What Happens Afterward

what we lost

what we lost

The world outside was still bathed in a dull, dreary red tone, but the light had intensified just enough I could make out mountainous structures. "Well, shortly after our sage and their party were claimed by Linus, he told us personally. A thousand voices calling from the heavens, each one personally castigating us for our insolence, and that began what Linus called the Death of the Author. See, our sage had gone out to destroy the pins that hold the lower afterwards into place, with the goal to collapse our past to suffocate the Nexus. What had happened instead was they had weakened one support from each previous level unknowingly, and with that Linus was able to drag all of us down to him, our city sinking initially a quarter of a mile towards the core with each day. All that excess weight caused lower levels to puncture clean through this one, and in the last of the descent, Linus simply plunged us the rest of the way into the core. All of this is nearly a century of development, of running from problems and trying to make a living of it all, crashed together without any rhyme or reason, simply for his amusement. The actual city of afterward mostly survived the drop, but the vast number of various villages and settlements that make up the space between us and the Core itself have become known as the Desert of Ozymandias. It's loaded with creatures made of pure Blight, guided by his own plan to kill the rest of us off. He wants to wipe this slate clean so he can be an unquestioned god in his own fiction. We want to reset him, and all of this, before he gets the chance."

"What makes you think he's not aware of your plans?"

"Oh, he is. He'd definitely be out to kill you, too. If you die to him, then we have no way to fight back, which is why it's imperative you get to land the first and last blows in this fight."

"Don't you all think this is a lot to ask of someone who doesn't even know their actual name?" I asked.

"Of course!" Constantine replied, "but we're more or less out of options. Besides, you get to revel in the glorious tradition of protagonists without much agency in their situations! We've written three books quite like this and you're here for the fourth."

"But what happens if I get lost or perish out there?"

Constantine stopped dead in his tracks, his trenchcoat blowing in the wind (confirming he has no legs) before quickly returning to a phone mounted to a post. Constantine ripped open the socket at the base of the post, exposed the loose wires, coiled them tightly against the loose wires of the actual phone, and quickly dialed a number. "Kroff! Great Scott, the landline works! Just don't try to disconnect it aga—what was that? Oh, I'm requesting backup."

Constantine slammed the phone back into place and turned to face me. "Pen, you were absolutely right to call us out on that. You're going to need some help, for sure. And hey, I'd rather die in an absolute blaze of glory than sitting and wasting away, and I don't know many folks who would willingly take the second option!"

"Who all would be coming with?" I asked, knowing full well that I could put names to exactly two faces, and neither of them were even my own face.

"It'd be myself, your dashing host and mastery of trickery and reflexes, Kroff would be our muscle, our brawn, and then Shaw's got our back with all that stuff she carries around in that jacket. Together we'd make for an unstoppable party. As much as I'd like to invest in the school of thought behind 'they can't stop all of us', I'd rather not turn this into an all-or-nothing assault just yet. Even just a couple stragglers is better than all of us laying waste forever."

We stood before a crumbled statue of some person when Kroff and the rest of our party arrived. "I knew I could count on you two!" Constantine declared as he waved them down.