Brishauna tossed in her sleep. Springs dug into her side. The edge of the bed against her back made her open her eyes.
Her phone buzzed against the metal of the filing cabinet that served as her nightstand. She balanced precariously on the edge of comfort, unwilling to turn over to get it. She reached over her head and grabbed the phone, wincing as the too-bright backlight assaulted her eyes.
Notifications:
Battery Saver 15% power.
Erisnet notifications
Hey, are you alive? (coPiOuS, 7:30pm)
Are we on tonight? (19AndrewS, 7:35pm)
Guess not. *tear* (coPiOuS, 8:00pm)
Brishauna groaned and looked at the corner of her screen. 11:38pm. Damn. Another missed session. She opened Erisnet and looked down the long conversations.
Sorry guys, fell asleep after work. (BTimeWiz342, 11:39pm)
She pressed the button on the back, turning off the eye stabbing screen. Eyes blasted by it, the room descended into absolute darkness. She didn’t feel good. Yes, the ten-hour shift at the hospital left her hollow and soulless, it usually did, but she also felt physically sick. Groaning, she shifted, leaned over the edge of her bed and pawed around at the junk on the floor looking for everything. Her glasses hit her knuckles first. She set them on the bedstand. Used notebooks and unopened mail, books and empty paper plates, red plastic cups with markers, old tissues, plastic game miniatures and pencil cases brushed against her fingertips.
She grasped a cool wire and felt the texture; the power cord to the alarm clock. A second cord felt smooth. A game controller? She leaned precariously over, felt a mesh coated cable and grabbed for it. Her hips overbalanced. She abandoned the cord, grabbed for the sheets, the pillows, the headboard; anything to stop her tumble.
Thud.
“Ow.” She said. Cool stone broke her fall. “What the hell?” she fumbled over her head for the phone on the filing cabinet, but more stone greeted her hand. She rubbed her eyes until bright stars flashed in her vision. She pinched herself. Then she realized that her arms no longer wore sleeves.
Stone grated against stone. A vertical sliver of light yawned into a square. A sillouhette filled the blinding whiteness.
“Hold, sleeper. Please!” a male voice called out to her. An orb of light floated out from the whiteness and settled in a chandelier.
The whole structure rumbled. The ground pitched and she lost her balance. A pale hand reached out to her. She took it, her hand in stark contrast to his both in color and temperature. She let him pull her to her feet. The structure rumbled again. She looked at the pointy-eared white face of the elf who had helped her up.
“Alive?” asked the pale elf, “How is it possible?”
“What the hell?” she asked. Her mind whirled, the stone groaned, and light fizzled through runes etched into the marble walls.
Knowledge slammed into her brain: Necropolis at Akel; the rim above the desert Aryn, the dungeon of Ov. The elf; undead. Am I Alive? No, whispered the knowledge flooding into her brain.
“Deathless,” she said. The understanding of the template filtered through her substance. The elf sucked air through his teeth.
“That makes more sense,” he said.
“I’m in the game world? Is this a dream?” she asked. the elf smirked.
“Dreamers don’t ask of citizens of their dream whether they are dreaming.”
“Is this Akel above Ov?”
“Of course it is, sleeper. Come! Come quickly.”
“What is happening?”
“Too many things. Seige. You. Them,” he said as he led her out into a hallway. Shambling things crowded the edge of the elf’s light. Red eyes glowed in the darkness, too many to count. The stone hallway reeked of death, rot, spices and blood.
“The undead?”
“They are not entirely sentient.”
“They want to eat me?”
“To welcome you.”
“I’m naked,” said Brishauna.
“Oh, of course. Let’s get you clothed for battle. Come on. The wardrobes and armorers are upstairs.”
He led her by the hand through the press of undead bodies in the hallway. The corpses followed as they hustled, creaking and farting as they moved. The smell made her stomach flip-flop but nothing came up.
“Why are they following us?”
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“They desire to join the battle upstairs. It has awakened all of them. They are ravenous.”
“Why are they down here then?” she asked. He halted in front of a blank stone wall.
“Oh,” she said. “There should be a door here.”
“Yes, sleeper. There is nobody inside the fort to let us out.”
“You locked yourself out of your own fort?”
“Ah, no. The gatekeeper was killed.”
“How do you know?”
“It is the only way it could be. I left him with an order to let me out within three days. That was five weeks ago. We despaired of being able to help our descendants.”
“You are not a member of the Akel Necropolis,” she said, “The wards can’t hold you.”
“That would be the other reason I know the gatekeeper is dead. When a gatekeeper dies, the necropolis goes on lockdown. Even I can’t pass the door.”
“You expected that you should be able to? What are you?”
“I am a servant of the Aryn. You know, an Imbiber of the waters? Does this mean anything to you?”
“You have been to the navel of the world,” said Brishauna.
“Donem has brought the star to the keeper of the Aryn. I was sent to bring news to the forts that still fight. I did not expect to be entrapped,” he said. More knowledge flooded her mind.
“The lich-lord.”
“He has made it known that his name is Risaud the Sane,” said the elf.
“So, you want me to what, exactly?”
“Open the gate.”
“But I’m not alive either.”
“You’re deathless. Strictly speaking, you were never alive because you were not born in this world and so death cannot touch you.”
“This doesn’t make sense. I was just—”
“You can tell me where your consciousness resided before now later, sleeper. Just try as I asked now. It might be just enough to trip the safeties. Put your hand on the door. Please, sleeper.”
“What will happen?”
“The humans have sieged this place. What happens when you let the undead out of any space they are tasked with protecting? But if that troubles you, think upon the consequences of letting the humans open this door. Do you want the Empire to have one more dungeon to exploit?”
“No!” Brishauna said and slapped her hand on the wall.
Magic snapped under her palm. Mechanisms in the wall groaned and clanked. The whole wall began to rotate. As soon as a sliver opened up wide enough for a body, The undead crowded her out of the way and streamed out of the necropolis.
“That was unpleasant,” said the elf, dusting himself off, “Well, what are you waiting for? Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“To get you some clothes, obviously. There is a battle. How should I equip you? What is your class? Magus? Fighter? Priestess? Rogue?”
“Dungeon master,” she said. The elf’s jaw dropped. He backed away from her.
“Impossible,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Every sleeper comes with a class. Dungeon master is not a class. It’s--”
“Look, elf, I haven’t actually played this game in years, OK? Nobody ever lets me. I never have time. I just run mods and work on my homebrew. I have an Erisnet server and about three games a week that I run but I never get to play. I don’t even have a character. If I am not dreaming then I have stumbled into some isekai—”
“You don’t have a class? Nothing? You can’t be. Risaud said nothing about this!”
“My name is Brishauna Foreman. I am a nurse at Rose County General Hospital. I work eighty hours a week. I haven’t felt healthy in months. I just overslept my Wednesday night session and let my players down, my cell phone is about dead and I fell out of bed into a whole different world where I’m not even alive; a world I have been dreaming about for years.”
Brishauna stepped over the threshold between the necropolis and the fort. She knelt down and pulled at a hand sticking out of a pile of stone. The whole fort rumbled again, loosing more stone in the hallway around them. A dead elf slid out of the rubble, his eyes staring into nothing.
“Isn’t he supposed to get up? Don’t Faryn just rise up after they die?”
“Your knowledge doesn’t tell you?”
“My knowledge tells me a lot about. . .not the Faryn. Not yet, anyway. It says a lot about the race that was here before the Faryn. All I know about you right now is the template modifiers to the vanilla elf stats and a brief blurb about how you all are necromancers and none of you stay dead.”
“It takes alchemical reagents and complex spells to activate them. All of those we just loosed? Every one of them went through a nine-week process to preserve their bodies. Their souls had to endure complete isolation the entire time and to a soul in that state, evey second is an eternity. They had to go through so much. My trials were a shortcut by comparison. We don’t just reanimate automatically like common ghouls.”
“Then I’ve been playing your race wrong the whole time.”
“Playing. . .”
“Representing. I’m a Dungeon master, ok? Faryn aren’t a playable race, but they are in my homebrew. But then. . .the books were written from the perspective of Donem, weren’t they?” she looked at the corpse on the floor, then at the elf.
“Look, I’m sorry. I have to get out of here. I don’t belong. I can’t belong. I must’ave hit my head on something. I have to wake up.”
Brishauna stood and ran down the crumbling hallway. The floor pitched under her feet. Magic tingled in her fingertips. Nakedness suddenly didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except getting out of the tangle of passages and into the sunlight. The knowledge put a map in her mind’s eye.
The sound of battle reached her ears before a trace of sunlight pierced her eyes. She opened a bronze door onto a battlement and raced out into the sunlight. The elf padded after her, his heelbones clicking on the stone.
“Wait, no!” the elf called out. Brishauna stopped and stared onto the field below. Screams of agony filled the smoky air. Sixteen stories down, humans shrieked and fled the battlefield. The undead crawled over the dead in a wave of gnashing teeth. Her stomach did flip-flops again.
“Get back, you’ll be destroyed!” he called from the doorway. Sixteen arrows blossomed in her chest and she staggered, staring at them. A seventeenth pegged her in the center of her forehead.
She sank to her knees and looked up at the sun, a blue-white spot in the sky with an orange belt around its equator—just as the book described it, a quark star with a yellow and a red sun orbiting it so swiftly that you couldn’t tell from the planet’s surface that there was more than one, so far away that those equatorial suns looked tiny, but the solar complex imparted light to the planet as bright as the sun of earth.
Cold hands dragged her back into the shelter of the doorway. A magical blast rocked the tower and destroyed the battlements.
“Holy shit I’m not dreaming,” she said.
“No. Did you have to run outside naked just to figure that out?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Did you figure out what the knowledge in your head had to teach?”
“I’m not alive.”
“That much is obvious.”
“I am a dungeon master.”
“Fine, I believe you. Now can we get you an extraction and a robe? I will have to take this news back to my lord. If Ov has a dungeonmaster again, the other eleven dungeons in the rim might also have them soon if they don't already. The end times are truly upon us.”
“Why is that?”
“Twelve deathless ones guarded the tree, each bearing a core. Most tales in the Aryn repeat themselves over and over again as sure as the sun wheels around the rim. But there is no tree in the Aryn and there are no dungeon cores in any of the twelve. Even Risaud understands this legend to be dead. You can’t be a dungeon master if you have no core to bear.”
“There has to be, doesn’t there? If I am here and the knowledge tells me about what I am, then Ov's core has to be somewhere in this place. If not here, then I guess I will just have to find where it has gone.”