The ash outside was falling, piling up like grey snow, up and around buildings. Sliding off of nearby slanted roofs and filling gutters in mounds, by the time I get up and thank priest Kindly for the tea, it's already half a foot on the open street, and it’s only going to get higher.
In here, the land is quiet, with too much stone and sanctity for its cries to reach us through the ground, but the sky is another thing entirely. I know each of us can feel it, whispering through the air currents that enter through the front, telling us about the weight in the sky as it fills with smoke before it gets too heavy to float at falls.
I decide that a last-minute final prayer to the gods might help a little.
It certainly can’t hurt, not with the gods here, they're all upstanding.
God’s like Hearth, and Bounty, Roads, each watch over little mortals like us, and are almost always benevolent; I prayed to each of them, then the Librarian, to please not send Skipseo to haunt me. I prayed for their protection and guidance, then more gods, some normal big concept types, some off-shoots, gods that are believed to be another good just taking on a slightly more nuanced role.
Prayer was a fascinating thing. Each god or goddess was something similar to the land, a kind of great big that you could commune with. Prayer was more in your head than outside, and it came rather naturally to me, I was simply directing my thoughts towards them so they could listen.
Each went off without a hitch or any sign, which was expected, but then I prayed to Death, and it all went strange.
"Kind lady Death, lady of the final road, guardian of the soul. I pray for my end to be swift; I pray for kindness and the guidance of my soul. I believe my final sleep approaches and that I will meet you soon. May you hold me close?"
As I thought those words, I envisioned Death as its recipient, following the basic lines of a prayer. It was a thing I had done dozens of times, except there was something there this time, something off.
Typically a prayer is accompanied by a sensation that you have been watched or that your words have reached where they are meant to go. A sensation of the god or whoever is picking it up like an angel spilling back. But for Death, it was different, it was like a connection was made before being unmade, like a door closing on some thread, blocked from passing to the god.
I don't know how to feel about that. It was the strangest feeling I have gotten from a prayer, like ever...
Did I do something wrong, or is Death busy or something?
I backed away from the shrine to Death. It was a small thing, just an image painted on stone of a lady in a cloak on a horse and a small bowl. I dropped my few coins in the bowl and decided it was time to get on with the grave digging.
I guess I can ask her soon, unless someone else comes, but even then, they might know.
I went back to Kindly and gave him a hug, both to Kindly, and one to Skipseo too. He might be my third favourite communal grandparent, but a proper goodbye deserved a hug. We were never going to see one another again after all, each of us bound for a different place, they were priests who would go to their god, and I would go to wherever I would go.
And then I saw myself out, and I definitely didn't cry at all, not one little bit. The ash was wet, is all, and got in my eyes.
As my foot landed on the ground, through a foot of ash, the lands crying came back. The sky trembled as the rain began to dribble down. A spring shower of sooty black rain. I went around the back of the church and found the shed.
It wasn't locked, just a block of wood to keep the door shut, barring it. I removed the block and found a spade, humble and time-worn. And walked over to where the old grave I was looking for was covered. Sweeping the ash to the sides, I started digging. Breaking the soil around the edges of where the lid of the tomb was, I removed the two feet of dirt quickly, leaning on my skills.
Classes and skills were a funny thing, they were an extension of oneself. No one I know ever remembers any choice in their class or skills, but they’re always useful, every. Single. Time.
I got my first class, much like everyone else, right after I finished puberty. It was just one level in a [Labourer] class, but it was my first. I could remember getting it the night I unlocked, waking up with a class and the first of my stats.
It kind of sucked, not because it wasn’t cool, but because it felt like going through a growth spurt, I felt all weird the next day. Turns out your body suddenly getting stats felt terrible at first, all of my muscles tingly and less responsive, my legs felt like they were longer even if they weren’t, and it came with the worst brain fog of my life.
When I finally got acclimatized to it two days later, though… That felt great. The next time I went to church I asked Kindly, but he didn’t know why it worked like that, but he got Skipseo to tell me.
Skip told me flat out why, which I suppose is his style, “The system is just a simple way to understand and categorize what happens to us. What that status stone showed you is just a spell, and the numbers are just a way of quantifying the amount of mana your body holds and how that affects you. You, much like most things, are now magical.”
I remember getting let down a few seconds later when he broke my dream of casting magic.
“That is not to say we can cast spells, simply that now that you have ‘unlocked’, your body now holds some mana, holding it and converting it, your Body is now stronger, and more flexible. As you gain class levels, you will gain skills, using those skills expends a little of that energy held in your body that empowers it. And by using that energy, you can grow how much energy it can hold, like working out to get stronger.” I remember him using air quotes on unlock, but the following six-minute diatribe was a thing full of math, talking about additive stats and subtractive stats.
He did have one good point which had stuck with me about stats, however.
“Take me and priest Kindly, he has a higher Charisma, that does not mean that he is unintelligent, I have more Intellect, but that does not mean that I can’t explain things. He simply makes himself known better, while I tend to ramble about details. That’s the social stat and its attributes, each cancels the other out, but the attributes are still present, Social is subtractive. A person’s body, however, can be both flexible and strong, one trait is generally more dominant, but the other is still there, and that is what makes it additive. The Stats, Body, Mind and so on is just how much of that trait you can use at a time, how much it affects you.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
After going through puberty and all of its pains, we got a second helping of system puberty, gaining a level per year until level five, and we became accustomed to it and how it changes our body’s. By the time I reached level 10 at 21, I was beginning to level faster, but it slowed down when I needed to level two classes instead of just my one, my skills becoming more focused as [Labourer] became [Ditchdigger].
Every two levels in a class, we got a skill, and every class skill we use gives class experience, our class levels averaged to find our level, and for each level, we got an increase in stats. And the increase in stats affected how useful a skill was, but a second class meant that slowed even if it didn’t lower my level below ten.
I was 24 now, and I had only gained two levels from my combined 24 class levels, fourteen levels higher than when I hit level ten. At least I hadn’t lost my ten levels in stats, a person’s level never decreased from gaining new classes, it just didn’t increase until it had enough class levels. Unfortunately, I never got the level 10 Deerfox trait.
[Tool handling] [Rapid action] and [Toil] were some of my most used skills, making my job far easier than normal labour, faster, and less exhausting. The smokey air stung my lungs as I stopped remembering the past.
Compared to when I got my first skill [Tool handling], my work was far better, I wouldn’t say perfect, but compared to my flailing when I first got it, I was leagues better. I shifted feet of dirt down and down. I even made little steps to move dirt up and down into the pit.
And then, like magic, I was finished.
The entrance was like a trap door mixed with a coffin, and I reached down and lifted it by the handle on the side. It opened, just like that. A hinge to the side let me lift it easily, not fuss from something that by all rights should have rusted shut, and it swung open to a ladder. I sat there for a moment, puzzling out quite the conundrum, a ladder which requires two hands, and a shovel that I didn’t want to get rid of.
I dropped the shovel in and made my way onto the ladder. The shovel made a clatter when it landed, but I was sure the monks wouldn’t mind. I closed the lid after me and made my way down in the dark of the grave.
It was a strange sensation I had in the earth, aided by my [Sense Stones] skill and [Natural Senses] trait. It was made from the feeling of the world crying its dirge, the air, recently disturbed by my entrance and movement, and my ability to tell where the stone was. It painted a kind of picture, whereas I picked up my shovel, it would cause a kind of ripple and distort my vision for a moment, before fading to make the image sharper. The plume was like when someone would take a puff of a pipe, the smoke eddying around objects to give their negative, it was somewhat surreal.
The small entrance room lead to relatively cramped tunnels around me, I made my way through the entrance room and down into the oubliette. Walking as sure-footed and confident as I could, avoiding the sconces and wear and tare the mausoleum had undergone by waging the shovel to create plumes of not vision for my [Natural Senses].
Through the Labyrinthine tunnels, I spotted little coffin-sized nooks, each had a person-shaped object inside, no doubt wrapped up in a death shroud.
I need to find an unused nook. This might be harder than I first thought it would be it's kind of crowded.
Indeed, it was crowded, more and more nooks started to dot the walls until they became more like shelves. Paths branched off and off, branching before ending in a repository full of old wrapped skeletons.
After a while of wandering through the tiny tunnels of the pitch-black oubliette, I decided to just go follow the main path. The dark passages wound down and down, sometimes, I would find that I was in the wrong tunnel with a cramped repository, or a side path I didn’t realize was a side path that would just end in a flat wall that I could feel led to some kind of mine. And all through the halls, I found the bodies, dusty skeletons all that was left of an order of [monks] that claimed they could cheat Death, some tucked next to one another, some closed stone caskets put sideways into the wall some placed into vertical nooks with only their handles facing out.
Dusty bodies and a dusty crypt filled with dusty hallways. It really was kind of perfect, in an ironic sort of way.
I hope I go in my sleep, it would suck to wake up down here and half to wait to die.
I must have been walking down the main path for the better part of an hour, the air thinning as I went down, when I found the end. It ended up in a larger repository, some two or three times the size of the ones above.
Some of the yet to be used coffins were on the ground, which was promising, but I didn’t want them. Each wall was nothing but containers for bodies but close to the back, a few open nooks were available.
The air is so stale down here, but hey, I found one. Now I can settle down with my shovel. Just in time, too, It's hard to breathe down here.
I crawled into one, a nook of my own, slightly wider than I needed and half a foot taller. I pulled my trusty shovel in with me to help fill the space. I cuddled up with the spade, the stone was not particularly cold, it didn’t sap away my body heat like I expected, my body heat slowly but surely warmed the tiny box, as I fell asleep with my trusty shovel.
I was dreamless when I finally passed out, my mind empty and dark when I was notified.
“You have suffocated.
You have died.”
As expected, I felt. Adrift and unmoored. I began to separate from my body, leaving behind my snuggle buddy.
“I wonder how long death takes to come get me. I guess the system must play into it somehow, similar voice.”
“Congratulations, for being the last member of your species to die, you have been anointed by Death as one of her saints.
You have gained the Subrace: Psychopomp.
Death will be with you shortly…”
“What?”
“Death Will be with you shortly…”
“What the hell is going on here? Is this some sort of post-life hazing?”
“Death is unavailable.”
“You have got to be kidding. Am I not getting an afterlife? Where is she?”
“Death is unavailable.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that she cannot be reached at this moment.”
“Wait, you can reply? Are you intelligent? What's going on here?”
“Calculating standard practice.
Calculation complete.
Wake up!”
“Hold on, what do you mean wake up? I'm dead, I can't wake...”
And I was shunted back into my body, confused and in pain, failing even to flail as my flesh was remade. It was an eternity, it was a moment, it was… Over? I stopped screaming, which was apparently something that I was doing while totally senseless.
I was on the floor, not my nook, holding my spade in my hand.
What the hell happened? Was I rejected? Was Death gone? To where? She's Death. It's not like she can die. Did she just walk off?
The dark was suffocating after the sudden return to my body. I reached out to the land bringing [Natural Senses] up, and it bridges the gap through the stone to the soil far above.
It was somewhat straining, but I got it eventually.
It sounded sad when it recognized me reaching out to it, like it had lost something. It called out to me like an old friend I thought was gone forever. Reassuring even at a distance from me, like a neighbour down the road, we waved. Well, sort of, it was more the thought of waving than waving, a silent hello.
It did not howl like before, the land was almost quiet, and very still.
How long has it been? I’m afraid to even ask, are the fires gone?
I did eventually, after activating my skills, and getting a sense of the rock below and above me, and the dark wasn’t so immediately claustrophobic.
“How long have I been gone.”
"Long."
Well, that’s less than helpful, not the lands’ fault, I suppose, it was never good at keeping time.
I held my shovel like it was a doll, and I was a scared little girl that I felt like. I got up off the floor, next to my nook, which was neither warm nor cold, just like I found it. And began to make my way through the passages.