Chapter 2: Must. Be. Whole.

Gossamer facets of an origami gem unfolded, and my consciousness returned to me. I was in a place where a blank, nacre screen stretched out in all directions; an endless, windswept desert. It reminded me of Belvan’s hourglass talisman, and that he barely existed.

I stared, trying to discover hidden colors in the white. There was an omnipresent hum which lulled me into a trance. I felt new and untroubled. I sat and basked in the purity.

It did not last.

I heard whispers and became conflicted with a realization; either I was alone, or I was not. Neither seemed better. I looked at my hands and found their familiar, insubstantial nature surprising. My left one disappeared. Something resembling a memory flitted at the back of my mind, then fluttered away.

I whirled around, stuck in place as if tethered to a pole. I gazed in every direction, growing frantic.

Sand dispersed in wisps, and I watched as befuddling strings of light traced out shapes surrounding me. A huge, hexagonal honeycomb formed like a cluster of bubble skins touching, settling into the geometry of least chaos.

It was near silent for a while, and a lull fell on me. I watched tendrils of colorless sand flow in unpredictable rhythms at the edge of the cell. I ruminated. A cell was what the place seemed to be; just another kind of prison.

My thoughts dwelled on Gnarlroot; what the man had done to her. My bones, reunited at long last, only to be used against me. I stewed in the shivering disgust of treachery. Blind to a long-planned mutiny. With age came complacency, perhaps. My bouts of sleep stretched longer, year after fading year.

The silence was short-lived. Whispers and distant voices seeped in from unknown origins. I imagined others locked inside this perplexing place. I wondered, was it truly quiet here before? Mayhap I was simply unaware of the obscured sibilance?

“Try to ignore them if you can.” A clear voice said from a nearby place.

I snarled and wheeled around to see the silvery form of a middle-aged man. He regarded me from the other side of a hexagonal glassy plane.

“My tree!” I spat. “Who dares?” confusion. “What rat would oust me? Answer!”

“Ignorant rage and rippling consequences…” the silver being’s smug rebuke only fueled my ire.

“What is this place?!” I demanded. The sound of my disused voice rattled me.

“You’re in no position to interrogate, I think. But don’t fret, you’ll not be here long.” The spirit man drew something from nowhere. It looked like an oversized key made of ice. With it, he traced a glowing sigil on the glass and touched it with his palm. He phased through and into the room.

His guise became clearer. It was the bone thief’s spirit friend. The one who had watched my tree burn.

“… where are we?” I rasped. “Why are you nameless?”

“You shall refer to me as ‘Warden Ralos,’” he said, “and we’re inside the scepter’s hive… where you, old fool, are now but one in a collection of wayward souls.”

He held a bundle of tattered, ghostly twigs. I failed to recoil as the silver man grabbed my wrists and bound them. The impossibility of this astounded me, yet I could not interfere.

“Anything I tell you is because I think it might benefit Azwold’s quest.” He bent to truss my ankles, “that’s it.” The bindings felt eerie; familiar. That I could feel them at all unnerved me. I was not used to tactile things.

I vowed secret vengeance. ‘Warden’ Ralos? A rebellious peasant, more like.

I listened as he prattled on, “You see, Azwold’s spirit collection has grown too fat to leave unsupervised. I volunteered to help him by maintaining order, at least for now. There we are!” He stood back to inspect the integrity of the shackles.

“Why?” I moaned, wishing a pox on the dirty myrmidon.

The silver man pierced me with a condescending stare, “You think what we’re doing is pointlessness? You should talk. What of killing players on the road? Searching for lost bones you’d never find?”

A squeal boiled out of me.

“Your impossible hunt ended my life!” Ralos’s anger rose to match my own, but he composed himself with an equal speed. “Listen, I know you’re just a quest NPC, but something is seriously wrong with that graveyard. Whenever you do that mind sweep move, [Spell: Plunder Memory], it renders player characters unplayable! This is a vital quest line for Spirit Mages. Until we work out the bugs, nobody can learn [Spell: Summon Skeleton]. And you think this,” he made a broad gesture, “is pointless? No. It is the opposite.”

I did not reply, only seethed. ‘Quest Enn Pee See’?

“This is an RP-optional server, Mr. Gnarlroot the Eld. We can’t have an important questline knocking people offline permanently. How can one role-play if the stage itself kicks one out of the theatre? Ahem! You wish to reunite with your blasted bones? Well, we will grant it shortly.”

The nonchalance with which he made this claim disarmed me. My rage fizzled with sorrow and pain. Did the old knave mock me? I only comprehended his jargon-riddled speech in a vague way. Was he an old friend to sorrow and pain, like I?

“You see,” he said, drawing sigils on the floor with a thin glass rod, “like Hap Emerson, my bones were sunk without a coffin, finding their way into your yard; both a sad and fortunate fate. Now we can finally meet. Want to know why those bindings work? They’re ghostly simulacrums of your own oak tree’s roots, that’s why.”

I glowered at him, offended like a crow watching thieves steal his shiniest nest treasures. I teetered on despair.

A shadow fell over everything. I looked up to see a massive face looming; segmented a hundred times as if viewed through the compound eye of a fly. Some trick of the honeycombed architecture, I imagined. Azwold peered into the scepter. They must have shrunken me with dark magics. The man’s citrine eyes were the size of boulders now, leaving me nowhere to hide.

“The time has come,” the Warden announced. “Ours is righteous work, Oak Spirit. Restoring and maintaining the Balance; it’s never-ending. You can either support us in our tasks, or don’t. Begin your road to redemption, or abandon it. I doubt he’ll give you much of a choice, but I advise you to be open…to being of service.”

Warden Ralos smiled at me, tapped the sand with his rod of glass, then snapped his ethereal fingers. I vanished in a poof.

~<>*<>*<>~

Things were black, and then they weren’t. The closest thing in my realm of experience to the sensation was a rare lightning stroke to my oak.

I could experience my surroundings visually now. I appeared to be in a dingy kitchen—or a tavern mayhap—sitting at a table. Across from me sat Azwold. He was staring at me with keen interest. I couldn’t move… still. I felt like a cold puddle.

“Are we in there?” Azwold asked.

I sensed genuine curiosity in his tone. His dialect was peculiar but decipherable.

I had not spoken in a long, long time; until my transient stay in the scepter. And I did not wish to now. My thoughts already edged toward discovering the nearest exit in this odd place. It was almost as strange as the magic honeycomb light-cage. Was it a tavern? Everything looked slick under the dust. There was glass, and metal, and banded wooden tables, dark varnish hidden below a dusty sheen. Above, a bulb shed dim light from a contraption of rotating wooden blades, swirling up a dim strobe of hazy turbulence. Abandonment hung among the air.

“Listen, I’ve been working on this for a while, so I’m gonna need you to give me a sign that you hear my words,” said the bone thief. He leaned in on a fist to study me closer, setting the scepter on the table next to his elbow. The sight of it elicited an involuntary, disapproving sigh from me. I was capable of making sounds, of hearing, and seeing. This was good to discover. But I needed to learn more.

“Ex-plain,” I muttered with great and gravelly effort.

“Ha!” Azwold’s exclamation was half-celebratory, half-incredulous. “I knew you weren’t a regular minion pet! I wonder if he’s intelligent?”

“Bones,” I creaked out in a long, airy whisper. My anger remained intact and strong. I wasted no words. The filthy burglar needed only a single utterance to know what I demanded.

“Hmmm,” the man’s mirth dwindled. Azwold sat back and linked his fingers together. He stared at me as if considering.

“You’ve wanted it all this time,” he said. “Now you’ve finally got most your bones and can’t even tell.” Azwold shook his head. But I did not care for his pity. His gaze stayed fixed on me over his steepled knuckles, “Can you move? Look down.”

Bleary, I tried. With no measurable movement, I saw my rune-defiled femur in my downward peripheral vision. Energized by a cascade of death-dulled emotions, I raised my right arm to drop it on the table with a bony clacking. The reward for my effort was a sight; my skeletal hand entwined in thin vines.

Frisson jumbled together with confusion. All I could manage was a weak, “What?”

Azwold offered a grim grin and his tension relaxed a little. “Alright. We’re gonna be working together for a while. I’ll do the good faith thing here and fill you in a bit, yeah?”

I nodded. A simple head movement, but it filled me with a forgotten experience; the impossible-to-pin-down joy of not being dead, mixed with the dread.

“Some people stick around after they die. My class quests revolve around identifying cases where restless spirits have taken a turn for the ugly. To find them and put them to rest.” He pointed at me; “but you’re different. You killed a bunch of my friends’s characters. Imagine getting all the way to your questline and then having to re-roll.”

A shift in Azwold’s tone made me nervous. My disadvantage in the situation was obvious. I decided then that whatever this man wanted from me, mayhap I would play along until I understood more. Vengeance had waited this long. A little longer would not matter much.

Azwold continued and I listened; “Your case has been troublesome. I’m gonna keep calling you Eld, okay? Until we figure out what’s going on with you, that’s your name. Anyway, I’ve been digging up anything I can, in and out of game. I’m honestly not sure how much I should tell you. Something or someone has buried more than dead players in your graveyard. Secrets. What little I’ve found brings us to where we are now. We’ve tried everything short of literally playing out the questline and seeing what happens. We had to put you in stasis, of course, to not get brain zapped. And we had to modify things to allow for the black box. There are several ways to electrify the yard for the quest, but I have access to certain things average players don’t. Put your other hand on the table.”

Having no skin, my frown was internal, but I did as asked. The bone ended at the wrist. There was no hand. A gentle shudder wove through me.

“So here’s what I’ve done; each time I visited the graveyard, I took the greenest, most sinew-like [Runner Vine]s from your tree. There’s a sizable respawn timer, but we felt we shouldn’t try to work around it. I collected them. Had a druid keep them rejuvenated and pliable. I’ve used them here to lash all your bones together, to make your skeletal shape. I also collected [Ectoplasmic Slime]. It glops out of the Spirit Realm whenever you get all murderous. I’ve glued your joints with it. Basically, I’ve reanimated your skeleton by trapping your spirit inside of it.”

“Why?” I wheezed. I grew impatient of enduring lectures on how I came to be like this.

“I need you to help me find the rest of your bones,” the Spirit Mage said matter-of-factly. “Ralos thinks if we carry on with the quest, we may get a clearer picture. And I think he could be right. Each quest step we complete brings a new lost bone. And cool gear, too. But the data! And with new game data may come lost memories. That is the quest story after all, Gnarlroot the Eld becoming whole, et cetera, et cetera. And just because I’m a game dev. doesn’t mean I don’t want to level up my dude. And learning why a being like you becomes malevolent; invaluable to my work.”

“I am not malevolent,” I groaned malevolently.

“It’s easy to think so when your lore says you’ve gone centuries slipping into irrational behavior, the mini-lord of your own little world-place.” Azwold squinted at me. “But you’re obviously compromised in some way. I just hope you’re not as crazy as the lore has you written. Honestly, I’m kinda lucky to have you as a case study. You have any idea how rare you are? The other Spirit Mages are gonna whizz their britches when I’m able to show you off. Eventually. Gotta keep it quiet for now, though.”

“Must. Be. Whole,” I rasped. My missing hand bones kept the angry fires of incompleteness stoked. Much of what he told me was borderline nonsense. Still… my curiosity was not altogether absent.

“And I’m glad you can tell me so!” he said. “Skeletons don’t have tongues, nor lungs. So, in place of lungs, I hung a lattice of structured beeswax. Your spooky voice? It emanates from your animation source; that little ball of lavender ectoplasm lodged between your collarbones. This is theoretical stuff, Eld. Ralos and I have been on the case for a while here. Anyway, suffice to say that most [Spell: Summon Skeleton]s can’t talk.”

He stared at me a moment. To catch his long-winded breath, I supposed. He carried on; “You entombed a whole graveyard full of spirits, Mr. Gnarlroot. The roots of your anger grew too deep to allow other spirits to break through. Kinda like you were their iron fence, huh?” he showed his grave-iron bracelet in case I had forgotten. So long as he wore my fence iron, it protected the mage from me.

Azwold grabbed the scepter and brought the head of it up to eye level. He peered into its dim, neon grey glow. “You kept those players’ spirits hostage for the price of your bones. So Ralos and I devised plans on how to set some wrongs right. One mage inside and one outside the [Hive Scepter]. That was the best way to make it work. We brought you back to join our quest, and I needed his help to shove you out. Aid our path, spirit. You might recover parts of your lost memory along the way. We’ll start with plundering your lost left hand. What do you say?” He lowered the scepter to have a square look at me.

The mage wants to finish bringing my bones together. Perhaps our fates entwined fortunately for now. A shared goal.

Still, I was skeptical.

I concentrated on uttering a cohesive sentence; “What can a twine-and-bone golem… like me… do that you cannot?”

“Well, the bad news is your skele-skills are back to square one. Wiped. No more psychic ghost abilities. We’re gonna have to do a little grinding, probably. Don’t worry, you’ll catch up. There’s a huge XP bonus till you get closer to 33. That’s my current level. But you can do many, many other things, of course. Skeletons aren’t just pocket tanks, oh no. You don’t have to breathe and have no heartbeat. How’s that for a start?” He smacked the table. I jittered.

I did not see any value extreme enough to do what this took. Blank, I stared at him, wondering what a “pocket tank” was. By now, I was learning to ignore the nonsense parts of his blathering.

“You don’t have to eat. You’re immune to poison. I can make it so your threat range is almost non-existent to ocean mobs. Sharks won’t do more than give you a little sniff, I bet.”

“I see no sharks,” my reply was flat.

“You’ll be happy for this advantage because I know where your hand is hiding. I think.”

“Undersea?” I croaked.

“Kinda. A sunken oubliette by the beach. It’s become flooded, and the water is too toxic for the living.”

“Dungeon? No.”

“You have no idea what it took to find this place, Eld. The sources I had to tap for info…” he stood, shaking his head. “I have access to unusual means, like I said. Still, I hit more road blocks than seem logical.”

I eyeballed him, wondering how I saw at all without eyeballs in my skull. A disquieting curiosity crept into me; was I grisly to behold?

“What are you afraid of, dying again?” Azwold shrugged. “Because I’m pretty sure that can’t happen.” He studied me, pondering something. He shook his head as if dismissing some silly notion, then continued; “You’re bound to me now, so you’ll just respawn when I summon you. If you take critical structural damage, your spirit chooses a more significant fragment of skeleton to inhabit.” He pondered a few moments. “I’m not sure what would happen if every bone but one were obliterated. Then, if that one became damaged, how long until your spirit is just inhabiting the biggest particle of dust? Then what? How tiny can you get until there’s not a particle big enough to haunt?”

I did not like this line of thought and opened my jaw to protest, but the mage continued; “Anyway, I’m asking you to help. If you refuse, then I will have to waste energy forcing you to help. I’d rather not.”

My ribcage rumbled with trouble. I held my left arm up to stare at my big, bare wrist knuckle. I looked down at the table.

“Step 1: find the hand,” he pushed on. “Step 2: get the memory data. Step 3: ????. Step 4: profit. Repeat. Mix in some levels and loot along the way? That’s a lot of win.”

He was right. To be whole again, with all my bones; the draw of this idea was too strong to reject. The Spirit Mage begins my servitude with a task he knew I could not refuse. Azwold’s cleverness annoyed me.

“Very well,” I sighed, “Let us go.”