“What do you mean it didn’t look right?” I asked, my voice taking on a dangerous tone as I mentally prepared myself for what he was about to say.
“Well,” Ignis replied, this time hesitantly as he sensed the undercurrent to my voice. “It was…tinted slightly green...”
“Of course, it was!” I barked, seeing Ignis and all his group members cringe at the reluctant admission. “And what about the warning that we gave everyone when we led you into this ruin? Specifically, the part that sounded something along the lines of, ‘if you see any Æther Crystals that happen to be glowing green, stay the hell away from it and tell us, because the last one we saw contained an endless horde of angry ghosts that nearly killed us!’”
“I-I remember,” Ignis answered in a small voice. “B-but it wasn’t a crystal, so we didn’t think—”
“Oh, goddamn right you didn’t think!” Lazarus hissed from beside me. “Why the hell would there be a difference?!”
“I don’t know!” the half-elf exclaimed raising his hands in front of him. “W-we didn’t think that you were being honest! You already have control of all the other Æther in the area! We just figured that the green type was just more valuable or something!”
“Are you serious right now, Ignis?” Freya barked angrily. “You thought we were warning you out of greed?”
“I…we…” Ignis countered weakly, his arms falling to his sides before he shrugged. “Like I said, we fucked up.”
“And you all decided to keep fucking up!” Sierra exclaimed. “Because when you did get close enough to the tainted Æther, and all the spirits started coming out of everywhere, you decided to run!”
“Actually, most of us just died on the spot as soon as the spirits started to appear,” the same elf that had spoken earlier stated. “We didn’t get a chance to do anything!”
“Which means that you were one of the ones dumb enough to actually get close to the Æther in the first place!” Sierra snapped.
“Fine, I’ll admit to that!” the elf replied while pointing a finger at Ignis. “But he’s the one who dragged the spirits back here. None of us were stupid enough to do that!”
“Thanks, Hido,” Ignis hissed turning to glare at the man who had just thrown him under the bus. “Do you want to say that a bit louder? I don’t think the entire camp heard you the first time!”
“Screw you—” the elf started to reply.
“Enough!” I spat, cutting off the argument before it could gain any more steam. It was obvious that Ignis’s group was in the process of fracturing, but I also didn’t consider that to be my problem to fix. If they wanted to fight among themselves, they could very well go ahead and do it.
Just as long as they did it after I was done with them.
I glared at the group until I was sure that none of them would interrupt me, then shifted my attention to Ignis.
“So, you ran,” I prompted the half-elf, watching his expression carefully as he replied.
“You know I did,” he admitted petulantly. “The moment that I saw the spirits start pulling themselves out of the lake, I took off. I figured that if I moved fast enough that they’d lose interest in me like the Grove creatures usually do if you run far enough...”
“But they clearly didn’t,” Lazarus observed with a growl.
“No,” Ignis replied with a sigh. “I made it most of the way through the jungle before I realized that they were chasing…and then I really started to panic.”
“Have you ever heard of Hanlon’s Razor, Ignis?” I asked, bringing up my hands to rub my temples as I considered what he had just told me. I knew that there was likely more to the story that he wasn’t telling me, or had decided to leave out, like how he’d even managed to get through the jungle alive, but after hearing his explanation so far, I found myself hard pressed to want to hear it.
“Uh, it doesn’t ring a bell,” he said uneasily. “What is it?”
“An aphorism,” I explained taking my hands away from my face as I gave him a resigned look, feeling the anger in me fizzle and morph into a dull exhaustion that began to radiate through my body. “Loosely translated, it means ‘never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity’, which is the only way that I could even begin to rationalize everything you just told me. If you somehow actually set out to maliciously destroy this camp, I don’t know how you could have possibly done a better job, short of literally not running into me when you did.”
Reddening at my explanation, I saw a look of anger, frustration, and embarrassment, come across Ignis’s face as he glared back me, immediately replying back in a sarcastic tone, “I guess I’ll have to try harder next time.”
“Don’t make shit worse for us with your damn attitude!” Hido spat as he suddenly shoved Ignis from behind, causing him to stumble forward. “Bad enough we stood by you when you opened your fat mouth last week and got us blackballed by half the Adventurers here!”
“Oh f—” the beginning of a curse flew out of Ignis’s mouth as he caught himself and spun towards Hido, only to have the elf’s fist slam into the side of the man’s face, sending him falling straight to the ground.
Almost immediately, the rest of Ignis’s group rushed forward to attack him, all of them managing to land several blows before any of us had the presence of mind to intervene and separate them.
“Stop!” I found myself shouting as I grabbed hold of the elf that had started the impromptu brawl and pulled him off of Ignis, who lay groaning on the ground before us. “That’s enough!”
“I think we’ve gotten all we’re going to, Lyrian,” Freya told me as she held the twisted arm of a thin half-orc in a tight grip. “They’re ready to kill one another at this point.”
“Looks like it,” I agreed, looking down at Ignis, who was slowly pulling himself together with a dazed expression on his face.
“Then that’s it?” Hido asked, breathing hard from the brief exertion, all the other Adventurers falling behind him as the group released them. “We can go? You’re not going to punish us?”
“For what? Being stupid?” I replied half-heartedly as I motioned for the group to step back while Ignis picked himself up off the ground, his hand covering a broken and bleeding nose. “There’s no point in doing that. Besides, I think having your Soul Fragments trapped in the middle of the jungle is more punishment than anything I could inflict at the moment.”
“Ugh,” Hido grunted as he and everyone else behind him visibly deflated at that reminder. “I forgot about that…”
“Good luck recovering it,” I replied, doing my best to project an honest tone in my voice. “But with that being said, if you guys want to keep fighting between yourselves, go do it in the Grove or on the surface. Anywhere but the camp.”
“Noted,” Hido said, giving Ignis one last glare before promptly turning around and leaving with the other three Adventurers into the camp without another word.
Staring at their departure for a moment, Ignis gave us all a dirty glance before turning around and heading in the opposite direction by himself, leaving us all standing by ourselves as we watched the two groups depart.
“Well, that turned out to be a little bit more entertaining than I was expecting,” Lazarus said, exhaling sharply. “We should have let them beat on one another a bit longer though.”
“Talking to them was a waste of time,” Sierra said in a frustrated tone. “I’m not sure I completely buy anything Ignis told us, or how he had the dumb luck to run through half the jungle without getting jumped by a creature, but damned if his group mates were pissed. That part was definitely honest.”
“Well they should be pissed,” Constantine stated. “You hear what they said about being blackballed? I have a feeling that sort of resentment has been brewing for a while.”
“Does anyone know anything about that?” I asked curiously, scanning everyone’s faces. “Has everyone who originally stood with Ignis the other week been getting the cold shoulder from the rest of the
Adventurers?”
“I don’t know,” Freya replied with a shrug. “You’d have to ask Dunedin, if anyone’s instigating against Ignis and his group, it’d be him. He took it a bit personally when Ignis pulled his stunt the other week.”
“Huh,” I grunted, recognizing the name as belonging to the dwarf that had stood up in favor of Virtus when we had first announced the discovery of the Nafarrian ruin and the Ley Line. I’d made it a point to thank him once everything had settled that day, but I couldn’t really recall seeing him since then. “Has anyone seen him lately? I sure haven’t.”
“I have,” Constantine said. “He’s been working with Jenkins and Ritt quite a fair bit. Something about having found a huge vein of metal in the Grove.”
“Wait, that was him?” I asked, remembering what the pair had told me just a few hours earlier. “Shit, I didn’t know.”
“If you had the time to keep up on camp gossip and everyone’s whereabouts on top of everything that you were doing already, Lyrian, I’d be shocked,” Lazarus grumbled. “As it is, I have no idea when you even find the time to sleep.”
“I’ve learned to get by on the little I get while blinking,” I replied dryly, prompting a chuckle from the half-giant. “But given what happened today, I think it would be good to check what the general attitude among the Adventurers is like. The last thing we can afford is fighting amongst ourselves when we have this world event to worry about now.”
“I’ll see if I can track him down once we’re done here,” Constantine promised.
“The rest of us can keep our ears open too,” Freya added. “I’m sure we can ask the rest of the guild members if they’re hearing anything too.”
“Hopefully it’s just Ignis and his group,” I said optimistically, running my hand through Amaranth’s fur as I spoke. “And not a bigger issue for us to worry about.”
“Speaking of bigger issues,” Constantine said, changing the topic. “What are we going to do about this…oh, what did that gizmo call it?”
“Spectral Infestation.” Sierra supplied, prompting Constantine to nod in thanks.
“Right!” he acknowledged. “This massive new Spectral Infestation that Ignis and his team of idiots kicked off. I don’t think we can turn the Ley Line off as easily as we did that infected crystal back upstairs.”
“Well, we can seal it,” I said. “Assuming we can find the remaining Runestones…and decipher the spell inscribed on.”
“That may keep the problem from getting worse,” Constantine admitted. “But that weird green Æther is still going to be there, right? Won’t we have to figure out a way of getting rid of that too?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I replied, shrugging my shoulders with resignation. “I feel like we’ve been tossed in the deep end regarding all this Æther stuff. First, it mutates every living thing it touches, and now apparently it can sort-of bring the dead back to life.”
“Or the dead can use it to come back to life,” Freya added, offering a different perspective. “Don’t forget about what the Slave-King did. He used the Æther at that Irovian Tower to come back to life too.”
“Yeah, but he wasn’t like the other spirits; he actually had his shit together when he came back,” I said. “These spirits are mindless, just driven by emotion, vengeance in their case, they aren’t—”
“I’m gonna stop you right there, Lyr,” Constantine stated, cutting me off before I could finish my thought. “Before your complaints start giving the game world ideas. Do you really want to be fighting all these spirits if they were actually smart and had a better sense of tactics?”
“Uh, no,” I agreed, realizing that I might have very well been jinxing myself. “Dumb and swarming is perfect. Forget I said anything at all.”
“As much as I agree with the both of you, that doesn’t get us any closer to answers,” Sierra said with a sigh. “Assuming there are any answers to this!”
“Well, I’m not exactly an expert on this Nafarrian stuff,” Lazarus interjected. “But there was one thing in that world event alert that stood out for me.”
“There was?” I asked as we all turned to look at the big half-giant curiously.
“Sure,” he said, his eyes temporarily losing focus as he brought the notice up in his vision. “Specifically, the part that said, ‘Bringing forth a vengeful host denied passage to their eternal slumber.’ The spirits are clearly the vengeful host, but it’s that second part that’s interesting. It mentions that they weren’t able to pass on. Now I don’t know about you guys, but based on that it’s not a far mental stretch to assume that something is holding them here against their will.”
“Like what though?” Freya queried as we all processed Lazarus’s train of thought. “I have no idea how the afterlife or any of that sort of stuff is handled in Ascend Online, at least from the NPCs perspective. The Adventurer version of it is pretty clear-cut.”
“Me either,” Lazarus replied with a shrug. “But look at what we’ve faced so far here, both in the dungeon above and now in the Grove. The dead clearly aren’t moving onto whatever type of afterlife they should be.”
“That’s a really good point,” I said, feeling Lazarus’s insight had a great deal of merit to it. “Well, I guess we should find out what happens when someone dies.”
“How do you plan on doing that Lyr?” Constantine asked me. “That’s…not something that we can exactly test.”
“Easy,” I told the rogue as I motioned for everyone to follow me. “We do what most people have been doing for thousands of years when faced with questions about death.”
“And what’s that?” Constantine asked as he fell in beside me, one eyebrow raised curiously.
“We ask a Priest,” I replied, flashing a smile in his direction. “Or in our case, a Priestess.”
Chapter 48
Moving with purpose, it didn’t take long for us to make it to the healing ward at the rear of the camp to where I hoped to find Shelia and get a better understanding of how the general theology of the world worked. Or at least what people generally believed happened. I didn’t know if any of the information would be useful, or even pertain to our particular situation with the Spectral Infestation that was currently afflicting the Twilight Grove, but Lazarus’s words had resonated with me pretty strongly, leaving me with one recurring thought that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around.
Why have none of the Nafarr in this ruin moved onto their afterlife?
Was it because they all died in anger? I asked myself, as I slowly filtered through the common tropes about ghosts that I’d seen or read over my lifetime, trying to pick one that would fit our current situation. Or is it because they’re trapped here somehow? Or maybe they’re some sort of echo of sentience caught by the Æther and not really ghosts at all?
Halting my train of thought as we entered the healing ward, I was happy to find the place quiet and completely devoid of patients, any wounded from the attack having long since been mended and sent on their way. After entering the area, it didn’t take long for the sounds of our feet to draw Shelia’s attention, her head poking free from one of the far blinds moments before the rest of her body followed.
“We’re not injured,” I said by way of greeting, after seeing her eyes drop down to inspect our bodies, searching for wounds or broken limbs.
“I figured as much,” Shelia replied in a tired tone as her eyes darted up to meet mine. “It seems to be a new habit that I’ve picked up after my time down here. But what can I do for all of you? I’m surprised to see you all still up after that battle and all the cleanup…”
“I’m sure we’ll turn in soon enough,” I replied, despite knowing full well that sleep was a distant hope for me. “We’re actually here because we have a few questions that we were hoping to get your perspective on as a Priestess.”
“Oh?” Shelia asked, her curiosity suddenly piqued. “What about?”
“What happens to someone’s soul when they die?” I queried, seeing her e
yes widen in surprise.
“Now that,” she replied, exhaling a deep breath as she spoke, “is quite the question, Lyrian!”
“Which is why we all came to you,” Freya said as she joined the conversation. “As Adventurers, we’re well aware of what happens to our souls if we die, but we also know that we’re an exception to the rule. We wanted to get a better understanding of what a regular person’s soul may face when they pass.”
“This is because of the attack by the Nafarrian spirits?” Shelia asked, her eyes scanning all of ours.
“That’s right,” I replied, giving the red-haired priestess a nod, not surprised with how quickly she had come to that conclusion. “If we’re to find a way to defeat them, or at least manage them somehow, we’re hoping to understand why they’re still here and haven’t moved on to whatever afterlife that they believed in.”
“And to do that, you want an idea what a soul would normally do after its death,” Shelia said, nodding at our logic. “Very well. I think I understand your question a little bit better now, but before I answer it, perhaps we should sit down first. This is not a conversation to have standing or one to rush.”
Without another word, Shelia motioned for us to follow her and led us behind the blind that we had seen her appear from just a few moments earlier, revealing an area with several chairs and a pair of tables with pitchers of water and food on top of it. With a wave, she motioned for us to take our seats, taking one for herself, and waited patiently until we had all finished moving.
“I admit, I find myself at a bit of a loss at where to start,” Shelia admitted as she looked out towards us. “When trying to answer what comes after death…all the scriptures and rituals of my faith come to mind, along with their meaning and symbolism. But I don’t believe that is what you are all looking for. So, with that, I will try and explain what I can…and hope that helps, somehow.”
Legacy of the Fallen Page 66