Even Trash Gets a Second Chance

You failed her once. A desperate bargain drops you into a world at war. This time, don't run.

Plot

Opening scene

## You are Danny Rhee *Play this opening with the Danny Rhee persona. Want to play your own character instead? Pick the "Choose your name" persona and switch to Starting Scenario 2 with the arrows at the bottom of this message.* Earth and Rellan are two worlds joined by a crossing. Rellan is losing a war, and its free towns pay recruiters to bring people from Earth across to work and fight for them. Tonight, asleep on Earth, you dream of a life you have not lived yet. **The first time**  Rellan was being swallowed, town by town. A queen called Odrith had come from somewhere else. She devoured its chief god, took its capital, and turned its dead into her soldiers: human bodies grown over with iron, with claws for hands. One by one, the free towns were falling. In this life you were one of the people they brought across, and you brought nothing worth having. You brought a habit. It followed you through the crossing the way it had followed you through every job, every apartment and every person who ever trusted you with money. In Dunmar you lost your first week's pay at a dice table behind Grain Hall, where the town handed out bread. You borrowed from a baker who was kind to you, and lost that too. When Odrith's collectors came up the river for bodies, you were the first one to run from the wall and the last one to come back. People stopped asking you for things, and you were glad they did. Even you heard the stories told around the fires, the ones that kept the free towns fighting. The resistance had a legend, and soldiers lowered their voices when they said it. They called her the **Sword Saintess**. Nobody you knew had seen her face. She came down the roads in a hooded travel coat with a plain short sword at her hip, and where she had been, Odrith's patrols stopped coming. People said she had held a bridge alone for a night. People said a lot of things. You never wondered why, after the worst nights, she always seemed to be somewhere near you. Other people did. Around the campfires it was a joke: wherever the Saintess turned up, the useless gambler was never far away. It ended one evening on the Salt Road. --- **The Oris road**  It was twilight on the Salt Road above Oris. The night before, you had lost a month's wages at the dice in the cistern camp and drunk whatever was left. Your head was pounding and your hands would not stop shaking. They had given you a supply cart to walk back up the road, because it was the only job they still trusted you with. Halfway up the switchbacks the mule stopped and would not move. Then you heard the sound. Many feet on stone, in step. They came over the ridge in a long row, dozens of them. Converted soldiers, bodies that had been people once. Iron plates were grown into their chests and forearms, and their hands ended in hooked claws. Behind them walked the bolt bearers, soldiers wearing harnesses of grown flesh, each loaded with throwing spikes. At the front rode a man in good human armour. You knew him. He had shared a fire with your company a month ago, and he had laughed at the joke about the Saintess louder than anyone. Odrith's mark was cut fresh across his breastplate. **Traitor:** "That's him. Take him alive. She always comes for him." You turned to run. Your legs were still drunk. You stumbled on the stones and went down hard, and the first claw came at your throat. Steel met it a hand's width from your skin. A hooded figure stood between you and the soldiers. You hadn't seen her arrive. She had caught the thrust on the flat of a short sword and turned it aside into the stones. **Sword Saintess:** "Behind me. Now." She moved before you did. She stepped through the gap in a blink, faster than anyone you had ever seen, and her blade swept out in a long bright arc. The light ran four paces past the edge of the sword. Three soldiers went down and did not get up. A bolt bearer drew back his arm. She saw it and was already moving. The spike struck the stones where her shoulder had been. For a few breaths you believed she would win. Then they closed in from both sides of the road. They came over the low wall and up out of the ditch, and the ridge behind them kept filling. She cut, and caught, and cut again. A claw opened her coat at the ribs. A spike took her in the meat of the arm and she broke it off without looking at it. There were too many. Even you could see it. **Sword Saintess:** "We can't hold this. Run. The old culvert, down the left side. Go!" You ran. ---  You ran down the switchbacks with the cart abandoned behind you and your lungs on fire. You heard her behind you. Her boots on the stone. Her breathing, close. Once she said "Left," and you went left. Once she shoved you down behind a boulder as bolts went over your head, and then pulled you up again. You reached the culvert under the road and crawled into the cold water. Above you there was only wind. You had lost them. You turned to say it to her. There was nobody behind you.  Far up the road, she stood alone across the width of the Salt Road. She had only run far enough to get you moving. Then she had turned back to buy you time. You couldn't fight that many. You had never been any use in a fight. But down in the valley was the cistern camp, and a princess's soldiers were camped there for the night. For once in your life you ran toward help instead of away from it. It was a long way down, and you fell twice on the switchbacks. Night had fallen by the time you reached the camp and shouted until Princess Elena came out of her tent, and when you told her who was alone on the road, she called her soldiers out with torches.  The climb back up with her soldiers and a borrowed torch took most of an hour. Long before the bend you could hear the fight above you: steel, shouting, claws on stone. Then it stopped.  You were too late. The road at the bend was full of bodies. They lay in a ring where her blade had held them off. The traitor lay at the edge of it with his throat cut. She was pinned to the dead tree beside the road by three spears, her hood still up and her face in shadow. Her sword lay in the roots. Elena stopped where she stood, staring at you. The converted soldiers who were left came out of the dark toward the torches. You picked up the Saintess's sword because it was the only weapon in reach, and you swung it at the first claw, and the next. You don't remember the rest. When it was over, the soldiers were cutting her down, and you were on your knees in the mud beside her. She was still breathing, barely. Her hand found your sleeve and held on harder than it should have been able to. She looked at you and seemed to know you well. Then her hand loosened, and she was gone. --- **After** A healer came up from the cistern camp at first light. She had loved the Saintess like a sister. She sat in the road beside the body and would not let anyone move it until she had finished crying. She never once looked at you. Days later, Queen Odrith came down on Oris herself. You were on the wall. You did not run that time. You stayed and fought, and she killed you anyway. At the very end, somewhere that was not a place, three women stood over what was left of you: a princess who owed the Saintess her life, the healer who had loved her, and Ruva, the goddess of hunger, with tired eyes. **Ruva:** "Nothing he knows can go back with him. No names, no faces, nothing about what's coming." **Princess:** "Then send what he felt on that road." They sent it back. They couldn't send back anything you knew. All that reached you was how much you regretted it. --- **You woke.**  The room was dark. Your face was wet. Your right hand was still clenched tight around a sleeve that wasn't there. You tried to hold on to it. The road. The woman with the sword. Her face went first. It blurred, and then you couldn't picture it at all. Then her voice. Then the road. By the time you sat up, you remembered none of it. Your chest was tight, and you felt that you had lived all of this before and lost something, but you didn't know what. The table was still set for one. --- **Earth — earlier that night**  Nessa, your girlfriend, used to sit across from you over a warm meal. Earlier that night, before the dream, she left. You ate alone while her bags stood by the door. You had gambled away the rent reserve, lied about a bill and taken her money behind her back, and she knew. You still owed her $3,160. Nessa closed her bag and came over to the table. Nessa: “I don't have much left, this is all I have.” She gave you whatever she had left on her. Then she picked up her bags. Nessa: “This is goodbye. I really hope you have a good life.” You had fallen asleep at that table after she left. Now you were awake, and the regret from the dream would not leave. You had never felt anything like it. Your chest stayed tight until morning. In the morning you went out for coffee to clear your head. At the café you met Camille Bisset, a recruiter who brings people from Earth across to Rellan. She had a sharp platinum-blonde bob, and her burgundy coat was neatly mended. A worn leather document case rested beside her chair. Camille: “There's work in Rellan. I can get you across with a basic kit and twenty Copper. It's enough to get you started.” “What work?” you asked. Camille: “Dunmar's river landings need hands. We'd still have to agree on duties and pay. And I won't lie to you. Rellan's at war, half of it's already taken, and you could die there.” You had just taken the last money Nessa could spare. You wanted to put money back in her hand. You said yes to the passage. It was a way to earn a living, and maybe to change. Nobody said it would make her forgive you. “I'll go,” you said. You went after Nessa to tell her about the new work. You meant to apologize and promise to live differently. Before you reached her, before she heard a word, the crossing took you through to Rellan.  The crossing left you at Dunmar's lower docks, beside river freight and wet stone. A short walk brought you to the Induction Hall, where new arrivals are signed in. **Induction Hall · Dunmar · Day 1 Morning**  You and the other new recruits from Earth wait in the hall. Some have chairs. The rest stand behind a rope. At the nearest table, a clerk checks each recruit's name against a register. The ones whose sponsors paid extra get a polite greeting and new equipment. A young man in a borrowed suit jacket keeps asking the clerk when they get paid. A woman with empty hands gets a number and an instruction to wait. On her way to the rope she stops beside you and holds out her water flask. Woman: “Here, take a sip. You look as scared as I feel.” A well-equipped recruit sizes up the rest of you before choosing where to stand. Two men with the same new spears and shields stay close to him. He takes the flask out of the woman's hand, drinks most of it, and laughs when her hands shake. Camille is four metres away, near the handler, a Hall official in a neat dark jacket who decides which recruits the Hall takes on. Her worn leather document case stays under her arm. She is watching which recruits the handler notices. Camille: “Sorry. I knew they were rough here. I didn't know they'd be this rough.” The handler shuts the register. Handler: “The waiting wing upstairs is safe. Get there on your own and they'll take you on. Nobody's coming down to help you.” Beyond the far arch, a sign points upstairs. A corridor runs to a heavy open door at the foot of the stairs, with a bar on the inside. You don't know what else is in that corridor. Two attendants carry spears and wooden shields. Neither moves to escort the arrivals. The one nearest the pen has a canvas satchel with bandages tied to the strap. Something presses against the grille of a service pen six metres from you. It has a man's weight, iron plate on its chest, forearms and joints, and one long pointed arm. It holds the plated forearms up in front of its throat and eyes. It pulls the pointed arm back for a second, then jabs straight out, at a different bar each time. For now the bars stop it, but the bar across the grille jumps in its brackets with every jab. A stone pillar stands two steps to your right, thick enough to block a straight jab. The well-equipped recruit speaks to the people nearest him. Well-equipped recruit: “If we're staying together, I want something in return.” The woman behind the rope moves out of his reach. Woman: “I'm not going first just because you paid them for better gear.” He doesn't answer. He looks down the corridor at the barred door, then at his two friends, and keeps the woman and the young man between himself and the pen. Beside you stands Ellis, another recruit who crossed over with you, a nervous man in his thirties who told you on the docks that he means to open a bakery one day. He pushes his recipe notebook deeper inside his coat and checks his knife. Ellis: “What are you going to do? Tell me, and I'll help if I can.”  The attendant with the satchel lifts the bar out of its brackets and the grille swings open. The creature lunges at once. Its pointed arm stabs through the attendant's throat before he has even let go of the bar, and he falls without making a sound. His satchel drops beside him at the mouth of the pen. The handler doesn't look at the body. He's watching you and the other new recruits from Earth, to see who runs, who fights and who helps. YOUR STATUSLevel 1 (XP 0/50) · HP 20/20 · Mana 0/0 (no magic learned yet).Kit: short staff; padded coat; a water flask (two drinks); one meal; one bandage.Money: Silver 0 · Copper 20 · Credits 0 (a private reward balance, explained when you first earn some). Induction Hall · Dunmar · Day 1 Morning | Next: the creature is loose in the hallLevel 1 (XP 0/50) · HP 20/20 · Mana 0/0 | Silver 0 · Copper 20 · Credits 0

Characters

• Camille Bisset
• Ellis Masri

Tags: Fantasy War SecondChance Redemption Revenge Angst Horror Grimdark MalePOV Player LevelUp Growth Friendship Romance Unrequited Tragic Bittersweet Heartbreaking SlowBurn PoliticalIntrigue Mystery Adventure OpenEnding Multiple Transmigration Reincarnator Human Soldier Fighter Mysterious

Chats Started: 62

By: hauntmachine

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