Timmat was born in the Heavenfall Enclave to a pair of young slaves, a miner and a waitress. He was raised knowing that because his parents were slaves and could not pay, the costs of his childhood would count against him when he finished his Tier Zero Path and became an adult. This didn’t faze him at all; it was simply the way the world was. His parents were still paying down their own childhood debt, after all, but things were good.

Baron Heavenfall was quite fair. He offered training to any debt-slave in the Enclave that you could take by increasing your debt even as a Tier Zero to try to get into a better Path to earn more and pay off the debt. People who took advantage of the offer and became even somewhat skilled could free themselves before they were thirty if they went into combat; crafting Paths like his father’s mining usually took a little longer, but as long as you saved your money for your buyout you could lead a fulfilling life and eventually free yourself and your children. Even those who avoided the extra debt of the training like Timmat’s mother were often able to free themselves by being frugal.

Unfortunately, Timmat wasn’t owned by the Baron; few slaves were. He was instead owned by the same man who owned his parents. This didn’t matter until Timmat was twelve and his father died in a mining collapse.

Timmat later heard from his mother that their owner had tried to assign his father’s remaining debt to her. When it didn’t work, he tried to assign it to Timmat. That didn’t work either because a past Baron Heavenfall had specifically prohibited assigning debt from a dead debt-slave to his children under any circumstances. The only way to recover the debt was for the owner to pursue the man who owned the collapsed mine.

There was no way the man was going to blame himself.

Timmat found himself a target of his owner’s spite after that. If he tried to attend training, he’d be allowed to attend just long enough to accrue the debt before being required to perform a task that made it impossible to get to the training before it was nearly over. After a couple of tries, he gave up on getting better training; it simply wasn’t possible.

He was assigned more work than a normal thirteen-year-old could handle yet was counted as doing “minimally adequate low value work” that paid extremely poorly. He kept racking up debt faster than everyone else his age despite performing far more work.

If there was a way to challenge it, Timmat didn’t know what it was.

The day after he reached level 100 in his Tier Zero Path, Timmat was sold out of the Heavenfall Enclave. He’d never heard of that happening to anyone else, but there was nothing he could do except go along with it. He actually had hope; perhaps things would be better away from his spiteful owner.

They weren’t.

Life in the Swamp’s Edge March was hard; worse was the fact that apparently he’d been sold as a “combat trained” slave based on the two training events he’d tried to take and been prevented from attending. He was blamed for not being able to fight effectively; obviously it was his fault. He’d been trained, after all.

His protests fell on deaf ears once again and this time he hadn’t grown up around these people; there weren’t people who would do small things to shelter him because they knew what was going on.

It wasn’t long before he decided to run away. The Dead Swamp was the only place he could go and expect to not be followed and caught, but it had to be better than this. Even death would be better.

Fleeing into the Dead Swamp was easier than he expected; no one was on guard against it because no one would want to go there.

As it turned out, living in the Dead Swamp wasn’t actually that bad as long as Timmat avoided the undead. If he got close enough they always saw him and would chase him. He had to kill a few, especially at first, but a solid branch or even a rock was enough.

Food was plentiful; one of the things he’d had to learn as a child was foraging, so while his diet was meat-poor there was plenty of quantity. Shelter was a bit of a problem since he didn’t have any tools to use to build things, but he was able to find some trees that had large hollows that he could use that would keep him somewhat sheltered away from the ground where the undead roamed. Sometimes he had to evict an animal from the nest-tree, but that usually meant that he’d have meat for the next few days so he didn’t really mind. There were few actually threatening predators in the Dead Swamp other than the undead.

As the weeks turned into months, Timmat became ever more adept at living in the Dead Swamp, so it didn’t surprise him when he started being able to tell where the undead were at a greater distance. It did surprise him the first time a zombie caught him by surprise, seemed to stare at him for a moment, then move on. He didn’t dare question it too much; not having to be as careful to avoid the undead was too useful to question.

Sometimes he found strange things in the swamp, usually a weapon or a piece of armor with no one nearby. He gathered up the ones that seemed useful for survival and slowly used them up or lost them again.

The first time he knew there was a problem was when his right boot, foot and all, fell off, leaving him with a skeletal foot. He took only a couple of steps afterward before he noticed that he wasn’t walking evenly, but there was no way to fix it. The flesh was rotting and he couldn’t get the boot to stay on without it. He tried wrapping the foot in cloth or leaves, but that was only temporary and he always lost the boot. Eventually the boot disappeared into the water and he didn’t go back for it.

He wasn’t bleeding and it didn’t hurt; he could even still feel his foot when he tapped the bones. Moving them wasn’t a problem either. It was fine. Really.

It had to be.

Timmat slowly adapted to the changes he was undergoing; they really didn’t change his life much as long as he didn’t think about what they meant, so he simply didn’t. Food became less satisfying and Timmat was always hungry, but he ignored that too and simply ate more of what he could get.

Animals seemed to develop something he called a food-light. He knew that if he hunted them down he could have satisfying food. He ate them as fresh as possible; it was better that way. He’d long since given up on trying to cook anything in the swamp; he didn’t have a way to make fire anyway. Fresh meat tasted better and better as he grew used to it.

One day, Timmat saw a huge food-light in the distance. All he could do was follow it. He found himself at the back of a horde of lesser undead all headed the same way.

He was getting close to the food-light when he heard a voice that told him to back up and join with the other undead.

Timmat froze. He wasn’t undead. He wasn’t!

He watched as many of the undead turned around and gathered in a clearing a little ways out from the woods. They seemed to climb on top of each other, then they sort of melted together. Once that finished, the zombie stomped off into the water and crouched down. Timmin could still make it out faintly, but he wasn’t certain he’d have noticed it if he didn’t know it was there, even with his vision.

There was another call and another. Timmat resisted both, but couldn’t bring himself to move away from whoever was calling. A skeleton and another zombie crouched in the swamp.

The fourth time, there seemed to be fewer undead. They were followed by the brightest food-light he’d ever seen, far brighter than the one that had called him to the edge of the swamp. Timmat stumbled forward a few steps before he realized that the food-light was a person.

When the food-light-person dispelled the new formation of undead, Timmat gained enough control of himself to climb a tree. He huddled in a tree crotch that wasn’t big enough to be a true nest and watched. Despite his fear of the person, he couldn’t bring himself to leave the light of the food-light.

The food-light-person was terrifying and fascinating. There was something about him that hurt and something about him that called, other than the food-light. When the food-light-person ran close to Timmat’s tree, Timmat couldn’t resist. He wanted that food-light, so he threw the fire-net he’d found some time recently. It should catch the food-light. Maybe even cook it; Timmat remembered that cooked food was good.

When the food-light-person threw the fire-net off himself, terror won over his entrancement and Timmin scurried quietly down from his tree. He couldn’t move quickly once he was on the ground, he’d be heard. So he moved slowly.

Voices caught Timmat’s attention and he used the distraction to make his way to another tree and climb it. This one was a proper nest-tree, with a crotch large enough to safely sleep in. There was no overhead protection unlike the ones deeper in the swamp, but it would have to do. Anything on the ground wouldn’t be able to find him in a nest.

Only the food-light did. It climbed up to him.

When it was close enough, hunger won and Timmat threw himself at the food.

The next thing he knew, a comforting feeling folded around him like a warm cloak on a cold winter day. He found himself doing what the Nice Voice said. It was someone he should follow and it made him not-hungry.

Timmat had forgotten what being not-hungry was like. He liked being not-hungry. The Nice Voice asked many questions so Timmat answered them.

Then it asked a question he couldn’t answer. “Do you want me to try to cure you? To return you to the living?”

Timmat leaned into the warm feeling surrounding himself. “You want me to change?”

He would do whatever the Nice Voice asked. It brought warm comfort and made Timmat not-hungry.

“Do you want to change? I want you to choose.” The Nice Voice asked another hard question.

Timmat took his time. The Nice Voice was patient, very unlike the masters of Timmat’s childhood.

The thought of those masters made it clear; the Voice was asking if he wanted to return to the days before he fled to the Dead Swamp. Did he want to? He would be whole, no longer having to hide from himself that he was not what he had been before.

Should he hide from his new self? The Nice Voice’s comfort was soothing to who he was now, not to who he had been before. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t bad at all. Why was he so afraid?

Timmat shook his head. “No. I am happy now. The Dead Swamp is safe, it is home.”

It was true and it had been true for a long time. He simply hadn’t realized it.

The scary-but-comfortable man with the bright food-light and the Nice Voice nodded in reply. “It’s your choice. Go into the Dead Swamp, then, and live there. People aren’t food even if they have food-lights but you can eat animals. Go.”

Timmat nodded and turned to head farther into the swamp. All was well.

He was happy.