Chapter Text
Do you know why you are here?
Kravitz blinks. Or tries to. Something feels different when his mind tries to signal his body to move. To react. To breathe. He feels like a billion disparate pieces, unable to pull together. He’s certain he wasn’t always this way, but he can’t remember whatever came before this..
Do you know why you’re here, child? The voice asks again, slower this time, resonating everywhere and nowhere.
Kravitz wants to shake his head, thinks no, thinks who are you? And there’s something in the back of his mind that he can’t seem to place or parse, but he knows deep down, deep deep down in the pit of his stomach where every truth he learned first bloomed, that something is terribly wrong.
Something has happened, and his mind is trying to save him from remembering it.
In time the voice tells him, just as Kravitz tries to anxiously examine that nagging sense of loss.
Then there is only the silence.
The flotsam jetsam of his consciousness radiating outward in an impossibly long stream that has no end.
And the nothingness.
And the ambivalence.
And the unfathomable bits and bits and bits of him.
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Do you know why you are here?
I never knew my father, my mother was a piano teacher. She taught me how to play as soon as I could reach the keys. I was born under a Harvest moon, I-- Somehow, without it being said to him, Kravitz knows this is not taking him in the right direction, he forces those familiar and comforting truths aside and moves toward the obfuscation, begins picking at it. The closer he gets, the more he wants to turn back, but it’s not in Kravitz’s nature to keep things hidden from himself.
Ignorant is far worse a thing to be, than afraid.
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I died Kravitz says before the presence can ask why he’s here. A sense of shock and loss and anger arrive with the admission, but he hones it, uses it to ground himself, forces the once meandering bits to stay together.
He’s still not certain where he is, but presumably an afterlife of some sort. He was not a religious man, and he called upon no gods when he died. All the pain and disappointment and the unanswerable questions from life have followed him here. This isn’t the endless sleep he imagined when he collapsed in the middle of his studies.
An illness grew quietly inside him before anyone even knew it was there, and by the time it’d shown its face, no Healer could touch it.
A stiff white bed and a fever that burned deep in his bones.
His mother, always so distant and quiet, holding his hand like she never had. The hands she’d created and crafted and taught to coax music from tonal dissonance.
The call of a raven perched in his window, and that’s the last thing he remembers from his life, the delirious pondering of who let that bird in here?
A chuckle, it sounds real now, not just a sound projecting in a million directions all at once, but from an actual source.
I am no simple creature, child.
From somewhere, Kravitz finds his voice,“Who are you then?”
Harvester. Shepherd. Mother. Queen. I go by many names.
Kravitz stretches out his senses, if he’s dead, where is everyone else like him? There’s no shortage of souls passing out of the mortal plane at any given time, so why is he so alone? It’s just him in this space, and the ungraspable presence that keeps speaking to him, regarding him with curiosity and a vague sense of benign affection. The latter of which seeming the most bizarre, at the moment.
It’s true, it has been thousands of years since I last took a vested interest in watching a soul form. I sometimes forget how much there is to you. Something stirs Kravitz’s consciousness, like one thousand fingers touching one thousand Kravitz’s all at once. How do you keep it locked so tightly inside of those tiny, fragile vessels, for even a moment? It must be agony.
“Yes,” Kravitz admits, softly. “Sometimes.”
I want to make you an offer. It is the only time I will make this offer. If you refuse, I will allow you the same fate as any soul that passes under my hand; to join with the others in the collective. To find your peace. It will not anger me if you choose this.
Kravitz takes a moment to consider the words, doesn’t ask until he’s sure he wants to hear the answer. “What is the offer?”
Serve me.
Huh. That’s… Well, he wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but it wasn’t that. “Pardon? I’m not sure I understand.”
Serve Me. Be My emissary. Bind your soul to the Veil and wield My scythe. Seek out those who defile the laws of fate and this plane; the necromancers, the Defectors, and bring them to Eternal Stockade. Reform them so they might one day join the others in the pool, as is My will.
“Do I-- Okay, wait,” Kravitz tries to think, “How would this work? Would I still be me even though, if I am getting this correct, bound to you?”
Child she says, carefully articulating like Kravitz might actually be very, very dense. Whatever it is that makes a being unique without equal, whatever magic it is that shapes and casts and patterns a soul together, can not be appropriated by any force. To be at peace in the collective, to be dead, is not to stop feeling. This goes on infinitely. It can not be taken or unmade. To fasten your soul to Me, does not mean an end to your existence. Do you understand?
No. There are too many questions to ask. How? He’s nothing. A wisp of consciousness and that’s all. He can’t even make a fist, much less fight with one. He was not a student of magic in his life, Kravitz knows nothing of necromancers, of wayward souls. He wanted to be a conductor. He only knows music, how to bring it into shape and make it move. He’s wielded a baton, but not a scythe. He is organized and precise, but sometimes to a fault. It makes him slow.
He means to say all of this, but all that comes out is, “Why? Why choose me?” Instead of someone better suited he means; a warrior, a wizard, a priest.
I can not say, She admits after several moments, Even I do not always know the will of Fate, and the tapestry She weaves. There is a purpose, though it be beyond my sight. You are-- She pauses and Kravitz can once again feel that same prickle of detached curiosity fall over him, --precious to me, somehow. Or perhaps you will be. There is something of you that’s important.
“Oh,” Kravitz says, and then,admittedly more out of panic than actual logical consideration, “I accept.”
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