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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I understand many things about life, how it comes and goes and how it exists in the present—in thought and in the unseen. I have the guide of perfect discernment—an immaculate compass of the ages etched into my bone and burned into my breath by a creature of creation long hidden from the eyes and knowledge of man. With such a tool, I have access to wisdom concealed from the wise. I know patterns, desires, decisions, even thoughts of those I encounter. I know their steps, their actions, their words even before they themselves have acted them out. I am a weapon to the world—a weapon wrought without contact, unhindered without touch.

Every day I awake and dress in the same clothes. I brush my hair the same. I eat the same foods. I look at the same photographs that slowly, bitterly slide from their importance in my past. And then I set out into the teeming populations of damnable promise.

I walk through markets and malls, amusement parks and stadiums. I wait, watch, and wonder at futures to be and futures to be destroyed. I marvel at the potential of all things good and all things terrible; I marvel at the possibility of altering one to the other and the other way around. Life is an untrustworthy machine laded with levers, switches, and pulleys. There is nothing definitive—nothing certain. Promises are broken, love is impure, and not a single soul can stand by its beliefs.

In these places I thrive and draw energy beyond measure. One life after another I manipulate and cut off from its source, letting it waste away as an ephemeral particle of dust.

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