journey of the [HERO] (Jamie Campbell).

Rewards: [Lena] will be granted whatever she desires.

[ACCEPT]

That wasn’t quite what I meant. The wording of the text hadn’t been what I was confused about.

What could I even do? I was dead.

Actually, I supposed I wouldn’t stay dead for much longer, with Jamie being around to bring me back with his magic. Huh. I didn’t know how to feel about that. I didn’t feel particularly glad that I would stop being dead. I didn’t ever remembered being suicidal, so maybe death was just like that? Maybe since I had already lost my life, I had become apathetic about it?

Not liking the impending existential crisis I was about to have, I shifted my attention back to the panel. The [ACCEPT] text had started to pulse with an eager yellow glow, along with the text detailing my “rewards.”

Not very subtle.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure I could feel emotion while I was dead… no, scratch that. I definitely could. Annoyance, at the very least, wasn’t lost to me.

In response, the pulsing glow slowed down.

Without an actual mouth, I could only frown in a metaphysical sense. What was the Guide trying to do? Why was it asking me this? And why now? Why was it offering me these vague rewards, and what did it want me to do? Well, what it wanted me to do was pretty obvious, but why? Why was it trying to fulfil Jamie’s wish? Why did it need help in the first place? It was a God. It was well within its power to simply reach down to Materia and change the world to suit its needs. It didn’t need to force me to do its bidding for it.

I groaned silently, no sound coming out of my non-existent mouth, but managing to convey the concept of annoyance all the same. The text stopped pulsing altogether, and a new button popped up.

[DECLINE]

I stared at the button. This was new. While I had only gotten one “quest” from the Guide before, I knew from watching Jamie’s boxes that turning the Guide down wasn’t usually an option. It always just seemed to assume that Jamie would do its bidding.

The entire wall of text pulsed in response to my thoughts.

I didn’t know what emotion it was trying to convey, if the Guide even had any emotions in the human sense, but I had clearly thought of something that was worth reacting to. I pondered the button for a few seconds.

Was it protesting the idea that it was forcing me to do anything?

The pulsing stopped.

What did that mean? Was my assumption right or not?

The blue box grew larger and closer to my sense of perception, close enough that my nose would be pressing into it if I was still corporeal.

The two buttons floated directly in my area of perception, silently asking me to choose whether I accepted or declined.

I stared at the panels for a moment before I raised my arm, or at least tried to. Remembering that I didn’t actually have a body to manipulate, I simply stared at the button I chose, focusing on the [DECLINE] button until the box faded away.

A pulse of energy enveloped me, as the Guide reacted to my choice. I didn’t understand what it was feeling, with its equivalent of emotion being too alien for me to even try to comprehend, but I doubted that the Guide understood why I had chosen to decline its request. From what I’d seen from it, it was too alien of an entity to even have a basic understanding of mortal minds.

There was another pulse of energy, different enough from the first that I could recognize it as a different emotion.

Confusion maybe? Or maybe I had assumed wrong and it was getting angry at me. I wasn’t sure. Whenever I heard my dad talk about religion, I got the sense that Gods could be quite angry for very little reason. Maybe the Guide would just erase my existence for my impudence.

Another pulse, another different one. I waited to see if my consciousness would be obliterated by the God, but nothing happened.

I still didn’t know whether it was angry or not. Maybe it was just waiting for me to reveal that even though I’d chosen to decline its request, I still planned to help Jamie if he did decide to revive me. I had always planned to do that. I didn’t need a vague promise from a clumsy God to motivate me, especially when I was sceptical about how it would try to “grant me whatever I desired” when it was doing such a terrible job at doing the same for Jamie.

A weak pulse of energy enveloped me, but this time, instead of it washing through my being, I felt my consciousness jerk uncomfortably stretching along with the wave.

My consciousness stretched along with the wave of energy, until I felt it spread thin, to the point where I could barely feel my own existence at all. Where was I? Who was I? What was I doing? I didn’t know. Soon it wouldn’t matter.

But the feeling stopped. My consciousness snapped back, once more, and I took a deep gasp of air and sat up, blearily blinking my eyes as I regained consciousness. Looking up, I saw Jamie’s bloodshot eyes staring down at me, a trail of tears flowing down his cheeks and dripping off the tip of his chin.

Oh. I was alive again.

“Hey,” I said.