A flash of text moved over my eyes, too quick to read. Something about cold cuts? I must be hungrier than I thought.

All around me was the evidence of my glorious victory, my ultimate triumph, my undeniable ascension!

I was pretty much covered in that evidence actually, and it was starting to dry. Ick.

Time to take stock. Three whole bodies of unknown, bipedal species with deep social bonds and carnivorous behaviour. Broken blade of absolute murder. An indeterminate number of my predecessors scattered around.

I had come so far. Or at least, farther than those guys.

“Hey guys are you almost done? I’ve got a great idea for the next one!”

It was ‘The Voice’, coming muffled from the other room, but definitely the voice.

“I’m coming in! I’m covering my eyes! Hide whatever you want hidden!”

Through the doorway came an old man, stepping carefully into the room. He was wearing white flowing robes, and was indeed covering his eyes. Even with his eyes covered, I could also see that he possessed the most tremendously bushy eyebrows I had ever seen. They curled around his hands with a sort of lively eagerness that unsettled me; entangling through his fingers like a timelapse video of a slime-mold; the longer I stared the more they trembled and the knowledge became increasingly unavoidable that they were reacting to my gaze.

“You guys! Are you prepping a surprise for me? Ohhh I’m excited now! I might peek! Did you do something fun to the body this tim—aHhh!” The Voice shouted in surprise as it encountered the scene—my scene—before it. “Wha-? You did it!”

The Voice was pointing at me excitedly with both hands. His eyebrows danced, scooping dust into their depths like some kind of underwater filter feeder.

After what I’d been through, I immediately tried to stab him.

It wasn’t a very serious stab to be fair, more of a ‘testing the waters’ kind of stab. A ‘hahaha, wouldn’t it be funny if this killed you—I mean I don’t expect it to, but what if?’ kind of stab.

For the briefest of moments I got my hopes up as the broken edge moved smoothly into his body, but the complete lack of resistance and blood left me disappointed.

“No one has beaten the initial challenge in ages! I was beginning to think that the ‘deprived’ archetype was a wash, but you’ve really bucked the trend! This is what, the six-thousandth generation?” He was talking at me without any particular concern for the inches of metal I was currently waving through his face and torso.

“The slow blade penetrates the shield,” I whispered as I moved the broken blade slowly into him... nothing.

Before I could really get into the swing of things however, he gestured at my blade distractedly and it dissolved into rusty flakes within my grip.

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“That’s quite enough of that! Bucking my temperate and reasonable rule doesn’t come until much later young man! Hahahahaha!”

He laughed a jovial kind of wizard-mentor laugh, the sort of laugh you craved to hear again. I resented it immediately.

“I hate you, your rule is unreasonable. I’m bucking it now. I want to go home to Small-Town City, America.” I felt I made my case a bit ineloquently, but was prepared for him to recognize the rightness in my proposal nevertheless.

He looked at me with the confusion all fools suffer before my superior intellect, his eyebrows entangling together like velcro and sticking fast, forcing his face into a befuddled expression.

“But lad, you are home! There’s nowhere else for you! And besides, you’re doing such a wonderful job so far it would be a shame to keep you from proceeding.”

He needed another round of my irrefutable logic.

“I belong in America. I want to make grass angels again, and push ice-cream at my wife’s face, and she can push it at mine.” For some reason my words weren’t coming out quite right when I wanted to talk about home. But I knew what the feeling of home was: that everything about it was right and good and safe, in all the ways this place was not.

He looked at me quizzically and hummed for a moment, but then began to talk once again, absentmindedly disentangling his eyebrows with practised ease.

“Ahh I see, your origin framework is all wonky. Some kind of memory leak whenever you query it. Well I have some great news for you, none of that is real! You don’t have a family or a wife, and have never even been to America! So don’t worry about it, you just need to complete the dungeon and save the world.”

There was only one response to this kind of unscrupulous chicanery.

“I will not be gaslit by a man in a robe,” I told him.

“No truly, you are a construct. I didn’t summon you here from your earth. That hasn’t been a viable method of acquiring heroics in ages. No, you are something far better. You are an aggregate template of heroic traits, randomly varied along minor criteria—that’s how your memory leak crept in—and sent through the trials of my dungeon in the hopes of finding a set that is capable of saving the world!”

“I will not be gaslit by a man in a robe?” I asked him, a little nervously.

“Here, I’ll demonstrate. What were your parent’s names?”

That was an easy one. “Mom and dad,” I replied, already feeling reassured that I had outmanoeuvred his absurd claims.

“No no no. What. Were. Their. Names?” He repeated it slowly to me.

I struggled to recall their first names, but that wasn’t abnormal. I mean, I’ve called them mom and dad a million times. So what if I didn’t remember their given names. What mattered was who they were to me, and I told him so.

Undeterred he continued his assault!

“What were their faces like? What was the first Christmas you can remember? What was the name of your first dog? What is your wife’s—which you look a little young for by the way—name?”

I was starting to hyperventilate. None of it was real. Every time I tried to think about any of my past not only did it fail to appear, I could feel myself struggling, grasping at whatever I could to create a fiction not for him, but for myself.

“Honestly I’m surprised you didn’t notice it sooner, you told me to send you back where again? Tiny-Town City?”

“small-town city,” I whispered.

“Yes! Exactly! Incoherent. An assemblage of scattershot Americana tropes arrayed without logic. Let me guess...were there skyscrapers next to the soda-shop on main street?”

“T-that’s where they kept the business factory.”

I remembered the business factory, Dad worked there. It was a big building where they manufactured... business.

Feelings... terrible feelings of doubt were beginning to rise within me. None of it was real. None of them were real.

I wasn’t real.