Damn, that was really, really painful.

Really. Five. Had I really managed to do this five times?

There were five little former clumps of Aelryinth like me drifting in this astral space with the whining remnants of a Death Curse attached to them?

Well, wasn’t that just par for the course. I wondered how the others had turned out.

I was a bundle of Karma, but metaphysical pain was paralyzing me, and the Curse whining as it went looking for the original on me wasn’t helping.

I was just drifting in astral space, unable to control myself. Wow, this sucked...

Well, the view wasn’t too bad, mindscapes slowly flowing past as I drifted. It was kind of timeless, I didn’t feel any sense of boredom or anything...

I was plenty shocked when the Sending came zipping down out of nowhere, visible in the astral space as a stream of information, and slammed right into me.

I kind of gawked at the long stream of digits, and the formula attached to it. A compression algorithm?

Well, my brains had degraded somewhat, but the Level of the spell was Raised. I applied the algorithm to the formula, and the whole message unwound, zeros and ones resolving into code which became letters, numbers, and symbols, and resolved into an intelligible message at the last.

Hello, this is Aelryinth. As I Send this, it’s been two days since I arrived at my destination. I have just received a message from the first of the seven of you, informing me that you aren’t random blank Karma, but actual soul-shards of me.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

No wonder it hurt so damn much.

My apologies putting you through all this. You know I’ll help if I can... and I’m going to be coming back your ways regardless.

I’m sure you all have names you’ll choose for yourselves, but for now I’m going to refer you to what I suggest your Rings be... Einz, Zvei, Drei, Vier, Funf, Zeks, and Zeben.

I don’t know where you are or how to get to you, but you all know where I came from, and I’ll do my best to find you if possible.

In the meantime, here’s some information that Einz has discovered that may or may not be of use to you, depending on where you end up...

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Well, that had certainly been informative. So was the information that a Sending at VII could hunt us all down.

Not that I could do anything about it, stuck here drifting to wherever I was going, and trusting in Mithar that it would be somewhere useful to do something.

Eh, that was a strange view down there...

Up and down were subjective, but the old adage of light one way, darkness the other, and stars one way and storms the other, seemed to be holding true.

This direction wasn’t down, it seemed more... in-between. Darkness cut through with strands of something white moving around, kind of looked like... a web?

Oh.

I looked around, and saw some very fine strands of something were drifting all around me

Webs are used to catch prey...

Well, wasn’t this going to suck. Here I am totally paralyzed and my biggest thought is the monstrous pain of my creation, and something massive in astral space was going to catch me, reel me in, and doubtless do something I rather didn’t want to happen to me.

Welp, grim irony. I suppose at least one of us had to have a complete shit fate.

The strands interwove around me so subtly that if you didn’t watch them closely you’d never know. I had no control anyways, but they seemed to be trying to grab me... gently?

Whatever. I watched the net close off any escape, and then pull tighter and tighter, fold down around me, and welp, I started getting dragged down into that area of white-laced darkness.

Yeah, something was moving around in there. It had a lot of legs, and a lot of eyes.

This was definitely going to suck... oh, well, short and painful life, there you go...