We shifted around a bit, so I was at the back end of the wagon, and Aryennos and Heket were at the front right behind Terenei and Myu. I fished out my pyer and turned it on, letting my eyes scan the gorgeous scenery passively without really thinking about it, my attention on the music.

  Much of it was bright and positive, unsurprisingly, celebration of life and love and all the good things, and while they weren’t at all shy about sexual references, there was no fixation on it either—or on romance. Singers spoke of dreaming about a special person—but the next one I came across was fantasizing about a greatly-admired dancer and hoping fervently that approaching her to work with them would go well and they could all create something new and amazing.

  They weren’t all cheerful, though. The conflict between a life on the road and the loved ones at home, the grief at the end of a retionship or the sadness of what could have been, but also the loss of a pet who had been part of the family or the mixed feelings of moving to a community or job that would be personally better but still meant leaving the previous one... this world might be missing a lot of the evils I was used to, but that didn’t mean that life was perfect and effortless and painless.

  I was used to rock as the democratic genre that let anyone sing, py, write, or listen to just about any subject possible, protests and visions and nostalgia and inspiration, joy and love and pain and anger sometimes all braided together, but this was familiar and alien at the same time. Like the lyrics, the style had both simirities and differences.

  All in all, it remained enough to keep my attention.

  A song came on that I knew I hadn’t heard the previous day. I would have remembered.

  A sorrowful androgynous voice, maybe aquian given the resonance, sang about loss, about missing someone addressed in the second person. “When her grasp fails, I’ll be here waiting. When you wake up at home, I’ll be the first thing you see. When she can’t hold you anymore, I’ll be here to hold you up.... Every day is endless, worse because I know it’s worse for you. I’d trade myself for you if I could, but it wouldn’t be a favour to put you where I am.... There’s no cure but time. We can cure everything but this. Why can’t we cure the worst thing?”

  I looped the song when it reached the end, and took a closer look at the listing of tracks and artists on the side of the box. There were a lot, so very many, the gift of the performers and a couple of merchants at the festival and I suspected some had somehow added the work of friends not present. I hadn’t really looked, just listening to the ones that were tagged as music.

  Lots of titles I’d expect, but here and there... I was pretty sure no one here was going to write a song called ‘Those Two’ or ‘Two Years’ without one very specific subject in mind, and other titles, ‘Come Home’ or ‘Tell Me What You Need’, were less emphatic but some must be that, just like the current ‘Here Waiting’. What else was a song simply called ‘The Worst Pain’ likely to be about? Or ‘Finally Free’?

  Of course there were songs about that. It was a universal source of distress.

  No wonder Serru had been so perplexed that I had no idea what a mossling was, though that felt like it had been years ago.

  I hadn’t heard or seen a single song that so much as acknowledged death as such.

  I told it to py ‘Finally Free’.

  That one was from the perspective of someone who had woken up at home and was still struggling to accept that it was over, that she could start to pick up her life where it had been interrupted, that her loved ones were here and real, her brother holding her while she cried and her spouse comforting her after nightmares and her dog refusing to leave her side.

  People didn’t talk about it, but music was always a good way to cope with strong emotions, and that song vibrated with them.

  I kept choosing songs with titles that suggested they were reted. The occasional one wasn’t. Most were. There might be subtle social implications or nuances I just didn’t get that told natives which were which. References to her and mosslings were far more frequent than to him and zombies, but both were there.

  Over and over, pain and grief and anger, the long wait at home knowing a lost loved one was living a nightmare and would be a mess when they finally came home, a heartbreaking struggle to reassure a child or a pet that the person they were missing would be home eventually, the utter horror of seeing a loved one mossling-infected or zombie-spelled, the struggle to help a returned love one recover, the struggle to recover despite the joy of being home, the joyous celebration of being home but rage lurked at having faced that nightmare.

  Hatred, even.

  Nothing about death as anything but the way home, the ultimate escape that even the Moss Queen and the Zombie King could only dey, not prevent.

  The misery was in the dey and what happened during it.

  Trying to compare death in my world to death here was apples and oranges, a false equivalency even if the word was the same. My friends had been trying repeatedly to tell me how they saw it but how could either of us really put into words what something so utterly fundamental, and so fundamentally different, meant from either side?

  But music went far beyond words.

  Serru’s family and friends were grateful. The people from the festival and their friends were grateful. To them, I hadn’t saved people from an inconvenience of any size. It had the emotional effect that saving dozens of lives outright would have had at home.

  Death wasn’t the end. It wasn’t the worst thing.

  What had Serru’s letter said?

  “Terenei? Do you still have the letters Serru sent?”

  “Everything’s in my bag,” he said without hesitation. “Which is back there somewhere. Help yourself. They’re mixed in with everything else, sorry. It’s the only stack of paper in there.”

  Aryennos helpfully passed it to me.

  I tried not to pay attention to anything else that came up on the inventory, just looked for a pile of paper and pulled it out.

  Messages were simple and not unfamiliar: at the top, it stated who was sending it and the post office they were sending it from and the date and time, and who they were sending it to and the post office it had been picked up at and the date and time. The script looked more like very neat and regur handwriting than an impersonal computerized font, although presumably it couldn’t be.

  I dug through them, stopping whenever Serru’s name caught my eye. Mostly those were references in the body to her being safe.

  Serru to Terenei:

  ‘Zanshe told me about her schedule and that she’s doing her best. If she trusts Anezke to get you there safely, then I’d take her word for it. I hope you got everything on the list I sent you. Some of it you probably won’t need, but if you do you’ll be gd you have it. I heard from Jaelis, en hears everything at the post office even without being on the council as well, and it took en no time at all to put pieces together. I promised answers ter, so don’t worry about replying.

  ‘I’m worried about Nathan, I’m fairly certain his world’s concept of death is worse than we can really understand. They don’t come back and they don’t know what happens after that, how can it not be terrifying? That can’t be a good combination with what you said about side effects of all those potions. It’s still going to be a few days before I can give him a hug and assure him in person that I’m okay and I’m the most grateful of all that he had the sense to stop that infection rather than trying to keep me alive. Maybe if I’d asked more about the games our world remind him of, we could come up with a context that would make sense. Do you suppose that if you die in those games it’s an ending? I don’t know. Try to keep reminding him that I’m coming, please?

  ‘I’m gd Heket stayed. The thought of you and Aryennos and Nathan alone in the Highnds is terrifying! Zanshe confirmed the route she pns to take. I’m almost at the Bridge of Flowers, I’ve been catching rides and eating travel bars on the move and only stopping to sleep if I can’t find anyone willing to let me nap in their wagon or riverboat, but on the other side of the Bridge I’ll be mostly back to just my own feet. Just please, please, keep all of you safe and intact for a few more cycle. I’ll find you. I promise.’

  Several steps below that, I found her original letter, the one Terenei had read just after I’d woken up.

  I would rather die that way a dozen times than ever be a mossling again at the mercy of that unspeakable hateful thing.

  The groundhog reference that had puzzled my other friends had been a deliberate effort to reassure me that it really was from her.

  The mental image of Serru in the pce of the Moss Queen’s messenger, rosy hair cropped short and half of her covered in moss, made me shudder physically. That was not a better thing to visualize than the reality of Serru falling and dying.

  “Respawn,” I said, gaze still on the letters. “Serru’s question about what happens in a game from my world when you die in one? In a lot of them, your character reappears somewhere intact. It’s called respawning. Usually you don’t respawn in the same pce you just died. It might be at the st safe spot you went through, or back in the nearest town. Usually you’ve lost something, maybe money or equipment or treasure you gathered, but it might just be time and having to redo whatever’s between that safe spot and where you died. Some give you a limited number of times you can do that. Some let you keep doing it as many times as you need it.” Save points and the like didn’t seem relevant. Neither did permadeath games.

  No sane game dev would have up to two years pass in active game time while you were dead and make you return with a character who was deeply traumatized.

  “That’s pretty close,” Aryennos said. “Just with a different pce and a short dey.” He sounded intensely relieved. Maybe because we’d finally found a way to bridge that communication abyss? “Does it help seeing it that way?”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” Although it wasn’t quite that.

  “Can we ask what prompted that?” Heket asked.

  “Music. At the festival everyone was pying their most fun and upbeat songs, I think. It was a celebration with people dancing, so of course they were. I didn’t really absorb before how much of a repeated theme it is, how bad everything gets when those two touch anyone’s life. Death doesn’t equal death across worlds, not even a little. What those two do comes closer, as far as the actual social impact and the feelings about it.”

  We didn’t have a word for hate. Victim is another new word. Viote isn’t our word.

  There had to be musicians and songwriters who heard Serru’s tirade at the Moss Queen. Would new words start to spread via music? How about storytellers? They were words I wished they had no need for, but since the situation existed, having names for concepts might help others the way it apparently had Serru.

  Those two needed to be stopped. Somehow. The best way was probably going to involve a contact-effective potion that would interrupt either process. I hoped fervently that either I’d discover that I had one, just as soon as I found that one st mineral I needed, or at least that alchemists like Terenei’s grandfather could run with what we knew already. There wasn’t really much else I could do—I couldn’t be everywhere to stop them even if I stayed.

  “Well, that’s a thoroughly unpleasant thought,” Terenei said. “But if it helps you find a context for what you’re seeing here, then that’s a good thing.”

  “I’m not sure I quite have it, but I’m closer, at least. Is it going to be annoying if I pull my guitar out and try to work out the fingering for a song? That’ll get repetitive and I’ll definitely hit the wrong chord at moments.”

  “It won’t bother me.”

  Heket shook her head. “I can’t think why it would.”

  “That’ll just feel like being home with my family,” Aryennos ughed. “Which one?”

  “’Here Waiting’,” I said.

  “I know that one to sing it. Dad and I were looking for songs like that for a while. And before you ask that, because you’re about to, no, it’s not a problem to hear it, or to sing it for you if you want that. Happy learning.”