“How’ve you been?”

“So-so.”

“I heard – from Lestrat – that you’re like… a medic, that’s pretty cool.”

“Cool huh?” Leo wriggled the word around in his mouth, tasting it, feeling it.

“I think so,” Roy added.

He and Leo sat near the table the old man lay on, opposite them was the mother and her two daughters. Five people, aware and conscious of the world, and one whose senses had long been scattered into the mist, as if the drab grey expanse were some haunting specter whose breath stole the life of the living to fuel its own immutability.

Now only the husk of a man remained, small undulations of the chest a wavering sign of life. Still, Leo persisted. He stared unblinking at the half-corpse, like his gaze was some life giving force that could keep cold clutching hands as bay for just a little while longer.

But there was no mystical force, the only thing Leo radiated was the harsh smell of antiseptics. A sense numbing, bitter odor which clung to the boy, sucked the color out of his skin and the light out of his eyes. So that his skin was like sulfur and his eyes two barrels of crude.

And Roy could see that lingering malaise, feel it brush up against him like a silent fog. Then when he pushed against it, threw what little conversational ability he had at the wall of vaporous matter, it solidified to become a concrete rampart, and he didn’t have the keys to the castle.

So he camped outside, they were all camped there around the body because not even Leo had the keys to what he really wanted, what his gaze longed for but could never bring into sight. A figment of life in the patient, it was all any of them wanted.

Hour bled into hour, bled into hour, and the chest sunk deeper and deeper and deeper until a dam burst and the mother screamed out in pain, her shriek echoing in the room because the night was too packed to take it.

The girls cried. Leo stared. Roy sat.

It was all they could do, or rather it was all they were willing to do. Not even the old man was moved by his own demise. He knew when he had come that morning to the front of the store to stare out at the mist that would claim his life.

There was only so much a person could do, only so much energy to expend, so much mana to exhaust. But Owen thought he could give a little more, sqeeze out just another drop to quench an old man’s thirst. It was too late now, too late for the body on the table, too late for Owen who could at this moment be lying silhouetted against the water. Back touching the concrete, as the blood left him and his life drifted away.

Or he could be fending of the hordes of monsters as he pushed along the streets, chiseled out of marble like an ancient Greek hero. Except there was no Patroclus at his side, no Hector before him, nor Paris behind him. It was just Owen, out alone in the night to fetch some medicine to save an old man’s life

Roy looked at the body on the table.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, but it was like an earthquake amongst the sobbing and quite pleas, and he quickly became the center of four pairs of eyes.

“Maybe we can, uh, give a proper funeral, you know? Burial and uh, stuff?” Roy racked his brains for something to say, anything to pass through the depths of the night.

The mother laid a hand gently over the head of her father, and let it rest there for a moment, as if in some deep conversation with the spirit of the departed, “Right, a funeral… that would be nice. Maybe some candles, plenty of fire, he always liked fire and the sun and the outdoors.”

Without another word, Roy began to line the room with suspended tendrils of flame. Hung in midair, they seemed to project from invisible candles which were placed in a circle around the mourners and the recently deceased. Wriggling, dancing, vivid fire, playing against the shadows in a constant game of back and forth.

Roy completed the circle and returned to his seat, then as if awaiting the signal, the mother began to speak in a low and stuttering voice, “My father was a, kind, gentle, loving, caring, strong... father... husband... grandfather…”

And she trailed off into the distance, voice disappearing as she gave her personal farewell. Roy felt like he was intruding, like he wasn’t supposed to be here among the mother and the two daughters. He hardly knew the old man, but here gathered under the roof of the grocery store, how could he not be here, how could these people not be the closest of neighbors?

The women finished, or perhaps she didn’t for her voice disappeared and only her drifting gaze hinted at the journey she was going through as she browsed the library of her memories.

Then they were all staring at the figure on the table again, and a silly thought occurred to Roy. How would they bury the body?

The mother’s next words seem to answer his unworded question, “He always wanted to go out in a fire... so we could send him along with the wind.”

That was good, because they couldn’t bury him with two feet of water covering the ground. Ashes, and wind and fire and corpses, the words formed a thought in Roy’s mind and the ability ‘Defile’ popped into his conscious.

“I can uh… cremate his body,” Roy spouted out before adding, “Without fire.”

The rest of them looked at him, as if that were a perfectly reasonable thing. Because it took too much to care about every little thing. So the mother nodded, like how she had nodded at the candle-less fires.

Giving the others another moment, Roy raised his arm and faced his palm at the body resting on the table, it seemed fitting, appropriate that he should perform some type of gesture. Then he activated the ability and his senses were flushed into the distance and it it felt as if he were up in the air and observing everything like an eagle in flight.

They were all so insignificant, they paled in comparison the four great nexuses of power that thrummed around him. For he was floating, his sense removed from his body so that he now felt acutely with his mind.

What was going on, he thought and the thought reverberated like he had shouted into the distance. This wasn’t like ‘flame’, it wasn’t like ‘reckless strength’, this was something different, and he had leaped in on a whim.

He should have asked the goblins, he should have tested things out first, there were so many things he should have done. But now he was isolated in this space, with his questions reverberating around him like pinballs.

Roy let his thoughts fade away, his trance like state was similar to the one he entered while accessing his mana, could this simply be another manifestation of the same phenomenon? Roy reached within himself and felt his mana easily accessible. It was almost too easy.

Roy pulled at a bit of his mana using his manipulator and a chunk at exactly the desired size broke away from his body. He hurled the unfathomable energy around, juggled it within a space unconstrained by gravity, before pulling it back in.

This was no feat he could have accomplished, regularly, so what was going on? He turned his sense outward and the four vortexes of power made themselves known again. If he focused, pushed aside the overwhelming sensation of those beacons, he could pick up smaller centers of power.

They were scattered in every direction, suspended within this unfathomable grand space. They were not static lights, unmoving points on a stellar map. Instead they were active, alive, and coils or tendrils floated off their dense energetic cores.

There were so many and the more he focused the more he could ‘see’, until the sensation of ‘sight’ overwhelmed him and he wound his senses tightly around him.Wiping everything except the monoliths of power away.

The monoliths, in his gut Roy knew they were the reason he was here. He could feel his connection to them, connected by a tether he would have described as glowing, pulsing, and wriggling with energy.

Unsure of what to do Roy sent his senses towards a tether. An eye catching one that shined a deep crimson and filled him with vitality as he approached. He extended a manipulator and touched it, the contact drew him in, not forcibly, but gently like a guest.

The energy beckoned from him to sample some, as if it were tea and biscuits. So Roy sent his senses into the flow that coursed through the tendril connecting him and the distant nexus of power.

A sensory connection seemed to grow between them and suddenly feeling and sensation began to trickle in.

He felt young, or even younger than he already was. His shackles had been thrown off him and nothing in the world could tire him. It was vitality, which flowed in endlessly and empowered him. Age would fall away, along with all the discomforts of time, replaced by unceasing, unrelenting life. It was warm and sweet like nectar. Vivid and lucid like… blood.

Blood, there was blood everywhere, it stained every surface. He would touch it, drink it, bath in it as it rained, no poured down like a waterfall. Roy pulled away from the tendril of power, repulsed by the pungent odor of rusting iron.

If he could sweat in his altered perception, he would have. If he could have panted, he would have. But all he could do was feel his senses swirl around within him, unsettled by what he had felt and ‘seen’.

But he couldn’t leave yet, somehow he knew that he was obliged to look through every one of the tendrils, sample every pool. He had bound himself to this task after activating ‘Defile’. This thought had swam into his conscious after diving into the first current of power.

Breathing in deeply, Roy delved into the next pool, this time he ignored the opening pleasantries and the sensation began to pour in at once.

What did he feel? He felt eternal, forever, and everlasting, like he was a rock or an ocean, or the stars themselves. He was free like the wind, free from the constraints of time and mortality. He could drift from place to place, carried along by curiosity, by the thirst for something to quench the loneliness of stars.

He could get use to this, Roy thought, before he felt the cold hard earth. It was like the chill of the north wind or the icy autumn rain. But there was no rain nor wind. He was cold because no food filled his stomach, no blood thrummed in his vains, and no heart beat in his vacuum of a chest.

Roy pulled away, the tingling frost clinging to him for a moment longer.

Two down, two to go, Roy thought as he gathered his wits again and headed for the next tendril of energy. These were all images, illusions, he convinced himself, right before the next set of sensations began.

This time he felt different, not different from himself, but always, and continuously different. Like every second he was adapting, changing, and undergoing a metamorphoses. There was nothing he could not adapt to, nothing he could not change about himself to get the most from life. Because he yielded like water and caught opportunity in his liquid embrace.

He could always be better, improve himself that extra inch and reach that new goal. He could reach so far, travel such a distance, and when he looked back he had lost sight of the first him. The origin, the creator, because he was constantly improving, constantly changing. Was his hair black or blonde, or blue?

And then Roy felt like himself again, he had returned from that distant him who no longer resembled him. He was Roy with brown eyes, and brown hair, and poor grades. Having reaffirmed his identity, Roy moved on to the last tendril, the last tribulation.

The sensation started to flow in. He was welcomed, pulled into an embrace. He could see life woven into a tapestry before him, with all its radiant peaks and temporary trenches. He could see himself at home before the computer, alone but not alone. Because he was a part of a community, a part of society, no matter what its form.

So what if his those friends were anonymous users? So what if his achievements were measured in ones and zeros? It was their way of life, their festivities, and their culture. It pulled him in, muffled him with the great mass of society so that he lay nested and secure. A square on a quilt, a node in the net.

Roy followed this connection, its sweetness and warmth drew him in and soon he was carried along by the currents, towards that great heart of power in the distance.