HTN 3-1 A new story

She sat on the edge of her tiny bed in the quiet of her room. Candles provided a dim, flickering light that bathed the room in a soft glow. She was oblivious to the darkness around her as she stared at the holographic screen that hovered over her arm.   

They returned from the great pizza adventure to find little had changed. The graveyard saw some activity while they were gone, but nothing was out of place. Her skeletons had respawned around the tower, and the bone night still stood watch just inside the door.  

Grettah chose to stay behind to find the villages in the hills and set a home point. She promised to visit after she met her community and established herself. Breanne came back with them and was delighted to see the size of the graveyard. She quickly set a home point, which required she bury a small glass jar in a grave.   

Heather was in good spirits most of the trip back, but slowly she began to dip. She had preoccupied her mind with her quest for something normal. Now that she had a taste of it, she wanted more, and that brought back the sense of loss. While they walked, she began to ponder old questions that were buried inside. Why was she here? What made her chosen? What was she supposed to do with herself?  For a while, she tried to suppress the thoughts by talking to Breanne.   

Breanne was a very organized and caring person who admitted she had children in the real world. Heather was shocked to learn that Breanne was seventy-one years old. She chose to come in to escape a host of medical conditions and her advanced age.  She had a deep understanding of history from her birthplace. She was originally from Ireland, and her mother used to tell her stories about fairies and fairy mounds. Heather found listening to these stories fascinating. There seemed to be a hundred varieties of faeries in Irish folklore, but one of them was unique. It would wail in the night, and anyone who heard it could expect the imminent death of a family member.   

“The modern word for it is a banshee,” she said.  

“Is that why you picked this?” Heather asked.  

Breanne nodded. “I wanted to honor my mother with my choice. She was the one who told me the old stories and instilled a sense of wonder in me.”

“It never occurred to me that people would come here to escape old age,” Frank said.  

I wonder if many will,” Breanne said. “I told my friends about my plan and encouraged them to follow me. They laughed at the idea and dismissed it as something foolish young people did.” She was silent a moment as she lifted a hand before her face and studied the smooth young skin. “But I saw it as a chance to be young again, and to have a life I enjoyed.”  

“It makes sense to me,” Quinny added as they walked along. “A second chance at a new life. I knew a lot of paralyzed people were coming in, so why not the old?”

Heather agreed, but knowing Breanne's age made her think of her mother. This led to more thoughts about all the things that she was going to miss. She was trapped in here and wouldn't be there for birthdays, or holidays, or anything family. What did her family think had happened to her? Did they even know she was here? Maybe they thought she had been abducted and killed? At least Frank and the others told their loved ones. Their family wasn't frantically calling an empty house, or filing a missing person report.  

The more she thought about it, the more she wondered if she really could be happy here. She had a very strange life and felt unnatural. It was based around a social video game concept that was alien to her. She mused at how accurate the word alien was. The whole world was built by aliens who she could only hope understood how human games worked.  Worse, she was a class that was despised by the vast majority of players for reasons none of them truly understood. Even Breanne, who witnessed some of it, knew very little of the truth.  

When they got home, she spent the night alone in her room, poking through her panel. There were menus and submenus with options that only appeared when you made certain choices. She was desperate to find some way to send a message out to the world. Hours of searching had proven to be pointless. All she managed to do was discover a way to alter the sound of her voice and translate Spanish.  

“What am I going to do?” Heather said. “How am I supposed to be happy here? I can’t convince myself this is normal.”

She looked over at her scythe that leaned against the wall. It seemed silly that she could even lift it, let alone swing it properly.  Everybody laughed at the modification she put on it, saying the perfume was a waste. It worked against the troll, hadn't it? Why did she have to do everything the way people expected? Frank explained that anything that didn't add to combat was pointless.  

“Why does anybody else have a say in what I want?” she asked.  “I didn't ask to be here; I shouldn't have to play it their way!”  

The silence of the room was the only answer she got.  

With an angry sigh, she dismissed her panel and looked around the room. It was her room, but it wasn't her room. It didn't have her computer, or her pictures, or the silly horse statue her mother bought her. It didn't have the corkboard with all her plans and photos pinned up, showing her dreams. There was the house in the country with the big porch. A photo of the bedroom set with a canopy bed and cherry wood dresser. The drawing she made of a man with long hair smiling at her. She thought of that silly drawing that was supposed to represent a husband in her future.  

“What good are my dreams now?” she asked. “What right did the visitors have to take them away from me?”

Again the silence was her only reply. She supposed there was no real use in being upset about it. She was here now, and she needed to make the best of it. She tried to count her blessings as she looked around the dim room. She had a place to stay even if it was a creepy old tower. She had friends who were at the very least fun. She was free of her student loan debt, provided they hadn't found a way to tax her in here. She couldn't die, or she supposed stay dead. Technically she was immortal and eternally young.   

“That's something to be happy about, I suppose,” she sighed.  

She got up and walked into the next room where the strange book sat on the table. She ran her hand over the cover as she wondered how to open it. She wasn't very fond of the idea of reading the contents at first, but she changed her mind. Maybe there was a secret to getting out of New Eden inside. Maybe that's why the players didn't respawn because they got out.   

She tugged at the metal band that held the book closed. When it didn't budge, she pounded a hand on it in frustration.   

“What good is a book you can’t read?” she shouted.

The room remained quiet as she tugged at the book, turning it over. This side had the round depression in the middle of the band. She traced a finger around the shape and wondered why it was there.   

Several times she thought about what they discovered in that tower. A book hidden by magic so only the dead could see it. A necklace with writing that also could only be read by the dead. The whole building and it's contents were out of place. It looked as if it was a hundred years old and long forgotten, yet New Eden wasn't even a dozen years old. The contents, though broken and rotting, looked carefully placed. Clearly, it was a player home, and true to that idea, they found the body of the owner inside. This too, was out of place like the rest of the tower. By all rights, the player died years ago, but it was still there as if he never respawned.   

She wondered if Frank and the others were wrong. Maybe the world generated things like that? How much did they really know about what the visitors were doing? Nearly all of them had come in because of some motivation to live a different life. They didn't care about the purpose of the world, only what it offered.  

Heather was focused on the purpose with laser precision. She was pulled in here to fulfill that purpose after all, and she was bound and determined to know why.

“Heather?” Quinny called from someplace outside. “You have been in there since early yesterday. Is something wrong?”

She let the book drop and headed for the stairs. Down she went into the gloom that was her tower. Just inside the door was the bone knight standing as ever as her protector.

“Open it,” she growled as she approached.

The monster nodded and pulled the door open, allowing the rays of the sun the violate her darkness.  

She stepped into her yard, where the rest of her skeletons stood in a line right before her door. She found the option to upgrade them in the panel, and now they were roughly twice as strong as before. They all carried a rusty sword in their right hand and stood by menacingly.  

“Heather?” Quinny asked. “Are you alright?”

Heather walked down the three steps from her tower to the ground and held up her arms.  

“Is any of this alright?”

Quinny blinked and looked around for what was out of place.

“I mean this world, Quinny. There are no such things as zombies or ghouls or necromancers.”  

“It’s just a game world,” Quinny said.

“I know that,” Heather replied with a sigh. “But I don’t like games, and I am tired of all this.”

“Oh, you're missing your real life,” Quinny said with a nod.  

“Is it any wonder why?” Breanne asked as she walked down the path that ringed Heather’s tower.

Heather looked to the tall elvish woman who had a strange regal appearance.  

“She has no anchor to this world or any of its concepts. We all chose to be here and prepared for the transition. To her, this is one long dream she desires to wake up from.”  

“You don’t seem to mind being here,” Heather protested. “And you weren’t a gamer.”

“I lived a long full life, and then went beyond the years where I felt whole. I was sitting around waiting for time to catch up with me. I left no hopes or dreams behind in the real world. To me, this was a chance to live a whole new life in a whole new way.”  

“I still had a life I wanted to live,” Heather said.

“And it was taken away from you,” Breanne said. “This world holds far less wonder for you than I.”

“But this world is so cool,” Quinny protested. “And Heather is a chosen.”

“Chosen for what?” Heather asked. “To sit here in an empty tower with nothing to do all day? What purpose was I chosen to fill? What difference am I making to anything?”

Quinny was silent a moment as she pondered her answer.  

“You made a difference to us,” she said. “You gave Frank, and I new hope that we could build the things we dreamed of.”  

Heather smiled and shook her head. “But I have no dreams here. All my dreams are back home. All the things I was working so hard for are lost to me. All that time, all those sacrifices mean nothing now, and anything I do here is pointless. Nothing I accomplish here will matter.”

“You are in a bad mood,” Quinny said.

“I'm sorry. I don't mean to be. I just get homesick.”  

“We all do,” Breanne said.  

“You do?”  

Breanne laughed. “Do you think I don’t miss the real world sometimes? I would kill for some ice cream right now.”

“I want to play a game,” Quinny said. “I thought being in a game would be endless fun, but your right; we sit in our lairs most of the time. I get bored.”  

Heather folded her arms. “I want to take a long hot bath, order Chinese and watch TV all night while I overeat.”  

“Now that does sound good,” Breanne said.

“You should go talk to Frank,” Quinny suggested.

“What can Frank do for me?”  

“He always cheers you up,” she replied.

“I can’t run to Frank with all my problems.”

“Why not?” Quinny asked. “It’s not like he’s doing anything.”

Heather walked to the gate between her yard and Frank’s graveyard. She looked out over the field of stones and mausoleums.  

“I live in a graveyard,” she said. “My best friends are a ghoul, a zombie, and a ghost.”

“Banshee,” Breanne corrected.  

“I need something normal in my life,” she replied. “I feel like none of this is right, and I have to search for something that is missing.”  

Quinny stood beside her and looked out over the graveyard.  

“Maybe you need to go to the city,” she said. “I bet people have recreated all sorts of earth foods and things there.”

“Which city?” Breanne asked.

“The one to the north,” Quinny said.  

“I don't know,” Heather replied. “Frank can't come with, and I feel bad leaving him behind.”  

“Nah, Frank will be fine,” Quinny offered. “He will miss you, but he won't fall apart over it.”  

“Maybe I could go for a few days,” Heather said.  

“Yeah, you can take Breanne with you. She can pass for human, err elf when she wants.”

Heather looked north as if she would be able to see the city from there.  

“I still feel bad about going,” she said. “I want to help build something here with you guys, but feel like there is something more important I am supposed to be doing.”  

“I would recommend video games and fast food,” Quinny said. “But that’s hard to come by.”

“You seemed to be in much better spirits when you were solving problems,” Breanne noted. “You don't like being idle, do you?”  

Heather shrugged. “I suppose I have always had something to do. Some project I was working on.”  

“Hmm,” Breanne said as she paced while tapping her lip with a finger.

“You need a task that gives you some purpose,” she said.  

“Like what?” Quinny asked. “All she can do is make skeletons.”

“Gee, thanks,” Heather said with a laugh.  

“Nonsense,” Breanne said. “The necromancer kings did a lot more. They made cities, created art, held festivals. They had huge gardens with white stone and lush flowers.”

“How did they do any of that?” Quinny asked.

“I don't know,” Breanne said. “But they built a kingdom to rival all others, and it didn't look like a graveyard.”  

“Where did it go?” Heather asked.

“It was northwest of here about a month away by foot,” Breanne said. “You would be amazed at the wonders they built. They used the undead to do benign chores, so the people who lived there had easier lives.”  

“There were living people there?” Quinny asked.

“Oh yes,” Breanne said. “A few of the living were able to dwell with the undead in harmony.”

“We wanted a village nearby for people to live and trade in,” Heather said. “Then, they could play in the graveyard to level.”  

“Your thinking too small,” Breanne said.

“I am?”

The woman nodded. “You are the last necromancer in the world. You should aim as high as your predecessors did, maybe higher.”

Heather walked into the graveyard and sat on a short tombstone.  

“I have no idea how they did any of what they did. I don't even know what they did. I only have your descriptions to go by. How could I recreate any of that?”  

Breanne smiled and walked into the yard to join her.  

“You start by advancing your levels and learning.”

Heather looked away and considered her words. “I don’t know. I don’t think I was meant to be a necromancer. It was all a terrible mistake.”

“Nonsense, you were obviously meant to be a necromancer,” Breanne said.  

Heather looked up at her as she stood a few feet away, smiling at her.   

“How can you say that?”

“Look around you?” Breanne answered. “You have already begun to gather the undead to your cause. This is the largest collection of undead I have seen in one place since the kings. You have been here such a short time, and a ghoul, zombie, and banshee already call you their friend.”  

Heather stood up and paced among the stones as the words sank in.  

“You mean I might have been meant to be a necromancer?”

“Why would that be so hard to believe?” Breanne asked. “You certainly have a knack for it.”

“I run most of the time,” she said.

Breanne smiled. “You run from fights you can't win. That's called good sense. This world is full of people who lack even that ability.”  

Heather sighed and reached into her pocket. She felt something metallic and realized the amulet from the tower was there. She looked up at Breanne with a sudden thought and pulled the amulet out.

“If you knew the necromancer kings, maybe you can tell me what this is,” she said as she held it out.

Breanne looked transfixed on the amulet and carefully lifted it in the palm of her hand to study it.

“Where did you get this?” she said in a sudden sharp tone.  

Heather was taken aback by the sudden change and turned to point over the stream.  

“There is an old tower in the woods way out over the horizon,” she said. “We found it on a dead body inside the tower.”

“A body,” Breanne repeated as she turned the amulet over in her hand. “So, you fought your way inside and found the body of a previous adventurer?”  

“Nah,” Quinny interrupted. “The place was a ghost town. All the skeletons inside were long dead and covered in dust. The body was on the top floor in a rotting bedroom.”

“We think it might have been a necromancer,” Heather said.

“Might have been,” Breanne laughed. “This is an amulet of Thorisdan, the grave lord. All of his captains wore them to show their loyalty.”  

“Then it was a necromancer?” Heather asked.  

Breanne turned it over and studied the back. “Only a necromancer servant of Thorisdan would have one of these, or maybe a thief who stole one.”

“It looked like a wizards tower to us,” Quinny said. “Not a thief's lair.”

“There is an inscription here,” Breanne said as she looked at the back of the amulet.  

“We know,” Heather said. “Only the undead can see it.”

“Ghost letters,” Breanne said. “A technique of the necromancer kings. They learned quite a bit about using the magic of the world for new purposes.”

“There was a book as well,” Quinny said.

“A book?” Breanne asked with a sudden look up. “What book?”

Heather gestured to the tower and led her inside. She took them upstairs to where the metal-bound book rested on the table.  

“It was hidden in a light that only the dead can see,” Heather said.

“It was hidden in the buffer,” Breanne said.  

“The buffer?” Quinny asked. “The buffer is where you go when you die.”  

“I don’t understand how it all worked,” Breanne said. “But there is more to the buffer than we suspect. The necromancer kings were working with magics to manipulate it.”

“I wonder if that’s how they were able to pull players back and make them undead?” Quinny asked.

“I wish I knew more,” Breanne said as she looked over the book. “But this book is likely full of their secrets. Much of what they lost might be written down on these very pages.” She turned it over and tried to open the cover but to no avail.  

“We can’t figure out how to open the metal band,” Heather said.

Breanne turned it over so that the round depression with the little notch was facing up. She smiled and reached out her hand, placing the amulet into the space. It fell into place as if magnetic, and with an audible click, the band split at the side.  

“You got it open!” Heather exclaimed.

“Ha!” Quinny laughed. “We had the key the whole time!”

Breanne stepped back and looked to Heather with firm eyes.  

“You were meant for all this,” she said.  

“I wasn’t supposed to be a necromancer,” Heather said. “I wanted to be a golden sprite. I only became a necromancer on accident.”

Breanne shook her head. “I have lived a long time, long enough to know things happen for a reason. You were pulled into this world because you would not come willingly. You were sent to the spawn point nearest to Frank's graveyard instead of any of the dozens of others. You were able to overcome your fear of him quickly and adapt to the world around you. In doing so, you not only found your legs as a necromancer but gathered to yourself other undead. Now you even have an amulet and book from the necromancer kings themselves. Coincidence?”  

Heather was silent as she tried to think all that through.  

“But none of this explains what I am supposed to do?”  

“The answer to that question might be in the pages of that very book,” Breanne said. “You have been given gifts on top of gifts. You were chosen and then delivered into exactly the right place and into exactly the right class to make use of that book.”

“Come on, open it up already,” Quinny said. “I want to see if ghosts fly out of it.”  

Heather laughed and approached the book with nervous energy. She lifted it out of the metal brace and set it to the side.  

“There is more writing on the cover,” Quinny said. “It must have been under the band.”

Heather quickly cast her spell to give her the undead sight and looked down at the book.  

“Those who dare to read what the dead have written must ultimately embrace the grave,” she said aloud.  

“Creepy!” Quinny laughed. “I bet it’s full of ghosts.”

“Will you stop it,” Heather said as she suddenly felt nervous.  She looked back at Breanne as her nerves got the better of her. “Is that some kind of warning?”

“I have no idea,” Breanne said. “I lived in the kingdom the necromancers built, but I didn’t help them build it. I know only what I heard in rumor or was rarely present to witness. I honestly can’t tell you anything about what they were truly doing.”

“So, you have no idea what that means?”   

“None,” Breanne said firmly.

Heather sighed and turned back to the book. Carefully she took hold of the cover and turned it open to the first page.

The screams echoed through the tower as all three women ran out of the front door. They practically collided in the yard as they turned to look back at the tower.  

“Hahaha! There were ghosts in it!”

“That wasn’t funny!” Heather yelled. “My tower is probably haunted now!”

“So what? You're a necromancer.”  

Heather tried to steady her nerves as she looked over at Breanne.  

“I am sorry, I had no idea that was going to happen,” Breanne said.

Heather tried to get the image of the red ghostly faces soaring up into the air as she opened the book. She wished she had never found it now and made a mental note to open the rest of the pages in Quinny’s burial mound.

“What are you three doing?” Frank asked with concern in his voice.

They jumped in fright again and turned around to see Frank standing just outside her yard.

“Breanne knew how to open book Heather found, and when she did ghosts came out,” Quinny said excitedly.

Frank looked at them with his dull yellow eyes and scratched at his head as if confused.

“The book is open?”   

“Yes, and it's haunted,” Heather said as she struggled to catch her breath. “As soon as I opened the first page, red faces poured out and rose into the air.”  

“That was probably an illusion meant to scare others away,” Frank said.

“An Illusion?”   

“Yeah,” Frank said. “A lot of wizards protect books with illusions and other harmless spells to keep the overly curious away.”

“Aww, I want it to be ghosts,” Quinny pouted.

“Well, I want it to be an illusion!” Heather snapped as she put her hands on her hips.

“Bah, if it's an illusion, you have nothing to fear going back in,” Quinny said.  

Heather looked to the dark doorway and didn't move. Thankfully Frank walked right passed her, and went inside. She scolded herself for being so silly and followed him as they all went back upstairs.   

The book lay where she left it, open to the first page. Not a red face was to be seen much to Quinny’s disappointment.

Frank walked directly to the book and looked over the first page. Heather joined him and marveled at what she saw. Half of the page was written in glyphs and the other half in English. It all seemed to be written with ink that had a distinct metallic look to it. The letters looked to be handwritten with a flowing preciseness that left her amazed.   

“So, what is this?” Heather asked.  

“It looks to be a translation key,” Frank said. “The glyphs match up with the letters on the other side.”

“But some of them are combinations of letters,” Heather said as she studied the page.

“The rest of the book is probably written in the glyphs,” he said. “You will have to translate it.”

“Oh good, I found a purpose after all,” Heather moaned.  

“This is odd,” he said as he ran a long nail across the page. “The glyphs repeat, but the letters don't.”  

Heather looked where he was pointing, and he showed her how the same glyph always appeared twice. Once with a single letter and a second time with a group of them, usually three to four.  

“So, which one is the translation?” she asked.

Frank shook his head. “I have no idea what any of this means. Replacement alphabets are common in games, but they usually have only one meaning.”

“Nothing can ever be simple,” Heather replied as she looked over the letters. She almost jumped when Frank casually flipped the page, and nothing happened. The next page was all in glyphs and diagrams. The left side was broken into five sections, each highlighted with a single symbol. The right page depicted a drawing of a man inside a pattern of circles and lines that made complex stars. Words were written in glyphs all along the lines and at the various points.   

“This will take forever to translate,” Heather said.

“You have the key on the very next page,” Frank pointed out. “Once you start working on it, you will begin to learn the glyphs, and it will go faster.”  

“What does that diagram mean?” Quinny asked from where she watched over their shoulders.

Heather ran her finger around the circle in the image and shook her head.  

“This looks like that crazy stuff you see in new age books,” she said.

“It probably is,” Frank replied. “Video games borrow from that stuff all the time, and the visitors borrowed from our games.”

“So, this is a guide to align my chakras?” Heather joked.  

The room was quiet a moment, and Heather suddenly felt uncomfortable.  

“What is a chakra?” Quinny asked.

“You know, the energy centers that run down your spine. They make up the connection points of your body to the higher frequencies of the reality.”

“What?” Quinny asked.

Heather looked around at the blank faces.  

“Oh, come on!” she griped. “Lots of people know about this stuff.”  

“I don’t,” Frank said.

“Neither do I,” Quinny added.

“Don't you ever wonder why people meditate?” Heather asked. “It's all part of clearing your mind and aligning your chakras. It teaches you how to manipulate your energy centers and achieve good health of mind and body. Some people can even heal by manipulating other people's energy.”  

“You know about this stuff?” Frank asked.

Heather shook her head. “Look, I took some yoga classes, and they occasionally had special days where they had wellness clinics. I would go to meet people and hear the speakers. A lot of the speakers talked about stuff like this. I bought some of their books and watched their videos online. I was thinking about teaching a class myself in a few months.”  

“And you think you were not called for this,” Breanne said.

“Yoga and necromancy are not the same things.”  

“Are they not?” Breanne asked. “Manipulating the energy centers of the body sounds very much like necromancy to me.”

“That is to make people healthy, not undead,” she protested.

“Whose to say the basic principles can’t be used for both?”  

Heather didn't have a good answer, so she looked back down on the drawing. None of it made any immediate sense to her, but the idea intrigued her. What if the two were similar? What if the visitors made them similar on purpose? What if she did know just what she needed to know to be a good necromancer?  

“Well, I guess I better start translating.”