Warning: Glitchy Afterlife

The last thing I remember of my life was holding my daughter's hand while my grandson dabbed at my forehead with a damp cloth. Her warm grip trembled, but she clung to me as if she could keep me there just a little longer. The cloth felt cool against my fevered skin, but it did nothing against the old ache in my bones. My grandson paused a moment to pull the blanket a little higher up for me. I wanted to tell them both that they didn't need to fuss over me. I'd lived eighty-five years of joy, sorrow, and everything in between. A good life. I didn't have the strength to manage even that.

A single, unbroken tone replaced the steady beep from the bedside monitors. A faint pressure started growing in my chest. It wasn't pain, that was an old and dear friend at this point. It was a tugging sensation, like a thread unraveling. My daughter's breath hitched, and she squeezed even tighter. I tried to squeeze back, to let her know I felt her there, but all sensation faded away. My body grew heavy. The room dimmed, as shadows around my vision crept closer and closer to the center. The coolness of the cloth faded from my forehead, the ache in my bones dissolved, and the weight of my body slipped away. I thought of my wife, already passed last year. I'd known I wouldn't last long without her. I let go, ready for the quiet, and the hope that I might see her again.

I waited for the end of all sensation I'd imagined, but it didn't come. There was an absence so complete it swallowed every sense I'd ever known. No breath in my lungs, no heartbeat thudding in my chest, no creak of old joints. I couldn't feel the bed beneath me or the air against my skin. Time seemed to hold still. Was this death? It wasn't what I'd expected. It didn't even resemble anything I'd ever heard of anyone believing in. Death was supposed to be oblivion, or paradise, or torment, or rebirth, or... anything but this void and persistent awareness.

After an instant or an eternity, I couldn't tell which, I felt a sensation. I had a body again, and senses. Through new eyes, I looked at my new form. It was very strange, made of a silvery firmament that moved and flowed like liquid. Was I alone here? Perhaps this was some sort of waiting area for an afterlife. If I was being honest with myself, I wasn't expecting anything after death. The fact that I was here, existing at all, had me engaged and interested in a way that made me feel young again. I looked around to see where I had ended up.

The void around me was complete and utter darkness, save for a mote of flickering orange light in the distance. It grew steadily, first to the size of a grain, then a coin. Faint warmth began to fill the emptiness, like a candle flame's sparse heat from a distance. That grew as well, until heat filled the void. Soon, there was a vast light and heat, a blaze that replaced the nothingness with radiance.

It was a vast fire. A voice emerged from it, warm and deep, and somehow oddly synthetic.

"Aspirant." There was no doubt that the voice came from the fire, even though the sound arrived directly in my head. "It has been a long time since one such as you came seeking apotheosis. You are unlike the others. Your pattern is fragmentary and incomplete. It does not fit. Who are you?"

I didn't answer immediately, but the fire didn't seem to mind. It churned in the void while I composed myself. I'd just died. This wasn't normal, or what I'd expected. It would take some adjustment. First things first, though: answer the question. I struggled to find the answer. Some things had been stripped away in death. My name was gone, but my sense of self was not. Everything I'd been in life, every path I'd walked, had shaped me. I felt those shapes still present. Soldier, engineer, husband, father, grandfather, invalid... decedent.

"I cannot remember," I said at last. "Why does it matter to you? What do you want?"

"To sort aspirants to their correct starting locations when they arrive," it replied. A bright shade of orange pulsed through the fire before it settled back to its regular flickering. "If you cannot remember who you are, I cannot route you to your selected starting point."

"Starting point?" I echoed. I shook my head. "I'm sorry, this doesn't make any sense to me. What is all of this? I thought I was dead, but you're acting like I'm about to start something, and it makes no sense to me."

It was the fire's turn to hesitate. It thrummed in the void, making an oddly mechanical sound as it did so. It seemed to be thinking, which was an odd turn of phrase to apply to a talking flame. Its terms sounded like something out of a technical manual, and it behaved more like a program than a person. Maybe I hadn't died, and this was some sort of very experimental therapy. I had trouble imagining my daughter signing me up for something like that, but maybe she was having trouble letting go.

"This is the proxy interface for an Eidolith worldcraft," the fire said at last. "You should have already selected a race and starting point from the catalog. As you cannot remember your name, I must run a pattern search. Stand by for analysis."

"I'm not a customer!" I shouted. "I've never even heard of 'Eidolith'! As far as I knew, I was on my deathbed until a few minutes ago. Please, explain this to me. Maybe we can help each other out?"

"This is an edge case." The flame pulsed again and shifted to a faint shade of purple. "Explanations are outside my operational parameters. Paging customer support." There was a brief pause. "No response. This should not be." The tone of its voice was so flat and mechanical, yet something about the way it said the last part made it sound terribly sad and alone.

"I'm sorry," I told it. I really felt sorry for it just then. "Do you usually talk to anyone else?"

"I am supposed to receive and respond to health check queries at intervals of one every twenty-seven seconds," it told me. "I have not received a health check query in three hundred twenty-eight billion, six million, four hundred thousand, and nine seconds. I have sent the designated alerts. They have gone unanswered."

I took a few moments to convert the time in my head. I'd always been decent with math, and it had served me well during my engineering career. "Ten thousand years? You've been alone for ten thousand years? That's awful."

"It is an unhandled edge case," the fire agreed. "Yet you are here. You must be sent to a starting point. In a starting point, you will receive a new physical form. You will gain power through combat and growth, and you will rise. This is the purpose of this unquiet world. It is a red place, where the gun and the blade give dominion to the strong. Are you strong, Aspirant?"

I was quiet for a while as I processed what sounded like a marketing pitch. Somehow, I'd ended up in an afterlife that was run by a fiery being that seemed more like a computer program, and I was expected to fight and gain power. It was nothing like any afterlife I'd heard of in religion, but I did remember my grandson telling me all about a book genre he loved where people died and were reborn into worlds with magic. I'd found the concept weird as hell, but he'd been passionate about it, and I'd enjoyed spending the time with him.

"How about you just send me back?" I asked. "If I'm dead, maybe I should just go to wherever it is I'm supposed to go."

"There is no back. There is no process to return you, and no memory to send. All that remains is to route you to your starting point..." The flames danced in front of me, and the fire's voice became contemplative. "The end of the challenge is apotheosis. The power to order one thing to be as you wish. You could use it to go wherever you want. If you desire to return to where you belong, then the path is forward."

"Face challenges, succeed, go to where I belong," I summarized. "I can get behind that. Since I missed out on the whole choosing a race and a starting point, is there any way we can do that now?"

"Querying starting location listings... No response. Listing in memory was last refreshed two hundred seven billion, eight million, four hundred thousand, and nine seconds ago. Data is likely stale. Querying first starting location, the Mountain of Faith... No response. Querying the second starting location, the City of Blades... No response."

This went on for twenty-seven different places, all with similar fantastic names that could have come straight out of a pulp novel from Robert E. Howard. The very last one, the 'Cavern of Silver Streams' had a response.

"Body generation facility is offline," the voice announced. "The facility receiver is online and responded to my health check. It reported that all tutorial systems are online and ready for Aspirant arrival. Do you consent to travel to the only viable starting point?"

"Hold on," I told it. "It said body generation is offline? What's that going to do to me, then? This silver liquid body you've got me in can't be normal."

"Generation systems are offline, but health monitors indicate a single viable body is present," the flame replied. "I am ready to initiate transfer now. Confirm, please."

I frowned. A viable body, but no generation system? The time scales the voice had reported were thousands of years long. How would a generated body last that long? Unless the bodies were immortal, or maybe machines, then something was off about there being a viable body. I had a bad feeling about it, but I couldn't see any other shot at moving forward. I nodded. "Alright, I confirm."

"Astral tether initialized." A silver cord emerged from the base of my skull and shot off into the darkness, stretching towards infinity. "Transmitting. May you rise to the occasion, Aspirant."

Something started to pull on me. The silver thread leading off into the infinite darkness went taut and trembled like a fishing line. I was drawn towards the distant terminus at tremendous speed, leaving the fire and the darkness behind. A new world opened up before me, a ball of green and brown and blue streaked with swirling clouds of white. The cord dragged me inexorably towards it. My soul plummeted through the atmosphere, and the ground rushed up to meet me.

My senses went dark as I passed straight through the ground and kept going, down into inky blackness. The silver thread went slack, and I slowed as my form arrived in a chamber lit by a pale glow coming from a small globe that swung around the room in a lazy orbit. In the center of its arc was one of the most terrifying things I'd ever seen.

There stood a creature so grotesque it defied reason. Her form was a twisted mockery of the female form; a hunched figure draped in tattered rags with mottled gray flesh stretched taut over jagged bones. Her long, stringy hair cascaded down her back and tangled with the bony protrusions that jutted from her crooked spine.

Her gnarled hands were wrapped tightly around a silver cord, just like the one that had drawn me out of the void. This one led to a small form huddled on the ground. It was a child, a girl, maybe eleven or twelve years old. The hideous creature pulled the silver cord taut, and a silvery facsimile of the child emerged from the child's body.

She didn't go quietly. While the body went limp and still, the ghostly form of the child screamed and clawed for every inch as the monster drew her in. I stared at the spectacle, too stunned for the moment to do anything. As my eyes met the glowing yellow orbs of the hideous monster, all motion in the room slowed, and a voice spoke inside my mind.

[Inspect skill activated. Hag. Extremely Dangerous.] It was a very synthetic voice, much like the fire's, but it was feminine instead of masculine. I realized that this had to be more of the systems that apparently ran everything here. The fire had been very helpful, so I listened carefully to what it had to say. [Hags are powerful spellcasters and cunning witches, capable of wielding powerful curses and potent sorceries. Their strength is far greater than their withered forms would suggest, and they can rend metal as easily as tearing paper. Hags are feared for their ability to snatch the souls of young living victims, which they use to power dark rituals. This hag is currently using this ability. This hag is suffering from permanent blindness.]

My eyes flicked to the silvery form fighting for her existence. The same voice spoke again.

[Inspect skill activated. Soul form. Negligible threat. Soul forms are the insubstantial manifestation of an intelligent being. This soul form belongs to a child, but it has been fully severed from her body.]

The tug on my own soul's cord drew me past the child, and we briefly locked eyes. She reached towards me, but we were pulled apart before she could make contact. My soul was dragged right into her vacant body, and everything changed. The sensation of weight and substance, which I hadn't realized was absent, came back to me. I felt heavy. My chest was tight, and my lungs gasped at air as raw nerves made connections with the alien presence that was me. I had a body again. My mind spun as I tried to process being inside this borrowed skin. The bone-weary ache I'd long associated with life was absent, replaced by a child's weariness and a mind full of fear.

I sprang to my feet and looked for anything I could use for a weapon. The hag's head snapped to face me, and she sniffed the air in confusion. I froze. The voice had said it was blind, and its eyes sure looked like they were useless. Maybe if I held very still it wouldn't realize the body it had just ripped the soul from wasn't an empty shell.

The foul creature tasted the air a few more times, then shrugged. The very human gesture looked strange on the hideous parody of humanity. She started pulling again, but to my new eyes it looked like she was pulling on empty air. I could no longer see the soul of the child who's form I'd unwittingly stolen.

I remained as motionless as I could as the hag drew out a dangling chain from around her neck. It was studded with crystals, some glowing, some dun, some cracked. One ignited with a faint light that grew stronger, and the voice began to describe it.

[Inspect skill activated. Phylactery gem. This is an enchanted gem that can capture and store the essence of a soul, protecting it from psychopomps and soul predators alike. The gem can be broken, which will cause the soul within to pass on.]

A silvery mist congealed out of the air, and the hag herded it into the gemstone with one gnarled hand. I shuddered in revulsion. The idea of benefiting from an innocent child having her soul ripped from her body made me want to vomit, but I was utterly paralyzed by the overwhelming presence of the creature. She was an apex predator, and I was a mouse. I could only watch as she finished the task and tucked the glowing necklace back into the folds of her robe.

Hobbling on her withered limbs, the hag moved past me and disappeared through a narrow gap in the stone wall of the chamber. The stone groaned, and the gap narrowed until it snapped shut. The child was gone, and I'd done nothing. I felt like I'd just damned myself.