Douglas knows he should be angry. He feels like he should be angry. The emotion just doesn’t take hold in his white cranium, no matter how much he tries.

He is still hearing the broadcast except now he is stuck inside the crumpled remains of the metal grate, unable to move. His jawbone actually hurts, a phantom pain irritating the wedged skull even further. He stopped trying to dislodge himself when a tooth broke free from his frantic snapping. He is sticking through the grate with his entire jaw, the top of his skull remaining in the small room. His sight is entirely taken up by the top of the vent and some scraps of thin metal.

Douglas has wondered why his mana was only a quarter full when he managed to open his status page for the first time. He had thought that the grate was pretty thin, having crashed through it while remaining alive. Looking at the half centimetre thick scraps, he thanks his bones for the fact he is still alive. As much alive as a floating skull can be.

He has no idea how long he’d been out, his skull might as well have been reduced to a single piece of forehead bone for all he knows. His missing bones seem to be regenerating at a slow pace thanks to the energy from his forehead.

That’s probably mana, Douglas suddenly realises. He feels kind of stupid for not consciously making that connection earlier. He can feel the energy quite well, having practised with the mana stream some more. Instead of needing to focus with all his mind to sense his mana, he faintly feels the stream of power moving to the back of his head all the time. His jaw is completely healed now, as much good as that does him in his current situation.

Trying to tune out the annoying broadcast, Douglas decides to focus on his mana instead. His forehead seems to be the nexus point for that power, flowing from an area the size of a coin. Trying to speed up the process, he starts pulling on the power, encouraging it to flow to his top vertebrae. What he vaguely feels to be two broadcasts later, his concentration is broken by another blue line.

[ New skill learned; meditation lvl 1 ]

Staring at the message, Douglas wonders what it’s about.

[ Meditation lvl 1; mana recovery is multiplied by 1.1 when active ]

And suddenly Douglas knows what he has been doing wrong and what he can do better. It’s like he has access to a large collection of people that had also been meditating, giving him hints and tips on what to do.

A lot of the hints and nudges confuse Douglas. Something in the back of his mind is telling him how to stop going hungry or thirsty for long amounts of time. He even gets the urge to make some special foods to facilitate this. Douglas doesn’t think he needs to defecate or sleep. He has been awake for many days now and he still doesn’t feel the urge to sleep at all.

Douglas resigns himself to the fact that he has nothing better to do and is stuck anyway, so he sets about trying all these tips and hints one by one.

He immediately runs into more problems. He doesn’t need to breathe. Nor does he have to find a comfortable place to sit or lie down, he is currently just a skull. A skull who is completely stuck. Nearly none of the tips that are being injected into his ponderous thoughts do him any good. Even the one about clearing his mind is pretty useless. Clearing his mind is really easy, it’s the thinking of thoughts that’s hard and takes effort.

Instead, Douglas focuses on the stream of mana flowing through his skull, using the few vague hints on dealing with mana flow to better his own control. The trickle of mana does seem a little bit thicker than previously and he starts pulling it towards his neck with muted enthusiasm. The irritating chattering fades into the background as Douglas loses himself in the task of guiding mana.

Douglas ignores all the blue bars, only stopping when he feels his stream of mana split into three, many, many hours later. This change in routine is enough to wake him from his meditative daze.

[ Meditation is now lvl 5 ]

[ New skill learned; mana control lvl 1 ]

Pushing away the notifications, he feels for his mana. Eight vertebrae form a small snake-like tail that flows from the back of his skull. He tries feeling the mana instead of merely ordering it where to go and senses that it flows where connective tissues should be. The flat and hollow spaces between spinal sections are filled with nothing, his bones floating freely without touching.

Douglas definitely feel something there, though. Guiding mana through his bones is a lot easier now, but he hasn’t managed to guide it outside of his physical form even once. The mana flows outside of his bones when traversing the voids inside his joints, but he feels something is there. Instead of cartilage and sinew there is something odd that keeps his bones together and allows mana to flow through.

The anomaly that woke him from his meditative state are the three bones spectrally connected to his lowest vertebra. The lowest bone is just another piece of his spinal column, the interesting ones are the two small ribs forming a ring as they move away and back together.

Vague memories of how a skeleton is supposed to look like emerge from the fog of Douglas’ past. The topmost pair of ribs slowly becomes fully visible in his mental image as he tries to overlay the sensations from his physical form with shards of memory, both recent and long past.

[ New skill gained; mana sense lvl 1 ]

He wondered what something called Mana sense would do.

[ Mana sense lvl 1; mana is 1.1 times easier to sense at all times ]

The same sensation happens as before. He doesn’t receive hard information about sensing mana, but each thought he has concerning the subject is accompanied by an odd certainty that other people have had success with trying this or that. Lots of nudges require him to have flesh and bone, though. Douglas laments that there seems to be a certain anti-skeleton sentiment in whatever is helping him.

Combining his sharpened sense of his own bony body with his improved mana control, Douglas takes the first real decision of his undead life. He decides then and there - stuck in a metal grate and having only a skull and neck bones - to regrow his right arm first.

He surely made decisions before but can’t recall having to weigh a few options against each other and then pick only one. Putting action to thoughts, he guides his mana to flow through his neck and into the right rib.

Carefully wiggling his neck he tests his new mobility. The moment the lowest vertebra of his prehensile neck touches metal puts a large smile on Douglas’ face. Grinning like a maniac, he starts wiggling the short stump of spine, searching for purchase. His eighth vertebra gets stuck behind some unseen scrap of metal and with a teeth-clenching sound of dry bone on sharp metal, he drags himself through the ragged vent.

Then Douglas has a good think about the concept of centre of mass. Previously, he consisted out of only a skull. All rotation in the zero gravity environment had been centred around his eyes. Now, with the inclusion of a decent length of neck, his spinning vision feels distinctly off-centre. Douglas is pretty sure he’d be heaving and puking his lunch out if he still had any flesh.

His extremely rapid spinning slows down as he feels his neck grow larger. He sees occasional white flashes shooting by, the rest of the world a blur. Smacking into other floating objects bleeds his rapid spin into a gentle tumble, allowing Douglas to properly observe the new space he finds himself in.

The dim light of distant stars comes in through ragged holes, lighting up the otherwise dark room. Rows of benches are attached to what Douglas assumes to be the floor. Each table has varying sized drawers and some form of tool or mechanism attached to it. The walls of the room are adorned with endless rows of cabinets and storage areas.

Everything is metal. Douglas fully admits to not knowing much, but the overabundance of metal everywhere seems slightly off to the floating skull. The room is of medium size, around three by ten meters, and looks like some form of workshop. Douglas manages to identify one object as a vice with a screwing handle, but the rest of the apparatus present remains a total mystery to him.

Douglas’ eye sockets briefly flare as he sees fragments of bone floating through the room, occasionally bouncing against the other items strewn through the interior space. He eyes one particularly large piece of bone - a piece of his sternum he suspects - when to his great horror, it tumbles through one of the holes in the outer wall.

Burning eye-flames trained on the precious piece of himself, he helplessly floats as the white fragment bounces off the lumpy and melted-looking edge before flying outside. Douglas feels like he should panic right now, his very life-bone floating out of reach, but the emotion just doesn’t happen. Then Douglas imagines himself floating out of the hole, spinning slowly through that endless abyss.

Very, very carefully Douglas starts trying to manoeuvre through space. Now having access to his moving jaw and a rather flexible bit of spine, the skull continues practising moving without the aid of gravity trying to grab onto one of the many protruding bits of iron. He uses his lower jaw and the front of his spine like a pincer, but his smooth bones don’t get much traction on the few bits of metal that float into his reach.

Instead, he continues training his ability to make controlled bounces, finding that it has improved greatly. His jaw only moves in one direction with a little wiggle room side to side. His spine moves like a snake, allowing him to actually aim at which direction he kicks off without spinning out of control.

He manages to fill in his right rib after only a few jumps, successfully aiming at clusters of floating bone shards. A large bone splinter now sits in the curved green outline of his rib. Douglas feels his mana working to change the bone fragment into the correct shape, bending and smoothing it slowly. A few more fragments get stuck inside the glowing border before others pass through without sticking, the needed bone mass apparently reached.

Now Douglas can choose to regrow the top part of his sternum or his clavicle. He immediately guides his mana to his clavicle, letting half of his mana flow continue working on his rib.

Douglas spends the next few hours carefully bouncing around the room. He first focuses on the largest piece of bone he sees. Those gone, he finds a true treasure trove of fragments stuck beneath one of the larger workbenches. He fills his clavicle with pieces, after which he can choose his shoulder blade or humerus. The fear that he needed the rather large wing-shaped bone first relieved, he chooses his humerus to work on next.

His upper rib, clavicle and humerus are still more glowing cracks than actual bone when he starts on his ulna, deciding not to work on his radius until later. Having looted the mass of osseous fragments under the bench, he starts exploring again, this time aided by a partially formed right arm.

Seeing a large piece of pelvis float near one of the holes in the room, he overestimated his own manoeuvring skills and nearly flies out into space himself. The only reason he doesn’t float off into the great unknown is due to his jaw getting stuck behind a sharp piece of outer hull. He manages to get the large piece of bone attached to his ulna and immediately decides that gambling like that isn’t worth the risk.

Half the bones in his body are now made of loosely held together fragments and Douglas finds that his flow of mana shrinks with each broken bone it passes through. The more cracked bones he has, the less power he can dedicate to repairing and reconstructing his skeletal frame.

His latest bone, the ulna, is an especially bad case. He can move the partially transparent bone around only when exerting a lot of effort. The feeling of the rough fracture line of pelvis bone scraping against his reconstructing humerus anytime he moves his elbow joint is like scraping nails across a chalkboard. Briefly wondering what nails or chalkboard are, he discards those thoughts. Holding his ulna in front of his face, he sees that its essentially a glowing stick with a large piece of matter stuck on one end.

He briefly wonders if using the mana to regenerate the bone instead of reshaping the unwieldy piece will be more effective.

Douglas decides to work on filling up his arms with bone shards before taking the time to fix them properly. He can't feel any pain but seeing his mana seep from all of his bones is uncomfortable on a deep level. He wants to have a functioning hand more than the feeling of unease, so he grits his teeth and continues gathering his shattered self.

One more thing to worry about, the green glow seems to be becoming a lot paler. Douglas clacks his teeth as he looks at his slowly repairing arm. Instead of the murky leaf green, his power has started taking on a distinct teal hint. He then looks at the small glowing outlines of his wrist bones, immediately forgetting his vague worries in his muted enthusiasm at the prospect of having a functioning hand.

Not floating away into the void is still his highest priority, so the slowly re-growing skeleton carefully steers clear of the gaping holes in the wall and starts exploring the room again.

He finds another windfall when exploring the far side of the room. Thick bolts secure black webbing to the wall, which in turn keeps thick plates and long rods of metal in place. One of his limbs must have tumbled this way because the webbing is riddled with bone splinters.

Putting one of his work-in-progress outlined bones to the splinters causes the fragments to get stuck in the suspended field of mana. This allows him to carefully pull the pieces free from where they are stuck inside or behind the cloth restrains. He can still faintly hear the hour-long broadcast, but more as a murmur in the background instead of the loud conversation it was previously. This allows him a sense of time that otherwise would have been completely absent.

A few commercials and half the news later, he has filled out all the tiny bones of his hand. He needs to use over half of his mana to keep his fragmented arm together, but he has a hand again! He experimentally moves the cracked limb, finding he can contort the floating bones in ways that his mind slightly rebels against. He is sure that his hand isn’t supposed to fold in half like that, but the mental resistance fades as he forces the creaking limb into all kinds of joint destroying contortions.

Focusing his available power on one of the small bones in his wrist, he starts exploring the room in earnest. Now able to actually hold on to things with his glowing fingers, traversing the room goes from a series of uncertain gambles to a slow and steady slog.

The partial skeleton first makes a round trip exploring the walls. He finds lockers with locked doors, some of them partially destroyed, and webbing holding blank materials. He also finds a closed door. The wall with holes in it doesn’t hold much interesting stuff and Douglas is pretty wary of accidentally slipping through the gaping openings. The fact that three smaller areas of damage are present on the opposite sides of the hull breaches leads Douglas to realise that these holes might not be on purpose or by design.

Once again slightly frustrated at how long it has taken him to realise something so obvious, Douglas tries to capitalise on the broken lockers by attempting to pry them open. One of them contains a large collection of small items with painted crosses. The lack of light still doesn’t allow him to see colours, but he has the odd suspicion that these items should be white and red. The other two lockers just have small holes punched through, their doors still firmly shut. He tries looking through the openings and can see a collection of boxes, partially illuminated by his eye flames.

Unable to figure out how to open the closets, Douglas decides to go towards the single door he found. Carefully moving his weightless skull around with his single arm, he reaches the closed door while only bumping into the floor a few times. He has to turn back occasionally, unwilling to cross large areas of the empty floor now that he doesn’t need to bounce and float randomly to move around. His single hand clings to the benches, tools and ripped metal with a desperate strength as he pulls his skull towards the door.

The door is a rather large and imposing slab of metal. It doesn’t move a single millimetre even though Douglas throws all eleven of his strength points against it. The only way he manages to get purchase on the door is when he bites down on a protruding screw with his teeth while shoving at the door’s handle with his single hand.

He then finds a marked handle behind a thin layer of glass after looking around some more. The oddly painted thing is placed on top of the door frame. Floating over, Douglas tries smashing the glass. It works perfectly, but the recoil almost flings him through one of the holes again, only managing to stay inside by grabbing on a ragged edge.

Once more being extremely careful, he makes his way back to the door. He starts pulling on the now exposed handle while carefully biting down on a decorated metal edge. The handle takes quite some strength to pull, but his efforts are accompanied by the sight of the door sliding open slightly.

Looking back, Douglas stops. There are still some bone fragments floating through the room. Most had been absorbed by Douglas while even more have undoubtedly tumbled out into space. He has learned that his health regeneration can make material from scratch, but giving it bone to work with is much, much faster. Keeping a wary eye on the gaping holes on the far wall, Douglas then spends a few hours meticulously gathering all the fragments he can.

Stuffing the last few parts behind the webbing, he looks at the fruits of his labour. A bony bounty sufficient to form another arm and maybe a piece of his ribcage is now stuck securely behind the webbing. Douglas then inspects his hand, finding that his smallest wrist bones are all healed and in perfect condition.

The metacarpals of his thumb and pointer finger, including the fingers themselves, are also in near perfect shape, only faint blue cracks showing. The rest of his arm is still a horrendous mess of cobbled together bone fragments and glowing splinters.

Satisfied at making progress, he carefully manoeuvres to the door and starts sliding it open. He immediately praises his own insight into the matter, as the space to the right of the new hallway is filled with stars. Everything to the right of the door except for a meter of wall is gone. The floor’s molten edges are sheared through in a rather clean manner, the solidified globs of metal similar to the holes in the walls Douglas entered through.

To the left is an intact hallway, its floors and walls made from a white material, the ceiling bare metal with ducts going across. Douglas notices a particular skull-shaped dent in the metal channel closest to him.

Other than his own bony profile, he sees a barren hallway. Dark smears cover large parts of the light interior further down the corridor. The wall opposite of the skeletal skull features a door located a few meters to his left. Douglas then thinks about it for a good ten minutes and comes to the conclusion that the door should be the one with all the pillows. More doors with nameplates are visible down the hall which curved to the right after the last door, taking a sharp right turn two meters further.

On a whim he doesn’t quite understand, Douglas decides to look to the left. He knows that he should go explore the other areas and find out where or even what he is. Instead, he creeps closer to the edge, his single hand grabbed the molten blobs of metal. The open space is filled with stars, the absolute lack of anything at all seemingly speaking to the placid skull on a deep level.

Douglas lost track of time again while looking at endless space as the ship did its slow tumble. The lack of any bodily functions or needs lets him hang there, floating at the edge of nothingness.

[ Rewards for discovery of UNKNOWN have been calculated ]

[ Reward for discovering unknown town; 100 xp ]

[ Reward for discovering unknown city; 1000 xp ]

[ Reward for discovering unknown state; 5000 xp ]

[ Reward for discovering unknown country; 10000 xp ]

[ Reward for discovering unknown continent; 100000 xp ]

[ Reward for discovering unknown sea; 5000 xp ]

[ Reward for discovering unknown ERROR NAN xp ]

That’s enough to wake the meditating skull from his daze. Something seems to churn in the background of his mind for a while. He stares at the rows of blue boxes a little longer before mentally commanding them to vanish.

[ Lesser skeleton lvl 1 100/100 xp reached ]

[ Lesser skeleton lvl 2 200/200 xp reached ]

[ Lesser skeleton lvl 3 400/400 xp reached ]

[ Lesser skeleton lvl 4 800/800 xp reached ]

[ Lesser skeleton lvl 5 1600/1600 xp reached ]

[ Lesser skeleton lvl 6 3200/3200 xp reached ]

[ Lesser skeleton lvl 7 6400/6400 xp reached ]

[ Lesser skeleton lvl 8 12800/12800 xp reached ]

[ Lesser skeleton lvl 9 25600/25600 xp reached ]

[ Lesser skeleton lvl 10 51200/51200 xp reached ]

[ 18800 xp deferred]

[ Congratulation, you have reached Lesser skeleton max level ]

[ Your skills allow you the following options ]

[ Lesser arcane skeleton 0/10 ]

[ Lesser soul skeleton 0/10 ]

[ Minor skeleton 0/20 ]

Wondering what that large list of notifications is about, Douglas asks if the blue boxes can please show him the information about his race.

[ Lesser skeleton; a skeleton raised by a necromancer, this race is often used as cannon fodder. Animated by magic and a pact with a deity of death, these creatures are a combination of arcane and necrotic magic. Although very rare, lesser skeletons that survive being controlled long enough can grow into more powerful variants. +str + con ]

Necromancer, that must have been the dirty old guy. Douglas nods to himself, knocking his chin against the floor as he finds the dark sounding moniker fitting for the wrinkled wretch. He doesn’t quite know what the term cannon fodder means, but he understands that it isn’t meant as a compliment. Douglas realises that he didn’t enjoy being a lesser skeleton, some deep and forgotten part of himself rebelling at his very state of existence.

Looking at the partially fractured bones of his hand, the floating skull can almost see the flesh and skin that should be there. The mana pouring from the cracks is even paler still, now only a hint of green remaining among the pale blue glow.

Feeling like he should sigh deeply followed by briefly wondering what sighing was, he asks the blue boxes to show him more information about the three options he is offered.

[ Lesser arcane skeleton; animated through arcane powers instead of a pact with a deity of death, this race is more akin to a golem than its more traditional necrotic counterpart. Its intricate spell matrix is capable of holding a controlling soul. +int +wis ]

[ Lesser soul skeleton; a soul melded with its long decayed corporal form, these beings are revenants that have endured or slumbered until nothing but bones remained. Animated through pure hatred and force of will, they often expire the moment they have accomplished their revenge. ++str ]

[ Minor skeleton; a more powerful version of the lesser variant, this being is either raised by a more competent necromancer or has evolved. Animated by magic and a pact with a deity of death, these creatures are a combination of arcane and necrotic magic. Still easily controlled, its nexus has a larger mana capacity, allowing for greater strength and solidity. ++str +con ]

[ ERROR; DEITY 404, CORRECTING… ]

[ Minor skeleton; a more powerful version of the lesser variant, this being is either raised by a more competent necromancer or has evolved. Animated by magic and a pact with a deity of death, these creatures are a combination of arcane and necrotic magic. Still easily controlled, its nexus has a larger mana capacity, allowing for greater strength and solidity. ]

It takes Douglas a long, long time to fully read through the new pile of information. The small note about being easily controlled makes Douglas think he can actually feel anger for a moment. However, the red haze turns out to be from a rather bright object in the starry sky.

Squinting at the rather bright interloper, Douglas realizes that it isn’t the big star he has previously seen. This object actually seems to be moving. Nearly imperceptible, the red dot stands out from the rest of the starry multitude. Each time the ship’s slow tumble makes his view perform another turn, the red dot is slightly brighter and larger.

Mentally shrugging at this seemingly inconsequential observation, Douglas goes back to methodically determining what he should do. The thought that maybe changing his race at all being a bad idea doesn’t even cross his mind. In fact, he feels some faded form of joy each time he thinks about being able to change into a more powerful version of himself.

The minor skeleton upgrade seems the most logical at first glance, it has two things going for it. The number of bonus attributes, strength and constitution are the highest out of all three. This combined with the higher level capacity makes it stand head and shoulders above the other two.

Though, its demerits are also the highest. First, there’s the fact that he will remain easily controlled. The necromancer had an entire army of puppets like Douglas following his every order. Then there is the fact that the attribute bonuses seemed to have disappeared…

That happened after the message about a deity. Normally, Douglas gets a slight hint and feeling of meaning when reading the words in the blue boxes. Nothing in the error message gives him any additional information except for the way these words sound. The few words he had experienced this with are the words ‘NAN’ and ‘UNKNOWN’. It seems very odd to the skull that the word ‘unknown’ does come with context, but the word ‘UNKNOWN’ doesn’t.

He stares out into the stars some more while slowly thinking about these topics. The stars around him make another full rotation and the red dot is larger still when he finishes his ponderous line of thought.

Going back to his previous activity, Douglas thinks that becoming a lesser soul skeleton sounds like a pretty bad idea. Having to move his bones through pure hatred or force of will seems exhausting. Everything he did now already takes effort, the only positive point would be an increased amount of strength. More strength wouldn’t have helped the bony bloke in any situation he has come across so far.

Douglas thus chooses lesser arcane skeleton, his mind made up. Having more intelligence and wisdom will increase his available mana and his mana regeneration. This will, in turn, speed up his recovery effort.

Douglas has time to think two thoughts before blacking out. The first one is a question about why he knows what the intelligence and wisdom actually do for him. The last one, a slightly more panicked thought, is whether it’s a good idea to do this mere centimeters from the void of open space.

DUE TO WANTING TO ACTUALLY EAT, HAVE A LIFE, MAKE SOME MONEY, AND ALL THAT JAZZ, I TOOK DOWN 90% OF BOOK 1 !!!!!!

I am actually very sorry about this. For the first story I ever put on here (The Dao of Magic), I swore that I would not do this. That story will stay on this site until the sun goes out.

As for Skeleton in Space, I'm afraid I will have to point you towards the ebook or audiobook of Skeleton in Space: Histaff. If you like this story, you can read it for free on Kindle Unlimited (if you are a KU subscription member) or buy the ebook or audiobook.

Thank you for your understanding.