A fish swam above his head, maneuvering in circles with deft little flicks of its tail. It was a beautiful creature, with golden-orange scales and long, wavering tails of silver, frilled fans of delicate rainbow-threaded membranes fluttering to either side of its head. It floated through the air in a little bubble, one that extended to carry it and shrank away behind it. A little light shone from the translucent sphere.

It was an oddly beautiful thing to wake up to. Especially at the end of the world.

Reaching out, Bayler discovered it quite liked to be touched, to have its head stroked. It made a comical little open-mouth blub when he scratched the elegant crest of its head.

Floating over him, it spat a silver ring, a pendant shaped like a fish, and a small black cube onto his chest, then returned to swimming circles.

Bayler picked up the cube and was surprised to find it hot in his hand. One side flashed white, and out extended a cone of light, half-transparent images of Enniac appearing in the beam. A hologram. He had to surprise a grin. Was he her only hope?

“Hello, Bayler, if this has reached you, you’ve exceeded all my expectations by not dying.” Instantly the smile soured.

“This is a memory crystal, a useful little thing. You’ll figure out how it works on your own. I’ve encoded into it answers for every kind of question that might be useful. The pendant is my way of finding you, if you survive until the end of Quarantine. Wear it always and it may save your life.”

“Next, the ring. Wear it and you will be able to see how much Mana remains in you. An essential treasure.” Turning the ring over in his fingers, Bayler saw the outside was marked with little black notches while the inside…

The inside of the ring held a tiny, thin needle meant to slip into the arterial vein running down the inside of his ring finger. Pleasant. Even the gifts were bloodthirsty here.

“The final gift is the fish itself. I can’t promise you it will be willing to bond with you, but if it does, it will be your companion until death. It is called a Spacial-Saint Fish, Messenger-Class. These are sacred creatures, Bayler. They are the only creatures who can leave the Abyss if they so choose, slipping away by unknown currents, but they stay with us, watching over us.

“Not even a Power would dare to harm one. They alone are immortal. For the rest of us, all days shall be numbered.” That line again, repeated like something between a prayer and a farewell. The image flickered and went out.

Alone in the dark together, Bayler watched the fish swim. It went nowhere but in circles. There was something ethereal, otherworldly about it. It made him feel carefree to watch it move.

Reaching up, Bayler covered the hole in his neck and spoke, in a rasping awful voice, blood spilling between his fingers as the mangled mess of his throat flexed painfully. “Well, want to come with me, then?”

Reaching up, he offered his hand to the creature. It darted forward and, as he went still in surprise, drank a drop of blood from his burned, ruined fingertips. It curled around his hand like a cat might, brushing over his wrists. Being inside its bubble of personal space made him feel weightless and cool.

He took that as a bargain signed and shaken on, and scratched the golden scales of its head again. There was a patch of crimson right on its brow, a noble jewel of red, giving it quite the regal air.

Bayler paused. His tattoo - Enniac had called it his Epitaph - had changed. Not only had Appetite appeared on a lower ‘branch’ but the number besides Mortal had risen.

As he focused on Mortal and pressed his thumb to the design, the familiar ‘voice’ spoke into his head. This time it wasn’t just numbers though, but a chart, half filled-in and half greyed-out.

|| Receive Enlightenment of Death ||

|| ??? ||

|| Defeat an Enemy a Rank Above ||

|| Bring Death to Ten Creatures ||

|| ??? ||

|| Receive a Fatal Wound ||

|| ??? ||

By the looks of it, he needed to complete three more hidden tasks before he’d get an opportunity to gain a new power from the Mortal Blessing. As for Appetite, it hadn’t progressed since he’d fulfilled the first requirement and received his ‘gift’ from the pig-god.

|| Devour a Living Enemy ||

Going by all that, his first goal had to be to uncover what the hidden tasks were. Mortal seemed singularly focused on the concept of Death. For Appetite, they almost certainly involved indulging his vices in one form or the other.

Unlike the Mortal tree, which had given him three options, the Appetite tree was a single ladder, climbing from one option to the next, with the occasional branch into a dead end. The only one open to him was:

|| Envy’s Vigilance - Black - 0% - When a Skill is used against you, your own comprehension of that skill is increased for the next week. ||

In the end, Bayler Shrike simply wasn’t eager to take any more ‘charity’ from the hideous pig-creature, especially when Vigilant Envy was likely to make him more Envious, and every step of the path after would lead him further down the seven sins.

By comparison, he seemed to find his way down the Mortal route without even trying. So long as he continued to fight and survive there’d be further gains.

Swinging himself down from the palette, Bayler Shrike savored the unique experience of waking yourself up by dousing your feet into icy seawater.

The flood was rising all the time, slowly but steadily, racing higher through the streets, starting to form whitewater churns where it struck against submerged obstacles. Soon it would be impossible to simply walk. All the while a steady rain came down, sometimes drizzling and sometimes furiously pelting at him with stinging droplets.

“You’re a messenger right? So you can find someone for me?” The fish did a particularly deft little turn in the air, which Bayler would take as a yes. “There was a girl with me, yesterday. I don’t… I don’t know her name.”

The fish paused, looking at him with giant, serious eyes before turning away. No good without a name, then. “Black hair?” He croaked, only to be ignored.

“Fine.” He had a plan, albeit a bad one.

Stepping out into the rain, he lifted his lantern high, letting its light flare into the narrow mouths of alleys and across the submerged streets. What he needed was another one of the hellhounds.

Transformed into a slime, Bayler could just about eat an entire horse in one, if he was willing to wait a while for it to digest. Consuming the hound he’d killed - the hound that had come out of its hiding place hesitantly, lured by the light of the Lamp of Treachery - was no obstacle.

Afterwards, there was a ripple, and the lump of black, sludgey goo condensed into a four-legged form, one with shaggy dark fur up to the base of its neck, where hair and hide suddenly peeled away to leave its muzzle bare and raw and red. Drool dripped from skeletal, permanent grin with no lips to hide it.

And most importantly, a clever, sensitive nose drank in the air. Putting his head low, Bayler Shrike began to hunt.

The trail of his prey carried him through the streets, low enough for the waters to wash around his underbelly as he tracked a faint lingering scent. Other hounds called out to him, and Bayler was surprised that he could vaguely understand their language, as much as it was a language at all. They were curious, unsure if he was one of them. He ignored them and padded on.

The fish was sometimes there, sometimes not. It seemed to shimmer out of existence as soon as danger threatened, only to slip back in when it pleased.

By the time his transformation ran out, he was well on his way. Turning into a hound took much less mana than becoming a slime - there was less differences in anatomy between him and a dog than him and a shapeless, primordial blob.

He stopped and hunted again, three dogs filling up the alleyway where he propped his lamp and waited. The last fight had torn his robe until he could only knot what remained around his waist as a rough kilt and hope there was no dress code where he was going.

At first he thought the narrow ground would give him an advantage. Then, as the first hound shot towards him, another ran up the walls and dove downwards, jaws snapping for his throat. He shoved his hand into its mouth and screamed as it crushed his fingers, drove him to the ground. He had to punch, kick, beat his way out of the crushing pile of fur and fangs that descended on him-

Overconfident. He’d gotten overconfident.

In the end, he won because they couldn't kill him fast enough. Because he answered every bite with a punch, until they were broken and he was, somehow, still alive to lift himself up and grab for his lantern.

Three quick, hard hits finished the job.

Metaphorically licking his wounds, he bit down and chewed enough raw, tough meat to refill his reserve and shift forms again, and continued on the trail with a new limp. His wounds were adding up. Continuing to function despite his body crumbling was one benefit of Will Made Flesh, but the pain was starting to be a problem on its own, the drip of blood down his body constant, oozing from a dozen wounds.

It was sweet relief when the scent grew thicker in the air, both more recent and traced over older whiffs of the same odor, telling him she’d been through this territory more than once. Finally, he found himself standing before a tall, white house, three-stories high and unappealingly boxy, with a wide lawn that had been reinforced by nailing plywood planks between the rails of an iron fence. The top window was open, and something glinted among the curtains.

With a shiver, Bayler turned into a man and stood back up, lifting his arms.

There was a long, tense pause, and then the door burst open, Lauren rushing down the flooded lawn towards him. “You!’

“You! We should actually trade names sometime.” Bayler called back, still keeping the corner of his eye on that open window, the swaying curtain. There was only one reason somebody would leave their window open in this rain.

“Dammit…” Groaning, Pike leaned his head out past the curtains and shouted down from his nest, “Lauren! Why is there a goddamn dead man standing in my driveway!?”

“He’s a friend, he’s a friend! Pike, don’t you fucking shoot him!”

Through all this, Bayler stood perfectly still, letting the scene unfold around him. Letting Lauren make his case.

“Well that’s nice. Tell him to go away!” The man leaning out the window had slicked-back, graying black hair, a smooth sweep of it over a sour, simian face, turning a shade of red as he howled down.

“I can pay to stay here." Bayler finally interrupted, reaching into a pocket he’d fastened in the knot of the hospital robe and drawing out his sole, glimmering Mana stone. He held it up between two fingers to catch the light. Even from here he could see a sliver of pink dart across the man’s mouth as Pike licked his lips and considered.

“I don’t have any more spare beds.” It was a grudging, surly concession, but the gem had clearly gotten his attention. “But you can sleep on the floor. Why the hell do you look dead?”

“Afraid that’s a story with a two beer minimum.”

“I don’t drink. But I have coffee.”