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The hellhounds were abroad.
Fodrish saw them only from a distance. They were glowing shapes that crept through the night, sometimes leaping from one rooftop to the next, sometimes discernible only as a dim orange glow from an alleyway as they prowled through Noblehearth.
When the rules were violated, when the geometry of the world was warped and defied, the Core Manual sent the hellhounds to punish the heretics. No one was out in Noblehearth tonight, because even if they had no part in the events at the cathedral square, no one wanted to find themselves in proximity to a hellhound. To see one, even to acknowledge them, brought a kind of pollution, an admittance of the awful truth that the rules could be broken.
Even the Player Characters had left Noblehearth. The hellhounds, legend had it, scaled by level, becoming deadlier the higher the level of their prey. A party of level twenty PCs would flee rather than face one. The adventuring parties were gone, and the Commoners were shut inside their homes.
Fodrish was not afraid of the hellhounds, because Fodrish didn’t feel anything. He hadn’t spoken to a soul since he had stood up from Melagorn’s body and wandered aimlessly until he found a place to sit. For hours his ears had rang and his body ached from the explosion, and time had slid by as if he was seeing the images of the square and the people as illustrations in a book. As he flicked through the pages they cleared away the worst of the wreckage to find people buried beneath it, or gathered up their wares from the ground. The stalls that had avoided damage were solemnly packed away and driven back to their owners’ workshops and warehouses. Some gathered in small knots, quietly weeping and holding one another, until they drifted away.
Fodrish had stayed through the afternoon until the sky began to darken, and the first flames of the hellhounds had flickered over the city’s boundary wall. Then everyone was gone, hiding from the coming scourge. Everyone except Fodrish, because he no longer had the capacity to feel afraid.
The world was impenetrable and immovable, as if Fodrish was ghosted over it and left no more impression than a shadow. He felt covered in a layer of dust that robbed him of the clarity of the senses, so even the flames of the hellhounds were muted and dull.
Is this grief? Is this what it feels like?
It feels like nothing.
Melagorn’s still, slack face came into his mind. He chased it away, and it was replaced by the eyes of the heretic from the cathedral. Those eyes had looked young, he realised now. She was little more than a girl. They held fear as well as determination.
And his mind finally crystallised the question that had been waiting to be asked since the moment the concussion of the blast had slammed into him.
Why?
What could anyone possibly gain from destroying the bazaar? Even more important than the identity of the culprits, or the means they had used to inflict such chaos, there was the question of why.
The question clawed at the inside of his head, and the only thing he could find to replace it was the face of his dying friend.
In the darkness, the hole in the cathedral was an empty eye socket staring out at Noblehearth, accusing the city of failing to protect its most sacred place. The drifts of rubble from its partial collapse had spilled across the square, waiting for labourers and masons to begin clearing it so repairs could begin. That would have to wait until the hellhounds were done. For now the heaps of broken stone would remain.
There were no hellhounds in the cathedral itself, which made sense. Those who committed the crime would be far away from the scene by now. There was a good chance they had fled the city entirely and hellhounds were scouring Noblehearth’s hinterland as well. Fodrish was completely alone as he crossed the square, and forcibly ignored the thought that one of the many bloodstains on the flagstones had belonged to his friend.
He went in through an entrance leading to the Shrine of Mhul. He lit a lantern he had found among the goods still lying in the wreckage, and by its feeble light the beast god’s statue was even more intimidating than usual. Beyond the pool of lantern light, the cathedral was utterly dark.
The words painted on the wall were still there, though cleaning them away would be the first job to be done when the cathedral was rebuilt.
MACHINES IN YOUR BLOOD
What does that mean? He imagined the heretics as the machines, moving through the bloodstream of Noblehearth and the rest of the Known Realms. Perhaps that was the meaning. Or the Commoners were the machines, acting blindly and ignorantly. That rhetoric would fit what little Fodrish understood of the heretics.
‘Wait,’ came a voice from the cathedral nave.
Fodrish froze, not even daring to turn to face the sound in case the lantern’s light gave him away.
‘You sure?’ said the voice again. It was a low, male voice.
‘Yeah, it’s here. That's it, right there.’ A second voice, this one older and weaker.
‘Then get it done and let’s bail.’
‘It’s not that simple.’
‘What? We got the bloody thing exposed, what else is there?’ The first man’s voice, the younger one, had a note of anger and panic.
‘Did we leave it too long?’ said a third voice. It was a woman’s. Fodrish recognised the voice of the young heretic he had confronted earlier in the day. Slowly, he reached down to the shutter of the lantern and closed it. The lantern’s light was cut off and the painted words vanished.
‘I don’t know,’ said the younger man. `We'd have been out of here twelve hours ago if it wasn’t bloody market day.’
‘Don’t let this be for nothing,’ said the woman. ‘Not with all those people.’
‘Stop going on about that. We didn’t know. They weren’t supposed to be there.’
Fodrish crept towards the archway leading into the nave, feeling his way along the wall. A glimmer of blue light shone through the archway, with the suggestion of figures silhouetted beside it.
‘There’s a… a block on it,’ said the older voice.
‘A what?’ said the younger man.
‘I can’t dial it up. I can… I can go down.’
‘Well that’s not much bloody use.’
‘I’m just saying what it is.’
‘Can you make it work or not?’
The pause that followed was so tense, Fodrish felt it was more likely to be broken by the sound of a knife being drawn than by more words.
‘No,’ said the older man. ‘No, the Core Manual’s plugged the loophole.’
‘Do we go?’ said the woman.
‘Hold on,’ said the younger man. ‘We’re not going to give up now after all this.’
‘It doesn’t work,’ said the older man. ‘I can’t do it. Stay and glare at it if you want, I’m done here.’
‘Come on,’ said the woman. ‘The hounds’ll be sniffing around here again soon.’
‘Fine,’ snarled the younger man. ‘Leave it, then. Head through the city wall before they hunt us down.’
Fodrish heard the trio’s footsteps as they walked towards the back of the nave, and the indistinct muttering of their voices as they continued to bicker.
For a long time he stayed still, certain they were going to return and drag him off with them. It was an odd form of distant fear, not something visceral and immediate but as mundane and everyday as dropping a copper coin in the street or mishandling a breastplate in the forge.
If they dragged me into the shadows and I never returned, would that be so bad?
Fodrish opened the shutter of the lamp and let the thin beam play across the pews and the statue of Tyrhannyl. The wall behind the god’s statue had collapsed in the blast and the God of Kings was missing several pieces. The blue glow was coming from a section of the floor that had heaved upwards in the explosion, with the huge blocks of stone sticking up like leaning gravestones and exposing the earth beneath.
Fodrish crouched beside the ragged hole where the three heretics had been a few minutes before. Inside the hole was the source of light, a tangle of pipes running beneath the cathedral floor. Glowing lines of light in blue and magenta ran around the pipe junctions, all with letters and numbers streaming along in flickering ribbons.
Fodrish had not seen the like of it before. I had to be magical, and high-level. It must have been important for the heretics to have gone to such awful lengths to access it.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Some of the lights formed a panel hovering in the air in front of a junction in the pipework. It showed several lines of letters and figures, forming a readout similar to the device the heretic had been using earlier in the day. Fodrish tried to focus on it and find some meaning in the words.
OVERFLOW DATA PROTECTION
PARAMETER SET INTERRUPT
FUNCTION LEVEL +/-
A flicker of light flared in Fodrish’s eye as a beam of pink light ran over him. A moment later, another line of text appeared on the panel.
COMMONER 1
It had read Fodrish’s character level. Whatever the heretics wanted with the strange device, it was to do with levels.
It’s to increase their character level. To bypass the XP ladder entirely, to take a shortcut through the whole world.
The implications of changing character level at will, to do in a few seconds what should take a lifetime, was so vast the shock of it was the only thing Fodrish had really felt since he watched Melagorn die.
The plus sign in the readout was in red, and the minus was in blue. Fodrish guessed that meant, as the heretics had suggested, the level could only be adjusted downwards instead of up. Perhaps the device was already set like that, or perhaps the Core Manual had reacted to the explosion by changing it.
Suddenly the idea of not existing, of vanishing entirely from the Known Realms, had a terrible and enveloping allure.
Fodrish did not will his hand to reach into the hole towards the glowing panel, or for his finger to point at the minus sign.
Imagine not being here. Never feeling this numbness again.
The minus sign flashed.
COMMONER 0
Fodrish blinked. I didn’t feel like anything had changed. He ran a hand over his chest and looked at the other in the blue glow. It looked and felt the same. He called up his character sheet and it appeared over the strange tangle of pipework and light.
FODRISH ABLEWRIGHT
COMMONER 0
XP: 0. XP to next level: 1000
STRENGTH 2
DEXTERITY 3
TOUGHNESS 3
PERCEPTION 3
INTELLIGENCE 4
SPIRIT 3
PROFICIENCIES: Artisan’s Tools, Basic Weapon (Club), Basic Armour (Cloth)
SKILLS: Leadership 1
His level was zero. That was lower than a person started with. The moment anyone left the Meadows, they were a Commoner 1. But Fodrish wasn’t even that.
He stood up and aimed the light of the lantern around the nave again. Did these gods even see him now? If he prayed, would his words reach the Celestial Plane where the gods dwelled? Was there a lesser deity who heard the prayers of a level zero? Maybe there had never been a level zero before.
In a near-stupor, Fodrish walked out of the Cathedral of the Primes and into the streets of Noblehearth. Higher-level Commoners lived in the district adjoining the Cathedral, and the fine houses beneath their bright gables were fronted with their workshops and stores. One sold clothes of velvet and silk. Another had a sign boasting of its highest-quality potions, taste and function both guaranteed. With the hellhounds wandering the city, they were all closed up behind wooden shutters.
Fodrish wasn’t sure where he was going. He didn’t even know if he could work at his forge again, since the results of his forging were partially level-based and now he had no level. His thoughts were swimming and distant, as if they were trickling down from someone else’s mind. He might have lost everything he had, he might not even be alive any more in any meaningful sense. But that knowledge, which should have been terrifying, seemed matter-of-fact and unspectacular. He still felt nothing.
Fodrish caught sight of an unusual light shining from ahead, the same cool blue glow as the device the heretics had revealed. The light surrounded a square open entrance in a high wall, something Fodrish was sure he had never seen in the city before. Through the entrance was a wide tunnel of dressed stone. He walked over the threshold and the chill night air became room temperature.
The tunnel turned sharply up ahead and Fodrish turned the corner to see a huge chamber, bigger even than the interior of the Tavern, yet brightly-lit all the way up to the stone ceiling. Almost filling the chamber, yet completely still and silent, were people. They stood in ranks and rows as neat as an army on the parade ground.
Each section of the chamber was filled with a different type of unmoving person. Most numerous were soldiers wearing leather armour with breastplates, carrying a shield on one arm and a spear or sword over the other shoulder. They wore helmets with red crests. Their faces were all different but they had the same physique and equipment.
Others wore the simple white robes of a healer, and had a pack around their waist to carry herbs and poultices for treating injuries and recovering small numbers of hit points. A third section was full of hunters, each in green and brown hide armour, carrying bows and quivers. Beside them were several ranks of horses, all similarly motionless.
Fodrish walked along the rows, looking into the expressionless faces. There were hundreds of soldiers and dozens of healers and hunters. Other types were less numerous, a few in jester’s clothes dyed bright red and yellow, and wizened old men and women in blue robes with packs of books and scrolls. Some wore black and red robes and had strange sigils painted on their faces, and eyes that glowed crimson, but even these did not move in spite of the flames flickering from their eye sockets.
They did not react as Fodrish walked through the chamber. He tapped a soldier on the chest with one finger, but she did not flinch.
They were NPCs, the kind that Player Characters could summon. The soldiers were the most numerous because they were the most frequently called upon by PCs with high Leadership. A host of loyal NPC soldiers could hold the line against a horde of enemies or draw the attention of a dragon or demon, or even simply walk ahead of the PCs through a trap-laden dungeon. Fodrish spotted the rear ranks were more heavily armed with full plate armour and tower shields, because the higher levels of Leadership could summon more capable NPCs as well as more numerous.
The healers were almost as useful, tending to PCs during a quest to heal minor injuries without using up the PCs’ stash of potions or magical power. The hunters could gather food in the wilderness or scout ahead for enemies. The rarer ones, the sages who could answer difficult lore questions or the jesters who could provide bonuses when dealing with other powerful NPCs, were more situational in their value and summoned only for specific quests or encounters.
Fodrish had not seen anything like the sinister black-robed figures with the burning eyes, but figured they were for high-level rituals by a magic-using class.
He had never seen this place before, never even seen an entrance, yet he had walked into it unhindered.
The place was for storing NPCs. That meant he was an NPC, too.
It was in the Meadows, as with most things, that Fodrish had learned of death. When someone died, the mentors explained, it was for good. They did not come back. Everything they might ever do would now go undone. Everyone who drew gladness from their presence would never feel that particular joy again.
It was a difficult thing for a child to fully understand. The Meadows were insulated from the rest of the Known Realms, because only by receiving instruction from the Meadows’ NPC mentors could a character be ready for the Known Realms and the ladder of XP that governed it. The Meadows was a place that did not have death. The rest of the world was different.
As a Commoner, Fodrish could die. Melagorn could die. Almost everyone in Noblehearth could die. And when they died, they stayed dead, just as they had been taught in the Meadows. Death became an absolute truth.
Then, a character reached Commoner 5 and went on to earn their first Player Character level. The absolute truth of death became translucent, with possibilities just visible beyond it. With each subsequent level, death became less an impenetrable dark wall, and more an ocean without paths or mercy but which could nevertheless be crossed.
At later levels, a character could cast the spell Guide Soul. This magic led a soul back to its body and, provided little enough time had passed since death and the body was above a threshold of intactness, the character returned to life. It was at this point that death, and all that death meant, changed.
The spell components were expensive. A character raised from the dead with Guide Soul suffered heavy penalties for some time, so that death still held a sting. But it was not absolute. It was not the end.
Almost every Cleric in the Known Realms chose to learn Guide Soul when they reached level seven, and it was granted to them through the divine powers of their chosen god. For this reason, no adventuring party of level seven or above would ever venture out questing without a Cleric among their number.
If a Player Character wanted to inflict immense amounts of damage to hordes of enemies at once, they might choose to become a Wizard. If they wanted to feel the rush of battle and shrug off awesome blows in the thick of combat, they might choose Fighter. But if they wanted to guarantee a place on the most rewarding quests, if they wanted adventuring parties and guilds to bargain and cajole for their presence, if they wanted to be essential in a way that no other Player Character ever could be, then the first choice they made on their adventuring career would be to take a level of Cleric.
Melagorn did not have a level seven Cleric to cast Guide Soul on him. A Commoner 3 was not valuable enough to an adventuring party to justify the extortionate cost of the spell components. For all he had seemed to soar so high above Fodrish, Melagorn had still been a Commoner, and the benefits of resurrection magic were not for the likes of him. Melagorn had died, and he would never come back.
Fodrish felt then, more keenly than ever before, what really drew everyone in the Known Realms up the XP ladder. The glorious deeds were one thing, and the magnificent powers and abilities to be gained. The wealth and the chance to witness all the wonders of the Known Realms were spoken of, but they were not truly the goal for a Commoner jealously scraping together every available experience point. Instead, it was the knowledge that eventually, high enough up the ladder, they would not die.
Old age would eventually take them, for the Core Manual maintained that was one of the immutable rules. But so long as a Player Character could afford the spell components and remain in the good graces of an adventuring party with a sufficiently powerful Cleric, they could never die for good by violence, accident or disease.
The awesome certainty of that guaranteed existence, the calming stone foundation of a natural lifetime, seemed like a rock a person could grab onto. The world was random and brutal, governed by mathematics beyond understanding, but to know death would not come until a century or more had passed must feel like living every day in a paradise of predictability.
Melagorn had died a happenstance, pointless death. Fodrish tried to imagine a world without that, a world above level seven, but his mind shied away from envisioning it. If Melagorn had not got to that divine land, Fodrish certainly never would. It would be too painful to even imagine, as painful as the stabs of memory when Melagorn’s face appeared to him.
The spiral of thought, half-experienced, fell away as Fodrish woke up. He had dozed off sitting against a wall of the huge NPC chamber. He got to his feet and stretched, for his body was stiff after lying against the cold stone. He found himself looking at the ranks of NPCs, and realised the number had changed. There were fewer soldiers now, he was sure. A couple of the ranks had gone.
One ache that did not go with a good stretch was in his stomach. Fodrish had not eaten since before the explosion and only realised now how hungry he was. For a moment he was about to leave the chamber and go back onto the streets of Noblehearth, but the place seemed completely uninviting to him. There was nothing for him there now. There were no reasons to order a tankard in the Tavern when Melagorn would not be there to order the food.
One of the soldiers marched forwards out of formation, followed by four more. They gathered beneath a glow on the ceiling of the chamber which grew in intensity until it filled the entire space with a shimmering blue light. The first soldier stepped into the shaft of light and vanished, his image becoming translucent, then barely an outline, then gone.
‘Summoned,’ said Fodrish out loud.
A second soldier stepped into the light and disappeared. The third walked forward to join him.
Fodrish shoved the third NPC soldier aside and walked into the light in his place.
There was nothing in Noblehearth for him. Perhaps the summoner’s location would be different.
The chamber and its legions of NPCs shimmered into nothingness, replaced by a white light. A buzzing intensity of motion overtook Fodrish’s body, as if every particle of him was being shaken apart.
Then he was gone, and Noblehearth was far behind him.