Lynn was dead, and Alwyn took his place, entering his dead, cold body.
All the terrible things that the boy experienced were nothing in comparison to Alwyn's tribulations, but he still couldn't dismiss the feeling of sorrow, guilt and anger that pervaded those foreign memories. And all culminated with his unjust death.
It was as if he had lived all those events on his skin. They had gotten into his head like a virus, only in reality he was the actual virus.
'I feel like shit…'
Still, not everything he saw was an awful experience, and not everything he saw he wanted to forget. He managed to learn some key knowledge that he desperately needed in his current situation.
For instance, the dynamic behind the incident that put an end to the lives of the carriage's crew members.
'Let's go by steps.'
Lynn Goldheart was a noble born in Crownshade, the capital of the human empire. He was just a nine year old when the God of Death forsake its creations. Humanity never recovered from that event, as it completely changed the laws of the world and its balance.
The concept behind it was pretty simple.
Death stopped reaping the souls of the dead, and so, the souls of those who perished lingered in the material world by inhabiting their lifeless corpses.
Those entities were later labeled Revenants, wraiths that haunted the living. Every being, both intelligent and unintelligent, at the end of their cycle would inevitably become one.
Surviving in a world like that was no joke.
Humans had to stop eating animals and even abandoned their habitats, such as forests and lakes, as the birth of those creatures wasn't subjected to any kind of control.
In just a month, no city in the entire kingdom could be considered safe anymore. Even Crownshade fell under the Revenants' might. Humanity had to find a way to adapt to this new world.
It was at that moment that some people invented one, one that would also become their downfall.
The kingdom built three minor citadels, where people could find a semblance of safety behind their high walls, and a main one, where mostly nobles resided. It was named Soulhaven by the King.
To dispose of the dead bodies, giant furnaces rose in the heart of the citadels. It usually took Revenants ten minutes to gain control over the bodies, meaning residential areas had to be developed in a way that everyone lived less than ten minutes away from the furnaces.
Things were looking good for the residents of the citadels.
With no corpse to control, Revenants could not be born, and the souls of the dead could not interact with the material world… or so people had thought. It took them nearly four months to realize they were wrong.
Deeply so.
The Goldheart family had just moved to Soulhaven, when furnace workers mysteriously started falling ill. The cause could not be determined by the researchers, and by the time the study received even the most irrelevant result, the first decease had already been registered. In just a day, the illness spread to other districts.
It was also the day of Lynn's birthday.
The citadels were too crowded.
People tried to reach the gates, but were not allowed to exit them. Soulheaven's walls were being besieged by the Revenants, and opening the gates would only accelerate their demise. With nowhere to run, they were imprisoned in a deadly trap.
It was a massacre.
Lynn's parents died during a venture in search for food, and so did the entire Veilcloud family, who lived too close to a furnace, and even the king himself, together with the royal family.
But Lynn somehow managed to sneak inside the sewage system, joining a small group of runaway children, and left the cursed city behind, as well as his past.
In just two weeks, the fortress that should have been a shelter to the living, was now only home to the dead. After the evacuation, no one was ever recorded to have come out of the citadel's imposing gates.
Soulhaven had ceased to exist. In the future, everyone would refer to it as Soulgrave.
The situation in the other citadels was looking just barely better because of the smaller number of citizens. But still, only a miniscule percentage of the population managed to escape from those artificial hells, and their future looked grim. With nowhere to go, the survivors gathered at the foot of a lone peak at the center of the human plain, waiting for their time to turn into frenzied beasts.
However, the many deaths of the previous days must have triggered something, because one night, as if the sky itself had been splitted into pieces, pitch black crystals as big as coins rained down all over the fallen kingdom.
Those who cracked one would awaken the ability to reap souls, just like Death did in the past, and so, the first Revenants started falling by human hands, this time forever.
People considered it a gift of Death, a last chance to prove their faith and redeem humanity.
That night, the Church of Death was created, and with it humanity regained a sense of security once again.
Armies of Reapers were soon assembled and stationed in newly built villages and citadels, to protect and give eternal rest to their inhabitants. This time those settlements were built on a smaller scale and were scattered throughout the human territories. People were afraid to reenact the events of the past.
There was only one exception.
That very peak under where desperate people had grouped together to find solace, was now the flourishing capital of the new human empire. It was named Skyreach, as the buildings were constructed both on the inside and the slopes of the mountain, meaning it was the closest point to the sky where people could peacefully live.
And at the very top of that peak, a lone black temple oversaw the daily lives of the citizens of the empire.
However, the previous hierarchy of the world had collapsed with the death of the royal family, and Lynn was left with nothing but what he was wearing and the locket, the gift he received for his tenth and last birthday. He had to start from zero.
Years passed and he moved from job to job, citadel to citadel, never settling down and adapting to a single lifestyle.
Money was hard to make, especially in the outer settlements, so he regularly had to beg the wealthy landowners for jobs and spare coins. He had a dream, something that needed lots of money to be achieved.
He wanted to move to Skyreach, so that his parents would be proud of him.
'And that takes us to a week ago.'
Lynn was eating his meager dinner in a Westguard tavern, the westernmost human citadel, when he was suddenly approached by a clergyman.
***
"They told me you are the most hardworking handyman around here. Wanna make loads of coins?"