This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/The_Do_It_All_Badger on 2024-12-27 10:00:54+00:00.

I can still remember… When I was alive, so very, very long ago. I was not a great hero, a mighty adventurer, nor anyone else that might aspire to greatness. I was a simple peasant, farming his lord’s land. The land my lord owned was right up against a mighty forest.

Most of us common folk knew that it was full of elves, monsters, faeries, the odd beastfolk village, and so forth, and we left it be for the most part as we were all on good terms. Sometimes elvenfolk would come and trade with us, sometimes our respective settlements would invite each other over for festivals. My best friend in fact, was an elf; Rizera was a barber’s daughter, and helped her family in making wigs from all sorts of hair and doing minor surgeries. They made a killing at festivals and holidays when beastfolk came in needing a spa day… Ah, sorry, I’m rambling a bit. It was, overall, a good life.

War took away that good life. I was pressed into a peasant levee and joined the battle against the armies of the Smiling Emperor, an ancient lich of tremendous power. Because of where my village was, each of the major Peoples sent out a regiment- humans, elves, beastfolk, even intelligent monsters.

All of them people I had known most of my life, and who had known me. We all worked well together. The tenacity of Men, the wisdom of Elves, the ferocity of the Beastfolk, and the cunning of Beasts. We, and other mixed armies like ours, fared well and weathered the early years without too many losses.

…But years began to stretch into decades. The Elven regiment got smaller and, unlike the other races, could not be replenished with speed. Their morale was all but broken, as they were forced to watch their friends not only perish but join the enemy’s ranks as various forms of undead.

These were people we had known for generations, and we fought harder for them than perhaps we would have for others. I was especially motivated to do this, as my best friend was in that army. She was a healer, and if I had a silver coin for every time she saved my life, I could buy my own barony.

I’d be lying if I said that, as the war ground on, I did not develop intense feelings for her. Feelings that I never dared act upon, for reasons that should be obvious, and if they aren’t then you don’t get shot at enough. The most I could do was be her shield, and I did that job exceptionally well.

Some even gave me an embarrassing nickname over it- the Raven Pavise, supposedly for how Rizera’s jet black topknot poking up just over me looked like a raven was perched upon my shield.

The war ended after fourty years and some hero whose name I no longer recall put the Smiling Emperor back in the ground. I was one of the few who’d been there since the early days. I retired a Sergeant, was given a pension, and went back to what little was left of my hometown with Rizera and a few other friends who’d managed to persist so long.

I tried to tell Rizera how I felt a few times, as the years passed, but… What was I to say? I was a scarred, beaten old man with new health issues coming every few years, and an increasingly bent back. She was still young, perfect, and in her prime. Would be in her prime, for centuries after I was gone. No, that would not do. …Better to live and die as a friend, and not risk putting regrets into her life. She did not deserve that.

In time… I died, age finally catching up to me. As a local hero (to my area at least), I was given a burial fitting the Raven Pavise. I was buried in the Elven fashion and put under a great tree, deep in the corner of the forest, to become one with nature. Things are a bit… Hazy, after that. It was like being asleep, but with a hint of lucidity, just enough to know that I was terribly lonely.

I missed my friends, especially Rizera. The only thing that kept me from becoming a miserable wraith was the discovery of being able to talk to other souls around me. I was not the first human buried there who was filled with regrets and unspoken love, so I had a pretty good support network as it were; when Rizera finally passed on, I could tell her how I felt, and- if things went well- we could enjoy our final repose until Judgment Day came. Yeah, I could live with th… …Well you know what I mean. I had plenty of people to talk to, plenty of sleep, mind games, and stories to keep us all occupied. Overall, it was a pretty good death.

Then… One day, I woke up. We all did. But something was wrong. Everything was… Hazy, hazier. Our minds could still reach each other but there was a fog we could barely speak through. Our bodies didn’t feel like our own anymore. We were moving around but not of our own volition.

That was when one of my juniors, who had been a skilled mage in life, managed to force a little of his will into our soul-group and connect the dots. We’d been raised into undeath, as skeletons! We’d been dead so long that there wasn’t an ounce of flesh left on us.

With that realization and the aid of some dead logic and magic, we came to a horrifying conclusion: our forest was gone, our villages and towns were gone, all that remained was a barren wasteland. Demons were shepherding our bodies along, to toil away at various menial labors.

Fortunately for us, our small collection of skeletons was added to part of a larger force, and with the aid of some post-mortem human ingenuity, our soul-group became larger. This was important, because our spirits still had connections to those old bones, and the fact that they were being worked without rest was exhausting us; don’t ask me how that works, I’m not smart enough to understand or explain it.

We supported each other as best as we could, sharing energy and trying to balance ourselves. If a spirit got cut off from its tethers, it would become disembodied and risk becoming an apparition of some form or another. Those were hard years.

One day, after a long while, something happened. For the briefest moment, through the haze and fog, I could see a face clearly. Part of a face. A pair of eyes and strands of hair. I knew those eyes… I knew that hair. Rizera! She was still alive!

Despite the pleas of my fellows, I reached out for that vision with every last ounce of energy I could muster, and felt myself… Shifting, for lack of a better word? Like my soul was entering the bones instead of just being loosely anchored to them. Becoming one with them. It felt like my eyes opened for the first time, even though I had none to speak of, and I saw her…

But something was off, something was wrong. Rizera’s beautiful eyes no longer held the same youthful, joyous warmth I remembered. Her hair was still beautiful but lacked its former volume and lustre. And her skin… Had become the color of night- no, the color of pure void.

Having achieved some kind of control over my bones, I looked down when I felt hands upon my arm. It was broken, though it didn’t hurt. She was patching it with some form of glue and a few nails. I tried to talk but I had no tongue, no lungs, no mouth, only a jawbone with a few calcified teeth. When she finished, I noticed I could move my previously missing hand as good as new. Puzzled by my immediately aberrant behavior, she called for a necromancer to determine what I was doing.

She was surprised to learn that I was a skeleton whose soul had retaken control. That kind of potential made me valuable, a strong will to overcome magical control would be a potent weapon. I was disheartened at first to see her thinking of me first as a weapon and not realizing who I was, but that was hardly her fault.

I was brought to Rizera’s commander, a great demon who aspired to build his own nation on this broken and wasted land. As I had enough presence of will to be my own ambulatory pile of bones, they decided to give me the power of speech, and made me an offer- if I served my new lord and served him well, I would be made a Captain of the skeletal legion, with further potential for promotions and there was even a dental plan.

I took some time to ponder this, and said I would serve but I believed it fair to request a small concession in exchange for this service. The would-be king laughed, liking my boldness, and said if it was reasonable, then it would be done. I said I would serve and with all due diligence, but only if I could be the Raven Pavise once again.

Rizera was not prepared for that, and I finally saw her smile again as she very nearly crushed my ribs while sobbing, her embrace was much stronger than I remembered. But then, I’d been dead a while, after all. My request was granted.

I came to learn that a dark god had been born millennia after my death and ruined most of the world, sealing away our old god in some kind of deific box. The races of people I had once known were now steadily approaching extinction and various kinds of demons were now masters of things, and it had been this way for centuries.

And a violent lot they were, for this pleased their god. Rizera had only survived by offering herself up as a sacrifice so that the rest of her people could flee. But her strength of will impressed the demons, so they made her this… Void Elf. She was alone, until I had come back. And, though it took me a few years to do so as I was busy being a working stiff (allow me my bad jokes, if you would), I was finally able to tell her how I felt, after so many ages… You cannot imagine my joy to know, she had harbored feelings for me too, but th…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/1hnbqsb/past_the_end_of_the_world/