After all the excitement of destroying the corrupted temple in northern Dezzermon, we all returned to the Temple of Bloodlines and settled in.

  It was a relief to be reunited with my two sisters after everything we had been through. Our situation was far from perfect, but now that we had a group of eight players with different skills and abilities, I began to feel optimistic again. It seemed likely that we were finding our way over the hump that new players usually face in games like this. We were all low-level, were new to this world, and had few resources to turn to in tight situations. As we overcame challenges and grew stronger, things would get easier. At least that's what I told myself.

  Even after our victory, we were still in a tight spot. Winter was coming on thick and fast, and that made everything we needed to do that much harder. Patricia's grandson Kyle was missing, and we had no leads to help us find him. The next day after the rescue, I went out with Patricia, Elizabeth, and Tabitha to look for Kyle. Patricia showed us the clearing where she said he had been held, but that had been days ago and he was long gone. With fresh snow on the ground, even Cheeseburger couldn't follow his tracks. Patricia and Elizabeth were heartbroken, as you would expect. They felt like they had let Kyle down. I didn't know how I could help, but I had promised Patricia that I would, and what is the point of being a wizard if you can't pull miracles out of your ass?

  After Kyle, our most immediate problem was food. When we got back to the temple that I had begun to think of as our home, we found that An had been busy. She had harvested a large pile of those little tuber things that Elizabeth had cooked us for breakfast. They weren't great. They would probably need several centuries of selective breeding to turn them into something close to a potato, but they were a hell of a lot better than starving. The ground was already freezing, though, so once those few kilos were gone, we would have nothing. With eight mouths to feed (plus Cheeseburger), that meant we needed new sources of sustenance asap.

  Our other problem was coordination. For some reason, Tabitha and Patricia started butting heads almost as soon as they met. I guess that Tabitha had her heart set on being the leader that would guide me and Dahlia through our time of danger and hardship, and Patricia, just by virtue of doing everything in her power to help us, had kinda whipped that out from under her.

  Old Dezzermon had turned into the lingua franca of our little colony. An would get pissed if we spoke in English, Patricia barely speaks any French, and only the Bei family spoke Vietnamese, so all the languages of the old country were out. Dahlia and An were able to learn Old Dezzermon from a bunch of ancient scrolls they found higher in the tower, so you would think there would be no issue. Despite the game system's attempts to tear down language barriers, everyone seemed intent on keeping them up. An refused to converse in anything except Vietnamese if she could help it, Tabitha kept talking to me and Dahlia in French, and Patricia and Elizabeth would talk to each other in a really floaty language they called Light Fae. The only person who didn't speak Old Dezzermon was Elizabeth, since she had already gone through all her Learning points. I asked her what she had spent them all on, and she just got mad at me. I guess it must be a sore spot.

  The end result of all this was that our group had no real leadership. The three family units were occupying the same building, but hadn't really merged into a cohesive group. Duy and Kiet seem like nice guys, but if I ask for either of them to help me with something, An throws a fit, and won't even explain what her issue is. Tabitha is the only one who seems able to bridge that gap, probably because she was trapped in close quarters with them during the whole vampire monkey incident.

  Apart from her beef with Patricia, Tabitha was really thriving in this environment. I had never really thought of a ranger as an incredibly useful build in RPG's, but when you're desperate to find food for eight people, a huntress who can spot prey from miles away, find tracks in the snow easily, and fire a bow with near-perfect accuracy is exactly what you want. Night after night, Tabitha would come home from wandering in the woods outside the city with an animal big enough to feed all of us. One night it was a little wild boar piglet, another it was a full-grown buck. Duy usually came with her on these trips, when his mother could spare him. He was the one who could actually carry the things home. I think he has a high-strength build. An wanted to search through the wreckage of the town for all the innumerable things we've been forced to live without, and Duy is in high demand for that task too.

  I helped with this process as much as I could, which I'll admit isn't much. Digging through rubble with cold fingers in no one's idea of a fun way to spend the day, especially when nearly everything we find is either rotted-out or crushed. After hauling yet another crate-load of scrap lumber into the sanctuary, I decided to take a break and warm up. I spotted Dahlia in the corner of the sanctuary. She was reading the vellum scrolls from the shelf upstairs. It must be strange to read in a language you've never actually learned, especially when you've only ever read in Braille. After tossing a few more scraps of rotten wood into the fire-pit that An and Duy had built out of loose masonry, I went over and sat down next to her.

  “How's it goin' Dahl? Leg any better?”

  She sighed. “It still hurts, but not as bad as it used to be. Patricia's ointment is helping. Are you the one who put that boon on me?”

  “What? No, that was Tabitha. I didn't have any Piety points left after healing myself. How did you know about that?”

  “Patricia mentioned that it was one of the options, but that only family members can do it. I noticed that my leg was healing a lot faster than I expected, so I figured one of you must have done it.”

  “You...you don't sound all that happy about it. Don't you want your leg to heal faster?”

  “Well...yeh, but...I guess I just get sick of being taken care of. You know what I mean.”

  I did. Until recently, Dahlia had been completely blind. She had learned to gain a large degree of independence over the last few years in spite of that, but it did kind of exacerbate the the normal protectiveness that older siblings always feel for younger ones.

  “Yeah, I do. You can finally see, and just when you were about get a little independence, suddenly you can't walk and monsters are everywhere. And now you're cooped up in this temple.”

  “Exactly! We're in a world with actual magic, and I can actually go and see it! But I can't just because I don't have enough Piety to fix my goddamned leg!”

  “It won't be too much longer. Soon, you'll be able to get out of here and experience all the horrible nightmarish shit this world has in store for you. I promise.”

  She stuck out her tongue at me. “It's not just that. Everyone else has something to contribute here. Everyone is working hard to get us through the winter. Meanwhile, the frickin temple itself tells me I can't get healed because I haven't done enough in service to Family. That's hard not to take personally. And I'm trying to go for a cleric build here! How am I supposed to get Piety if I can't help anyone, because my knee is fucked, because I don't have Piety!”

  “I ran out of Piety too. I'll be in trouble if I get hurt again. I wonder if there's a way to, like, borrow Piety on credit.” I said.

  “Nope. Apparently, the gods don't offer loans. I checked.” she informed me.

  “How did you check?”

  “Query system. I burned through a bunch of my queries asking about temples and piety and boons and all that stuff. Interesting system, but I couldn't find a way to get my leg fixed any faster.”

  “Could you maybe give me the highlights? It might be stuff I need to know.” I wasn't really all that interested in religion in or out of this game, but Dahlia needed something to contribute right now, so I settled in for a lecture.

  She took a deep breath. “Okay. First of all, did you know that it was Patricia who originally claimed this temple? Before that, it was an unclaimed, chaotic temple. That's was because all the priests and worshipers either died or abandoned the place, and their claim lapsed.”

  I nodded. Patricia had told me the same story.

  “And now, Patricia's claim is due to lapse in a few more weeks. She captured the place, but she doesn't have any of the things she would need to actually maintain that claim.”

  I furrowed my brow. “For example?”

  “You can't just walk into a temple, claim it, then dust off your hands and walk away. This place is supposed to have an actual clergy, with a congregation, and statues, and murals, and books of doctrine. You know, an actual religion. If we don't do something, this place will go back to being chaotic. That means it'll start to spawn defenses to keep people out.”

  “And this is scheduled to happen in the middle of winter, and we're stockpiling all our shit here.” I completed her thought.

  “Bingo. If we're gonna keep living here, and I think the benefits of doing that are too good to pass up, we need to have a real strategy to keep this place running properly. That's why I'm reading these scrolls.”

  “What are those all about, anyway?” I asked.

  “All kinds of stuff.” she said, gently organizing the delicate vellum scrolls into neat stacks. “This one has a set of creation myths, these ones are hymns they used to sing here back when it was called the Temple of the Inner Fire. Some of them are historical records and legends. Records of ceremonies, sacrifices, births, deaths, marriages. Lists of prayers. Philosophical texts. Point is, this place used to be the main temple for a major world faith. Now, Patricia just erased all that and wrote “Family” across it. Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with family as a concept, obviously. But you need a lot more than one word to build a religion. This place needs a real faith to function properly. I was hoping that if I read these scrolls, I could train my Mysticism skill up. That's the skill that covers all this stuff. With enough Mysticism, I might be able to find a way to make this place work without adding a couple hundred more people.”

  “Yeah, that would a suck a big one. We can barely find enough food for the people we have now.”

  A silence descended. I realized that I had probably said something insensitive by mistake.

  “How's the archaeology going?” she asked, changing the subject again.

  I chuckled a little at her choice of words. “About as well as can be expected. Duy is the one who does all the heavy lifting and hauling around here, for obvious reasons, but he's off hunting with Tabs today. That just leaves me, An and Kiet. An's arm is still hurt, so she can't do much more than supervise, although you'd be amazed how well she manages with one arm. Kiet's great, but I don't think he's done much manual labor. We've mostly just been exploring the ruins, trying to find places that have survived mostly intact. There's a lot out there, but hardly any of it is the stuff we need.”

  “You found plenty of firewood.” said Dahlia, nodding toward the huge pile of scrap lumber that had accumulated in the sanctuary over the last few days.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Yeah, I think we'll be okay as far as fuel is concerned, although An still wants to add more. I can see her point. We don't really know what the climate is like around here. We don't want to run out of shit to burn in a month or two, then have to find fuel when everything is buried in the snow.”

  “And the same logic applies to food.” said Dahlia.

  “Uh-huh. Tabs can keep us fed for now, but that'll get harder as it gets colder. More dangerous too.”

  She eyed me. “You worried?”

  I shrugged. “Kinda. I mean, I expect things to get easier as we gain levels, but we're really vulnerable here. We've been lucky so far, but one bad hunting day for Tabs and we'll go hungry. An's working on a smoker so we can preserve meat, but that wouldn't be enough even if we started months ago. Even if we had plenty of food, I'd still be worried. I feel like our group isn't coming together the way it needs to. Tabs is off on her own most of the time, An barely talks to anyone except her husband and son, Patricia has kinda folded in on herself since we got back from the other temple. Nobody's really stepping up to get things organized. And that's just the problems we know about. This is a game, after all. It won't just let us stay in one place and live peacefully. It's gonna throw curveballs at us, and we need to be ready for that.”

  Dahlia listened and nodded along as I rattled this off. I really began to feel more optimistic the more I spoke to her. By the time I finished, I felt warmer and lighter.

  “So aside from all that, everything's good?” she said finally. I laughed.

  “Yeah, can't complain. I mean, I am a fucking wizard now. Check this out.”

  I held out my hand, and willed an image onto it. Within seconds, my hand was covered in tiny blades of grass with flowers sprouting from it. Then a horse appeared from my sleeve and walked into my hand, munching the grass.

  “Cool.” said Dahlia, with only partially forced enthusiasm. “What is that?”

  “...that's a horse Dahl. You've been around horses before.”

  “I knew what they sounded like and smelled like. This is the first one I've seen.”

  She stared at my illusory creation. I was pretty proud of it. It's a very complex construct, with multiple moving parts.

  “I think I like it.” she finally announced.

  “Teenage girl likes horses. Film at eleven.” I answered. She punched me a little for that one. The horse and grass vanished.

  “Hey, could you help me up the stairs? I want to check something in the system interface.” she asked.

  I helped Dahlia up the long set of stairs. She could probably have managed on her own, but her leg won't heal if she keeps putting weight on it. Getting past the big statue that's always in the process of climbing the stairs is the tricky part. When Dahlia touched the altar she seemed to shiver for an instant. Its weird seeing time freeze from the outside. I had no way of knowing how long she spent in the interface, since it was always instantaneous for everyone else.

  She turned to me. “Good news! My leg is fixed!” she demonstrated by jumping up and down in the little shrine.

  “Great. We could use a hand with the searching.” I replied.

  “That's all you have to say? Don't you at least want to know how I got the Piety?”

  “You made me feel better. That was a service to family.” I said.

  She stared at me, annoyed.

  “What? Its pretty obvious if you think about it.” I answered.

  “Some things are better left unsaid. I'm gonna go help An and Kiet. You coming?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I guess.” Dahlia celebrated her new mobility by running down the stairs. My first instinct was to tell her to be careful, but I knew from experience that she would only go faster out of spite. She disappeared down the opening to the next tier. I was tired already, and a bit overweight if I'm being honest, so I didn't even really try to keep up.

  When I was passing the damaged door that led out from the stairwell to the second tier balcony, I happened to overhear Patricia and Elizabeth arguing on the balcony outside. They were speaking Light Fae, so they obviously didn't want anyone overhearing them, but I heard Cheeseburger growling, so I knew Elizabeth was upset about something. As I came up the stairs, Elizabeth ran past me and down the stair-case without so much as a nod. It looked like she was trying not to cry. Cheeseburger followed her, which forced me to press myself against the wall. Rude.

  Patricia was standing on the dais, looking out over the city. I hugged myself against the cold as left the stairwell. Though it stings my Canadian pride, I admit that I do not care for the cold.

  “Patricia?” I called to her in English as I approached. She turned, startled.

  “Oh, hello Arturo.” she said.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  There was a pause. “No, not really.”

  “You wanna talk about it?”

  We sat down between the crenelations, our backs to the world.

  “I guess I feel...helpless.” she admitted finally.

  “Because of Kyle?” I asked, hoping that I wasn't tearing open a fresh wound.

  She sighed, “That's most of it. It was my fault he got kidnapped. I knew that little fairy bastard was trouble the moment he showed, but Kyle and Elizabeth both loved him, and...he made them feel safe. That's important, when you're in an unfamiliar place like this, in a situation that you can't really get your head around. When there's so much that's been taken from you. I should have told him to hit the road, but then it would have just been me again. I'm not really a maternal kind of person. I did my best with Charlotte, but I was never good at the emotional side of it. Making someone feel like everything is going to be alright, even when you don't really know if that's true. It's just not in me.”

  I gave her a moment before I answered her. “Well, if it makes any difference to you, I feel safer with you around.”

  She snorted a bitter little laugh, but I pressed on. “I'm bein' serious here. I was screwed here before you showed up. I ain't gonna lie, when I first got here, I was thrilled. I thought it was gonna be all awesome adventures, collecting piles of treasure, kicking the shit outa monsters, that kinda thing. Then the fuckin' monsters actually show up, and its just blood and pain. Dahlia was hurt, then Tabitha leaves and never comes back, and I'm just sittin' there with a pissed-off Asian lady bitching at me, wondering what horrible thing is happening next. Then you showed up, and things started looking up. You're a hero, Patricia.”

  “I don't really want to be a hero.” she said.

  I nodded. “Nope. Shitty job. Pay sucks, hours are terrible, retirement plan stinks, etc. But I want to follow your example, even so. We're gonna get through this.”

  “You don't know that.”

  “We're not gonna leave it to chance. I've made my decision. We are gonna get through this.”

  “Things are worse than you think they are. Did you know that this temple lets you locate anyone who's related to you? That's how I found Kyle last time.”

  “And you tried it again?”

  “Of course. First thing I did when we got back from the other temple. It showed me him, but I didn't get a location. He was sitting at a desk covered in old books, crying. I don't think he's even in the same world as us anymore. Then, I tried using the same “boon” to find Charlotte, his mother.”

  She paused. I didn't interrupt. Patricia stood and pointed off toward the sea in the distance.

  “I still have the boon. She's there right now, ninety-three thousand miles away. She was walking across a desert, riding on an animal I've never heard of.”

  I winced. “Ninety-three thousand miles? That's impossible.”

  Patricia shrugged. “If you're gonna make a career as a wizard, you'll have to learn to stop using that word. I am aware that that is nearly four times the distance around the whole Earth. But Earth is gone. We're somewhere a lot bigger. I know she's there, just as I know you're here.”

  “Wait, what do you mean “Earth is gone”? Aren't we on Earth now? I mean, in reality?”

  She shook her head. “Whatever this all is...” she gestured to the world in general. “It took us from our world, from our bodies, from everything. We're all just programs now. Just so many lines of code. I don't know for sure whether I'm really “me” anymore. I don't know if Kyle or Elizabeth are really them either, or if we're all just copies of ourselves.”

  “If you really believed that, you wouldn't be so worried about them.” I said. She sighed again.

  “You're right. It doesn't really change anything. This world is home now, and we have to learn to deal with it as it is, for better or worse.”

  “Mostly worse.” I agreed.

  “Mm-huh.”

  “So what's going on with Elizabeth?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.

  “Oh, she misses her mother, and her friends. She misses her brother too, even if she doesn't realize it. And she's worried about her pet. I don't want her off wandering in the woods, but she says Cheeseburger is hungry, and so is she. She just won't listen to me. Mind you, she never really listened to me before, but that wasn't such a problem back when she had her mother to look after her. Nobody listened to me back then. My mind was on its way out, you know. But now, just when I really need her to follow my lead, she has a cat the size of a pony to take her side on everything. How am I supposed to make her listen?”

  “You're asking me this? I don't know anything about kids. Or lions, actually.”

  She smiled. “Thanks for listening to me Arturo. I really appreciate it. I really feel...like I'm not alone here.”

  “Any time.” I answered. I took my cue to get back to work. “By the way, Duy is off helping Tabitha with the hunting, so I'm sure An could use someone super-strong to help with excavation.”

  Patricia nodded.

  An and Kiet had been excavating a ruined building a couple streets over from the temple. It looked like it had been used as a warehouse of some kind. It was full of casks which had been used to store wine. The wine was all vinegar now and most of the barrels were destroyed, but some were still good enough to store water, which we would need in the winter. I helped as much as I could, but An's constant yelling was getting on my nerves. I decided to start exploring the ruins on my own.

  I took to wandering through the streets looking for intact buildings to plunder for supplies. Without a backpack, there wasn't much I could bring home on these little excursions, so if I found anything, I would have to ask for someone to help me hail it back. I also didn't have a coat, so staying out for more than an hour or two got pretty painful after a while.

  To compensate, I started looking for rest-stops where I could stop and warm up. Many of the buildings of Dezzermon survived the fall of the city mostly intact, and a few even have fireplaces and enclosed spaces. Firewood is never hard to find, and I can always build a firepit out of loose bricks. Over the next few days, I began to carve out my own little network of houses and rooms in the western part of town. I started finding useful things and interesting curios, which I stored in a little cache in a cellar under a ruined house. I began to find rusty metal tools, random pieces of cloth, even a few intact bottles and jugs. All of this would be useful for the group, but what I needed were things to help with my magic.

  In this game, there are three axioms of magic. Each has its own particular drawbacks. Theurgy involves calling on a higher power for your spells and abilities. The natural drawback is that the higher power can have ideals, plans, and opinion of it's own, and if your decision don't please whatever super-being you've shackled yourself to, they might withdraw their power, or even punish you. Animism revolves around connecting yourself to the natural world, especially other living things. The drawback was that the more you connected yourself with animals, plants, and the wind or whatever, the less able you are to connect with other human beings. In one case, you sacrifice your independence, and in the other, you sacrifice your humanity.

  I picked Thaumaturgy as my magical axiom without really considering its strengths and weaknesses, purely because it had the kind of flavor I was going for. Thaumaturgy is the most resource-dependent of the axioms, which means it sucks in this particular scenario. I needed stuff like candles, incense, chalk, skulls, that kind of thing. What I needed most of all was books. Books that were already full of spells and arcane lore would be ideal, but even a blank notebook to write things in would be handy. I could get a lot more use out of my illusion powers with the right preparations. To that end, I started converting my little cache into a laboratory.

  Once I had a goal in mind, I began to see potential materials everywhere. A few chunks of charcoal from a fireplace became my chalk and pencil supply. A set of small glasses from the remains of a tavern became the start of a basic chemistry set. Glass of all kind became a fixation of mine. I wasn't sure how I would do it yet, but I suspected that there was a way to take advantage of the refractive properties of glass to make my illusion spells more energy-efficient.

  During all the battles I had participated in so far, I had survived (and helped others to survive) by making large numbers of distracting images. I liked butterflies for this purpose. They were colorful, they attracted attention, and they had a simple structure that was fairly easy to keep track of in the heat of combat. Still, once I was trying to project more than a few butterflies at once, the mental strain became pretty intense, and I felt exhausted afterward. This game doesn't seem to have a mana mechanic: everything you do, mental, physical, or magical, runs off stamina. All the fights I had been in were short, but they each left me feeling like I had been chopping wood all day. That was a problem I needed to work on. Soon, we would be facing real enemies again, and my teamates would be counting on me to break out the serious mojo, and I needed some serious mojo to break out.

  At the end of each day, I would fill a couple buckets with anything that seemed useful to the group and carried it home to the temple. The others, who had been working all day excavating or hunting, weren't all that impressed with my output, but as long as I was contributing, I still got a share of the food. I hoped that I would have something tangible to show for my experiments before too long.

  Dezzermon's library broke my heart. It was a stately brick building in the southwestern corner of the city. When I first entered, it took my breath away. Hundreds of shelves, lined with tens of thousands of volumes. All written in Old Dezzermon, a language in which I was newly fluent. For a moment, I believed that I could be the one to share this vast repository of ancient knowledge with the others. Who knew what ancient secrets could have sat undisturbed here for centuries, awaiting the brave heroes and wise scholars who could uncover its bounty and share them with the world.

  It was all ruined. I reached for the volumes on the shelf, and came away with a handful of dust. The books had been left exposed to the elements. In the center of the library's ceiling there had once been a round stained-glass window to let the light in. The window had shattered and fallen in, and the wind and rain and snow had followed it. A fortune in knowledge, lost to the ages, like the library of Alexandria. For a while I stood and stared at the pointless waste.

  I searched the library from top to bottom, searching for some book or even a few pages that had escaped the elements, but found nothing. Instead, I collected the glass shards from the pile of snow under the circular opening. A few broken shards of multicolored glass wouldn't interest anyone else, but I added them to my growing collection. I sensed something in these seemingly worthless objects. They weren't magical, exactly, or my Arcanism skill would have allowed me to identify their properties. But I was sneaking up on the idea that the line between magical and non-magical in this game might be more complex than I had originally thought. I would need to experiment further to see where this insight might lead me.

  That night, I had very little to show my day's searching. Instead, I chose to entertain the others with my illusions to earn my place at the table. They watched and clapped as I sent dolphins and birds of paradise flying through the air of the sanctuary. I couldn't do this all the time, as it really tired me out after a few minutes, but we after so many hours of digging through ruins in the bitter cold, everyone needed to see something beautiful.