When Randidly stepped through the portal to his next destination, he was surprised to see that he was not the only person nearby. A young woman grunted with exertion and stuck her spade into the ground. She was hunched over, perhaps six meters down the slope from him. With an extremely slow movement, she tossed the dirt to the side. Then she stuck the head of the shovel into the ground once more.

They were standing on the Western slope of a low mountain, exactly opposite the position where Randidly had fought Kaan Swacc several days ago. The clouds above were thick and white against the blue sky, although the wind was extremely cold. It seemed like the Earth had finally shifted toward the long-delayed winter.

Randidly recognized the young woman below him, too. It was Rose Callaway, the young woman who served as Ace’s second in command. From the look of it, she was digging a grave.

Basically, she was stealing Randidly’s thunder.

As she flipped her second shovel full of dirt to the side, she noticed Randidly standing on the slope. She stilled and looked at him for a long time. Randidly saw her trembling lips and watery eyes. He saw how red and raw her hands were. From the fact that she had only reached a depth of about a half-meter so far, she either had started her grave recently or she wasn’t very good at digging.

So Randidly took a single step forward. “Can I help?”

Rose Callaway continued to watch Randidly for a long time. She pressed her lips together so tightly that they turned white. Then, finally, she nodded.

As Randidly conjured a shovel completely composed of roots, he glanced up at the sky. More clouds were beginning to gather and the accumulation turned their countenances dark; with their luck, enough clouds would gather for a storm before they finished. Still, Randidly was an old hand at digging graves from his time on Tellus, so he quickly hopped down next to Rose and began to dig.

She quickly frowned at him. “I know you can use that root Skill for more than making a shovel. Why make us both dig…?”

Randidly took a very pointed glance at Rose’s hands. Although it had rubbed off in most places, there was clearly still blood under her fingernails. Then he glanced sideways at Ace’s corpse, which he had been avoiding looking at thus far. Even his severed left forearm had been retrieved and set neatly next to him, while his other limbs seemed to twist and curl inward on themselves with the unwillingness he had felt at the moment of his death. “Some things are worth doing by hand. It’s a sign of respect, right?”

“A sign that the other party will never receive,” Rose replied in a whisper. But she fell into place next to Randidly, widening the hole while he handled adding more depth. In order to work effectively, Randidly summoned another wave of roots, this one forming into a replacement for his left arm while his metallic arm continued to heal.

“Why aren’t you taking his body back to the Refuge to bury him?” Randidly asked casually.

A hollow smile flashed across Rose’s face. “It was… one of Ace’s earliest rules. You can only be buried in Refuge… if you die in the defense of refuge. And I think no one would argue that this was… anything but Ace’s own… labor.”

For a while, they worked in silence. Even though his mental energy was largely depleted, Randidly’s physical Stats meant that he was a veritable work crew when it came to grave digging. Within ten minutes he had reached a depth of three meters with enough length and width to comfortably lay Ace. By this point, the clouds had completely darkened from white to dark grey.

Randidly hopped out of the hole and offered his hand down to Rose. She ignored it and pulled herself up out of the hole, part of the wall crumbling down into the grave as she hauled herself over the edge. Then Rose dusted the dirt off of her knees and sat down next to the crumpled form of Ace. After burying her head in her arms, she sat there for several more minutes.

Although Randidly had other things to do, none of it was particularly pressing. So he reigned in his impatience and gave the woman a bit of space to grieve. Instead, he looked up and watched the first few flakes of snow drift downward toward Earth.

So much change, all at once, Randidly thought tiredly. It’s honestly… hard to keep up with it all.

Rose spoke in a hoarse voice, not bothering to raise her head. “Why are you even here? Why bother giving him a grave? I’m… aware of what happened. You let him die. If you think digging some fucking hole will help with your guilt-”

“I don’t feel guilty,” Randidly said slowly. He reached up toward the sky with his right hand, stretching the shoulder joint until it popped pleasantly. Bits of snow drifted downward and melted in his outstretched palm. “I’m not here as some form of repentance. I came to dig Ace a grave because I wanted to do it.”

“You watched a man get slaughtered and calmly planned to come back later to bury his body? Either you are more a monster than even your worst critics say, or you are lying to me, Mr. Ghosthound.”

Despite the fact that Randidly didn’t know this woman personally, or perhaps because of it, the first part of her statement stung. But Randidly ignored that. Instead, he just allowed a sad smile to drift across his face as he lowered his arm. “I just believe… that humans are sometimes shaped, to our detriment, by simple narratives. You cannot summarize a life.”

There were several seconds of silence. Randidly looked freely at Rose Calloway’s hunched form, trying to gauge her reaction. Her skin was as pale as a corpse and the bones of her elbow jutted sharply out from her folded, seated position. Without her expression or any noticeable images, he had to rely on just these details. This thought about simplicity had been one bouncing around Randidly’s head since the fight and Sydney’s chilled reaction afterward, but he hadn’t had the spare time to explore it fully. So if he had the opportunity to talk through it…

When Rose didn’t speak, Randidly slowly continued. “You seem to think that I couldn’t agree with Sydney killing Ace and also have enough respect for him to want to bury him. But Ace… I’ve seen too much of him. He was too big a part of my life to be summed up by a single emotion. He was… many things to me. I owe him so much, and he probably owes me a little bit more than that, but I won’t just reduce our relationship to the difference between our obligations. And I also don’t need an easy label like good or bad to understand him.”

“He was a good man,” Rose responded fiercely, finally raising her head in order to glare at Randidly. Her eyes were red and leaking tears like a rusted bucket.

Randidly didn’t try to contradict her; he didn’t even want to contradict her. Instead, his mind turned to another shadowy figure in his mind: that of Yystrix. Randidly rubbed his thumb against the knuckles of his pointer finger. If he had to qualify her as a good or a bad person…

“...but he made a lot of mistakes.” Rose’s gaze settled on the middle distance, seeming to remember the past.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Revelation energy sparked to cover Randidly’s hand. And from there, it raced up his arm and down his torso like wildfire in a dry grassland until his entire body was smoldering with it. Of all of the Skills he had used to fight Kaan Swacc, this was the one with which Randidly had improved the most. Because suddenly he realized how far his gaze could reach while holding that energy.

A threshold was a door, and beyond that door was a sea of shifting possibilities. Randidly flexed his fingers and saw the ripple he spread outward through those possibilities. Action and reaction, the connection made clear and highlighted by the revelation energy. It wasn’t perfect, of course, but still… With that energy-boosting his focus, he could glimpse the possibilities in front of him. As long as he controlled his own actions, this energy would give him a glimpse of what that would cause.

But instead of looking at the outcomes in the sea of possibilities, Randidly looked at what little he could perceive of the steps to get to those outcomes before his eyes. He focused on the details that paved the Paths to the future that he could see.

Next to him, Rose shook her head. “He was a complicated man, but I’m still going to miss him.”

“Yeah. Me too.” Randidly sighed. Knowledge often brought with it a choice: between the awareness of the knowledge he was missing or surety. The former would point him toward increasing his knowledge further but the latter was… easy.

As he now sought to deepen his knowledge, Randidly instead found irony. He had protected the Earth, but he had killed a member of the Xyrt Brigade, a group created to defend the Nexus, to do it. And honestly, perhaps it was correct for the Xyrt Brigade to target him; he had made a vow with Vualla to target the Nexus.

Yet that was the future. Right now, Randidly looked at the past that leads him here, standing next to Ace’s grave. And the closer Randidly peered at the chain of causality, the more disturbed he became. It was clear in retrospect that Yystrix had made every effort in order to nurture Randidly. It was a tough love that would have let him die if Randidly had failed to keep up with expectations, but the results were tremendous: Randidly’s growth was impossibly fast.

If not for Yystrix, Randidly would not have had the strength to defeat Kaan Swacc. He was the progeny of a known enemy of the System, and he carried that inheritance well. In addition, Randidly probably had the chance to intervene in the life of Ace Ridge in the past. It wasn’t a sure thing, but Randidly expected he might have been able to sway Ace’s Path had he known and intervened early enough.

Was Yystrix a torturous mother figure or a heroic trainer with high expectations? Was Randidly the villain for the roads he hadn’t taken in the past?

But as he said to Rose earlier, those were simple narratives. To follow them was a mistake. You can either look for more knowledge or be sure. One of those is much easier than the other.

The revelation energy burned across his body, melting the increasingly thick flurries of snow. His eyes stared at the ground, completely oblivious to the world around him.

If Randidly shoved an individual, was he at fault if that individual shoved back? What if Randidly knew that the shoved individual was aggressive? What if Randidly had seen the individual shove back for dumb reasons in the past? What if Randidly was 100% percent sure that the individual would shove back but he shoved anyway despite forewarning of that reaction? Was he at fault for the reaction if he knew it was going to happen?

Was it the intent, the action, the result, or the awareness that would make him a guilty party? Where did culpability lay? The possibilities buzzed in front of Randidly like a swarm of bees in a tunnel full of honey.

Congratulations! Your Skill Revelation of the Atramentous Threshold (T) has grown to Level 298!

A dangerous Skill, Randidly thought tiredly as he opened his eyes and extinguished the energy around him. He could see the danger of reducing anyone to just one or two descriptors, but he didn’t have any secret insight into the workings of the heart. If anything, this newfound understanding of social interaction only made him more confused.

To want to answer these questions would help him continue to improve. To obsess over the details of culpability would doom him to simple narratives.

But his exposure to revelation energy did have one desirable side effect. One that would now assume its place at the core of Randidly’s behavior, from now until the day he died. Now that all the pieces seemed to disassemble themselves before him, truthfully or not, Randidly stumbled across something important. He didn’t need just to react anymore. He could act in accordance with his own wishes.

I can act as I want. It’s time I consciously live my own life.

“No more platitudes to try out on me then?” Rose asked sourly, snapping back Randidly’s focus. Then he shook his head and dislodged the bit of snow that had settled there. She was still looking at him with a frown, but a lot of her animosity was gone. “But okay, I’ll bite. To you, he’s more than a good man, a bad man, or a complicated one… he’s… Ace. So why does Randidly Ghosthound, the heroic leader of the Order Ducis, help dig the grave for Ace, a man who planned to submerge the Zones in a sea of blood-”

“Honestly, I didn’t just help; I dug most of the grave,” Randidly cheekily pointed out.

Rose’s expression darkened. “Answer the question.”

“...Didn’t I already answer? I wanted to.” Randidly didn’t smile. He just let the pain of his drained mental energy and vague grief at Ace’s death show in his emerald eyes.

Rose twisted her mouth. “It is enough, I suppose… It just isn’t very satisfying. And I’ll say this; that was the justification that Ace used for all the things that he did. So you are certainly in… interesting company.”

To that, Randidly just scratched his cheek. After a bit more of silent standing, Rose gestured to the body and Randidly nodded his head. Randidly took the legs while Rose moved to the head. They lifted Ace Ridge, helmet still on his head, and lowered him down into the grave. Rose picked up his arm and tossed it in after him in a casual motion that probably had more to due with her exhaustion than any disrespect. While Randidly rapidly shifted the dirt to cover his former friend, Rose created a small headstone.

Ace Ridge

He wanted to be Dauntless. He gave everything to that dream.

For a few minutes, Randidly bowed his head and settled his emotions. Snow immediately began to settle on the grave, as though this storm had been brewed specifically to blanket the newly buried Ace. Yet Randidly kept his focus inward. I’m not responsible for this. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try harder in the future to prevent things like it.

Then he opened his eyes and they flared brilliantly emerald in the dark evening gloom. Right now, he needed to take another rest more than anything else. The next thing Randidly wanted to do was test the merging of images in less stressful circumstances. And to accomplish that, he would need to be at his peak mental condition.

Yet as he flipped the Philosopher’s Key and created a portal, Rose spoke again. “Can I… have a job?”

Randidly twisted around and frowned at Rose. She wasn’t looking at Randidly this time. She was just staring at the rough headstone that she had carved. Already the top was lined with snow. Chewing on his lip, Randidly thought about the question. At the same time, he couldn’t stop thinking about what he had seen happen to other people that were left alone with grief.

Randidly gritted his teeth. It isn’t a sure thing. Do I owe it to her to try and steer her away from that Path…?

The possibilities hummed in front of him incessantly. But Randidly pushed them away and forced the tense muscles of his back to relax. No… what I really should be asking… is do I want to offer Rose Calloway a job…?

That turned out to be a very easy question. Randidly nodded. She might need to be watched for a while, but he had subordinates enough for that. And if she proved to be capable...“Sure. You helped Ace run the Refuge, correct? I have a big project that could use someone of your Skills. Do you have any experience teaching…?”

As Randidly continued to speak, Rose’s expression became strange. When he frowned at her unusual reaction and subsequent silence, she seemed to shiver and then shook her head. “You… you seem to be misunderstanding something. I don’t want to sell myself short but… I basically just handed the reports to Ace. He took care of everything. He might have been crazy when it came to interacting with the world, but for the Refuge… Ace always made time. Even at the end. He was like a father to those people. My Skills are mostly related to observation and analyzing problems. Oh, and general Skill knowledge.”

“Huh. Is that so.” Randidly glanced back at the headstone. Following an impulse, he walked up to the grave and brushed the accumulated snow off of Ace’s grave. Then he forced himself to turn away.