Chapter 1: Chapter 1: Dead

Nothing can be said to be certain in life, except death and taxes.

That is how the saying goes, right?

Well, don’t tell the IRS, but I believe one thing on that list can be avoided pretty easily, actually.

Sooo... I died...?

I think so, at least.

Unless this was actually how all of my drunk blackouts went and in a few hours, I would wake up and just forget this spooky void. Somehow, I knew that wasn’t right, though.

But hey, here I am, right? Might as well have a look around.

Hmm... not much going on around these parts.

Black void in front, in the back, left, right, up, down... did I already check this direction? With no light, it was hard to determine where I was looking. I couldn’t even see my hand when I held it right up to my face. In fact, I didn’t even feel it when I tried to touch my body. That felt really weird actually, like my brain thought the hand was somewhere in my intestines, but neither was sending any sense of pain... or touch, for that matter.

After I experimented with that weird sensation and tried sticking my hands into a few different parts of my body, I got bored, though. I didn’t feel it, after all, so there was only so much distraction I could get out of it. Distractions from what again?

Oh right, I was dead. Even if it felt like my thoughts had to fight their way through a syrup-filled Olympic pool, that fact always made its way into the forefront of my mind eventually. Sometimes I felt like I was forgetting something important, though. You know what I mean, right?

I guess I should explain how I ended up here, shouldn’t I? Oh, how rude of me! I haven’t even introduced myself yet. To whom exactly? Ehhh... I don’t know. The people listening to my thoughts? That thought was definitely a sign of a stable mind, but I’m dead anyway, so if you have a problem with me talking to my imaginary listeners (sorry, but we aren’t friends yet. (I mean you haven’t even told me your names yet (What do you mean I haven’t either? That’s beside the point!)))... then sue me, or something? Are there lawyers in the afterlife? How do I even pay them? Is there a currency system here, or do we just barter it out?

Gah! Got distracted again. Why didn’t you say something?!?

So, anyway, I am... right, what was my name again? My name is.... hmmm...

I am... dead? Right, but I had already established that, didn’t I? Was dead my name? No, I don’t think so, unless my parents really didn’t like me. How long have I been here again? It feels like it has been centuries, but I’m not even sure how long that would be.

You know, there actually is this old quote. I don’t know if you’ve heard it before. It goes like this:

Nothing is certain in life...

What do you mean I’ve already said that? I just came up with it, I’ll have you know! Also, don’t you know it’s rude to shine directly into my eyes like that? And then, from all directions at once, the gall of some people!

~

“I’m dead?”

For some reason, that was the first thing out of my mouth. I hadn’t even opened my eyes yet and the whisper had already left my lips. Why had I just thought that? Trying to remember why gave me a killer headache, and I instinctively brought a hand to my forehead to dull it. It didn’t help all that much, but it distracted me enough that the pain vanished on its own.

Slowly I opened my eyes and the first thing I saw was an unfamiliar ceiling painted in a colorful pattern. It was an arrangement of overlapping circles split in half by a gray line. The left half of the ceiling was in monochrome black and white, while the other seemed to contain all colors of the rainbow mixed in a hypnotizing pattern. Also, I could have sworn that some circles changed their colors, but I had difficulties pinpointing when exactly that happened.

You are reading story King of the Steppe at novel35.com

Looking around some more, I saw that I had woken up on a low couch, or perhaps it was better described as a mattress with one half folded against the wall. As I sat up, I also noticed a few pillows thrown around. The rest of the room wasn’t what I expected, though - not that I was sure what exactly I expected. It looked like the waiting area for a doctor, with some magazines lying on a table and a few chairs arranged in a semicircle around it. One wall was taken up by a big bookshelf with a lot of books in it; they looked worn down from too many readings. There was only one door in the room and it was currently closed.

The strangest thing, however, was the other... occupants of the room. Most of the before-mentioned chairs were taken by some weird statues. They looked like movie props for some cheap Lord of the Rings knock-off, to be honest.

Hmm... that was a weird thought I just had. Lord of the Rings, and also the comparison to a doctor’s waiting room. Where had these thoughts come from? I didn’t know. It felt like if someone had asked me five minutes ago what a waiting room was supposed to look like, I would have drawn a blank, and also what an elf or an orc were supposed to be, but now that I saw them before me, I suddenly remembered fragments of watching some old movies at home or having to go to the dentist. It went little further than that, though. I couldn’t tell you what exactly a dentist was, for example, just that they had a waiting area like this. Was I at a dentist’s?

No, that somehow seemed wrong, but again, I didn’t know why it did. As I tried harder and harder to kick-start my memory, I felt the headache returning and quickly gave up. Instead, I got up from the couch and decided I had nothing better to do than to have a look around.

Obviously, the first thing to check out were the weird statues in the chairs. In total, there were four of them. The one I had called an elf before was the closest, so I went to check it out first. It was pretty small, only around 120 centimeters, but I didn’t get the impression that it represented a child. The face looked like a young man just out of puberty and the lifeless stare he was giving the floor gave him a pretty creepy, uncanny valley vibe. One of his long ears was actually missing a chunk at the end.

I quickly looked away from his head and instead focused on the clothes he was wearing. A dark grey tunic was held in place by a belt around the waist and I saw a pair of bracelets engraved with some weird runes I couldn’t decipher. They seemed pretty, though, all swirly and with no hard angles. Just how you would imagine an elven alphabet was supposed to look, I guess. Other than that, he didn’t wear much, though.

The statue next to him was the orc. In contrast to what I expected, it didn’t look like the rough barbarian-esque feel I associated with the word ‘Orc’, but that had been the first word that came to mind when I saw the greenish skin tone and small tusk-like teeth. The chair that had looked a bit too big to the elf seemed comically small for her.

Unlike the smaller statue, this one had smooth skin without any visible blemishes or injuries. Her hands also looked like those of someone who never had to do much manual labor and seemed as smooth as the rest of her skin.

She was dressed in similar clothing to the elf, just adjusted for her impressive size. The bands she was wearing were engraved with another set of runes. However, these looked more blocky, not as flowing as the elven ones had been.

There wasn’t much more to look at, so I moved on to the last two.

They were both humans and looked to be the same age, around eighteen, if I had to guess. One of them was a boy and the other a girl, but they both had the same clothes on and I could also see that their bracelets had the same symbols. I still didn’t know what they meant, but I thought I could discern some of the characters used. It was like someone writing in a foreign language that used a similar alphabet. Unlike the first two, they weren’t looking at the floor with that thousand-yard-stare and instead looked at each other.

I couldn’t do much more and the statues gave me the creeps, so I decided to just move on with my room tour. The next thing to check out was the shelf on the opposite side of the room. It was filled with thick books and a lot of their spines were damaged or outright replaced with something that looked suspiciously like duct tape.

To my surprise, I could actually read the labels. Not because they were written in a language I knew, but for some reason, I just... felt what the words meant. That was the best way to describe it. It was like the normal process of my brain understanding the written words was skipped and instead, I instantly got the meaning of the words put into my head, even though I had never seen this language before.

Most of the books were about different cultures and races, and how they prepared for and dealt with death and the afterlife. The second-thickest one was actually about humans, only beaten by the book about merfolk and, yeah, that meant mermaids and stuff. It felt pretty weird reading the title of a book and suddenly having visions of what I assumed that race looked like, but I got used to it after the first row.

Before I could try to read one of them, however, the door opened. Coming through it was what I first assumed to be a human woman, but as I looked again, I saw some feathery wings on her back. Although one wing was pure white, the other was a dark yellow tone. I doubted they were big enough to lift off with, however. I also noticed that her hair had a similar white-yellow split. In her hands was a clipboard, and I didn’t think she had noticed me snooping around yet.

After flipping through her documents and checking over something a few more times, she put down the board and looked into the room. As she scanned around, we eventually made eye contact and for a moment, I saw her eyes open in surprise before she went back to her papers with a confused look.

I couldn’t understand what she said, but her tone made it clear that my being here had her confused. And after she flipped through the documents, this way and that, she looked up at me again and asked a question. I didn’t understand a word she said, but it was obvious she had asked me something and she seemed a bit annoyed at me. When I didn’t answer, she started tapping her foot and asked me a single-worded question. Again, I didn’t understand.

“Umm, hi?”, I thought maybe she could understand my language though... whatever its name was again, “Can I help you? Or maybe you could help me? I think I am kinda lost.” That got her to again say something I didn’t understand and she pulled out a... phone. There was no better way to describe the small metallic-looking thing pressed against her ear. It was an older-looking flip phone and she had pulled out a little antenna when she flipped it open, but it was undoubtedly a phone.

The angel ignored me for the next few seconds as she waited for whoever she was calling to pick up. After that, the call seemed pretty quick. She said a few sentences - probably explaining the situation - and then listened to the other side. About a minute later, she said some quick goodbye and closed the phone again.

Turning back towards me, she said some more words and motioned for me to follow. I didn’t have any better ideas and just nodded before going after her. The outside corridor seemed to follow the monochrome-colorful contrast that had been going on in the room.

We walked by more doors and I assumed that beyond each one lay a similar room to the one I had just left. Before long, however, we reached a junction with another corridor to our left; on our right, I saw a big metal double door. I suspected it was an elevator and that feeling was confirmed pretty quickly as the door slid open when we approached.

You can find story with these keywords: King of the Steppe, Read King of the Steppe, King of the Steppe novel, King of the Steppe book, King of the Steppe story, King of the Steppe full, King of the Steppe Latest Chapter