Z3ke (Original Poster)

  We’ve stopped for the day and are just chilling around a campfire after dinner. Compared to all the shit that happened yesterday, today has been relatively peaceful. The Deadlands stretched out in front of us in every direction. Its vast sheets of cracked, dead earth were only broken by patches of twisted vegetation that somehow managed to survive out here. Dust devils drifted lazily across the horizon and the sun beat down on us mercilessly.

  I never realized how absolutely awful hiking across a desert could be. None of the movies or tv shows I watched ever mentioned how much your feet ache afterwards or how the heat builds up slowly and cooks you alive or how dry your mouth gets.

  The early morning was the worst part about it. I never even knew there was a five AM. We started not long before sunrise, hoping to get a couple miles under us before the sun toasted us alive. We headed out under a veil of oppressive silence and that was mostly my fault. I was still carrying around all that anger and resentment from yesterday and nobody really knew how to talk to me.

  I’ve calmed down a bit since then. I listened to what a bunch of you said and I thought about the expedition group’s explanation for why they did what they did. Sure, it was an asshole move. But…whatever. I was able to slowly lower the anger that I felt throughout the day.

  Pell scouted ahead of us just like yesterday, slipping in and out of our group without a sound. He’d rush ahead and disappear for about thirty minutes before coming back and checking in with Corva. During one of those early check-ins he came back with dark smears of blood on his clothing. He didn’t say anything to the rest of us, just leaned in close to Corva and whispered something before going out scouting again. Later on, Corva told us that Pell had killed three creatures that had been stalking us. He made it sound like a simple chore and, maybe for Pell it really was.

  We stopped for lunch around midday and Pell came back with news of another pack of Jackal Runners. This was a smaller group than yesterday, and he told Corva that they didn’t look too aggressive. Maybe they weren’t as starved and desperate as the group from yesterday. Or maybe they were just passing by and didn’t plan on attacking us. Either way, Pell said that they’d probably just leave us alone but Corva had different plans.

  He turned to me and suggested that it was the perfect opportunity for me to boost my melee skills. He didn’t push me or demand that I fight, he just offered the chance. I knew what he was doing. I’m not completely helpless out here, but yesterday did prove that I’m not as ready for the Deadlands as I need to be. This was Corva’s way of saying that I needed the practice and that this situation was the best thing for me.

  It felt kinda like a peace offering. He was asking me if I wanted to fight the Jackal Runners instead of just having Pell guide them towards us. So, I nodded and accepted the hand axe that he gave me and told him that I’d try.

  We set up our ambush. Pell tracked the pack and herded them towards us. Cole stayed out of the fight since this wasn’t a large pack and he wasn’t needed to corral them into kill zones. When the pack reached us, Wren and Corva took down three of the Jackals pretty easily and Pell guided the last one towards me.

  This fight felt different. I had the same hand axe and it didn’t feel strange in my grip anymore. I wasn’t shaking as much from excess adrenaline and I felt like I knew the plan now and wasn’t just panicking and flailing about.

  The Jackal tried to lunge at me but it wasn’t as focused on me as it should have been. Its attention was back on the rest of its pack that Wren and Corva were dealing with. After it saw its pack killed, it felt more like the beast wanted to try to break away and run, but I kept cutting off its retreat.

  The fight still took a while. Longer than yesterday at least. I know it’s gonna sound weird, but I think the reason the fight took so long was because I’d chosen to fight. I chose to swing the axe and chose to cut off its retreat and chose to chase it down. Yesterday I’d been fighting for my life and that made me take risks and desperately swing out to try to kill the beast wanting to rip out my throat. This time, I was a little smarter and a little more cautious and that made the fight, surprisingly, harder.

  Still…I managed to kill the jackal. It wasn’t clean and it wasn’t fast, but it was something. And it felt a little like progress. After it was all over Corva gave me a small nod and a proud little look. I didn’t get a boost to my melee skill but I still walked away feeling a little bit more capable.

  After the fight, something had shifted in our group. The tension eased off a little. Pell still scouted ahead and Wren still guarded our rear and Corva still guided us forward, but the atmosphere was different. No one seemed worried that I’d snap at them or fall apart again. Instead, the hike seemed a tad bit more normal.

  We marched across the Deadlands and Cole must have sensed the change in the atmosphere too. He seemed thrilled that the unnatural silence that had plagued our group was gone because he started talking. And he didn’t stop.

  It was like he’d been building up a lecture inside his head all morning and he’d finally had a chance to release it. For the rest of the afternoon he talked nonstop. And I mean nonstop.

  His lecture started with the Vash Dynasty - some ancient empire that ruled most of the Deadlands long before the Fracture hit. According to him, the Vash Dynasty was infamous for their brutality. He described their territory as “golden cities lacquered in blood.”

  When he said that sentence he had a tiny self-satisfied grin on his face and I could imagine that he’d been waiting years to use that line. He talked about their empire and explained that it had spanned dozens of territories that now make up a sizeable chunk of the Deadlands, and that their entire culture was built around war and domination.

  He went into copious detail about their military structure, their trade routes, their political failures, their downfall, and every other inane topic that you could ever imagine. He was absolutely thrilled that he had a captive audience he could prattle on to, even if that audience was Wren scanning for threats, Corva staring at the horizon, and me trying not to think about how much my feet hurt.

  Seriously, I regretted not spending some of my cash on hiking boots back in The MIZ. Trying to travel through the desert in thin Converse shoes was a mistake, and every step that I took was just another reminder about how unprepared I was for life in the Deadlands.

  Still, I will admit that Cole’s lecture helped pass the time. His voice filled the space that felt so heavy earlier, and even though he talked more in a few hours than I think I’d ever said in my entire life, it kept my mind off the ache in my legs and the sweat soaking through my shirt.

  By the time the sun started falling, the day felt completely different from how it started. I wasn’t as angry anymore. The group didn’t seem on edge. And for the first time since starting this expedition, I didn’t feel like I was dragging everyone down.

  When Corva finally called for us to make camp, I crumpled to the ground in relief. My legs were sore and cramped, my clothes were covered in sweat and dirt, and I was ready to just sleep for a couple hours.

  Corva threw something together for dinner and we all just sat around a fire, letting the day’s aches fall off us. The fire burned low and the rest of the group did their nighttime routines. Wren was at the edge of camp, focused on breaking down his rifle and cleaning every inch of it. Cole had a thick leather-bound book out and he was scribbling into it, muttering details about the day’s events to himself. Pell had disappeared for one final sweep around our camp, making sure nothing was out there that could threaten us.

  Corva had found an old battered log that, for some reason, had been half-buried in the sand. It was a mystery because there weren’t any trees around so…where the hell did he get it? I was lost in thought for a good twenty minutes trying to solve that little puzzle. Eventually I noticed that he had something in his hands that he’d pulled from his coat. At first I thought it was just a small stick that he was gonna toss into the fire, but on closer look I realized it was a small block of deadwood that was roughly the size of a finger.

  He had a carving knife in his hand. Its handle looked worn, like he’d held it millions of times before. He rolled the small piece of wood in his palm, studying its knots and the grain running in odd directions. Then he pressed the knife to it and made the first cut.

  I watched him work the wood. There was something oddly calming about it. I heard the quiet scrape of the knife and watched the tiny curls of wood fall to the ground. I didn’t want to interrupt, knowing that if I spoke up and drew his attention away from his whittling that I’d be stepping into his personal space.

  At the same time, I couldn’t stop thinking about what you all posted yesterday. Everyone went on and on about how me going without a class was dangerous. You all reminded me that I was at risk of just disappearing one day. That thought had stuck with me and I’d been working at it for most of the day. I needed an answer to all my questions and…no, that’s not right. What I needed most was for someone to reassure me that they knew what they were talking about. If Corva really was able to guide me to the Drifter class, like you lot suggested he could, I needed to decide whether or not to trust him.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Uh…Corva?”

  He didn’t look up at me but his knife slowed. “Hmm?”

  “Yesterday you said that I shouldn’t be focusing on getting a class right now. You said I should just boost my skills and learn what I could.” I cringed at how I sounded, like the stupid kid in class who kept pestering the teacher because the homework didn’t make sense.

  All the rest of the expedition group had classes. They had experience and knowledge and skills. They knew how to defend themselves. They knew how to do their jobs. And here I was, basically begging Corva for whatever he could give me.

  “Well, I was wondering how you gained your class. Like…what did you do?”

  Corva stopped his knife and just stared down at the little block of wood in his hands for a few seconds. Finally, he sighed and started carving again, but it was slower this time.

  “Well…people’ll tell you that there’re two ways to get a class. There’s the way that you hear about in the story books. Something dramatic happens. The hero goes through a crazy crisis or some defining event or…whatever, and the world rewards them with a class.” He let out a slow breath and leaned back a little. “Something like that rarely happens. It’s for fairy tales. It's for historical epics. What normally happens is people get their class the second way. They do what they’ve always done for most of their life. A class is just the world recognizing what you’ve done and that you’re getting better at doing it.”

  He fell silent again as he stared at the piece of wood he was shaping. The fire crackled softly between us.

  “I was…oh, I don’t know, maybe 23 or 24. It was around that age where I left home.” He spoke softly. It wasn’t really sad, but there was a weight to his voice that wasn’t there before.

  “I didn’t have no grand ambitions or anything like that. I wasn’t looking for adventure or glory or riches. No dream was pulling me forward. I just…needed to get away.” He shrugged a little. “So I left. I drifted. I pointed myself in a direction and just went.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “There was a merchant I met. Miles from my home town. He ran this convoy that hauled goods between towns and he needed someone to load the crates and guard the goods and fix the wagon wheels and whatever else came up. The work wasn’t hard, and it paid, and it kept me moving.

  “I was with that convoy for a couple months, just drifting between small towns, selling his wares. Eventually we stopped in this border town. It wasn’t anything special. Nothing like those towns that you read about in adventure books where wealth and opportunity is around the corner. It was just some dusty, half-abandoned settlement that needed workers. Well…the merchant eventually left and I stayed put.”

  He smiled, but it was a tired-looking smile. Almost bitter.

  “The town needed people and I took whatever jobs available,” he said. “Stocking shelves, hauling shipments, running errands, fixing broken furniture. If someone needed a warm body for something, I was there. It wasn’t glamorous. I did all the small jobs and I earned the small pay. But it was enough for me to get something to eat and it put a roof over my head.”

  By now Cole had quietly closed his book. Wren had set aside his rifle. We were all listening to the story. The fire popped again, throwing warm light across Corva’s face.

  “After a while, the adventurers started showing up. Border towns always attract them. A bunch would show up in town, make a party, and then head out into the Deadlands in search of relics, ruins, monsters, and whatever else they thought would make them rich and famous. They’d roll into town all bloody and hungry and tired and dragging broken gear behind them. They’d treat the place like a pit stop, nothing more than a place to sleep, resupply, drink, and head back out into danger.”

  Surprisingly, he didn’t sound all bitter when he said that. It was like he knew his role in town and had accepted it. He turned the piece of wood over in his hand and carved away a few careful slivers, slowly shaping it into an object.

  “All of them needed something,” said Corva. “They needed someone to cool the meals. Someone to clean the pots. Someone to patch the tents. Someone to keep the gear organized so they wouldn’t spend an hour tearing through their bags looking for a whetstone. Someone to haul the crates and bundles and tools. Someone to dig the latrines and choose where the fires went. Someone to make sure that the water didn’t run out and nothing important got left behind. Someone to do all the invisible work that keeps adventurers alive and fit and rested and thinking they did everything themselves.

  “So I did that. I did all of that. And more. Anything they needed. Anything that paid.” His knife shaved off another curl of wood. “I didn’t have any special training. I wasn’t particularly strong or good in a fight. I was just a guy who could lift things and didn’t know how to say no.”

  He paused and shifted slightly, staring down at the piece of wood in his hand.

  “It was hard work. Boring work. Sometimes disgusting work. But it was steady work and it taught me things. Every group I worked with had their own little tips and tricks. One party taught me how to stake down a tent so it wouldn’t blow away during a sandstorm. Another showed me how to maintain all their weapons. I learned enough basic healing to keep someone breathing long enough to get them to a real medic. An old ranger taught me to navigate rocky terrain. I picked up skills everywhere I went. Bit by bit. Job by job. And slowly, I made myself indispensable.”

  He carved a bit more off the piece of wood. By now I could tell it was some kind of charm. It was small and simple. I couldn’t figure out what shape he was working towards, but the way he handled it and took care with each swipe of his knife meant that it mattered to him.

  “Those adventure novels I keep talking about, the ones that all the kids grow up reading,” he continued, “the ones with the heroes shooting guns and swinging around swords and tossing lighting. Well, they skip on all the parts that I did. No one writes about the guy who wakes up at the asscrack of dawn to cook breakfast. No one writes about hauling fifty pounds of equipment through a scorching desert so the fighters can all keep their hands free. And nobody write about choosing where to dig a latrine so the whole camp doesn’t stink so bad it makes everyone sick.”

  Wren snorted at that. Corva ran his thumb along his carving, checking the shape of it. It was slowly morphing into a familiar shape; something recognizable to me. There was a loop at the top and the whole thing almost looked like a cross but it wasn’t finished yet.

  “Anyway, that’s how I made myself useful. I wasn’t always the strongest or smartest or bravest, but I was the guy who kept things running. I made it so everyone else could focus on their jobs. Eventually, after years of picking up skills and doing the things nobody else wanted to handle, something changed. If you do something long enough, and when you get good at it, something notices.”

  He looked up from his carving and smiled at me.

  “That’s how I became a Drifter. It’s good with logistics and survival and repairs and a little bit of everything else. It’s not the flashiest of classes. I know that. You ain’t gonna hear bards singing songs about it. But it’s one of the most useful classes a person can earn.”

  He leaned back a little and pointed his knife my way. The fire reflected off the metal edge. “Like I told you before: a class isn’t random. It’s a reflection of what you’ve already done. What you learned. What you accomplished. What you’ve survived. And what you’ve chosen to be.”

  Corva went back to his whittling and Wren went back to his rifle and Cole opened up his book again. We all realized that Corva was done talking and were lost in our own thoughts.

  Classes had been on my mind all day. Corva’s explanation of them being “a reflection of what I’ve already done,” didn’t exactly fill me with happiness. My life before now had been…fine. Quiet. Safe. Comfortable. That was the best that could be said about it. I hadn’t ever pushed myself to be more and I hadn’t taken risks. I’d simply kept my head down and scraped by. So what kind of class would that get me?

  The only class I’d managed to unlock since getting to this world popped up in my mind. Bartender. At the time I’d assumed it was some kind of cosmic joke. Maybe it was the universe’s way of telling me that it was all I’d ever amount to. A bartender. Just a bartender.

  I mean…it could have been worse. I could've unlocked the “Lazy Dumbass” class instead.

  I stared into the fire, lost in my own thoughts. Did I want to be like Corva? Drifter sounded useful, but it also sounded like it had taken him years of nonstop grinding. I didn’t have years to devote to a class, as everyone on the forum was so keep on reminding me.

  The fire dwindled away and the desert air got colder. Meanwhile, Corva kept whittling away at his small piece of wood. The shape slowly started coming together. A round loop at the top. A short horizontal bar. A long vertical stem.

  Something tugged at my memory and the longer I watched Corva carve the wood, the stronger the memory got. It wasn’t until Corva turned the carving slightly and caught the fire just right that everything clicked.

  “Is…is that an ankh?” I blurted out.

  Corva didn’t pause or look surprised. He just kept whittling and hummed quietly. “Mm.”

  An ankh. The Egyptian symbol of…I want to say life? It was a symbol I’d seen on jewelry and posters and every goth girl’s Instagram profile. But how the hell did it exist here?

  Egypt didn’t exist in this world. Or, at least, I was pretty sure it didn’t. As far as I knew, this world was completely different from the Earth I knew. There wasn’t a “Deadlands” back home, unless you counted New Jersey. So why was Corva carving an Ancient Egyptian symbol?

  “Why are you making an ankh? What’s it for?”

  His knife paused mid stroke and Corva went completely still. At first I thought he just hadn’t heard me and was focused entirely on his whittling project, trying to decide what more he needed to do to finish it off. But then the stillness stretched.

  Wren, who’d gone back to tinkering with his rifle after Corva had finished his brief story about his early career, looked up at the sudden quietness. Cole put his pen down and closed his book and turned fully towards Corva.

  Finally, Corva lowered his knife and set his carving down beside him on the log. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded different. Older, now. Worn. Tired.

  “I told you that I’d left the town I grew up in when I was about twenty four.”

  I nodded, unsure whether he wanted an answer or if he was just taking a moment to gather himself.

  “That wasn’t the whole story,” he murmured. “Just the part that’s easiest to tell.”

  He fell silent again, just staring into the camp fire. His eyes weren’t really focused on the flames. It was like he was staring through them, lost in thought, trying to figure out how to explain what happened.

  “I grew up in a small town. A very small town. It was the type of town where nothing ever happens and where the most exciting day of the year is when a traveler gets lost on the road and stumbles into town.” He smiled faintly, but his smile never reached his eyes. “I started working young. I was an apprentice to a carpenter. I liked the work and I was good at it. My mentor was a patient man. Hard worker. Quiet. He taught me how to make all the things that the village needed: benches, tables, cabinets, little toys for the children.”

  His face softened a little and he gave a small smile.

  “He was family long before I married his daughter. Before I even realized that I loved her. He treated me like a son. Taught me things. Guided me through life.”

  Both Cole and Wren leaned forward at that. None of us spoke, mostly out of fear that we’d break whatever spell had landed on our camp.

  “I’d built a life for myself in that town. It was a simple life. And a good one. I married her. My Mara. We had two girls and were raising them together. That was it. That’s all I needed. That was my world. Maybe others would have found it boring…but I liked it.”

  He drew a slow breath and the pause continued as he stared into the fire.

  “That was before the plague.”

  A log popped, sending sparks skipping upwards. Cole had a puzzled look on his face at the mention of a plague, but he didn’t interrupt.

  “I don’t know how it started. Don’t think anyone does. There weren’t any clues about what caused the sickness and if there was ever any cure…nobody found it. Some people got sick and died within hours. For others it took them weeks to show the symptoms. By then, it was too late. There wasn’t any kind of pattern to who got sick and who didn’t. And there wasn’t any mercy about it either.

  “I didn’t get sick. I was one of the ‘lucky’ ones.” He spat the word out like it was poison.

  “There weren’t a lot of healthy people in the village. After the plague hit and the first couple died and the bodies all started piling up…well, someone had to bury them. My woodworking skills were pretty useful in that moment.

  “My mentor and I got to work. At first we tried to make the coffins perfect. Smooth edges, sturdy corners, proper lids. We wanted to give each of the coffins a meaning. We wanted to honor the dead. We wanted to show them the respect they deserved.” He swallowed at that. “But after the first couple…the bodies didn’t stop coming. They didn’t slow. Just, more and more people dropped. One after another. We kept working. Faster. Rougher. After a while, we didn’t have time for perfect. We barely had time for adequate.”

  Corva shook his head and paused. It looked like he was trying to force the words out.

  “We made coffin after coffin, just churning them out as fast as we could. I had to bury neighbor after neighbor. The funerals all shrank down to small affairs. The town priest would say a few words. There were some tears from the families. Then the silence hit. The silence of an emptying town.

  “When my mentor…when my father got sick…I didn’t cry.” His voice was rough now. “Couldn’t. I was too busy. I had more work to do. More coffins. More graves. More concerns about the future of the town. More of…everything. It all blurred together in those last few days.”

  A shadow crossed his face and there was the longest pause yet.

  “Then,” he whispered. “I had to build three more coffins.”

  My stomach twisted and I finally understood why this story was so difficult for Corva to spit out.

  “One for the woman I loved. And two smaller ones for the children I never got to see grow old.”

  His words hit hard. Wren focused on the ground. Cole seemed to struggle to figure out words to say to the man he obviously respected. I was in the same boat in that I didn’t know what to do with myself. What do you say to something like that? How do you comfort a man who just told you about how he’d lost everything?

  “That broke me,” he said softly. “It truly broke me. After that I stopped caring. I didn’t care about the town or the coffins or burying my former friends and neighbors. I stopped carrying about anything at all. I mean…what was the point? Why should I care? What future was there for me anymore?”

  None of us spoke. The fire crackled softly and each of us was caught in our thoughts. Wren cradled his rifle and Cole stared down at the book he’d been jotting in. Finally, Corva broke the silence.

  “There was a tree in the middle of town. It was a massive thing. Taller than any house we ever built. Older than all our elders put together. I grew up climbing it and playing in its branches with all the other kids. Our moms would yell at us to get off it before we broke our necks.” His mouth twitched into an almost smile. “We called it the Heart Tree. If our village had a body, the tree was its heart.

  “Everything happened around that tree. It shaded wedding feasts in the summer. It guarded birthday picnics. Priests blessed it on holy days and children played games around its trunk.” His eyes drifted to somewhere beyond the camp, lost in the memory of his childhood. “It’s where I kissed my wife for the very first time. We were teenagers then. Scared and excited and stupid and absolutely convinced we were the only two people in the world to ever feel that kind of love.”

  He looked up at me and his expression was unreadable.

  “I cut it down.”

  I blinked. “You…what?”

  “I cut it down,” he repeated “By that point, I was all the village had left. Everyone else was either dead or gone. People fled, trying to outrun the curse or the sickness or that cruel twist of fate that had settled on our town. There was no one left. No one there who could understand my pain. No one to mourn with me. No one to stop me when I tore out the last reminder of a better time.”

  He stared into the fire and, for a moment, I thought I could see a tear bubble up.

  “I cut it down and used its wood. I used it for the last three coffins I ever made.” His voice thinned until it was barely audible. “For my wife. And our girls.”

  He shifted slightly on the log and pulled his coat aside, revealing two slim sheaths strapped to the inside lining. I hadn’t noticed them before. The knives inside were small and wooden.

  “In our village, fathers made a knife for their children when they turned ten. It was considered a rite of passage. A way to say, ‘you are now trusted with something dangerous. I believe in who you’re becoming.’” His thumb brushed over one of the knives. “I never got the chance to make my daughters a knife while they were still alive. So…I carved these instead. Using wood from the Heart Tree.” He let his coat fall closed again. “One for each of my girls.”

  His eyes lowered to the ankh in his hands, the one that I’d questioned him about earlier. He rolled it gently between his fingers.

  “There was still so much more wood left,” he murmured. “So I started carving these. I carved an ankh for each person that I lost. Every life that the plague took from my home.”

  I stared at the ankh again and it somehow looked different to me now. It wasn’t some foreign sign that had lost all meaning in this current day. It was…something more. A promise. A memorial that Corva had carved over and over until the simple act of whittling had turned into a quiet prayer that he said.

  “It’s an old symbol,” he said quietly. “Meant to represent life continuing. Even when the world takes everything else away, even when there’s no reason left to struggle and keep going. Even then, it’s telling us to live.”

  He exhaled, long and tired, and picked up his carving knife again. He started whittling and I could imagine all the faces of the people he’d lost flipping through his mind as he carved.

  “I’ve made hundreds of them.”

  For a while, none of us gathered around the campfire said a word. The fire burnt low and Corva whittled away, not looking at any of us. Finally, he finished his carving and stared down at it before coming to a decision.

  He reached into his jacket and pulled out a thin strip of leather. He threaded the leather through the ankh’s loop and then held it out towards me.

  I blinked at it, not knowing what it meant.

  “It’s a charm. It’s helped me more times than I can count, and I think…” he paused, trying to find the right words. “I think it would fit you.”

  I hesitated for a second before taking it and then slipping the whole thing over my neck. It sat there, pressing gently into my chest, and he nodded once.

  “Keep it close,” he said. Then he turned away and went to his blankets and went to sleep. I stayed by the fire, trying to quiet my thoughts and push away my fears about classes and skills and disappearing into the void. I just sat there and stared into the fire and thought about everything that Corva had lost.