Vigor Mortis (part 2)

Chapter three! Like I said, this one is quite a bit longer than the first couple. Glancing ahead, chapter four appears to be shorter again though, and chapter five shorter still. So, I think I'll do chapter three in this post, and then cover four and five in another early next week.

We left off with Vita deciding to not let her new minion beat his son, or at least to not let him beat his son too severely.

Chapter Three: Return With Interest
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That title definitely makes it sound like there will be some revenge or judgement carried out in the next few thousand words.

Hmm, that actually makes me think about my musings in the previous post, about how this society's mistreatment of children seems pretty self-destructive given the world it exists in. I proposed that this seems like the kind of social order that's bound to come crashing down under the weight of its own stupidity before too long, and looking back at the intro blurb I'm now wondering if maybe that's exactly what this story is going to be about. We have a mistreated child with a) zero investment in society and b) a lot of resentment for the powers that be c) manifesting a gift with immense subversive and/or destructive potential. "Before too long" might just be now.

Vita goes through the shop and into the bakery room itself. Grig's wife is described as "weakly protesting" her intrusion, but not doing anything to stop it. Either she saw that Vita arrived along with Grig, or she's just too much of a wimp to do anything about anything. Either of the above would be consistent with what we know of this family. Grig's son is crumpled in a corner, bruised and crying, while Grig stands over him demanding to know how he can keep fucking up something as simple as "remove bread from oven after X amount of time." Vita interrupts the lecture, and tells Grig to stop beating his family. Grig looks a little confused and tells Vita that she told him to go ahead and discipline his son, so he's not sure why she now has an issue with it. She just sighs and tells him that he's "beaten out her taste for beatings" (nice turn of phrase, there), and he acquiesces though he still seems confused.

Speaking of nice turns of phrase, the bit of dialogue that follows is some of the best in this story so far.

““Um, father? Who is this?”

”This is Miss Vita! Be respectful, boy!”

”...Isn’t she the girl that kept stealing your bread, father?”

”Yeah, I am,” I butt in confidently. “So be respectful!”

He blinks in utter confusion. Mission accomplished. But I still need to figure out what to do from here on.”

Got a chuckle out of me for sure.

Vita feels a little good about what she's just done. This family gets to keep its father and moneymaker, but isn't at risk of physical abuse anymore. They're better off now, possibly including Grig himself. Then again, killing "bad" people and reviving them as slaves strikes Vita as not exactly the best way to go about improving the word (though she doesn't articulate why; her reasons for feeling this way may or may not be good ones). Also, the new status quo with Grig's family is only going to last until people realize he's a revenant, which puts a real limit on how much good she can say it's accomplishing. She decides that her next objective should be to find a way of letting revenants better pass themselves off as living, but she isn't sure if that's a realistic goal at least with her resources.

She's probably more responsible with these powers than I would have been at her age, I'll give her that.

For want of a way of making Grig seem alive, she considers her other options. Turn to her street people friends for advice? They're the closest thing to friends she has, but the stigma against necromancy is very strong, and it might be too much for them. Flee the city? The world beyond the walls is supposed to be full of monsters who would kill a lone civilian within the day, at least according to everything she's been told. Granted, a civilian who can pull out their souls and reanimate them as undead slaves might have better odds, but I guess it depends on what sorts of monsters; anything that lacks a soul or has a ranged attack might be a rock to her scissors. She could just distance herself from Grivenant and hope his discovery doesn't implicate her, but that's a risky option on multiple level.

For the time being, she asks Grivenant for more information about undead, since his father told him all these stories. He's surprised she doesn't already know all this stuff, since she did the whole necrotic touch + create undead combo on him, and is even more surprised when she explains that she got this powerset via gift rather than study.

““...It’s odd that you could be a natural necromancer. Isn’t animancy an affront to the Mistwatcher? So why would... ah. Well, it doesn’t matter. If the Miss says it is, then it is.”

"The Mistwatcher" is an epithet that's been used for God a couple times so far. I really like this bit, honestly. In a world where people believe that wild magical talents are divine boons and necromancy is against god, the appearance of a wild necromancy talent really would throw them for a loop. It's the kind of thing that the religious authorities might have to call a big council meeting to puzzle out, and with the insinuations we've had that the religious authorities are also civic authorities in this place that could have serious, country-wide ripple effects.

Granted, it also seems odd that this has never happened before in recorded history. Which could mean that there's been a metaphysical change of some kind, or it could just be a matter of these theocrats only having access to a few centuries' worth of data from a few nearby sky islands.

Anyway, Grig doesn't know anything about how necromancy works, but he does know about the types of undead his father's order ran into. And, I feel like the story is punishing me for liking that earlier bit of worldbuilding now, because this shit is straight out of a DnD monster manual. There are dregs, aka zombies, which are mindless servitors of their necromancer creators. There are also "skeleton dregs," which are the same thing as zombies except that they have no flesh on them, and this is a meaningful distinction for...no provided reason. "Zombies" and "skeletons" are different monsters in DnD and its countless imitators, everyone knows that, so there's no perceived need for explanation or elaboration (nevermind the fact that the differences *in those games* really beg for explanations that are only very rarely forthcoming. Like, that's a flaw in the stuff the author is cribbing from that she copied heedlessly along with the rest of it). Next up in order of Challenge Rating are revenants, which by Grig's example are basically just cold, unbreathing versions of their living selves with built-in loyalty to their creators. Then there are wights, which are considered a major threat even independently of the necromancer; when first created, a wight can be easily defeated by a well-trained templar squad, but they get stronger over time, and eventually a wight can become a city-destroying apocalypse beast. Not sure if this is due to them getting stronger as they soak up energy, them reproducing geometrically by turning people, or something else. I hope something else, because the first two are...well, you know.

Grig also says that revenants are supposed to come with a murderous hatred for the living, but puzzlingly he doesn't seem to have gotten that. Either Vita's revenants are different from most, or the hatred of the living is just church propaganda, or Grig was just misanthropic enough to begin with that it didn't make a noticeable difference.

Once she's learned everything he knows about undead, Vita tells Grig to return to his normal life. Act as he usually does, except that he's not to be physically violent, and he is to try as best he can to hide his undead state for as long as possible. I still don't know what he's going to be able to do once he starts rotting, but I guess they'll cross that bridge when they come to it. He's also to not talk about Vita if he can possibly help it, and to discourage his family from asking or talking about her visit (too bad she wasn't thinking about that when she decided to mess with his son's mind earlier. That's going to make him remember her much more than if she hadn't done it).

Hmm. She also didn't think to leave a self defence clause in the "no beating people" command. On one hand, that's probably the responsible thing to do, because someone like Grig might have a very liberal notion of what constitutes self defence. On the other, this feels like an oversight that might come back to bite.

Vita sneaks out the back door of the bakery, not that that's likely to raise fewer questions at this point, and makes her way to Lyn's shack. I guess Lyn isn't technically homeless then, but close enough for it to only make a little bit of a difference. Anyway, Vita reaches the little cobbled-together shack, and some younger urchins start crowding around her.

“Grubby kids swarm around me, pawing at my shirt and cloak. I had been one of them not too long ago, though I’m older than any of the ones here by four or five years. I had just been… content to live on handouts. To eke by with the meagre life allotted to me and nothing else. Not contributing, not working, barely even thinking, really. Just existing on the generosity of someone kinder and more talented than me. And she would have let me, too. Deciding to try and help Lyn had been my choice, but I made it so late in life I wonder if I still have it in me to unlearn all those awful, lazy habits. I’ve just felt something stirring in me, something that makes me look back at my life so far and feel so much disgust that I have to move forward.”

So, the orphan children weren't pickpocketing, shoplifting, etc all along? Vita only started helping steal stuff when she was in her teens? This seems unlikely to me. I do like the suggestions that Vita has internalized some of her society's classism, thinking of herself as lazy and worthless because she's been a beggar. But...thinking she's a burden on the *other homeless people* when there are others who aren't doing as much as she does - for SOME reason - is weird. Even as an irrational, neurotic, self-hating thing, this seems off to me.

Although...hmm. The next bit actually makes me wonder if Vita has a more serious psychological problem than just that.

Vita manages to make her way to Lyn after giving the other urchins some bread she took from Grig's shop. It's not the pennies she was supposed to divvy out to them, but she had to spend those along with most of the money Grig had on him to get herself healed. Lyn is glad to see her, worries after her residual limping and stiffness, and asks her what she needs. Earlier, Vita described Lyn and the others as "the closest things to friends she'd ever been able to have." And here...Lyn seems to be an actual friend, if not a sort-of mother figure. The other urchins seem to like her. Why would she not have any real friends, after living among these people for seemingly her whole life?

My best guess is that it's the internalized classism again, mixed with some clinical depression. Her peer group aren't real people, so they don't count as real friends. Maybe. Or maybe I'm being too uncharitable to Vita, and it's really just depression making her incapable of acknowledging anything positive, no ideological conditioning required.

She swears Lyn to secrecy, and then - cautious all the while that she might say something that will make Lyn try to kill her for being a dangerous abomination - lets her in on the day's events. Lyn believes Vita (in her own words, Vita is too smart to try and pass off such an outrageous lie), and is only concerned for her rather than about her. Lyn is sufficiently disillusioned with society to not believe that necromancy is evil just because the church says it is, and also pragmatic enough to not want to throw a powerful tool away just because it's evil. However, she also wants Vita to dispose of the Grivenant. Any murder that was done using magic is going to get the authorities' attention, and revenants are likely to start a full-on inquisition until their creator(s) have been dealt with. Furthermore, Lyn believes that the church templar have a "detect magic" ability that they periodically sweep the city with, so even if Grig manages to (somehow) conceal his undead state from his family and neighbors it'll only last until the first time a paladin wanders near his bakery.

...wait. I thought almost everyone had a "gift," and all gifts are considered to be magical? Even if most of them actually aren't, at least some of them are. Why would a guy pinging as magical be at all suspicious?

Heck, would a culture like this even have a concept of "magic" as a distinct force?

Well, I guess Lyn is just talking about rumors she heard that may not be at all accurate. It's not like she's educated on this topic, after all.

Lyn has Vita bring her back to the bakery. Grig has a real cognitive dissonance moment when he sees his beloved mistress behaving deferentially to a dirty stinking street thief, but Vita is able to calm him down. Likewise, he's contemptuous of Lyn's suggestion of killing him again, but when Vita seems to be considering it he tells her that if she sees his demise as necessary then he will gladly accept it. Reluctantly, Vita agrees that they need to do what they need to do, and she and Lyn start leading Grivenant away to his execution.

Also, either there's some contextualizing factors that make this make sense, or this is the most batshit urban planning I've ever read about:

“The three of us sneak much more slowly back through the alleyways, heading towards the edge of the city. Skyhope is built in and around a crater, so the edges of the city are much higher in elevation than the middle. This is, so I’ve learned, a huge pain for sewage management; sewers around the city have to be dug deep and managed carefully to prevent accidents from pooling unsanitary water in the center of the city, and since the center is the rich district they actually manage it pretty well. The designated sewage disposal areas are out near the edges, where all that disgusting sludge has to be pulled up from deep underground so that it can be deposited outside the walls. In that grossness is where Grig would die again; he’ll be mixed in with the mush and pushed outside the city walls where his body won’t be found.”

Okay. So. The city is built into the sides of a crater, and it's the rich people who live down in the center.

Before we even get into the problem of sewage, wouldn't there already be natural problems with flooding in the lower district just from rain? I guess if there's a permanent crater lake at the bottom with enough outflow channels to neutralize the heavy rains then that would work, but in that case why not just throw him in one of those outflow channels? Those would be running outward from the center and through the rest of the city via ducts or trenches, right? Surely there'd be access points to it along the way, even if it's mostly covered; there's no way in hell that a premodern city is designed so that fresh water runs across half its width without there being a way for people to reach it.

Given the way this society seems to work in general, I'd expect that - even if the crater's center was originally meant for rich elites - things would pretty quickly shift around as the wealthy find it cheaper to gentrify the higher slopes than to keep spending however much money and manpower it takes to run an uphill sewer system. Just let the water quality get worse and worse the closer you get to the center, it's not like anyone cares if poor people are living in filth around here anyway. And...one way or another there still needs to be some kind of bulk outflow from the middle, because otherwise the whole crater would just be a lake before anyone could have built a city in it.

I guess it's possible that hydrology just works totally different in this world. Like, water comes out of magic crystals and rain isn't a thing, or whatever. Otherwise though, this really just makes zero sense.

Okay then.

As they make the long journey out of the city to the sewage outflow, wherever the hell that's supposed to be and however it's supposed to work, Vita asks Grivenant for more information about the templar. Oh right, shouldn't he be able to just tell them if templar actually have a detect magic ability, since he was raised by one? Maybe that's classified or something, idk. Anyway, he tells them about how the templar are their civilization's first and best line of defence against nonhuman threats, and a significant portion of their defence against human threats as well during wartime. They are separate from the conventional armed forces though, so the church clearly doesn't control the entire government and military, just a big chunk of it. When Grivenant gets to their piety and faithfulness to the cult of the Mistwatcher, Lyn interrupts him with an internet atheist rant. She very vociferously does not believe in the Mistwatcher, or any other divinities, and thinks that the church is just a criminal organization that invented a god to justify "hogging all the metal."

Hmm. Metals as a whole are a precious resource, then? Or maybe "metal" is just local slang for money, referring to gold, silver, etc coins. I kind of hope it's the latter, just because this world is in desperate need of some local colour that isn't cribbed straight from generic RPGland.

For her own part, Vita is less atheist and more misotheist. She's never really questioned that the Mistwatcher exists, since almost everyone around her believes in him, but she's concluded that whatever plans or ideals he stands for don't have room for her in them, and therefore he's uncaring at best and malevolent at worst. Grivenant, however, surprises everyone - including me - with the first bit of explicit worldbuilding to actually catch my interest:

““...You don’t talk to many people over forty, do you miss?”

She blinks.

”Huh?”

”The Mistwatcher is very real, miss. We’ve seen him. The One Below All. Ask anyone that was alive to be there, ma’am. He saw a star he didn’t like, and he pulled it out of the sky, just as the Church said he would. He holds the islands in the air with naught but his will. Go to the edge and look down, miss. If the mists are clear, you’ll see him too.”

There’s a moment of silence, as Lyn and I try to take that in.

”...As if two street urchins like us could afford a trip to the edge,” Lyn responds scathingly. “Get over yourself, dead man.”

He shrugs.

”Live long enough, and you’ll see him whether you go to the edge or not. They say in ancient times, people worshipped many false gods. Invisible gods. Gods you had to believe in just because you’re told to. Some people still do, I hear, and they’re all fools. The Mistwatcher is real, miss. Whatever you think of him, he’s there and everyone knows it.””

I'm kind of surprised that Lyn got through 20+ years of life without ever having had this conversation, assuming that Grivenant is telling the truth. But, if he IS telling the truth, then this world just get a heck of a lot more interesting. There's a living, physical god living in the mist below the flying islands, and occasionally his living, physical body rises up into the sky to do his inscrutable business.

Granted, the star-eating entity that sometimes rises from the mist may not actually be the interventionist creator god that the church claims it is. It could just be like ancient people in our own history seeing lightning storms or the sun and thinking those must be gods. The church can apparently predict its behavior, but that might not be a matter of divine revelation from the entity so much as just conventional use of standard-issue precognitive magic.

On the other other hand, even if the creature down there isn't actually their god, that doesn't necessarily mean that their god doesn't exist. Just that the thing they thought was its physical body isn't actually related to it.

Of course, they could also be perfectly correct. Maybe the eldritch abomination in the mist below really has been giving them commandments, and maybe it really did create the flying islands they live on. I honestly kind of hope that it's that one, if only because it would be the most unusual within the fantasy fiction milieu.

Also, regardless of whether or not hydrology in this world works anything like it does in real life, astronomy very clearly doesn't. If stars are something you can pull down from the sky within destroying the planet you're on, then your stars are not our stars.

They reach the edge of the city, and then open a manhole and descend into the sewer outflow tunnel. Wait, those are up here at the edge of the city, not in the next valley over? Or at least further away across the surface so there isn't such a vertical angle of ascent? Yeah, okay, the water in this world is about as weird as its land and sky. They brace themselves against the stench and descend into the knee-deep river of sewage. Lyn instructs Vita to "destroy" Grig, and the attempt at a more comforting euphemism for "kill" rubs Vita the wrong way. Vita knows that Grig is an evil man, probably deserving of death, but killing him in cold blood like this is different from doing so in self-defence like before. Besides that, the act of holding Grig's soul in her hands, feeling its aliveness and delicacy, has given her a new perspective on human life and what it means to end one.

At the same time, there's also temptation. Having slaves, people who will obey, provide, and even die for her without hesitation? There might be some sort of black magic corruption making this appeal to Vita, but even just a lifetime of deprivation would be enough to make this sound appealing. However, on the other hand...Vita finally forces herself to realize that she has real friends. She hasn't been alone until now. She has people like Lyn, and alienating them in favor of keeping slaves would be...not an auspicious start to her career, to say the least. Lyn is a real friend, a willing provider, and someone who's stuck her neck out for Vita unprompted; isn't that more valuable than a zombie slave?

This is also the first moment where it's been clear that the author is aware that Vita is an unreliable narrator. She isn't as alone as she's claimed. Her devaluation of the people in her life is at least as cruel and unfair to them as it is to her. None of that was accidental by the writer, and now the character is confronting it in as many words. My estimation of the author has improved, even if I still think there's room for improvement in her craft.

So, with that humanistic and pro-social breakthrough, Vita decides to murder someone in cold blood.

She walks up to "the awful fat man" (seriously what is this, an /r/fatpeoplehate post?) removes Grig's soul again to let his body fall limp into the sewage, and in so doing discovers some new things. For one, the little piece of her own soul that she used to glue him back into his body has merged completely with his own, making something new. Additionally, the soul - previously palm-sized and spherical - has grown itself a set of tentacles that extend throughout Grig's body, enabling it to animate and control the carcass without need of neurons or metabolic energy. Necromechanics, I suppose.

Then, suddenly, while holding the mutated soul, Vita has another one of those inexplicable compulsions that seem to have come with her power. She pushes the hybrid, tentacled soul into her mouth, and swallows it. She feels it merge back into her own, assimilating the old fragment of herself and absorbing all of Grig's vital energy on top of that. As if the bit of herself she attached to him was a digestive agent, and in the time he spent as a revenant it prepared him for assimilation. Vita feels her own spiritual composition change. She is aware that she, too, now has a network of soul-tentacles spreading through her body. A supplemental musculature. She's stronger, faster, tougher now, with her organic body doing half the work and her new pseudo-undead overlay doing the other half.

Lyn, who saw Vita bring her hand to her mouth, swallow, and then stand straighter, asks her what the hell she just did. When Vita tells her, well, that finally crosses a line for Lyn. Her gift apparently includes a "danger sense," and Vita's escalation from undead creation to psychephagy tripped it. When Vita tells her that she just swallowed the altered soul on instinct after removing it, Lyn isn't at all comforted to learn that Vita apparently has a soul-swallowing instinct. Vita realizes that, yeah, that's probably something she should be concerned about as well.

Still, Lyn believes Vita when she says she means no harm and is almost as freaked out by the implications of this as she is. They don't know if she's dangerous to people who don't start shit like her, or if she'll light up on the templars' detect-and-smite senses, but Lyn still isn't going to turn her out in the cold. She decides that they'll let her stay in the secret hideout place under Lyn's shack, and have her make physical contact with as few people as possible while Lyn and Rowan try and find more information about ani/necromancy.

They embrace, though being covered in shit from the sewer kind of ruins the moment when they both feel it on each other.

So, with that harrowing task over with and Vita's future ominous and uncertain, they leave the sewer to find some rainwater or something to wash themselves off with before returning to their neighbourhood. Not mentioned is the fact that both of them having walked away with Grig the last time anyone ever saw him is proooobably more suspicious than anything else they could have done, so Lyn's admonishing of Vita over the risks she took before are starting to look pretty hollow lol. In any case, hope Grig's family can get by without him. End chapter.


Chapter three got off to a bad start, but the final third or so of it was much better than anything before it. There's still a lot that annoys me about the writing and worldbuilding, but that's now balanced by things that interest me, enough that I actually want to continue and see what happens next. I'll do more dissection after the next post, since there are some philosophical threads started in this chapter that I can't really assess until the story follows them up a bit more.

For now, I'm warming up to this story. Hopefully the trend continues.