Other than a bit of uncoordinated flopping in his sleep, Miit barely moved. Ayn kept telling herself his breathing was fine, yet every time he paused, she couldn’t help but stare until his chest rose again, and she passed hours of the night doing just that. Her mother had long gone to bed. The house was dark and quiet, save for the slivers of moonlight slipping between the shutters over the one little window by Ayn’s bed.
The memory of Miit waking her had led to the memory of sneaking out in the dead of the night to cause mischief with her first, and last, close friends in Cristak. Like the sight of her weakened familiar bandaged and drugged in front of her, good memories led to bad, and soon she was drowning in them.
“Forget it,” she muttered under her breath.
Ayn threw the shutters open and crawled out. She didn’t need to. Her mother wouldn’t have stopped her from walking out the front door, yet the simple, familiar action still created a jolt of excitement. Her demons ebbed, and the shadows welcomed her back.
The night’s blanket covered Ayn all the way through Cristak. Silence reigned. Even the most industrious workers were asleep by this time, saving up their strength for the busy day ahead. Th inn Kayara had spoke of was easy to find. It was, after all, the only one in Cristak. Its thick log construction, two stories, and large foundation made it second in size only to the Crafter Guild’s hall. The inn, too, stood dark and silent.
Ayn slipped around the back of the building without thought. After her father died, her mother had worked at the inn for a bit, and Ayn had taken the time to map every nook and cranny of the place with Neu, Rav and Tayla. She and her mother had been kicked out shortly after some coins went missing, along with a traveling Crawler’s prized wand.
The log wall was easier to scale than Ayn remembered, but she had grown a lot since the last time. The top floor of The Cedar Tree Inn had eighteen rooms—five lined up on each side, and eight along the back. Room thirteen sat in the corner.
She’d scrambled up to room thirteen’s window and knocked on it before common sense caught up. She wasn’t with the gang anymore. Rav, Neu and Tayla were gone. The one behind the window was someone she’d met only recently, and despite the crash course of the Dungeon forcing them closer, they still knew very little about each other.
Ayn gauged the distance between her and the ground. It wasn’t that far. A quick jump and dash, and she’d be back inside the blanket of shadows.
The window’s shutters swung open, nearly knocking Ayn across the head.
Kayara’s eyes went wide on the other side of the window. “Oh, sorry! I…wasn’t thinking.” Her words were a bit slurred, like she’d just woken up.
Ayn mentally kicked herself. Of course she’d been asleep. Every sane person in town was asleep. She was the only idiot skulking around. “No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”
“Why? I invited you over. I didn’t expect the…” Kayara waved in Ayn’s direction. “Uh…spider routine, but you’re here now, so why not come in? Or do you prefer sticking to the wall?”
Ayn chuckled nervously. The urge to run was getting stronger. She shoved it down and climbed inside the window.
Kayara’s room was a clone of every other inn room—bare log walls around a rectangular floor space just big enough for a bed, drawers, and a table with four chairs. Larger inns in larger town and cities would have a variety of rooms with more floor space or amenities. The Cedar Tree couldn’t afford such niceties, and each patron was expected to rent their own room through gold or trade.
“How are you paying for this?” Ayn grimaced as soon as the words left her mouth. As far as small talk went, that had to be the worst way to start. “Sorry, that was rude.”
Kayara shrugged. “Materials. I had to do some fast-talking to get a tab, but it paid off after the last floor. Apparently, blue coconuts are a hot commodity in inns. This room is mine for months. Too bad, though. I wanted to experiment with them.”
“Oh.” Ayn shifted foot-to-foot. The air suddenly felt heavier.
“Do you want to sit down?”
Did she? The window was still open. She could still leave and go back home. Back to Miit and drowning in the past.
Kayara watched her in silence as she decided, and only after Ayn had settled in a chair did the ranger move to sit down across from her.
“How are you?” Kayara asked.
The question froze Ayn’s thoughts. She’d expected the ranger to ask about Miit, or what was so important she’d had to scale a wall in the dead of night. She had answers prepared for those. With her preparations rendered moot, she suddenly felt very exposed. “I…uh…Miit’s resting still.”
Kayara took Ayn’s question dodging with the same grace she took everything. She nodded sagely and leaned back in her chair. “I see. I meant what I said. He’ll pull through just fine. He’s growing on me, you know. I can respect his level of stubborn.”
Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.
“He’s still dying.”
There it was. The truth that had been haunting Ayn all night. Rebirth was immortality, freedom from the struggles of flesh and blood. That’s what the pamphlets had said. Yet in two short digital lifetimes she had seen the dark side of such promises, the half-truths, and yet another was staring her in the face.
“Because he doesn’t have a summoner?” Kayara asked.
“Yeah.”
“Have you heard about your father yet?”
“No.”
He’s supposed to come back soon, Ayn wanted to add, but the words got stuck. She needed to believe that he would, that he’d keep his promise. Right now, though, it all felt like a lie wrapped in a bubble of her delusion. If she voiced it, the bubble might pop, leaving only the lie behind. There were too many of those weighing her down already.
“Why do you think they lied to us?” Ayn asked.
“Who?”
“Immortech. The pamphlets. The ads. ‘Free from suffering,’ you remember?” Ayn’s voice cracked in the middle of the sentence. She didn’t care. Kayara seemed so knowledgeable, so calm. Surely the ranger could help her feel the same. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen a hell of a lot of suffering already. Miit, Mother, Neu, Rav, Tayla…”
“The Rebirths you used to run with.”
Ayn choked out a laugh. Of course Kayara had heard of them. The townsfolk loved to talk about how horrible they’d been, how glad they were that most of them were gone. The townsfolk would be even happier if Ayn was gone, too. If not for Miit’s need to stay in Cristak, she would have granted their wish years ago. “I’m sure you’ve heard the entire story.”
“I’d rather hear it from you.”
Ayn looked away as her eyes stung. The memory was one of the ghosts chasing her since Miit got injured. Shoving it down only strengthened it, yet she feared letting it out would tear her apart. Tayla’s round, innocent face filled her mind. Out of all of them, she’d deserved what had happened the least. Telling Kayara would give her one more person who knew so, and Tayla deserved that.
Ayn nodded. “Okay.”
*****
Ayn had gravitated toward Neu and Rav as soon as she saw them. They were two years older than her, and hellions by the moment their characters could walk.
The System governed the maturation speed of Rebirths, and it had decided on ten years. As such, a two-year-old character was physically more like a four-year-old in the original world, and a ten-year-old more like a twenty-year-old. However, a Rebirth’s mental age didn’t change. Ayn had found it bizarre and awkward having an adult mind stuck inside a newborn body, but it had also been kind of fun to re-experience early life with a mind that could understand what was going on. Neu and Rav hadn’t seen it that way. They were “Old Souls”—Rebirths who had gone through dozens, if not hundreds, of lives.
Each new character meant ten long years of drudgery, of mind-numbing repetitions of the same steps before the excitement of Crawling. Only within the randomness of the Dungeon did they feel alive. To combat the boredom, Neu and Rav had devised a plan—they would make their own challenges. Those challenges always involved going where they shouldn’t, and doing what they shouldn’t, and Ayn had found it almost as fascinating as Neu’s tales of all his previous lives and exploits.
At first, she’d followed them around just for the stories. She even roped Cristak’s newest Rebirth, Tayla, into coming with her, so she could talk about them more. It wasn’t until her father had died that she’d lost the will to be the “good girl” he’d always told her to be. Her and her mother’s life changed in one day, and Neu and Rav’s antics held an escape, a rush which covered up all the questions in her mind, and she’d dragged Tayla along.
With two more in the gang, Neu and Rav’s plans grew more elaborate, more dangerous, and more damaging to the targets of their plots. Young Rebirths still held a certain amount of leeway despite adult minds, perhaps as a holdover from the original world. Still, everyone had limits, and the four of them quickly found themselves at the limits of Cristak’s goodwill.
On this night, they all stood in an abandoned house at the edge of Cristak. It was a little more than a mud and thatch shanty, a tossed away shelter from a dirt poor Rebirth who had either moved on to better things, or ended their life for a re-roll. Neu had latched onto the second idea, and frequently enjoyed making up stories of how the original owner had died.
“It’ll be fun,” Neu said. He’d grown from a white and fluffy-haired toddler into an equally fluffy-haired teen, The System finally deigning to add some muscle to the lanky frame hidden under farmer’s clothes.
“I’ll be dangerous as hell,” Rav countered. She, too, was filling out in preparation for her tenth year with her character. Her dark hair, eyes, and skin were a perfect contrast to Neu’s paleness.
“Same thing.”
“Fair. But we just stole a bunch from the Crawlers at the inn. I thought Lanchester was going to pop a vein. It might be a good idea to lie low for a while, let things cool off.”
“Or what?” Neu’s signature crooked smile widened across his face. “Are they going to kick us out? So what? We can lie low in a different city. What we do in this backwater shithole won’t matter.”
“Granted. But it’s not just us.”
Neu’s smile turned on Ayn and Tayla. Ayn was still a twig, and a good deal shorter than Neu. Still, she stood up taller when he looked at her, and matched his grin with her own.
“What do you think, Sprout?” Neu asked. “Should we have some fun?”
“The bigger the score, the better,” Ayn said.
Tayla, who was trying to hide her three-foot-tall self behind Ayn’s four and a half feet, tucked closer to Ayn’s back. If Neu noticed the youngest gang member’s discomfort, he didn’t show it.
He clapped his hands at Ayn’s answer. “That’s my girl. See Rav? We have three out of four votes. Democracy wins!”
Rave rolled her eyes. “Who said you had my vote, idiot? I only said it’d be fun to do something. Destroying property is too much right now. Chill out a bit, Neu. We’re almost to Crawling age again. If we die before then, I don’t know how I’ll stand being a minor for ten more years.”
“So what?”
“How can you say that so flippantly? The growth time of these stupid characters has been getting longer and longer. What if it takes twenty years next time?”
“Then I’ll just have more time to play.”
Rav glared at Neu. Neu’s grin never faltered. The glimmer in his eyes, the cocky way he held himself, all pointed to one thing—he’d made his decision, and he’d push until everyone else fell in line.
“Fine. I’ll go, but no property damage, or hurting anyone, okay? I’m serious. Steal all you want, annoy who you want, but no breaking things.”
Rav’s gaze flicked to Ayn as she spoke. Ayn readily nodded. She loved the excitement, the danger. It didn’t matter to her what kind it was.
“Yeah, yeah. Buzzkill,” Neu said. He waved away Rav’s dirty look, then motioned for them to follow.