This/Survivors song

Coraline awoke face-down in the dirt. Not sure where she was, what was real, or even, for that matter, what had happened, she rolled over and peered into the early-dawn light.

It looked like winter probably looked in a much more moderate climate - namely in pretty much anywhere on her world further south than where she was from. But this wasn't her world, was it? If it were, why would she be further south?

Even so, the dreary light looked dreadfully normal, and the pain in her head and general whinging of her sore muscles seemed pretty insistent that there was absolutely nothing supernatural going on here - probably just a particularly bad hangover or something? Not that she drank, but a bad bowl of noodles could do much the same.

And the whole conversation, the whole night and day before that you remember, why, that was probably just a dream...

Probably? So where the hell was she, then?

She sat up and looked around more carefully. She was sitting by a small creek, almost frozen over, with leafless trees lining the banks, and brown grass and curled leaves all around. A light frost glittered on the edges. Her staff - the staff Sherandris had given her - was a couple metres away in some dead-looking shrubs, so clearly that much wasn't a dream. And dead-looking... the proliferation of twiggage suggested that it was definitely not actually dead, just waiting. So yes. Winter. Probably.

So it was real. This wasn't her world. She didn't know what it was, or if it even had winters, but supposing it did, this would probably be it. Right? Maybe. Sure. Why not.

She got up, despite the protestations of her back and legs, and picked up the staff. Here she was, then, wherever here was.

There didn't appear to be any signs of civilisation in any direction, though the trees made it somewhat more ambiguous. She pushed through the shrubbery to a better look away from the creek - it appeared to be only grassland beyond, not even cultivated fields, just hills and grass and the bones of trees, and some low mountains in the far distance. Same in the other direction? Seemed to be.

But there was, of course, a very good chance she was missing something obvious. Despite a youth spent running around barefoot in the forest that spanned the county where she grew up, she had never been much of a practical outdoorsman, and the onset of a computer had pretty much cemented it. Ah, computers. They had certainly changed how people interacted, for some even negating the need to go outside at all for long stretches of time. Coraline wasn't one of those, and she certainly didn't quite take it to the extremes of considering the countryside 'unnatural' on account of too many trees, but... bah. Where was a ranger when she needed one? Or a sandwich?

She checked her bag, but all it had for food was half a box of crackers she'd grabbed for breakfast the previous morning. She pulled out a handful and stuffed the box back into the abyss of her bag of miscellaneous junk, but it raised a troubling question. Just what would she eat, if she couldn't find anyone? And even if she did find folks, what then? It seemed unlikely she'd have much of value to any locals; her paper money certainly wouldn't mean anything here, and random electronics, tools... the trash of another world...

This was an intriguing problem. One that never came up in any of the movies, or any of the games.

The sun was higher. The frost was gone. Twiggage rustled in the breeze. There was nothing here but loneliness.

---

bag/pockets:

• wallet
• phone
• bluetooth
• mouse
• three flashdrives
• bus passes
• keychain
• cuddly sea-anemone toy
• several receipts

• two books - House of Leaves, Guild Wars Factions art book
• one glove
• pens/pencils
• notebook/pad thingie
• wad of eraser - 'kneaded rubber'

• floss
• screwdriver set
• wirecutters
• pliers
• two knives
• set of upholstery needles
• file
• pair of chopsticks
• small scissors
• MAGNETS

• hairclips
• sunglasses
• extra socks
• small mask (filigree-style)

• tube of ointment
• superglue
• deodorant
• lip colour (paint stuff and balm)

• large wad of aluminium foil
• empty metal water bottle

• half-eaten box of crackers

...

Hells, any of it could be relevant.

wearing:

• jeans
• xkcd sysadmin t-shirt
• huge-ass coat
• scarf
• beanie
• mittens
• boots

...and a staff weapon. Dzang, girl, you go into the world with an odd assortment of junk.

---

"Hello, a visitor?" someone said behind her. Coraline turned and found a rather pleasant-looking woman, middle-aged, dressed in autumn colours, standing in the doorway.

"Oh, hi," she said. Again the words felt odd, as though they were the wrong ones, as lost as she was. So many questions, and yet she didn't even know enough to ask.

"That's Alyre," the woman said. "Goddess of love, beauty, passion..."

"Masks?" Coraline asked without thinking.

The woman smiled. "Sometimes. But that depends on the masks."

---

Coraline woke up one morning, walked into her pub, and was immediately surprised to find that it was indeed a pub and not a library, though really the only significant difference in practice is that libraries tend to be more dangerous. Even ones without wheels.

So it was going to be one of those days, was it? Fine, then.

This was, after all, very much her pub. The counter gleamed because she made it gleam; the busboy scurried because she made him scurry; the shelves were full because she kept them full. So she didn't know all the mixes by heart; if someone wanted something special, they could either tell her what to do or suffer. She knew enough. The basics, at any rate. The usuals.

And she knew breakfast. Breakfast was what she had for lunch, and it usually involved an egg, some toast, a whop of coffee, and more brandy than she was likely to admit, and this she made now, munching her toast as one of the overnights came down burdened with a hangover. Wordlessly she passed him a coffee and moved onto a vague cleaning of a random glass. Barkeeps were always cleaning a random glass when someone else was around, so she did this too.

The overnight stared glumly at his coffee, disinclined to move.

"Drink it," she said. "It'll help." Not that she'd know. She had never had a hangover in her life. The odd headache waking up, yes, but when it was solved so simply as by drinking a glass of water, that hardly counted as a hangover, so far as Coraline was concerned. Hangovers were something else, something more mysterious, involving the aftereffects of alcohol killing various parts of the body, most assuredly. But these were the remedies, and so she administered them, good barkeep and innkeep that she was. Shuffled those too drunk into rooms for the night, administered to the hangovers in the morning, and wandered off into the day that was the afternoon.

It was a life, of sorts, though not what she would ever have expected. Coraline was a librarian in her heart of hearts, and she had trained to be a librarian. She even had a piece of paper attesting to this, though it was in another world in another language, where everyone had probably assumed her missing, and then, as the months and years went by, probably assumed her dead. But this wasn't that world; here words were precious, and libraries were rare, and trucks were at best a distant dream. Here she did what she could, and that was booze. It was really the same sort of thing, just liquids instead of words. Strange that either one could be so very effective at passing others into the worlds of dreams, but that suited her fine.

"Seriously, drink it," she said.

The guy, dressed in the typical rural attire of the area, stared at his coffee as though it were some strange and foreign potion, then downed it in three solid gulps.

Well, that'll do it, Coraline thought, absently wiping a random glass mug.

He stared at his own empty mug.

He seemed to stop.

Then he startled, twitched, stood up suddenly, and fell over.

Coraline peered over the counter, somewhat worried that she'd finally managed to accidentally kill someone, but the guy was already getting up. He shrugged himself off, looked at her suspiciously, and then asked, quietly, "Er, how much will that be?"

"Eight cela, including room and board. Breakfast is also on, if you want it."

"Er," he said, passing her the coins, "What's breakfast?"

"I made toast." Coraline was not known for her culinary expertise, something about how she usually didn't bother since the ingredients on hand around here tended to be absolutely worthless anyway.

"Okay," he said.

Wordlessly she passed him a piece of toast. He wandered out, munching.

She leaned on the counter. Some life, but it was a life, and a fairly stable one. Even the voices were passably quiet now, since so long as she kept at the booze they just faded to the general buzz of the background. And there was no lack of booze here. No lack at all.

---

Space, of course, is very vast. Most folks know nothing of it; only on the larger worlds, where there has been more time, and more science, and more madness and depression, is anything indeed known of space.

And that is really not very much, generally speaking.

Coraline knew a bit. A thing or two. Enough to say with a fair amount of certainty that a star is indeed a star and a world is indeed a world. But that really wasn't her field of expertise. Books were.

They called her the Librarian, and librarian she was. Degree in information technologies, truck full of books, and seven cats rendered her very much a librarian of lore, and she knew exactly what was where and where was what. It was her job, and it was who she was.

At least part of who she was.

There was, of course, a good deal more to it.

---

It began as a whispering. Something almost, but not entirely, out of sight, out of sound, and out of mind. A shadow of a shadow, except heard, not seen. Whispers at the edge of hearing, and even, as it were, the edge of thought.

She did not even notice them at first. Occasionally they would sneak in even without her noticing, but then as the hours and days went on, they became more insistent, more pressing, until there was nothing to do but listen.

Then they came as an onslaught. When she noticed, she noticed, and then there was simply nothing to do but notice. The voices poured in, beckoning, begging, screaming, asking, crying, shouting, an endless roar of a whisper, the torment of a thousand waves all crashing at once. And she heard them all so clearly, so plainly,

There was no escape, no solace from the torment, simply more, and more, and more. She lost herself in it, lost track of her surroundings, her intent, and everything she was after and was. There was only room for voices, voices, voices. Speaking out of the shadows, never-ending.

She stumbled and continued, lost in the depths of her mind, reeling in the voices never-ending.

If only there were silence amidst the madness. But there was none; there was only madness and more madness, voices, and no silence.

Only voices, and shouting, and clamouring, and no silence amidst the voices, only more shouting and crying and pleading.

There was only the din, the overbearing loudness, the reverberation and roar and the place, the place that was all the same, the place that was all sound and no silence.

If there were sound and also silence, a respite, a sanctuary against the sound.

If there were the silence only distance, alone, without the sound, the sound of the voices, thousands, tens of thousands, never stopping, never ending...

But there was no silence.

Coraline wandered on, lost amidst the madness of the roar within her mind.

She knew nothing. She was no-one. The wind. A whisper and a shadow.

The world was not real.

Others passed her by, but they paid no head. They were not real, and nor was she. Only the voices stood out, in their shout and their roar and their reverberation against the shadowy, flimsy backdrop of the world she saw with eyes. It was nothing.

Only the rock and the shadow, washed by the whirl of voices, so many souls that passed through, so many voices, shouting, shouting, always shouting and never heard. They were meaningless, and still they shouted, because they did not know, they could never know, but they were only the cicada, they were only the whisper, and yet they whispered on.

Whisper and whisper, shout and shout, question and question. The cacophany was never-ending, and yet all were lost within. No single soul stood out, no single voice was heard, only the masses, the unending masses, coming and coming. It was all. It was everything. Voices.

Only voices. No end to the voices, just voices shouting, voices pleading, voices lost without even hope to carry them on, but still echoing even now, for there was no hope here, only nothing, only echos, always echoes. This was the place of echoes, where echoes were only all. Only echos. Nelanor. Echos.

They pleaded, the echos. They called. They whispered secrets and shouted legends, for it was all they knew, and amongst the echos there was nothing, only nothing. If only there were something amidst the nothing, no abyss, no great shadow, no deep darkess that loiters below, only something, a shadow of the world, but something, then. Something to support the voices, the echos the shadows.

But there is only nothing.

She realised she was in a place. She didn't know how she had gotten there, or what she was doing there, or even, for that matter, much of anything at all, but this was a place. Some of the whispers had mentioned places, but as they whispered on, the places faded.

Everything faded. Everything was lost in the whispers, in the shouting, in the din.

There was a cup in front of her. Someone said, quieter and yet somehow louder than all of the others, "You look like you could use some shalott."

She looked at it. Rock, part of her though, staring at it, and then, before she knew what she was doing, that part of her drank it. Amidst the voices she didn't really notice. There was nothing to notice.

It was later. It was clearly later.

And there was only silence.

Nelanor looked up. "It is what the thunder said," she said.

"Sorry?" the barkeep asked.

She was in a bar. It was clearly a bar, though like none she had ever seen before. There were no taps and no vast assortment of myriad bottles such as marked the bars she knew, but there was the bar itself. It was very clearly a bar, long and wodden and polished, and the barman behind with apron and bottles and barrels, ready to pour whatever, so long as he had it, to whoever, so long as he could pay for it.

There was also no lighting in the rest of the room, as far as she could tell, The patrons drank in smoke and gloom, coming forth, perhaps, only as often as they had to. And here, at the bar, there were only the three lanterns. Kerosene, if she had to guess, and no apperture for anything better. This was all they had. They made do, though. People did, when it was as far as they had come, and indeed they were proud of it. They had come this far, after all. They had achieved real lanterns, right?

Or something along those lines. She wasn't sure what was going on, or how she had gotten here. There was, however, another mug in front of her. Had she already had one? It was hard to say.

For lack of a better idea she drank it.

For the first time in she didn't know how long, Coraline Henderson was thinking clearly. At least relatively so. She was also, from the feel of it, pretty decently drunk.

---

It was paperwork. The paperwork of the multiverse, niggling for completion.

Most of the paperwork was automatic, the random details filled in according to sender and origin, but there were two things that needed a specific answer. Choices on the part of the petitioner. Names. A place and a person. A castle and a king. Black sand everywhere. So much sand.

She blinked, not that there was anything much to see. Curtains, wall. No sand. Just a metaphor like the castle itself. Two names. Castle and king. Moonlight speckled across the curtains, trailing shadows of leaves.

"Here reigns king of the sandcastle, Kyrule of Arling Tor," she whispered. Sand drifted silently around her.

There. Paperwork filled out.

With that she fell asleep.

---

(possibly champion's/deathgods')

Three hundred years ago, Coraline Henderson, then going by the name Anja Torn, had been a regular customer at the Empty Cistern, even then one of the oldest taverns in the city.

It wasn't that the place was close to where she was staying (because it wasn't), it wasn't because it had good service (because it really didn't), it wasn't because the clientelle were respectable (if anything they were the opposite), and it wasn't because the booze was good, although it actually was most of the time. The reason she went here because because nobody cared - eveyrone here was here because nobody cared; nobody cared about the law, or about propriety, or about anyone else's business. People came, they went, and they got, if not exactly discretion, a good heaping dose of apathy.

So Coraline got no trouble here walking in dressed like an acolyte of Kyrule and ordering a triple-dose of 20-stone shalott, even though it was well-known that the acolytes were not permitted alcohol. Indeed, it seemed some of the temple's higher-ups had a made a point of visiting all the bars in town to let them know, just to be clear, but they would have skipped this one.

She got the same trouble as everyone else, of course. The general suspicion, shifty-eyed watching as she passed, the curiosity of what might be wrong with her that was gone as soon as she was, but that was really it. All in all, the Cistern of the time was the sort of place where the more normal you looked, the better off you were - if you looked normal, people had to guess, and the imagination often filled in far worse nightmares than reality ever could. And aside from the robes, Coraline looked pretty normal.

The only real trouble had come the first night she was there, or might have had she responded differently.

She had been sitting at the bar minding her shalott, wondering vaguely how drunk she could safely get and still maintain her cover, when someone sat down next to her and said, "Hey, you going to stop that?"

Not even sure what she should be stopping, she looked around. Turned out someone had died, something which often happened there - a body was slumped over a table and it sounded like people were bidding.

She took this in and just said, "I don't want him."

Somehow that settled it. The guy grinned gappily at her, slapped her on the shoulder, and left. This was the nature of the place, lawless, godless, and ruled only by the order of commerce, of what people wanted. And if someone died, that was valuable.

Of course, had she really been an acolyte of Kyrule and not just posing as one, that could have presented something of a problem. The religion was very much against the mistreatement of the dead, and selling bodies very much qualified as mistreatment in their book. But she wasn't one, and in her somewhat more practical view of things, the dead were already dead. They weren't apt to care.

Nor was anyone else, there. And so, during her stay in the city of Soransie, she came to frequent the place.

---

"I have spoken and that is final. Shut up leave me alone I'm drinking."

---

Basic Necromancy was at four. It covered the general theories, and would begin practical studies in reanimation in the next few weeks. Coraline was good at theories, but the reanimation part worried her. It sounded suspiciously like magic, and she had no idea if she could actually do magic.

Not normal magic, at any rate.

---

"It's not that I'm incredibly drunk," she said. "It's just that I am incredibly drunk."

---

"It's not like I'm worried. If I could think straight about anything I'd be worried, though."

---

"Francis Door," she said.

He took a long drink. "Yeah?"

"You know the story?"

"Yeah."

She downed her shalott and pushed the mug forward for a refill. "What do you make of it?"

He took a long breath. "Crazy shit," he said. "Damn crazy shit."

"How so?"

"Well," he paused, thinking. "You got this guy. A fuckin' normal guy. He loves a few things in life, his god, his work, his woman, and for them he'd give up anything. For any one of them he'd give up the others, if it came to it."

"Is that what happened?"

"Near enough. It was his wife's sister, if you can believe that. All the stories say it was his wife, what say it at all, but it was her fucking sister."

"What..."

"Right?"

They minded their drinks. Things swam swimmily around them, objects in space. They watched, and listened, and drank.

"Some folks would do anything for family," Coraline said. "Is that so wrong?"

He stared at his shalott and tipped it randomly. "'Snothing wrong or right about it. That's just it. Just shit what happens, an' choices what don't work out.

"'Swhat makes it all so fucked up."

---

"And you came out of there? Alive?" He looked at her suspiciously. "And are you... sane?"

"Define 'sane'," Coraline said.

He snorted. "Yeah, really." But he also relaxed, apparently satisfied.

---

What happens to you, little dreamer? Where do you wind up, you and your stories and your dreams and your loss? How does it go, if written down in words, without the words themselves to guide?

You wind up on this world, alone in the wilderness with nothing but your wits, a staff, and a bag full of random stuff, no idea where this is, how it is, or really anything at all about it, simply because of a promise. This promise is why you are here, and it drives everything you do, but you cannot admit to it, because to do so would break the promise.

So you start walking. You look to see what there is to see, and follow the creek, because as much as the videogames you grew up on tended not to adhere to this, in real life water always leads somewhere. You encounter the usual problems, of course - what to eat, where to sleep, how to boil the water so it's actually safe to drink, but you use what you have and it works. You test the staff and it blows a hole in a nearby tree, smoldering on the edges. You test it again and achieve far more precise results - good for hunting, but also good for starting fires. Your coat is thick, probably more than needed here, and though you hear murmurs from time to time, it seems you are indeed alone. Just the birds and the gophers. Some deer on the prairie. A huge winged creature soaring overhead, neither dinosaur nor bird.

You're out of crackers. It's all gopher meat from here; though you realise the danger in that, you do not know the plants, and thus you do not know what is safe to eat or otherwise. You consider a deer, but have no idea what you'd do with it all.

And the landscape changes. Hills give way to valleys, plains give way to forests. The days are long and the nights are cold, and though you sometimes hear shrieks in the distance, they could be anything. Valley cats. Mountain cats. Not cats. Who knows. Doesn't matter. Snow falls. Winds blow. At night you stir the fire. Sparks rise and join the stars when they come out, but you recognise none. Come day, you walk. Down, down, down, out of the highlands, out to the sea. Or that is the direction, at least.

The creek is now a river. Tributaries flow in, little and big, and the crossings take time. The hills around have risen into sheer cliffs; the valley is a gorge. Birds sing like voices in your head. Shielded from the wind, it is much warmer down here, and the plants much lusher, though many are without leaves, merely mossed twiggage reaching for the clouds. Some of them almost look familiar. Almost.

And then you find the road, a high bridge crossing your river like a figure out of legend, an elegant contraption of stone and more stone. You climb to its start, up the hill and through the trees, pulling on vines like guide ropes. It is a road, and maintained, but not like one you've seen in years. Cobbled, brick foundation with stones on a layer of sand, you find, and put the cobbles back. Like the roads in ancient Rome, perhaps? And narrow. Road and bridge might suffer a single vehicle, but poorly. A bug perhaps would manage, but with nothing on either side. But this isn't a world of vehicles. Even now, you know it. This road was made for walking - and probably for riding. But riding what? And what...

And then you realise. This is another planet in another universe. Roads, of course, are a fairly universal (har) concept, but what of the builders? What would they be? Would there even be a way to communicate, any common ground at all? And what would they make of you, in your jeans and t-shirt and big fluffy coat?

But as ever, there is nothing for it but to walk. Pick a direction and move forward. Follow the road and find out, see where this story goes. So you head north, across the bridge, away from the path of the sun, not because north seems like the best direction to go, but simply because of the bridge. A bridge like this clamours to be crossed.

The road cuts around hills, up and out of the gorge, back to the plains, though these are different. Rockier. Hills and ridges. Smoke in the distance, but it could be anything. Stay on the road. The road is safer. You have what you need right here; in the cold water lasts, and saved meat lasts longer.

Stone piles mark offshoots, smaller paths heading away into the grass. They don't look travelled, but you follow one for the hell of it, breaking through patches of old snow untouched but for rabbits and game. It leads to a husk of a village, years gone, burned out and empty. Stone walls jostle with charred logs, crumbling into rubble. Old bones poke from the snow. In the center, the square, or perhaps what they would have called the green, dessicated bodies are piled around a stone obelisk. There are no scorch marks, and no scavengers have touched them, but the elements have worn them down to bone, skeletons mummified in their clothes.

They look human, the dead. It is unclear why or how, but the air feels strange. It is wrong, here, in this place, and you know it. Where buildings once shielded the green from the wind, it should now tear through their ruins, but everything is still and silent, simply you and the dead and the obelisk, unmarked. There is nothing to be done. You turn back to the road. Even if you should find something left to scavenge, you would not trust it, not from that place.

At the outskirts the wind hits you suddenly, tearing with abandon and screaming in your ears, screaming, screaming. You turn your head against it and it almost steals your beanie, but at least the screaming stops. What happened? What is wrong with the place? Is it wrong with the world? But there are no answers.

You stray no more from the road.

And the road leads on. Up again, towards mountains and trees, ever rockier. There is nobody else around, nobody else travelling the path. Ghosts drift out of long shadows and dissipate in the light. Carrion birds circle above, cutting crisply through the icy air. Day and night. On and on. The cold bites in the night. Water runs low, but dirty snow distils same as river water. Shapes flicker and dance in the fire, babbling to themselves, as you watch and drift into sleep, into Nightmare.

In the foothills, the trees close around like an enveloping cloak, roaring whispers in the pines.