“Yeah, ma…” said I. Pacing in my room my cellphone clutched to my ear.
Feeling uncomfortable because the people I was talking to, both were and weren’t total strangers to me. Feeling achingly, familiar, because I had all of Cornelius’ memories of them.
I could remember every skinned knee, every scolding, every bit of encouragement, every lullaby, lecture and hug. Recalling it as if it had happened to me.
“I’m really sorry ma.”
“No...I wasn’t ignoring you, ma.”
“No seriously. Like I said, I was hurt...uh...dead.” I said. Unable to think of a good lie and figuring that I might as well tell the truth.
“No, calm down, it’s okay, now. I’m talking to you, ain’t I?”
“ I was uh...mugged?...Yeah mugged. Some junkie, who needed money for his next fix.”
“Yes I’m okay...Yes she ‘is’ taking good care of me, ma. I don’t know why you too never got along.”
Actually I did know. My wife and my mother’s antipathy lay in the fact that my mother believed that Agnes had trapped me in a sham marriage.
An unfair surmise, yes, but I suppose no mother wants to think of their little boy as a brute.
“No that’s fine. I’ve mooched off of you two enough.”
I really did, the truth was a fair portion of my ‘income’ came from their retirement fund. I...Corny made enough working to support himself, but good drugs and clean call girls were ‘so’ expensive.
“Yes, I’m serious.”
“It’s not that funny.”
“Yeah. I..uh ..I love you too.”
I was disturbed to find I actually meant it. ‘Mom’ was a mostly pleasant woman, who was similar to Agnes in that were both nice and both very religious. ‘Dad’, was distant, but indulgent.
And both parents lived in a mainly suburban, little city south of here, Where things were a little warmer and little safer. A small town kind of place that Corny had hated, because it was too quiet and too small for a big, loud man like him.
Lately I found myself finding it hard to tell where Corny ended and ‘I’ began. The differences fading as I found his memories slowly becoming more real, while mine grew more vague.
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With both reaching the same blah middle ground that all old memories eventually lived in. At first I wondered if I should feel more trepidation over the issue, but that went away as the distance between Corny and I grew even smaller.
Eventually I figure, I’ll stop caring, it’ll likely be around the same time that its too late to do anything.
*****
Rather than One World, Novem was made up of two. The first was the Inside, a honeycombed, complex of human settlements (cities, towns, etc..), that sat in a network of isolated subspaces and were all connected by interdimensional gates.
The second was the outside, the real world, the main world. A world filled with death and magic and the undead. The two world shared an indelible connection, due to the existence of the source towers and the Dread Lords.
The Source Towers were the anchors that allowed each individual subspace to exist and kept their dimensional walls from falling apart. The Dread Lords were...a little harder to define.
In theory they were just especially powerful, especially intelligent severed. Apex super predators of the outside. Except sometimes that wasn’t true. Sometimes they were other things.
Sometimes they were wasteland monster, sometimes they were things that weren’t around before the sky broke. Things that were ‘other’, alien and strange and fae.
*****
As for why any of that mattered...that was simple. I was out of a job and this was still a post-apocalyptic economy. My kingdom, Alvis, had just been through a war, and thing were tough everywhere.
And I...Corny...had a family to take care of. Or at the very least I couldn’t just lay about at home, not contributing while my wife worked to make ends meet.
Fortunately there was one job that was always available a job that anyone could take part in and could even bring real wealth if you played your cards right.
*****
Hunters were a mainstay of the modern world and part of the military-industrial of any Kingdom worth its salt. They kept the severed population down and kept the Dread Lords influence from washing over the source towers that kept us all safe.
While many who wandered the outside met their deaths their, this ‘was’ a world of undead. Even if their wasn’t a fair chance that an bad end wouldn’t be ‘the’ end, most people would still join the profession.
Why? Because it pays. Paying fairly lucratively, in fact.(So long as one was suited for the job and survived long enough.) The Kingdoms and the Church had put a bounty on the head of every monster and Dread Lord that roamed the Outside.
“Mhm….Guess, I should get a hunter’s license then.”