One Thousand Deaths: Wayfarers World

By Jessi Hammond

Sager Ashton died in 1066, at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.

But he didn't. Not really.

Because during that battle he angered a Norse goddess.

And Freyja, whose realm is the home of the honourable dead, has cursed him to die a thousand deaths.

Sager has died three hundred and twelve times now, in many horrific and painful ways.

But this life is different. This time the boy he's become has serious problems of his own.

Problems that could become life-threatening if Sager does nothing…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kincaid Publishing
• Release date: Feb 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224338528

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About this book

Sager Ashton died in 1066, at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.

But he didn’t. Not really.

Because during that battle, he angered a Norse goddess.

And Freyja, whose realm is the home of the honourable dead, has cursed him to die a thousand deaths.

Sager has died three hundred and twelve times now, in many horrific and painful ways.

But this life is different. This time the boy he’s become has serious problems of his own.

Problems that could become life-threatening if Sager does nothing…

One Thousand Deaths

One

Sager Ashton knew when he died he would wake up as someone else.

He just didn’t expect to do it kneeling in front of a toilet bowl, his arms collapsed across the seat as if he’d fallen unconscious, his head hanging half in the bowl. Which was good, because as soon as he opened his eyes and shifted slightly his stomach took that as permission to throw up.

When he was finally done he pushed himself upright on unsteady legs and closed the toilet lid, flushing the foul-smelling mess away. Then he lurched across to the basin and cupped his hands beneath the tap, rinsing his mouth several times, trying to spit the taste of vomit away. There were a row of three toothbrushes hanging in a plastic holder on the wall above a plastic yellow cup on the corner of the basin, but Sager didn’t reach for them. He had no idea which toothbrush belonged to the person he now was.

Instead, he raised his eyes to the big mirror behind the basin, curious to see what he looked like this time.

He was maybe sixteen or seventeen, eighteen at the outside. Medium height, around one eighty centimetres, dressed in worn pyjama shorts that showed a body that wasn’t skinny but wasn’t over-muscled either. Light brown wavy hair, pale blue eyes, and he was white-skinned again.

Very different to what he’d looked like when he’d died the first time.

Back then he’d been a little shorter, maybe one sixty five, half-starved, dirty and terrified, with grey eyes and sandy hair. The young man he now was looked like he kept himself reasonably fit – unlike the man he’d been before Greg, the middle-aged accountant he’d died as the night before. That man, Ron, had been morbidly obese. Thank the gods he’d only been him for a few weeks. Sager hadn’t felt that unhealthy for centuries. He was almost glad when Ron had died from a heart attack as Sager was trying to introduce the bloated body to a bare minimum of exercise.

Almost.

Because he knew he wasn’t Ron’s cause of death. He never was. He had no idea when death would come to his hosts, he just knew they would not die from natural causes. He’d been some people for a few days or weeks, others for decades. He’d only been Greg for two days. Greg had died in hospital after he’d been hit by a car in Rockhampton.

His had been the three hundred and twelfth death Sager had died in the last thousand or so years.

He had six hundred and eighty eight to go, if he took the goddess Freyja’s curse literally.

Or maybe six hundred and eighty seven, if she counted his own death as the first one.

She probably didn’t, though.

At least he was still male. One of his recurring fears was that one day he’d wake up female.

He could imagine the goddess doing that to him, just because.

The memory of the rage in her eyes still gave him nightmares.

He coughed weakly, his throat raw, and his head throbbed in time with the cough. He felt sick – and not just throwing-up sick. His head pounded to a slow rhythm, his stomach ached, his whole body ached and he felt shaky and weak and more tired than he’d ever felt in his life. He vaguely remembered feeling like this back in