[Arise, Death Knight!]
Something reached into the dark void that he fell into and took hold of him
It closed around whatever was left of Nathan Avenworth, all the loose sinking pieces of him, and it pulled, and he came up out of that black sea, as though it were a drowned man reaching up desperately for a rope.
His body slammed back into him.
Nathan jerked upright with a breathless sound. Cold air hit him and he felt wet leaves underneath his palms. The smell of soil and rotten substances followed. He was gasping so hard it hurt, dragging in breath after breath, and every one of them worked.
Fortunately, every one of the breaths he took filled the lungs that had stopped working hours ago.
He was breathing.
He shouldn’t be breathing, and that annoying screen didn’t go away.
That pale green text stayed hanging in the air in front of him, jagged and blocky, and while he sat there heaving in the dirt, more of it began to write itself.
[Available Skills]
[Blade of Death]
[Grade: Legendary]
[Active]
’Death does not care what shape it takes.’
[Any weapon held in the host’s hand becomes sharp enough to cut what stands in front of it. The blade is not the edge. Death is the edge. A stick will fell a colossal beast.]
[Soul Mark]
[Grade: Outer]
[Passive]
’What takes your life becomes yours.’
[The soul of any being who kills the host is marked. Upon that being’s death, its soul is drawn into the host’s Sea of Souls. Marked souls may be raised to serve, or rendered down into Soul Essence.]
[Soul Essence]
[The core resource of the Death Knight. Soul Essence may be spent to raise stats, to mend the host’s body, or to take for the host’s own use an ability belonging to one of the host’s undead, provided the cost is met.]
[EXP: 0 / 100]
[Complete System tasks to earn EXP. EXP advances the host’s Level. EXP may also be converted directly into Soul Essence at a rate of 100 to 1. The conversion rate worsens as the host’s Level rises. Growth spent is growth surrendered.]
[HP: 100 / 100]
[Soul Essence: 0]
Nathan stared at it.
He read it twice, then a third time, because his brain kept sliding off the words and back to the single impossible fact underneath them.
’I’m alive.’
He looked down at his hands. They were filthy, streaked with black and rusted, the whole front of him stiff with dried blood that had soaked his tunic through and gone tacky.
There was so much of it. It had come out of him. He’d felt it come out of him.
Slowly, he lifted one hand to his throat.
His fingers found a line.
Not a wound, A thin seam of raised skin running clean across the front of his neck, closed, cool, already old.
He pressed it, hard enough that a real cut would have opened and began bleeding again and nothing happened at all.
’It’s closed.’
’It’s completely closed.’
He was still sitting in the leaves with his hand on his own throat when he turned his head and saw her.
His mother was lying six feet from him.
They hadn’t even taken the sack all the way off. It was pulled down to her waist, canvas bunched around her like something discarded, and they had left her on her side in the leaf litter with one arm folded under her and her hair across her face.
They had thrown her here. Both of them, lost deep in the wilderness where the beasts would do the rest and the story would tell itself.
"Mom."
He didn’t remember standing. He was just suddenly there, on his knees beside her, hands hovering over her because he was afraid to touch and more afraid not to.
"Mom."
He got her hair back off her face and saw that her eyes were still open.
They were the same eyes from the hallway, filled with fear the moment she spotted her son and the strange men.
Whatever had been looking for him in them had left hours ago and taken all the warmth with it, and her skin under his fingers was cold in a way that no living thing ever is, cold the way a stone is cold, and Nathan made a sound he had never made before in his life.
"Mom, come on."
He shook her shoulder.
"Come on, Get up...Get up!"
He shook her harder, and her head moved with it in a loose, terrible way, and he stopped immediately because he couldn’t stand it.
His face was wet and tears flowed endlessly down his face. He didn’t even notice when that had started.
"Please."
Liora Avenworth did not get up.
Nathan clenched his jaw, unadulterated fury.
There had only ever been the two of them.
His father was like a stranger, Nathan had nothing of him but a surname and a warning. But his mother he’d had every single day of his life, and now that he was holding the cold weight of her, all of it came at once, in the wrong order, without mercy.
Her hands, always cracked from lye and hot water, doing other people’s washing in the yard behind the house until the skin split.
The way she’d rub them together in winter and pretend it didn’t hurt when he looked.
The way she hummed. She hummed constantly, tunelessly, while she worked, and he had complained about it for sixteen years, and he would have given his own throat again right there just to hear four bars of it.
The bowls. She’d served him first, always, and always given herself less, and told him she’d eaten while she was cooking.
He’d been eleven before he worked out that she was lying.
He’d started leaving half his portion and claiming he was full.
She’d caught on within a week and they’d never spoken about it once, not in five years, the two of them just quietly starving on each other’s behalf at the same small table.
The hallway, he had taken his first steps in that hallway and she told the story so often that he could see it, her walking backward with her arms out and her face lit up like the sun had come indoors.
She had died in that hallway with a dish towel in her hand.
"You wanted this," he said, his voice came apart in the middle. "You wanted this so bad."
She’d been so proud this morning and e’d been too irritated to look at her properly on his way out. He couldn’t remember what she’d said to him at the gate. He tried, and it wasn’t there, and that was going to be with him forever.
He pressed his forehead to her cold shoulder and cried in the leaves like a child.
And then, somewhere in it, a thought surfaced.
Marked souls may be raised to serve.
Nathan’s head came up.
He wiped his face with the back of a filthy hand, smearing dried blood across his cheek, and he looked at the green screen still hanging patiently in the air.
’Bring her back.’
His voice cracked out loud into the empty forest.
"Bring her back. It said you can bring people back. I saw it. Bring her back."
The screen changed.
[Query acknowledged.]
[Sea of Souls: Empty.]
[The subject’s soul has not entered the host’s Sea of Souls. Only souls bearing the host’s Mark may be drawn upon death. This soul was never marked. It has passed beyond the host’s reach.]
[Resurrection is not possible.]
Nathan read it.
He read it again.
’Not marked.’
Because the Mark only took the souls of the people who killed him.
It was a weapon, it was built for enemies. It had absolutely nothing in it for the one person in the world he would have spent every drop of it on.
He’d had his heart torn out once already today, on a hallway floor, six feet from her.
This was worse.
This was being told, very politely, by something that had reached into death itself and hauled him back out by the collar, that it could do the impossible for him in a hundred directions and not the single one he needed.
"Then what good are you," he whispered.
The system did not answer that, he buried her as the light started going.
He used a flat shard of rock and then his hands, digging in the soft black earth under a wide old tree until his fingernails split and his palms were raw and the hole was deep enough that nothing in these woods would find her.
He took the canvas off her completely first. He wasn’t going to put her in the ground in the thing they’d carried her in.
He closed her eyes with two fingers. That was the hardest part, harder than the digging, harder than lifting her.
Then he filled it in, and packed it flat, and sat back on his heels in front of a bare patch of forest floor that had nothing to say about who was under it.
The forest was very quiet.
"I don’t know how to do this," Nathan said.
He looked at the dirt.
"I don’t know how to say a thing over you. You’d have known. You knew all the words for everything."
He swallowed.
"You were the only person I had."
He stayed there a while longer.
And underneath the grief, slow and steady, the other thing was coming up.
Because grief on its own would have flattened him. He should have been curled in the leaves next to that grave until something came out of the dark and ate him.
But every time he closed his eyes he saw a man reaching across a doorway with a lazy little flick of his arm, like he was pulling a curtain closed.
He heard a flat, bored voice explaining that people would rather have a story than a question. He saw a clean room high above a temple, and a man in a thin gold crown deciding two lives were an acceptable price for being certain.
’They killed her for nothing.’
’She wasn’t even the order.’
The hate came back up out of him exactly as it had on the floor of his house, black and total, and this time there was a body around it and a breath in his lungs and it had somewhere to go.
Nathan got to his feet.
His hands were shaking.
"Every one of you," he said quietly, to a forest with nobody in it. "The two who came into my house. Whoever sent them. The man who gave the order."
’I don’t care how long it takes.’
’I don’t care what I have to become.’
’All of you are going to pay for her.’
And the green screen, which had been waiting this entire time, lit up like it had been listening.
[You have experienced your first death.]
[A killer’s soul has been marked.]
[Marked: Assassin — Nolan]
{Ding}
[Mission: Kill your killer. Claim what is yours.]
[Reward: EXP +50 | Soul Essence +10]