My name is Chloe Einzweller. I think. I'm 32 years old. I graduated with a baccalaureate in Mana Magic with a minor in Arterial Magic at the Arcaenium of Heart and Soul. I'm a Missionary for the Church of Speculation and Prose in Locria and Gods above, it's hard to organize my thoughts with this awful soulache.
I leaned against the crate behind me, held my palms close together, and steepled my fingertips not quite touching, taking in deep breaths. I gathered mana in the air around me and let it circulate from my heart, through my veins, and to my fingers and back but something just didn't feel right. Nothing feels right. My manaflow trickled through wobbly and inconsistently, but I've practiced soulcycling my entire life. Physically, I'm fine. No injuries, no symptoms of illness. Mentally? I don't know where I am and I don't know how I got into this carriage, but if there's one thing I know... There's something wrong with my soul. I need more information somehow.
I closed my eyes and sank deeper into the darkness. I slowed the circulation of mana to a trickle and let out an almost imperceptible wave outwards. As it bounced off of everything round me, I received it back and saw it revealed: large clouds and tufts and clouds emitting from the two up front, and smaller clouds from the cabin's equines. I narrowed my senses until a thin, white line connected each of them to me. On left, the woman's soul was bright. Very bright. Very mature. It almost overwhelmed my entire soulsight. And I let it go. It was too destabilizing. So I focused on the man-- Remi, as she called him-- and his soul, on the other hand, was dim and almost entirely transparent. I followed the thread down the line until the mass of his soul swallowed me whole. And before I could understand the depths of what I saw, I felt a sharp twinge in my soul, the thread wobbled and snapped, and I lost connection with Remi and myself.
I took a second bite of the peach in my hand and kept thinking of ways to die. I needed to reset. I didn't get the information I needed out of Tavi, but thats okay, because before I could process it, I felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my chest. I gasped for air. Did I just have a heart attack?
"What's going on?" she asked, but I couldn't even choke out a word.
I fell to the side and almost fell out of the driver's seat, but Tavi held a hand against the cabin and grew?-- expanded?-- no, materialized a mandelbrot of branches to catch my fall. I've never been in this much pain in any of my previous deaths. I grasped at my chest and keeled over the wooden floor that I suddenly found beneath me, and it felt as if the air itself was littered with fiberglass that assaulted my lungs with every breath until I woke up at the front of the driver's seat. With one bite in my peach. The checkpoint shifted. Again? So soon after the last checkpoint? I thought quickly about what could have possibly shifted the checkpoint and abandoned that thought because I'm about to die an awful, painful death. I don't know how long until it happens again. My chest hurt with a sharp pain, but I don't think it's that same heart attack. I've felt this before, moments before I fell off the edge into the first-sky. It's anxiety. I think. Just anxiety. I need to breathe. I looked up at Tavi and she looked concerned.
"Did you just die?" she asked.
"Yeah. I did."
And I don't know what to do about it.
Remi's demeanor changed completely, again. One moment he's relaxed and buried in thought and the next he's in a whole-bodied tense with a furrowed brow, narrowed gaze, tight shoulders, and a highly increased rate of breath. He touched his lip, dropping his peach. It's sweet. I can smell it from here.
"Did you just die?" I asked.
"Yes, lots. Lots." he replied.
"How many times?" I shot back. He furrowed his brow further, somehow.
"I don't know. I stopped counting. I'm on branch four," he answered with his eyes wavering. There's that word again.
"Well, how are you dying?" I asked, as he looked through my eyes.
"I don't know," he said, grasping at his chest, "heart attack? Invisible magic? Internal bleeding? I can't tell."
"Okay I see," I said slowly and calmly, trying to get him to match my pace, "Did you learn anything else?"
"It's probably her," he said, pointing at the cabin, "I think." He spoke a bit slower this time.
"Okay," I replied.
I peaked inside and saw Chloe posed for meditation. She looks so relaxed. She's like a statue. If she wasn't breathing so deeply, I would think she was one.
"Hello?" I called. No response. Maybe I should go back into the dark and see what she's doing.
I looked at Remi and gave a quick, "I'll be right back. Try to breathe. Slowly."
And once again let my soul escape my body as it slumped over, dark and soulless, and I saw the beautiful sight again. I always forget how lovely it is in here. I inched closer to my old body, phasing through the walls of the cabin, and for a moment I let myself get distracted by the shifting patterns and colors painting the walls around me. The grains of the wooden walls curled into rivers impressed upon evershifting lattices that shrunk and grew and expanded and contracted at the same time. And somehow, it's still dark. Colorful and dark. I snapped out of my trance and broadened my vision until I saw my old body sat beside my new body; hers a bright white star, mine so dark without a soul that I couldn't see the pretty colors behind it.
And there it was. A thread. A bright white line beginning to form, connecting her and Remi. What is that? I got closer and touched it. It felt real and alive. It's part of her soul. I moved closer and closer and felt its pull, and it detatched from Remi and wrapped around me like a warm hug. It felt soft and fuzzy. It felt, somehow, like love.
Who are you? a voice asked, but I didn't know how to respond. It vibrated into me, almost like the voice came from my own head, but I have no head here, and I cannot speak. I tried to vibrate back but no words came out, none that I could hear.
Oh, Goddess of Goddesses, what are you? I leaned into her soul and let them touch, the sensation so pleasant and calming that I no longer wanted to shift into her body, I just wanted to stay like this forever, but I knew it had to end sometime and I shifted back into my new body. As I came to, she was staring at me with bewildered eyes, as Remi nervously peaked into the cabin.
She managed to whimper out, "Who are you? Both of you?"
Remi and Cali. Two people with abnormal souls, one day after the Archmagus's death. I find this too convenient to be a coincidence, and even moreso that we happen to be on the road to Locria; the Church needs to be informed about this. Goddess Elkae may have possibly blessed us with a new Narrative Thread.
Calypso "Cali" Calliope stated that she specializes in Wood Magic and Flower Magic. She graduated from the Arcaenium of Life and Death in Ionia. That tracks. Her story is consistent. The only missing piece is how she's able to detatch her soul from her body. That shouldn't be possible. It's possible I misinterpreted what happened, given my damaged soul, but I saw what I saw. As for Remi "Reginauld" Smith?
"So, tell me about yourself," I started, as I took a bite out of my peach. The boxes of fruit rattled against the sides of the carriage and made it fairly difficult to hold a proper conversation, but the peach made it worth the tradeoff.
"I, um," he stuttered. He wouldn't meet my gaze. He's hiding something. He continued, "Yeah. I'm 24. I specialize in--" he paused for only a moment, "information management."
"Oh, Library adjacent?" I said, tilting my head, "Where at?"
He paused for a long moment, thinking of an answer, "Uh, it's hard to explain." It's too early to conclude a nefarious reason for his secrecy, but his answers raise a few red flags. With the sheer depth of his soul, he must be highly advanced in his studies, and knowing his specialization would certainly help narrow down why his soul is dim, dense, and loosely tied to his body.
"Ah, if it's classified information, that's alright," I said, giving him an out to lower his guard, "I get it. Bureaucracy. It's like that at the Church too. Everything must be ever so secret." I watched his eyes at the mention of the Church, but he still seemed nervous and on edge. "Now that I think of it, you should come visit the Church. We have a very well maintained public Library, some of the most well-trained practitioners of Library Magic and Paper Magic from the Arcaenium of Thought and Polish."
With that, I caught his interest. His eyes shot towards me. I got him. Guard lowered, just a tad.
"Do you have a history and magic section?" he asked, almost too quickly.
"Absolutely. Embarrassingly our international history section is rather poor, but we have books from most areas of study."
"Yes. Yes," he said, looking lost in thought again.
"Any particular field?" I shot.
"All of it," he replied.
We sat in a long silence, and I broke it to ask, "You have interesting clothes! Where'd you get them from?" But I lost him. I'm not sure he even recognized I said anything. He stared off into the distance, and despite my attempts to engage in further conversation, I was met mostly with one word answers as he continued pondering. What have I actually learned? Very little. Although, I got him right where I want him.
Of course they have libraries and universities here. Why didn't I think of that? I'm excited to see how this world is systematized (it's been an eternity since I've been somewhere I could actually use what I learned in grad school) and I need to know everything; geography, magic, history, social structure, cultural norms. I also need to know more about my powers. I think it's growing increasingly plausible that my respawn powers (which I'm henceforth calling Respawn Magic which, compared to what Chloe said, matches this culture's taxonomy) are linked to the magic system of this world, but that depends on how magic is handled.
Are there rules for magic in this world like in hard-fantasy, or is magic a deus ex machina like in soft-fantasy? I suppose I'll find out at the church library. I'm interested in seeing how the mages of this world organize information. What are the odds they use the Dewey Decimal System? Some analog spreadsheets and databases? I wonder if I'll need a librarian's assistant to help fetch the books I'm looking for (there's certainly no electronic lookup form) and I'll need a lot of them. There's too much I don't know (and I can't stand just how little I know about this world) and developing some kind of fundamental, baseline knowledge will be important if I want to... survive? Go back to Earth?-- no, not that one. Maybe, to finally end my respawns.
I'm really starting to wonder about the 5th Rule. My checkpoint moved twice in rapid succession, and I'm a little suspicious that it moved immediately after I found an easy reset button in Tavi and moved again as soon as I told her. It just seemed too perfect. In a story about an isekai respawner, it makes sense to lead the protagonist away from abusing checkpoints, because that removes all conflict (at the very least, that's what I would do if I were an author). What story is left to tell when your protagonist has perfect hindsight? And, narratively, the checkpoint moved at just the right time. If Tavi is a permanent companion (and it's growing increasingly likely that she is, given her new appearance and the fact that she saved me), then it makes sense to have her in the loop about Respawn Magic-- but it would have to be revealed in a narratively compelling way. For this conflict, all of my agency was stolen away from me, and Tavi alone had the power to break me out of the loop; it's an event that shows the audience that she knows how the loop works, and it's the first sign that she will be capable of assisting the protagonist.
Compared to other narrative death loops, Phil only escaped the loop through character development; abusing respawns would take him further away from escape, so some metaphysical force literally tracked his mental/emotional state of mind. Subaru actually did abuse respawns for information, but often that lead him down torturous cycles of death and rebirth, where the only way to escape was to find the next plot contrivance (just like what happened to me). He never does intentionally try to find the next plot contrivance. The story moves around him. Well, if my checkpoints are moved by story beats, then I'm not just going to let the narrative shift around me. I'm going to shift the narrative.
"Hail," I heard from outside the carriage, "Cabin inspection." I saw Chloe step out from the back and reach for her documentation. Identification. Shit. Shit, I don't have anything. What do I do about this? I didn't come up with a cover story. One of the other guards put a foot in the cabin and waved me out before checking over our fruit.
"Papers, please," said the same guard that had checked Chloe.
"Uh," I choked, "I don't have an ID. It was, stolen."
The guard looked at me for a long moment, before Chloe began, "Ah, I'm sorry officer, it's true. I'm with Speculation and Prose. I was escorting my friend here to the Church to speak with a victim's advocate," and with that she pulled out a bundle of papers that the guard inspected.
"Alright, you're cleared," he turned to me, "I'm sorry for your loss. Head to City Hall for a new ID at your earliest convenience, although I would suggest staying in-city until you've obtained one. Enjoy your stay in Locria."