CAD4-042
Barista: Jean-Marc Chausson
Date: Jan-30-2020
Receipt: CAD4-042
Subject: Recap
It began with a burning corpse.
The fire was still smoldering when we arrived, curling from the ruins of the Third Cafe—blackened, broken, dead. The Crisis still burned—long after it should have been reduced to ash. The Crisis took eight of ours. No sweeping, no ash, no graves could change that. Lucy. Felix. Gone. The last time we buried our dead, we swore we wouldn’t have to do it again. That was a lie. We are always burying our dead.
And when we tried to turn away from one corpse, we found another waiting.
A breathing corpse.
Katherine Wade. Test Subject 13. A girl caught between the cold logic of machinery and the permanence of death. The Astoria 23rd’s ZULU Division thought they could create a god—what they made was something else. Something hungry. We pulled her out before they could decide—success or failure, god or ghost. We don’t leave people to be torn apart by men who think divinity is something you can manufacture with blood and circuitry. We don’t leave the dead to be scavenged. Not even our own.
Which led us to our buried corpses.
A mass funeral. Too many names, too many stories cut short. Too much grief. We all carried the weight. But Julia bore it like a brand. She thought it was her fault. That she had brought ruin down upon us. But the fire inside her disagreed. It pulled her away, pulled her into the between-space, into the liminal tide where truth takes shape. And in that burning light, the truth was laid bare—
She is my daughter.
Lucy kept her from me—to keep her safe. A poor choice, made in pride. But damn it, she might have been right. It’s too late now to fix any of that… And now, she has chosen to stay. To stand with us. To keep moving forward, even when the road ahead is clearly paved with graves.
And that road took us here.
To another damn corpse—this time in a barrow. At least, that’s where they should be.
This corpse, grinning from his chains, waiting for us like he knew we’d arrive all along. The Otherworld passage locked inside his chest, sealed by the work of a long-dead witch. It should have been impossible, but impossibility has never been enough to stop us.
And so, here we stand, at the threshold of something vast, something we were never meant to see. The dead led us here. Step by step. From burned ruins to open graves. From stolen gods to forgotten legends. Now, there’s only one path left. One road waiting. We step forward—into death itself.
Into the Otherworld.
Into whatever waits beyond.
The Last Corpse Himself,
Jean-Marc Chausson