Appendix • Evendur's Afterlife

"*The glowing diamond dust on Evendur’s chest begins to disappear, seeming to sink into his chest. The glow, now illuminating the skin from within, spreads outward in a complex fractal web, which those of you who have studied the body would probably recognise as the nervous system. It spider-webs through the entire body until it reaches the brain, where the glow intensifies to the point that it is seeping through the closed eyelids, the mouth and ears.*"
 ― Evendur's Resurrection Ritual

After Evendur falls in battle shortly after leaving Stillwater, the party takes his body to Lavente in the hopes of procuring a resurrection from the Di Angeli Family. A resurrection ritual is carried out by Cardinal Paradisi. In the meanwhile, Evendur's soul travels through a strange landscape, which he can only assume to be the afterlife.

## Transcript

Evendur. You wake from a bad dream with a start. In your head images bounce around: faces and names, the glint of starlight, a distant screeching roar, flashes of pain, flashes of triumph, and an all-encompassing blackness. It all begins to fade, as quickly as it came, and the memory of the dream is already all but gone.

You feel tired, dazed. The nightmare must have kept you from sleeping too well. Pity. There was so much you needed to do...or was there? Try as you might, nothing can quite come to mind. In fact, you’re not really sure why you’re here, or how you came to be here, for all that matter.

Where was here, actually? You look around. You’re sitting in the middle of a road, trees on either side, a dusting of snow still covering the leaves, patches of green grass peeking through. Seems vaguely familiar, but you can’t really place it. It’s quiet. Empty. There’s no wind rustling the leaves, no swaying of tree branches, no birds in the sky. Just an empty road in an empty forest under an empty blue sky. Funny. You thought it would be a lot different when you died.

Wait. Died? You’re not sure how that thought came to you...but it does seem to fit, now that you consider it. Yes. Dead. That makes sense. You thought you might be afraid of it, but now that it’s here, you find yourself quite unable to find the will to do anything but accept it.

You stand, take a look around. The road stretches on behind and ahead of you, unchanging, and as you look, the trees around you begin to slowly fade. A distant memory comes to you, unbidden, of a child standing on a balcony in Autumn, looking out across the sea. High in the sky above, two suns overlap into one radiant circle, and bit by bit, are covered by the moon. A confluence, a double eclipse, and the child watched as the bright daylight faded and dimmed until a sort of eerie twilight covered the houses, the trees, the towers and the sea. Everything was just as clear as in full daylight, but there was less light to see it by, as if all the strength were draining out of a dying sun. The same thing happens around you now, but...odder. The edges of things seem to be losing definition as well, becoming blurred. You aren’t going blind, you’re certain of that. No. The colour was slowly seeping out of the world. A dim green grey for the bright green of the trees and grass. A dim azure-grey for the vivid blue of a cloudless sky. A dim blood-grey for the dark brown of a muddy road. It doesn’t happen all at once, in fact it’s all very very slow, but you can tell it’s happening.

Your attention is drawn to a group of people walking down the road towards you. It seemed like only moments ago, they were far away, barely visible, but in a blink they seem to be close enough to see clearly. Yet they weren’t running, or teleporting, or even moving very fast at all. In fact, they seem a lot like you, uncertain and dazed, looking around at the fading trees, pointing and holding one another’s arms for reassurance. There’s twenty or so of them: men, women, and children, all stumbling shakily down the road. They are led, it seems, by the eldest man amongst them: an elderly man with a thick beard and a pockmarked face. He seems to have some idea where they’re going, though his expression is just as hesitant and confused as the rest. They get nearer, some casting you wary glances, seeming afraid, but continuing in your direction nonetheless.

"Mamma?" you hear one of the children ask, "Why’s it getting dark in the daytime?"

"Hush, darlin'. Don’t fret. Can’t make anythin' better by frettin'. We're dead, I expect."

"But where are we going? I don’t want to be dead, mamma!"

"Shhhh. We’re goin' down the road, that’s all. We’re going to see Gran-gran, and papa."

You see the child bury his face into his mother’s arm, and hear a muffled sob, and the group continues to walk towards and past you. You hurry up to catch up with the elderly man at the head of the group, and ask, "Do you know...where you're leading them?"

The man frowns, confused for a second. "We’re going where all the others go. Seems as if I know, but I can’t remember learning it. Seems as if it’s along the road. We’ll know it when we get there. I expect we’ll be told."

He looks around him for a few more seconds. "It’s strange. In all the dreams the blessed Earth-mother gave me, I always saw death as an endless field of flowers and trees. Perhaps I was not as devout as I thought. This must be the Ashenfade then. But that cannot be also... in the stories there's always a river. Always a fortress. Always a midnight sky. It must be something else. Something different."

"I wouldn't give up hope just yet...perhaps, this is the way to where you wish to go," you say to try and assuage his fears.

"Aye...aye, perhaps it is. We should go, follow the road. Will you come with us?"

He asks the question, but his attention has already trailed away, and before the decision is even really complete in your mind, he and the others are already walking. So you follow. Now that he mentions it...there is a small tug at your heart you hadn’t noticed earlier. A pull, some instinct, drawing you down the road, calling you onwards. And indeed, with every step, the group of people moves ever more purposefully.

The colour of the world around you has continued to fade and the sky is darkening, as if a mighty storm were threatening, but there is none of the electric tension that comes ahead of a storm. The trees are gone, but a blur at the edge of your vision now. You and the others walk on steadily, and the road runs straight ahead across a landscape that is almost featureless, trudging in silence under a sky that has finally darkened to a dull iron-grey, and remained there without getting any darker. You’re not quite sure how much time has passed…indeed, time seems to have very little meaning here. Or perhaps it has very little meaning to you, now. Hard to tell. Either way, it’s difficult to keep track of, with no suns, or moons, or stars. But you walk on, and the pull in your heart only gets stronger.

You see other roads now, on every side, parallel to your own. And on these roads are more people, the only clear thing in the haze. They are walking in lines or pairs or groups or alone, but all empty-handed, lost, confused… just like you. Dozens at first, then hundreds, then thousands. Men and elves, you see, dwarves and gnomes, and many other creatures you have never heard of, seen, or even dreamed about. Some covered in fur with towering horns, some insect-like, some small fluttering through the air, some large plodding dejectedly in wide sweeping steps, some barely even humanoid. All drifting over the plain towards a blur of dirty-coloured smoke rising slowly far ahead in the distance, to add its darkness to the dismal sky.

Without really noticing when it first happened, you realise the ground is sloping downwards now, and becoming more and more littered with heaps of rubbish and waste: rubble, debris, broken furniture, abandoned tools, bits and pieces of every little thing, piled haphazardly. There was not a patch of clean soil in sight, and the only plants growing anywhere seem to be rank weeds, and coarse grey grass. The air is heavy and full of smoke, and other smells besides: acrid chemicals, decaying vegetable matter, sewage. The further you walk, the worse it gets. And then, all of a sudden, the road ends. You come to an abrupt halt, at the back of an endless crowd of people, all faded and desaturated, just like you are now. All standing patiently, shuffling quietly in place, and before long hundreds more have already taken up place behind you, and you are a part of the crowd, one of countless many.

Ahead of you, from above the heads of the people standing before you on the downward slope, you see that the ground ends. It is replaced instead, by water. A lake, of some kind, stretching away into a curtain of mist. The surface of the lake is murky and unreflective, yet perfectly still. No waves, no currents, not even a ripple. The crowd stands, frighteningly close, at the very edge of the water, just as still. And then, from the very front, a single figure walks forward, stepping into the water. Ankle-high, knee-high, waist-high, and on until it envelops them whole, but they leave behind no trail or mark of their passing, and the water remains unmoving, as though none had ever touched it.

While you watch, and wait, more figures from the crowd step into the water and disappear. At random, seemingly, but always from the front. One by one, sometimes immediately after another, sometimes whole hours flit by, though to you the two are more or less indistinguishable. Whole days pass by, in mere moments it seems to you, and very little changes. Every now and then, you shuffle forward, swept along by the crowd, and by the tugging pull in your chest, and bit by bit you come closer to the edge of the water. The nearer you get, the more you begin to hear voices from the mist. They seem so far away. So distant. You can’t even make out words, or even any meaning, and yet in a way, they’re familiar…tinged with nostalgia, regret, joy, despair.

You realize, all of a sudden, that the pull in your chest isn’t some mysterious force, some spell cast on you. It is longing. Desire for something you once knew, yet still don’t fully understand, but you long for it regardless, and every moment you are kept apart from it is agony, and every step you take towards it is bittersweet bliss. Yet there is no energy left within you to push forward, to press through the crowd. All you can do is stand, and wait, just like all the rest. After all, time has no meaning, you’ll be at the water in a moment.

And so you are. In a blink, the days have passed by, and you take a step forward to find nothing in front of you except the water and the mist. And you stop. The longing in your chest still clawing at your heart…but tempered now by a heavy dread that comes over you on the shores of eternity. This was it. What came next, none could say, if there was even a next. You’ve longed to be here for what seems like an age, it’s all you can really remember now, all that you have been, all that you are. You barely know who you were before. What brought you here. All that mattered is getting here, to this very shore. But now that you’ve made it, you’re not quite so certain, and you understand at last why those before you had hesitated for so long.

The water before you is oily and languid, murky, like swirling clouds lazily turning, its depths invisible beyond the first two steps. The mist that hangs above it, equally so, obscuring any sight of a distant shore. You stand there, motionless. One part of you, clear and present, pulls you forward, urges you to accept what must be. Another, holds you back, and it is a much fainter pull, fading by the second, for you cannot really remember anymore what it was you lived for. The world around you narrows to that small stretch of sand where earth meets water, where your next step would take you, and the longing begins to build again in your chest. The voices in the mist come to you once more, that same wistful yearning on the air, and they speak of a past you don’t remember, of days by the sea, of days in the sun, of family and of home, and at last the longing is too much, and you begin to step forward...

Only for the sky above you to suddenly burst asunder. Through the dull grey comes a burning flare of sunlight, casting aside the twilight. Radiant. Blinding. The crowd as a whole shifts backward under the blaze, but you remain locked in place, staring, unable to turn or look away. From the heart of the daylight, or perhaps the very cause of it, a humanoid figure descends, twelve-foot tall at least, a dozen or more incandescent interfolding wings twisting and turning behind it. Metallic skin burns white-hot, pouring out divine light, the sheer brilliance it exudes seared into your eyes, and a voice pierces your mind, overwhelming all conscious thought and being.

"You cannot enter."

Stammering, as though you'd forgotten the sound of your own voice, you answer, "But...I need to enter..."

The voice comes again, scorching away the half-formed protests in your mind. "You are needed elsewhere."

In a flash, it reaches forward, and takes you by the arm.

And when it touches you, a lifetime of memories comes rushing back in. Every moment, every breath, clear as a ray of daylight piercing through clouds. They flood through your mind in rapid succession, one after another, a blur of images passing by in an instant, and you remember *exactly* who you are.