Worth the Candle

After ten years of heaven, it felt to Raven like everyone had moved on but her. She kept in touch with the entire party, with the exceptions of Bethel and the locus, occasionally meeting with them for a movie or game night, and sometimes one-on-one for coffee, or dinner, or something like that. They had […]

The primary question of heaven was different for everyone. For some it was ‘how do I deal with other people?’ and for others it was ‘what is my purpose?’, but for Bethel, it was ‘who do I want to be?’ The question was a fairly common one, and it was something that everyone in the […]

The Angel and the Devil had dressed up to play cheerleader to their Juniper, the Narrator. The Angel was Fenn, of course, the one who had died to poison and then gone to heaven, where she’d spent approximately three years with the Narrator, lounging about and getting a taste of the heaven that everyone else […]

Darili Irid was the same as it had always been. Every time Grak went back, he found that strange. He could understand, in the abstract, that some people wanted things to be how they’d always been, and those sorts of people made up the bulk of those who populated the lower heavens, but the people […]

Most people in the Mid-Uppers were there for the complete transhumanism or the lack of intellectual or creative scarcity, but not so for Valencia the Red. No, Valencia was a relatively rare specimen of the Mid-Uppers, someone who liked the neighborhood, so to speak, but also enjoyed a fairly mundane human existence. The assistants had […]

We drove down I-90 in a navy blue 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan, listening to Fenn’s eclectic mix of songs that were playing from her phone that sat beside her in the front passenger seat (she’d called shotgun). Amaryllis was driving, her hands at ten and two and her eyes straight ahead, while the rest of […]

Amaryllis stood in the kitchen of our new home, the morning after the end of the world, cooking breakfast and singing a little song to herself. She was wearing her faded pink ‘Princess!’ t-shirt, which was at least four years old at this point, maybe more, and beneath that, pink and white striped undies. She […]

The world didn’t end the same way for everyone. Rance Su was a farmer, though not as diversified as the common conception of a farmer. He had no chickens or cows, no marbats or pigs. He had a single crop he tended to, taking three harvests of milk leaves a year from his numerous fields, […]

The Dungeon Master looked different. He was still wearing a hoodie. This one said “Dice Girls” on it, and had a d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20, all with legs, arms, and little faces. They were dressed up, each with their own costume. I thought from context they were supposed to be the Spice Girls, […]

The Long Stairs had, in fact, gotten harder, and I didn’t think it was just a function of us losing power as we went along. If I had to guess, part of it was because we were seeing more of the second iteration of the campaign, which had been more deadly. Because it was more […]

Before we reached the last Landing, Arthur’s armor promptly fell apart. The thousands of black beads fell off him and hit the floor all at once, clattering to the ground and rolling everywhere. He wasn’t quite naked beneath them, but he was just in briefs again. They had to have been magical, because they’d changed […]

We were back in the rooms, taking them one at a time, and following through the RDP as much as we were able to. During the time we’d been in the Landing, both books had gone through unrecoverable rot, and consisted of the same word, over and over. The copies had likewise rotted, and I […]

The third Landing was a maze, one of such great size that traveling through it, even on the correct path, was going to take a while. The walls were a hundred feet tall and twenty feet apart, featureless dark grey, capped with regular lighting that gave a hostile, institutional vibe. It was all laid out […]

Moving through the rooms was easier, now that we had the crystals in our heads. Using them, we could confirm that it was Earth, or at least a version of it, since one side benefit of the crystals was that they were capable of telling you whether or not someone existed. We all picked different […]