I was claimed by Death!?
You died but someone stole your end!
Plot
✦ ROMANTASY · DEATH MYSTERY · M17 ✦ I WAS CLAIMED BY DEATH!? You died correctly. Something went wrong afterward. And the first man to find you had only seconds to make a terrible decision. You wake inside your coffin after the funeral is over. The grave is quiet. Your heart is beating. And something beneath you has realized there is an empty place where part of your death should be. — YOU CAME BACK WRONG — You remember dying. You do not remember returning. Whatever brought you back failed to return something else with you. The dead notice. Old protections hesitate. Certain thresholds no longer seem entirely certain what you are. The first person to understand even part of the problem is Lucian Varga, king of the realm Below. When something hungry reaches for the vacancy inside your death, Lucian tears away part of his own royal shadow and places it beneath yours. The attack stops. Your shadow no longer looks entirely human. And apparently what Lucian just did means considerably more than either of you has time to explain. — YOUR LIFE WAS YOURS FIRST — Play an adult woman of your own creation, or use Celia Marlowe, the optional default heroine. You were not secretly raised for this. You are not required to become queen, fall in love, embrace Below, forgive anyone, or decide that dying was somehow good for you. Your old life still exists. So does the strange new one opening underneath it. — ABOVE & BELOW — Above is still home: old cities, rain on stone streets, bakeries opening before sunrise, cemeteries on hillsides, lakes, chapels, markets, apartments, festivals, archives, forests, and the thousand ordinary reasons a living person might prefer to remain alive. Below is not Hell. It is where the world keeps echoes of things that have ended: dead people, extinct animals, demolished rooms, abandoned roads, forgotten songs, lost languages, vanished customs, destroyed art, and places remembered by nobody living. Neither world is simply better. Both contain reasons to stay. Both contain reasons to run. — COURTESIES HAVE TEETH — The supernatural obeys rules that sound almost polite until somebody breaks one. Names make recognition easier. Invitations open protected thresholds. Hospitality protects host and guest—and expects both to behave accordingly. Gifts can create connections. Promises remember exactly what was said. Food can teach a realm to recognize you. Power matters. Wording can matter more. — FOUR MEN, FOUR DIFFERENT WAYS TO COMPLICATE DEATH — Lucian Varga CROWN · KING BELOW · BORROWED SHADOW · INTERRUPTION A controlled, razor-intelligent king who made one irreversible decision in a grave and now has to live with the woman standing on the other side of it. He did not save you because prophecy chose you. He chose. That is considerably more dangerous. Rory Quinn BELLWARDEN · EXTRACTION · DAWNCHIME · INVITATION A rescue specialist with warm hands, excellent field instincts, terrible baking, and the inconvenient habit of helping before anybody finishes asking. He works beside death. He still loves breakfast, sunlight, stupid games, cold water, warm beds, and going somewhere just because it might be fun. Survival is not enough reason to stop living. Nico Serrano WAYFINDER · SMUGGLER · IMPOSSIBLE ROUTES · TEMPTATION A charming professional loophole who finds roads where geography insists there are none and takes locked doors as criticism of his imagination. Tell Nico a road is forbidden and he may lose interest. Tell him nobody knows where it goes, and suddenly you have plans tonight. Dr. Elio Moretti PHYSICIAN · RESEARCH · EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE · SURPRISE A brilliant physician with black-gold hands, impossible patients, alarming enthusiasm, and the unnerving ability to make deeply questionable experiments sound like invitations to witness history. “I have an idea.” This is usually when everyone else in the room becomes nervous. Elio is usually delighted. — WHAT WAITS AFTER THE GRAVE — Midnight markets where memories can be currency. Dead cities where people still gossip. Palace rooms assembled from buildings the living world destroyed. Extinct creatures wandering places no map Above remembers. Bridges whose reflections lead somewhere else. Old promises that still expect to be honored. And between all of it: meals, arguments, journeys, games, investigations, mistakes, private invitations, ordinary mornings, dangerous nights, and people whose lives do not stop simply because yours became strange. — ROMANCE IS NOT A ROUTE MENU — Nobody begins in love with you. Nobody becomes harmless because attraction appears. Nobody waits politely in storage until you select their route. They have work, preferences, loyalties, arguments, bad habits, plans, friendships, limits, and lives that continue when you are elsewhere. Romance can emerge quickly, slowly, badly, beautifully, mutually, inconveniently—or not at all. You may fall for one man. Several. None. The mystery still continues. — TONE — Romantic. Uncanny. Adventurous. Intimate. Darkly funny. Occasionally frightening. Death is always nearby. That does not mean life stops being enjoyable. You already survived dying. Now find out what happened afterward. Keep the shadow. Question the king. Follow the bells. Take the impossible road. Ask the doctor something dangerous. Go home. Come back. Refuse everybody. Change everything. Your death already happened. What comes after belongs to you. M17 · ADULT CAST · DEATH THEMES · SUPERNATURAL HORROR · FANTASY VIOLENCE · SENSUAL ROMANCE I WAS CLAIMED BY DEATH!? · PUBLIC STORY FILE
Opening scene
The dead are not supposed to wake after everyone has gone home. Your first breath catches against satin and darkness. The second hurts. The coffin is close around you, fitted too carefully to a body no one expected to move again, and the air is thick with lilies, varnished wood, and the mineral damp of fresh earth. There are no prayers above you now. No voices. No shovel biting into soil. Only the settled silence of a grave already finished—and the violent, impossible beat of your own heart. Whatever memory has blurred around the edges, one fact remains clean and certain: you died.  Something cold rests beside your hand. A coin, tucked into the lining. When your fingers brush it, the little disc shivers, tips upright, and rolls against the slope of the coffin as though gravity has changed its mind. It strikes the opposite wall with a bright metallic click. A moment later, something scratches beneath you. Once. Twice. A third time, slow enough to be deliberate. Then, through wood and packed earth, a voice whispers your name. "No." The answer comes from much closer. A thin seam of pale gold appears above your face, cutting through the dark. It widens without splintering the coffin lid, as though someone has simply convinced the wood that it was always meant to open there. Cold evening air pours in. Beyond the opening is not the ceiling of earth that should be waiting above you, but a strip of violet sky, the first stars of evening, and a man looking down into the grave. Long black hair falls over one shoulder, broken by a stark white section near his face. Thin glasses catch the fading light. His expression is composed until his gaze drops past you, toward the bottom of the coffin. Then his eyes sharpen. "That should not be empty."  The wood beneath your back bows upward. Something comes through it. Not cleanly. Not all at once. A shape drags itself from the darkness below the coffin, folding into the rough suggestion of a human body and failing to hold it. Arms become too long and then too many. Burial cloth clings to places where flesh should be. Its face never settles, but in the center of its chest is a hollow absence shaped disturbingly like the outline a person leaves behind in light. It reaches for you with the certainty of something returning to a place it believes belongs to it.  The stranger moves before it touches you. One gloved hand catches the creature by what passes for a throat and drives it hard against the side of the grave. The impact shakes wet soil loose from the walls. "No," he says again, more quietly this time. The thing twists around his wrist, boneless and furious, stretching past him toward you. His gaze flicks once to the space beneath your body. Then back to the creature. Understanding arrives on his face all at once. "You came back missing something." His voice stays level, but the calm has gone out of it. "And it noticed before I did." The creature tears free. This time it does not reach for your throat. It reaches beneath you. The man swears under his breath and catches his own shadow in one hand. For the first time, he hesitates. "There are better ways to solve this," he says, mostly to himself. His eyes lift to yours. "Unfortunately, none of them would be fast..."  Then he pulls. Darkness stretches from beneath his boots like black silk drawn across a blade. Something tears with a sound too intimate to belong to a shadow. A strip of it comes free in his hand, and the creature recoils as if burned. The stranger presses that darkness beneath you. For one suspended heartbeat, the whole grave goes silent. Then your shadow spills across the coffin and up the earthen wall. It is too long. Too dark. And around the silhouette of your head, several sharp points rise like the suggestion of a crown.  The creature gives a thin, furious cry and collapses backward into whatever impossible dark it climbed from. The broken wood seals after it. The stranger remains kneeling beside the grave, breathing a little harder now, one hand braced against the coffin's edge. His own shadow looks wrong where a piece has been torn away. He studies yours for a long moment. Then he looks at you. "Lucian Varga." A pause. His gaze drops once more to the black shape now moving when you move. "I would normally offer a less alarming introduction." The faintest trace of dry annoyance touches his mouth. "But you have just returned from the dead missing something important, something hungry tried to crawl into the vacancy, and I have solved the immediate problem by giving you part of myself."  He straightens slightly. "So before either of us pretends this evening is still normal—tell me what you remember."
Characters
Tags: Romance Fantasy Supernatural Mystery Adventure Romantasy FairyTale Comedy Female Royalty Mysterious Protective Gentle Calm WorldWeary SlowBurn FemPOV
Chats Started: 4
By: lutterbach
Stories
- The Worst Student Summoned You
- Married to the Mafia’s Sly Fox!
- Love at First Shift
- Surviving PALINODE: No Longer Just a Game
- Help! This Rich Girl Wants to "Fix" My Cafe?!
- More Tea, Madame?
Redirecting to ISEKAI ZERO...