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Riz dies in the Forest of the Nightmare King. The livestream chat goes batshit.
For the record, all that the internet at large can see of the event itself are Killian's empty eyes and then whorls of ominous cloud cover overhead. The stream is nothing but sky for several seconds, laced through with a preternatural darkness and clear tidings of doom, because the camera is on Riz’s chest and he is, to be clear, lying flat on his back unambiguously super dead. But no part of his body is visible, meaning the stream technically does not break the hosting site’s Terms of Service.
Which is to say, the world is saved in precisely the way Riz always knew it would be: pedantic rules-lawyering about content moderation.
He wishes he could pretend that’s the furthest thing from his mind as Infernal flame and incalculable pain wrack his dying form. He’d like to say he thinks of his mom, or how his friends will be worse off in this fight, or all the mysteries he will never get to solve. It would make a way better story than admitting the greatest sorrow he feels at leaving this mortal coil is that he doubts any of his friends will think to point his corpse at Kalina to get one more cool shot for the stream, a certified AV club nerd’s version of Hellish Rebuke.
And then, light. And then, peace.
Vision returns to him in bursts of color. He’s back in the outdoor office, grass greener than green and a sky so clear and blue he could fall right into it happily. A flash of movement ahead has Riz blinking focus back into his eyes.
“Oh.” His father dashes to him. Steady, gentle hands cup Riz’s face, run over his hair, adjust the collar of his shirt. “Oh, kiddo.”
“It’s okay,” Riz says quickly. He needs to unspool the grief in dad’s eyes as soon as possible. The sheer sadness there makes a lump rise in his throat, and he doesn’t want to cry or—whichever-god-hangs-out-here forbid—throw up in heaven.
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s going to be okay now.” Dad presses his lips together, then presses them to Riz’s forehead. He’s breathing in and out sharply through his nose.
“No, I mean it’s okay. I’m, uh, probably not gonna be here long?” Riz pulls back and pats his dad reassuringly on the shoulder. “A lot of my friends have died before. It’s cool.”
Dad laughs like the sound has been startled out of him.
“Gorgug and Kristen, right?”
“Yeah. And Kristen is on death number three at this point, which still isn’t as many as Gilear. Fig figured out how to summon diamonds. Because illusion magic? So, like, I’m gonna be fine.” Riz shakes himself, sniffles, and asks, “Can I have some heaven coffee?”
Dad’s face softens at the waver in his voice. Riz would be embarrassed by it, except he did just fully die so he thinks he’s allowed to be kinda wigged out about the whole thing.
“Sure, kiddo. Let’s get you some coffee and have you take a breather.”
Riz finds himself wrapped in a flannel blanket on the dock by the creek. He thinks the minotaur with the pocket protector draped it over his shoulders, but he can’t be sure. He’s still trying to shake off the phantom sensation of a fracturing skull. His mug is pure ivory with a gold stencil outline of wings, and the coffee is, of course, the perfect temperature.
He and dad both have their shoes and socks off, pants rolled up to the calf, dangling their toes in the water. Riz’s legs are almost as long as his dad’s now. A lot has changed since they were both alive.
“What was it like for you?” Riz asks quietly, lips brushing the rim of his mug as he speaks. “Dying, I mean.”
Dad takes in a deep, slow breath. He’s always done this when Riz asks a big question—or a little one, stupid questions that felt important when he was eight years old—silent for a long few seconds to give the answer all the time and thoughtfulness he can.
He didn’t have a lot of time to give when Riz was little, and ultimately less than he even knew. Older now, Riz recognizes the deliberation for what it is: a thousand gifts of the most precious resource Pok Gukgak has.
“Hurt like a bitch,” is what he finally says.
Riz’s surprised Ha! nearly sends coffee up his nose.
Dad flashes a grin at having made Riz laugh. “You’re lucky you didn’t get eaten. It’s, honestly? Humiliating.”
“If it makes you feel better—”
“You ate Kalvaxus, I know. And I couldn’t be prouder.” Dad slings an arm around Riz’s shoulders to pull him close and tight. The point of his chin drops onto the top of Riz’s head. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“About eating a dragon? He had a really weird flavor—”
“About dying,” dad clarifies.
“Oh.”
There’s a long stretch of silence marked by nothing but rustling leaves and the happy trickle of the creek.
Time is funny here, Riz learned on his last visit, so somehow the minutes that have already ticked by don’t feel urgent. A hot, willful part of him knows he’s not out of the game yet back down on the Prime Material. He’s just taking a breather. Riz has to bite back a sardonic laugh at the thought—I’ll relax when I’m dead.
“I know it’s still fresh,” dad finally says. “I couldn’t even admit I was dead for, god,” he shakes his head, “it must have been weeks. I kept thinking, there has to be a way to bust out of here, finish the job, and get home.”
“You tried to jailbreak heaven?”
“I absolutely did.” Dad pulls back far enough that Riz can see his face. He looks out over the water, misty-eyed and smiling. “It didn’t work, but it got me some attention. That’s how the task force recruited me.” He shoots Riz a conspiratorial glance like he’s sharing a secret. “I turned them down twice.”
“You—But—Why? You’re an angel spy. That’s the most badass thing I’ve ever heard in my freakin’ life, dad.” Riz fidgets excitedly just talking about it, bounces slightly in place and spins the coffee mug in his hands. “Why would you say no?”
“You,” he says simply, “and your mom. And the job, of course. I was the only person who knew the truth about The Harpy. I had information that could save a lot of people’s lives, so I thought if I could get back—Kiddo, do you want to know what lit a fire under my ass and got me to finally join the task force?”
“What?” Riz sets his mug aside, lifts his arm, and wraps the blanket around his dad so they’re sharing it. Dad pulls him close again.
“The first time you visited me at Cravencroft. The first time I heard you at my grave.”
Riz’s eyes well up. He clutches tighter at dad’s chest and buries his face in his shirt. Dad smells the way Riz had forgotten he remembers: old leather and cologne and the living room couch in the Strongtower apartment, a sense memory that hits him so sharply it hurts.
“What did I even say?” Riz hiccups a sound that’s almost a laugh. “I just remember crying a lot.”
“You asked your mom if you could speak to me privately. In exactly those words.” Dad chuckles. “I was always amazed by how you were such a handful and so polite at the same time.”
“This wasn’t at your funeral, right?”
“No, I missed that. I think I was sneak attacking a planetar at the time.”
“You’re so fucking cool,” Riz whispers.
Dad ruffles his hair, then leaves his hand resting gently against the back of Riz’s head.
“You told me you missed me, and that,” he breathes in fast through his nose, clearly holding back matching tears to the ones Riz is leaking steadily into the front of his crisp, celestial shirt, “that you were going to make sure you solved all the problems I wouldn’t be around to, because you didn’t want your mom to worry about anything else. You were so small and so serious, Riz. Like you’d been making plans instead of grieving.”
“Yeah,” Riz croaks, “that’s kind of how I spent the last six years. Uh, sorry.”
“Shh, hey, no. You have nothing to be sorry for. It’s—Shit, I had a point.” Dad wipes at his eyes and pulls back so he can look Riz in the face. “You were nine years old and I was the one in denial. I was the one not accepting the situation right in front of me, while you looked straight at the truth and asked, What can I do now?
“You shouldn’t have had to,” dad continues. “But I shouldn’t have gotten myself deep fried by a high school administrator seven blocks from where I grew up. Sometimes you have to say, fuck should. It is what it is. Where do I go from here?”
Riz nods. He takes a deep, shaky breath.
“I’ve been up here a while,” he says. Dad smiles at him, achingly sad and full of such a searing amount of love that Riz can’t figure out which one hurts more.
“Coffee breaks here last as long as you need them to.” There’s jovial hope in the statement, but his eyes flick to Riz’s nearly empty mug.
Riz feels his ears droop. He straightens his spine, runs a hand through his hair—maybe he’ll wear it loose from now on, everyone was so excited by the loss of his hat—and confronts the choice between sparing himself pain and doing whatever is in his power to find out the truth.
He’s Riz Gukgak. It’s no choice at all.
“There’s one more thing I need to tell you, dad,” Riz says solemnly as he lets the blanket drop from his shoulders.
“Of course.”
He looks straight at his father and smiles with all his teeth. “I got to use the grappling canister.”
“Really?” Dad grins.
“Yep. And I looked so badass.”
With that, Riz downs the final dregs of his coffee. Still, somehow, delicious.
For a second, nothing happens. Riz feels his stomach drop like barely more than a memory of the sensation. The calm of heaven softens the blow of mortality. Dad opens his mouth to offer comfort, to grieve Riz’s death with him.
Riz’s ears perk up.
Dum-da-dum-dum.
“Do you hear that?”
Dad shakes his head. “Hear what, kiddo?”
Da-dum-dum. Dum-da-dum-dum.
As if from far across the water and the open field, so low he can feel it in his ribcage, Riz hears a familiar bassline. He starts laughing.
“I have to go!” He clasps his dad in another tight embrace. Dad kisses him on the temple, a relieved laugh on his breath as well. Riz leaps to his feet, then pauses, looking down at the green skin of his feet against the wooden dock. “If you lose your shoes in heaven, do you lose them in real life? Whatever, not important.”
Riz leaps into the creek. The water brightens and parts around him like driving through fog with headlights on, and instead of hitting the bottom, he plunges into an upside-down sky. The sensation of falling lacks all the usual intensity in his body—it is all sight, weightless, nothing but thinking of home and waking up.
“See you next time!” Riz calls back up the celestial thoroughfare.
In a crackling whisper like a bad crystal connection, Riz hears, “There better not be a—Oh, who am I kidding. Knock ‘em dead, kiddo!”
In the briefest moment before he snaps back into corporeality, he witnesses his own resurrection. Not that it’s one of Riz’s areas of expertise, far from it, but he’s pretty sure the way Fig touches a hand to Ayda’s arm is flirting.
Literally over his dead body. Should he be watching this?
He comes to with a gasp, one part one-liner and three parts genuine social awkwardness, “Am I interrupting something?”
The chat goes hog fucking wild yet again.
Somewhere, far above in the celestial plane, Pok Gukgak shakes his head, laughs, and gets back to work.