Silas lay utterly still, frozen by more than just the encroaching chill. His eyes, wide and unblinking, fixed on the triple moons painting the alien sky: a lurid red, a stark white, a haunting purple. The sight swam, a dizzying welcome to this new reality.
Just five minutes prior, he'd been shunted across realities, his consciousness abruptly inhabiting this cold, lifeless shell – another unwilling recruit to the legion of transmigrators from fantastical tales.
But this was no gentle passage. A raw, primal terror had seized him, locking every muscle. His body remained rigid, a petrified statue, every nerve screaming a silent alarm.
Because at this very moment, he was, to all appearances, a corpse.
Worse, a corpse on the verge of being unceremoniously discarded.
Through the desolate wilderness, two figures trudged, cloaked in black, their faces lost in the shadow of deep hoods. Between them, they bore a rough wooden plank.
And on that plank lay "Silas."
"Where in the blazes did it go wrong?" The voice from the figure in front, presumably a middle-aged man, was thick with frustration.
His companion, a man of sturdier build, grumbled, "The formula, most likely. Needs more bone marrow, a dash of lizard brain perhaps. We'll try again in a few days."
Damn you both! Don't you have any respect for the dead? Can't even close my eyes! They're burning, drying out! Silas howled in the confines of his mind, battling the agonizing urge to blink, to breathe, to betray the charade of death.
He'd held this agonizing stillness for five minutes, his endurance stretched to its breaking point.
Mercifully, his handlers seemed utterly convinced of his demise. Their attention, scant as it was towards him, was mostly devoted to scanning the menacing, empty landscape around them.
Another minute crawled by. The pair halted before a dense thicket of wild grass, towering over a man's height. With a grunt of effort from one and a muttered curse from the other, they heaved him off the plank. Silas's body tumbled unceremoniously into the tall, scratching weeds before the heavy wood slammed down over him, plunging him into suffocating darkness and the smell of damp earth.
"Jace, you'll keep this quiet for me," the thinner man urged, his voice a conspiratorial whisper.
The robust Jace grunted his assent. "Consider it handled. No worries."
A bitter wind moaned through the grass, carrying the first flurries of snow.
"Best be going," Jace urged, his voice sharpened with sudden anxiety. "If those blasted Night Watchers catch us out here, we're both finished!" With that, they were gone, their footsteps crunching away into the silence.
Silas remained pressed against the freezing ground, every instinct screaming at him to flee, yet he dared not stir.
I've already died once in some freak accident. I refuse to die again the moment I've arrived! The thought was a frantic pulse in his mind.
Before this, Silas had been an ordinary young man. Life was a predictable rhythm of work and commute, a gentle current that had smoothed his youthful, idealistic edges. He'd long since shelved his fantastical, "chuunibyou" daydreams, quietly anticipating the mundane milestones of marriage and family.
He'd never, in his wildest imaginings, expected his childhood fantasy of transmigration to manifest so brutally.
One mundane evening, on his way home from work, an unseasonal summer snow had begun to fall. As he'd stared, bewildered, a bizarre, ornate spear had plummeted from the sky, impaling him through the heart.
My heart! The memory jolted him. He desperately wanted to check his chest, to feel for the wound, but the fear of his captors' return kept him pinned.
Right, focus. Memories. This poor sod's memories. He'd been too consumed by terror to process them earlier.
Gradually, consciously, he willed his frayed nerves to unknot. And then they came: the memories of the body he now inhabited, flooding his consciousness like a relentless tide.
"Silas Sotos? An apprentice necromancer? The Death Cult…" The influx was overwhelming – alien concepts, arcane knowledge, even an entirely new language unfurling within his mind.
According to the memories of Silas Sotos, he was a former top philosophy student. A graduation day confession, met with scorn due to his humble origins, had shattered his pride. Consumed by a burning rage, he'd been lured into the Death Cult, a shadowy organization that promised him the power to exact his revenge.
He'd envisioned stepping into a world of arcane mysteries, of wielding extraordinary power, of finally commanding respect. Instead, he'd found the cult's necromancer wasn't seeking an apprentice, but a guinea pig. After a few scraps of elementary lore, the flow of knowledge had dried up.
Then, three days ago, he'd been seized, marked as the latest experiment. The necromancer's goal: to reanimate his corpse into an undead warrior.
Clearly, the experiment had been a spectacular failure, leading to this clandestine disposal.
"What a magnificent, horrifying, insane world," Silas breathed, the scope of it all dawning on him as he sifted through Sotos's life.
This was a realm teetering on the brink of an industrial revolution, a steampunk fever dream where steam power had proliferated to an almost ludicrous extent.
Steam-belching trains thundered across the land, steam-driven automatons clanked through city streets, and colossal steam airships drifted through the smoggy skies. Even steam-powered robotics and intricate steam-gear firearms were commonplace.
It was a world torn from the pages of the late Victorian Gothic novels he'd once devoured: elegant gentlemen in top hats, shadowy cults whispered about in hushed tones, cities choked in industrial smog, their skylines pierced by towering Gothic spires. Here, people wrestled daily with the clash of burgeoning science and deeply entrenched superstition – and all of it was terrifyingly real.
But this world had a crucial divergence from his own: magic, true arcana, was an undeniable force, twisting its developmental path into something far stranger than Earth's history.
He lay there for what felt like an eternity, easily an hour, straining his ears until the last echoes of the men's presence had faded into the howl of the wind. Only then did Silas gingerly push himself up, his limbs stiff and aching.
A cautious sweep of his surroundings confirmed he was alone. He sagged, a ragged gasp tearing from his lungs.
"Gods! That was… too close!"
He slumped back against the cold earth, breath sawing in his chest. He raised his hands, inspecting them in the dim, ethereal light of the three moons.
They were a ghastly white, utterly devoid of color, the hands of a corpse.
"Am I… am I alive or dead?" The words were a harsh, grating whisper from his own throat.
His hand fumbled towards his chest. A frantic check: his heart hammered against his ribs – a definite, living pulse. He sucked in a ragged breath, the air rasping in his lungs. Alive. He was still, somehow, gloriously alive. Not undead.
"That Silas Sotos… what an innocent fool," Silas muttered, shaking his head. "The Death Cult? The name itself screams 'bad news.' Ditching a proper job for this hocus-pocus, and getting himself killed for it? Talk about courting disaster."
Silas Sotos hailed from humble stock – a working-class family, his parents toiling as cotton spinners in a factory. He was their only child.
Four years prior, a factory accident had claimed their lives. The grief had been immense, but the compensation, coupled with their modest, inherited house (one room of which was rented out), had allowed Silas Sotos to scrape by.
Six months ago, he'd graduated from university. But instead of seeking employment, he'd fallen in with the cult, his behavior growing increasingly erratic and secretive. Evan Madton, his closest friend since childhood, hadn't spoken to him in nearly a month.
The snowfall intensified, flakes swirling thickly around him. Yet, strangely, Silas felt no bite from the cold.
He pinched the back of his hand. The skin was cold, yes, but it registered the pressure, a dull ache blooming. "Feeling… still there," he rasped, the words scraping his throat. "Nerves are working."
"Right, I've been 'missing' for three days. I need to get back. Now. Before this gets even more complicated," he resolved, a new urgency propelling him.
This world, unlike the lawless fantasy realms of fiction, possessed a surprisingly robust legal framework. And with the pervasive threat of sinister cults, any disappearance was meticulously investigated.
Three days missing was pushing it, but still potentially explainable. Return after a week or more, and he'd have the constabulary breathing down his neck, demanding to know if he'd been involved in any "irregular assemblies."
With this spurred him, his gaze swept the dark surroundings. Night had fully descended, swallowing details, making it impossible to even guess at a direction.
"All this wild grass… no sign of city lights, no buildings. Sotos's memory suggests this is the western suburban wasteland. So, eastward should lead back to Bayne City."
"Okay, next step: find east."
"The lore of this world is clear: every night, three moons rise. One from the east, one north, one west."
"The White Moon, from the east, is the Pale Moon Goddess of Birth, the paramount deity of the Tri-Moon faith, symbolizing fertility and purity."
"From the north comes the Purple Moon, the domain of the Misty Purple Moon Goddess, representing the intertwined dance of mystery and science."
"And from the west, the Blood Moon, avatar of the Primordial Blood Moon Goddess, embodying primal forces and the essence of blood itself."
"They appear at dusk, around six, reach their zenith at midnight, then retrace their paths to vanish at dawn, six in the morning."
Silas tilted his head, studying the celestial bodies. "It's deep into the night. Judging by their arc… must be around two AM. Perfect. To head east, I just need to follow the Pale Moon."
His course set, Silas pushed himself to his feet. Mud clung heavily to his boots, each step a squelching, painful effort as he stumbled forward, a grotesque parody of a walk.
"Cherish life," he muttered grimly to the uncaring wind, "and stay the hell away from cults."