by Ivan Kal
“Think hard on your purpose, allow it to fill you whole. Bend your will to the task of getting out of this. This darkness,” Oxylus clarified, gesturing to the coming dark. “It is nothing before the might of your will. Feel it with your whole being, and it will not take you. You will wake up.”
“But what then?” Morgan asked. “I am still being choked by that skeleton. I am not strong enough to get away.”
“You have all the tools you need to survive,” Oxylus said.
“Can’t you just give me a hint at least?” Morgan asked desperate.
For the first time, Morgan saw Oxylus make a kind and soft expression. “Morgan, a victory given is no victory at all. Strength borrowed is a false strength. Do you think that this will be the last time you are in this kind of a situation? If you wish to follow the path of strength above all, you cannot afford to grow confident in the aid of others. To stand at the summit of power on your own strength means never hiding in the shadow of another.”
Morgan opened his mouth to speak, but Oxylus continued before he had the chance.
“Remember what I told you about will. The power of your soul’s will knows no bounds. It is the cornerstone of who you are. And as long as it is strong enough, nothing, not even death will stand in your way.” With that, Oxylus turned to walk away, but Morgan spoke quickly.
“Wait!” he said, and Oxylus glanced back. “Are you really here, or am I talking to some fiction of my own imagination? Are you a hallucination? Is this all in my head?”
Oxylus grinned at him. “Would the truth really change anything for you?” With that he stepped into the darkness that was now almost touching Morgan. He thought on the god-that-was-not-a-god’s last words—Would it change anything?—and Morgan knew that the answer was no. He did not want to go, did not want to die. He wanted power and strength, to ascend more and more until he conquered the challenge that Oxylus put before him on the day he had given him the second chance at life. He wanted to go to the Tower and climb to its top, to stand before Oxylus and tell him that he had not been wrong to choose Morgan.
He saw the darkness getting closer and knew that he had no time to waste. He closed his eyes and filled his mind with a single thought. All of his being, he funneled into the single desire, to open his eyes. He felt the cold as the darkness neared, but he did not falter. He willed his eyes open.
The pain was the first thing that came back. The skeletal hands over his throat, the burning in his veins as his heart struggled to pump blood to all of his body. The coldness and the wetness of the blood now soaking his shirt, the blade buried deep in his chest no longer even hurt—they were just strange feelings of something foreign in his body.
Morgan’s hands rose to grasp the undead skeleton’s skull as Oxylus’s words echoed in his head. He said that I have all that I need to survive, Morgan thought, and he realized that he did know a way to survive. His Arcane Shift would’ve been useful, but he could tell that it was still on cooldown. But he had command over nature, over life and death. The cycle of birth and growth, and of death and entropy. He focused his entire mind on a single desire, pulled on the energy in his entire body for a single purpose. He locked eyes with the glowing embers in the empty sockets of the skull now in his palms, and through his constricted throat, he whispered a single word.
“Decay.”
Energy inside of his body exploded in a rush to his hands and into the skeleton through his ability Power Infusion. He could feel it spread through the undead, take hold and obey his command, pushing the bones to decompose. Morgan had power over the alignment of nature, over the natural order of things, and by his will, nature answered. The bones beneath his hand turned slowly to ash and dust, the grip on his throat lessened and then disappeared as the skeletal arms collapsed and fell in a rain of dust to the floor. The skull remained in his palms as the neck broke apart and the rest of the skeleton’s body fell to the floor, sending a cloud of dust everywhere. It took a few moments for every bone to turn to dust, and even the armor that the skeleton wore followed rusting further and flaking away into smaller particles that disappeared.
The skull crumbled slowly, and Morgan watched as the embers in the empty eye sockets burned out and fluttered away. A moment later, his hands were empty as it, too, disappeared.
He looked at the now empty ground where it had fallen, then at the gear of other skeletons torn apart by his roots or by his sword. To the side he saw Clara slowly get back to her feet from where she had struck the cave wall, her ball of light still shining a pure white. He glanced down to his chest and saw the rusted blade. Right, still got a sword in my chest, Morgan thought, and fell back to the floor.
The last thing he heard was Clara rushing over to him, yelling out his name.
CHAPTER SIX
Morgan came back to consciousness to a sensation of heat and pain. He hissed and looked down to see his chest open—without the sword sticking out.
“Morgan? Can you hear me?” Clara asked. He had been leaned on one of the sarcophagi. The healer was kneeling next to him and had her hands glowing over his chest and the open wound there.
“Crap,” Morgan wheezed out through his bruised throat. “I’m dying, aren’t I?”
“You are not dying, not today,” Clara said through clenched teeth. Somehow her tone and the look in her eyes did not reassure him.
“Oh, I remember what it feels like to die, I’m pretty sure that this is it,” Morgan said.
“Just shut up, I need to focus on this or you really are going to die,” Clara said.
Morgan closed his eyes. He felt cold approaching, the same cold as the one he felt in the tunnel where he first met Oxylus. Damn, I’m really going to die, Morgan thought to himself. He wondered if he should even fight it; his conversation with Oxylus or his hallucination at least had made him want to live, but he didn’t know how. Yes, he felt different. There was something inside of him now, a goal—but it was all the other crap around that that worried him.
“You know,” Morgan said slowly. “I don’t really deserve to live.”
“Of course you do,” Clara said. “And you need to, you have too many people counting on you. You are a Guild Master and you have a responsibility.”
“They will be better off without me. I’m a liar and a fraud.” Morgan felt something wet roll down his cheek. It hurt to talk, but he just couldn’t stop himself. If he was to die at least he wanted to do one true thing in his life. “You know I lied to them all, every word out of my mouth is a lie. I don’t know how to speak the truth, I don’t know how to act like a person. Because I am not a person, I am just a mask that I crafted so that I can live without being afraid.”
“Morgan, please, you can speak later. Let me fix this,” Clara said.
“You don’t know, but I killed my step-father when I was a child. And since then something just broke inside of me, you know? I told everyone that I did it because of my mom, because he was hurting her…but that wasn’t the truth. He never touched her. I lied.” Morgan wheezed out.
“He was…” The words got caught in his throat, but he pushed them out. He needed to speak this out loud at least once. “He was hurting me. My mom didn’t believe me, you know, when I told her. So I saw my chance and I took it. I pushed a knife in his back and I watched him die. I thought that I would feel better, but I didn’t, not really. My mom lied for me, to the police, to everyone, and I lied to my therapist, telling the story about how I protected my mom. But it was a lie. I killed a person for myself, and since that moment, my mother never again touched me. Not a hug, a pat on the shoulders. She never told me that she cared for me. And I knew that she saw me as a monster, a killer.”
Morgan paused. He could see Clara working tersely to save his life. Her energy was flowing inside of him, boosting his regeneration, but he was dying nonetheless. She kept her eyes on his wound, but he knew that she was listening, so he opened his mouth again. He needed at least one person to know everything about who he was.
&n
bsp; “We moved to another city then, and she told me to keep what happened a secret from everyone. And I did, but I just didn’t know how to speak to other people. I was a child who his own mother hated. I was not worthy to speak with anyone. Therapy didn’t help at all…but then a strange thing happened, you know? I found video games, and I started playing with other people from across the world. And in those fantasy worlds I could be whoever I wanted to be, and I was. I created stories about who I was, a hero in the game and a happy kid on the outside. I made friends and we talked for hours every day over the internet, but they didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know myself. Now I know that we weren’t really the kind of friends that I wanted to have. We just played together. And then I died, and a god offered me a chance for a new life.”
“You are not a liar, Morgan, and you have real friends here,” Clara said slowly.
“Hah,” Morgan tried to laugh, but his chest hurt. “Oh, no. I am a liar. I deceived my friends here, too. You know, I am not really an idiot, the way I speak and try to make light of everything, the way I pretend that I have misheard things and misunderstood what was spoken to me. None of it is real. It is the mask I have always used, because I do not know how to have a real conversation. I lied about everything: I told them that I know how to run a Guild, that I had done so in the past in my world. But that is a lie, too, as you don’t really understand what games on my world are, and I have never been a Guild Leader. I was not social enough for that. I was the tactics guy, the dude who spent days all alone reading up on the encounters, figuring out the tactics for the dungeon and raid runs. And I was good at that, but I didn’t interact with other people, I didn’t lead them. I just sent a file with all the tactics that they needed to learn and that was it. I am a fraud.”
“You’ve done well enough here, and that is not a lie,” Clara told him. “You’ve saved lives, Morgan. You have friends, and people who follow and look up to you. And you have Vestella,” she continued as beads of sweat formed on her brow.
“I’ve caused deaths, and people here have died because of me—because I don’t know anything about this world, because I can’t figure out tactics when I don’t know what to expect. And Ves…oh sweet, naive Ves. Her I have deceived most of all. I intentionally pretended like I understood what she was saying to me when she told me that she liked me, that she wanted us to be mated for life. I knew how sheltered her life was, that she was just so damn naive. You know, I’ve never been with a girl before. Because I was afraid. I tried, I really did. But I just never could progress past a few dates, a couple of kisses. I knew that I would be forever alone. And so when Ves came, when she said that she liked me, that she wanted to be with me… I saw the opportunity to get something that I never thought I would before. I liked being near her, because she didn’t speak much and nor did she ask many questions. She felt safe, and I took her because I could.”
“You are lying now, Morgan,” Clara replied sternly. “I have seen the way you look at her. You care for Ves, and she for you. That is no lie.”
“Isn’t it? I don’t know, how could I know? I have never really felt loved before.”
“You are just confused. Everyone who looks at you can tell that you care for her.”
Morgan frowned, but that did make him feel a bit better. He just didn’t know—was it he that loved her, or his mask? Were they even separate things at this point?
“It doesn’t matter now. I am about to die. You will all be free of me soon.”
Clara finally leaned back on her knees. “No, sorry, but you are not dying today.”
Morgan frowned and looked back to his chest to see a closed wound with scar tissue over it. It was pink and red, and his chest still hurt, his throat his hurt, but nowhere near the amount it hurt before. “Oh fuck me sideways, I’m gonna live?”
“You are,” Clara gave him a little smile.
“Any chance that you can like, forget everything that I said?”
Clara’s expression turned somber and she moved to sit next to him, leaning her back on the stone behind Morgan’s back. Their shoulders touched, and she didn’t respond immediately. “You remind me a lot of my brother,” she said at length. “It is why I like poking fun at you.”
“You have a brother?” Morgan asked.
“Had—he died. He was very much like you. I think that I could just tell somehow, and that was why I was drawn to you. He, too, had been feeling lost.”
“How so?”
“He was the one chosen to be the ascended of our tribe,” Clara said.
“Oh, and what happened? I mean, you don’t need to tell me, but I kind of told you all of my darkest secrets, so…”
Clara slapped his knee. “To understand what it means to be ascended for an orc tribe, you need to know our history. And we…we’ve been keeping the oral history of our people since the moment we were brought to this world by the Great Lord.”
“Oxylus brought you all here?”
“I have heard you call him that before. Did he tell you that that was his name? I am aware that sometimes the chosen are personally brought over to this world by the Great Lord or one of his Heralds.”
“He said that he had many names, but that I can call him Oxylus. I think that I was supposed to know what the name meant, but, well…” Morgan shook his head, remembering the encounter. He really had been a wiseass. I need to change the way I act toward gods-that-are-not-gods, Morgan promised to himself.
“Well, we know him by another name: Heart of the Mountain. He came to my people at the time when we were at our lowest point. My people had been wanderers, traveling the land of our birth alongside the two other races. A lot of our history is lost to us, but we know that we had done something that made us outcasts, and that also made us forsake the use of magic. After that we made contact with humans, who came to us from another world—through a gate that bridged our homes. And we were accepted by them… Eventually, all of my kind moved to live on the human world,” she said wistfully. “But our departure from our home was not appreciated by our gods. They came for us, to take us back to the lands they ruled. This was when the Heart of the Mountain interceded on our behalf, because he owed our people a favor. He fought against our gods in a terrible battle that moved from the world of humans to our own. We know that their battle cracked our home in half, and sent our gods running before his power. But while the battle hadn’t been waged for long on the human world, it did do damage to their world as well.”
Clara sighed. “The humans did not appreciate that. A few factions of humanity wanted us off their world, and while we could’ve tried to fight and stay, the Heart of the Mountain offered us something else: to come to his world and help him in his desire, and some of the tribes took his offer. We know what it is he wants to do, you see. The orc tribes alone understand his goal.”
“Wow, that is an incredible story. So what is Oxy’s goal? I know that he’s said that he wants people to conquer the Tower of Power, but why?” Morgan asked.
“Because he needs an army, and this entire world is the training grounds for that army. To conquer the Tower, you need to be powerful enough that you might as well be considered a god. The Great Lord’s design of the ascended is a path to that power, a guide and a helping hand to accelerate the process.”
“But… So many people die, and he is just putting us all through the grinder hoping to get a few strong enough for his army?” Morgan asked.
“You cannot put your kind of morality on a being such as a Great Lord. My people had once worshiped gods who we thought all-powerful, but even they were nothing before him. He stands at the summit above all, and to him mortal lives are nothing.” At Morgan’s expression, Clara continued, “But you don’t need to be so outraged, as every race he has brought here would’ve been dead had he not done so. He does not take those who are living their lives with no danger of death, but only those who would’ve died otherwise, or those who already had died, like you. No one on this world would have existed if not fo
r the Great Lord. This is a cruel and a hard place, yes, but it also allows you a path to greatness, to achieve the power of a god.”
Morgan nodded reluctantly. “Right. I guess that I can’t really blame him—if not for him, I would’ve probably been going to that white light.” He shook his head as he shivered. “But what about your people? You weren’t at threat of death.”
“No, we were not. We chose to come here on our own. But we still had our own beliefs, and to us magic is forbidden…yet we owed the Great Lord a debt. So the tribes decided that each of the tribes would allow one of their number to become ascended, to try and achieve the Great Lord’s goal.”
“So your brother was chosen?” Morgan asked.
“He was,” Clara said. “The choice is done through a lottery, one in which every child in the tribe is entered. He was chosen, and he began his training immediately. But for the orcs, being ascended means abandoning your people—because an orc using magic cannot be a part of the tribe. My brother, Greg, hated that he was chosen.”
“Greg? Really?” Morgan asked. I guess that the names do kind of make sense if their ancestors had lived on a human world before coming here.
Clara slapped his knee again. “To be ascended meant that you would inevitably be forced away from everything that you knew and loved, and he didn’t know how to deal with that. Our parents, they drew back, interacting with him less and less in preparation for what was to come. They tried to be ready for the moment when their son would ascend and they would lose him forever. His training made him isolated, and he drew more and more into himself. He was lonely… And then one day, he left the village and went into the forest to find a monster to kill and ascend. He did it before his training was complete. I think that he just wanted to get it over with. Living in a village, but being always apart from everyone else… It weighed heavily on him.”
Morgan nodded. He understood the feeling quite well, being alone in a crowd—he had felt that way his entire life.
