In the land of the blind, the ones guided by the hand of God rule.

Wisdom of the Ancients, Book 1

The plains Johanna was on resembled Ancient ruins in general appearance. But Ancient ruins ground down to an endless nearly homogenous field of rubble, of broken bricks and pieces of wood, without the slightest trace of building walls or anything that normally peppered such things. The only thing that stood up in the distance was a gigantic contraption of metal wires and rods, a chair that could never have seated a normal person comfortably. But the chair held a skeleton. The huge seated bones dominated the perspective, seemingly stretching to the ultra-blue skies, seemingly divided by bright lines. And the skull atop that skeleton… looked toward her, with cavernous eyes that seemed to swallow even space around them.

There was no doubt in Johanna’s mind about which skeleton it was.

“Who are you? What are you?” she asked, futilely.

I was no one, and I am no one.

She hadn’t expected an answer. Let alone that kind of silent answer, as if it was half-whisper, half-thoughts, coming down from afar.

“Are you really an Ancient? Everyone says they lived like gods. Are you an Ancient god?”

All I was is gone. All I am is now.

The answer was more cryptic than she’d have liked. But, expecting an Ancient Power to be talking like a normal person was foolish on her part.

The Dead Ancient pushed on the armrests, stood up from its chair, and started walking toward her.

She backpedaled, trying to keep her distance from the Power. But despite everything, the skeleton closed in, slowly shrinking until it was nearly as tall as a person rather than a giant, city-sized figure. As it reached her, she found herself raising her arms in defense, trying to invoke – futilely – her powers. But no flame came, and the skeleton merely ignored her, reaching her… and passed through her, as if it was smoke. Or as if she was.

Cold, freezing smoke. A kind of cold she hadn’t felt since that book’s conversion into parchments of power. She turned, looking behind her, and saw the skeleton stop at the lip of some cliff.

She joined up with the weird figure and looked down.

There were clouds below, an inverted covering of white below instead of the weirdly blue sky above. But over that blanket were drawn four huge squares, bordered by colorless manalight. One showed Laura at some kind of wood table, one showed Peter at a similar table, one was all dark, with indistinct shapes, and one had a bar counter with an animated pair of people looking back toward her. She heard Tom’s voice, asking about local ruins, and one of the people said that one had basically vanished over the course of a year two decades ago.

She realized suddenly that the square showing Laura also had Tom in the background, seated at the inn’s bar and she could see to his side one of the persons from the other square.

The four squares were them. That black square was hers, she realized, asleep in the inn’s upper room. Laura and Peter were seated at the same table, holding hands and talking to each other about periods, and maybe she was with child, while Tom was drinking at the bar, chatting with the patrons about the area.

“That’s us. You’re looking… through us?”

I belong here, you belong there.

She shivered. Then she realized it confirmed everything. Like them suddenly gaining new abilities to match the challenges they were facing. The Dead Ancient watched over them. All of them. All the time.

“Why? Why are you helping us?”

You are Chosen. You came to me, and you gave me your choice. Now, I can choose for you, when it is possible.

She almost asked if she could choose to have her old life back. But that would be futile. You couldn’t undo the past. And she needed all that the Dead Power could give her, give them to navigate the dangerous world she was living in now.

“I still don’t know what you want from us.”

The skeleton turned and went back, somehow passing through her again despite her trying to dodge it. She turned and found herself facing… a library.

Shelves of books, in Ancient form, stretched as if a labyrinth. The skeleton went in between two rows, and she followed hurriedly.

The shelves gave way to a circular room, spokes filled with incredibly tall bookshelves leading out from there. In the middle of the room stood a table, and on the table was… the world.

At least she assumed it was. Mistress Vanu, when she taught the kids back in Anasta, had shown them once an ancient map showing all the great expanses of land and sea, and the rock and tiny rivers evoked one of those great lands as if it had been shrunk to fit the table.

The Ancient Skeleton walked to the side and stopped. She joined him, and the side of the map expanded as she approached, growing as if she was approaching what it represented. A coast grew, great bays visible until the land rushed, filled the table, and abruptly stopped at the same time she did. She was looking at a city ruin, an Ancient city that didn’t look like the familiar ruins back northwest, with an enormous building nearly intact in the middle of the table. There was another ruin of a sumptuous building next to it, with a long rectangular copse of trees extending toward the outside of the border of the “map”, bordered by more ruins, and a weird tall column in the far distance. Somehow, it felt as if she could see beyond the borders of the table.

The Power to shape is there. What makes your allies begins there.

“You want me to go there?”

Books are ideas. Ideas are power.

“The Ancients are gone. Why books? Why theirs? Why do you need books? Because you’re one of them?”

The skeleton stayed silent this time, looking at her with its empty eyes. Then, it finally spoke weirdly.

People have forgotten the world. But ideas linger on. I can choose powers among the ideas, but I cannot make new ideas.

It turned and looked at the building.

But I can turn old ideas into new powers. The powers the world needs.

She blinked in the darkness of the inn’s bedroom.

“Now, that’s the most strangest encounter I ever had,” Johanna said. Then she closed her eyes again and fell asleep again instantly.

It had taken him some time to wait until one had gone upstairs in that Inn to catch some sleep. But once Johanna had hit the pillow, the Yes option had finally popped up.

Direct options

Pull

5000XP + 500XP/level (8000)

Confirm

No

Yes (9724 XP available)

He had only one choice visible for now unless he wanted to wait for more XP. Maybe there was another hidden somewhere, but that was it. The only help available when focusing on the option said “Pull”, which was somewhat stupidly redundant with the option name.

So, this was a surprise when he saw a… kind of globe, of skills and numbers wrapped in ways that didn’t quite make sense, stretch out from the window into the middle of the abstract space and pop there.

No, not a globe. A sphere, or maybe a hyper-sphere. A wrapping surface around a core that was qualitatively different. And he realized that, somehow, Johanna was in there. She – at least the abstraction of her, like one of those old memes drawings of a super-powered brain with glowing neurons – was now brought – “pulled” – to his space.

Douglas Moore had no idea how the exchange had gone. In the abstract quasi-spaceless void of the Beyond, what had she seen when she’d popped in? But she’d followed him around, in a strange way, as he tried to show her the Beyond, the windows, to make her understand what he was, an HR staff guy and amateur gamer lost in some incomprehensible afterlife, trying to vicariously cling to life through them 150 years after the world ended, trying to give them skills since they did not have access to them, the ability to pick their path.

He had spent quite a lot of Experience Points to bring her, trying to talk. But that was futile. He was still pretty sure she spoke some form of English, given that was what was written everywhere, but he could no longer hear her voice, either in the world or in “person”. He did not think he had been any clearer. He had no mouth or anything either. From her reactions, the reactions of the weird abstraction she had been while there, she’d perceived things. Seen and heard things, maybe. But what, exactly?

He still hoped he’d been able to convey to her his idea somehow. Together, they could bestow the power of the System, and recruit allies. Hand people the tools to beat back those mana zones and their Changed beasts, and reclaim their world, all of their world. And they needed lots of books to do that.

Given how weirdly preserved some ruins were, there ought to be some libraries or bookstores with enough intact books to start the ball rolling. It was a band-aid, a temporary non-sustainable solution, but it was all he had for now. He didn’t have a cooldown, a resource to expend. He could work as fast as they could lay their hands on some pre-Apocalypse books. And they’d get power to offer to allies, power to stand against whatever the world would throw at them. And then reclaim the wild parts of the world.

I wonder how the world will react.

And how much XP is there for me.