Magical After: Dark World Book 1 Part 1

by David Gunter

  ❧

  The dream faded away, and as John moved farther away from the dream, the living world got closer, and he became more aware. But something was very wrong. As he was coming to consciousness, he felt that he was burning up. He was cold, freezing cold, but he was also burning up inside. He touched his chest and felt it was super hot, and he felt like something was burning a hole into his very being, but his extremities were frozen numb. He heard himself say many incoherent things like. “Save Hellen and save the world. Ride a dragon and save the ‘Narrator.’ No, wait! There’s a demon trapped in a cave. The light has a demon trapped. Have to save somebody. Have to save everybody.” He continued to repeat combinations of this in his delirium, to the point where nothing made sense after a while.

  Somewhere in the middle of all the bouts with his ailment John came to his senses briefly, and he heard the voice of an older man say, “Hold on, soldier of light, don’t give up fighting just yet.”

  Then a younger voice. The voice of a young woman said, “Did he say save the ‘Narrator.’ That is just a myth, right?”

  The older man responded. “Don’t try to interpret the words of a man in his condition. The demon’s blood will use its vessel to confuse the faithful. Don’t forget your teachings.”

  “Yes, Master.” the young woman answered.

  John’s awareness faltered, and then he passed out once more.

  After some time, something started bothering him, and this discomfort was enough to pull him away from his slumber. As the discomfort, he was feeling started to clarify and consciousness returned, he started feeling like his arms were burning.

  Suddenly he sat up in his bed. No, it wasn’t a bed. It was a simple cot and, if not for his feet touching the ground, that action would have spun him, head over heels, onto what was left of his face but instead, it simply left him upright, but not in a position to comprehend it. Beyond any disorientation or confusion about his surroundings, the one thing he knew for sure was that his right arm had a terrible burning itch. He quickly rolled up his right arm sleeve and looked in amazement as he saw a tattoo he was sure hadn’t been there before. Just as suddenly, he felt his left arm burning and, rolling up his left arm sleeve, saw a similar tattoo there. Someone had given him a recent paint job.

  “What the heeecckkk! Someone better explain this!” he said aloud and then realized he was alone in the room. He looked around and spotted the doorway leading to his room and then listened to the sounds coming from the other side of the door. There was clanging and banging like some kind of machine was hard at work on the other side. Apart from the clanging coming from outside, the complete silence made him think that he was in a ship, but he felt none of the normal swaying that would normally accompany it. Then he, once more, remembered his arms and his anger at having been tattooed in his sleep, and he decided he would have to deal with this problem right away.

  He tried to stand and then fell back into the cot, seemingly drained of all his stamina. He looked at his stats and saw many changes.

  Character Sheet

  Name: John Taney Level: 2

  HP: 20/31Stamina: 20/23

  MP: 20/23Soul: 15/23

  Race: Human

  Alignment: Light Aligned

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  Status : Toughened by pain

  You have suffered a great amount of pain and have survived. Your base stats get a 5% bonus as a permanent bonus.

  +5% All Stats

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  Buff: Demon Blooded

  Your blood and that of a demon are intermingled within you. You are conflicted with motives and desires that are not your own. The constant struggle to remain you adds a buff to your Soul.

  + 10% Soul

  + 50% HP

  + 10% Stamina

  + 10% Mana

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  Debuff: Demon Blooded

  You are not always you. Your decisions are altered and changed.

  Unpredictable effect

  After barely landing back in the cot, he decided to sit for a little while longer and think about what had happened and what he last remembered. He remembered walking through the woods. He remembered finding some armor and the miserable time that followed as he tried to handle the heavy equipment. This made him look around the room in search of the items, and then he saw, to his relief, that they were piled up in one corner of the room. He then remembered his trek through the woods and finally seeing the cave of the bear. But something had happened after that, and then he was here in a room with two tattoos on his arms and feeling hungry.

  His body quickly told him he was hungry, and his arms again reminded him that they were feeling bad. He rolled up his sleeves again and decided to examine these tattoos more closely. Maybe he could learn something about the people that had given them to him before it became time to confront them and get some answers. He held out his arms in front of him and, with his inner forearms facing him, compared the tattoos side-by-side. He went back and forth, looking at both of the designs, and started to see some differences. First, the designs were somewhat religious in nature, though he couldn’t tell which religion it could possibly be. He could see many drawings of crosses and shields. There were also depictions of battlefields and the bodies of slain soldiers on one arm, but on the other arm, those same soldiers were marching to meet some foe. The drawings seemed to tell a story but also contained a sense of promise and of victory. How his arms burned, however, did not seem like an effect caused by the tattoos. He wasn’t a stranger to a good inking, and yet this was far more burn than it should’ve been. Continuing to look at the two tattoos side-by-side and silently examining the work, he couldn’t help feel a pulsing sensation to the burn.

  The reason for the two tattoos was not exactly clear, but he couldn’t deny that it was doing something to him physically and that it could, in fact, be beneficial. In that moment of careful introspection, John heard a clang coming from the place outside that was different and sounded out of sync with the other clangs and bangs. Someone was coming, and he thought that he could be better prepared if he were standing near the door. He quickly got off the cot and bounded for the door, and as he neared the door, he threw himself towards the right side of the door and prepared himself for a direct assault. He waited for the door to open and prepared to face his capturers, but nothing happened. He waited some more, and still, nothing happened.

  John got a bit impatient, and he moved his head over the door crack to see if he could hear any sounds of approaching footsteps. All he heard was a slight scuffle of feet outside, and then the door flew open, just hitting him in the nose as he failed to fully clear the door.

  “Oh shhh, damn it!” John exclaimed as he held his nose and turned away from the door. But his visitor wasted no time attacking his right knee with a right low kick and then buried a right elbow into the back of his head. Then there was that, now familiar, blackness.

  CHAPTER IX

  A Coin for a Boat Ride

  Their eyes met, and Tala knew joy and fear once more. And then she started to dissolve.

  “Tommy, I’m disappearing, but I’m not dead. I’m vanishing, but I’m not gone. Find the boatman, and he’ll bring you to me. Finding the coin is the trick.”

  Tala was looking at her Tommy as if seeing him for the first time. She couldn’t stop feeling at seeing him again. It had been so long, and she had appeared in this strange place thinking it to be some kind of hell, full of the dead as it had been. Yet here he was and clearly alive. She had accepted that in order to remain corporeal, she would deny her emotions, and this had been acceptable, but she had had no reason to feel before. She had only existed and had simply participated in the practices and rituals of the city but waking and seeing Tommy was too much. She felt joy, fear, sadness, longing, and panic.

  She saw the dread in Tommy’s eyes as h
er body started vanishing into dust and as she was transformed quickly into a spirit. Others of the dead community could see her, but to the living, the spirit form was invisible. As there was less and less of her to see, she saw the panic in her Tommy as well. He was losing her all over again.

  “Find the boatman and give him the coin,” she said once more, and then she was gone.

  Tommy tried to reach for her in those last moments, and she watched in desperation from the other side as he stood, with dust in his hands, looking all around in bewilderment.

  “Was that really you, Tala?” Tommy said in a whisper that only she could hear, and she could tell that he was fighting his disbelief with nothing but these strange and meaningless words she had left him with. She watched as he stumbled backward a bit as if the place was a dreadful horror he needed to run from and as he desperately wiped away the dust in his hands on his raged and torn clothing.

  Tala was then a bit taken aback as he turned to sprint towards the center of the city and saw that he had acquired wings. As she followed him in the secret waters of the spirit realm, she then saw that it was actually wings that had acquired him. She had known one other person who had had this problem, the old voodoo healer, but she couldn’t remember her name.

  Tala knew something was wrong. She had spent time with the healer, and they had talked and exchanged stories over hot tea. But she saw less and less of her in her mind. Was she losing her memories in this form? Tala opened her character sheet, something she had stopped doing for some time as it had never changed, and received a surprise.

  Character Sheet

  Name: Tala Limbaco Level: 1

  HP: 15/15 Stamina: 15/15

  MP: 15/15Soul: 15/15

  Race: Human Undead / Spirit

  Alignment: Dark Aligned

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  Effect: Spirited Away

  Away with the flesh away with the sorrow. You will live on in a blissful state of oblivion. Only the coin of the living can bring you back. A coin for a coin the boatman says. On the island of the spirits you can remember the living. Go there to know yourself.

  She wanted to follow her Tommy and help him in any way she could, and though he couldn’t see her, she would find ways to help him deal with the denizens of this land. Or at least she would if only she could hold on to herself. But how long would she have before she wouldn’t even care about a man called Tommy that had saved her from the meaningless short life she had been destined for.

  It was this life full of meaning he had gifted her when he hadn’t needed to that was worth fighting for. She had defined herself through caring for him. It was true that some days helping him do things and caring for his aches and pains was challenging, but then there was also his love and his attentiveness that had saved her.

  The war in her part of the world had been grotesque, and she and those of her gender had born the worst of it. Without her ‘Tommy boy’ to care for, she probably would’ve stayed with the other orphaned and disgraced women and, like them, remained something she despised. A person clinging to any kindness no matter how small or imagined and willing to do anything for it—a woman she would not have loved or even recognized.

  She remembered Tommy crawling on the floor with his legs destroyed and outstretched hands pleading for any rescue she might give. She looked into his eyes and saw a good man and not like the others. He had given a younger girl a candy bar the day before and had taken nothing for it. He hadn’t done the things the others had, and she could see then that he had been ashamed of so many things. Later in the evening, she had stared at him in misplaced fear but also in surprise as he had come into the elderly woman’s hut, where she and other used and battered girls were huddled together receiving care, carrying four buckets of water from the village stream. He had looked at them briefly before heading out of the hut, but before stepping out, he had looked down at the floor and said something in another language. “I’m sorry.” She didn’t know what it had meant until much later, but she knew it was a kindness and one neither she nor the other girls had earned from him.

  So then, laying there near the bodies of his comrades looking up at her with those same sad eyes full of regret, she saw something else. She saw hope, a chance, and a new beginning. She couldn’t let him go from her world. She bandaged him from the cloth ripped from the other men’s bloodied clothing, and with all her strength, she had lifted him and carried him out of the village and past the tree line to the village stream. There, beside the stream, she cleaned his wounds and gave him water to drink until the following day. She remembered too that she had offered herself to him, hoping to relieve some of his pain during the night, but he had refused it and instead asked to hold her through the night instead.

  She wasn’t sure how he had survived the night, with so much pain, but when she spotted the helicopter coming over the hills towards the town, she had lifted his weak body once more and carried him to the clearing where she’d hoped to be spotted. She had guarded his body as if it was a prize or cherished possession when others who had arrived in the helicopter had tried to separate her from him, but in spite of his fever and delirium, he had spoken for her. He had saved her in return.

  These memories would soon be gone. She wouldn’t let this happen. He would be nothing to her if this happened. So she looked around through the eyes of a spirit and saw a glow in the distance towards an island off the coast of the City of the Dead. She crossed the distance rapidly as if pulled through a tear in reality as if stretched through a tube, and then she was standing before the boatman who was clearly one of the ‘Brotherhood’. The Shrouded, as they were also called, were an odd group of skeletal men and women who never showed their bony faces. They hung around in places where the other Undead, those like her, would often go for directions or answers. These places were gates to the city, doorways to important city buildings, and some street corners. These odd fellows always seemed to know what was happening and what anyone was doing but never seemed to care for one outcome or another. To say that they were impartial wasn’t exactly true, but rather, it seemed to her that they were playing at a much higher game.

  She wasn’t someone to pass up an opportunity and standing there about to embark on some unknown voyage; she dared to ask. “Hi there Mr. Boatman. I take it you’re giving me a ride to that other side? Where are we exactly? What is the meaning of a coin? And how do I get one of those lovely shrouds?”

  The boatman, who had placed his hands gently on her shoulders to guide her into the boat, turned to look at her as he led her to the boat. Then to her surprise, he spoke with a deep and resounding voice that felt warm and reassuring.

  “My name is Archavious, but my friends call me Archy. Yes, it would amuse you to know that we ‘Shrouded,’ as you call us, do have friends and, before you ask, we do have enemies. Where we are, you ask? Well, we are deep under the island called the ‘Withered Face’. This cavern is something of a mystery to us as well but what we know so far is that it can take us to many places depending on the direction we go. We’ve left these ropes you see on the surface of the water, so we don’t lose our way to the place we need to go, but it could be said that these waters take one to an infinite number of places. It all depends on the soul traveling on the boat. As for the coin, well, when the soul crosses the threshold beyond, it leaves behind a coin. These coins are a very valuable currency, and they are traded in the spirit world, among the Shrouded and others as a type of traded commodity. The more powerful your collection of coins is, the more prestigious we are considered, and the higher is the position and responsibility we are given. Beyond this, the details don’t concern you, but one thing you can be sure of is that we don’t lose coins, and your soul coin will be in safe hands. As far as the shroud is concerned, that is a bit more complicated. There are many things that have to happen to get one of these but what I can tell you is that even though it may appear that we Shrouded each
carries his or her own shroud, the truth is that these shrouds are all one and the same and were all collected from the same place and time. In order to be one of the shrouded, you have to have a shroud, and no one can give you a shroud as you instead have to take it from the same corpse.”

  To say that her mind was swimming with ideas and questions was putting things lightly.

  “You said, but then, so what if…”; she started to ask one question then stopped, started again, and then stopped. She didn’t know where to begin.

  “It would probably be best if you thought about it a while, Tala,” the shrouded said.

  The truth was that Tala hadn’t expected an answer and now, having received much more than she had expected, wasn’t sure what to do with all the knowledge. She decided that Archavious was right. She would have to think about this information more, but she did have one thing that made no sense to her, and if Archavious could answer it, she would have to try.

  “So Archy, what I really would like to know is how it is that I just saw my Tommy a few moments ago, but he looked fully alive, and he had that horrible demon creature on his back, and here I am dead but more dead now since I’m a spirit and... what is this world anyway?” She should’ve been able to form her thoughts into a coherent line of questioning, but she couldn’t explain anything that had happened to her so far, and she was confused by having lived with so many false assumptions.

  Archy chuckled a bit and then began, “Well, that sure sounded like a bunch of questions all rolled up into an ugly mess, but I understand your predicament. It shouldn’t surprise you to know that I’m pretty used to dealing with people in your predicament. That said, this is where I get to be most mysterious as I know all the answers to the questions you have and yet can only answer a few to your satisfaction before you receive greater intelligence to receive them. So let me start by saying this. This place and this world are not made of the things you see, and both you and Tommy are neither alive nor dead in the way you have been taught. This place is not a place for the dead, but a place for the living, and we are here for their amusement.” Then he paused and seemed to be scratching his head as if wondering how to proceed.