002 – Aru

“If you’re serious about mastering magic in Dirge, here’s the secret: you just… make it up. But you get out what you put in. If you’re a scrub like I was, you pool your Semblance with your guild. Build up a system of rituals, symbols, whatever. Doesn’t matter what it is, just has to be consistent. Nobody knows the exact threshold, but eventually the game writes your casting tradition into the engine. To answer your question, no, you can’t become some jack-of-all-trades ‘Wizard.’ That’s a pipedream. You pick a lane, you dedicate your build to it, and you get good. End of story.”

As Ai cast her gaze around the tomb, the sight of a second sarcophagus at the foot of her own made her heart leap in her chest. It was barely a meter in length, carved from the same black stone, with a single image on its lid: a lizard-dog, curled in sleep.

“Aru.” she breathed.

She scrambled towards it, her sandals scuffing against the stone. Her fingers trembled as she ran them over the carving. He had been with her at the end. She remembered his joyful barking on the dais, the feel of his fuzzy head against her shoulder. If he was buried here, and especially with her now freakishly high Semblance…

She could definitely weave a spell to bring Aru back. Maybe this really was Varrah. And she was [Ayle]—no, she reminded herself.

She was Ai Kanbara.

With a surge of adrenaline, she pushed at the small stone lid. It slid aside with a grating crunch. She looked inside and smiled.

There you are.

Aru’s remains were little more than a desiccated husk, but Ai had worked with worse.

Aru wasn’t just any animal. If the world of Dirge was now reality, if Varrah was now a living, breathing world, then everything that had gone into Aru’s creation was now also real.

She knelt, her fingers tracing the familiar shape of Aru’s skull, the delicate ridge of his feathered crest. Aru had been a bespoke creation, a masterwork of magical theory developed in collaboration with the fleshcrafting biomages of BioSculpt [rodin]. He had been a gift to her from her own guild of Karravar [kava], designed with a single purpose in mind: to be a forever dog.

The core of his design philosophy was to be a self-sustaining biological loop. He wasn’t a fully natural animal, not in the conventional sense. He was a piece of living, breathing magical biotech. His metabolic processes were conceptually keyed to the two everpresent inputs of sunlight and water. Given time, he could heal from nearly any wound. He could subsist on almost nothing, and his lifespan was theoretically indefinite. In short, he had been built to last.

Honestly, getting photosynthesis to work without resorting to chlorophyll was probably the trickiest engineering challenge they’d had to overcome. Ai had wanted a big fluffy lizard-dog, not a leafy green plant-dog.

In magical terms, the husk of Aru before her was in a state of dormancy. He was, in essence, a biological machine that had run out of fuel and simply powered down.

It had just been a few centuries longer than his designers had anticipated, that’s all. His systems were all there, just waiting for Ai to give him a nudge. And she was, according to the game’s own obscene calculations, perhaps the single most metaphysically influential person in the world.

A determined energy bubbled up from somewhere deep within. She could do this. She could never bring her parents back, or undo the last eight years of her life, but she could do this.

Ai laid her hands on Aru’s dried out remains, the texture of ancient paper beneath her palms. She closed her eyes, and she began to weave her magic.

Some players in Dirge had experimented with necromancy back in the day, keen on recreating their wildest fantasies of undead lichdom. It was always the same story of monkeypaws and unseen consequences and perversions of the natural order. This was simpler. Cleaner. The targeted re-initiation of a known, well-loved system.

She reached out with her will, sinking it into Aru’s body, searching for the core conceptual framework of his being. She found it nestled in his doggy heart: a faded, sleeping blueprint of [Eternal Companion Sustained by Sun and Water].

She fed him her memories of [Sunlight], the brilliant, impossible gold of Varranir at dawn which to her was barely a moment ago.

She fed him her concept of [Water], cool and clean and life-giving.

Finally, she fed her own sense of being to him, of [Companionship] and [Unconditional-Love].

The spell seemed to demand a cost, as all magic did, but it was nothing she couldn’t pay, a pithy spark compared to the roaring flame that was her being. She formed her sigil, and that was enough.

For a moment, nothing. Then, a twitch. Ai’s breath hitched. She pushed more, continuing to weave the concepts of [Warmth] and [Flow] and [Heart] into Aru’s dormant reptilian body.

Leathery scales began to soften, regaining their color. Brittle fur and feathers plumped and puffed up, a snow-white mass of pure floof spreading over Aru’s body. A chest, once concave and still, expanded with a sudden, sharp intake of air.

A wet nose nudged up against Ai’s hand.

A pair of intelligent green eyes blinked open, slitted pupils dilating in the gloom. Aru lifted his head, gave a confused cry halfway between a whine and a sort of bork, and then blinked slowly as he looked up at her. A spark of recognition.

His entire body erupted into a frenzy of wiggles, his plumed tail thumping a frantic, joyful rhythm against the stone floor. He scrambled to his feet, barking, a real, full-throated sound of pure, unadulterated happiness that echoed through the silent hall. He licked her face, his tongue wet with doggy slobber and love.

Ai laughed, a raw, choked sound of giddy relief. She knew it was going to work, of course she did, but seeing and feeling him in the flesh was a whole different experience. She threw her arms around him, burying her face in his thick, fuzzy fur, and relished in the sense of rightness that flooded through her as she hugged Aru.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

For that one, eternal instant, she was just a girl with her dog.

Ai and Aru spent the next few minutes in innocent bliss as they excitedly reacquainted themselves with one another. Soon however, something that had been bugging Ai returned to the forefront of her thoughts.

She looked at the inscription on her sarcophagus again.

If she knew [Stormold] well—and she definitely did—he wouldn’t have taken the effort to carve the Japanese script into stone purely from sentimentality. He definitely was a sap who couldn’t resist a sob story, but he was also a fellow member of Karravar [kava] who understood that the media was the message.