Dark Fate: Book 2 – The First Night

“Come on, Derrick! There’s nothing good here.”

As I stepped into the apartment, I saw two men searching the room, with their backs to me. Looters, going through the apartments where people were either dead or missing. It was a common enough story in the first days after the apocalypse.

Less common, however, was the spirit in the shape of a woman floating in the middle of the room. Spirits were different from phantoms, poltergeists, and ghosts. Ghosts were undead creatures, typically those who had some kind of ‘unfinished business’. Poltergeists were collections of negative psychic energy. Phantoms were manifestations of creatures on parallel planes where the veil between realms grew thing.

Spirits, on the other hand, were beings of pure magical energy. Sometimes they were created by the death of someone with a link to one of the primal forces of the world, and sometimes they were manifestations of nature itself. Either way, they could be incredibly powerful creatures when in their element.

The lowest form of spirit was called a Child, and as they advanced in Tier they would become a Spirit, Great Spirit, Primal Spirit, and so on. So, you would have a Child of Fire, or a Child of Lightning, or so on. Even without [Appraise Value], just looking at the ethereal look of her, one could guess that she was a Child of Mana.

The Child was hanging in the air in the middle of the room. She wasn’t speaking, or trying to help or interfere with the two men. When she spotted me, she moved aside, going into one corner to watch. I wasn’t blind. She was definitely watching me, and wanting to see what I was going to do.

Shifting into my true form, I cleared my throat to get the men’s attention. They turned, took one look at me, and promptly pissed themselves (literally, in the case of the thief). “You will empty your pockets and inventories of all the items you have looted from this apartment. Then, you will leave this building, and search out monsters and fight until you are at least level five. If I see you, here or anywhere else, before you are level five, then I will kill you, and raise you as my undead minions, to be my slaves for all eternity. Do you understand?”

“Y-yes! We understand! Here, here’s all the stuff we took!” The thief who had soiled himself silenced the warrior with a glare as they began unloading items. As they were leaving, I heard the thief whisper to his friend, “Don’t, just don’t. That monster could kill us in a heartbeat!”

The girls just looked at me in surprise. I shrugged, and deactivated [Spellblade]. “I may not have the Intimidation skill from the System, but I have a bit of a presence. My Charisma is almost certainly over a hundred points higher than either of theirs, which amplifies the effects quite a bit.”

The spirit giggled and licked her spectral lips. “Not just that. The one that wet himself had something called ‘Danger Sense’. He told the other one that I wasn’t a threat when they saw me, so they just ignored me.”

I nodded thoughtfully. [Danger Sense] was one of the Least Boons that someone could get from the System. Basically, it gave you a ‘gut feeling’ about how dangerous someone was to you. It was different from skills like [Analyze] in that it didn’t tell you their levels or classes, but instead it compared someone’s overall power to yours, and the compatibility of that power. You could be facing a Fire Elemental several times your level, but if you were immune to fire, then your [Danger Sense] might only register as much as a human fighter within a level or two of you. On the other hand, an ice creature that was vulnerable to fire might find that [Danger Sense] was positively screaming at them when facing a Fire Elemental several levels below theirs.

This sounded powerful, and, to be fair, it could be. But it was only a Least Boon because it was so uncertain. It didn’t come out and tell you how powerful someone was, or in what way. It just gave you a feeling that basically asked, “Do you feel lucky?” But feelings can be ignored, especially in high stress situations (like when combat is imminent), making the sense unreliable, especially when dealing with hotheaded users.

I looked to Hibari, and said, “You and the girls go and gather any supplies or personal items you want to take with us. We won’t be staying in a room with no door, obviously.” As they trotted off to search the apartment, I turned back to the spirit, and asked, “So, Liliana, what’s your story?”

The spirit looked at me, surprised. “Ooh, you have some kind of skill, don’t you? That is fascinating!” I raised an eyebrow, and she sighed. “Fine, fine. As you already know, my name is, or was, Liliana Jacobs. I lived on this land long ago.”

“I was being courted by the third son of the Daniels family, and I had hopes that he would be the one to complete me. On the surface, he was a strong man, but that strength ran only skin deep. He thought himself strong, powerful. But he was filled with doubt, with jealousy about what others had, always comparing himself to his brothers, or his father, and the power and prestige his family had lost when the Union forces ended the War of Northern Aggression just the year before made it all the worse. He was weak, and it sickened me. If I was to be wed, then I wished for it to be to a real man, one who knew himself, and would not let others control him. I did not wish to serve an unworthy master.”

She paused, and then said, “Finally, I had given up on him, and sought to end our engagement. He was furious at me, saying that I had no right to embarrass him like that. He only cared about me as something to stroke his ego. When I refused, he flew into a rage.”

“That night, I died, as my betrothed tried to prove how ‘powerful’ he was by taking the iron poker from the fireplace. I was unarmed, and could not resist. And, in his impotent rage, he lost all sense of himself. My last memory in life was him crying and cursing, telling me to say something, whining about how he was afraid of the lawman coming.”

I smiled at her. “So, you died just after the Civil War? How is it you came to be in this form, then? The System did not exist back then, as far as this world was concerned.”

Liliana shrugged. “I don’t know. In life, I had been fascinated with the truths of the world that the eye could not perceive, and that the Christian faith, for all its wonders, could not encompass. I read The Magus, The Spirits’ Book, La clef des grands mystères, and even the writings of Randalph! Oh, reading his words, you never would have known that he was a free Negro!” She sighed happily.

“All my life, I looked for the truths beyond truths, the essence of magic, even in my own small way. My family was well off, and so they could support my desires to know, so long as I kept my workings in secret. Now, this… System, it has awoken me, and there is so much I never knew, that now makes perfect sense!”

Her eyes met mine, and I could see that they were filled with equal parts childlike wonder and a thirst for knowledge. I had seen looks like that before, when the Apocalypse started. Occultists, Wiccans, and people who had believed in magic their entire lives were now presented with the proof that they were right all along, and now they could learn everything. The UFO enthusiasts were the same, since the blue screens and mentions of other worlds clearly meant that aliens really were real.

I nodded to her. “Yes, I can see how that would give one such as you no end of joy. So, you are a spirit of one who was called to magic, but the world without the System blocked it from you. What do you plan to do now? There is a whole world of magic and monsters for you to discover and explore. Of course, there are dangers as well, even for a being like you.”

The spirit nodded very seriously, a look so unfitting to her face that I had to keep myself from laughing at the juxtaposition. “Yes, the magic tells me that much. I know that I should get stronger somehow, but I don’t know how. I leveled somehow when a disgusting creature with a skull upon its head tried to cast some sort of spell at me, but my body… ate it? Yes, ate it is the best way to describe it.”

“Yes, Spirits draw strength from their elements. It can even help them level up, at least in the early stages. Of course, as the levels go higher, they require greater and greater concentrations of their element to level up passively like that. A Water Elemental might level up from Level 1 to 2 by basking in the river for an hour or two, but by the time they get into their twenties or thirties, they would need to spend days or weeks at the bottom of the ocean to gain a single level.”

Liliana’s eyes grew even wider, until they resembled those of an anime girl. “Oh, wow! You know so much about it already? How can you know that? Can you teach me? I want to know everything!”

“I could, perhaps, offer some of my secrets, in return for knowledge or other things that you might possess which I do not. But I will not make any such agreements in a ransacked apartment. Such an exchange of knowledge and power must be approached with proper solemnity, as nothing is so dangerous as a little knowledge mishandled. And the walls may have ears, here.”

Liliana nodded vigorously. “Yes, yes, that makes sense. The magic needs to go to those who would use it properly, not the ones who would squander it!”

“I’m so glad that you agree. Tell me, Liliana, are you bound to this place, or can you move around? I know that some spirits are bound to a certain radius of the wellspring that formed them, and others are able to journey about, though they are most comfortable in areas with their element.”

The spirit looked off into the distance, clearly reading blue screens that only she could see. “Uhm, the System tells me that I can move around, but for every hour I’m not near ley line, I’ll get weaker. But if I can find a node between two ley lines, I’ll grow stronger!”

I grinned. “That’s great. In that case, I think finding me again to get the information you’d like would be the first test. I am going to be leaving this building with my pets. There is a building I intend to make my base of operations in another part of town. If you can find that building within one week of me departing here, then I will tell you a secret. If you cannot manage that much, then you are clearly one of the ones who would squander the knowledge I possess.”

I saw her starting to pout, and then said, “I will give you one hint. You are a Rune Mage and a Spellcrafter, right? Think about how you would track a group of people from afar, so you would know how to reach them later.” When her eyes went wide, I made a shooing motion with my hand. “Now run along. And I don’t want to see or sense you following us. That would ruin the challenge.”

“Ugh, fine! I’ll do it! Just you watch me!” And, with that, the spirit turned and flew off, passing through the floor, heading… wherever it was she was going.

Hibari moved up next to me. “Master, I have gathered the items I wish to keep, and what supplies from the kitchen are still good.” I could see that she wanted to keep speaking, and so I nodded for her to continue. “Master, why did you let the spirit go? Wouldn’t she be a powerful slave for you?”

I chuckled. “Oh, undoubtedly. However, one should always be careful in how you deal with spirits. Enslaving them is not like enslaving people. Enslaving a spirit marks you as an enemy of spirits of that type, which can be very dangerous indeed.”

“Also, I would need an enchantment or spell to allow me to touch incorporeal creatures before I could even try it.”