I’ve had this ... daydream, I guess, for years. In the dream, I’m minding my own business, waiting for the bus or buying a six-pack of beer at the corner store, when suddenly disaster strikes.

A kid runs into traffic, or a robber pulls a gun. Something like that.

In the daydream, I’m the hero. I save the kid or disarm the robber, or shove the racist cop off the bridge. It was pretty silly to fantasize like that, considering I wasn’t a teenager anymore, but still, I enjoyed it.

Of course, I knew I was no hero.

I’d never disarm a robber. Hell, I didn’t even like making eye contact with cops, just in case. Plus the chances of me running into traffic to save a kid ... well, I wasn’t that dumb.

Or so I thought.

Until one evening I was at the corner store buying a six-pack of beer. Just like in the daydream. And ... nothing happened. No robber, no building on fire. Hell, there wasn’t even a kitten stuck in a tree.

So I headed home. I found myself walking behind a hipster dad pushing an empty stroller, with a little girl toddling along beside him.

I was idly thinking about texting Camilla, this woman I’d met at work. I was hesitating because I couldn’t tell if she’d been flirting with me or just had a bubbly personality. I didn’t want to be a creep. Of course, if her personality was bubbly, it would’ve matched her bubble butt perfectly ... which was maybe a little creep-ish already.

I’d never say that aloud, though, so--

The little girl in front of me bolted.

Into the street.

Where an SUV was bearing down on her like the End of Days.

Before I knew it, I was sprinting after her. I guess all those daydreams had trained me to react without thinking.

I didn’t even have time to be scared.

I just ran flat out.

I was in pretty good shape. My ex-girlfriend had been heavily into tennis, so for a year and half I’d been heavily into it too. I got pretty damn fit for a while there. We broke up six months ago, though, and while I did a little manual labor at work, and swam in the ocean now and then, my only really regular exercise was walking my elderly neighbor’s dog.

Still, I managed to sprint twenty feet in three terrified heartbeats.

I heard the dad screaming in horror behind me.

Wheels screeched.

Brakes screamed.

The SUV skidded forward.

My world narrowed to just me and that stupid little girl, still toddling onward, completely oblivious to her impending death.

I reached down and grabbed her upper arm as hard as I could. Her skin felt soft in my palm.

Then I wrenched her backward. Hard enough to dislocate her shoulder. She wailed and I heaved her little body behind me, out of the path of the SUV.

And, uh, yeah. You’ve already spotted the tiny flaw in my plan, haven’t you?

***

I woke in a daze.

Disoriented, unfocused, and tied down on a hospital bed.

I didn’t remember the SUV hitting me, though I knew that it had. Nothing else could’ve possibly happened. I didn’t remember any pain, but--

“What the fuck?” I said, when my mind cleared.

Because I wasn’t in a hospital bed. The ceiling above me wasn’t acoustical tiles and florescent lights. The ceiling was stone. A dome of old, weathered stone rose above me. And at the very top of the dome, there was a round slab of rock the size of a ... a wagonwheel or something, maybe two feet thick, decorated with elegantly curving shapes and strange letters.

Runes.

Glowing runes that faded as I watched.

I didn’t even try to convince myself that I’d seen a trick of the light. Those were fucking runes. I tried to move, but nope: I was tied tightly in place.

I whimpered in fear and raised my head, Looking down my body, I saw a stone wall between my sneakers, twenty or thirty feet away. A couple of white stone columns were widely space in front of the wall, which curved around behind me.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Okay. I was in the center of a small, round, domed room with a ring of slender columns surrounding me.

Also, I wasn’t on a bed, hospital or otherwise. No, I was on a raised platform of polished obsidian or onyx or some glossy black stone.

An altar.

A fucking altar.

I was tied onto an altar, bound at the wrist and ankles and chest.

I whimpered again. In fact, I whimpered harder. Because hey, it had worked really well the first time.

What I didn’t do was call out, “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? Help!”

Because if you wake up lashed to a stone altar in medieval-looking chamber illuminated only by the freakishly-bright flames of the braziers burning around you, which are also emitting terrifying quantities of oily smoke, the first thing you don’t want is attention.

Instead, I wrestled silently with my panic for a minute. Maybe two. Then I rolled my head to the side to see the cord around my right wrist ... and the cord was smoke.

Like, actual smoke.

I was tied down by cords of smoke, and they were too strong for me to break.

“Okay, Alex,” I muttered. “Time to wake up.”

My full name was Ruben Alex Levin, but everyone except my mother called me Alex. (My mother called me, ‘How come you’re still working that dead-end job, why couldn’t you be more like your sister?’ Though for the record, my sister was a clinically-depressed dentist, while I was happy working at the waterfront.)

Anyway, I tried the trick I always used when I wanted to wake up from a nightmare. I tried brute-forcing my consciousness into alertness, making myself remember my bed and my bedroom, with the bathroom door to my left and--

The braziers flared with fire.

More smoke poured from them, turning the entire room black.

Except for one window of light. It wasn’t a normal window, though. It was a text-window that said:

QUEST: You find yourself lashed to the altar upon which you were summoned, in the Temple of the Billowing Ones, Those Who Linger, the Formless Forms of Forgotten Flames. Remove the linchpin at your fingertips before the gem crushes your skull.

REWARD: Survive, and gain moderate expoi.

FAILURE: Skull. Crushed.

What the absolute crosseyed fuck? Quest? What quest? Hell, what ‘formless fucks of the fucking flames?’

What linchpin?

What gem?

And what the hell did that mean, crushing my skull?

“Okay,” I said again, as my heart started beating harder. “Stop--just stop.”

I tugged at my bonds but the smoke ropes felt like steel cables. My helplessness terrified me. I was paralyzed and--

Oh! Paralyzed like sleep paralysis.

Even my dreaming mind remembered that. Sometimes I’d get stuck between sleep and wakefulness. That happened to everyone, right? No big deal. So I calmed myself. After the panic passed I closed my eyes--which was silly in a dream, but you couldn’t expect logic while drowning in surreality--and tried once again to force myself awake.

I pushed my consciousness harder and harder into wakefulness, until an awful grinding noise sounded ...

My eyes sprang open.

And I saw a gem, three feet above me. The gem, I guess.

It was a round, semi-translucent stone about the size of a golf ball. Or half a golf ball. I didn’t know if it was a full sphere, because it was embedded in the slab of stone that was lowering toward my head.

Oh, didn’t I mention that? Yeah, the slab of wagonwheel-sized rock that a minute earlier had been on the ceiling was steadily dropping directly toward my head.

From beneath it, I couldn’t see what was keeping it in the air. I didn’t care. All that mattered was that it was descending toward me. Slowly, no faster than a beetle walked, but all too goddamn steadily.

And with enough weight to crush my head like an egg.

“Shit, shit, shit,” I whispered.

I needed ... what had that text-window said? I needed to remove the linchpin at my fingertips?

“What linchpin?” I asked aloud. Then louder, as the stone kept dropping toward my head: “What linchpin?”

So much for not attracting attention. If I didn’t stop that stone in thirty seconds, attention wouldn’t matter, because my brain would splattered across the stone floor and--

Bile rose in my stomach, and I couldn’t finish the thought. Okay, focus.

Find the linchpin.

I raised my head and looked more closely at my right hand. My wrist was in the firm grip of a rope of impossibly-strong smoke. There was nothing near my hand, nothing near my fingertips. Not a linchpin, not anything else except for a flat expanse of black stone altar.

So I looked at my left hand.

“Oh,” I said.

There, just beyond my fingertips, a copper-colored bar disappeared into a hole in the glossy black stone altar. The bar was about as thick as my pinky finger, and cross-hatched with grooves.

The linchpin?

Had to be.

As the smoky gem, and the massive skull-crushing stone, lowered toward my head--two feet away now--I stretched my left arm as far as possible.

I reached out with my hand ... and I touched the linchpin. I felt the cool metal with the tip of my middle finger, but couldn’t get any closer.

The huge round stone was twenty inches away from my forehead, then nineteen.

My fingernail scratched and scraped at the linchpin, but didn’t get a grip.

“C’mon, c’mon,” I begged under my breath, and stretched farther.

My nail rasped across the cross-hatching ... yet I couldn’t get any purchase. I couldn’t move the linchpin an inch. Hell, I couldn’t move it a millimeter.

All I could do was touch the very end of it, as the killing weight of the stone lowered toward my face. The gem was ten inches above me. Polished smooth, and round instead of faceted, but definitely a gem. Tendrils of smoke seemed to curl through the interior.

Which I might’ve found more interesting if it hadn’t been seven inches away from killing me.

Then five inches.

My breath came in gasps. I threw everything I had into stretching my arm, my hand, just one more fraction of inch ... but I couldn’t. I couldn’t grip the linchpin, much less remove it from the hole.

And I couldn’t stop the stone from lowering another three inches. From crushing me to death.

I’d never been that frightened. I’d never been that desperate.

The gem touched my forehead ... and kept moving.

The pressure jammed the back of my head into the altar.

The gem pressed harder. Tears sprang to my eyes. Pain blossomed in my forehead, like a drill was boring into my bone.

My fingertip frantically scraped the linchpin. And even though I didn’t have a grip, I pulled. Without hope, without expectation, without anything except absolute need, I pulled.

The linchpin vanished and--

A notification appeared.

Domain:

1 Linchpin

In my mind, I saw an image of the linchpin. It looked like a copper rod, about six inches long. Not an image, really. More of a ... concept. And not my mind, apparently: in my domain.

More important, the millstone froze in place. The brutal, crushing weight remained. Pain radiated from my head into my neck and shoulders as the gemstone kept me clamped to the altar by my forehead, but at least it had stopped moving. At least it hadn’t killed me.

I almost wept in relief.

SUCCESS! You removed the linchpin before the gem crushed your skull. Good choice.

REWARD: Moderate expoi.

Accept Gem? 100% Chance of Successful Implantation.