Daniel spent little time in his room, only stopping to grab his bag after deciding that he could hit two birds with one stone by seeking out the library to test out writing with the rib. He regretted the decision on his descent of the stairs again, tired legs throbbing in protest as he entered the entrance hall again. But he couldnât risk healing.
Kali was up from her desk, the first time he had seen her that way. She was standing in front of the large bulletin board, pinning strips of paper to the board that contained various details written primarily in Common.
She struggled to find new places to pin missions, though, the board overflowing with paper that went uncollected by the near-vacant headquarters.
As he descended, a four-man group of Crawlers returned, the leader pushing through the double doors with a haggard trail behind him. He didnât pause to give greeting to Kali or Daniel, instead marching straight up to the board and scanning it, top to bottom.
He called back to his group in Proper, groans and sighs echoing amongst them as they discussed, then some agreement was made and the leader plucked a new mission from the board. Kali quickly filled the vacant space.
Daniel had paused on the stairs to watch the exchange, but when the group started giving him wary side-eyes, he scurried down the stairs, into the basement floor that Mayline had said contained the library.
The darkness swelled soon after, its presence broken up only by sporadic glowing runes pinned to the narrow hallway in small metal cages. Daniel stepped off the last steep, shoes brushing against brick, a tightness in his throat brought on by the visual similarities to his first dungeon.
He could imagine the walls rolling, hear the crunch of flesh between them, see himself falling through the floor into a room heâd never escape from.
He staggered back up a few of the stairs, the distant light of day a mental rope he clung to.
It was just a hallway. He could see the end.
It was just a hallway. There was only one direction to go, no maze to get lost in.
Just a hallway, leading to a library. The bricks wouldnât hurt him, the floor wouldnât change, he wouldnât die down here, wouldnât be flattened by a subway train, wouldnât be bound and left to bleed to death.
He leaned back, preparing to sit on the steps and work through the anxiety, but his arm lit up in a familiar squeeze of pain.
âWhy do you think that helps?â he groaned, grabbing at his own skin and trying to rub the growing pressure away. Blood scorched his insides in response, his nervous system screaming a warning for fire that wasnât there.
âFuck, Svel, havenât I hurt enough?â The unseen hand snaked up his arms, smashing through the joint of his shoulder and closing around his throat.
âPlease, just give me a minute to thinkâ¦â A chainsaw ripped through his hand, splitting it in two, cutting through the meat of his forearm and separating it down the middle. Its nonexistent chains shredded his skin, tore him apart inch by inch until the pain could no longer be tolerated and Daniel staggered forward down the hallway.
The pain relented immediately, his body physically fine, but each time a step paused just a second too long it threatened to return, and so he made it down the hall in quick strides and emerged in the library.
âI hate you,â Daniel muttered, glaring down at his hand before taking stock of his surroundings. The scars itched in response.
He sighed and looked about, the comfortable library a welcome remedy to his damaged mental state. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the room and formed rows that were periodically broken up with leather chairs, couches, and desks. The room was lit through the same bright runes that lined the hall, not a torch to be seen in a place so sensitive to fire.
There was a musty smell to the place, a byproduct of its location in the basement, but the softer scent of paper outnumbered the roomâs dank nature. An accenting herbal scent grew stronger as he navigated through the first few rows of books.
As he passed through the rows, various labels jumped out at him, some he could read and some that he couldnât. Common was, fortunately, a common language, but there were many more in the language Daniel was starting to recognize as Proper, and a few others he hadnât seen.
But he wasnât there to read, not yet, so he sought out a comfortable chair and desk to sit at. He set his bag on top of the sturdy wooden furniture, reaching to the center of the table to grab a rune-covered sphere that served as the surfaceâs source of light. He positioned it close to himself then retrieved his notebook and unsheathed the rib.
Svel appeared a few feet away, slung across the arms of a leather chair like a discarded coat. She wasnât looking at him, and he only spared a glance at her, his focus on his notebook.
He took a quick moment to pen the events he hadnât recorded thus far, a special emphasis on capturing names. His greatest resource at that point were his fellow Reborns and the occasional friendly non-Reborn Crawler like Tyn, it seemed important he stayed in their good graces and that began with never forgetting a name.
With that busy work done, he turned to a clean page and grasped the rib, touching its point to the page. It bled on command, the unnatural fang happy to release what remained of the blood taken from the bandit. He flinched back, not wanting to waste a single drop.
Then came the question of what to write. The obvious option to Daniel were the runes. They were written everywhere in Etheril, served various purposes and seemed to correspond to different languages, gods, or perhaps general domains.
He looked to the sphere in front of him, then carefully mimicked a string of the swirling, spiral glyphs that wrapped around the orb. The same runes that lined Maylineâs body and reappeared with prayer.
When he finished the string of letters â or what he understood to be a complete string â Svel was watching him, curious, twisting one of her chains about to occupy idle hands.
The runes did nothing on his page as they were. He frowned at them, looking for errors in his penmanship and finding none. He set the rib down and flipped back through his notebook to his section about Mayline, everything she had done and said that he could remember.
He turned back to the bloody glyphs. âMother of Light, Inso, please grant me the power of your light so I may make it through these shadowed times.â
The glyphs erupted in light, tainted red by the source of ink. They ticked down, a rapid decay of their nature compared to Maylineâs runes. Daniel, wary, extended a hand and pinched at the paper, grasping the string of runes just as Mayline had done with her golden arm. He pried them up and they flowed off the page, dangling like a piece of wet newspaper.
Svel was sitting upright, a toothy grin on her face. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, watching in fascination.
They were rotting fast, a lack of skill between what Daniel had done and what he had seen Mayline do, but he moved quick, slapping the stubby string of runes to the table where they fused with the wood and resumed their ticking timer of light.
Seconds later, they faded entirely, leaving no mark on the desk he sat at.
He jotted down the results of the experiment, then slouched back in his chair. Interesting, sure, but weak, with no obvious way to improve on the method. Maylineâs feverish prayer seemed to indicate religious loyalty was the path to improvement, but he wasnât sure Mayline or her god would like seeing their runes written in blood by the rib of another deity.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
He looked over at Svel, who had resumed her cat-like stretch over the chair. She had been interested, but interest meant he hadnât done what she intended for him to do. There was something else to try today.
Daniel looked down at the page. Her favorite fruit was strawberries. She could read his mind, at least in parts, maybe just feelings, but she must have brought that up because he had been thinking about oranges, his own favorite.
Rib back in hand, he wrote the word âorangeâ on a clean page. Nothing happened. He picked at it like he had the runes, but couldnât pull the word from the page. He considered for a moment, then pleaded with his fake patron. âIrel, goddess of harvest, please grant me your fruit.â
A made-up prayer which yielded no fruit. Perhaps Common or English wasnât good enough â Irel probably had her own language, like Insoâs swirly glyphs. Or, Etheril had no oranges, so Irel had no orange to provide.
A frown settled over him and he flipped back through the pages of the notebook, thumbing through them one at a time. Eventually he passed by a crude sketch of some of the alien flowers he had seen in the demolished village, alongside a doodle of a daisy.
He flipped back to the clean pages and snatched the rib, drawing an orange in as much depth as one could accomplish with a bloody rib. Then, he reached into the drawing, fingers rubbing against the peculiar but familiar surface of an orange just below the page. He struggled to get a grip on it, settling for stabbing at it with his nails until he had enough of the surface to pull the thing off of, or maybe out of, the notebook.
He held an orange, and honest-to-god Earth orange, in his hand. He could see Svelâs wicked smile out of the corner of his eye, and he sheathed the rib just to be free of it while he looked at his blood-made fruit.
It felt wrong to eat it, but worse to not know if it was what it appeared to be. He carved the peel off with a nail and fingers, unraveling the thing entirely and setting aside the stringy rind in a neat pile. By all accounts, it was a plain orange.
He split it in two, separating each slice of the fruit and setting them in a line. No abnormalities, though he wished there had been. There was only one test left to perform.
He ate a slice of the orange, a gush of sweet and sour liquid in his mouth. He chewed, swallowed, and thought, each action slower than the last.
Daniel could make objects, fruit, at least, with Svelâs rib. Her rib, and blood.
The cost was a burden he wasnât thinking about as a perverse and childlike excitement washed over him.
He needed more information, his fingers tapping a rhythm into the desk that his leg matched. Could he use his own blood? Did it have to be human? Did they have to die, as the bandit did? What could he create?
The first and the last were the easiest to test in the present, and that he did.
He ate another slice and tried to draw his cellphone next. It had two differences from the orange that he cared about â it wasnât alive, and he knew it well enough to draw but not well enough to understand its internal structure.
He couldnât create his phone.
Next, he drew a pen, a specific one, a Bik pen, the kind he had idly deconstructed and reconstructed when bored in high school.
He pulled the pen from the page, giving the end a satisfying click and remembering the spring he had accidentally sent flying to a neighboring desk countless times. He unclicked it, excited to have something better to write with, the price of it drifting further in his mind.
There was more consideration in his next attempt â he could call upon the gods, sometimes, as other Reborns could. But what of his own patron? Would there be a benefit to praying to her, as others did to their gods? She hadnât shared her domain, whatever it might be, but she had a few trademark traits.
The chain was easy enough to draw, and when he finished, he set the rib in front of the notebook and spoke, cleanly and bolly, to where he knew she had been. âSveltana, unknown goddess, please grant me your chains.â
Svelâs laughter howled around the room like the wind of a tornado, a deep reverb to it that shook not just the desk, or the library, or even the building, but the entire world, a humorous and brief earthquake. His notebook shuddered, the chain drawing oozing its own blood that stained the pages, and Daniel stuck his hand in, grasping and pulling the soaked metal inside until it was free of the pages altogether.
About ten feet of chains came loose off the page, a far greater reward for the comparative cost of blood, not that he knew what he would do with a pile of chains. He shoved them into his bag, a bizarre possessiveness for them that was mirrored in his feelings for the rib, and the heart retrieved from the 112th dungeon.
He pressed the rib to the page again, but the tip was dry, the bone bled out. Time for the first question.
He flipped his forearm up and lifted the rib above it, lowering it slow so as to prick just a dot of blood free. His blood welled, dripped down his arm, but the rib maintained its ashy white color. His jaw tightened and he pushed harder, deeper, but the rib refused, accepting none of the crimson liquid.
It would have to be someone, or something, elseâs blood then, he thought with a nod. He patted his minor woundâs leakage away with old clothes from his bag. Maybe they didnât have to die, that would be difficult to do, but what was one life to the grandness of such a wonderful gift? He could create near anything! The power was limited only by â what, blood? Such a readily available resource, such a bargain!
Daniel froze in the face of his own thoughts, an uptick in his heart rate. He stared at the rib in his hands, a dry irritation forming in his mouth and throat. He sheathed it and moved to pull the entire chain contraption over his head, but his hands, his own hands, his own flesh and blood, fought him.
He wanted it close to him, and that made him all the more certain he needed it off of him. He ripped the necklace and sheath off, casting them to the far end of the desk, as that was the furthest he could bring himself to send them.
But the motion itself revealed the futility of it, the extension of his forearm drawing his eyes to the ring of gray flesh around his wrist, to the scars on his hand. She was built into him, her influence as native as any other cell in his body.
He closed his eyes, pressed his forehead down into the wood, forced himself to think about the man he had killed. The look in his eyes as he bled out, the sheer surprise on his face as his life leaked out of him like his neck was a broken spout.
He took anotherâs life for a fucking orange. And he wanted to do it again. She made him want to do it again.
Bile and spit and disgust churned inside him, his fingers pushing up his forehead, into his hair, digging into his scalp.
âI refuse, Svel. I wonât kill anything for you. Never again,â he swore, and his consciousness was stolen.
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No time had passed, but Danielâs eyes opened from the briefest of slumber, revealing the library, unchanged except for the addition of Svel sitting cross-legged on the desk. The chained rib lay beside her, unmoved.
âYou have to.â
âI wonât, I refuse. I wonât complete any quest for you, wonât kill any fucking beast. I wonât, youâre a monster.â
âYou donât get it, do you?â she asked, a sharp tilt to her head like a spring snapping back into place. âYou can refuse all you want, but youâll never be rid of this. Youâre Reborn. Youâll live and die and come back, forever a gear in this grand system.â
Before he could answer, she shouldered on, a persistent throbbing in his head with every word she spat. âYou think you can refuse? You think youâre the first to try? This is eternity weâre talking about. Patrons will wait forever, if thatâs what it takes. Theyâll hurt you forever, kill you forever, abandon you forever.â
âYour brain literally canât comprehend it! They will stretch your mind out, subject you to lifetime upon lifetime upon lifetime upon lifetime until you donât even know who you are anymore. They will take everything from you,â she hissed, her voice peaking, breaking into a feral sob that she gargled her words around. âThe tragedy isnât watching your loved ones die, Daniel. Itâs forgetting you ever loved them. Your mind wonât be able to remember your beginning, it wonât ever have an ending â an infinite treadmill of existence walked for only a single purpose, and it wonât be yours.â
Daniel leaned as far back into his chair as he could, a stunned silence Svel pounced on.
âYou think Iâm evil, huh? Think Iâm the worst there can be for you? Think killing a man who would have killed you is your rock bottom? Think using their blood is an atrocity? If Iâm not your patron, youâre at the mercy of whatever god scoops you up next. Pray for a fucking fruit goddess, because more likely youâll be picked up by some shitty lich, your body used even if your mind refuses.
âIs that what you want? To rape and murder and pillage, your only solace that youâll live long enough to forget what youâve done?â
She fell silent, glaring down at him with reddened eyes, her lips curled back to bare her disgust. There was a difference between killing for self defense and becoming what she warned of, he knew that. There was worse than this.
But she was speaking from hard-earned experience, and she described a Rebornâs perspective, not a patronâs. He could only shake his head, a nightmare she promised no worse than the one in the making.
âYouâre already doing it. You put these thoughts in my head, and youâre taking away my choice. Youâre exactly like the worst patrons.â
And for all her shortcomings, all the apparent cracks in her sanity, the loss of her humanity â for all her decay, she still held at least one moral close to her chest. Her own wish.
âYou took my freedom, Svel.â
Her hand lunged forward, claws sinking into his forehead and ripping his face clean off.