FOR THEY CANNOT DIE ANYMORE, BECAUSE THEY ARE EQUAL TO ANGELS.

[cccorp]

Today, the canals of Mac Anu flow as gentle as they always do, gondolas drifting lazy through the paths of sunlight cut bright across the water. Shops and vendors line the stonework streets along the waterways, a general murmur of NPCs circulating through their preprogrammed business keeping Mac Anu, as always, feeling maybe a little more alive than a real city.

There is one particular bridge that nearly every player's taken at least once, because it connects to a great many other places of interest, and it's wide enough for easy travel. Besides, with the professions update, they've put a fishing spot on the other side of it. NPCs with fishing rods litter the spot in alternating shifts, their laughter mingling with the calls of shopkeeps advertising cheap prices for some simple plants to get started crafting with, and the clink of forks and plates at a restaurant nearby, its customers singing the chef praises.

Below the bridge, a gondolier passes, humming, his gondola drifting along its circuit through the canals, his tune in rhythm with the passing conversation. As he comes out from under it and sails further away, he glances up at the bridge, as if he were expecting something, and he seems to see it. His gaze remains fixed there until, eventually, the water takes him out of sight again.

Today, you might notice that at the base of this bridge, just before your feet, is a red sort of smear.

A little further down the bridge, about a fourth of the way along it, is a person collapsed on the ground. The red trails to him, fallen forward.

You see upon approaching his hand grasping at his throat at the singularly cut sliced deep into his neck. His one good eye wide and unblinking, he is—among all the laughter and conversation on either side of the bridge; in the shadow of the clock tower, which stands a silent witness, the sun at its back—no longer breathing, his body cool to the touch.

Perhaps this could be considered a kindness: for one who failed, time and time and again, to grasp the desire to live, maybe he found some suggestion of it in his last moments, his hand at his throat, his palm smeared with dried blood, a curious anomaly in the deathless Mac Anu. Fragment had, after all, taught him a great many things. Should he not be grateful for one more, no matter how permanent the lesson?

Mithrun is dead.

Comments

[tablescraps]

( It seems nearly like Tylor won't have his attention at first. Ghost or zombie or real or not, Mithrun is nothing if not single-minded in his determination to do as he will. Tylor says his name, and he's navigating the menus, and maybe that's just going to have to be it.

And then, as if somewhere in his fugue state the name finally got in after traveling slow through water, he looks up slow; unfocused at first, and then he seems to see Tylor proper, his neck all red, his skin pale as death.

Though his movement's unsteady and weak, he reaches out. He sets his palm against the potion and it disappears like it's gone into his inventory (and in that moment there's the sound of sixteen placeholder fish splashing into the canals below; expelled by some force, apparently, to make space), As the potion goes his hand continues just that much more forward, closing the slight space between them. His hand cool, cold, he takes Tylor's own hand with a gentle touch.

Gnashed up as he is, bruised and scratched up and burned and with a nasty neck-forward cut, his eye turns up to Tylor, and he smiles, slight enough to miss it. )

... Thanks...

( "... T̶̪̾ý̸̘̙̮░̸͉̍̍̚o̸̰̽͋█̸̩͍̩̒▓̵̻͉̇̏̐," he seems to say, but the sounds don't quite make it out right, and the moment doesn't hold. There is his touch; there is his smile and the way he stands just in the shadow of the clock tower, Tylor stood across the threshold in the sun, and then— he's gone.

It's 12:03 PM, and Mithrun is, as he has so far remained, offline. )