The Dark Lord of Crafting

Breathe in, breathe out.

It was still warm, though I hadn't seen the sun all day. Even when it should have been at its apex, the clouds had kept it hidden. The storm was magic, you could tell that by looking at it, what with the red lightning and the fact it went on forever in every direction, but it was looking like the clouds were a permanent feature of Dargoth rather than an inclement weather pattern.

Alone, passing the time with a few minor projects, it had been a contemplative day. Death wasn't permanent for me, but the memory loss probably was. Sure, I would come back if I died again, but this day would be gone. Everything I had experienced in the months since my capture was only words on a screen. My encounter with Bill wasn't something I wanted to keep in my head for all time, but I didn't like the idea that the fight, or one like it, had happened a hundred times before and it had still felt like a first.

If this was all my life could be, Groundhog day reimagined as a horror survival flick, it would have been better if I could really die.

The situation called into question the nature of the self. Like, if someone hacked off a piece of your brain, and you survived, would you still be you? That was like what was happening here. Tiny pieces of myself were lost with each replay, and I had no way of knowing how much was gone already. How did you know if you were a different person without having reference to the original?

I'd spent the last hour as the sky darkened sitting with my back against the cliff near the torchlight. My world was reduced to a narrow lane, a shadowed alley that would soon crawl with monsters. The prospect neither scared nor excited me.

In normal life, people forgot more than they remembered. There was nothing special about it. But this felt different. It wasn't that I couldn't list off what I'd eaten for the last three breakfasts. It was more like the last several months of my life had been surgically excised from the timeline. I knew it had happened. No one was hacking my journal to tell me lies, though that would have been an intriguing conspiracy. This was all real.

I pictured Esmelda's face. It wasn't difficult. I've always had a very visual imagination. But what if I was wrong about the way she looked? Were there really freckles over her nose? Did her cheeks dimple when she smiled, and if they did, would I ever see that smile again? These were idle thoughts, and not as painful as they could have been. My emotions felt muted. While it was a positive that I wasn't experiencing anxiety, it was also an early warning sign of depression.

It felt like there was something missing in my gut apart from food and water. My brothers had all looked like me, or I had looked like them, depending on how you thought about it. People had always commented on how similar we were when we were out together. But now, when I tried to think about them, their faces so similar to mine, all I saw was Bill. This was not the second life I’d dreamt of.

I hoped they were okay. If I could have asked the goddess for a favor, it would have been to tell them I was too, even if it wasn't true. They would have loved the idea of me going on an adventure in another world. They didn't need to know about this.

Leather armor and bone tools. They hadn't been enough for the other mes, but maybe they would be tonight.

The first spawn of the night was a phantom. Despite the lack of starlight, the absence of the moon, I could see it clearly, outlined against the blackness of the sky. Had Beleth's eyes always worked that way? This seemed like more than simple low-light vision.

It dove, the air rushing through the ridges of its wings and its complicated mouth parts generating the familiar scream. Unlike Bill's laughter, the sound had no effect on me.

I stood up, my back still against the cliff, and hopped to one side. Instead of ramming into my chest, it went face first into the rock and bounced off. My sword seemed to move on its own, the stone blade cutting clean through its wing, and then its spine. Gastard wouldn't have been proud of my technique, but the weapon felt comfortable in my hand.

The extra weight was no longer an issue, but more than that, it felt like I'd done this a thousand times. Probably because I had. The mind wipe didn't extend to muscle memory, and I'd been killing monsters every night for months. Another phantom had to die before the first zombie appeared. I chopped its head off and dragged it into my cave.

Harvesting leather with my skill processed it into a finished material, which wasn't what I wanted here. Hacking up its body the old-fashioned way should have been a decidedly unpleasant experience, but I was numb to it. It had plenty of skin, which hung loosely on its bony frame. As many zombies as I'd killed in the past, I'd never really examined them all that closely.

The teeth were more canine than human, the insides more fungal than flesh. Its eyes were milky enough that it should have been blind. I'd noted things like that about them before, but now it made me wonder how these monsters really worked. Did they follow me by smell? One of my oldest notifications had suggested they had a sixth sense for finding Survivors, and that had chimed with my experience. But how clear was that sense?

Could they be tricked?

Ten minutes later, I walked out of the shelter wearing a skin cloak. I'd covered my armor in the fluids that passed for its blood, and made a strap to hang my shield on my back under the disguise. It gave me a hump. The Tainted Leather Cap was already a zombie mask, and that had never felt like a convenience before, but here we were.

Another zombie had already spawned around the anchor. It was shuffling around the diamond case like a drunk security guard at an outdoor museum. It moaned as I came close, but it wasn't aggressive. I tried to shuffle like they did, dragging my feet and letting my head droop. When I was a few paces away, I stopped and waited.

It ignored me.

The journal had said the mobs acted odd here. It could have been a coincidence. There was a squid clamped onto the cliff thirty or forty feet up. They could change their skin color. I'd never noticed that before, but it had camouflaged itself almost perfectly against the grays of the granite. But I could see it. Like the phantom, it stood out to me.

There wasn't a glow or a floating target, and for some reason, I didn't think this was a previously unknown class skill. I just knew it was there. Maybe I was developing the same sense the monsters had. But if that was how it worked, how could a disguise help me?

I walked over to the cliff and stood directly under the squid. A minute stretched out, then two. It didn't drop. Maybe this could work.

Mobs continued to appear. More of the same. The spawn rate seemed higher than I remembered it being when Gastard and I had shared a vigil. There were still gaps between appearances, but zombies and phantoms were appearing with disturbing regularity over the course of the next few hours. Then there was something new.

A horse-hound. As the journal had described, a horse with a wolf's shaggy head. Its front legs had paws, but the back pair was hooved. It appeared near the torch, casually stepping out of the cliff, though there was no cave there that it could have hidden in. The entire area was dark, but most of the spawns were happening on the slightly lighter side.

The torch wasn't for my convenience. Mobs didn't spawn in total darkness. They needed a hint of light; they needed shadows. That had been a hard lesson to learn, but an important one. It also wasn't a mechanic I'd ever totally relied on. The home I'd built for myself and Esmelda was underground, and therefore might have been safe without torches.

But I trusted the light more than I trusted the darkness.

The horse-hound padded up to me, showing more interest than any of the other mobs, and sniffed. Its head was bigger than mine, and its lips curled back to reveal altogether too many teeth. A low growl emanated from its throat, and I remained motionless, not even breathing, awaiting the promised bite. It never came.

After another sniff, the monster tossed its head and wandered off.

Without a moon, time stood still. My only sign that the night was, in fact, passing, was the ever-growing supply of mobs. When Bojack arrived, the valley was practically crowded. The zombies stopped shambling, and the phantoms flocked to the far end of the alley. When they flew in unison, it was almost beautiful.

They swam through the air, forming a loose ball as they spun around and around like a school of fish. The zombies were much less organized. Shamblers be shambling. They stumbled into and over each other as they moved toward the barrier, while squids squelched along the cliffs. The horse-hound leapt over a crowd of zombies, covering twenty feet, and loped easily the rest of the way.

For a monster, it was actually kind of cute. Even when they were evil, you couldn't go wrong with dogs.

I moved with the zombies, keeping toward the back of the pack, but with a few stragglers trailing behind me. The diamond wall briefly caught the gleam of a distant red flash from among the clouds, and I caught sight of a humanoid shape beyond the translucent barrier. Eight feet tall had been a conservative estimate.

If this was the same horse demon that had been present for my capture, he had gotten bigger. My eyes were drawn to him. The sense of his presence, whatever I was feeling, was a lot stronger than for any of the regular mobs. He parted the diamond like Moses parting the sea.

Crystal became liquid, sweeping aside in a wave that left a gap ten feet tall and half as wide. The demon entered and stepped to one side of the opening, dressed like a Roman senator in a white toga and sandals. Though it was hard to tell what a horse might have been feeling, he looked bored as the zombies filed out in front of him.

Tucking my sword under the flaps of my zombie cloak, I ducked my head and adopted my best shamble. The mobs were treating me like I was one of their own, and I didn't want to break the illusion by paying too much attention to the demon. Progress forward was agonizingly slow, but it was surprisingly easy to remain calm. My breathing was regular, and my heart was quiet.

Shuffle, sway, slouch, just one of the gang.

I didn't dare look at the opening, but it was drawing closer. Could this actually work? Had we really never tried this before? I'd watched the Walking Dead. It seemed like an obvious hack. It occurred to me that there may have been more at work here than a disguise. Maybe being in this place so long really had changed me. Maybe I had lost enough of myself that the zombies couldn't tell the difference anymore.

The demon wasn't saying anything. Definitely mental commands. I could feel myself getting closer to him, even without looking. How was it possible that he couldn't feel me too?

The opening was only a few paces away, clogged with zombies. If I tried to rush through, Bojack would catch me.

Keep calm. The plan is working.

The plan is working!

A heavy hand dropped on my shoulder, clamping like a vise.

"William," the demon said, "we need to talk."