Charlie, as it turned out, was indeed a soldier. Em had tried to ask him about his background, but they didn’t learn much more than that. Charlie’s voice was too mangled to be easily understood, and he quickly got too frustrated to continue trying to talk.

The next day, the new arrivals were rounded up and lined up in front of one of the houses, where they entered one by one to be examined by the troglodyte. The few “rotters” like Charlie—those who hadn’t attuned any essence so far—were sent to Agatha.

At the door, an aide whose name Reshid didn’t catch went through a list of questions with each of them, ranging from what his name was, to what skills and education he had, to what he could remember about his life before waking up in the crypt.

Reshid couldn’t remember much of his life before his death, but he did his best to answer. He had been a merchant, of sorts, traveling between cities. He couldn’t remember where he had died, and he had no military experience he could remember. He knew a smattering of phrases in other languages, could write and do figures, and still knew a few basic historical facts. The aide dutifully wrote everything down, though Reshid couldn’t imagine how the information would be useful.

Then Bartholomew stood over him, poking at the bark growths on his face and chest with a large clawed finger as he sat on a small wooden stool facing the creature.

“Curious. You’ve definitely attuned to some kind of cultivation essence, but it’s almost like there wasn’t enough of it. You’re in terrible physical condition for a life elementalist.”

Reshid raised an eyebrow. “What? I feel great. Pretty good, anyway. The others don’t look any better.”

What was he talking about?

The trogg huffed out a breath. “Well, yes, technically, but that’s beside the point. It’s not just about appearances. You have arthritis, for goodness’ sake! Look at these fingers! It just doesn’t happen. Not with cultivation essence. You should be brimming with verve, not sitting there rubbing your back!” The trogg seemed agitated, and Reshid couldn’t tell if the creature was excited or annoyed by the mystery. Self consciously, he stopped rubbing and placed his hands in his lap.

He was unsure of how to respond, so he didn’t.

Bartholomew frowned, “We need to get to the bottom of this. Tell me about how you attuned this essence. Where did you find it? What happened? Did you get interrupted in the process? When...”

Reshid raised a hand to stop him, irritated now, and acutely aware of his knobby, crooked fingers. “What happened? Monsters have been hunting and trying to kill me for as long as I’ve been down here. I don’t know anything about this place, or about cultivation. How would I know if anything went wrong? I lived, that was good enough for me at the time.”

“Don’t be daft,” the trogg frowned at him, “Ghouls don’t kill people... mostly. They’re revenants, just like you. Sort of, anyway. Regardless, you’re here because the Confederation is looking to take advantage of the unique services that revenants can provide. The town belongs to revenants like you, or it did until the Free Cities soldiers moved in. I doubt the locals really mind the extra security, though.”

As he was talking, Bartholomew had turned around to search through a small box of crystals of various shapes and colors. After a few seconds, he turned back to Reshid holding a tiny green crystal between his fingers. It glowed very softly, and he recognized it. It looked almost exactly like the one that he had seen embedded in the vial that he had traded to Thelonious what felt like a lifetime ago.

“This crystal creates cultivation essence. I have no way to tell if it’s very similar to your own, because I don’t know the exact source of this crystal, but you should be able to use it.”

Reshid reached out, and Bartholomew slapped his hand away. “Not like that! Try to draw it in, however you did it the first time. And tell me about how you attuned it.”

His fingers stung.

“I ate a pine nut. I was dying, starting to fall apart, really, and I got so hungry. There was this tree near a stream, and I found some good pinecones. When I bit down on it, the essence just sort of flowed in. More came from the tree itself, I think, but I was pretty out of it.”

Reshid tried to remember exactly what it had felt like. Reaching out his hand again, he gave the trogg a defiant look, inhaled sharply, and tried to visualize pulling the essence into his hand. The crystal dimmed slightly, and then a wisp of green light drifted to his hand and sank into it. That wasn’t so hard.

He felt it course through his blood and warm him. It was far less than he had gotten from the tree, but that didn’t bother Reshid. The crystal was tiny after all. This was great.

Over a few seconds, he felt the pain in his fingers ease, and then the essence was gone. Wiggling his slightly straighter fingers, Reshid laughed.

The implications of this weren’t lost on him. This was about more than just his arthritis. If this worked the way he thought, he might be able to reverse the ravages of old age entirely. He hadn’t really considered this sort of thing back when he had first gotten attuned back in the forest. He’d chosen it mostly by accident.

The crystal had already brightened again, so Reshid reached out for more, excited. But, when he drew it out this time, the wisp of essence was even thinner.

Bartholomew’s frown, which had never wavered, deepened. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You’ve got to be the weakest revenant ever. If you’d gone with any essence that didn’t have such a strong healing factor, you probably would have just wasted away.”

The troglodyte paced around the small room. “Did something go wrong when you reanimated? What happened?”

“Uh…” Reshid hesitated, confused. “I just woke up in the crypt. The guards wouldn’t let me out, so I went down instead…I don’t remember much from before.”

Bartholomew grunted, dissatisfied. Then he stopped. “No other details? Perhaps voices, visions… uh, dreams maybe?”

Reshid shook his head.

“Well, that’s different. Yes… Do you know what brought you back, exactly? Did you get a blessing from a temple to Morana? Did a lich curse you, maybe?”

“No. I don’t know.” Reshid answered, “Like I said, I don’t remember much. Why would Morana's blessing make revenants?”

The trogg ignored the question, scribbling notes on a sheet of paper. Then he handed him the tiny essence crystal. Looking closely, he realized that it wasn’t a real crystal at all. It didn’t have the sharp regular angles one would normally expect. Rather, it was a tiny piece of green-glowing amber.

“It’s only a temporary issue, nothing to worry about. Practice drawing in essence with this as much as you can. You’ll get a little bit stronger with time. Just keep going with as much as you can handle, you wouldn’t be able to overdraw enough to matter if you tried right now. In the morning, I want you to go see Agatha, she enjoys problem cases. She’ll find a way to use you, even if you won’t be much help in the fields just yet.”

He dismissed him by nodding toward the door, “Send in whoever’s next on your way out, and be back at the stables by nightfall.”

––

Reshid spent the rest of the day wandering the town, trying to get his bearings. There were fewer than a hundred houses in the village, haphazardly laid out around the small walled fort in the middle. Some were built in clusters, with neighbors separated by a single wall, while others stood alone, surrounded by small fields. Most of the villagers were revenants, some of which looked truly fascinating. One had horns and the same odd, square-pupiled eyes as the sheep he was watching. Another, tending to a flowerpot in a window, looked almost like a living sandstone statue. The strangest was a guard near the fort entrance, who floated a few feet off the ground and seemed to periodically disintegrate into smoke before reforming—clothes and all. A few waved to him, recognizing him as a new arrival. Reshid greeted them back—he didn’t want to seem rude—but he didn’t engage anyone in conversation, and no one pressed him. His experiences in the Deep Paths so far had taught him to be wary of friendly-seeming strangers. Better to take things slow.

The living people didn’t mix with the revenants much. They were mostly soldiers and kept to themselves inside the walled fort area, and travelling in small groups on whatever errands brought them down into the Deep Paths in the first place. They ignored Reshid—for the most part.

As he turned a corner, Reshid saw a guard standing over a weakly thrashing shape.

“Where did you get that? Robbing graves from below?” The man kicked the figure in the stomach, flipping it over to reveal Charlie’s mangled face. He leaned down, and started tugging off Charlie’s jacket, who looked more bewildered than pained as the man shouted at him.

Reshid froze, unsure what to do.

“You don’t get to disrespect our fallen comrades, demon! You might have the brass fooled, but we’ll get justice with or without their help. We know who the enemy is, and you can tell the other ghoul-lovers that.”

The man spat at Charlie, and walked off, carrying the remains of his jacket with him. As he went, he looked back, seeing Reshid for the first time. He met his gaze and spat again, fingering the sword hilt at his hip. It was a threat if he’d ever seen one.

When the man was gone, he went to help Charlie up. Surprisingly, the rotter seemed uninjured, though the crutch he had been using to get around was broken.

“What the hell was that about?” Reshid asked.

Charlie shrugged wordlessly, gripped Reshid’s arm, and began to hobble back toward the stable.

–-------

“Nightfall” in the caverns was unmistakable, if somewhat of a misnomer. The light crystals dimmed noticeably, though this cavern had far too many of the massive crystals to allow for anything resembling the dark of night. Why the crystals worked in time with the sun was, as far as Reshid knew, a mystery.

When the time came, they joined Em and the other Revenants for dinner near the stables. Hasan and his small team of Revenants had brought lunch to their new recruits earlier, but a small woman named Eiri had complained loudly about the quality of the cooking, much to the visible discomfort of Hasan, who had apparently made the rather crunchy soup himself.

Rather than punishing her, as Reshid had expected, Hasan had retaliated by giving her the job. A wood revenant, ironically named Leif, built an outdoor kitchen in front of their accommodations in a matter of minutes. The way he worked was fascinating, reshaping and fusing lumber, twigs, and even some firewood into a raised cutting surface, a sealable storage area, long narrow tables, benches, and a variety of wooden containers with his power.

Hasan, for his part, added a stone oven. His technique was fascinating. He put his hand on the ground and pulled, causing a broad spike of solid rock to erupt upward with a loud crack. Then he simply rammed his hand into the stone as if he was trying to break his own fingers. Instead, his fingers broke the stone. A few strategic strikes later he was brushing gravel out of a solid stone oven. It was incredible, and Reshid couldn’t help but wonder if there was a way he could learn to do that.

As he went to line up for a bowl, Reshid’s stomach grumbled hungrily. As far as he could tell, not all Revenants needed food, but that didn’t stop them from eating Eiri’s cooking. The woman clearly knew what she was doing and Reshid made sure to compliment her and flash her a friendly smile as she handed him a plate.

It always pays to be friends with the cook.

Sitting down with his companions, Reshid told Em and Charlie about what he’d learned. He carefully sat upwind of Charlie, and avoided watching him eat. The man’s jaw wasn’t moving quite right anymore as he chewed—it was more than a little disturbing. Bartholomew had apparently been much more impressed with Em than Reshid, especially by her control over her essence. Em rolled her eyes when she told them about it.

“I don’t know what had him so excited, really. Air is everywhere. You don’t even have to go looking for essence! I can’t imagine that air revenants would be rare. ”

Still, none of them had seen anyone else around the town that looked like they might have a similar attunement. Bartholomew referred her to Hasan, saying she would probably be trained as a scout. She’d spent the rest of her day meeting Hasan’s revenants along with a few other newcomers that had been selected to join Hasan’s little army.

Charlie, they knew, had been sent to Agatha but he didn’t even try to explain what his day had been like. Talking didn’t seem to hurt him but he just shrugged when they asked, and they didn’t push. Reshid wouldn’t want to talk much either if he had to worry that his jaw might fall off.

After dinner, Reshid went to turn in for the night. Reshid’s back ached and his knees creaked, and he couldn’t wait to lie down. On his way to bed, he pulled out the tiny essence crystal, and drew a wisp of essence into himself, which helped a little. Bartholomew had said that his essence would fix him up eventually. That time couldn’t come soon enough for him.

–

Agatha lived and worked in a small half-timber house set right up against the palisade wall. Rather, the palisade, made of unseasoned timber, was set against the house. Reshid found it easily.

Charlie sat on a stool across from Agatha in front of the home, staring intently at a small glowing box that she held up in a gloved hand. He was trying to draw in the essence that shone in the crystal. Reshid stopped to watch, and after a minute of trying, the former soldier sat back with a resigned gurgle that was probably supposed to be a sigh.

“Never mind, don’t get discouraged” said Agatha consolingly, closing the box and setting it down on the ground, “There are plenty more to try. Besides, we don’t even know if any of these can be used to create revenants in the first place. I invented that one myself.” She picked up something else, and held it out. It was a metallic-looking cube and emitted no light that Reshid could see. Charlie reached out, trying to work out how to draw on it the same way Reshid had done the day before.

He and Em had tried to teach him to draw in cultivation essence from his crystal after dinner last night with no success. Agatha, it looked like, had a similar idea.

He wasn’t sure what to think of this. Apparently she was trying to help Charlie to become a revenant. That was good. What was less good was that she was obviously doing it by experimenting on him with essences she didn’t fully understand. He didn’t know very much about essence crystals or the energies involved, but this was definitely reckless. Everybody knew that essences and crystals weren't something to play around with.

Reshid and Em had worked together to look after Charlie the last few days, and the idea that this woman might now accidentally melt him into a rancid soup in pursuit of her own ends didn’t sit well with him. He wasn’t exactly a friend, but he felt responsible for him.

“This is an order crystal.” She explained enthusiastically. “At least that’s what I was trying to create. It’s very stable, but we’ve only managed to make the one. I don’t think it emits any essence at all ...at least I haven’t been able to detect any. Instead, we think that it incorporates any essence it generates back into itself in a basically inert feedback loop. It’s very tricky to create the right conditions for an abstract essence crystal, and the results can be difficult to predict. Still, a revenant with the ability to enforce or maybe manipulate order… I can’t even guess what that would look like, but it would be groundbreaking!”

Neither of the two acknowledged him, and Reshid wasn’t sure if he was waiting for an invitation, or eavesdropping. One of them was being rude, regardless. Grumbling a quiet curse to himself, he approached the two and sat down.

Agatha looked at him, surprised, as if just noticing him. Eavesdropping, then. Then her eyes flicked to the bark on his face.

“Ah! You’re the cultivator.” she said, face breaking into an easy smile, “Reshid, right?”

Reshid nodded. He didn’t smile back.

“Hi. Bartholomew sent me. Uh, isn’t what you’re doing here kind of dangerous? Did Charlie agree to this?”

She hesitated a moment. “Well, it’s safer than waiting to see what happens if he doesn’t attune to an essence soon. Becoming a revenant with an abstract, artificially developed essence like this could be revolutionary!” She exhaled, excitement dimming slightly, and added, somewhat defensively, “Besides, we’ve also tried a few more conventional options. He hasn’t had any luck with any of the usual elemental options.”

Charlie exhaled, shook his head, and handed the odd cube back. Agatha put it away and pulled out a rock. It didn’t look like any kind of crystal to Reshid, but she held it out to Charlie like she had the others.

“This is not one of those, probably. It’s just a rock, but it’s stuffed full of essence. Hasan found it when we were prospecting for essence sources about a month ago. He told me that it’s not any kind of stone essence, which is very strange for… well… a rock. He couldn’t tell what it was either. It could be something entirely new. Give it a try.”

Looking a little more hesitant, Charlie reached out and took the stone out of her hand.

Immediately, he began to disintegrate. His skin seemed to whither, and his hair blew away as a small cloud of dust. Agatha looked shocked for a second, before turning to Reshid.

“Heal him!” She yelped.

Reshid gaped. “What? You killed him!”

Charlie was writhing, the skin on his head peeling back to reveal already-aged grayish bone. Agatha grabbed Reshid by the arm, pulling in panic.

“Your essence. It grows things—has life in it. Do it now! Go, go!”

Reshid fumbled the little green crystal out of his pocket, pulling the essence out and into himself. Then he reached out, touching Charlie’s rapidly withering arm, and tried to mentally push it out. In a rush, it was gone.

Well, that wasn’t so hard.

For a moment, nothing happened. Charlie lay on the ground where he had collapsed, no longer struggling, and not breathing, so far as Reshid could tell. Maybe it just wasn’t enough.

Then he gasped, drawing in an agonized breath. A hundred tiny wisps of green light flickered from the palisade, from the grass, and from the crystal Reshid still held in his hand until it went completely dim.

Slowly, he began to… uh, heal? His exposed flesh first grew mold, then began to fill in with fungal-looking growths. Agatha stared, face full of horror and fascination.

He kept drawing in essence, but now dimmer green, then yellowed and brown wisps came from the soil in the garden and, for some reason, from under the roof of the house.

Skin grew back, though it looked like old leather that had been left outside over winter, discolored and cracked. His fingernails looked like weathered chips of wood. When his eyes opened, they were darkly yellowed, with mud-brown irises.

“What…” He reached up, patting himself down, and then sat up. “What was that? What happened?”

His voice still sounded a bit rough, but nothing nearly so horrific as before. Agatha was looking thoughtfully back and forth between her garden and the house, so Reshid answered for her, voice rising as he spoke.

“You let a mad scientist experiment on you and almost died! What the hell were you thinking?” He raised his hand as if to slap the boy on the back of the head, then stopped himself. He wasn’t entirely sure where the emotions had come from, but his heart was pounding. Still, he wasn’t the young man’s father.

Charlie looked taken aback. He looked down at himself. “Well, it worked out, I’d say. Even if we have no idea what this is.”

Agatha looked back at him, already excited again, “You infused him with some cultivation essence while he was attuning. So, he attuned it along with the other one. Makes sense, right? I had no idea this kind of mid-attunement adjustment was possible! He has a mixed essence. The first one was directly destructive somehow. Or maybe there’s an essence for time itself, or age. Put life and growth together with that, and you get whatever he’s got. Decay, maybe. Or something for the types of living things that break down and destroy other things. I’ve read about it before, but I’ve never heard of someone combining conceptually simpler essences into more complex ones.” She was practically glowing with excitement, and furiously took notes with a clipboard that had appeared in her hand almost as if by magic. “This is going to be revolutionary!”

At that, Reshid realized that Charlie didn’t stink anymore. He still smelled, but much more pleasantly. The cutting reek of turned meat had given way to that of old leaves, soil, and wet moss.

Charlie himself looked contemplative, studying the back of his no longer human-looking hand.

Agatha took a step toward him, taking the rock that he still held clutched in his other hand.

“You can take the rest of the day off and see if you can find any good essence sources.” She said gently, “ I think you might be unique. That could be important soon.” He looked up at her and nodded firmly, then rose. “Stay close to the village, though. It’s dangerous out there. We’ll start working out what you can actually do tomorrow.”

The former soldier stood straight. Reshid though he was about to salute, but he nodded and walked off, heading back toward the stable.

Turning to Reshid, Agatha pointed at his cultivation crystal. “So, I can see what your problem is. Barty wasn’t kidding. You can’t move more than a little wisp of essence.”

Reshid nodded, but said somewhat defensively. “It seems to work well enough. Look,” he wiggled his fingers at her, “I healed these just since yesterday.”

She grinned, “Nice! Still, not exactly up to standard, though. Anyone can use their essence to help heal or repair themselves. Yours is almost perfectly designed for it, so it should work better for you than for other people.

Healing others, growing food, and whatever else is harder than that. That’s bad, because we need revenants like you for both. Food security is a major issue during wartime, and there isn’t a lot of arable land here. At least, not very much that we can protect from the ghouls.”

“Hmm. If it’s so dangerous, why are you even down here?”, Reshid asked, “Living people can’t use revenant powers, and you can’t learn anything new for your crystal contraptions here that you couldn’t more easily research on the surface.”

Her eyebrows rose in surprise, “Isn’t it obvious? Revenants are the new frontier! We’re doing science here!”

Her expression turned down a little into a grimace. “Also, we don’t have much of a choice. Ghouls started coming up from below a few years ago, and our neighbors on the surface are starting to smell weakness. We need all the help we can get, and you’re it. You can learn to grow food for us, or Hasan can try to figure out how to use you for the fighting.”

Reshid felt a quivering feeling of dread settle into the pit of his stomach. He spat and grimaced, pushing down disjointed scraps of painful memories. More war. Of course.