Alex had just ducked back through the front door of his apartment when the solar flare hit, which almost certainly saved his life.

It was early evening and he’d gone out to check his mail, eagerly anticipating the arrival of his two neatly printed university degrees. After five years of very hard work, he’d finally done it! He was almost bouncing at the prospect of getting them framed.

Of course, priorities like that were going to have to take a back seat now.

It was early evening and he’d closed his shutters, which meant that he was only temporarily blinded when the outer edge of the golden flare washed over the continent of Australia and instantly incinerated anyone unfortunate enough to be outdoors at the time.

Even indoors, Alex’s vision turned white as he was hit with waves of heat and excruciating pain worse than anything he'd ever experienced. His body and mind gave out, and for what would be the first of many times he convulsed, threw up, and passed out. Glass had shattered all around him, cinders springing up around his apartment, and a vicious nuclear wind began to howl outside.

Minutes later, Alex came to in the aftermath of the flare. As he moved one arm in front of the other to crawl along the floor of his now-ruined apartment, his slowly returning, hazy-white vision showed quickly growing burns and blisters all along his arms. All he could hear was a weird static.

Nuclear attack? Solar flare?

That brief hypothesis would perhaps be the only practical application of the physics and engineering degrees still clutched in his right fist, fresh from the mailbox. Their edges were lightly aflame, and unthinkingly Alex clumsily clubbed his left forearm down onto them, extinguishing the flames. He was almost surprised that this was painless.

My nerve endings have already been burnt off.

Alex passed out again twice before he began to crawl.

Water. The fridge.

Crawling on pure, illogical instinct toward a source of cool and water, he dragged himself forward a couple of metres, past the doorframe leading into his living room. The floor-to-ceiling windows were shattered and their shutters had been blown across the room, creating a gaping hole in the apartment wall. Through it, his gradually returning vision caught a glimpse of the hellscape which used to be suburban Sydney.

It seemed the entire world was on fire. Not a shred of green was visible, with every tree on his leafy street transformed into a blackened husk. The wind he could feel through the window was incredibly strong, threatening to pull him out through the hole in his wall – even from his vantage point in a different room. But strangest was the thin black vertical line that floated right by the broken wall of his apartment, the hot air warping around it.

After blinking and moving his head to ensure that it wasn’t just his damaged eyes, Alex could spot at least three such anomalies spread far and wide across the cataclysmic vista behind the first, all hanging suspended in the air. They looked like cracks in reality itself, a fierce wind roaring around each of them as they seemingly created an endless vacuum. Alex could even swear he saw flickers of colour through the blackness of the anomaly in front of his window as it pulsed, throbbing and thrumming with an alien heartbeat.

Without warning, a bolt of black lightning shot from the anomaly with a snap, ionising the air in the apartment and vaporising his sofa.

Damn, that sofa was expensive.

Alex, perhaps in shock, forgot about the fridge and began dragging himself into the living room, feeling the wind whip around him as he moved closer to the anomaly.

What am I doing?

But he knew deep down that he was already dead, and if there was one quality that he didn’t need two scrunched up, slightly burnt university degrees to prove, it was an enduring curiosity. Enduring until the end, it seemed.

Black lightning flashed again, this time between two of the anomalies floating high over the street in the distance. Eerily, the brightness that had lit up the world had faded back down to a regular mid-evening level, as the omnipotent sun continued to float lazily past the horizon, having done its work for the day. The lightning was almost invisible in the dark dusk sky, obscured by streams of thick smoke and debris blowing in the wind.

Alex was edging closer and closer to the rift in reality, flickering in and out of consciousness as he carelessly painted a trail of hot blood and plasma along the floor behind him.

I want to touch it. I want to touch it before I pass out for the last time.

Being hit by the black lightning would no doubt be a quicker end than radiation poisoning and burns, and the exhausted, pained Alex began to fantasise as he pulled himself across the last few meters. At this point, the strong wind was beginning to lift him slightly, aiding his journey toward the hole in his wall.

A fragment of broken glass sliced across his back, zooming toward the rift as he edged the front half of his body out over the broken wall. The rift was within reach, stretching up above and below him. He could have sworn in his final moments before passing out that he caught a glimpse of something through the rift – a towering black stone obelisk lined with radiant gold. But before he could blink, the wind lifted him fully and his body whipped through the air as he somersaulted towards the crack in space.

Trevia bent over to unload another sack of daucus fruit from her cart in the town square, breathing in a lungful of the sweet dawn air. Lifting the sack of produce, she walked it over to where her husband and daughter stood assembling the family market stall in the early light and lay it gently it on the ground by them. The square teemed with activity as a wide array of merchants and producers set up their stalls for Linosa’s autumn harvest market.

The small town of Linosa formed a hub for the local region, and over a thousand people would flow through the market square this week to stock up for the coming season. The town’s obelisk floated gently in the centre of the square, a short grey construct carved with runic patterns and emanating a subtle, otherworldly power. Fountains and decorative shrubs ringed the central courtyard section it occupied, with merchants, tradespeople, and farmers like Trevia setting up stalls further out in the wide, open space.

Beyond them, Linosa’s main buildings ringed the courtyard – a tall town hall, the merchant’s and crafter’s guilds, the grandiose delver's guild, and the town watch headquarters. Each was wrought of the same grey, rune-lined stone as the central town obelisk, having been commissioned and summoned by the current mayor and founder of Linosa, Edrick Linstone. That hadn't stopped the various guilds from festooning the outsides of their buildings with posters and decorations, clearly differentiating each of the slate-grey structures from one another.

It was from directly above the obelisk in the centre of the square that a crack split the dawn air, both audibly and visibly. Trevia jumped, almost dropping a second sack of daucus fruit as her head snapped toward the source of the sound high above her.

Shouts of alarm echoed through the early morning calm as merchants scattered below the black dot which had appeared hundreds of metres up in the sky. The dot began to elongate slowly into a rift-like form, like a crack in reality itself.

Within seconds, important figures were bursting out of the buildings around the square. It would be incredibly foolish for bandits to attack on a day like today, where almost all the local delvers were present to repel them. But this was beyond banditry – this looked like the work of a high-level spatial mage, at the very least. Even Mayor Edrick, standing in the doorway of the town hall and brandishing his signature greataxe, looked incredibly alarmed.

Guildmistress Eleanor Hayfyr stood just outside the doors to the delver's guild, her eyes and body crackling with a blue arcane lightning which lazily arced off her surroundings. She began to levitate herself into the air toward the growing rift.

“Show yourself! What is this?!” she screamed in its direction.

A group of braver delvers followed her out of the guild, brandishing a variety of glowing weapons and magical attacks toward the mysterious blackness. None had the skill to fly or even to levitate like the guildmistress, so they began to spread out around the square instead, their eyes glued to the rift.

And then, as abruptly as it had appeared, the rift was gone with a final flash of black lightning. It left a single, rapidly growing speck in the sky in its place. A body? Small fragments of debris became visible, falling around it.

“Hold fire!” shouted Guildmistress Eleanor, as Mayor Edrick squatted in front of the town hall and then leapt hundreds of metres into the air towards the falling body. The guildmistress followed, shooting through the air around twenty metres above the town square. Trevia’s eyes widened as she watched. While it wasn't true flight, this level of control over guided levitation was far beyond what most of the Reborn would ever achieve. No wonder she was guildmistress.

But even Eleanor wasn't as impressive as the mayor. Edrick’s leap, perfectly timed, had him snatch the body out of the air in seconds, before continuing in a lazy arc to land on the far side of the town square, narrowly avoiding smashing into Trevia’s family and their stall.

Eleanor, still crackling with lightning, descended from the sky slowly to land next to him. Trevia cowered behind her cart metres away, but she could still feel the ozone in the air and heard them as they spoke.

“Who is it? Are they alive?” the guildmistress asked.

“No clue. Barely. He hasn’t even been reborn. He can’t have been responsible.”

“What!? What the fuck is this? Do you have anything to do with it?”

As the two most powerful people in Linosa muttered to each other, the broken body in the mayor’s arms groaned and blinked slightly, but they both ignored it.

“Did I? Do I look like a fucking evil void wizard, woman? If anyone was responsible for this, it’d be you or one of your guilders!”

The mayor was livid at having even been asked, looking as if he was about to redraw the massive axe he wore on his back.

But Trevia had eyes only for the young man the mayor was carrying. He was a bleeding ruin, with weeping sores all over his body and missing clumps of thick dark hair. His blood-drenched fist was closed tightly around a bundle of what appeared to be parchment, and his strange clothes were singed and burnt off in places. On instinct, Trevia acted.

“Healers!” she cried, her voice catching as she looked back at the guild. Then louder, more determined: “We need healers!”

Her shouting broke the odd silence which had descended on the town square during the minute or so since the rift had appeared, and immediately several of the guild members who specialised in healing began to sprint towards the mayor and their guildmistress... along with several who specialised in violent combat. A number of merchants and farmers had retreated from the square, abandoning their seasonal goods to hide amongst the stone buildings ringing the large area.

Trevia stepped aside and rejoined her family, watching as three guild healers, after a nod from the mayor, laid their hands on the burnt and broken man. At least another three guilders kept bows trained on him even as golden energy flowed from their peers into the man.

There was some improvement, with the more obvious wounds closing up and the man’s eyes flickering, but it was clear that the healers were struggling. Even Berin, the highest levelled healing mage in Linosa, was visibly sweating as he pumped healing energy into the man.

The head healer started shaking his head just as one of his compatriots panted and pulled away, clearly out of mana. “He’s poisoned. It’s all through his body. I don’t know if I can fix this.”

A second healer nodded grimly and pulled away, not wanting to waste any additional mana. Berin persisted for another few seconds before he too gave up.

The guildmistress, meanwhile, had knelt and pulled the strange burnt parchment out of the dying man’s hand – with great difficultly. She frowned and looked up. “What language is this?” she muttered, pocketing the first piece of paper. Still frowning, she looked at the second and pocketed that too. Both had a crest on them with some sort of sigil – she would try and identify it later.

Berin looked down again at the burnt man. “Perhaps it's a message. He might be able to read it, but I can’t keep him alive with this poison in his system. We’re going to lose him.”

The mayor stomped the ground angrily. “Is there nothing we can do? I can’t just stand for random strangers dropping out of the sky, and that was powerful magic. My town could be under threat.”

Trevia leaned out from behind her wagon again. She could still see the obelisk in the middle of the square, hovering there as always, slowly rotating about a half-metre off the ground. “Rebirth” she muttered. She stepped fully out from behind the cart, speaking louder now. “Rebirth would save him.” She was intimidated by the Reborn in front of her, but she knew the mayor was a good man at heart despite his massive power.

Edrick and the guildmistress exchanged a glance. Rebirth was dangerous, and it only worked on the young. Even if he made it through the initial trial, the average reborn would die within a year of rebirth, during one of their first four delves if not on the surface. Even after that, the Reborn had limited life spans. It was for that reason that the process required a willing, trained participant both under common cultural laws and the law of the gods. It wasn’t unheard of to use Rebirth to heal someone following a near-fatal accident, but the fatality rate of the process was arguably worse than that of most ailments.

“It’s our only option,” the guildmistress snapped. “Authorise it.”

The mayor sighed, then once again leapt with the young man in his arms, covering half the length of the square in an instant to land in front of the gently hovering arcane obelisk at its centre. Trevia spotted guildmistress Eleanor rolling her eyes at the excessive display of strength, while Berin the healer watched on from next to her.

Over at the obelisk, The mayor muttered to the young man in his arms. “Are you awake, kid? Do you understand me?” He received an indeterminate groan in response. “Good enough. You’ll want to say yes when the stone makes contact. Good luck, and you’d better have an explanation for the mess you’ve made of my town when you get back. Now kindly fuck off.”

He not-too-gently slapped the young man’s hand against the obelisk and looked up to publicly perform a rite he was well familiar with. Given the urgency of the situation he left out some of the usual flowery ritualism, but it never hurt for his townspeople to see their leader at work. Pressing his own hand against the obelisk, he spoke again, this time loudly for all the square to hear.

“As the chosen of the Linosa Obelisk and favoured of the gods, I hereby authorise the rebirth of the young man before me. I open the channels of power to him, with the hope that the gods may judge him worthy to traverse the Unending Depths. I wish him the best of luck. May my blessing, the blessing of Lady Aranea, and the blessing of the King follow him through his trials.”

Truthfully, even that much was unnecessary – intent and contact alone were enough for an authorisation, and no one was even sure if the gods cared about the flowery ritualism. But Edrick felt the usual trickle of mana flow between his hand and the obelisk as it acknowledged his words. He looked down at the burnt young man he was propping up. The kid's life was in his own hands now.

Alex wasn’t sure if he was in some sort of afterlife – he was barely conscious and could sense that his mind was giving out. He’d been passed out entirely earlier, on the verge of slipping away. But something had changed, a golden energy within his body lengthening his lease on life. It had restored his consciousness, but barely, and he was sure that the blurry sights and sensations of hurtling through the air in the arms of some sort of burly strongman were the result of a hallucination.

Do you accept the challenge?

The thought was intrusive, and loud. It spoke not so much in a language but rather in direct concepts, the root of language, broadcast directly into his mind. In doing so, it drowned out all his senses such that time seemed to stand still. His lucidity spiked with the shock as he wondered what he’d just heard.

Rebirth has been authorised. Do you accept the challenge?

What? Is this God? Am I dead?

Alex hadn’t been a religious guy, but this was getting weird. Maybe he’d been dreaming? He tried to wake up.

Detected information request. If you accept the challenge, your body will be restored, and you may be granted a soul. In return, you must complete the trial, and will be summoned to delve the Unending Depths on each of the four solstices.

His confusion persisted, not least because he knew there were only two solstices.

False, there are two suns, you idiot. Do you accept the challenge?

Within the mental space the obelisk had placed him in, he blinked. Had it just called him an idiot?

Yes. You have three seconds to decide whether you accept the challenge. Your decision will be treated as final.

Wait – where am I?

This time he addressed the thought directly to the entity speaking into his mind. It ignored him.

Three.

Two.

Fuck it. I accept the challenge.

For the second time that day, Alex’s world turned white.

Alexander James Patel Overview Affiliations Linosa Town Level 0 Class None Status HP - MP - SP - Attributes STR - CON - DEX - END - INT - WIS - LCK 0