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Chapter One – Rebirth and Death
Where am I?
I looked around dazedly, trying to get my foggy thoughts together. It was hard to think.
I thought… I thought I had been reborn. I thought I was a baby again, and then, and then –
I jolted at the remembered images. No. No, I hadn't just thought that. Those balefire eyes, gleaming with evil. The bruised, blue-back skin, the warts and extended nose, the teeth like jagged nails, and that voice…
No, it wasn't a thought. And then that… thing. Like a baby made out of ooze. Crawling toward me, opening its maw into darkness, coming down on me, covering me, coming INTO me…
Devouring me…
I looked down at my hands.
They were translucent, see through, as if I wasn't really here. And small, too…
I was small. I looked around, and everything looked so misty, and so big…
Not really a baby, not really anything, but… a dream.
I twitched again, and memories fired back up coldly in my head.
How I had died… was that a building exploding, coming down on me? It was hard to tell. The world had gone to Hell, I was fighting… undead, zombies, yes… death…
It had been a game, it had become reality. I had been…
Sama Rantha.
My head snapped up and around as something seemed to whisper, inside, outside, I couldn't tell. I didn't know how real my body was, but my senses seemed to work the right way.
I was a Hagchild in the game. And now…
Naturally, being a Hagchild meant I had to learn just what being the daughter of a Hag meant. Basic information was that you were a would-be Hag who had undergone the Ritual of the Silver Queen, had the Hag's Curse and the magic that came with it ripped away, ending up a Forsaken Human who could never wield magic.
I had picked Annis-born, the brute Melees of the Hag set. A Hagchild had no strength penalty for being female. Annis-born had a natural 40' movement rate, instead of the default 30', and if they picked Improved Unarmed Strike, natural claw damage.
All Haghildren had double canine teeth. I licked mine, and yes, there they were. Their nails were also odd colors. Annis-born were black… as were mine.
I hadn't gone through the Ritual of the Silver Queen. I had been eaten.
Lore from the game rolled across my mind with uncanny clarity. Hags were as unnatural in childbirth as they were in life. They couldn't actually raise their own children, or they'd eat them. At the same time, they were compelled to expand their cursed sisterhood by inflicting their Curse on innocent souls.
Thus, every Hag's child was born by killing other children and taking their innocent souls.
And I… was that innocent soul...
Which meant… what was around me was the Hag's Curse. It had to rely on my soul to live. That I was awake, aware, and able to think was definitely beyond its current level of ability to deal with. On the other hand, I had no idea what to do, and likely I had been consumed and replaced.
Hagmom Annis would have raped and consumed some man to conceive a child. If she was cruel and cunning enough, she would have done so to my real father. The cursed thing she conceived was basically a soulless thing that would have consumed me and taken my soul to give it life, taking my place and living my life, blissfully unaware that it wasn't really me… until it was time, and it was old enough for the Hag Curse to catalyze. Nearby Hags would sense the readiness of a Hagborn, swoop in, and perform the Ritual to consume and corrupt my soul, warp the innocent persona that had lived out my life, and turn an innocent soul into a Hag.
Other Hagborn had different systems. Greenhags consumed a babe and conceived a replacement in their womb. Shellycoats relied on aborted fetuses and spreading venereal disease to as many men as possible in an orgy, bringing all the material together to form their daughter.
That process… was what was going on right now. I was a soul, trapped inside the auspice of a new Hagborn that had taken my place.
Trapped… in its dreams.
This misty place of shadows and the evil that was dwelling in them… was the dreams of the Hagborn, of the artificial persona of the curse, the place where its evil and madness gathered and grew, until it erupted out under the Ritual and consumed the skein drawn over it, consuming me in the interim.
Which meant I was doomed, unless I could overcome it.
Very slowly, I began to smile, and then laugh, low in whatever passed for a throat here.
Three things were going to go very, very wrong for this Curse.
One, and very important, was that it couldn't kill me. Without my soul, it couldn't remain alive. It could cause me fear, pain, and trauma, try to bind and seal me… but it couldn't kill me.
Two, I was Sama Rantha. I'd embraced the persona when the world went to Hell. I was already a Hagchild. I could beat this, and I had all the tools and potential to do so.
Three, I had taken that status into this world. I was no Powered. I hadn't played the game as a spellcaster or chi-user. Nope, being a Hagchild meant I was Forsaken. Forsaken meant no magic… not even Curses.
The Curse was doomed, simply because it would never be able to transform me. The transformation would slide off me no matter how hard it tried. I wasn't a Primos, ripe victim for the greatest Curse to afflict the human race. I was Forsaken. I was Normal done Hard, and I could never be a Hag!
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