Chapter Text

Julia spent the years of the rebellion praying for the safety of pretty much everyone she knew. Family, friends, neighbors, clients - even people she only ever saw in passing, those who lived closer to the governor's house where things had a tendency to get violent more often. She prayed, every night until they had victory, that death wouldn’t come for these people, her people, the citizens of Raven’s Roost.

Of course it wasn’t a fool-proof method. Most of the time, her shortswords and Magnus’ broad axe were more effective when it came to protecting people and even then there were deaths. But most of the dead worked for the governor, and she and Magnus didn’t kill when they didn’t have to. It was, she had joked with him, probably the gentlest rebellion Faerûn had ever seen.

When the column collapsed over the Craftsman Corridor, it had been months since she had prayed death away. She’d been so happy, she’d just forgotten to worry. The initial collapse flattens the half of the house that her father and their dog, Brutus sleep in, and she turns away from that yawning pit of horror and despair and climbs instead toward the sounds of whimpers and screams, toward people she can still help. She gets four of them out before a secondary collapse swipes her out of view, and she finds herself standing on the hill beyond the town wall, watching the dust rise into the sky.

At first she thinks that some kind of magic saved her, and then she turns to see the Reaper.

“Is it because I stopped praying?”

It’s a foolish question, but it slides out of her mouth almost before it pops into her head and she can’t exactly take it back.

The Reaper has curly hair and kind brown eyes and she gives Julia a look that is gentle and fond. “Of course not. It’s because some asshole decided to commit architecture-based homicide. Come on.”

The Reaper begins to walk away, and Julia doesn’t make the choice to follow but Raven’s Roost fades behind them anyway. The Reaper introduces herself as Rowan, and she asks Julia a series of questions before reciting a set of rules. Don’t try to return to the material plane. Don’t try to contact people on the material plane. Exploration is a privilege which you will lose if you harass other spirits. And so on. At the end she hands Julia a pamphlet with an illustration of a ghost on it surrounded by strange symbols. At the top it says, ‘ So you’re dead :( Now what?’

“In case you need a reminder,” says Rowan.

“Am I going to a good place?” asks Julia.

“Good is subjective,” says Rowan. “Most people like it, some don’t. But you aren’t going to Shadowfell, if that’s what you mean.”

Julia frowns. She doesn’t think that is what she meant at all. “Shadowfell?”

“Yeah. If you were to become, for instance, an incredibly powerful parasite that fed on the blood of others and tormented all the people in your kingdom for funsies-”

“Like a vampire?” asks Julia.

“Like the first vampire,” says Rowan. “Then the forces that rule Shadowfell would make a special, miserable place for you where you would be trapped for all eternity. But most people just go to the Astral plane.”

“What about the Nine Hells?” asks Julia.

“You aren’t a demon,” says Rowan. “Nor, according to our records, have you ever made a deal with a demon. So no, Asmodeus has no claim on you.”

“But if, say, I was a shitty human who murdered a bunch of children for funsies and wasn’t actually very powerful at all?”

“You would still go to the Astral plane,” says Rowan. “Sometimes the Raven Queen - she’s the goddess in charge around here - sometimes she’ll tell us to single someone out and keep them away from other spirits. But existence here is what you make it, literally. Miserable little shits tend to make themselves miserable little places. Good people make good places. It all sort of works itself out. Come on now, you’ve got a little patch of land along a lake. It’s not too far from your parents.”

“My father already came through?” asks Julia.

Rowan nods. “He was in a big hurry to see your mum again. I’d give them some alone time if I were you.” As she speaks, the lakeside materializes around them, and Brutus materializes with it. He barks and runs forward to sniff and lick Julia’s hands, and Julia scratches his head absently. The lake is beautiful, though the shimmering shapes beneath the surface are a little unnerving, and the hillside is dotted with tall trees and colorful flowers. It’s idyllic and remote and there is not a single structure within sight in any direction.

“What am I supposed to do now?” asks Julia.

Rowan shrugs. “Whatever you want. Some people have buildings waiting for them, some build their own. Some just wander. You don’t need food or shelter. The weather will be whatever you feel like. The pamphlet provides some tips for all that. If you’re good, I need to get back - there are a lot of people to ferry out of Raven’s Roost tonight.”

“Of course,” says Julia, trying not to betray the flutter of confusion and panic in her chest. A second later she says, “Wait!”

Rowan tilts her head.

“What about Magnus?” asks Julia. “My husband? Magnus Burnsides?”

Rowan blinks and consults her book. She flips through a few pages, sees something that makes her eyes widen and her eyebrows climb toward her hairline, and then she clears her throat. “Magnus isn’t currently dead,” she says carefully. “So he’ll have to be dealt with later. Sorry, I really have to go.”

Julia doesn’t like the sound of any of that, but before she can say anything, the Reaper is gone.

-

She spends the day toying with the weather and splashing about the lakeside with Brutus. The pamphlet tells her that her only limitation is essentially her own imagination, though there’s an extra layer of complexity that she’s not sure how to parse. She can imagine, for instance, trees, and weather, and changes in the landscape, and those things will change around her accordingly. Things will also often change according to what she wants or needs. If she’s cold she might come across a blanket, for instance, without necessarily having to focus on creating a blanket. But it’s a lot harder to create something more complex, like an animal, and nearly impossible to create a person.

When she begins to think of sleep, more out of habit than any real need, a soft bed of flowers and vines rises to comfort her. When she wakes up she finds building materials piled neatly nearby, and she gets to work planning out the foundation of her home. She’s aware of time passing, but it’s somewhat meaningless from her perspective. She can tell, though she’s not sure how, that it’s been about three days on the material plane, but in that time she has experienced multiple seasons and only one night. It’s all a bit much to keep track of.

About a week passes, material time, before she seeks out her parents.

Once she starts looking she realizes it’s actually quite easy to find people. She holds her memories of them at the front of her mind and a path forms through the forest, leading from her space to theirs. Brutus trots along at her heels as she follows a surprisingly short, winding path, and when she clears the trees she finds a big old farmhouse with her mother and father on the front porch, sipping hot cocoa. It’s winter here, the snow perched neatly atop the roof and windmill and fence posts, pretty as a painting. Steven spots her first and leans over to her mother, whispering something in her ear. Mari’s face lights up as she turns, eyes searching. When they land on Julia’s face, her mouth splits into a grin and she hurriedly hands her cocoa to Steven so she can run down the steps and through the snow to fling her arms around Julia’s neck.

Mari looks younger than Julia remembers her - they both do - and she holds onto Julia for a long time. “You are so lovely, and Steven says you’re just as brilliant and wonderful as I thought you’d be.”

Julia finds herself crying, and she tries to wipe her face without Mari noticing but it doesn’t work. “Oh don’t do that - there’s nothing to cry for here. I’ve missed you something terrible, come on in for some breakfast and tell me everything .”

Julia talks for hours and shares two meals with them before heading back to her own space. It looks just as it did when she left - a dry, early fall morning, the beginnings of her cabin laid out on a hill. She develops a pattern, working on the house for a couple weeks, then visiting her parents for a day or two, rinse, repeat. She’s got a solid frame built by the time she gets bored and lonely and decides to try something new.

Magnus never liked talking about his past, but she knows he can’t have just sprung up out of the ground. He had parents - Reina and Samira - and she could tell by how he talked about them that he loved them very much. She could also tell that they were gone, and so she hadn’t pressed him for too many details. But Julia is ‘gone’ now too, and so one day she stands at the edge of the forest, not far from the path to her parents, and she thinks very hard of Magnus, of everything he ever told her about his mothers, and she thinks particularly hard on the names Reina and Samira Burnsides .

Where the path to her own parents is a wide, well kept dirt road, the path that opens before her now is more or less a game trail. With a sigh, she follows it anyway. She explores for two days and finds many things - spaces between personal afterlives, where the remains of old places lie still and dormant. She learns that spirits lose form the longer they stay here, especially once there’s no one left on the material plane for them to worry about. They begin to float or become blurry at the edges, and then they begin to become abstract representations of themselves, and eventually they’re just shapes that exemplify a feeling. The restless flit from place to place, the angry sneak into other people’s spaces and call down lightning, the sad drift along in a cold mist, the happy settle in beautiful places and swirl. She realizes that’s what’s beneath her lake - happy old spirits - and she feels a lot better about it.

But two days later she is no closer to finding anyone called Burnsides, and the moment she thinks wistfully of her hill on the lake, she’s back there. She naps in the sunlight with Brutus and works on her cabin and thinks.

-

Her parents stop keeping track of time almost immediately. Julia visits them every couple weeks like clockwork, but sometimes her father will say, “Twice in as many days? Mari, we’ve won the lottery!” Or he’ll say, “We haven’t seen you in months, where have you been?” The second comment is invariably followed up by, “Is that boy of yours here yet?” By which he means Magnus, and the answer is invariably ‘no.’

Julia doesn’t give up looking for Magnus’ mothers, but she does get sidetracked pretty frequently. There’s an enormous wealth of knowledge lying about in forgotten places between inhabited afterlives, and she spends at least as much time haunting empty ruins as she does working on her cabin. Occasionally she spots a Reaper, and aside from Rowan she identifies four of them. It seems like a small number for the amount of spirits they must have to look after, but on one memorable and terrifying excursion she sees one of them in their skeletal form, chasing down a spirit that tried to escape. After that, she figures five of them are probably more than powerful enough to handle the whole of the Astral Plane and she starts avoiding them. She was told that exploration was fine, but she’d rather not find out that she shouldn’t be poking her nose into the past. As Magnus used to say, back when the rebellion was still just a few small acts of defiance - better to ask forgiveness than permission.

She thinks of him every time she sets out, and sometimes the game trail is wider, and it leads her to a specific person, but that person is never Reina or Samira. It’s usually someone from Raven’s Roost, and for the first couple years of her search, it’s all people who died around the same time Julia did. They all say things like, this is so weird, I was just thinking of Magnus and now here you are! Is he with you? When Julia tells them he’s not, they usually smile a little and say well maybe he’s trying to take out that bastard Kalen once and for all before he joins us, eh?

She always leaves after that. It hurts her heart to think of Magnus alone and hunting down vengeance with nothing else to live for.

Years pass. The cabin rises up out of nothing, and she builds furniture to fill it. She sleeps sporadically, mostly just for a change of pace. And then one day she approaches the path she built with Magnus’ name and finds it a little wider, and it leads her down into a cave she’s never seen before. She can hear a strange, intermittent sound, like waves crashing against a shore, and she follows a winding stone path down to a door, in front of which there are three figures. One of them is slumped against a wall to the side, thick white hair curtained over their face and a voluminous red robe obscuring their body. The other two are dwarven men, standing in front of a massive door and having a furious argument that they are trying to keep to a whisper.

“Excuse me?” says Julia. They both jump and draw weapons as they turn to face her.

“Who are you?” demands the older of the two. “How did you find this place? What are you doing here?”

He glares at her for a moment but then seems to register that she isn’t armed and lowers his weapon slightly. “Do you have any knowledge of healing? Please, quickly, she’s gravely injured.” He points at the figure slumped against the wall.

“She’s not injured ,” growls the other dwarf. “She’s dead . Will you please just listen to me?”

“Hush now, Gundren, I don’t recall you ever showing any interest in medicine. Please, milady, if you can do anything...”

Gundren rolls his eyes and paces away as Julia moves toward the injured or possibly dead woman. There’s an umbrella tucked against her side, which seems weird, and when Julia brushes her hair aside to check for a pulse she finds a stunningly beautiful elf woman whose eyes are open and glassy. The veins in her neck and chest are blackened with some sort of poison and Julia looks up at the two dwarves as the older one swears.

“You see, father?” says Gundren. “I told you.”

“Well it’s only been a moment,” says the father, “do you have any magic, lass? Could you revive her?”

“She’s a friend of yours?” asks Julia.

He hesitates a moment before saying, “Yes.”

“No she isn’t!” snaps Gundren. “You hate elves! Do you even know her name?”

His father ignores him, sheathing his weapon and stepping toward Julia to extend his hand. “My name is Cyrus Rockseeker, milady, and this mad imbecile is my son, Gundren. My friend here was helping me get this door open when she - ah - pricked her finger on something, and-”

“Bullshit!” shouts Gundren angrily. “Just tell me what you did with the rest of the things in the vault!”

Cyrus glares at him.

“Listen to me, father,” says Gundren. “You’re dead . I don’t know what happened but you both made it down here and opened the vault and then died, and I need you to tell me what you did with the rest of the treasure, okay? Please?”

Cyrus shakes his head, and the body beside Julia withers into a skeleton and then snaps back to being glassy-eyed and poisoned. “That’s ridiculous, Gundren,” he says.

“Excuse me,” says Julia. “Sorry, you guys are going through something intense, and I hate to interrupt, I just... did either of you know a man named Magnus Burnsides?”

Something flickers across Gundren’s face and he clears his throat before he says, “I do. I hired my cousin Merle and a couple of guys to transport some goods from Neverwinter to Phandalin for me, and Burnsides was one of them.”

“You don’t have a cousin named Merle,” says Cyrus dismissively.

Gundren frowns at him. “Of course I do. He’s older than I am, you should know him.”

Cyrus shakes his head. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you or why you keep spouting nonsense, but we-”

Gundren opens his mouth to retort and Julia interrupts again. “Hey! Sorry again, very sorry, but Magnus - was he...was he okay?”

Gundren shrugs. “Sure. Big guy, confident, didn’t blink about the news of increased goblin activity in the area, and less greedy than that little-” He blinks, and then scowls, and then looks down at the body of the elf.

“What is it?” asks Julia.

“The third guy was an elf, called himself Taako, didn’t seem too bright or interested in anything but money. But he looked just like her .” He points at the elf and then scratches his head. “But he didn’t say anything when we...when...” He blinks again, and the elf withers back into a skeleton, her clothes rotting away but for the crimson robe which the umbrella tucks itself beneath. Gundren turns to the doors and suddenly they swing open, and the three of them look in on an empty domed vault made of black glass with one solitary figure in the center, wearing a silver gauntlet that is raised up into the air.

“What the hell is this?” demands Cyrus.

“That’s you,” says Gundren. “I tried - I was going to reopen this mine and use the wealth in this vault to do it. The transport gig was just to draw the goblins away, but everything went wrong. My brothers and I got jumped and our bodyguard turned out to be pretty useless. We were taken by this pompous wizard who called himself the Black Spider, he killed my brothers and dragged me down here to force me to open the vault but people showed up...Merle and the others, and a fucking orc.” He presses his hands to his head, squeezing his eyes shut, and then he says, quietly, “I’m dead too.” He looks up, past Cyrus, at Julia. “Aren’t I?”

Julia nods.

“What?” says Cyrus nervously. “What are you talking about?”

“We finally got to the vault and it was empty, except for this and the umbrella outside. Merle tried to pick up the umbrella and it threw him across the room but when Taako grabbed it, it just shot off all this lightning and like...fireworks or something and we...man those guys were fucking weird . And kind of assholes.”

“Says the one who hired them to get attacked by goblins,” says Julia.

“Fair point,” says Gundren. “But we - my dad had been gone for like seven or eight years and we got into the vault and found this and Magnus just...high-fived him.”

“Yeah,” says Julia with a grimace. “He does that.”

Gundren shakes his head turning back to his father, his eyes full of rage. “I know what happened to everything else in the vault.” He gestures at Cyrus with his weapon and says, “You fucking burned it up.”

A moment later they’re engaged in a pretty brutal fight, and Julia sighs. She closes the elf’s eyes and holds her hand for a second. “I’m sorry you died here,” she says, and then she gets up and slinks away.

Outside the cave she finds Rowan, looking irritable. When Rowan sees her, the frustration evaporates into confusion for a moment. “What are you doing here?” she asks.

Julia shrugs. “Wandering.”

“Hmph,” says Rowan. “Well, best to stay away from these types.”

“They didn’t know they were dead,” says Julia.

“Aye,” says Rowan, “and they’ll forget again soon enough. They can’t handle what they did.”

“What do you mean?” asks Julia.

Rowan sighs. “One of them killed a woman for a powerful artifact which then burned up all his wealth and killed him. The other one got down there, took the artifact and used it to destroy the entire town of Phandalin. I don’t know if they’re just using it wrong or if it was cursed to begin with, but it packs one hell of a punch. You should move on, I’m going to have to break them up. Again .”

“Thanks,” says Julia. “What about the woman? Is she here?”

Rowan shakes her head. “She never crossed into the Astral Plane.”

“How is that possible?” asks Julia.

Rowan shrugs. “Maybe her soul got trapped by something. Hell, maybe she was a lich. We don’t know. Cyrus doesn’t remember her name.” She sighs and heads into the cave, giving Julia a wave as she disappears.

Julia stares after her for a moment before slinking back into the forest.

-

A few weeks later, when Julia sets out again, she picks a different portion of her forest to create the trail, and this time she thinks about a silver gauntlet and black glass. The path this creates is wide, and then it isn’t there at all, and then it’s more modest. It flickers a few times, but seems to settle. She frowns, takes a deep breath, and follows it.

Brutus appears at her side and follows it with her, as if aware that she’s doing something unusual, something that might be dangerous. He looks younger as his ears flick and his eyes scan the path around them, and Julia gives him a friendly scowl.

“Ah,” she says. “So all this time you’ve been old and lazy by choice .”

Brutus pretends not to hear her, but his tail starts wagging at the sound of her voice before he can wrestle it back into stillness.

The first place she finds is a personal afterlife. It’s a broad field, and two things exist in the center of it at the same time. One is an army standing triumphantly over their fallen enemies, their leader in the middle with his gauntleted fist raised in triumph. The other is a circle of black glass, perfectly round, perfectly smooth, with no bodies save for the one in the middle, right where their leader is standing. It’s a corpse on its knees, fist raised, the gauntlet sitting atop it without so much as a scratch, just like Gundren’s memory of Cyrus in the vault. The two things are layered over each other, like an afterimage when you look at something too bright or for too long. A man paces around the outside of the circle, tearing at his hair and clothes, shouting occasionally, eyes glued to the gauntlet.

Julia glances at Brutus and considers her options for a few minutes before taking a breath and stepping forward. “Excuse me? Sir?”

The man jolts and whirls around to face her, drawing a sword and rushing to stand between her and the circle, flinging his arms wide as if he can hide the entire thing with only his body. “Get away!” he shouts at her. “It’s mine!”

Julia glances at Brutus again, who growls at the man but in a noncommittal way. He seems as confused as she is. “What is?”

“You can’t fool me,” snaps the man. “I know you’re here to take the gauntlet. I just can’t figure out what you’ve done to hide it. What is this barrier?”

“I don’t-”

“It’s mine !” he shouts at her. “I found it! I earned it! It’s mine !” Flecks of spit fly from his mouth as he rages, and Julia takes a step back, and then another. He keeps shouting at her, nonsense about how it chose him, about how she has no right to keep it from him. She moves away slowly at first, but he doesn’t seem inclined to step away from the gauntlet so eventually she breaks into a run and doesn’t stop until she’s back on the path. Her head aches a little as she looks back at the scene she left behind, and she feels like there is something obvious right in front of her that she can’t grasp. It’s like having a word you know but can’t quite remember sitting on the tip of your tongue. She turns away and keeps moving.

She finds eleven more, and with each one the headache gets worse. Some are the remains of towns. Some are the remains of battles. Many have people pacing at the edges, people who can see themselves holding the gauntlet in the afterimage they’re staring at but who can’t actually reach it. One of them is a shadow of Phandalin, haunted by some of the people who died there. At the last glass circle, she finds something different.

It’s the remains of another city but there’s no afterimage on this one, just the glass and the burnt corpse in the center, its fist upraised with the gauntlet on it. Sitting at the edge of the circle is a boy in his teens, his knees tucked up against his chest. Julia approaches cautiously and calls out to him, and he turns to look at her with surprise, but he doesn’t react violently the way the others have.

“Who are you?” he asks when she reaches him.

“My name is Julia Burnsides. This is Brutus.”

He looks at the dog with a sad smile and holds his hand up for Brutus to smell. Brutus licks it and flops over next to him. “I’m Jacob,” he says.

Julia sits down on the other side of the dog, scratching his belly. “What happened?” she asks.

Jacob sighs. “I found it. It was on a suit of armor in an old part of the castle. My mom worked there, and I was helping her clean because she - she wasn’t feeling well. And we couldn’t afford for her to lose the job, so...” He trails off for a while. And then, angrily, he says, “She wasn’t sick.”

“I didn’t say she was,” says Julia softly.

“No, I know, but I was making it sound like- but she wasn’t sick. She had a broken rib and I had to pop her shoulder back into place because her worthless shitrag of a husband lost his temper again. We’re all dead now, I should be able to say this.”

He fumes quietly for a few minutes, and Julia just waits.

“I found it on a suit of armor. It stuck out because it didn’t match the other hand, and then it...this is going to sound weird, but it talked to me. It said that if I put it on, we could make him stop. I just wanted him to stop . He was gonna kill her, I just knew it, and every time she tried to leave it was like he was suddenly everywhere. Like he had eyes in every inch of the city. So I took the gauntlet. Just in case. I hid it in my room, and I tried - I knew it was powerful, so I wasn’t going to use it unless I had to. It was just in case. But he hit Mandy. My - my little sister. He hit her and she was bleeding and crying and he was still rampaging and I just wanted him to stop . So I put it on.” He waves a hand at the scene before them. “And that’s what happened.”

Julia looks up at the devastation, sorrow and horror burrowing into her chest. “I’m so sorry.”

Jacob shrugs.

“When was this?” asks Julia.

He shrugs again, but he thinks about it, and a moment later he says, “I stopped keeping track, so I’m not sure, but it was harvest season, eight...eight years ago? It - I think it was 1350 P.R.”

And finally, the thing that’s been on the tip of her tongue spills over, and she hears herself say, “During the Relic Wars?”

The headache gets worse and then eases away entirely as she has the very strange experience of remembering something she is certain she didn’t know about before she spoke to this boy. She remembers the constant fighting, the flow of refugees and scarcity of food. She remembers three years of endless destruction and violence, which felt like it would last forever until suddenly it just stopped . Magnus moved to Raven’s Roost around that time, when the leaders and kings of Faerûn were trying to figure out why they had been positioning their armies at the borders of neighboring countries they’d been at peace with for years. The evidence and aftermath of all the fighting had been everywhere , but Julia - and, apparently, everyone else - had just...stopped thinking about it. Or talking about it. Or remembering it.

“There was no war on then,” says Jacob, snapping her out of her reverie.

“But there was right after,” says Julia, as much to herself as to him. “All across the world, terrible wars. People turned on each other, cities were destroyed. They would disappear or be swallowed up by the forest or drowned in a mad storm. One town turned into peppermint. Everyone wanted these things, we called them the Grand Relics. But every time someone got hold of one it ended in disaster.”

“I probably shouldn’t feel good about not being the only one who fucked up, huh?” asks Jacob.

Julia turns to him. “Jacob, this wasn’t your fault. You don’t have to sit here and beat yourself up about it. You should find Mandy and your mother. You should make sure they’re happy.”

“I killed them,” says Jacob.

“Well, yeah,” says Julia. “And that kind of sucks. But if it was me, I’d understand. I’d miss you. I’d just want to know you were okay. Find them. The worst that can happen is that you’re right, and they’d rather be alone. But it would be better to know, wouldn’t it?”

He shrugs, but she can tell he’s considering it. She climbs to her feet, and Brutus drags himself up with a sigh.

“Hey,” says Jacob. “How did it end? Where did this gauntlet end up?”

“I don’t know,” says Julia. “But I intend to find out.”