PreCursive

  Shockingly, though, Aveline immediately recognized them. The reddened eyes of the surprisingly resilient little girl brightened at the sight of the man I was now eyeing warily. She squirmed her way out of my grip to nd on the…non-corroded steel around us?

  This pce…in a way, it almost reminded me of the b I had found Aveline in. Only…

  It was in pristine condition. Insanely, impeccably so.

  This looked like another b, only as if it had been preserved in time from whatever tragedy had befallen the Netherim within. The shiny steel floor was pristine and spotless, as were the counters holding futuristic equipment that I could only guess at the function of. There were even non-slip, bck rubber mats lying on the floor, tracing paths through the entire room. But this wasn’t a b.

  I think this was an infirmary.

  An antiseptic smell filled the air, as if this space had only been scoured by bleach in the st hour or so. Unnervingly familiar hospital beds lined the walls of the rge rooms, some of them accompanied by an array of equipment, trays, and tools that looked decidedly medical in nature. Clean white linens covered all of the beds, with some of them closed off by curtains.

  Movement briefly caught my eye, coming from one of the shrouded beds. At least, I thought it was movement. The shadow had been brief enough that I could have been imagining it.

  Was there…someone else in here?

  While I furrowed my brow in unease, Aveline had fallen onto her hands and knees, only to scramble to her feet moments ter. I groped for her, but she had already sprinted across the distance to the person who had waved us down and saved us from the Maw.

  A human man who I didn’t recognize, wearing a b coat.

  Aveline threw her arms around his legs when she reached the man. “Doctor Travers!” She cried. “I-it’s you! You kept your promise! Y-you’re s-s-till here!” Aveline didn’t manage any more than that before she fell into full-on sobbing. She buried her face into his knees, muffling them, but they still rang out through the infirmary.

  Doctor Travers. I…could see it, I suppose.

  I got a better look at the elderly man, as he tenderly y one gnarled hand on Aveline’s head. ‘Travers’ was a heavy set man who looked like he was in his te sixties at best, seventies at worst. His head still bore the wispy remnants of what might have once been thick, dark hair, but was now a steel gray. Although faded with age, kindly emerald eyes still gazed down at the child as she sobbed into his knees, his lips curving behind a thick beard and a thin, short mustache.

  “I would never leave you alone, little Lina,” ‘Doctor Travers’ said in a kind, and yet incredibly weary voice. The weight of impossible ages seemed to press down on the man then, his shoulders hunching. Still, he stood as strong as he needed to, in order for Aveline to lean upon him.

  The Doctor must have felt my regard, then, because those faded emerald eyes flickered up to regard me as I climbed to my feet. There was decidedly less friendliness in that gaze than there was as he comforted Aveline.

  Something about his eyes…

  They were so ft and hollow. All emotion leaked out of him as he looked at me as if I were little better than an ant. It nearly felt like he was just putting on a show for Aveline, and this was his true state. I started to tense, but then he looked away, dismissing me in favor of the kid. He knelt down himself in order to bodily pick her up without any resistance.

  “Let’s get you into a bed, yes?” Travers said soothingly. “The post Stasis exhaustion must have been hitting hard, I’m sure. A nice snack and nap will fix you right up.”

  “I-” Aveline started to say, before interrupting herself with a yawn. “I’m not a little kid anymore, Doctor.” Still, she didn’t protest as Travers reached one of the beds and drew back the curtain. Shockingly, a bizarrely recognizable juice box with a cartoon apple on the front of it and a packet of cookies of all things sat on the surface. As soon as Travers set her down on the bed, she fell upon them ravenously, devouring them both as the Doctor and I watched in silence.

  Aveline was drowsy by then, but she still maintained enough presence of mind to reach up and grab Travers hand as he prepared to close the curtain on her bed, drawing a thin sheet up over her body as he did so. “Doctor…” She said, exhaustion and childish sadness thick in her voice. “Is mama…I don’t think she…”

  Sorrow returned to every inch of Traver’s heavy-set body, then. “Later, child,” He said softly. “For now, rest.”

  Although the words were short, Aveline still dozed off halfway through. Travers finished drawing the curtain, hiding her from my sight.

  He turned to face me then, the kindness gone from his face once more. The older man eyed me with a hint of disgust in his gaze, cutting off the greeting that was on my lips. He jerked his head in a motion to follow him, away from Aveline’s bed, and toward what seemed to be a partitioned desk and office space of all things in the corner of the room.

  I had to suppress a slightly hysterical ugh at the mental image of a general practitioner’s office in the depths of an ancient, abandoned, cursed bunker full of undead. Still, I followed after him.

  What else was I going to do?

  It happened in an instant. I must have crossed some kind of mystical, invisible barrier as I followed the reticent doctor. But the moment we passed from the line of sight of the rest of the infirmary, the world changed.

  The polish and gleam of modernity fell away, and what repced it was the corrosion and darkness of the rest of the bunker. The walls were no longer pristine, the furniture and fixtures no longer appeared brand new, and most importantly…

  The Doctor no longer appeared to be living.

  I froze, staring at the man who very much appeared to be undead now. Where before Doctor Travers had looked like an older man past his prime and settling into his twilight years, now he seemed to be well past sunset. He wasn’t an outright skeleton like most of the Walking Dead had been in the hall. Instead, his decomposition was more akin to what Cecily had been like.

  He looked like a raisin that had been left to dry for too long, desiccated and abnormally thin. His formerly heavy set frame had colpsed in on itself, sometimes literally in the case of his abdomen, visible behind the bare threads of his decayed b coat. His eyes, ears, and lips had long ago either fallen off or dissolved into dust with the visible passage of time, and his bare skull stared back at me with eyes full of an emerald fire.

  I…

  Wait.

  I had seen something like that, before. I had known only one undead in my time on Vereden whose eyes had glowed in that color.

  His staff was even now strapped to my back.

  This man…was a Lich.

  And I’m not sure he was a friendly one. At least, not to me.

  Doctor Travers ced his decayed fingers together and stared at me over the bridge they made. “Don’t just stand there, pretender,” He said, his voice undercut by both a palpable disdain and the form of soul speech I was starting to think belonged to existences that were more spiritual than physical. “I have matters to discuss with you.”

  I stared back at him for a moment, weighing my options. Eventually, I decided that at the very least, he had appeared to care for Aveline. He was unlikely to try and kill me outright. I stepped forward until I was in front of his desk, and lowered myself into the bare metal chair that sat there, its cushion long since decayed away. It creaked and groaned audibly under my weight, but thankfully held up.

  Meanwhile, I almost physically felt it as the Lich’s fiery eyes roved my form for some reason, inspecting me. “So. This is the solution the High Admin came to. Desperate times, indeed.”

  A bolt of realization stole down my spine then, piercing through my wariness of this ‘man’. My eyes widened and I leaned forward, staring at Travers with a deep hunger in my soul.

  “You…” I breathed. “You know what I am. What Precursors are…”

  This Lich had the answers I’d been wondering about ever since I’d been dropped onto Vereden. He knew what I was.

  Travers snorted, somehow working long decayed lungs to do so and sending a spray of dust to settle onto his desk. “Precursor? Is that what the System ended up calling you? Imitation is more accurate, but I can see where the term came from.”

  Wait.

  System?

  I had noticed just how old Akhoroth had appeared when I’d Observed him, but I’d been too preoccupied with running for my life at the time. It had said the monster was over five thousand years old, far before the time of the Initialization and the System. That was nearly two millennia before the time of the War in Heaven, if I had my dates correct. This Lich had to be from that same period of time as well.

  How the hell did he know anything about the System?

  I stared at Travers with unblinking eyes. “You’re different. You’re not like the rest of the undead down here. You…you aren’t a product of whatever curse is going on here, are you?”

  The Lich’s lips twisted in a mocking manner, almost as if he was sneering at me. “Oh, well done you. Gold star. Would you like a packet of cookies as well? They’re still edible, I assure you, even after all these years. When they say military rations st forever, they truly aren’t joking. Especially enchanted ones,” His firey emerald eyes appeared to roll in their decayed sockets. “Of course, I’m not like the others, fool. I’m the veritable fly in the ointment, the hair that spoils the broth Lucretia tried to brew down here. The arrogant little twit never considered that there were others who had studied the bcker arts and were prepared to linger. For spite, and…other reasons.” His eyes roved past my shoulders, in the direction I knew Aveline was napping.

  There was a lot to unpack there. Names, and implications, and literally millennia of context I was desperate for.

  “I’ve never heard that name,” I said quietly. “Lucretia. Is she the one who cursed this bunker?”

  Travers looked back at me. “It was the name she was born with, but not the one she took for herself in the betrayal. She and her little band of traitors all took assumed names, and began calling themselves ‘Gods’. Practically raved about it, really, during the assault. Patently ridiculous, of course. Even with what they stole, they could not rightfully call themselves true Divinity, although they can ape it.”

  Oh.

  Well, there was one mystery solved. The Veredenese ‘gods’…the War in Heaven…

  It was all a joke. Just…infighting, among a group of people who had apparently ‘stolen’ something.

  Honestly, it wasn’t much of a shock to me. I had never forgotten the way Alveron had called the ‘gods’ physical existences, subject to mortal desires and wants. That had never struck me as particurly godly. Frankly, I don’t think the Veredenese even thought of them in the way I would have thought of the divine. There was cultural context to the term ‘god’ that I don’t think ever transted well through Language Adaptation.

  But I did notice that Travers still had a concept of what real Divinity should be. That was curious.

  While was absorbing that, it was Travers whose gaze suddenly filled with hunger as he stared at me. “Tell me…is she dead? Are they dead? I felt the notification some two millennia past, that they had lost their grip on the System and propagated it outward to the Generim.”

  The First Initialization, had to be.

  “Have you…been down here all this time?” I asked slowly. “Just…”

  “Waiting for the day this tomb of fools would be opened?” Travers finished for me derisively. “Not the whole time. Awareness comes and goes. I sleep, and I wake, and I sleep, and I wake. But now that has come to an end with you, pretender. Now answer the question.”

  I suddenly seized under the loosening of what I could only call a Mantle, from this ancient creature. It manifested as a sense of creeping dread, I think literally cwing at my spirit from behind me. I hands and fingers spasmed while various muscles in my body tensed and untensed in rapid succession. “I don’t know!” I blurted out shakily. “I-It depends on which side she was on, in t-their war against each other! One side called themselves Chaos, and the other Order! Chaos won with only a single loss, and Order l-lost all but two members! I don’t know their names!”

  I was really wishing I had thought to ask the historical names of the ‘gods’ right about now. I only knew a handful of them, such as Ixiah, the Mad God, and I…think I’d heard the name of the Orcish goddess somewhere, but I couldn’t recall it right now.

  The Mantle suddenly loosened on me, and I regained control of my body. Suddenly, I could breathe again, although those breaths came shakily. That had been one of the worst experiences of my life, I think. It had been like my very soul was under attack, directly bypassing the flesh.

  I’d never experienced a Mantle so powerful. Grey, or Honoka, or Tzo…

  None of them could compare.

  The owner of it sat back with a dissatisfied, rattling hum. It echoed out of him from vocal cords long gone. “It’ll have to do, I suppose,” Travers said, visibly and audibly dissatisfied. “To know that all they worked for together came to dust in the end. I can’t expect a quickling like you to understand actual, unimagined history. The time for questions is over,” He said with finality, as I overcame the shock to my spirit and opened my mouth in protest. “You’ve gotten all you will out of me. I didn’t linger for literal millennia to be some sort of…database for you to plunder, fool. Find your answers elsewhere.”

  I ground my teeth in frustration as most of my hopes went up in so much dust. “Then why did you stick around all this time?” I asked harshly.

  The Lich bared his brown and rotten teeth at me, in a mockery of a smile.

  “Why, for the girl, of course.”