Swinter didn't like what everyone else called him, “the ghost seer,” or he who communes with the dead,” Or simply an abomination.  He had seen the tuning begin and had been swept up by the Elder Beings magics.  Like a servant, he was forced to follow and experience the tuning by some unseen force. He bore witness to the death of the world humanity had created. He felt fear and panic as people fled, desperate to escape the changing and disintegrating cities.  But the experience of feeling the death of all those who perished is what changed him.  Swinter was sure of this.  Mentally broken with the weight of everything suffocated him until the singularity happened.  Instantaneously, he was set free, and he fell to the earth. The Elder Beings were violently and abruptly expelled from the world.  

 

On his first free day, he felt light and was deliriously happy to be free from the influence of the Elder Beings. But as the day turned to night, he saw them for the first time and knew his life would never improve. As one appeared, soon more followed, floating silently through the city with wraith-like bodies; they glowed faintly in the moonlight. These spectral creatures swarmed into his reality like a sea of the dead.  The people around him didn't notice them. Swinter assumed they were too busy trying to rebuild and hide from the newly emerging Magicians to take notice.  That was until one flew right through the chest of someone. The lady didn’t even flinch.

 

Over the following years, Swinter had tried to join various settlements, but it never worked out for long.   Since his captivity ended, he could tell he was just off. The people around him would eventually feel it and chase him out of the community.  People would notice him staring at things that they couldn’t see.  And when people started to die mysteriously, the villager's fingers would always fall on him.  He at first begged and tried to explain what he could see. It was the Wraiths stealing the life force from the people. But that only made the villagers more angry.  

 

Giving up on a normal life, Swinter became a nomad, moving from village to village. He stayed long enough to earn a little coin before he moved on. Swinter had thought about finding a little land spot to raise crops. But when he allowed his mind to settle, the flashbacks would start. He would relive his captivity. Scenes of the Elder Beings changing and warping his world would come flooding back.  The Wraigths always seemed to find him, but when he was having flashbacks, they became more agitated and aggressive.  Being around other people seemed to ease the pain, so when things got real bad he would go into town and have a drink.  The drink would numb him, but the sound of people and their laughter was what chased out the darkness.  

 

On this night, things were the worst they had been in a long time. Seeing the buildings crumble and the people dying play out over and over in his mind.  As the flashback became stronger and more vivid, the Wraiths came and swarmed all around him.  In sheer desperation, he headed for the town of exile.  The villages around exile would send them their criminals and unwanted as a kind of bribe. The people of Exile were almost inhuman and had caused problems in the past.  The Villages didn’t know what they did with the offerings and did their best not to think about it.  Poor Swinter, on the other hand, did know. The Magicians were gone but had left their corruption in that town. Unlike the many other towns that had rotted and died from the corruption, Exile had been reborn.  

 

As Swinter approached the village limits, he was too disturbed by the visions to notice the Horrors.  The Fence encircling Exile was lined with burnt corpses, and on the hillside above were the chard remains of the stakes the people had burned. The people smiled at him as he entered and things went very well. He was initially very surprised by the hospitality.  Without asking the tavern keeper gave him a bowl of stew and an ale. But this village hid their corruption well, and if he had not wandered the remains of humanity for so long, he could easily have missed the slip in the village's veneer.  It had been subtle, but he caught the people's looks when they thought he couldn’t see.  The food he was given was in fact, a goat stew, but the smell of the villager’s dinner couldn't be hidden from his nose.   The scent of cooking humans had a distinct odor. When cooked over the flame, humans smelled like soured oily pork.  

 

Slowly eating his stew, trying to figure out what his next move was. He kept thinking, how does a town survive on humans without running out of humans?  His heart skipped a beat when he saw it.  A wraith emerged from the air, purple smoke enveloping it, then quickly dissipating. To him the wraith was visible, but parts became invisible, the way sunlight glittered in a moving stream.  Swinter had come to call it the shimmer.  He tried to get a closer look at it like he always did. But like all the other times, his eyes wouldn’t stay on it. He would look straight at it, and his eyes immediately slid right off it.     It floated over to him, watching him.  They always seemed very interested in him. But they never tried to harm him.  Suddenly, it glided over to what appeared to be a random person. It shot out a tendril and thrust it into the person.  The victim tensed up and gasped before his eyes and lips turned a purplish black, and he dropped to the ground dead. 

 

Swinter would have tried to call out and stop it from happening in years past.  But he had learned he could do nothing for the person.  Everyone else in the tavern didn’t even bat an eye.  The innkeeper rang a bell, and shortly after, men in all black with black hoods came in and took away the body.  Swinter lost his appetite when he saw one of the men feeling the plumpness of the dead man.  Looking closely at the villagers, all the women had a baby on their hips.  This was how you fed a population of the dead.  A cold sweat broke out in him, and he tried to pay and leave.  He left a copper on the table and felt the eyes of everyone on him as he walked out.  

 

The mob seemed to be waiting for him.  A little one pointed and yelled, he's the one momma.  He can see the life-takers!  Yells of Witch and Burn the Witch started to call out. He was momentarily stunned into inaction. He looked at the child, no one had marked him before.  The child turned its head to him, and he gasped.  The child’s eyes were gone; they were just empty black sockets. But the Child’s head followed him as he started to walk away.  At the tavern's end, he quickly turned down a dark alley in hopes of losing the mob.  Walking in almost complete darkness, he tripped and stumbled through and out the other side.  Exiting the darkness into the moonlight, he had found his way to the edge of town, and his hopes were raised as he started to run.  But he was quickly spotted, and the villagers, like rabid beasts, came after him.

 

 

Weak from the generations of corruption, the Swinter quickly outran them.  That was when they started to throw stones at him.  One made contact, slicing his head open. Stumbling and almost falling to the ground.  Panic kept him upright and kept him from losing consciousness.  He ran long after the villagers had given up and kept going even as the blood from the wound blinded him.  Falling to the ground as the last of his strength gave out. Closing his eyes, he lay there all night. He was waking in the morning to a pounding headache.  Opening his eyes, he was greeted by a black bird standing on his head and pecking at him. Groning, he took a swipe at the bird and got up. The head still felt like it would split open, but upon inspection, the wound had healed.  Like they always did.  

 

Rubbing his face, thinking back to the first time he had died.  The villagers had hung him five times, but he kept getting back up once they cut him loose.  So they just dragged him to a sinkhole and threw him in.  It had taken a while to get out of that one.  Unsure of what would happen if he had been burned alive, that scared him. Dusting himself off, he grumbled, God damn, he was tired of dying.