May you live in interesting times.

Pre-Fall curse

Johanna nearly kicked her friend Laura in the head as she reflexively twitched her legs when she opened her eyes. She had no recollection of what had happened after that flash of blue light, yet she was sprawled on the dusty floor of the room. She’d somehow tripped – maybe – and ended up dazed.

She rolled, pushed herself off the ground, not looking behind her, and half-crawled, half-rushed toward the room’s exit. She needed to escape the magical trap. Nothing else mattered right now.

As she reached the door, she suddenly realized that there was no more weird blue light reflected on the walls, or anything coming from behind her.

She stopped and slowly turned back, peering into the room. The half-darkness that had been there when they came in that section of the ruin seemed to be there again, filling the place with its patchwork of lights and shadows from the two windows and the opening in the ceiling. She could see no trace of the blue light, and the room, on the whole, seemed almost normal again.

Save that the skeleton was somehow still bathed in bright-looking light. A light that came from nowhere, colorless, like snaking rivers of shimmer streaming from every corner of the room down into the chair, weaving around the bones. That these strange flows didn’t stop at the walls or illuminated anything else in the room told her that whatever magic permeated the room was still there, active and ongoing, and the threat was not over.

No wonder people fear magic. I’m going to hate the stuff now, she thought.

“What happened?” Tom whispered as he reached her. Laura and Peter were also half-rising, half-crawling toward the exit as well.

“You tell me. There was some kind of magic event, that’s a given.”

“Seems over.”

“Look at the Ancient’s bones, and tell me that again.”

Tom looked back and frowned.

“Blue light’s gone. Look like it’s all spent.”

“Uh? What are you talking about… there’s a shit-ton of magic still pouring in, so much you can see it,” she replied, incredulous.

“You sure you’re okay?” he asked, looking back at her.

“Yes. Whatever knocked us seems to be done now, but the magic… you can’t see it?”

Laura and Peter reached the room’s exit door and turned to look at the far end of the room.

“There’s nothing to see now, Johanna,” the latter confirmed.

“Well… there is light coming in. More like… I don’t know… like streams of liquid light flowing in the air,” Johanna tried to explain.

“You seem more affected by that blast than us. We’re leaving, like, now,” Tom said.

“And I’ll check you for concussion,” Laura added.

The group found themselves in the bent corridor. As on the way in, Johanna thought again that the place had been scrambled by some Changestorm. The corridor turning suddenly on an oblique wall was the clearest indication that parts of the ruin came from somewhere else, which was the surest indicator of immense magical discharges. And if the encounter in the room was an indication, then magic had pooled there for a long time afterward. Until they came around and stupidly triggered whatever had been nesting in the skeletal… king? On a strange throne? Like those fantasy novels that she always found both funny and stupid, yet always engrossing somehow.

She reflexively patted the bag on her back. Already, she was no longer sure about the contents they had pilfered from the room. She pretty much knew nobody would be able to appraise the contents for magical residue. You knew of mana from what it did, not what it was. She’d never seen it – none of them had – until that blue glow, and she now fervently wished she never had.

The only sane option was not to mention it. Either they trashed what they’d just salvaged for safety, or they foisted it on their usual buyer. And pleaded ignorance if things ever came back to bite them. She briefly debated with herself about the ethics of bringing mana-loaded stuff back to Valetta. But it wasn’t their fault that salvage had soaked in mana.

Right?

“Nothing else seems to be disturbed,” Tom noted as they negotiated the last leg of the corridor, before emerging back into the open ruins.

“Lucky us,” Johanna said drily.

“And now, sit, while I check you. Everyone knows that visual hallucinations are a sure sign of concussion.”

Laura staved Johanna’s protest and pushed on her shoulders, insisting she sat on a piece of old concrete. She started waving her hand, making Johanna count fingers, answer basic questions, watching for signs of mental trouble or difficulties.

“I told you. I’m okay,” Johanna started to grumble after a while.

“You had me kind of worried with that light-not-light speech for a while,” her friend finally answered, relaxing slightly.

Johanna tried to remember exactly how the room felt back then.

“But that’s what it was,” she finally said. “Like some light that only lighted the skeleton on that chair and nothing else in the room.”

“Not like the blue light, then?” Tom asked.

“No. Different. Weird like magic ought to be, but different.”

She saw the worried look of her team and hurried to reassure them.

“But I am fine. No headache, no nausea. Nothing.”

“Well, who knows what’s a magical version of a concussion like,” Tom said.

She reached and squeezed her boyfriend’s hand in reassurance.

“I. Do. Not. Have. Concussion. Magical or otherwise.”

“Allow me to be worried,” he replied.

“All of us,” Peter added, with Laura acquiescing.

“Because I see lights in a place where there's magic? Come on.”

“We should be going,” Tom replied instead.

She frowned.

“Hmm, where? I agree this is potentially dangerous, but you are not suggesting we return? We’ve barely started.”

She immediately raised her hand to forestall the protest.

“Running away will not make us safer when we come back. And we will come back again, right, guys?”

Johanna could see the three others internally debating against themselves.

“I. Am. Fine.”

She gestured toward Tom.

“Worst thing, the big lug can carry me if I collapse. Which. Will. Not. Happen.”

She pushed herself upright, straightening her salvage bag.

“We move out, find a different area. Then we fill up those,” she said, tapping the half-empty leather container on her back.

“Aye?”

Johanna could tell Tom, at least, was not entirely convinced. But she picked a direction, more or less at random, and started.

People will say it was going to happen sooner or later…

Moore pondered the views. The window squares were silent. He could guess the four were talking among themselves, lips moving, gestures flowing, but he heard nothing at all. No voices, no wind, no noises, just like a silent movie from a century ago without the music. He had just vision, from the perspective of each one of the four. At least, the view did not track eyes or anything. Or maybe he was compensating for the rapid eye movements that anyone constantly did half-consciously. It just showed what they were looking at, mostly.

The ruins were sobering.

The four persons’ team was in some kind of hellscape of broken concrete walls, jutting reinforcement bars, and the kind of scenery that he was familiar with from dozens of post-apocalyptic FPS games and Z-series movies. All it lacked was some zombies. Or maybe a dragon. What was the name of that old movie with dragons invading the ruins of London or something? The name escaped him. Reign of something… dragons? No, not dragons.

It would come back to him, or it would not. It didn’t really matter anyway. For now, he was looking at what the world looked like outside, and he did not like what he was seeing. Not a bit. Ruins of a modern city were filling his limited perspective. His city? He couldn’t even guess. There was nothing like a reasonably recognizable skyline. In the distance – and here he ventured a guess that he might be able to see details that a normal person might not even be aware of, as he had no real retina to limit him – he could see an expanse of aligned squares that suggested a suburban house sprawl, reduced to foot-high rubble. But there were no such suburbs next to his low-rise apartment complex.

The city might be an unfamiliar jumble of ruins, but from the crumbled parts, Moore felt like there had been a lot of time elapsed since that apocalypse.

The first indication had been when they looked at the room where they’d been when his consciousness restarted somehow. It was a bit weirdly shaped, with two different windows where his old room had only one. But the skeleton sitting on what looked like the remains of a gaming chair had brought a sudden flash-back to his demise.

Sure, there didn’t seem to be a desk or computer, although the broken glass and a frame to the side might be coming from a flat monitor. But, given the context… his first thought had been.

Is that… me?

He remembered vividly how, once he stopped moving, silence had fallen, and then power had failed abruptly, and nothing had happened at all until he suddenly realized he was in some abstraction of space, looking at – through – four people.

There had been an apocalypse, and he had missed it. Well, he had missed it because he died immediately just before its beginning, so that wasn’t an entirely bad thing or even a good thing to happen to him. More of an “at least you didn’t suffer” thing if that old skeleton was any indication.

And now, the whole situation slowly started to make sense to him. The old sports-brand cloth, incongruous-looking against the handmade feel of the rest of the clothing. The reference in the System interfaces to a “scavenger” for all of them, until he overwrote it with a “real” specialization.

Those four were looters, scavenging in the ruins of this destroyed 21st-century metropolis, trying to grab some useful stuff lying around. Certainly not for mere survival, though. The landscape and that – his? – skeleton looked old and worn after all. This was not a few weeks or months after the apocalypse, this was much, much later. Broken-up and overgrown ruins meant many years, decades even. They were not looking for cans of tuna, meds, and guns to last the next week, more like salvaging hard-to-manufacture goods and cheap metals or plastics. Well, maybe guns too. Good guns were always useful after the apocalypse, he knew, no matter when you found them.

Well, it wasn’t as if he could give them directions to help. He had no idea where that team was and no way to communicate, at least not using anything he saw in his weird non-space. The surrounding did not entirely match what he’d remembered from when he was alive. The suburb ruins were certainly not there in his memories. And the ruined buildings around that group were no longer fully recognizable.

If he still had lungs and mouth, he’d have certainly sighed in frustration.