++Each Tier is vastly more powerful than the one before it. A Commoner can heighten a Primary Attribute by as much as 15 levels beyond its beginning level, a Secondary Attribute by 13 and a Tertiary Attribute by 11, here expressed as 15/13/11.

  For a Journeyman, this potential is raised to 30/27/24.

  Adepts enjoy 40/36/32.

  Experts, these most fearsome creatures, stand at 50/45/40.

  For the higher Tiers, I cannot say. My own studies have confined me to only these four levels of power. If half the stories I have heard are true, however, then those of Master and above are calamities in human form.++

  Chapter 8

  Reggie was stunned for a moment. One moment, that’s all. Maybe half a second as his mind registered the shock, as he slowly processed that everything good about the world had just turned bad, that his hope was decaying into toxic sludge, that his life was in danger all over again.

  That one moment was more time than the closest elf needed to take two steps and hit him.

  After twenty years of life, Reggie had now finally felt a punch. He’d thought he had before, of course. He’d lived a long time with the delusion that he knew what it meant to be struck. The momentary contact of those steely knuckles and his watery bones corrected that misconception, and it did so explosively.

  Everything became liquid and sponge, his arm bursting open like rotted fruit and blood spurting out in all directions. Reggie spun around, and around, and around some more. He spun so fast he actually felt himself starting to black out, the sheer rotational speed already more than his body could take. Then he hit the floor, stopping in an instant. Even that left more bones breaking.

  Reggie squealed like a rat in a beartrap, looked up through blurry eyes as the elf stalked after him.

  “Wait—” a foot came down on his belly, it burst open. The air was flooded with a repulsive stench of gore and shit, digestive fluids erupting out. Reggie couldn’t bear to look down at what had once been his midsection, felt his heart break at the ruination now greeting him. His legs went numb. He’d never walk again. That much he knew in an instant.

  A crashing sound hit Reggie’s ears, and he turned to stare through a fog of tears as one of his cauldrons—big and cast-iron—was thrown down hard. It broke against the cold stone, spilled its contents everywhere. Mixture ruined, ryven wasted. Then another cauldron followed.

  “No!” Reggie raised his pistol in a shaky grip, fired and missed. The elf he’d been trying to dome kicked it free of his hand with a contemptuous motion, one that nonetheless had strength enough to snap his arm and send the bone spearing right out through its skin.

  The pain hit Reggie like a cannon ball, obliterating senses and bringing up all the ancient and animal parts of him. They ate his intelligence, mangled his thoughts out of coherence. He only came to when he was being hoisted back off the ground, looking around to see his workplace in shambles. Broken glass and shattered iron littered the interior, chemicals spilled and reeking everywhere, flames starting to build. Years of work, a life. His life.

  “...Why?” He was sobbing now, the tears running down his cheeks. Why was it always him? Why did nothing ever work? Why did the world hate him?

  “Give him an answer, Oleri,” the elf grabbing Reggie suggested, “he’ll die without sharing it anyway.”

  The leader, apparently Oleri, thought for only a moment before her reply came.

  “Your kind are creatures of the mud, and you must stay there. I am sorry. For what it’s worth, I truly am sorry. But humanity can never again wield the power of its ancients. You must die to keep the discoveries you made here buried. Take solace in knowing it is for the greater good.”

  Greater good?

  Demons needed to be banished for the greater good, witches burned, traitors rooted out. So much pain and misery, all accepted with a grimace and a nod, a tightened jaw, just hard people doing what was needed. What about Reggie? What about his life? A little thing, so small and short, so painful and dark, but it was his, damn it.

  It mattered.

  “I don’t want to die.” He was crying, a mix of pain, shock, whatever else was shooting through his brain. Reggie trembled, sobbed, jerked in the elf’s grasp. “...Please.” No plans this time, no clever escapes. Reggie knew it was the end.

  And he was right. The elf tightened his grip, bursting all the big veins and crushing all the thick bones, rendering Reggie’s neck into a pulped mess. If nothing else, the last thing he felt was relief as the pain went away. Then Reggie was dropped down to land in a heap. Smoke was hitting his nostrils, tinged with the reek of spilled mixes that he’d once dared to hope would save him from poverty. A thousand dreams torn apart and tossed onto the fire.

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  It spread, consuming his basement, his clothes, his rickety furniture and his body.

  I don’t want to die alone. Reggie had lived alone, this one small thing seemed so very unfair. But life wasn’t fair, and in the end it denied him this wish as it had all the others. Moments later, the heart of Reginald Smith beat for the last time.

  ***

  Darkness everywhere, crushing, smothering. It was bearing down on Reggie from all sides like a blanket of…what, what was this? He tried to feel its texture, to shift and move, but even those minor motions were resisted by a force he couldn’t identify. Not stone, at least. There was give, just not much. This felt more like a feature of weight and mass than any material hardness. But what was it?

  Memory was what told Reggie in the end, a distant one. Back when he’d been a kid, not as good with those scarce coins Ludvich gave him, not as wary of the way Norvhan would up their prices when the demon-boy was asking. He’d ended up burning through a month’s funds in just one week, and starved for the remaining three. Gotten desperate enough to eat all sorts. Sawdust, spiderwebs, dirt.

  Dirt. That was what Reggie tasted now, felt clogging his mouth, flooding his nostrils, scraping his eyes. Dirt. And if he was pinned down and smothered by dirt…Dull recollection of his last moments of consciousness came back, and it all made sense.

  Reggie had been buried alive.

  Panic took him fast, the instinctive sort that cut right through bravery and let hard men know that they were all soft and gooey inside. Well that was fine, Reggie learned that lesson about twice a month. What mattered now was that it wasn’t the last one he ever learned. How did one escape from a prison of soil?

  Digging, ideally. Which was possible even with no tools and seemingly no leverage. Straining his limbs against the dirt was as useless as Reggie might have feared, but he quickly stumbled onto another approach. Shifting his arms and legs side to side slightly, doing the same with his shoulders; his head, his torso, his ass, everything. Giving himself leeway by the tenth of an inch, all slow and excruciating. He waited for the burn of oxygen deprivation in his chest.

  It never came. What the hell was happening?

  The problem gave something for Reggie’s mind to do while his body was busy, at least. He chewed away at the mystery even as he muscled away at the soil. It must’ve been light stuff, because it was shifting far easier than he’d have expected. In moments Reggie was within a small cavity underground, in moments more he’d scrambled up to its ceiling and drawn himself a few inches closer to breaking out entirely.

  Was he buried as deep as an ordinary corpse in a grave? That would be bad, if so. Reggie normally didn’t invite the contempt of his townsfolk—they were so very generous with it already that it’d be downright greedy of him to want more—but this time he found himself hoping he’d been tossed in some shallow ditch by the elves. Better to claw through two feet of this than six.

  He might go mad with claustrophobia before managing six.

  More scraping and scratching, shifting and grinding. Reggie fell into a sort of demented rhythm, feeling his body move almost on its own. His mind was trapped in that crippled meat, which meant it was trapped underground. But it felt like it was drifting far away.

  Crippled?

  But he was. The memory came back abrupt as a sucker-punch. Reggie had felt his spine crunch and all the feeling go away, and he knew enough to know there was no more movement ever again when that happened. So how was he doing this?

  [It’s all in your head.]

  Shut up, demonic voice that lives in…my head.

  [I’m surprised you could see the irony there.]

  Reggie paused in his movements, just for a moment. Did the voice just…answer him back? It had never done that before, always run through him like a phantom noise in the wind. This sounded almost conversational.

  Maybe he was just crazy. Maybe this was all just the last few moments of life left in him, a hallucination keeping the last holdouts of his dying brain entertained.

  Something changed at the tips of Reggie’s fingers, banishing all worries about madness and sanity. He felt air on his skin. Cool air, nasty air. But air. Reggie redoubled the efforts at freeing himself and made the remainder of his progress twice as fast, finally erupting from the ground as a spluttering mess.

  There was dirt in his mouth. So much dirt that he felt a weight leave him as he spat it all out, thick globs of dry soil mulched and crumbling down where he let it fall. His eyes were an irritated mess, though he realised they weren’t wet. The soil in his mouth wasn’t wet, either. Was he dehydrated? Was—

  Just then a sound hit him, feet shifting on the ground. Reggie whirled to see…the woman. The outsider, the one he’d shown his lab to. She was seated on…a log, surrounded by mist, by bare trees, by danger and terror. Surrounded, alongside Reggie, by the damned grimwoods.

  And she was smiling.

  “I had a feeling you’d be rising soon,” she noted. The woman seemed about as calm as anyone Reggie had ever seen. That was a surprise, given that they were in the region capital for getting eaten alive. He resisted the urge to yell, slowly getting to his feet and speaking with careful, quiet tones.

  “W…” his throat scraped and twisted in protest, feeling somehow atrophied, and it took Reggie a few more times to force coherent speech out of himself. “We need to get out of here.”

  Whoever this woman was, she clearly didn’t know how much danger they were in.

  “Relax,” she cut in, confirming Reggie’s fear, “we’ll be fine.”

  “No, this is a grimwood, any moment now we could get—”

  —”we won’t be attacked by undead, and most of the monsters here will leave us alone. If they don’t, I’ll protect you.”

  Something struck Reggie’s mind as she said that, a wave of…what was it? Trust. He blinked, frowned, found himself trying to stave it off, but completely unable. “What is…what’s going on?” The sudden calm overcoming him didn’t do much to keep him from thinking, he had so many damned questions that they just sprouted right up to distract him as soon as the concern of physical danger abated.

  “I was dead,” Reggie groaned. Had he forgotten that? No it…it just felt distant in his mind, but it was coming back now. “I was torn in half, I felt my…my neck…I was dead.”

  “You still are,” the woman told him. Reggie stared at her, waiting for the words to make sense. “You were beaten to death by the elves, your workstation burned down, your body mutilated beyond any healing magic. Reginald Smith, you are a dead man.”

  A shaft of moonlight poked through between the branches above, washing over her body. Reggie saw irises of bloody crimson, teeth like needles, skin like snow. She continued speaking.

  “I wasn’t able to bring you back to life, but I could preserve you in unlife. You are no longer human. You’ve begun your nights as a vampire.”

  He stared at her, dropped down to his knees, and started weeping. There were no tears, just streaking blood.