Kael Mercer died on a Tuesday, which felt about right.
The specifics were embarrassing enough that he decided, in the brief window between the bus and the nothing, that he would not be telling anyone how it happened. The nacho cheese was involved. The skateboard was involved. The crosswalk was, technically, involved, though it bore no fault. He was twenty-two and had been on his way home from a shift at a grocery store and had not been thinking about death at all, which is probably how it tends to go.
Then there was a woman behind a desk.
She was maybe forty, wearing robes that had seen better days, and she had the look of someone who had been at work for fourteen hours and was not going to pretend otherwise. Her desk was absolute chaos — papers everywhere, an inkwell tipped on its side, three empty goblets pushed to one corner. She was squinting at a clipboard.
"Kay-el Mercer," she said. She had mispronounced it.
"It's Kael. Like 'kale.'"
"Right." She made no correction. "Human, twenty-two, groceries — well, adjacent to groceries — Aethelgard, blessing assignment..." She shuffled papers. Something fell off the desk. She didn't look at it. "Here. Inventory Organization. Lovely. Off you go."
"Inventory what?"
"Organization. It's fine. Good luck."
"Wait, what does that—"
There was a light.
Then there was cobblestone, very close to his face, getting closer.
He did not have time to process the new world, the purple sky, the smell of woodsmoke and animal, or any of it, because the cabbage was already there.
It was enormous. Roughly carriage-sized, moving on root-legs that churned the street behind it, and it was absolutely pointed at him. Behind it, a man in a blue municipal uniform was also running, waving a clipboard, screaming something about registration fees that kept getting lost under the noise of the cabbage.
Kael ran.
He turned a corner. Vaulted something. Knocked over a crate of what he hoped was apples. The cabbage turned with him, which was disturbing — it turned with purpose, with intention, which is not a thing cabbages should have. The street curved and he curved with it and skidded into a wall and stood there panting while the cabbage rounded the corner forty feet back and slowed to find him.
"Mutant Cabbage King," said someone to his left. "Rank C."
He looked. Young woman, leather armor, short sword, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. She looked like she'd been there a while.
"C rank," Kael said. He was still breathing hard.
"Scale goes to S."
"That's C."
"Average, yeah."
The cabbage had found him again. It began to accelerate. The official with the clipboard was still behind it, now also being pursued by something — Kael looked closer — a chicken, apparently. The chicken was on the official's head.
"Do you have a weapon?" Kael said.
She tossed him something without looking away from the cabbage.
It was a broom.
"I have a sword," he said.
"I know. I'm using it."
The cabbage hit a market stall and sent it sideways into the street, spraying dried herbs and what appeared to be leather sandals across the cobblestones. Kael ran again. He had no idea where he was running to. He turned into a narrower street and there was a merchant's cart parked to one side and he shoved it into the cabbage's path, which did nothing, and then grabbed the side of it to haul himself over it, which caused it to tip, which caused the contents — all unlabeled potion bottles — to hit the ground.
The sound was forty glass bottles disagreeing with cobblestone simultaneously.
The smell was forty different alchemical compounds deciding to become one.
What happened next was genuinely hard to describe. There was a color that didn't have a name yet. There was a sound like the world briefly arguing with itself. The cabbage walked directly through the cloud of mixed reagents and came out the other side as a golden retriever, sitting on the cobblestones, wagging its tail, looking around with polite interest.
Kael lay flat on the ground.
The woman with the sword appeared over him. She looked at the dog for a moment.
"Potion cloud transmutation," she said. "Uncommon."
"I didn't do that on purpose."
"Still counts as a kill. Probably." She held out her hand. "Sable. Rank D."
He took it and stood up. His knees were wet from the street. The official arrived — clipboard first, chicken still aboard, two more officials jogging behind him — and planted himself in front of Kael with the energy of a man who had been waiting for this moment.
"One destroyed cart," the official announced, breathing hard. "Forty-one potions. One minor reality fluctuation." He looked up. "The cabbage had a twelve-gold bounty on it." He looked down at his clipboard. "Your current net liability is sixty-eight gold."
Kael stared at him.
"I've been here fifteen minutes."
"Fourteen and a half. There's a late registration penalty for the last thirty seconds." The official made a note. He seemed almost sad about it, in the manner of a man who is doing his job correctly and takes no pleasure in it. "Report to the Adventurer's Guild for processing. Failure to appear generates a lien on your blessing."
"You can put a lien on a—"
"Welcome to Oakhaven. Have a good afternoon."
They walked away. The golden retriever followed them, tail still going.
Kael stood in the potion-stained wreckage and didn't say anything for a moment.
Then he noticed something in the debris. A green orb, fist-sized, faintly glowing. Something about it reached into his chest and pulled, the way you feel a song you can't quite remember. He picked it up.
His blessing — whatever it was — buzzed against his palm.
Text appeared in the air in front of him, which was alarming and apparently normal here.
CURSED CABBAGE CORE — ORIGIN: DIVINE. NOTE: This item was supposed to be a Legendary Artifact. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please contact divine support for resolution.
Note: Divine support is currently unavailable.
He looked up at the purple sky.
"SERIOUSLY?" he yelled.
The sky didn't have anything to say about that. Somewhere far above the clouds, a divine notification was being dismissed unread.