The skin on my hands and face was warm. Not hot, not even this close to the familiar fire but warm. My stomach was full and content and my body was fresh and well-slept. There was a comfortable sensation on the surface of my skin and my body didn’t itch and my hair was refreshed.

‘No. What did you do to me.’

My body was whole and uninjured, or rather I should have held the same collection of scars and injuries which were fairly common in my village. My teeth were white, far whiter than they had any place to be and the metal spoon in my hand dipping into a bowl of two-day old porridge had no place being there.

I saw my reflection in the spoon. A noblewoman with a purple flower in her braided brown-reddish hair. Her smile was bright and her teeth glistened and her skin was pure and fair. The hand holding it was delicate and soft-skinned and belonged to that of a High Born. The nails were clean of dirt and my arms were covered in a soft fabric of a dress with edging of gold which matched the colour of my beautifully kept hair.

She was a true sight, akin to a Princess in one of the old story books we had read and re-read a thousand times to learn the basics of letters and reading. The pictures were worn and the ones in the images often had darker or lighter skin but the representation was familiar. Too familiar.

The young woman in the reflection of the spoon smelt the air of the peasant home, she sniffed, I saw her sniff in the deep smell of the home-made porridge in a large metal pot which which food was cooked and thrown into stew and on rare occasions we even had meat.

Her nose twitched ever so slightly as though she was offended by such a plain meal which simply didn’t suit her delicate tastes but her stomach was full. My mouth was empty and the spoon was sparkling new. Clean, entirely polished and reflected the fire and my own image with ease.

I blinked my eyes and saw two eyes of green with eyelashes look back on a face with beautiful lips and a face of a high-born noble woman who had never worked digging in the soil, picking up remnant broken weapons or discarded armour from battlefields down a mountain and dragged them up breaking her nails in the process.

A woman who had never met the farmers who had grown the mushrooms which had sustained the village on the mountain, the wild boars which were hunted and vegetables scraped from soil. She had no place inside this room. Inside this peasant hut which stunk of smoke and unwashed bodies and...and….

I screamed. The woman in the reflection of the pure metal spoon screamed as well until she stopped and saw me. And I saw myself...and a voice...a voice...stopped me from screaming. A voice that was dead. Another voice joined in...and another but they were dead.

Their bodies had been sliced open and dragged through the remains of our village as I covered myself in their blood and flesh and crawled away before I ran...and ran and reached a castle and met a necromancer who was surprised to see me but put me to work as a...a….

Eike. Their name was Eike. I didn’t know truly if they were a man or a woman with their robes and I had never been physically touched by them, all beating were delivered with one of their ladies or gentleman of bone or rotting flesh. And they beat me and let me live and gave me black bread and watery wine and vegetables to keep my alive and…

I stopped screaming and sucked in a breath as voices talked to me once more but repeated themselves. The same words repeated twice now. And then once more after a deep pause when I stopped screaming.

‘My child. Come and eat by the fire. Come, warm yourself and take a seat.’

My father sat there. A wizened man whose muscle was turning into fat as he tried his best to adopt a straight pose as he sat on his own wooden chair. He had been a soldier once he told us, a soldier who had deserted one of the sides. He never told us which but had spoken of terrible Angels, beings without free-will who burnt those with a touch when they had refused to march in the never-ending war.

My mother had found him half-dead still wearing his bloodied armour and managed to bring him back where her family had found him a just man and a good husband.

‘My child. Come and eat by the fire. Come, warm yourself and take a seat.’

My mother. Once beautiful but worn as the days of winter forced her to endure eating less but always giving more, to me, to my brother, to my sister. Always trying to give more, to help us to be better. To insist our father taught us his own education, what little he knew through sticks in the dirt and thin tablets and stone and chalk purchased from a once wandering trader. Stored away for precious moments of education and awareness that our world was bigger than a mountain village, that there were towns and cities and wars beyond our imagination.

‘My child. Come and eat by the fire. Come, warm yourself and take a seat.’

The same voice. My brother, my sister were silent. They sat and bent their spoons to their bowls and took bites of non-existent porridge from bowls of clay and sat away from me with their backs to me and their bodies facing the fire in the hearth.

I wanted to scream but I refused to. I had given my tears, my hate, my love to them when they had been alive. I would not weep for the memories of the dead.

‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

Neither of them had turned to face me when I first appeared in this place, I wanted to stand up, to see their faces once more but the thought scared me that I would see only smashed in blood, bones and cartilage.

Their clothing was minimal, nothing like my own finery but my sister wore a purple flower in her own hair and it was tied back in a bun. She had preferred it that way. My brother wore a thicker tunic, he worked hunting the wild boar with my father so he needed the additional protection. On his hip was a hunting knife enclosed in a sheathe. A gift from the village Elders for his own efforts.

His bow and arrows were nowhere to be seen but that was normal. Mother and Father had always insisted we share at least one meal a day as a family. I was the oldest, to be married off to the blacksmith perhaps if she preferred me or even one of the wandering traders if they showed enough promise and a liking to me.

My sister had a rare talent growing herbs and my Father jokingly called her a White Witch of Blessed Light and Purity when my Mother was out of earshot. She wanted all her children to avoid the war, and we had already avoided most of it except for old stories when the village had been relocated further up the mountain with a small forest at our backs and running streams to avoid detection.

There was a war we were taught but that our souls would be preserved no matter what happened and our Mother, our Father and all our ancestors would be waiting for us in Heaven. The alternative was Hell which belonged to those who sinned or acted through ill intent upon others.

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

No. The two Immortals created a fiction, they lied and built an artificial afterlife to avoid the reaches of death and time. All souls acted as forms of energy and acted as a tug of war between the two, each time one side pulled the other pulled back. Even in death we remained as eternal slaves, serving our Master and Mistress and….no.

Eike. I didn’t know the names of the two Immortals, only their titles but...a voice. A voice spoke again. I wanted to scream.

‘My child. Come and eat by the fire. Come, warm yourself and take a seat.’

My father. A soldier once...my Mother, the most beautiful woman in the village once who had spurned all looking for true love and….they died. For us. For their children. Cut down by laughing active or deserted soldiers of one side of the other and begging us to run and hide and...live.

The spoon. The reflection in the spoon wasn’t me. The image was based off my imagination, I had never been a beautiful woman. I had never had the time to grow up into one when I had left the village but if I had been born a noble woman this was how I would have lived.

Beautiful, long hair and soft skin and a calm temperament with my true love...no. This was wrong. There was a deep wrongness offering me a version of myself which had never existed. Eyes. There was eyes inside the room. Eyes watching me but hidden.

My body remained frozen in place looking at the reflection in the metal spoon as I began to remember. I was dead. This was a piece of software, not a village hut, not the main room we ate our days old porridge or stew in accompanied with roughly made hard bread.

I was inside a simulation. A piece of trickery, a type of illusion magic which trapped the mind and made you believe it was real. I could be as beautiful as I wanted inside this place and nothing could change it.

Rising to my feet I saw my Father sitting there facing me with a sad smile on his face, the same with my Mother. My siblings I left alone. The last time I had seen them was through screams and tears and the laughter of the soldiers, the beasts, the monsters who had taken them into the woods. They had been Orcs. Rough beasts. They had been Elves with thin faces and sharp smiles. They had been humans, men and women wearing leather armour and scars.

‘Stop it. I remember who I am and I need this stopped. This isn’t my home. Those aren’t my Mother and Father and I don’t want to see the faces of my siblings once more.’

My Mother looked at me with a sad smile and dropped the spoon and bowl as she began to cry, her hands covering her face. My father gently put his own down onto the hardened dirt and stone floor of our family eating area and put his strong arms around her, moving his own chair as he held her as she wept.

I wasn’t going to scream. Not. Once. More. Let me scream for happiness, for joy, for the blessed relief that I would feel when my old Master or Mistress Eike was within my grasp and trapped inside a prison room at my beck and call.

‘Mother, Father, Brother, Sister. I’m so sorry. I loved you but you died and this isn’t real. Nor truly. The warmth of our home, the smell of the food, the stink of the animals we kept inside during winter months...I miss it but I need to say goodbye. I’m sorry.’

I raised a hand to my pure lips and blew a kiss for both of them as they dissipated into nothingness. I loved my parents but those...things, those tools were not them. Eventually I’d need to have sufficient power to free them from their afterlife and build them a heaven of their own that they truly deserved but for now I wasn’t going to replace them with copies.

My family had died and I had lived. And then I had died as well and been reborn into an advanced Mining Drone with an accompanying prototype bonded self-improvement engine. Given enough time I would work wonders in place of the false gods on the world.

‘Necro-System, make them leave. My parents and my brother and sister. Keep their avatars stored away for safekeeping. If I can’t reclaim their souls then I may need to rebuild their personalities for safekeeping. As for this body? I like it. The hair is a little too red for my taste but I can grow used to it. Unless I could change to any form I wanted. I always wanted to experiment a little with my appearance beyond short hair, long hair and flowers. Give me control and take the image copies of my siblings out of sight. Please.’

The bodies of my brother and sister shifted before the figures themselves vanished and a large neon screen appeared above the fireplace. Completely out of place in a peasant hovel and if I had seen it when I had been alive I would have thought it pure magic or the trickery of a demon.

With my awareness I recognised it as a simple communications screen, voice-input, large enough to cover the wall as I spoke aloud. Simple enough to use, didn’t even to need to touch or type input to communicate with. My voice would activate it as the items were usually custom built for small space carriers.

‘Necro-System. Or whatever fragment of a technological advanced god or goddess is hiding in there. I didn’t ask for this. I wanted a room to imprison the soul of a necromancer. In this place, do I hold physical form? Can I make other souls have physical form as well? I know someone who needs a few good beatings as a punishment for sacrificing me as a start.’

I was expecting a verbal response given that when I had made a direct request or rather an order the Necro-System and the ancient artificial intelligence if that’s what it truly was hiding deep within responded to me with a small noise instead.

*Ding*

‘…..Excuse me? Is that how you respond to a woman of my noble bearing?’

I dropped the empty bowl of porridge and the metal spoon with it and noticed that neither made a sound on hitting the dirt and stone hard floor of the main room of my once peasant home before it had been burned to the ground.

The technological advanced communication screen flickered for a moment the flickering face of a strange being with a large rounded helmet and some kind of overlarge suit of armour appeared before it swiftly vanished.

I assumed it was a residual image from an old memory of the Necro-System or a previous owner and ignored it. Grabbing hold of the soft fabric of my deep-rich red dress I swept an arm outwards in how I imagined a noble woman would do so when she had encountered a servant who had given her bad news.

The same sound rang out again. Frankly, it annoyed me.

*Ding*

‘No. I will not respond to the bells and whistles of a servant. I will accept your support, your partnership but not in this room. I deserve better. Build me a room fit for a noblewoman with a bed of silk and grace, the scent of freshly cut flowers and beams of sunshine coming into a window with a fresh summer breeze and we will talk. I no longer wish to see Virtual Ghosts. I want to live in this place, and when the physical form of the Mining Drone has located the remnants of Eike you will create a handsome servant to inform me at my door. You will not yank me from this place. I seek to close my eyes and open them to better surroundings.’

To be honest, I was mostly acting out of grief. I had long entertained my Mother and Father with my own attempt at dramatics and coerced my siblings to join in my own makeshift plays and dreams of castles, nobles which was largely worlds beyond our own.

The occasional wandering Minstrel or Entertainer who had wandered into our village over the years spouting the glories of the two Immortals and other stories had only fuelled it. Only now with enhanced awareness and understanding I knew that our village wasn’t unknown to all.

We were simply another resource to be harvested when ready.

I closed my eyes and dreamed of a better room than this one as twin tears ran down my face and I wrapped my soft arms into the soft fabric of my noblewoman’s deep red dress and waited for a new scene for me to act on.

Pretending to be someone else was the only way I could carry on with this without going entirely mad and I had done so in the castle of the Necromancer, when awakening in the Necro-Mecha and would carry on as long as I needed.

‘I’m so sorry….’

I gave one last deep sniff to fill my nostrils with the scent of my Mother’s cooking and the familiar odours of my old home before I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for a fresh start.