A soft wind rippled the grass of the prairie, carrying a brief message to the man who was – to the best of his knowledge – the only one there. He didn’t remember how long he’d been sitting there, just that he had stopped to take a break at some point and never picked himself back up to continue with...whatever he had been doing.

  The message was very simple, being only two words, and it was even simpler due to the fact that the words may have been the two words he was most familiar with. The words were his own name: Jay Carter.

  He didn’t find it odd that the wind was delivering him the voice’s short message. Even the thought of finding it weird failed to cross his mind. The only thought or feeling that the words produced in him was a desire to follow it, something he found as equally not-weird as the message itself. Jay understood on some level that the message was a summons, and that to answer it, he should walk in the direction the wind had blown from initially.

  So he did. He wove his way through the knee-high greenery, obeying some instinct that told him where to not walk without realizing he wasn’t walking a straight line and certainly without attempting to rationalize why he was meandering so much. There were other people sitting in the grass. They were scattered around, in no particular order, heads roughly equal height with the grass.

  Jay didn’t see them. They didn’t see him. None of them recognized anything wrong with the situation.

  The breeze blew again, carrying the same message to him: Jay Carter. It was more insistent this time, and he began to walk his circuitous route at a faster pace. He didn’t know how long he’d been walking by the time he came upon the doorway hanging just above the grass.

  The door was the first thing that gave him actual pause. Something about it was wrong, something about the way that it hung there unsupported, in just the right way to rattle Jay a little. Maybe it was just the lack of support. Maybe it was the way it stood out as clearly unnatural among the pastoral greenery. Maybe it was the carpeted hallway visible through it, underlighting running out from under the baseboards.

  Whatever it was, something was very, very wrong. Logic warred with the voice’s call, deadlocking Jay right in front of the strange doorway. Caution and curiosity won, and he began to investigate the door.

  He started with a hand on the left post, but something in him still rebelled at the thought of stepping through even if his hand was currently partially inside. His hand was able to wrap around the post itself, clearly it wasn’t connected to anything. He’d just be stepping through to fall, no matter how real the carpet and its underlighting on the other side looked.

  He put a hand through the space behind the doorway that the hallway should have occupied and found no walls to stop its movement. He circled the frame and found the same: nothing stopping his passage. He put a hand through the door from behind, as if he was stepping through the door from what should have been the hallway’s side, and found that nothing felt different. There was no hallway there.

  He circled back around to the front of the door frame, head cocked in utter puzzlement as the hallway came back into view. What was he to do? The call was still there; he still wanted to follow the wind’s message to its source. But how could he? This wasn’t possible. There wasn’t a hallway there to enter.

  It was a weird thing to focus on, Jay knew that, but some kernel of him deep inside was screaming at the inconsistency. He didn’t know where that part had come from, or why his body listened to it so eagerly. The rest of him trusted the call the wind was bringing him. Why was that one portion of him so insistent on bringing up these objections?

  The wind blew again, coming straight out of the door frame, and the message was longer this time. Jay Carter, it said. You are running out of time, Jay Carter. The voice-on-the-wind even sounded impatient, though surely voices that floated along on the currents of the air were beyond such petty emotions.

  He did not want to run out of time. There was a deep dread in those words, almost a threat. Something bad, something horrible, would happen if he ran out of time. If he didn’t hurry. If he didn’t make it. If he didn’t follow the message. The implication would have made him break out into sweat if he hadn’t been – the thought slipped away, then even the realization that he had lost his train of thought followed it. The desire to follow the breeze’s message filled him again.

  Jay inhaled to steel himself. There was nothing else to do. He had to at least try to step through the door. Surely if he failed, if the hallway-that-wasn't-real didn’t let him through, he couldn’t be blamed for it. The voice had to understand that, but he would not fail because of a voice in the back of his head.

  He took another look through, taking in the black-and-gold carpet with red underlighting that seemed to light up more of the space than it should and the strip of dark wood separating the wall into an upper and a lower half. If he was going to step into a space that didn’t exist, he wanted to have a clear vision of what mirage was going to humiliate him before he did.

  He stepped through and, despite the height of the doorway, had no difficulty making the step into the hallway. The hallway that wasn’t real, except it had to be real in some way, because Jay now found himself standing in it. It looked just as it had from the prairie side, though now he could see that the underlighting was reflecting off the steel of the bottom half of the hallway, giving it all a slightly more illuminated appearance than it should have had.

  Something was very odd about all of this, and it itched at Jay despite the lack of words that he had to put the oddities into. The wind’s call remained, so he walked the length of the hallway, sticking as closely to the middle of the carpeted strip as was possible. He lost track of time again as he walked, the uniformity of the hallway blending everything together into one long moment.

  Until he came to a door. Not some hanging framework of a door this time, a bona fide door made of the same dark wood as the lengths on the walls. A door that had his surname emblazoned on a gold plate hanging perfectly at eye level, in an elaborate Gothic-type font, a strip of some similarly golden material hanging down around the plate as a door knocker.

  The voice-on-the-wind's call itched at him again. He was almost there. He just had to knock and go through. This was what it had been calling him for.

  Jay took hold of the door knocker. It was oddly warm in his hand, though he hadn’t seen anyone else since he – the thought slid away. He hit the knocker against the backplate, an oversized, booming noise resulting, and the door swung open the moment he released it.

  The first true voice Jay had heard throughout his time in the hallway spoke in a resonating bassy rumble: “Enter,” it said.

  He did, and the door shut behind him with deafening finality.

  *

  The other side was clearly an office, though it was like no office Jay had ever seen before. The bookshelves were fairly standard, as were the faintly buzzing fluorescent lights and floor carpeted in gray with a faint pattern, but he was fairly sure he’d never seen an office with a window looking out directly onto what appeared to be the surface of a star. Or one whose desktop was head-height on him, with an occupant sized to match. With horns. And red skin. And what looked like a pitchfork leaned up against the window behind him.

  The thing – the devil? He certainly looked the part of a devil – behind the desk had a stern face, very nearly glowering at Jay, with a gray-patched beard and salt-and-pepper hair broken up by six horns protruding in two lines leading from his temples toward the back of his head. “You were almost late, Jay Carter. We do not smile upon lateness here.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You certainly should be. If all of you dawdled like that, we’d never get anything done around here, and we have more than enough to do even when you lot are on time.”

  “All of who? I didn’t see anyone else. Anywhere.”

  “Yes, well, you wouldn’t, would you? Too many fights if that happened; trust me, we tried it that way for centuries.”

  “Centuries?”

  “Keep up, damn you. Yes, centuries, and every day, dozens of times a day, you little things would get into fights. We had more security staff than we had administrative staff. That’s never a good sign, not when Up Top wants us to keep things well in hand from start to finish.”

  “Up Top?” Jay could hear the capital letters when the giant man had said the words but had no reference point for what he might have been referring to.

  “Not important. Let’s get back on track, shall we?”

  “Um,” he began.

  “Excellent!” The man behind the desk picked up some papers and tapped them together. “My name is Kalras. I’ll be your psychopomp today. First, let me inform you that this advising session may be monitored by my higher-ups, though neither of us will know it, solely for quality control purposes.”

  “Psychopomp?”

  “Yes, Mr. Carter. I was assigned to watch you through your mortal life until your death, then to escort your soul here for final determination of your afterlife. Technically I was also responsible for ferrying your soul to the first stages you were just in, but most of that work has been outsourced by now.”

  “So I’m...” Jay trailed off, not even wanting to say the word.

  “Dead, yes. You have been dead now for longer than you were alive initially. There was much paperwork to be done in your case, for reasons I’m not fully at liberty to say, but that we as an organization are prepared to compensate you for.”

  “What happened?”

  “Again, I am not at liberty to disclose certain aspects of the situation, even to you, but I can tell you that you died early. Too early. While some people are certainly slated to die young, for one reason or another, you died before your time.”

  “How does that happen?” He began to feel oddly cold. “How does someone just die before their time?”

  “It doesn’t happen. Normally. This was an exceptional circumstance. If it makes you feel any better, that does technically make you exceptional, Mr. Carter.” Kalras smiled at that, though it didn’t look like he had much practice smiling, as the expression looked slightly painful on his face.

  Jay just sat there, staring blankly at the psychopomp. Of all the things to be exceptional for, it was dying. “So I died early. Did I at least die in a cool way?”

  Kalras looked down at the papers in front of him and paged through a few, clearly looking for something and setting aside all the others that didn’t match. His face brightened as he found the page, then lost that brightness again as he read what was on it.

  Jay winced. “So that’s a no, then?”

  “Unless you consider being hit by a truck while in a crosswalk cool, then I’m sorry, Mr. Carter, but it is in fact a no.” The devilish man gathered up the papers he’d put down and cleared his throat. “Now. To get us back on track and stay within expected guidelines, let’s talk about what happens from here.

  “You died. There’s really no going back from that, Mr. Carter, not after this long. However, due to the...situation...behind the death and its nature as an act outside of the Plan, Up Top is prepared to offer you a unique opportunity. You are being offered a chance to reincarnate, Mr. Carter. On a different world than the one you previously inhabited, of course, to allow you to keep your current memories and be integrated into the world at your age of death instead of having to start over as a child.

  “We have a list of several options for you to peruse and are very confident you will find somewhere among them attractive as a place to begin your new life. Would you prefer to hear these options verbally or to read them for yourself?” Kalras’s face became that painful-looking smile again as he finished his spiel.

  Jay boggled, trying to take in everything that had just been said and abjectly failing. He still hadn’t processed that he was dead yet and here he was being asked to consider reincarnation on another world? There were other worlds? And a concrete, physical afterlife with offices and apparently a wrongful death compensation plan? And whatever the prairie and hallway had been?

  “Mr. Carter?”

  Did they have some kind of mind control? Was that why he didn’t question following the wind and its voice? Was that how he’d known where they were coming from in the first place and how to follow?

  “Mr. Carter.”

  If he was going to get a new body, would it look different? Would he be taking over someone else’s body? Would it appear out of thin air? Clearly if there was a star right outside the window of Kalras’s office without any side effects, making a body wouldn’t be that difficult.

  “Mr. Carter!” The psychopomp’s voice shook the entire office and finally brought Jay’s focus back to the moment.

  “Sorry, what?”

  The devilish deskworker gave him a flat look. “Would you like to hear your choices verbally or read them?”

  “Uh. Reading sounds good.”

  “Excellent.” Kalras leaned down and started pulling binders out of a drawer that Jay hadn’t seen until that moment. Three green ones that rattled the desktop when they were set down were followed by six yellow binders that weren’t quite as hefty. The yellows were followed by six thin red ones, which were in turn followed by a single black binder. “These are your primary options. We’ve sorted them according to our estimation of your suitability for these worlds. Green is best, black is worst, I’m sure you can figure out the others in-between.

  “I’ll come back in thirty minutes. Until then, read away.”

  *

  There were too many options. Far too many options, if he was honest with himself. Only a couple of them sounded bad, but that still left fourteen options to pick from. Jay felt like he was in college again with all the binders open and spread out in every available space. He shut a few, partly at random and partly based on gut instinct. Olorith, Imarth, Conzo, Awei, Tavis, Halea... Those would have to be his finalists, even if his reason wasn’t the best. At least he had a reason.

  They had magic. He’d always been a fan of the idea of having magic, courtesy of a childhood of fantasy novels, and if he was going to live another life, he wanted something fun. That meant magic; that meant these six.

  Kalras came back in, and Jay flipped the binders for Awei, Olorith, and Tavis shut as he settled into his chair. Repeated apocalypses in a twenty-year cycle? Pass. Dark Lords showing up every century? Pass as well. A shattered planet still struggling along in the aftermath of a meteoric frenzy? It had some appeal but sounded like the quick route to cancerous tumors galore.

  “That’s your thirty minutes, Mr. Carter. Do you have your choice?”

  “Almost,” Jay said.

  “Do you have any questions that could make your final selection easier?”

  “One thing: what does this mean?” He pointed to a single entry on the first sheet of the Halea binder: “‘Magic system: System.’ What does that mean?”

  “Ah. System worlds are a common environment where magical laws have been harnessed and distilled into a single recognizable form that every being of that world has access to. It rationalizes their magic, allowing for less risk and more concrete visualization of a magical path. Sometimes these Systems are inherent to the physical makeup of the world, sometimes they are made through advanced technology, and still others are germinated through an act of great magic performed by an inhabitant. I do not recall which of these Halea’s System is.”

  Jay lit up. “That’s it. That’s the one. Put me there.” Magic with minimal risk of blowing himself up trying to whip together new spells? Ideal.

  Kalras nodded. “Halea it is. Good choice, Mr. Carter. Now, when you arrive, you will be assigned a Class. This will dictate what kind of magic you can do most easily, though no variety is beyond any Class, given enough time and effort. There is no way to tell what you will get, so don’t ask. And whatever you do get, even if it may not seem magical – or even good – at first, there is not a single Class without value. Remember that.”

  “Uh. Okay.” Should he be worried about how ominous that had sounded? Halea had been in a green binder, so it should be fine, but the way the psychopomp had just said that...no, it had to be his imagination. “So how does this work, then?”

  “Like this.” Kalras snapped his fingers and – after a brief flash of colors – Jay was somewhere else.

  With a message hanging in the air in front of him in a box of golden text on a blue background.

  Holy shit, it was real.