The Opsikion Theme was vast, lush, rolling. Everywhere farmers worked the land. Torres—Alexios—whoever he was—sensed that the alternating patchwork of yellow and green grain had been here for ages, as the golden spears glimmered and rushed in the wind, stretching into the blue distance.

The name of this part of Opsikion was Troas, in reference to Troy, a city so old it had sunk inside the hills, the ancestor to Rome. Although Troy’s exact location was unknown, you could hardly take a step here without tripping on a clay potsherd jutting from the ground. People had been living in this place since the Fall. At one point Torres spotted some kind of mountain shrine where a colossal woman extending her arms had been carved inside an enormous cave.

Older than Rome no doubt.

Torres passed olive orchards and vineyards as well as herds of cattle and goats. The hills and low mountains were all forested, and streams flowed in little silver ribbons where the songbirds were so loud he almost needed to cover his ears. Yet for the most part Torres thought the place sparsely inhabited, even compared to rural Maine. He passed several villages, but none could have housed more than a few hundred souls, and the people in the fields were almost always spread out and far off. It was easy to avoid meeting them and having to explain himself, yet when the Romans—that was what they called themselves—spotted him, they often waved. Some who were within shouting distance asked where he was from and if he had any news. When he mentioned Leandros, they would ask about friends or relatives there—people unknown to Torres. But since it was difficult to explain that he had lived in Leandros all his life and yet knew almost nothing about it, he would just tell these people that their friends and relatives were doing well. No one asked difficult questions.

From these interactions Torres leveled up to Intermediate Charismatic (5/10), and also advanced his strength and stamina a little by spending hours walking to the mountains on the horizon, moving in the straightest line possible. These improvements made the game more fun, but also changed his personality. To improve his charisma meant that he talked more with people; to improve his stamina meant that he walked faster and sometimes jogged.

When he reached the Simois River—which was more like a glorified stream—he crossed while holding the manual and his clothes above his head. He had even removed his medieval underpants. (This term, medieval underpants, always cracked him up.) Torres also made sure to move through the fields from one copse to the next so that it would be easy to hide, and he kept an eye both on where he was walking—in case he stepped on any snakes or scorpions—and who was nearby. A soldier mounted on a horse once cantered along a nearby dirt path, but Torres threw himself down into the grain before the man spotted him.

The biggest problem was the ache in his legs and feet. The water in his flask refreshed him, and he refilled it and rinsed his face wherever he found a stream. At around noon he stopped in a forest to devour his bread and cheese, and was once again shocked at how tasty and satisfying it was. Much of his stamina was replenished.

As he sat against a beech tree at the edge of a field of gleaming grain, he thought of a Russian novel he’d read for school—a real brick where everyone’s name was ten pages long. The Brothers Karamazov. How long had that book even been? A thousand pages? Why had they even read that for English class? It was about a bunch of sons trying to murder their dad to steal his money. Big deal!

Anyway, Torres remembered a moment in that novel—maybe toward the beginning?—when a priest or a monk or someone had pointed outside and said something like: look at all the trees and plants and animals just endlessly praying to God. That’s all they’re doing as they flicker in the wind. They just endlessly pray to God.

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Torres wasn’t religious, and his character’s piety was low, but he couldn’t help feeling something profound as he took in the majesty of these lands. He had always thought the Middle Ages backward. What was that phrase? “Cruel, dark, and short.” But now that he was here, he found that he kind of liked it. He was doing a modernity detox. Sure, it wasn’t all perfect, but more was going for it than he had realized.

The real question was: why did everyone think the Middle Ages was so terrible? Maybe it was worse elsewhere in Europe. But was he even in Europe? Wasn’t Turkey part of Asia and the Middle East?

As he was thinking of getting up to leave, he realized that no one was ordering him around. He was alone. If he returned to Eugenios and Eudokia, no one would care that he had failed to deliver the manual. His new family would welcome him. The world would continue, more or less, as it always had. Long periods of peace would be interrupted by short periods of war, plague, chaos. Decades when nothing happened would be interrupted by weeks when decades happened.

On the plus side, Mount Ida was much closer than when Torres had first set out. A strange noise also came from the distance. It was almost like peeping crickets, but louder and deeper. Torres stopped, ducked, listened—shaking his head. Then the sound faded. After a moment he got up and kept moving.

Weird.

Anyway, he’d had this vision in his head, before getting teleported to Byzantium, of a car stuck in the mud, just revving its engines and turning its wheels and spraying mud all over the place—wasting energy, getting nowhere. That’s what his life was. Whether you worked hard or not, the car was still stuck. The only escape was video games, where work made a difference, but in an imaginary realm. And more and more the outside world was intruding in video games these days: anyone with enough money could skip all the boring grinding. That last escape was being destroyed.

Here in Byzantium, however, with the sun shining on his face, he could change things, even if it seemed like almost nothing had changed for thousands of years.

It was contradictory. The world made no sense. Nature itself was hypocritical.

By now Torres had traveled enough into the interior, away from the Dardanelles and the Aegean, that villages were less frequent. In the grasslands goats and sheep were more common than people. The herders lived in tents, and must have taken them apart and moved when the seasons changed.

Cool, Torres thought. My first nomads. Aside from, like, biker gangs and people living in campers.

Forests became less common and were also sparser, populated by the kinds of plants and coniferous trees that preferred dryer environments. The ground grew rockier. When Mount Ida was so far above his head its peak almost touched the top of the sky, Torres found himself in a canyon that wound back and forth as the land rose into the mountains. Pebbles became rocks, and these grew to boulders that he sometimes needed to scale. In the heat and sunlight he was dripping sweat, and he worried about finding more water, as his stamina declined. But Eugenios had said it took half a day to reach Dionysios, whoever he was, so Torres must have been close.

Then something made Torres question his positive opinion of Byzantium. Straight ahead, over the boulders and at the winding canyon’s end, was an ant the size of a car.

It turned to him, bobbed its antennae, and made that peeping noise Torres had heard earlier.

He hid behind a nearby boulder and gasped.

Dionysios can get his own manual, he thought.

Just as he was about to sneak back to Leandros, the peeping stopped. Torres peeked over the boulder’s edge. The giant ant was gone.

He sighed, fell behind the boulder, and wiped the sweat from his eyes.

He looked up again. Giant ants covered the canyon walls. They were staring down at him. As he met their compound eyes, he pulled Eugenios’s knife from his pocket.

The metal glinted in the sun, and the ants fixated on it. Then they chirped at each other so loudly Torres needed to cover his ears to keep them from bursting. He turned to run, and the ants surged after him, their legs pounding the rocks. Something hard knocked him onto the ground. When he turned to slash it with his knife, all he could see were two enormous mandibles widening to eclipse the sun.