Cormac woke up in a forest.
Wet leaves on his back, cold morning air on his face, and no idea how long he had been lying there.
He sat up slowly and checked his hands first.
Five fingers on each, normal skin, no fur, no armor, no wings folding out of his head.
‘Right,’ he thought.
‘Human again, or at least human looking.
Good.
That’s an excellent start to the day.’
Cormac climbed to his feet, brushed leaves off his coat, and took a slow look at himself the way he imagined a soldier might check his kit before a march.
Now fully accepting his fate, no longer a stranger to his name nor body, embracing his personhood.
Three pathways.
Twilight Giant, Darkness, and Death, and every single one of them currently sitting at Sequence 9, the bottom, the very first step of a beyonder.
‘Which means,’ he thought, ‘I can properly adjust to my power, and I have enough time to build up humanity to stabilize my existence before becoming a complete Great Old One.
Warrior, Sleepless, and Corpse Collector.
A start better than most.’
He flexed his arm, the ordinary human one, and felt the difference underneath the ordinary skin.
Warrior, Sequence 9 of the Twilight Giant pathway, empowered his body the most, the easiest of the three to actually feel.
Superhuman strength, superhuman reflexes, a body that could pick up any weapon or drop into any fighting style and simply know what to do with it, the way a key already knows the shape of the lock it was made for.
Cormac crouched, picked up a fallen branch from the forest floor, and turned it once in his hand.
His grip settled around it on its own, weight balanced, wrist angled exactly the way a trained fighter’s wrist would angle, and all of it felt remembered by a body that had never actually practiced.
‘Genuinely the best pathway for a straight one on one fight, it was only because the God of Combat was such a bum that people kept slandering it,’ he thought.
‘But my GOAT, the Giant King Aurmir proves otherwise’
He rolled his shoulder and felt readiness sitting there, coiled and patient.
Then he swung it with precision and perfect edge alignment, even though there was no edge at all, but the force behind that strike was certainly real, sending a gust of wind that made the greenery around him dance.
Then there was Darkness, quieter, harder to feel with his hands, easier to feel behind his eyes.
Sleepless, Sequence 9 of the Darkness pathway, gave him high spirituality and a mind that noticed things an ordinary mind would let slide straight past, the texture of bark, the exact angle sunlight fell through leaves, the small shift in air pressure before a breeze actually arrived.
He could manage small rituals with it too, nothing close to what a proper Seer could do, but enough to be useful, enough to bend a small rule of reality if he was patient and careful about it.
‘And I only need three or four hours of sleep a night to run at full power,’ he thought, and felt a very specific, very old grief rise up in him.
‘That would’ve been so useful during finals week.
I would have more time to waste wishing to have even more time.
I would have been unstoppable.’
Then there was the Death pathway, which gave a more general enhancement.
Corpse Collector, Sequence 9 as well, pushed both his physical and spiritual ability a little further, a bit more strength, a bit more spirituality, but it also came with its own particular flavor.
A faint gloom clung to him now like the smell of a corpse that cannot decompose, like a cold wind that a passing stranger might feel before they could name why, and a mild discomfort settled over his skin whenever direct sunlight landed on it, nothing that burned, just an itch that wanted him somewhere shadier.
Cormac glanced up through the canopy at the pale early light and felt that exact itch start along the back of his neck, small and patient, like a held breath he hadn’t been asked to hold.
‘Fair trade, though,’ he thought, stepping deeper into the shade of a nearby tree without quite meaning to.
‘Undead creatures will leave me alone because of this.
Small price to pay for not getting chewed on by something that used to be a person.’
The best part of being a Corpse Collector, he decided, was what it did to his spirit vision.
Being a Sleepless alone gave him something vague, a blur of light in the rough shape of a soul, shapes he could sense more than actually see, for better or worse.
It sharpened his Spirit Vision considerably, let him pick out individual pieces of a soul instead of one smudged whole, let him see spiritual creatures with real clarity instead of guessing at shadows in the corner of his eye.
‘Balance,’ he thought, testing the word the way he tested everything else this morning.
‘That’s the best word for what I have.
Not just raw power, balance.
Three pathways, each one covering a gap the others leave open.’
That was when Cormac noticed the problem.
His spirituality was not sitting quietly where it belonged.
It was leaking, slow and steady, like water finding a crack in a dam it had not noticed until just now, and if he did not do something about it soon he suspected the leak would turn into considerably more than a leak.
‘Cogitation, I should try it.’
He threw away the branch and sat on a broken log.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
He walked through the steps the way the novel had described them, slow and deliberate, quieting his mind first, letting his thoughts settle the way sediment settles at the bottom of still water, layer by layer, until the surface above it finally went calm, recalling the words.
‘First, imagine a common item of this world’
He thought about his memories of this life, the clothes, the food, the hustle and bustle of the city.
‘Now, something that doesn’t exist’
He tried a few abstract shapes first, a triangle that was also somehow a circle, an idea with no name attached to it, and none of it felt specific enough to actually hold onto.
‘Too vague,’ he thought.
‘I need something concrete.
Something this world genuinely does not have, not a scrap of it, anywhere.’
And then it came to him, obvious once he actually thought of it, almost insultingly simple.
The 21st century.
His century, the one this world had never lived through and never would, the one that had rejected him and sent him tumbling backwards into someone else’s story.
He gathered it all up in his mind, every scrap of it he could still remember, phones, motorways, and every small ordinary thing about a life that no longer existed anywhere at all, and folded it down slowly into one single dense point of meaning.
A vortex, spinning quietly behind his closed eyes, patient and complete, and he named it exactly what it was.
The 21st century.
He opened his eyes.
The forest exploded into color.
Not literally, nothing was on fire or anything, but every living thing around him suddenly carried varying colored smoke and glowing outlines, a dance of soft light moving with some rhythm he could almost hear if he leaned in close enough.
Trees breathed faint light in slow, steady pulses, in and out, out and in, patient as sleep.
A flying bird somewhere above him left a trailing smear of red every time it moved its wings, brief and bright and gone again before he could properly follow it.
Even the moss on the log under him held a dim, patient shimmer, quiet, old, and strangely, achingly beautiful.
‘Oh,’ he thought, and felt something in his chest go very still and very warm at the same time.
‘I understand now.
I understand completely why people go mad chasing this.
Madness might actually be a fair price for a view like this.’
Cormac let himself have exactly one more second of that thought before he caught it by the collar and dragged it firmly back.
‘No.
Absolutely not.
I am not becoming a cautionary tale on my first morning as a beyonder.
Focus.’
He closed his eyes again, properly this time, and walked the ending of the technique the same careful way he had walked the beginning, guiding his spirituality back down into something calm and contained instead of letting it spill wherever it pleased.
For the trigger, the small physical action meant to flip the switch on and off without needing to fall into a full trance every single time, he settled on something simple.
He tapped his thumb against his middle finger, twice, light and quick, and filed the motion away as his own.
‘There,’ he thought.
‘Spirit vision, on and off, whenever I feel like it.
I should still train it but my spiritual perception is better in everyday life, so I won’t use it much unless I actually need the more detailed version.’
He opened his eyes one final time, slower now, and the forest looked ordinary again, green and brown and quiet, the glowing outlines tucked safely away behind his own eyes until he called for them again.
He felt steadier than he had all morning.
A little more human too, oddly enough, which struck him as a strange thing to feel relief about after an abrupt and thoroughly unplanned ascension into a Great Old One.
‘Alright,’ he thought, standing and stretching until his bones gave a satisfying pop.
‘Adjusting complete.
Three pathways, three starting sequences, Warrior, Sleepless, and Corpse Collector.
Mildly allergic to sunshine, capable of seeing people’s feelings in high definition.’
Cormac looked around at the quiet trees, the empty forest path, the general lack of any suitcase, any Storm, any Vertin.
‘Now,’ he thought, rolling his shoulders one more time, feeling the Warrior level strength settle comfortably under his skin, ‘let’s see what all of this can actually do.’