Upward I climbed, foot over foot, and hand over hand. Blood pounded at my temples while I strained to maintain strength and focus. Beads of sweat rolled off of my forehead and fell the depths of my course. My sight was set on nothing but the path I had already traveled. My feet were above me and my hands were below. Backwards I crawled to achieve my movement—the future reversed; the past to come—to trick the summit, to allow me passage. I took my time; I rehearsed each movement meticulously in my mind. I pressed fiercely my feet into stone and moved at the pace of a turtle’s stride. Double-jointed knees abled my legs with the necessary angles of grip and with pull. My hands supported me and helped spring me to new footholds.

I did not climb because I had to. I did not climb because I wanted to. I climbed because of ill-fated ability—I climbed because I could and no one else—not the strong, not the powerful; only I—one of the strange, one of the outcasts, one of the deformed of miscreation. I climbed Mount Usen Riddiddexdedet to prove the worthiness of imperfection and to scream its curse atop the peak of existence.

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The cool, still water embraced me as I jumped into it and submerged within it, leaving the sounds of laughter behind. The water wrapped its ever-changing arms around my shape and held it perfectly. I exorcized air—one quick blast to balance my buoyancy. Then there was the Calm; I did not rise, I did not fall. The dawn of time ended and then began again, churning the moments of now into a serum of rich thought and sensation. There, within the water, I hung within a suspended capsule, unknowingly engaging an energy hidden from the world within the secret place of weightlessness.

I mouthed a series of ancient words given to me through the passing and connecting of distant minds—words I did not know of a moment earlier or a moment later; I knew them only as I spoke them for the brief moments that I was a receptacle of realms. Each syllable came and went like lightning—precise, crisp, gone. My eyes were closed. My limbs were motionless. My essence roamed free.

A fey danced into my mind’s eye—so beautiful, so alluring. She twirled around my insides, caressing them with touches of deep tranquility. “How are you, my love?” she whispered to me, over and over again—not intending a question, but instilling a comfort. The peacefulness was beyond me; I was beyond my self.

Then, suddenly and shockingly, there came a sting—one beneath each of my feet—ending unpleasantly the euphoric reverie of weightlessness’ tithing. The stings immediately grew deeper, reaching through me as if I were a puppet filled by controlling hands.

I tried to open my eyes, but I could not, or if I could, I still could not see. And with the blackness, the nourishment of my breath depleted. Panic followed, coming for me on wings of dissolute hope, plunging through the surface of the water to make its kill.

Not death, I beseeched. Not death.

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Metek, Alaya, Sturge, and Crim sat anxiously on hard wooden chairs around a wooden table in the basement of the Abandoned House in Semtar’s Forest. The basement was lit by candle-flame, but the moonlit, night sky peeked through holes and cracks in the faltering, aged floorboards above. Animals and insects scurried in the shadows. A strange scent saturated and impregnated the air. The atmosphere was dense and heavy…

Death is but a tangent of existence, for I have lived many different lives in different worlds through death—death being the medium through which I reached these lives. There are different layers of afterlives. They are each unique, and they do not blend. And whether or not all who perish will share with me the adventure into the endless haze of possibility is uncertain. What is certain, for me, is that death brings life and not unending darkness. Death is a button that each time pressed reconstructs matter and sets me within it.

So, as a drug instills its ecstasy, I have been led into a spiral of repeated suicide for its thrill of reinvention. No, this is not reincarnation; this is rematerialization in flesh and body with the full transfer of mind and memory. Each new world comes with the remembrance of those prior. And these worlds are both real and ethereal. I can live a full, new life. I can feel pain. I can die, but death only brings upon me that which I desire: rebirth. How I come to be  in such places  in the fullness of life after each death is the key to understanding the actualization of my situation—that I am caught in a cycle of wholesome ghostliness, a form of eternity.

Death upon death upon death is my gift and ability within the universe of known and unknown matters. Such worlds have I seen. Such pleasures have I experienced. Such creativity in demise have I expressed. Although, as with living comes disease, so with my infinity comes conditional powers of parallel iniquity. It has been in these various fate-defiers—deep in this cycle of ongoing living despite death—that a damnable thing has been forced upon me, an estranged evil more cunning and absolute than the full capacity of the mental construct, intellect. How terribly disease can drain life. How excruciatingly Craytick can deaden immortality. The further into the deaths I travel, the more Craytick reveals itself to me.

But let me begin at the end—the end of my first life and the beginning of all the others.

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The castle of the Lord Brasher stood as it always had—sharply cut black stone jutting upward to create halls and chambers and towers and spires. The front gate, before which I stood, eerily hung open as like a gaping wound run dry of blood. No one foreign to these walls would dare enter, so the powers therein dared to leave it open. The castle’s sins had long outlived their mortal bindings, creating within it a world of evil unconquerable by mortal means. I had come to cleanse it; or, more truly, I had come to summon the vessel that would carry out the deed.

From a jug, I poured a puddle of clean river water atop the dusty road leading into the castle’s darkness. I poured enough to create a watery span of two feet. Then, with utmost concern and delicacy, I retrieved a rose and its stem that had been laced with string across my back. The surfaces of the rose had been intricately decorated with paint—the most absurd and archaic illustrations being the result of such artistry. It was such designs that were the spell of this summoning—the ideas and lore that reached between worlds of life into worlds of magic and played between the two, merging to define abnormities beyond the land of dreams.

I tossed the rose into the puddle. It landed silently and sent brief ripples outwardly upon the surface of the water. The display was beautiful, but the act was insidious—insidious, but necessary.

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