“What do you mean?” I said, “Like you actually hear voices speaking to you?”

Emma nodded, “Of course.”

I exchanged glances with Max. He seemed non-plussed. I was a little freaked out.

“How long has this gone on? Before the game?” I asked.

“No,” Emma said. “Only in the game.”

“Do you remember when it started?” Max asked.

She thought for a moment and said, “After the city.”

“Springfield?” Max said. “That was when we hit third level. So, you would have gotten a boon.”

“Oh, right. I took Devine Inspiration.”

“What’s the description of that boon?” I asked.

“Looking it up now,” Max said.

I was already in the help menu looking as well. I found the description as Max read it:

Divine Inspiration

Type: Boon

With each milestone, you feel a gentle touch from beyond, your spirit guided by the wisdom of celestial beings. Whispers of ancient knowledge guide your every step, and your presence becomes a beacon of hope and understanding for those who fight at your side. In moments of doubt, your soul emboldens, reminding others of the sacred path you walk.

“Holy moly,” I said. “That sounds sinister.”

“What?” Emma exclaimed. “That’s not sinister, it's uplifting.”

“Let’s put it in the context of how it's manifesting,” I said. “You’re hearing voices in fires.”

Max interrupted, “And you are talking to your horse.”

“Yeah, but that’s pretty innocuous.”

“Is it?” Max said.

“Yeah, but Emma hasn’t shared any of what the voices in the fires have shared with her.”

“And you haven’t told us any of what your horse has said,” Max said.

“You really want to hear about sixty-two types of grass, and which is the most delicious?”

“Not really,” Max said. “But I didn’t know what she was telling you or if it was meaningful.”

“All you had to do was ask,” I said.

“Did you ask Emma?”

I sputtered, “Well… we were kinda busy…” As Emma glared at me.

Slade asked, “Hey, Emma, what do the fires tell you?”

She took a deep breath, and we all waited eagerly.

“That we are here to solve puzzles and build a bridge. That we are not alone; there are a lot of others in here with us, all trying to do the same thing.”

“Alright,” Max said. “So. There’s an endpoint to this game. It's not just a sandbox.”

“Or a live-service.” I added.

“Cool,” Slade said. “Let’s do it. Knock out this puzzle, collect our pay, and head home.”

“Any indication what the puzzle is?” Max asked.

Emma shook her head slowly. “No, but they say we would get clues when on the right track, including the first time we met a glitch.”

I remembered that. It was the first time we’d gotten an experience message without fighting or killing something. I whispered, “Right, the dungeon of the glitch.”

Max looked at me nodding, then got excited, “So the glitches, are they the puzzle?”

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

“I think so,” Emma said. “They seem like very old souls caught in the game.”

“How do you know they were old souls?” I said.

“It was trying to communicate with us. It kept touching the chessboard and pointing to the writing.” Emma said.

“Did anyone copy that writing?” I asked.

“Of course,” Emma said, “What do you think I was doing down there?”

I shrugged, “I don’t know, talking to fires.”

Emma scrunched her face like I was the crazy one.

“Can we see a copy of it?” Max asked.

Emma went into her inventory and pulled out the book The Voyage of the Enneaxia.

The cover of the book still made me feel uncomfortable. It showed a black sailing ship on black waters under a black sky. The ghost ship seemed to sail without crew. It looked lost and lonely, and looking at it made me feel the same.

She opened the back cover. Where the last page had once been blank, the message on the dungeon wall had been recreated. Most of the symbols were dashes, angles, and triangles. Max and I huddled around Emma while Slade was content to watch.

“Does Enneaxia mean anything?” I asked.

“Possibly,” Emma said. “In Hellenistic Greek, Ennae is the number nine. Axia also means worth, value, or merit. Together, they could mean nine values.”

“Or nine glitches,” Max said.

“I wonder if it means there are nine puzzles?” I mused, “Or maybe there are nine clues?”

“A coded message. This could very well be the first puzzle.” Max was excited by this prospect. “The first thing we need to do is break it down by individual characters. A, E, I, and O are the most common letters in English, along with T, S… and N if I remember correctly.”

“What if it's not in English?” I asked.

“I know Spanish, Greek, and some Aramaic writing,” Emma said. When she saw the looks Max and I gave her, she continued, “Anthropology specializing in Religion and Myth. The Bible was originally written in Hellenistic Greek.”

“Good to know,” I said. “Especially since the name of the book has Greek in it. Anyone else know any other languages?”

Max shook his head. I didn’t, but Slade said, “Does Klingon count?”

We all laughed, and I said, “What?”

“My dad was a huge nerd. Taught me chess, Klingon, and some elvish. You know, Tolkien?”

Still laughing, I said, “Also good to know. Sadly, I don’t see any elvish in the Enneaxia book.”

He shrugged, probably very used to getting his chops busted in whatever frat he was part of.

Looking at the recreation that Emma had made Max asked, “How did you write this?”

“Here,” Emma said. “I’ll show you.”

A stick and a candle appeared in Emma’s hands. The candle was already lit, and she passed the end of the stick through the flame.

“Clever,” Max said. “Can I borrow it?”

“Sure,” Emma said, giving Max the stick with the burnt end.

“All right, let's make a list of all the unique characters,” Max said as he started scrawling a column of shapes.

Emma and I helped by pointing out characters that weren’t on the new list.

“I’m going to go do some networking,” Slade announced as the three of us worked on the list.

Max perked up, “Networking?”

“Yeah,” Slade said. “You know, like rubbing elbows with others. Malworth may be a foul-tempered bastard, but he’s got beer… so…”

We continued working on making a list of all the individual characters. After a good half-hour of checking, double-checking, and triple-checking, we were finally satisfied that we’d gotten them all.

I counted, “Twenty-seven characters.”

“That seems to be a recurring number,” Max said.

“Yeah, it’s a perfect cube. Three times three, times three.” I said, then thought about what Emma had explained earlier. “Nine is also a factor. Nine times three. If Ennea being nine is significant.”

“Okay,” Max said. “The next part is just going to take some brute force, counting each character. We only got one stick, so I’ll do this part, and you two can join Slade, or sleep, or whatever.”

Max stood up with the book and took the candle from Emma. He then wandered back to his sleeping roll, where he lay down and began counting each of the characters.

“I guess I’m going to go see what Slade is up to,” Emma said.

“Wait.” I said before she could get up. “Can I ask you something?”

“Uh huh…”

“Do you trust them? The Eneaxia?”

“I do,” she said. There was an odd look in her eyes. It seemed distant and introspective.

“Why?”

Emma looked down at the ground. “I don’t know that I can explain it. There’s an age-old, ancient loneliness, and yet a yearning for something, understanding, I think. I wish there were more, but I trust them; I want to be friends with them.”

“We’ve only seen one. How do you know there is a ‘them’?”

“The goblins said there were more. Many more, consuming their lands from the south.”

“An invading army doesn’t sound very friendly,” I said.

Emma paused a moment, “I’m sure the people of Springfield will say the same of the goblins. Yet we were able to make a deal with them.”

She went off to find Slade. I went to my bedroll and watched the stars for a bit. Occasionally, Max would swear. I drifted off to sleep.

I woke up to the sound of a goblin war horn. They were blasting like a dozen of them in fast, short blasts. Goblins were scrambling around, tearing down tents and packing stuff up on the back of their swiftscales. I was happy that all I had to do was open an inventory menu to pack my gear away.

Emma had moved her sleeping roll closer to Slade’s. I was relieved to see they weren’t sharing one.

With a gigantic smile, Max brought Princess to me. “Good morning. Ready for another day of riding?”

“I might be, but my ass says not at all.”

He laughed politely even though it wasn’t my best work. “I spent most of the night trying to see if there were repeated letter combinations.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, petting Princess’s nose.

“I think you’ll find it interesting. All the repeat words are three-letter combinations.”

“Weird. If they have twenty-seven characters and they make only three letter words… that means they have a vocabulary of roughly… twenty-thousand words. English has something like a half million. That would be a very basic rudimentary language.”

“True,” Max said. “Unless their primary communication is something else.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Smell? Sign Language? Maybe telepathy.”

I thought about it a moment, but there was nothing in the human experience that offered any direct evidence for telepathy, or telekinesis, or clairvoyance no matter what people like Emma thought. I was just about to express my rejection of his idea when a message flashed by:

Gained: Experience