Nations of Rothel:

Following the advent of supers, the world changed drastically; new lines were drawn, both on a humanitarian and a geographic scale.

Under the heel of supervillains and superheroes alike, the powerless of the world felt helpless.

Slowly, inevitably, Rothel burned to ashes. Innocents died, cities collapsed, countries were ruined. Creatures mutated, mountains crumbled, and hope was lost.

Rothel was dying.

Finally, a new hero arrived, one who would change the world: The Great Hero Azel.

In the years that followed, the map was separated into ten different nations, with the outskirts of these nations standing as a sort of no man's land. Each nation was founded by a single Savior; one of ten different heroes that had been chosen by Azel and empowered with her own ability, Marking them forever. By undergoing specific rituals to mirror these Marks, the formerly powerless could form a connection to an individual Savior's Mark, gaining access to the Savior's own superpower - along with the potential to gain up to four other, more limited abilities over time - in return for small tithes of life each time. All the while, natural superhumans became a dying breed.

A price that much of humanity was more than willing to pay.

Anything to keep their Saviors alive.

Anything to keep their god-heroes breathing.

Anything to not be powerless again.

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I was lost in the darkness that was death. Even so, I knew that I wasn’t entirely gone. Yet slowly, ever so slowly, I felt a few of my many lives begin to spill away - to slip into the vast darkness that surrounded me. For what felt like an eternity, I waited. After that, I simply waited more.

Eventually, I felt a tug.

Something pulled at me, calling for me. Somehow, it latched onto my incorporeal form, tightening its grip on the stubborn mass of life that was all that remained of myself. It brought me close to another, smaller mass of life that waited nearby. For a moment, I panicked, all but sure its light would be snuffed out.

Heedless to my fears, I was pulled closer to that fragile little life. My being swirled and eddied, melding with it, joining it. It shuddered at my touch, even the smallest portion of my gargantuan mass of life beginning to overwhelm it.

I felt myself stretch, pulled like taffy on the brink of a sudden tear. It was a different sensation than that caused by my power; in fact, it was very near the opposite.

The feeling halted, and I was violently ripped asunder; a little piece of me was lost, torn away. A metaphysical sort of agony filled me, heedless of my incorporeal form. The darkness consumed me once more.

After an unknown amount of time, the tug came back.

Again, I was called. Again, I was torn. The sensation repeated, feeling as if it were a cycle everlasting.

Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Aga-

Something was different this time.

My form was pressed up against a new life, a new light, but it was weak. Flickering. Even so, I melded with it, flowed towards it as we began to become one. Fearing the agony that would soon come, yet helpless to resist it, I let myself flow easily along with the pull.

To my surprise, the unsteady life flickered for one last time. It died.

In its place, a void appeared. A vacuum of nothingness. Ravenous. Hungry. Needing to be filled. It pulled. I felt my existence shift as I filled the void.

Sensation filled me.

Something different from the darkness that had been death. Something else. Something new. Something old. Something familiar.

“Welcome back, Eran,” a familiar voice whispered beside my ear. I shivered at the sound.

Also, at the pain. The horrible, agonizing, debilitating pain.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I screamed. Sometimes you just have to let it out, after all. I am a little ashamed, however, of the gruesome spectacle that came next.

The flesh of my shoulder burned as if it were an entire conflagration unto itself. At the same time, something there pulled at me. It pulled, and pulled, and pulled with a nearly unending hunger. I felt my life slipping away. My muscles dried, my bones creaked, my flesh twisted. I fell to dust.

An instant later, my next life asserted itself. I was reborn. The next moment, something pulled once more.

Despite my own screams, I could almost begin to make out the whispered comforts of a familiar voice. It helped a little, I think.

I fell to dust.

The cycle of life and death, of destruction and rebirth, marched onwards.

Finally, the burning pain began to reduce in intensity. The cycle began to slow, returning me to a semblance of lucidity.

I decided to keep screaming anyway. Truthfully, I think the slight increase in lucidity made my continued deaths far more terrifying than before.

I fell to dust. I was reborn once more.

I could hear her voice again, hidden somewhere behind my own, whispering in my ear. It cut through the screams, the pain, the terror, the dying. I latched onto it. I breathed.

The cycle had nearly ground to a standstill. Weakness assaulted me, radiating from a point on my right shoulder. I turned my head, noting a powerfully glowing sigil emblazoned upon it. It was shaped as a diamond, with a glowing circle pressed into its center. The remaining four clear points of interest, the vertices of the diamond, were dim. Empty. Lifeless. Surrounding the diamond were a series of curves and marks, glowing with life.

As I watched, the markings flared brighter. I felt one final pull of that strange something, and the majority of the light guttered out, overloaded. Sated. Satisfied. Only the glowing mark of light that was contained by the central diamond remained lit.

An overwhelming feeling of relief flooded through me, the sudden removal of pain a near-rapturous sensation.

Then, as always, beautiful, horrible life began to flow into me once more. My terrible power was still with me - drawing from a life source off in the distance slowly, inevitably. Irreversibly. In the next moment, that life was gone.

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I whimpered, my mind skittering to a halt.

No, not again, never again, I won, I saved them, I -

Please don’t make me do it again.

Though a single moment of thought would have reminded me that resistance was futile, there was no time for thought. I did the only thing that I could.

I resisted.

I strained. I thrashed. I flailed. I panicked. I raged at the invisible bounds of my very being, violently rejecting the wonderful, horrible life that I held within myself.

I needed it to go somewhere else. To fill something else. Anything else. Something answered.

My shoulder pulsed with light, and I felt my body grow immensely weaker in return. A connection to something formed in the back of my mind. I pushed once more.

And again. And again. Again.

Just as before, I fell into a cycle of death and rebirth. My vitality slipped away in bursts with each pulse, before rushing in anew as the following life asserted itself. Yet, this time was different than what had occurred moments before. There was pain in it, to be sure, but it was simply the pain of weakness; closer to the discomfort of illness than real pain.

My life was being spent, but it was my control that directed it. A laugh burbled its way past my lips. My mind calmed, tumultuous waves of despair slipping back into the sea as if they had never been. Things were different, now.

I could gain control.

I could feel it distinctly; there was a certain sense that came along with my power, an innate understanding of its strength. While it was not an exact sense, I could at least have a general idea of my power’s reach.

It was becoming ever-so-slightly less than I remembered.

Glee filled me.

For an indeterminable amount of time, I worked tirelessly. I pushed away at the boundaries of myself, my flesh burning with the strain. My mind felt crowded, filled to the brim, pulled in every direction at once. I paid it no mind. I simply continued my work.

Soon, the sound of skittering stone broke the silence. Startled, I whirled toward the noise and jumped to my feet.

A monster stared back at me.

I froze.

That was normal. After all, I’d imagine that most people would have a similar reaction to being surprised by some sort of quadrupedal abomination armed to the teeth with…well, teeth. Very sharp teeth, from the looks of them. Of course, others might instead object to the beast’s mangled flesh, sloughed off here and there to reveal the muscle and bones underneath. Others still might be frightened of the jagged claws that scraped against the stone.

Me, I had a different reason.

I felt connected to it.

“How cute!” Mel squealed. “We always wanted a dog!”

My lips twitched. While true, I had always imagined something more dog and less...well, whatever it was.

“See if he’ll roll over!” she suggested excitedly.

“I’m not going to te-” I caught myself before I could continue. I had fallen back into the habit of responding to her without noticing. As always, forcing myself to confront the truth of her existence was difficult.

I sighed, melancholy setting in. Still, I supposed there wasn’t any harm in trying. I was at least somewhat interested in seeing the result.

“Roll over,” I said halfheartedly. As expected, it didn’t work. I stared for a moment longer, before realizing something.

Right. I felt a connection. Quite literally, I felt a connection in my mind between myself and the nightmare beast in front of me. I mentally pulled at the link while repeating the command silently.

The monster rolled over.

Huh. I guess it was a little cute, for a disgusting murderbeast.

All around me, the din of squelching flesh and skittering bone filled the air. Yet, this time, I showed no alarm as they approached. After all, I knew what they were. They were monsters, all. They were the destroyed, the ruined. They were the mangled and the broken.

They were mine.

An amalgam of rotting and skeletal creatures surrounded me, in mind as well as body, displaying varied forms of death and decay. Here, a waist-high lizard-like creature in a nearly pristine state, iridescent scales shining in the sunlight. There, a tusked boar consisting of bone connected by frayed tendons and minimally propelled by deteriorated muscle, limped along with a missing forelimb. Hordes of skittering insects burrowed from the depths, announcing victory over their once-final graves. All around me, they waited. To each of them, a connection was drawn within my mind, a vague sense of direction, and of dominion.

One connection held a far greater weight than all of the others - leading not to an undead creature, but to somewhere within myself. It had a monumental weight to it, as if tugging at it would be more likely to pull me towards its origin than I would be to pull it towards me.

I wanted to know where it led.

I pulled at the tie, sending a small corona of light radiating from my shoulder once more. For a moment, a mere blink of an eye, a wave of coruscating threads filled my vision. They shifted in the air, twisting and binding, winding and weaving. As I watched, a growing ache made itself known in the back of my mind. My thoughts grew heavy. My limbs grew weak. My eyes closed; a vision of something new filled the empty darkness.

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Grief spilled in like the tide.

It slipped onto the shores, crashing against shattered bone and twisted flesh - filling it, embracing it, only to lose its hold once more and fall back into the dark.

The wave crashed against me in turn, twisting around my ankles, lashing at my skin and filling me with a sense of its immeasurable loss.

I paid it little mind; my own thoughts felt distant, slippery, difficult to reach.

Bursting through the darkness around me, as if an unassailable mark on the world, was a beautiful and alluring luminescence. The light wrapped its way around the island, fingers sinking into the false sands of the shore; the waves of sorrow crashed against it, lapping away at the edges of its existence.

I felt out of place - a passenger in my own body - as my feet began to move of their own volition, independent of conscious thought. They padded down the beach of flesh and bone, of death and dissolution, leaving an echo of their passage in my wake. Slowly, the shattered sands of the shore began to fade away and become something new.

A city of white, pearlescent bone rose before me. Its walls seemed to stretch towards the heavens themselves, reaching beyond the bounds of our meager existence. Yet, for all its majesty, for all its unerring construction...the gates lay open and empty - and so my feet simply marched ever onwards.

The city of bone, silent save for my own muffled footfalls, was lifeless. Barren. Waiting. Time twisted and contorted as my feet walked, stretching ineffably, interminably. Days passed. Weeks. Months. Years - or perhaps only seconds.

In the silent city’s center, they found their destination.

A mausoleum rose from the depths, though my mind balked at referring to it in so simple a term. Thick pillars of carved bone thrust upwards, their decorative mass supporting an even more decorative dome that spanned the distance between them. From its open doors, a radiant light spilled forth.

My feet walked, and my mind followed.

Finally, they found their journey’s end. A woman knelt before a tomb, clad in mourner’s black.

Without turning around, she spoke: “You are not one of mine, Reaper, no matter whose skin you come to inhabit. Though I am certainly surprised that you are here.”

Words failed me, still locked within my own mind. Despite my silence, she chuckled, a deep and throaty thing, tinged with an undercurrent of sadness and vitriol.

“Yes, I know who you are. Or rather, who you were - if not in intent, then in execution.”

Unbidden, images flashed through my mind: of heroes and villains, of Mel’s death - and of my own failure.

Her voice softened. “Ah, it is a terrible thing, is it not? To spend your years searching - while what you desire seems forever out of reach. That is something I know well.”

With that, she found her feet. In the blink of an eye - were I actually able to blink - she was before me. Though her face was hidden behind a mourner’s veil, I could feel intensity radiate from her. Though I was sure I wasn’t truly present, my shoulder began to burn with the proximity.

“You have stolen from me, but I am not without understanding. The circumstances were...extenuating - and we are all thieves in the end, are we not?” Her voice lowered, becoming nearly inaudible. “Even Azel. Even I.” She smiled sadly.

“Yes. You may keep the vessel that you have filled. He has already faded. It was a dangerous thing, melding your remnant soul so perilously close to his own. A desperate thing.”

She paused for a time, as if providing a moment of silence for the recently departed.

“Through it, you may now utilize the same power that I provide all of my own Marked: a benefit you have already taken advantage of, I’m sure. In return, you will help me find what I am searching for, eventually.”

“For now, it seems that She has chosen to grant you access to a conduit - a...fragment of a Gift. An aid towards the goal which you seek. The first of many, perhaps.”

“Remember this: I am Neladrie. You are now one of Mine. Until we meet again, Reaper.”

She reached for me. New power, and the knowledge required to use it, flowed inwards. The darkness embraced me once more.