From Corpse to Crown: Reborn as a Mortician in Another World-Chapter 24: Stonewalled

The door slammed harder than Lucian meant it to. He stood in the center of the King's Quarters—what Staesis thought was luxury: polished sandstone floors, an unused hearth, and an impossibly clean mural of a crowned skeleton watching over a city of endless labor.

Lucian ignored it.

He paced, fists clenched at his sides, the Grimoire twitching with every step. The walking cane, thrown on his bed, shone in time with his hands.

In a corner, Rosa sat quietly, still shaken up from the ceremony. But it wasn't her own fear she was concerned about—not now.

Lucian stopped in front of the cold fireplace, breath ragged.

"She sends me here," he spat. "Gives me orders. One day to rest. Then she sends me into a town that refuses to let me help." He kicked some dust onto the firewood, like a petulant child.

Lucian's voice cracked on the last word. He turned to Rosa, eyes deep with frustration. "They won't let me see the records. They mayor buries the truth under red tape and smiles while people are rotting in place. And the Queen...just watches."

Rosa didn't say anything and instead kept her hands folded on her lap.

He shook his head, hard. "I'm the only one who seems to give a damn about these people dying. Not passing...dying."

She walked to him, slow and steady, and touched the crook of his elbow. "You're not the only one who cares."

Lucian's jaw slackened and he looked at her, pondering. Rosa offered a small smile. "If you truly had no power here..." she glanced at the walking cane. "They wouldn't be so afraid of you."

That stilled him.

He looked down and blinked as the anger faded—and left a cloak of exhaustion around his shoulders. "I just wanted to help."

"You still can," she said. "But it'll be outside of their rules."

Lucian sat beside her, shoulders sagging. "I'm surprised you're suggesting that."

Rosa smiled. "I work for the Queen, but it doesn't mean I agree with everything she's said...or done. I just can't talk about it."

"If we ever solve your problem, you have to tell me that story."

The ever-dependable maid nodded. "I hope we do."

Since Lucian wasn't here to help people who clearly didn't want it, he just wanted to break something. If she hadn't wanted him to solve the missing death link, what was he here for?

She said someone requested aid, but never told me who. I assumed it was the mayor.

He looked outside the window and saw undead laborers slowly shuffling toward their tasks, despite their arms nearly falling off and their legs caked with dust.

Am I just here to patch them up? Or did someone write a letter to the Queen without the Mayor's knowledge?

No matter how hard he thought about it, he didn't have all the pieces. Lucian sighed as he struggled to sleep, his dreams full of red tape, mysterious letters, and the knowing smile of a demonic entity.

+

The next day began with a knock.

Not a courier, or the mayor's lackey. The driver and Rosa were still asleep, and whenever he had a problem, Lucian became a light sleeper. He didn't recognize it—three times, slow and steady.

Cautiously, he undid the dead bolt and opened the door...

...to absolutely no one in the hallway. There was only a scrap of paper on the ground, weighed down by a piece of silver.

As he unfolded it, the pendant on his neck grew cold.

"If you want answers, come when the candle wicks burn halfway down. Library. South annex. Bring your book.

- G"

The handwriting was old-fashioned, ink faint and penned with a quill sharpened too fine. It was thoughtfully written, he observed, because each letter was perfectly spaced. He almost wanted to keep the note and frame it.

Rosa glanced over his shoulder.

"Someone else is watching."

Lucian nodded. "Let's not keep them waiting."

+

They threw on their traveling cloaks and followed the shadows to the south wing of the town's library—a massive building that was equally clean. Too clean, down to the contents of each book.

Every tome was printed in gray ink, and, Lucian suspected, held revised bits of history. Clean margins and sterile records.

In contrast, the annex was completely different. No guards and no locks—save for the massive wooden boards nailed to the door. Someone had taken the time to pull the boards apart so they could enter.

They found her waiting underneath a collapsed arch, a ring of glyphs glowing faintly around her dark-colored hair.

Even without asking, Lucian knew she was a librarian. She wore horn-rimmed glasses and a frayed cardigan, and the hearth next to her had been painstakingly cleaned. Even the chair she sat on was blackened around the edges.

But her presence was much larger here. It was as if the silence bowed around her. If Lucian didn't concentrate on her surroundings, he could almost imagine how beautiful the annex had been in its prime.

The librarian nodded and led them to a ladder descending into the floorboards.

+

Underneath the annex was a room that shouldn't have existed—it was massive and carved into the bedrock, lit by glowing mushrooms and iron lanterns. Dark oak shelving was built into the room and housed books of different qualities and sizes.

Encased in delicate glass were scrolls that still remembered, filled with words that weren't edited. Lucian held his breath and glanced at the books. Some of the spines were branded with Staesis's royal seal, like someone once tried to burn them.

"You've been preserving this."

"Someone had to." The librarian said. "The truth can be overwritten so easily, if there is no one who remembers and records it."

She walked to a central pillar where an oil painting hung, protected with thick layers of glass. It was of a man wearing mortician's robes and the same coffin-shaped pin on Lucian's lapel.

He too had dark hair and deep-set shadows underneath his exhausted eyes. The man wore a pair of rectangular glasses, and in his hands was a walking cane identical to Lucian's. The man held it like it was the most precious thing he owned.

"Alaric."

Lucian stepped forward and frowned. "He looks holy."

"Just tired," The librarian corrected. "The people have seen your cane before."

"I wasn't aware it was the same one," Lucian admitted. The walking cane was warm beneath his hand, like it forgave him. "You're holding a magical artifact full of the experiences of the previous morticians."

She glanced back at Alaric's painting. "I saw him feverishly writing scrolls in the evenings. He rewrote the rites not for glory, but relief. He was breaking beneath the weight of every soul that passed through his hands."

Lucian stared at the painting and at the librarian, at a loss with this newfound knowledge. "They keep a statue of him in the palace."

"That is no statue, Mortician Bowcott," she said gently. "That is the original body of Alaric Montegeau. This painting is him before he became a symbol."

Rosa tilted her head. "What happened to him?"