Although brief, that bout of aborted chortling did not go unnoticed. It meant to Mikkel that the man was starting to learn, though that kind of wisdom probably had to erode its way through several strata’s worth of sedimented religious indoctrination and the queer circumstances of his revenancy. Whatever was awaiting on the other side was bound to be interesting enough to be worth a revisit, but you had to let the decades do their work first.

“Curious that, most people object to the baker bit instead.” As he said that, he raised a gloved hand to his head and turned it a few times. It was a little remembered fact that skeletons did not in fact have palms the same way people who still had flesh about their person did. Once you got past the carpals, it was just fingers all the way to the tips. Kneading dough became therefore rather more challenging without some external support. “Anyway, I’m a bit old school, you could say. When you’re old school, you always get some poor buggers knocking on your door – or knocking it down, really – to try to vanquish you in the name of goodness, justice, their kingdom – and it’s always a kingdom, never an empire or a republic – or any divinity you can think of. Or even bandits, once in a while. In the meantime, there are times when you’re in need of test subjects or human sacrifices. So, when they just deliver themselves to you without you even asking, do you send them back? No way.”

Of course, there were other circumstances under which he would find himself with guests unexpected and otherwise. A bunch of notables from neighbouring lands that he’d kidnapped at some point from one reason or another, the odd prospective understudy, countless runaway youths… And it would take all day to go over them, though there were a couple of anecdotes worth a retelling, like the time when a random princess somehow managed to sneak into his lair and tested no less than seven different beds in about as many different cells and firmly believed there were seven versions of himself called Michael, Mickey, Miguel, Michele with a k, Mikhail, Mitchell, and Cornelius Algernon “Grievous Bodily” Harmsworth. That one had been trouble.

“Odin,” he repeated. “Alright, I know that one – big guy, always on horseback, very martial.” Until his death, the guy had said. Mikkel decided to hold on that thought and promised himself to address it later, because that was getting ridiculous. But Mister Flatbread had decided in the meantime to get to a bit of good old brown-nosing, and Mikkel would sooner be found dead(er) than with his pants up for that – you had to respect some nice villainous flattery. It was just good manners.

“Indeed. For over a thousand years I have struck fear into the hearts of the common people. Some, I made rare. My name is featured on hundreds of ballads and many a chronicle, on dozens of epics and countless pieces of actually quite deranged literature that thumbs its metaphorical nose at basic notions of anatomy of any species.” And now that he was on Zephon, even he could not fathom the latest inevitable developments. “He who allowed the non-flying to fly, a prodigy of technology and magic alike, now an enemy to all! He who in hindsight is not very good at anagrams yet dares you to find the differences between these two paragraphs! And– Yeah, and so on and so forth. Charmed, I’m sure.”

“Indeed. For over a thousand years I have struck fear into the hearts of the common people. Some, I made rare. My name is featured on hundreds of ballads and many a chronicle, on dozens of epics and countless pieces of actually quite degenerate literature that thumbs its metaphorical nose at basic notions of anatomy of any species.” And now that he was on Zephon, even he could not fathom the latest inevitable developments. “He who allowed the non-flying to soar, a prodigy of technology and magic both, now an adversary to all! He who in hindsight is not very good at anagrams yet dares you to find the differences between these two paragraphs! And– Yeah, and so on and so forth. Charmed, I’m sure.”

Finally, Mr. Flatbread – or rather Barnabas recounted the tale of his reclaiming of his free will. It was rather short and perhaps more anticlimactic than expected. Yet, at the same time, it felt fitting. He who embodied Mr. Big Warrior Guy with Sword and Spear and Horse, taking back his freedom for the sake of a bit of fisticuffs. A warrior through and through, truly. Well, Mikkel considered in the traditional way that led one to conclude a thought with “I guess”, as long as emancipation was in the picture.

“Yes and no,” he said in response. “Or to better explain: when you die, your body and mind no longer force you to… care. Care for things that would have mattered to you as a human, or a dwarf. Survival, mostly, and what it takes you to achieve it as an individual or species.” Society, for example. Family, reputation, duty, companionship. “Yet, it does not prevent you from caring either. You are simply free to choose what you want to focus on, everything else be damned. It’s quite liberating, though I’ll admit it takes a while to really get to this stage. Didn’t realise it myself in the first few years, I have to say. Anyway–”

–and now came the knot to the handkerchief that he’d made earlier.

“You said you are going to be the Dominant of Odin until your death. But then you became undead. Then Ultima’s chosen vessel killed you. And now you’re here, alive or undead. Look, I am probably putting way more thought into this than I need to, but: what?”

“Well, that is interesting, because you see: akashic, in my world, refers to a type of oven-baked flatbread that is served with no cheese toppings, which is the most sinful state for a flatbread to exist in.” It was either that or a type of thorny shrub, anyway. “I always say: you can skip the tomato sauce and still make it work, but never the cheese. It’s just wrong.”

He waved a dismissive hand. Maybe it was a thorny tree. Honey was involved somewhere too, he was pretty sure.

“Hold on though, I need to get this straight: your Ultima needed some servitude, and decided that the best way to go about it would be by creating humans. Except, humans have free will. And that’s bad. So, Ultima tells them that it’s a sin, and if they’re undead, they’re less sinful. He began stroking his beard thoughtfully. “Look, I’ll even fill in the blanks here and assume that they need to be the right kind of undead, that is to say those that are made undead by somebody else and are thus controllable. Is this like, real, or is it just mythology? Please tell me it’s just mythology.”

In hindsight, that was a very stupid question, albeit not due to some ontological lack of sense so much as the choice of person to whom he had just addressed it. Of course, he expected to hear, it was real, and even if the man had neither born witness to his world’s own cosmogony nor heard the tale from Ultima himself, there was very little a strong enough faith feared.

“If free will is intrinsic to humans, Ultima should have known about that from the very start, and could have thus chosen to create anything else to serve him – if man can manage that with simple machinery, I don’t see why a god couldn’t. If free will was instead added onto humans, then it stands to reason that it could have just as well been removed from them from the very start, instead of simply requesting that they do not exercise it. I mean, that is in itself a bit of a paradox, isn’t it: even complying with such a request would require agency.” It had to be mythology. You could not even argue ineffability there: it was his interlocutor himself who said that free will was not part of Ultima’s original plan, and even then, nobody would ever convince Mikkel that ineffability wasn’t anything more than a rhetorical smokescreen for the failures of those alleged higher beings who couldn’t tell their heads from their arses if you gave them a map. “If Ultima failed where man succeeded with a fraction of the effort, then Ultima is hardly worthy of man. In other words, you’ve been worshipping a complete tit your entire life: congratulations.”

He stopped talking to allow the man to soak in his words and allow him to react… what was the word? Maybe organically? Organically felt fitting enough. Still, there was one more question that Mikkel had to ask.

“Ah, so you’re an undead as well. An acacia– an akashic. So, did you actually cast away your free will, or are you just telling yourself that to convince yourself you’re a good… Ultimian? Ultimanian? Ultimaniac? Lastie? Not familiar with your terminology here.”

Of course the human followed him. He was a bloody human, and a lone one at that, and not once in sixteen centuries did Mikkel see a lone human just shrug their shoulders at a fleeing chap and carry on with their own lives, their own businesses. If you were lucky, you got the dainty maidens who were generally unaware of what legs were for, beside extra parts to be shaved, and who just kind of whispered at you to wait with an arm outstretched in your general direction. And even they had that tiniest hint of a chase instinct.

Mikkel did not in fact stop when the human asked him to. He reasoned that, worst case scenario, he could try to get him for sexual harassment and for being a dirty, dirty theophiliac – which just meant you were attracted to deities, but any word ending in -philiac sounded nasty enough that he might as well toss that in. Surely there must have been a priest who was going to feel called out and thus overcompensate with zeal in fistfuls.

He kept running until he heard the human follow up. He then halted mid-stride, remaining with one feet hanging in the air behind him, recomposed himself, and carefully turned back to face him.

“You benighted donkey, no one granted me undeath but myself. And it is with undeath that comes the purest, most unrestrained and real freedom you could possibly imagine.” Mikkel's voice had glaciers in it. “Yet you call that a burden, interesting that. Now, human, I should like to be the one to ask you one question.”

He straightened his glasses-nose-moustache-combining contraption back into place, insofar as one could argue it to have any place about his face to begin with.

“How is my sexual life any of your business?”

Irritatingly tautological as it was, coming to inhabit a largely unexplored world came, inevitably, with not knowing a whole lot about it. Granted, it was not truly unexplored, much less largely at that: as far as Mikkel could gather, one could find people in nearly every nook and cranny of said world – the key was knowing where to look. But the old world… He knew that like the back of his hands, and he knew what to expect from it anywhere. Anybody looking to start anything funny from leagues away could count on him to turn his head in their general direction before the first test. And if Mikkel had to disappear for a while, he knew exactly where to go.
But this, this was different. He could secure a cozy seafront workshop days within his arrival, but anything beyond Torensten was an incognita – and to an extent, even within it. Had something queer enough appeared within his radius, there would have been no way for him to see it coming, nor did he have anywhere he could go if the worst happened. Quite frankly, that had been the premise of perhaps too many of his little excursions, to the point that thinking about it drained a lot of the fun out of them, but it was what it was.

His itinerary for today consisted of what passed for a city in the middle of the Reikinto Sands. Aljana. All that Mikkel knew about it, he had read it on the old almanacs that he would often salvage – or steal. Some of the information was outdated. It must have been. Also, the pronunciation still eluded him, which was obscenely aggravating.
Aljana only counted a few thousand souls within its walls. Next to Torensten’s millions, it paled. Next to any other settlement one could possibly find in the area, it was gargantuan. Mikkel had approached it by air, flying over it from far up high enough that any onlooker could have reasonably mistaken him for a vulture, and then landing at a safe distance from the city walls. It took him twenty minutes by foot to reach them again. He then crossed the gates under the stupefied eyes of the guards…

…but why? His camouflage was flawless! His armour covered him down to his last bone! And for what his helm and beard could not cover of his skull, Mikkel had crafted a nice little gizmo that consisted of a fake nose and black, bushy eyebrows and moustache attached to a pair of spectacles. Yeah, alright, they might not have been the right colour, but as far as he was concerned, he looked as alive as the next guy.
More alive, in fact, that the city itself. Its streets more deserted than what stood outside the walls and many of its shops closed, Aljana lay mostly silent before him. He saw very few people out and about, and… Ah! Mikkel could see a number of them converging in the same direction. So he followed them.
He then remembered the almanac. Throughout the year, Aljana could only have two reasons to look like it was at that moment: Yunazif Sakhr, and Hariq Rami. As the people were heading towards what Mikkel recognised as the Temple of the Gods, it was most likely the latter.

Inside the temple were all the people he did not see in the city proper. Families, for the most part, with a few couples, the odd widows and widowers, and a couple of small groups of people that couldn’t have possibly been related by blood. Not many folks on their lonesome, beside himself and some other bloke who had just made his way in.
Heedless of the crowd – what hushed conversations he could hear at all did not interest him – Mikkel drew closer to the walls. Inscriptions studded them, but he could not read them, not quite yet, for they were written in a language of yore, and he knew from experience the number a mere handful of centuries could do to the way people spoke and wrote. Now, pictures, pictures were universal, even when the style was a bit wonky and flat and even naïve, which was for the most part just an ostensibly politer way to say unsightly.
“Hey, that’s Ifrit alright,” he commented, because it took even the most mugged (like gifted, except the exact opposite) of artists some effort to make that fiery horned janitor unrecognisable. “Where *is* this one anyway?”