I stood in the guest room of my...his...Agnes’ house, staring at my reflection in a full length mirror. Okay, maybe I kind of just stared at my crotch for the most part. In my head, the act was entirely reasonable, and was a good sign of me, hopefully regaining some semblance of my humanity.

I mean,I’m pretty sure, this would be something that most normal humans would do after suddenly finding that their physical hardware ( i.e. their bodies), had been replaced.

Seriously, man or woman, adult or child, whether it’s checking that everything's normal down there, or checking to see what’s changed, either way at some point you’d check.

The good news was that things were pretty much the same down there as I remembered them being. Actually this was some ‘extremely’ good news since the two moons in the sky had convinced me, I was no longer on the planet of my birth, and therefore had no reason to believe their ‘human’ anatomy would be exactly the same as what I remembered from back home.

Anyway, asides from my perfectly normal looking ‘equipment’,  there was a body that stood at roughly five feet, eleven inches in height. Covered in light brown skin. All of it, toned like something out of a comic book.

I have to say, considering that I could have just as easily been pulled into the body of an invalid or a dog, I might have gotten extremely lucky here. Cornelius Douglas might have been a right bastard, but he’d also been vain as hell.

Using all manner hair gels, skin softener and muscle toning serums. As well as some bone supplements he’d taken as a child because the other kids kept making fun of him for being short.

The guy spent his days on self-care. Constantly working out when he wasn’t making an ass of himself or partying with his friends. As far as I could see it, Cornelius, was ‘that-guy’, the guy in the gym, who plainly didn’t need to be there, except in the interests of making everyone else feel bad about themselves.

The feeling was kind of like suddenly, unexpectedly, inheriting your sleazy uncles muscle-car, you could tell how much love and attentional was put into it, because of all the jargon and flash that attached to the damn thing, but you knew that things were probably going to go down hill from the moment ‘you’ put the keys in the ignition.

The very last time, I went to a gym was the very last day of my high school gym class. I never went back, I never intend to go back and no one mortal or immortal can say anything to make me change my mind on that. While I wasn’t exactly obese in my original body, I liked snacking and I was highly restive(read:Lazy). So it was probably a fair bet to say that this was the best I was going to look….Ever. The only marring was the network of scars, and stitching that ran across every major section of my body.

******

Did I mention that I got married yesterday? Cause I did. Basically it was a day after, I’d been brought back, brought through, whatever one would call what happened. I was sitting in my room, the guest room, trying not to have a panic attack, because I’d just woken up from a nap to find that all this was ‘not’  some cruel and wonderful dream.

I really was home, or at least in a reality like my home. I really had been rescued from the terrible nightmare realm that I’d been languishing in. I really could keep living again. I didn’t do anything to deserve it but somehow salvation and a second chance at life landed in my lap.

I saw her, Agnes, my...his...wife going out and panicked like a small insecure child, I asked, where she was going to. She said church, so I asked if I could come along. I hadn’t suddenly found religion or anything, I just hadn’t wanted to be alone. In any case the faith and the doctrine wasn’t quite what I learned back home.

For one this church was called the church of the Splintered Heaven. With the four aspects of the splintered Heaven being named as the Severed Sun, the Shattered Moons, the Scattered Clouds,  the Hollowed Stars and the Saint who came down from the heavens that exist beyond the heavens and put everything back together again.

The sermon that they gave was quite educational, conveniently made up a fair portion of the worlds history. A thing I knew because I,...Cornelius...had learned the same in school, during the few times he could be bothered to crack open a book.

******

First off, no one knew what broke the sky. The broken sky event definitely happened, but it was sort of like the question of what killed the dinosaurs. Something definitely killed them, we knew that, on account of them all being dead, but know one who might have been around was saying anything.

Second, apparently everyone was undead, or so the doctrine went. Depending on who you asked. A priest would tell you that the world was filled with ‘redeemed’ undead. People whose souls were saved and returned to their bodies by the Saint of Broken Sky’s holy bell. The first of the holy bells, the one that all warding bells were based off of.

A scientist’s opinion surprisingly wouldn’t differ all that much, except the word ‘redeemed’ would replaced with ‘revenant’ or sane undead. There was magic in this world and it was openly used. Thus things that others would call dreadful superstition were more or less just treated as fact, because they more or less ‘were’ facts.

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In any case. everyone, on the planet, Novem, was undead. This was a world where death had died. As to how that happened, well first, the sky broke, then something no one remembers happens,(because it was stricken from all the records), then there was a plague.

A zombie plague, but not just any zombie plague. No, this was more like the effects of the super virus created by a certain pharmaceuticals and inclement weather accessories companies.

Everyone got infected, but some people got infected by variants or became variants. And then the world pretty much ended. Hard. If there were any humans going through it, they all got the downer ending, without exception. Either dying from the elements, taking their own lives, or getting eaten. Mostly the latter.

Then a few years after the last ‘old’ human was eaten, the first ‘new’ humans, the first ‘revenants’, were born. Created either as a mutation of the virus, or a final stage of the plague of undeath that struck the world. That was all a few generations ago though. After the first few generations of revenants stopped killing themselves because they couldn’t handle the memories and recollections of what they’d done, eating all their friends and families, society rebuilt itself.

By now, a long enough amount of time had passed, that the world was much different from what was remembered. Long enough for any nations and countries that were there before to be long forgotten. Long enough that a lot of old tech needed to be reinvented, though fortunately they had digital copies and ragnarok-proofed computers to help speed things up.

Novem was a world where life and death were fluid things. If you shot a man in the head and left him out on the countryside there was a very real chance that he’d  maybe, be up and around to complain about it on the morrow. He’d die, but then he’d likely get up again.

In fact it was kind of a problem. Which was why citizen class was such a big thing. Aside from one’s rights of residency and work, it also governed one’s right to life. Whether it was how much ‘life’  magic you got access to when you got hurt, or how long you could stay within the kingdoms before being exiled as potential ‘severed’.  The fact that death as man had known it, was effectively gone, things changed.

Regenerative potions and resurrection serums, making the line between life and death even thinner. Thus my scars, the only thing that could keep a dead man ‘dead’ was dismemberment or thorough burning, or old age.

When my...Cornelius’s... buddy, killed him, he also dismembered his corpse. Chopping him up and leaving him in a heap in an alley. Leaving him for the dogs to eat. Interestingly enough that line between death, was actually even thinner than most thought.

Technically a dismembered or burnt corpse, ‘could’ come alive again, it just generally wouldn’t come back sane. Actually even normal death could turn one into a monster, which was why the regenerative potions and resurrection serum was invented.

As a way to raise the chance for a sane recovery. The severed, the mad undead that made up the majority of the monsters that lay beyond the cities, wandering the ‘outside’. The grand wastes that the kingdoms couldn’t retake.

My...his.. Wife, couldn’t let me stay dead, and she couldn’t let me come back as severed, so she found me...him in the alley likely through asking/threatening/begging his friend. She sewed the pieces together with magic thread and tried to bring him back. Failing and bringing me to this world instead.

*****

And that is why I proposed. Popping the question after the father’s long winded sermon was finished and most of the parishioners had already gone home. I went to the old priest and explain who I (Cornelus), was and that we were already married.

Using charm and social I didn’t know I’d had, I managed talk the man into marrying us. Using some lines about how, I was an intrepid soul who didn’t want to leave his missus in the lurch, if he died. Which was fairly true.

In any case, it took all of thirty minutes and the state confirmed the marriage in five of those minutes. Emailing the priest a certificate that he printed out and gave to us.  

For some reason Agnes was real quiet the whole cab ride home, staring at the piece of paper that declared our marriage upgraded. Taken to the next tier, so that in return for our paying higher taxes, her citizen class and the classifications for our kid would be ensured.

Then she cried, staining our new marriage license with silent tears. Afterwards she locked herself in her room...and I haven’t seen her since. I’m not sure if she’s upset or not, or whether I should say anything. I mean we ‘are’ technically strangers. Still I think that I made the right call. This way, she doesn’t need me any more.

This way, whatever happens I can at least say that I at least tried to pay back what I owed her. This way I’ve given her the one thing, that chicken-shit, bastard, Cornelius would never give her and can cleanly differentiate between the old him and the new me.