The Black Path & the Apothecary
When you die, you used to stay dead. But it hasn't been that way on Mirhanan for a long time. Oh, you'll stay dead eventually, but odds are pretty good that you'll end up at the Apothecary first, and they'll send you back to where you came from, patched up and ready to face whatever killed you.
The Collapse changed everything.​
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What was once the final, inalienable truth of life, that it ended, was suddenly thrust into chaotic uncertainty.
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Thislan had long known magical cure-alls and the ability to pull the nearly departed back from the brink of death (or even just past it). And likewise, Janeth Prime, with its soaring technological advances, had placed death on the shelf somewhere a little to the left of the common cold.
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Yet people died. It was inevitable. The mind and body became weak, accidents happened, cruelty existed. Like the sun rose, like tides flowed, like taxes, Death was a constant. Death was part of life. Death… was the end. Even more so after the Collapse, when magic and technology alike failed. People had to learn to live with Death’s pale hand constantly on the back of their necks once again. But just as they began to get used to the change, another change happened.
People started coming back.
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What must have gone through the mind of the first person to walk down the warm stones of the Black Path? How did they know to follow it, the only scrap of solid reality, through the mist and bright, blinding nothingness around them until they came to The Apothecary’s door? What surreal terror must they have felt to realize that they were not in a twisted afterlife nor comatose dream, but instead literally opening the door between life and death?
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To their credit, The Apothecaries were also shocked. What strange new customers had come to peruse their wares? Mortals. Humans- dead ones- with spirits so fragile and beliefs so strong. The Apothecary that waited at the end of the Black Path was not the face of one’s god, it was not blessed rest, it was not judgement, and it was not always Fair.​
It was chance.
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Whatever power these Apothecaries possessed, they seemed content to listen to the dying and offer them the ultimate gamble: a chance to return, or, the death they’d expected with their last, gasping breath.
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And mortals like nothing more than to try and control their odds.
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Religious sects and mages and scientists alike did their best to unravel this new mystery of life, to understand what occurred within The Apothecary, to understand the Black Path that a soul would find themselves upon. To speak with the dead and understand what brought them back. And what didn’t. Despite funerary rights and medical advances, superstition and experimentation, to this day we know tantalizingly little about the Black Path and The Apothecaries that speak with us when we are too careless with our fragile, beating hearts.