“You know I died three times, isn't it? That...”

“Yeah, everybody can be resurrected two times per year by an angel. The other deaths do not count in the main statistics, only the angel resurrections do!”

This info took White Flower by surprise as she wondered:

"Really? You can be resurrected by an angel? Really? I mean you can buy an angel resurrection?"

Meanwhile, Tina admonished Spartacius for the interruption:

“Stop interrupting, Sparty!”

“Sparty?”

White Flower called them to order:

“Tina, Sparty!”

Unbelieving that an NPC would give him a nickname, he still wondered:

“Sparty!?”

The Lynx coughed: "Ahem!". Alice kept silent looking intensively at me.

I sighed. There was finally silence, so I continued:

“True, if you pay the high fees for an angel's resurrection, you may be resurrected, but only two times per year. It is a truly fascinating experience. Some people let themselves be killed from time to time just to experience the feeling. Beautiful, silver-gold angels come. They collect your poor self and treat you in their golden hands. You feel like... No, you are clay being transformed into a living being. You feel their soothing touch everywhere divine magic penetrates and washes over you, like a pleasant crystalline river flowing over you, the river of life. Where and what it touches, life sprouts. The clay becomes alive. This is what an angel's resurrection is."

"Can everybody do this? I mean: pay for an angel's resurrection?"

I watched Tina. Spartacius countered:

"Now, you are interrupting!"

I ignored him:

"I don't think so. Probably only players can do it, but I do not know for sure. Well, if a player dies a third time in one year, he is being collected by Tenebra. She is also an angel and yet totally different. She does not have that golden look to her, she looks more like those mobs, the dark angels, those killing machines around the death node.

Tenebra, the angel of death. She does not come instantly. She lets you wait. She lets you hope that she will not come, that you may somehow cheat her and survive. And then, all of a sudden, everything dims out. As if the sun loses its power. Shadows descend over you. You are a ghost, you do not feel the cold, and yet you feel the chill in the air.

That shadow is not a simple shadow, but more like a presence that envelops you. She takes you.

She did not grasp you with her hands and yet you are trapped. You cannot move, you cannot hide. She takes you up, like a giant bird picking up a small snake for lunch, and she brings you to the so-called hero's chamber. Well, hero's chamber... This chamber is practically a giant graveyard where all you can do is review your past existence. You can ask the angel for more info about some events, for instance, who was the one that sent the arrow that killed you. She may answer you and show you more details, but she is not compelled to do so.

OK, whatever. So I died a third time, and it was during the same year. I should be dead.”

I turned toward Alice and looked into her eyes:

“You need to know it was not me, Dolores, here inside Cala at the time. It was Markus.”

She hugged me as if she would be pardoning me. Pardoning me from being Markus?

"How could you risk dying a third time? That was stupid!"

"Well, Spartacius" - I sighed - "There is a guaranteed way how you could survive in Mephisto: you do not play. Anything else has a risk. You stay in an inn and the inn could be attacked. You stay in a city and the city could be raided."

"Oh!"

I continued:

“Everybody has his strategy and theory on how to survive in Mephisto. You cannot win all your fights, so you cannot live long in this fucked-up world without having a worked-out plan on how to be resurrected when needed. Most people try to do this in groups. They look for safety in numbers. They need a healer who learns the resurrect spell, which can be learned only at a relatively high level, and then they go together. They may even have several groups helping each other. They build guilds or clans. They must however protect their healers and the groups are leveling slowly.

Remember our Terri? She was on the cusp to learn to resurrect, she did not know it yet. OK, some healers learn it at a lower level, it all depends on how she did set up her priorities, but you see how difficult it is to get a healer that can resurrect.

Leveling as a lone player is faster but riskier. This was the way Markus chose. He did not work with other players but with NPCs."

"Enpisis?"

I turned towards Tina and looked into her eyes. I sighed. It stayed on my tongue, and yet I could not tell her the whole truth: non-person characters. Uh. Non-person.

"It is what we players call the spawns of this world."

"You players?"

"Yes, I am a player, like all those who come from the other world to play inside this world."

"Play?"

White Flower chastised her:

"Tina, let her tell her story!"

"But..."

After one look from Alice, she refrained from further asking questions.

I shíghed again, trying to find my thread:

"Markus had an arrangement with Awala, a druid NPC."

They looked at me, and I corrected myself.

"A spawn. She was a high druid of Nohekhta, the green Goddess of the Woods. Markus had once saved her life even before she became a high druid. They were good friends. There was a lot of luck involved and a strong friendship. OK, I will not bother you with details.

When Markus died, his body was retrieved by his... spawn friends and brought to Awala. Everything needed to happen within less than five minutes. In some cases, it was Awala who was ported and resurrected me there. You know Alice, you also did this a couple of times.”

“But you were not dead, you only... you told me...”

I looked into her eyes. She understood now.

“Well, he told you... I told you that I'll survive for five minutes. But yes, I was dead. Resurrection is a thing here. Most spawns do not know. Some know and think it is divine intervention, but you could resurrect anybody within the short time frame of five minutes. You know this, Alice. It is a kind of magic CPR in this world, and you need to have your own ambulance doing it in time. OK, the arrangement did cost some money, as you needed to have the portal scrolls, prepare the option to break the fight and run retrieving the body, and have the druid ready to resurrect you, but it is a good option that works. As the last backup, you have the angels.”

“Oh! But that is cheating!”

“Cheating... Spartacius, everybody cheats where they can. Using the rules is not cheating. With time they made it more difficult, now you cannot open portals to any place but towns, to port someone also needs at least two people from your team to do it plus a specialized mage or a warlock, and so on. It came even so far that aggro mobs gathered and burned the bodies to ensure that the devils do not respawn.

I had two accidents last year, two times I had to be resurrected by an angel."

"Two accidents?"

"Yeah. Once the portal scroll malfunctioned. It simply exploded and almost killed Master Koro, who had cast it. The second time, there were two portal scrolls prepared, but the temple had been attacked exactly at the time when I was killed, and Awala could not come. Two fucking accidents or so...

Markus was becoming very careful. He took only very safe jobs, bidding his time, but as Murphy's rules go, shit happens when it can cause the most damage, I was attacked on a safe road by some wandering high-level mob. It was the third time a fucking accident happened. It was not inside the same calendar year, but less than a year since the first death, and worse, the mob did camp long enough over my body to make any resurrection impossible.

I died.

My soul was collected by Tenebra, who, surprisingly, proposed me a deal. You know Tenebra is some kind of a sponsor for the black church, the assassins' temple. She likes the work the assassins' guild does. She said that it would be a pity to remove me from this world, whilst I was serving her so bravely. She could resurrect me if I would promise to do a job for her.

I promised, and she did resurrect me. The problem was that, as the angel of death, she could not rebuild my body perfectly. She was lacking the skill, exercise, or talent to do so. She did patch me up, see there was an arrow in my left eye, one sword had cut my chest. It did cut deep. There was another cut that almost severed my head. You know, I was dead.”

I did point at the respective scars.

“She did promise she would fix everything once I did my job: kill Isera, the green angel. Well, I succeeded. She did help me. To help me succeed in my future mission, Tenebra did a little tweak when she resurrected me. She gave me high resistance to divine magic and life magic, but to achieve this I lost any resistance I had to shadow magic. Even worse, I got a weakness to shadow magic.

She promised everything was temporary. Yes, temporary. The question is, what do angels understand by temporary?”

"Angels can be killed? Are they not in many different places at the same time?"

I looked at White Flower, surprised that she knows this much about angels.

"Yes, that's what I thought, but I learned from Tenebra that they have one presence, the only one that matters, at their magic node. There is an altar there, and the true angel is there."

“Oh, so you killed an angel? How could you do such a thing? How could you be so cruel?”

Tina was shocked. I shrugged.

“It was my ticket to survival. Angels can be resurrected too. And they do not have the same time problem that we have. I thought that it was only a temporary death for her. There must have been some quarrel and trouble between the two angels. What I did not understand at the time was that Isera was the angel protector of Awala's temple. With the angel dead, Awala's temple was later raided, and she was killed. There was no angel to resurrect her and no temple to resurrect the angel.

I guess that raid was also helped to happen by an angel's hand. Somebody gave it a nudge or so."

I sighed.

"What do I know? This is just a supposition on my side. A couple of times I thought I recognized her scent. You know, once you have met her, it is impossible not to recognize her or her traces. It is not a smell and yet it is something comparable to the smell of decay. So yes, I do think I 'smelled' her when I checked that blasted portal scroll or the ruins of the temple. Tenebra has had her fun, and I got my anklet as a reward. It made the illusion that was cast over me tangible, palpable. Tenebra did also cast the illusion. My scars were covered with a smooth, perfect illusion. You could touch me and feel the smooth skin, caress my brow, and do not feel the scar. I could even have asked somebody to put a new illusion over me, and I could have acted as that person. I could have been Marilyn Monroe or Donald Duck. The anklet was cool. The perfect tool for an assassin."

I sighed again and continued:

"Markus did not know about Awala's demise. Only when he lost two spawns from his group did he find out that he did also lose the resurrection option that he so carefully maintained during his game life. Even worse, he found out that no other angel would ever resurrect me, for them I was dead. Tenebra did not answer his calls and I was left with this weakness to shadow magic. This is too big a weakness to fight any shadow priest or other shadow magic-user. See, this is why I said that Tenebra fucked me. Besides this, the three deaths. I should have known before. I suspect those things did not happen by pure happenstance. Markus was too careful to let it happen, all the years before nothing and then three, one after the other. I suspect some divine help was involved to make them happen. Tenebra needed a hangman.”

“You mean an angel tricked you? They have limited powers, they don't have much levy over this world. Did you not realize that she was maneuvering you?”

“When did you last time win a chess party against your computer? Especially when you do not know you are playing that chess party and you just move your pieces like playing checkers? With the shadow magic weakness, I was fucked. I could not take any more jobs against villains. I was pushed into a corner and would have been forced to kill only holy or divine high-level mobs. Realizing this, Markus left. But he was too much in love with Cala to let her die or just gather dust in a corner, he did what best he could, he gave me over to Dolores.”

I shrugged and hugged the furry leg. I got a kiss on my temple from Alice and then a swipe from a raw tongue.

“OK, OK, I am good, enough with the tongue!”

I laughed pushing him back and getting another swipe from the giant tongue.

Mount!? He is worse than a Saint-Bernard.