Arthur had died, and his mind kept circling back to it.
The last of it was still there: the cold floor, the warmth spreading under him, a house so silent he could hear the refrigerator. Yet here he was. Or "standing" was the wrong word. There was no ground under his feet and no sky above him, and nothing pulled him down. There was only the dark, and it didn’t seem to need air.
And Xetra.
She had told him her name only moments ago. Angel, spirit, he still couldn’t say which. She stood a few paces away, held in the void by the soft light that breathed around her like starlight caught in deep water, and something about her felt familiar in a way he couldn’t explain. The panic in his chest had been draining out of him since she took his hand. What it left behind was closer to awe.
"So..." His voice came out without the tremor he carried through every school day. "What happens now?"
Xetra smiled, and it reached her old, bright eyes. "I have found two suitable hosts for you, Arthur."
She raised one slender hand, and the dark beside her rippled.
The void smoothed itself into a tall pane of woven light. Two pictures took shape inside the frame, and Arthur leaned toward the glow.
"The first is a shepherd." Her voice had the ring of wind chimes. "He fell from a high ridge not long ago. His soul has already gone into the ether. His body is whole, and it will accept yours."
A young man appeared with a sun-beaten face and rough woven clothes. Behind him, green hills ran down to a village so small it looked like a handful of dropped dice. It was quiet. It looked like a life where a person could vanish and nobody would ever need him back.
"A shepherd," Arthur said.
Xetra waved a hand, and the hills thinned into nothing. "And the second."
The new picture was a different world. A man in the prime of his years stood in a coat of velvet and silk, tailored so closely it might have been poured over him. Behind him rose a manor of pale stone and dark timber, four floors of it. Polished carriages stood in the yard. Oak desks sagged under parchment and wax-sealed letters. Iron-bound crates were stacked in the courtyard, each stamped with the same ornate crest.
"A trader," Xetra said. "His soul is leaving as well. Years of drink and indulgence have ruined the body, but I can mend enough of the damage for you to live in it."
"A trader?"
The word caught on something in him. He had spent thousands of hours in the glow of a monitor. He had played armored warriors with broadswords, mages who called down the elements, archers, even kings on high thrones. He had never played a merchant lord who owned trade routes and priced whole cities. It was the one class he hadn’t tried.
A wealthy trader was also a man people had to respect. Nobody walked past a man like that without looking up.
A smile came onto Arthur’s face, and it felt strange there. "A trader."
Xetra tilted her head, and her pale-green hair drifted with it. "Is that your choice?"
"Yes." He didn’t wait. He looked at the manor, the crates, the crest. "I already lived one life with nothing. Nobody saw me." The smile darkened at the edges, with the calm of someone who had nothing left to lose. "Maybe this time I’ll start with everything."
"So be it."
Gold light flared under his feet. A circle drew itself across the dark, ring inside ring, the inner ones turning with a low hum.
Then Xetra stopped, and the rings slowed.
"There is something you must understand, Arthur."
The warmth had gone out of her voice and left something level in its place. He looked up.
"The vessel belonged to another man. His memories will not pass to you. You inherit his body, his possessions, his name in the city, and the consequences of the life he led."
Arthur frowned, and the gold light caught in his eyes. "Consequences."
"You will have to find out how many."
She gestured at the pane. The pictures ran forward: the carriages again, the busy merchant squares, and then the view dropped. The manor fell away and a cellar took its place, low and damp, with water beading on the stone.
"His ledgers list the trade of rare antiques and imported goods."
"That sounds like decent business."
"However."
The picture sharpened on an iron door at the back of the cellar. A wax seal had been pressed across the lock. The stamp was a jagged crown, cracked down the middle, with a weeping eye beneath it.
Arthur stared. He had seen plenty of guild seals in plenty of games, and this wasn’t one. This looked like a warning someone had pressed into wax. "What does it mean?"
"I do not know." Something crossed her flawless face that he could only call doubt. "Parts of his history are hidden in the ether of that world. My sight does not reach them."
"So I’m inheriting a mystery."
"Perhaps." Her smile came back. "Your second life may be more complicated than a tale of wealth."
Arthur laughed, and the sound surprised him. It came out clear, with none of the weight that used to sit in his lungs. "After the life I just had? At least this one won’t be boring."
Xetra closed her hand. The window burst into motes, and the motes went out.
"Before you go, there is one final gift."
The dark between them trembled, and a sphere of energy sparked into being. Emerald and deep blue currents wound through it like a star made of liquid glass.
Arthur stepped back and threw an arm over his eyes. "What is that?"
"Mana. The lifeblood of your new world."
It drifted toward him against any sense of weight. He raised his hands, unsure whether to catch it or block it, and the sphere touched his chest and went straight in.
Energy went off inside him.
His back arched and a gasp tore out of him. It didn’t burn like fire. It was a clean, electric rush, running down his arms and cutting channels through veins he couldn’t see. His fingertips buzzed. His heart pounded in the silence, slow and heavy as a drum.
Then it settled. The current drew together and pooled in a deep, quiet reservoir behind his ribs.
"What did you do?" He was staring at his hands.
"I concentrated a fragment of pure mana, attuned to your soul."
He flexed his fingers and could feel it, a heavy, patient presence just under the skin, like an engine waiting for a spark. He didn’t think about it. He pushed his will down his right arm and into his fist.
The air around his knuckles bent like heat over a road. A shard of crystallized ether floating nearby split with a crack.
"I did that?"
"You may direct it through your body. It will bend to your will."
The gamer in him took over at once. He sent the warm current into his legs and felt them go light and coiled, springs wound tight. He lifted it to his head, and his sight sharpened until he could hear the faint hum of the golden circle at his feet. Last, he let it wrap his heart and run with the blood, and every muscle fiber seemed to tighten and settle into place. His balance corrected itself. He felt like a drawing someone had finally traced over in ink.
He laughed again, with nothing held back. For the first time since the void, and maybe for the first time ever, he felt whole.
"I can actually be strong." He said it to his glowing hands.
"You may become much stronger than that, Arthur."
"How strong?"
Xetra smiled, and the light around her pulsed. "I do not know."
That answer lit him up more than any promise could have. There was no level cap in this place and no preset limit.
She lifted her hands to begin the ritual, and he watched her. The glow around her was hard to look at directly. Hers was the kindest voice he had ever heard. She had listened to him and hadn’t mocked a single choice. She had never once looked at him like something on the floor to be wiped up.
His new chest tightened. He had spent his whole life wanting someone to look at him without contempt, and the first person he met after dying was incapable of it.
He stepped to the edge of the golden circle.
"Xetra."
She lowered her hands. "Yes?"
"Will I ever see you again?"
Something old and sad moved behind her eyes, and then she smiled to cover it. "If fate permits it, our paths will cross once more."
He hesitated. A heavy reluctance dragged at him, and he hated how much it felt like leaving home. He managed a small, awkward smile. "I’d like that."
The rings under his feet began to spin and threw arcs of gold across the dark. Xetra raised her hand.
"Goodbye for now, Arthur."
He kept his eyes on her while the light climbed and swallowed his sight. The void tore along its seams to make room for the world.
In that last splitting second, something broke.
A dark pulse sheared through the clean mana in his chest. It wasn’t the emerald warmth she had given him. It was cold, and it had barbs. A spike of violet shadow beat once, like a dead heart starting up.
Outside the circle, Xetra’s calm cracked. Her eyes went wide and her aura flared outward. For one fraction of a second she felt it: something enormous and asleep and hungry, fastened to the trader’s soul. She had just tied Arthur to it.
"Arthur!"
He couldn’t hear her. The golden circle snapped shut, and the light folded in on itself and took his soul with it.
Xetra stood alone in the dark, staring at the place where the boy had been. Her hand came slowly down to her side.
"What was that?" she whispered.
Far away, under layers of reality, something dark pulsed once more. Then it sank out of reach.
Arthur opened his eyes.
Gravity came back all at once and pressed him into a mattress softer than anything he had ever lain on. Crimson silk curtains surrounded the bed, stirring in a cool night draft. Moonlight came through tall latticed windows and cut pale squares across mahogany floorboards, across an enormous room that smelled of wine and old smoke.
His skull was thick and heavy. It felt like the leftovers of a night he hadn’t lived, a hangover from drinks he never drank.
He groaned and pushed himself up.
He touched his face, his chest, his arms. The underfed frame of his old life was gone. This body was broad and heavy with an adult’s muscle, and under it, quietly humming, was the mana Xetra had given him.
He swung his legs off the bed and stood. His balance was perfect. Strength ran through him like a second pulse. He crossed the room to a tall silver-gilded mirror in the corner and stopped in front of it.
A stranger looked back. Sharp features, dark heavy-lidded eyes, a mouth that settled by itself into a smirk.
Arthur stared at the man in the glass.
He let out a slow breath. He raised a hand and the reflection raised its own. He put the smallest fraction of will into his knuckles, and a faint emerald glow sparked across them.
The stranger’s face broke into a real smile.
"So this is it," Arthur whispered to the empty room. "My second life."
He had money. He had a future. He had a manor, a name the city knew, and a body that did what he told it. He stood there and let himself have it.
The glow on his knuckles flickered, and for a heartbeat it was violet.
Deep in his chest, something beat that was not his heart.