No, seriously, what the fuck did that mean? Why was that an option? Was that something that everyone would have the option to do if they came here?

  It couldn’t have been; surely someone would have claimed it before…

  Did the System window just respond to his thoughts? Without him trying to manipulate the menus?

  Jay had no idea what that meant either.

  He couldn’t think of the words to express just how tired of this kind of thing he was getting. Everywhere he went, it seemed like there was something waiting for him. What was the point of trying to be a little irresponsible – to have a little bit of fun on a side adventure – when it just ended up landing him a new set of troubles each time?

  But this had still been his idea and he should see it through, so Jay stepped over to the only book visible in the room and lifted it off its podium. He had just a second to take in the title and cover, On the Backs of the Dead embossed in gold across a dark green leather, before something unusual drew his attention. His little health box, the one he’d been so studiously ignoring as it flashed back and forth from low to high to low again, flashed red.

  And bottomed out.

  Thirty points of health evaporated in a second, the remainder of the stockpile that usually took him through the day vanishing before his eyes. Jay didn’t even have time to brace himself before it hit zero, but he winced afterwards in a delayed response to the impending consequences. Was he just going to die outright? Snuffed out like a candle because he picked up a book?

  Every one of his senses shut off, plunging Jay into a void so deep he couldn’t even tell if he had a body. He started to panic slightly, wishing for the blackness to give way to any stimulus; even if it had to be the meadow again, that would be better than complete nothingness. Even if he was dead again, this was still cruel.

  Then the darkness parted, rippling like a shaken curtain, and a tall woman stepped out from behind the shifting texture. Her skin was swirled with intertwined black and white, both colors glossy like polished stone, and everything in her posture and expression screamed intense focus. She looked just above where Jay’s head was, inclining her head slightly to match, and began to speak.

  “I don’t know how much you’ve learned by now. I don’t know when you’re hearing this. I don’t even know when you are.

  “But there are things you must know, things about our powers and our history.” She raised a hand to show him wisps of nearly liquid green magic pouring off her fingers. It was brighter and more solid than the threads that appeared when he used his own magic. “I would hope that this is not the sole remaining testament to that knowledge. But it may not be much time until that is the case. Listen close and remember.”

  Information poured into his mind like an ocean trying to force itself into a spoon. He was watching the entire world build itself, sliding through nations rising and falling at a rate that fell on the wrong side of unpleasant. Jay couldn’t tell how much time was passing, but he saw cities crumble, be rebuilt, and then crumble again. He could have sworn he saw a brief glimpse of skyscrapers at one point, just before the entire world froze over.

  When the snow melted, there was no sign of any buildings, and time kept advancing.

  Eventually the time-lapse of experiences slowed just long enough for him to take in a ring of runes forming from small – relatively small at least, since they were still floating over an entire planet – lines of green light. The ring spun around the planet, pulsing multicolored light like an aurora across the entire spectrum. Then it sped up again, but this time Jay was looking from a perspective like standing on the planet itself.

  Mountains rose and fell, waves engulfed the land where he stood and then drained away, even the sky went from blue to black to red to gray to blue again. Everything in the world was reshaping itself. He knew, despite his stationary perspective, that even the continents were moving.

  Then time slowed back toward something more normal again, and Jay watched as a procession of people passed him. The first had wisps of green magic streaming off of her, bleeding out of her skin so frequently that they backlit her skeleton. Behind her trooped dozens – no, hundreds – of beings that were clearly undead, all with embers of her green magic in their eyes. Some were skeletons, others zombies, and still others were oversized amalgamates of multiple corpses shambling along in the rear.

  They began building, the speed returning in full force. A small quarry emerged, stone left it, and it was filled back in. A town took shape. People arrived, lived, grew old, died there. A tree was planted at the center that grew to shade every one of the houses beneath it.

  Ships sailed to and from the town, most of the same clipper variety as the Madcap Wanderer, and all crewed by undead. Nobody panicked when they came ashore with crates and barrels. The town’s inhabitants even helped stack the incoming supplies, making a pyramid just where the stone docks hit dirt.

  It was the shape of the docks that confirmed the suspicion creeping up the back of Jay’s neck. This wasn’t just a random town he was watching get built, this was Arbon. He’d been here. It looked so happy, so whole, in this weird abduction-vision that he wondered what happened to it.

  An answer came almost before the thought had faded.

  The sun went dark in the middle of a crew unloading their cargo. Panic filled the air from the living; there hadn’t been a chance for an eclipse today. The undead were unnaturally still, crates falling from slack hands. Their eyes dimmed, flickering as if something dark was passing in front of the glow’s source.

  As one, they turned and began to attack the townspeople. Every blade of grass they stepped on died; every building they brushed against began to rot from the inside; every inch of flesh they came into contact with blackened.

  The inhabitants fled and died in equal measure. The undead pursued, shambling southward after them. Time began to speed up again until the remnants of Arbon dissolved entirely, grass reclaiming the area.

  The vision ended with something similar to an earthquake. The ground pitched downward several feet, a berm of earth rising to separate the docks – which had somehow survived – from the rest of the town. The rest of the peninsula rose as well; Jay could see the edges of the landmass curling up and away from the water.

  Blackness swallowed him again, with the Asanti woman already there. “We built this world on the backs of our creations. We ruled it. We were too useful. Necromancers were the foundation and once we were removed, the rest of the world fell with us.

  “I had not gained a class when the disaster struck. I will soon set out to gather what information I can from the civilized remainders of the outside world. This record will remain unless I succeed in reversing it.” She took a breath and then kept speaking, but Jay couldn’t understand her anymore. It was just a static hiss.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Then the darkness behind her rippled again. This time it wasn’t the rippling of a thick curtain shaking, it was the rippling of a pond that just had a large rock thrown into it. The waves grew, spreading over the rest of the blackness and cascading into a froth of gray bubbles that moved until they were all around Jay.

  They drifted naturally until they were in perfectly even distribution. Then they stopped and turned to face him. He didn’t know how he could tell they were turning, or that they were now uniformly facing him instead of being scattered around, but he still knew it.

  Each of the bubbles opened, proving themselves to be eyes. Eyes that were wholly focused on him. A new voice spoke, silky smooth and all-encompassing and deep enough that Jay could feel it resonating in his chest and mind.

  You are mine. This is inevitable. You will remain here until you admit that fact.

  The eyes popped like the bubbles they had first seemed to be. The golem woman shattered like glass, the slivers ceasing to exist the moment they’d separated from the majority. As promised, the blackness remained.

  A sense of his body returned, made all the worse by the fact that it was the only sensation he had. He couldn’t even tell if he was breathing. For all he knew, even his eyes weren’t moving as he tried to look around. One patch of complete blackness was indistinguishable from another, after all.

  Jay started trying to think of ways to escape the inescapable.

  *

  He had no ideas.

  Jay had tried reaching out to Agensyx to no avail. He couldn’t move to try to interact with whatever the blackness was. He couldn’t even pull up his summary sheet.

  He kept running through those three options. What else was there? Maybe eventually something would change and he’d be able to twitch a finger that would miraculously dispel the entire vision.

  Or, knowing his luck, he’d get a single chance to move and every muscle involved would cramp at the same time to prevent him from doing anything useful.

  He couldn’t see himself in this not-quite-space, despite all logic saying that he should have been able to, so he didn’t notice anything amiss. If someone else had been watching and could see his body, they’d notice the traces of gold that had formed on his hands during his Origin change flaring and fading each time he tried something. They almost perfectly overlaid the darkness that was tracing his hands, something Jay himself hadn’t noticed since they had faded into invisibility for the majority of his time.

  All Jay had was a feeling of casting out a mental fishing line every chance he got, trying to hook into Agensyx’s mind when trying to push a message across their bond. Or pushing against a rigid skintight casing when he was giving movement a shot. Or a feeling very close to trying to remember something that had slipped his mind if he was trying to summon his sheet.

  And then something slipped. The space-that-wasn’t-a-space-but-also-wasn’t-a-vision shuddered with the feel of it. For a second, Jay expected the bubble-eyes to come back, but they didn’t.

  Then, when he ran through the three options again, something sprang to life. It wasn’t quite what he’d been going for, since it wasn’t his summary sheet, but it was something. Something he’d never seen before, etched in gold text on blue light.

  Working by instinct more than knowledge, Jay triggered the effect of the new adaptation. It trickled through him, warming him where the effects passed, but didn’t seem to do much else. He tapped his chin in thought, trying to figure out what exactly it had changed.

  Then he froze. Jay moved a hand to make sure he wasn’t imagining it, and it actually moved. He had moved.

  He could move! He could see his body again too, as a handy bonus. More than just movement, more than just the body, he could feel the Crystalband. He could feel Alister riding above it. He could feel his summary sheet, though he still couldn’t bring it up.

  The familiar bond stayed depressingly out of reach, but that shouldn’t be much of an issue. He’d be back in actual reality quickly now that he had locomotion back. Jay stopped himself from celebrating too much, taking a pair of deep breaths to calm himself down. He could throw a party when he was out.

  He focused on the weight of the Crystalband and spoke a command he hadn’t tried before: “Crowbar.”

  Between the visualization and the command, it worked, and he had a crystalline crowbar. He swung wildly, finding the edges of the space and bashing them with every ounce of strength he could summon. Blue lights flickered into being around him then winked out. System windows tried to form but couldn’t.

  He just kept swinging. He got tired and he flailed the crowbar anyway. His arm got sore and he just passed the tool over to the other hand and kept going. He had no idea how long he went on for, but long before he stopped, concern radiated from Alister.

  Jay ignored it in favor of swinging the crowbar more.

  Cracks began to form and he dug the leveraging end of the crowbar into them, pulling with his entire body’s weight. The cracks widened. The blackness ameliorated into a thin grayness from the brightness now pouring in. When one of the openings grew wide enough, he threw himself in, ignoring the blaze of pain while tapping Gilt’s active effect again. He’d have to trust it to guide him back to his real body.

  Even if it didn’t work, he’d be out of that space-not-space. That was what really mattered. He let himself fall, let the buffeting currents within whatever the blazing whiteness was push him around, and kept hold of the tether that Gilt was to him.

  *

  Jay woke, drained and in pain, in a bed surrounded by rubble and detritus, a flood of System windows blinding him. He didn’t try to sort through them yet; there were dozens and it would wait. Instead, he spoke, trying to clarify what he was seeing now that they were out of his face.

  “Why do you have that golem by the throat?” His voice came out weakly. Jay didn’t know how long he’d been in the vision-space but clearly it had been enough time for his throat to dry out.

  Agensyx whipped around, letting the Asanti slide to the floor. “You are… awake,” he said aloud, sounding like he meant alive instead of awake.

  “Yeah. Barely. But seriously, why?” Jay repeated.

  The snake shifted to talking via their familiar bond. I thought they had trapped you. You opened that book and collapsed. I was trying to get Ovav to fix whatever they’d done.

  “But that’s not her,” Jay pointed out. “Why this random golem?”

  It is her sister. She had already said there was nothing she – or I – could do except watch your body.

  “Don’t threaten people’s families. Why would you even…” Jay trailed off. “God, I’m exhausted. We’ll talk about this when I’m not passing out, but you should at least apologize.”

  He felt some portion of assent from his familiar and let go of the fingernail hold he had on consciousness. The only things that accompanied him into sleep were Agensyx’s last words: I would not let them take you.

  Then Jay was asleep.

  *

  Beneath the Blights of Halea, a series of crystals cracked themselves to slivers. Only one person took notice; a young woman covered in geometric green tattoos watched as the writhing black smoke began to seep out. She stayed kneeling as it slithered up to her and twined itself around her limbs, not even flinching at the unnatural coldness that crept in from the contact.

  Her flesh began to decay, skin and muscles vanishing into the growing black fog, and her only movement was to close her eyes. Chunk by chunk and layer by layer, it devoured her where she knelt, converting what it took to its own material. Then it began to spread, thinning out to fill the room the crystal had been in. It slipped into small pipes in the wall.

  The necropolis began to return to life.

  https://imgur.com/a/SsaiV8Z (It wouldn't keep the whole image.)