I am alive.
I am me.
I am.
It was this constant, never-changing litany that had accompanied him all throughout the endless march. Uncountable times, uncountable steps and it never changed, never faltered. To falter in such a place was to die, to cease in the most fundamental level. To not reaffirm himself was to fall to total entropy. He did not know how much time had passed, how many times he had moved forward, filled with nothing but certainty that he was, indeed, alive. That he was separate from the ever-waiting nothingness at the beginning and end of all things. That he was human, conscious, alive. Present.
His soul and body had atrophied, reduced to a mere shadow of what they once were, his inner magic and skills collapsed under the sheer attrition of the non-existence he so stubbornly faced, only his ego and the Stillshell protecting him from utter obliviation. He had not felt hunger, thirst or even warmth for what seemed like aeons. They had no meaning here, in this place where time went to die. It was a place utterly inimical not solely to life, but to being itself. To be here at all was anathema, a struggle that was both maddened and pointless. And yet he pressed on.
He had no other choice.
This was not the first time he had these thoughts. This was not the last time he had these thoughts. He would repeat stories and streams of mind endlessly, in his constant struggle to maintain his mind, as a frenzied engineer might try to stop a boat from sinking. And he had succeeded. And he would succeed again. Not a memory had been lost. Not a thought, not a mote of emotion. All had been kept, impossibly, miraculously whole. And it would be kept as such for as long as he lived. For as long as the march lasted.
For how could he fail now? After all the pain, all the effort, to fail would here would have been an utter mockery of what came before. There was no pain here, no horror beyond annihilation. There was only focus, only will. He had faced worse odds, and as he knew Causality itself hated him, he would face worse still. It only waited for him to persist beyond this. It always waited. To strike in the most painful, petty way. For he was mortal and had endured where no mortal had endured before and this was an insult to reason, to logic, to itself. And insults had to be answered for, regardless of their severity.
He would not let it win, the spiteful vermin. He was here before, he was here now, and he would be there at the very end. To laugh at it, to mock it with all the venom, all the hate any man could afford to muster. Even a broken man, even an empty man, even a strange man. It mattered not his state of being. Him being at all was enough. All the enemies, all the beasts, all the nightmares. Where the brave had died, he survived. Where the cowards died, he survived. Where the innocent died, he survived. He survived.
He always survived.
All of them. All of us. Always.
He was the last man standing, the last man singing, the last man dancing. He was alive. And nobody else was. The price, the price, was horrid beyond imagining. And the prize was being alone. Alone but alive, broken but alive, hopeless but alive. He did not care how he lived so long as he did, so long as he killed them. Them, them, THEM. Traitors, beasts, reavers one and all. He had done well, he had done consistently and he had done proudly. They laughed, they laughed until they bled, until they hurt, until they died. They never thought they’d die. Why would they have thought so? Death was for the innocent. Death was for the sane. And he proved them wrong, each and every time, each and every battle, each and every struggle. He proved them wrong and they feared, and they run. They knew him. They knew tales, they knew stories, they knew information and in merely knowing they did not understand and for this they died. For knowledge is but lead in the mind without understanding.
I am alive.
I am me.
I am.
I am-
Something. For the first time since he began this exodus he perceived something. Anything at all that was not HIM, that extended beyond his skin and the Stillsuit that might has well have become part of the former. All the chaotic edifices of his mind imploded as all that he was focused on this… something. There was something. It was impossible. He was the only exception to this. Not anything else. Certainly not the dreamless things in waiting that were legion here and would persist until the end of time itself. Certainly not the Still Ones, dread things in mourning for an emptiness that was. But there was, undoubtedly, something. And so this could only mean one thing, and one thing only.
The end approached.
The end of the march, the end of the struggle, the end of this worthless void. Heat, movement, life at long last. It would be his. It would be his for at least a second even if it killed him. For numberless years he had walked, for running would have achieved little but distraction from himself. But the end was here and he would not be denied. He begun to sprint, every fiber of his being, his body, mind intent on bringing him to promised freedom at long last. He had not forgotten. Even after all this time he had not forgotten. Yet, while the memory remained, reality was a different thing. He did not run with the speed and certainty he once had, for the body had to sacrifice in the name of the mind but run he did. And so his motion, which was merely loud for the silent inhabitants of this non-realm became outright deafening. He did not care. Their anger merely hastened his departure. He ran, ran and then ran some more as fast as his slumbering legs could take him.
And then he reached it. There was no object, no shape, no thing. It was just warmth and it was enough. His hands, his hands, for so long left unused grasped for it like a man on the edge of starvation. And as he perceived something that was real, truly real and not merely an extension of himself, every synapse of his brain flashed alight with intent. And he pulled. And he fell. And he stood. And he felt.
He felt the Stillsuit collapse into dust and then nothingness as it crumbled under the pressure of that which mattered and which it could never be. He felt the pull of gravity straining his bones and muscles. He felt the brush of air against his now naked, scarred skin. He felt warmth that was not his own seep through him. He felt, for the first time in an age, alive. He could not distinguish anything of what he was perceiving, so unpracticed were his senses now but it did not matter for to perceive at all was undeniable proof of his victory. Victory. He had won, he was alive and he had won. He heard what he could swear might have been voices, perhaps even human voices but he was too disoriented, too overwhelmed to make sense of it, of anything all around him. It didn’t matter. He was alive and every nerve of his body was alight with joy. He had won and the great struggle was over. A victory like no o-
Something hit him.
It took him a couple of seconds to realize, to process, to absorb this. He was the the most excited he had been in ages, his every muscle bristling with happiness, his deprived senses bursting with information. How could something have hit him? How could anything physically ruin this? And as he felt the lingering pressure, not pain, of whatever had him in the… back? Yes it was the back. That’s where his back was, he remembered that while it did not hurt, it could have. Now pain, that was not a sensation he missed whatsoever. With great reluctance, old and practiced instincts roused from their ancient slumber and his senses focused, his muscles tightened and his mind reluctantly rose out of the mire it had so long been stuck in. And he saw where he was.
It was an alley. An exceptionally dirty alley, even by his truly abysmal standards. It was a dead end, filled with trash and strangled between old and decaying pseudo-brutalist buildings, painted in what might have once been blue. There were strange looking garbage bins and neon colored graffiti in a language he had never seen, and a non-insignificant amount of unidentified liquids. There were also, he noticed, people. Exceptionally ugly people, dressed in garish, casual red clothing that for some reason had sharp metal spikes strapped onto it. And they were not all human. One was tall and lithe with long thin ears. One had broken antlers. One was short and wide with a beard that would have been the envy of most men were it not for its clear lack of care and the… bones… those were bones, that this fine gentleman had decided were perfectly fine decour for his facial hair. Now that he paid attention, they seemed have decorated themselves with a staggering amount of corpse imagery.
Something hit him again.
He turned slowly, inexorably to look at the culprit. This one was human, not that it made any difference at the moment. Wild hair, red facial paint, a true image of savagery. An attempt at it anyway. He actually looked like he’d just woken up from a particularly unsatisfying rave. He had a confused, baffled look to him and a gun in his hand. Ah, so he had been shot. Strange though, with his body so weakened, a bullet would have done something. As he looked down at the gun he understood. Even with his senses and perception so rusty, he could easily tell that the pistol was a cheap, plastic piece of trash and the bullets were less tools of death and more tools of strong suggestion. Who would use this? Not even the most desperate, idiotic reaver would be caught dead with such a thing, it’d be humiliating. In fact, he was fairly certain he had never seen a single proper plastic weapon in all his time back home. Then again, this was another universe altogether. Was it a non-lethal armament?
He was hit again. In the forehead. And the barrel was only a meter away. Alright, so not non-lethal, just worthless. The bullet didn’t even bounce off, just sadly falling on the ground as it discharged its pitiful kinetic payload in full.
He turned his eye away from the weapon and at its wielder, raising his eyebrow. The would-be barbarian had only become more confused, like a child not understanding why his toy had just stopped working. Despite this, he knew he was going to do it again. This did not seem like the kind of man who reconsidered his course of action. He could hear the voices of his friends, anger and confusion mixed together, rising, boiling. He looked to the man in front of him, saw in his eye that he was intent on another attempt and took the only reasonable course of action.
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He punched him.
Hard.
His body was weak, but that mattered a little less to his prosthetic left arm. Or significantly less considering the would-be shooter’s head snapped backwards at speeds rarely seen by objects not bound for space, unleashing a resounding crack throughout the alley before he smashed against the pavement. His comrades screamed in anger and shock and suddenly he could feel yet more of those worthless armaments on his skin. Honestly, were these guns meant exclusively for cardboard boxes? Even an especially small child would have difficulty getting killed by something like this.
He crouched and, to his distaste and with great reluctance, picked up the gun from the still body of the barbarian. It was a pistol all right, if futuristic looking in a cheap and sterile sort of way. Not many ways someone could fuck that up, though people certainly tried. And to his dismay succeeded. If nothing else, learning about this so called gun might have made him hate it slightly less. Or more. But that was something he would have to find out the usual way. He got up and turned around. The group was in complete panic mode, shooting, screaming, moving erratically and without purpose. These people would not have lasted much even in Poland. He lifted the gun with his left arm and pulled the trigger while aiming at the bone-bearded dwarf. The recoil was as small as he expected but the result was surprising. A clean bullet hole, right trough the chest. The dwarf fell backwards, in shock. He would die soon, he’d aimed for the heart. Or at least where the heart would be related to a human body. For all he knew about dwarf physiology he might have shot his liver.
Precise. And a little more powerful than he expected. It hadn’t penetrated fully but this was more than sufficient. He supposed that his body was not quite as atrophied as he feared and that some of his toughness had remained. Good news all around. His satisfaction was interrupted by another bout of screaming and panicked shooting by the… 6 remaining people. The pistol had shot 4 times and so he hoped it had enough bullets for all of them. Even as they kept peppering him with a hail of supposedly lethal plastic, he aimed and shot. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and it was done. All hits, all center mass. Anticlimactic, but quite frankly he had more than enough climactic battles during his life. A frankly ridiculous and unhealthy number of them.
As they died, silence fell on the alley.
He was alone now. He looked at the corpses around him and felt the pistol slip from his grasp, his focus fading, his blood slowing and a bitter sense of exhaustion fall over him like a funerary veil. It had been barely a couple of minutes since he had effectively returned to life and already the bodies had started dropping. He did not feel guilt for defending himself but he did feel that it was a great unfairness that even for an hour he was not spared from violence. Was he this unlucky? That his first moments of new life had to be like this? What were they even doing armed in a random alley? He did not deny violence, it was a part of him, but he wished that he could have enjoyed a measure of peace before returning to old habits. He sighed and collected himself. He was in an unknown universe, on an unknown world with an unknown people. He would have to do something to make a life out here and he had not the slightest idea how to. Considering the guns and the building style he concluded this to be a fairly advanced world. So he’d need documentation. Records. Money. Things which he did not have. He’d have to slum it for a while, to get his bearings. Not that he wasn’t used to it by then…
“Ue!”
He turned at the voice. Had one of them survived? He looked and found that at the end of the alley, in the darkness was a… dwarf he presumed, bleeding, bruised and laying on his back with his open palms turned towards him in what he presumed was a gesture of peace. He had red hair and a beard with, both with white streaks, each shaped into a large braid and though his warm, pinkish features were swollen and colored by the bruising, he could tell he had a strong, handsome face, with blue eyes and a now broken roman nose. Regrettably, every positive facet of his look was utterly ruined by what could have possibly been the ugliest suit he had ever laid his eyes on: it was colored in a disgusting, blinding yellow shade with outright blasphemous purple accents and all of it was highlighted by the most in-your-face flannel pattern the cruel had ever devised. Indeed, compared to his face, the suit was immaculate, as clearly whoever had beaten him had decided that wearing such a thing was punishment enough for his body. Not even Henri, that mad bastard, had this poor a taste, either as a man or a god. Even in his nakedness he felt more fashionable than this… thing.
“Ue?” He said, and whispered something else too, but it was not in any language he knew. A strange sensation, to hear a language he did not understand.
Clearly he had spent too much time contemplating the horror laid before him, for the dwarf had called him again, this time a bit wary, a bit hesitant. After all his naked, scarred and very violent savior had just spent a truly long minute looking at him with a certain intensity. So he decided to stop wasting time on the contemplating the horrors of fashion and looked at the beaten dwarf in his eyes, walking towards him. And then for the first time since he even undertook the pilgrimage, he spoke.
“Do you speak English?” It was clear, well-spoken, but such a long time had passed since he last had a conversation that it sounded like it came from a burning factory chimney that was on the verge of crumbling. He hoped dearly that he’d recover his normal voice soon. He rather liked it.
The dwarf just looked confused at him.
Well, it was worth an attempt. He doubted that an entirely different universe would have the same languages he knew but it did have compatible laws of physics, a breathable and habitable atmosphere and also humans, so with all these coincidences lining up, why not language too? But it was a hope too much, clearly. Now what? Thornspeak? No, this was, presumably, a normal mortal being, he’d fry his brains out. So what was left… Demonic, he supposed. Worth an attempt. And so he spoke a greeting in the harsh and whispery sounds of the tongue of Demons.
The dwarf did not quite understand, but comprehension dawned on his face and he quickly started fidgeting with his suit, frantically searching until he found and pulled out a beige bulky phone-like object from what he now realized was an indecent number of pockets. Truly the horror grew in scope and facets. The bearded man tapped on the touch screen of the item and then extended it towards him, his other hand turning in place, asking him to repeat. And so he did. The device repeated the words once and then seemingly translated them out loud in a neutral, robotic voice into whatever language was used in this place. It sounded pleasant. Melodious. Evocative.
The dwarf nodded with a grin, lifted himself up from the ground with no small amount of effort, looked him into the eye and then spoke into the tool.
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Bheren could not believe what the fuck had just happened. Everything was going as usual, a group of gangsters was threatening him to get out of their business or die, and had pulled him into yet another alley to do so. Granted the Red Reavers were more violent about it than most others and really hit his head more than it was necessary but it was, fundamentally, the same situation he had gone through over a thousand times by now.
And then a naked, scary-ass human glitched into existence out of nowhere and killed them all like it was nothing. Which, well, to the stranger it clearly was. They had shot him multiple times but the sheer ease and calm with which he retaliated was downright unnerving. And terrifying. He could predict the Reavers. He could deal with the Reavers. He could appease the Reavers. He did not think the could appease this… murderous apparition. He thought to simply keep laying down, since he hadn’t been noticed but he did not know how long that would last and something told him surprising this human was a terrible, terrible idea.
And so he called out to him. And thankfully he was not murdered for the trouble. Then the human turned and looked at him. For an uncomfortable length of time. He called out again, a bit more wary of evoking hostility and whispered his thoughts out loud.
“Does he even understand Merillian?”
This apparently was the wrong thing to say, because the murderous streaker stopped just looking at him and started walking towards Bheren. He really hoped he wouldn’t kill him. Thankfully he just stopped in front of him and as he got a better look at him, he realized he was certainly something to behold: He was completely naked, with a thin muscular build, his left arm and leg replaced with simple looking black, metal cybernetics. His skin, unhealthily pale for a human, at least ones from Elthalis, was a tapestry of scars, with bullet holes, blade cuts and Gods know what else all throughout, covering his exterior as if attempting to hide it. His face had only one eye, the right one, an intense, focused red orb, while the left eye socket was covered by a small, angular metal plate. His facial features were as sharp as knives and adorned by disheveled black hair that fell down to his nape and a goatee that once might have looked slick. All in all, he certainly looked the part of a murderous streaker. Bheren, for his own sake, would not say this out loud.
The man spoke but he understood nothing. It was not in a language he had ever heard of and with a voice that came straight from Zharnak. It sounded… vaguely Sinneal? Maybe Helmonian? No, none of those felt right. Might have been just a planetary language. He really hoped it wasn’t, because he was fairly sure his Hand-D did not have it in its Codex. The man spoke again and his body washed over with relief, for while he did not understand the words, he knew it was some manner of Demonic, even if an exceptionally unpleasant dialect he had never heard before. He frantically searched for his Hand-D and pulled it out as fast as he possibly could. He activated the device and forwarded it to the man, his free hand asking him to repeat. Hopefully the physical language was understood as what it was, rather than a mortal offense, like that time with the Satrapy noble. Luckily, the human understood and spoke again.
“Greetings, changing one.” translated the Hand-D.
Alright, that sounded polite, if strange. Good, he could deal with that. He nodded, satisfied that he probably wasn’t going to die today and his face was split by a grin. Time to put to work that winning smile. With what little strength he could muster, he lifted himself off the ground. Thank fuck the suit was properly armored or it would have been a lot worse.
"Hello, I am Bheren Fendhalm. Thanks for helping me! Could you tell me your name?" He spoke into the tool, as clearly and concisely as he could. Better give no chances to the Hand-D to mistranslate.
The man listened to the translation, and it must not have been too precise, for he seemed a bit confused, but he ultimately understood and responded.
"Greetings, Bheren Spawned Of Fendhalm. This one is sung of as Zaccaria Moranni."
Bheren's smile widened and he said the words he knew would turn this situation in his favor.
"Would you like a job?