The symbolism of her multicolored light—light that shot through a picture of her own majestic self—dancing across our backs and heads was not lost on me. Well, maybe it was. You could really take that in a few different directions, in my opinion. Plus, when it is up to humans to interpret meaning, they tend to read whatever is most convenient or palatable.

She held her palm flat, and flapped her fingers upward in the vaguest indication that we should stand. “Up,” she said, and the supplicants stood. (I stood up on all fours, attentively.)

Commander Zideo stood slowly, unable to take his eyes off of the woman. I knew that look.

Slowly, she walked in front of Addrion, a head shorter than the spacefaring warrior, if you didn’t count her tall, pointed hat. “I broke them out of Fort Weepus,” said Addrion. “They’re holding prisoners there… and worse.” Addrion sniffed and added, “Your majesty.”

I had never been in the presence of human royalty before that day. I still do not understand the purpose, myself, but humans seem to get either very excited or very upset about it. Either way, the scent I was getting from my human was nearing fight or flight. He leaned back on his heels, inched away perhaps without even realizing it, with every step she took toward us. Her slippers tapped across the stone, and the sound was swallowed by the soft carpet interior.

“If I may,” said Helmgarth, pointing his nose at the ground. (Just one of many moments that suggested to me that he would make a great dog.) “There was a sign in the sky. An omen.”

“You don’t know that,” said Addrion.

“But surely-”

“I saw it,” said the Princess, and they were silent. A pair of miniature Zideos, polka-dotted in colorful light, were imprisoned in the mirror lenses of her sunglasses. “Everyone saw it. Even, I am sure, the Boss Council.” Her voice had the commanding quality that I remembered from my trainer, many dog-years ago. I wanted to obey it, for obedience held the promise of some intangible reward; I feared to disobey it, for punishment hunched in the shadows of the dark, vaulted ceiling, swaying with this creaking tower.

“Indeed,” said Helmgarth. He looked like he was uncomfortable standing up. It was all he could do not to kneel in her presence. “They appeared moments later.”

She reflected the seneschal in her mirror lenses, then Zideo again.

“Commander Zideo,” she said, disliking the taste of the words. “You must be he.”

Zideo nodded.

“And who are the Game Fellows?” The miniature Zideos squirmed in her lenses.

“You’re asking me?” he said. His different colored eyes seemed to “bug out” from his skull. He looked thin.

“Your majesty,” hissed Addrion.

“Your majesty is asking me, your majesty?”

“Her majesty,” said Addrion, agitated. “You don’t address—”

The Princess lifted a hand and Addrion halted. How much power must she command to silence a soldier like Addrion, whose entire body seemed a weapon? She hadn’t so much as growled. She had no claws, no sharp teeth, no wings and no weapon, natural or otherwise.

“Commander,” she said. “Did you bring your forces with you?”

Zideo laughed nervously. “I keep getting this question,” he said. “It’s not a title. It’s an asethetic thing.”

“A screen name,” said Addrion, staring daggers into my human.

The Princess waited for a long time. “Sorry?” said Zideo. “Listen. I was just sitting at my desk, starting my stream back up. I had been banned—well, banned is harsh word, suspended from Twitch. For like… a week! For something I didn’t even do! And so I’m over here refreshing and refreshing every day waiting for my appeal to get looked at and finally they reviewed it and said they were reinstating it, so I started my great big return stream and everyone was SO psyched but then… there was lightning, and I fell into my computer screen, and now—”

She raised her hand again, and this time Zideo halted.

“Seneschal,” she said, looking to Helmgarth. “Did your mission succeed?”

Addrion’s face contracted—she formed the human sound “m” on her green lips, and I predicted she was about to say “Mission” before she caught herself.

“Yes… sort of. I have acquired the Compendium, your majesty.”

“Sort of?”

Helmgarth raised his head and brightened. “There are tidings her majesty must hear. The book is in the possession of our new friend, the Commander. For he truly does command it.”

All eyes turned back to Zideo.

“Well?” she said.

“It obeys him. M’lady… he opened it. It obeys him. He can summon it at his will.”

Then it really was quiet. Until, of course, my human broke the silence. “I don’t even want it. Here, do you want it?”

“NO,” said everyone in the room except the Princess. Even I barked a negative.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

The tower creaked, and blue and yellow lights played across the shoulders of the Princess.

“Forgive your servant,” said Helmgarth. “But does her majesty understand what this means?”

The Princess was very good at keeping her face completely composed, although I didn’t find that entirely fair, as perhaps her concealed eyes betrayed much. “Yes,” she said. “But I’d like to hear it from you.”

Helmgarth’s shoulders began to rise in embarrassment. An awkward patch of red light from the stained glass colored his cheek, as though he were comically ashamed of his words. “It must be said. I believe Commander Zideo is a player.”

She took a deep breath, and it seemed to me that the entire tower breathed out.

“We don’t know that,” repeated Addrion.

“I know that,” said Zideo. “I’m definitely a player. I was playing a game when I got here.” The ripples of the word were visible in the others present. The merchant was knocked back a step, Helmgarth winced, and Addrion became annoyed. “Shit,” he said, “sorry.”

The Princess had not reacted at all. “Better here than down there,” she said, with a nod toward the balcony. I heard the large-shod youth at the door chuckling.

“So, but wait… then you know?”

She waited patiently to see where he would go with this. She crossed her gloved hands in front of her waist.

“So it is all… g-words? You’re all from… them?”

She stared at him, reflecting the question on his face back at him.

“Everyone’s from somewhere,” muttered the merchant, speaking low and quickly as though he could circumvent the etiquette violation of speaking in front of the Princess. “We’ve been over this.”

“Yeah but like…” insisted Zideo, squeezing the air with his hands, “my place? The place I’m from isn’t a g-”

“The Purple Prince is dead,” said Helmgarth. All eyes turned to him. He looked miserable and joyous, full of terrible excitement. “Commander Zideo killed him.”

The blood drained from Zideo’s countenance, and I smelled the empty-stomach fear of an animal. “Wait,” he said. “That’s not my fault. Was he your… your…?”

The merchant’s hands went over his face in embarrassment. Addrion’s eyes went wide. Helmgarth trembled visibly, and all his creatures hid in his backpack. The eyebrows of the Princess rose, becoming visible above the tops of her shaded lenses, the only visible sign she made of her emotions.

“Was the Purple Prince… my consort?” she repeated, to clearly understand the question. “Was the heir to the Empire of Sorrow my lover?”

“That’s… I mean…?”

She did not erupt, but slowly turned her head toward Helmgarth.

“He understands little of the world,” said Helmgarth. “Another reason for my belief. He shows signs of an Inventory. He can Pause. He, ah… jumped on the prince.”

“Jumped?”

“M’lady… your majesty…” Helmgarth stammered and corrected himself. He brought up his hands to make gestures to explain. Although I pride myself in being perhaps the foremost dog scholar on human behavior, I have never understood this human practice, and will one day write a book on it.

“The wind was blowing from Shard Platformia. He dropped on top of the prince.”

“And the body? The proof?”

“The body was… well, you know… obliterated. In the Platformian manner.”

She shed the subject faster than Lisa shed her “business coat” after coming home from work. The Princess knelt down in front of me. I saw two warped images of myself reflected in her lenses: a handsome mutt, if I do say so myself. Gray fur that does not need to be groomed, of a texture that is shaggy enough not to be pretentious. My collar, the only clothing I will suffer, has what Lisa called (in a squealing voice) a “bow tie.” I didn’t like it at first, but after I saw Zideo forced to wear one to a school dance before he went off briefly to college, I recognized the formal feeling it bestowed on its wearer. When one wears a bow tie, people have no choice but to take one seriously.

She knelt down, her starlight-hued gown drawing back from her slippers, whispering as it shifted. She reached one white-gloved hand out to me, and paused. “And what about you? Are you a player as well?” I tried to helpfully say no, but all that came out was “Hruff.”

“It doesn’t speak, your majesty,” said Kriegsgeswinnler.

She stared at him. “It doesn’t speak?”

The merchant shook his head beneath his hood. “It’s like the ones in Open World World. Y’know. The ones that guard crime bosses’ houses and stuff.”

Her fingers tapered to a slight point beneath her gloves. This promised to be a very good head scratch, but she froze, and turned to Zideo.

“May I pet your dog?” she asked.

Everyone froze. Zideo tried to say something, but it evaporated in his throat, and so he nodded his head. It was indeed a pleasurable head scratch. She had nails beneath the gloves and she could really get in there.

“His name is Cormac,” said Zideo. Addrion back handed him in the ribs gently (by her standards) for speaking out of turn.

“Cormac of…?”

“Cormac McBarky,” said Zideo. He is always ashamed of my full name for some reason, but nobody seemed to take any notice. “Of Arizona, I guess.”

“Cormac,” she said, and she knew the EXACT spot on my cheeks and chin and she got a ton of Dog Points for that and she rose instantly to the top spot in my human rankings, except not THE top spot because Zideo was the great human of all time obviously but my nerves were a chorus of happy and I started to thump the floor with my tail and—

Ahem.

“He is why we almost got killed,” said Addrion, dourly.

The Princess inclined her head but pointedly did not face her subject.

“They’re making a new weapon,” she said. “A new kind of troop, a sort of bot that brainwashes nonsentients and uses them for control.”

“And you saved this one from that fate.” observed the Princess.

Addrion clearly thought she was being dressed down. “He wouldn’t leave without it. It cost us time.”

One by one, the critters began poking their heads out of Helmgarth’s backpack. The porcupine, the mouse, the others. “But you rescued them.”

Addrion didn’t know what to say.

“Good,” said the Princess. She turned to Addrion. “That’s good,” she explained. Why Addrion required an explanation for this is quite beyond me. Without her, I would have been an Ohmpressor. I might be out there now, marching towards the city.

The Princess walked back to her archway, where the background cacophony of breaking stones and shouting voices became a comforting signal of day-to-day normalcy. “Seneschal,” she said, “what makes you think he was not summoned here by the Boss Council?”

Helmgarth’s mouth was suddenly very dry. She continued. “What certainty do we have that this is not a ploy form the enemy?”

“Why… would they have?” His eyes fluttered in confusion. “How could they?”

“Seneschal.” It was a statement, and it obviously exhorted him to be serious. “Think. What good would a player do for us? What good has a player ever done? How much trouble has been left in the wake of those parasites, those destroyers?”

“I…” Helmgarth clearly could not believe what he was hearing.

“I have half a mind to send him to the dungeon,” she said, stroking her chin as though still debating it. My body was very confused. The need to protect my human clashed against the association of the best ear rubs I’d gotten in some time. “In fact, I think that would be getting off lightly. If I were the Boss Council right now, and I had summoned a new weapon to put the final nail in Ludopolis’s coffin, and my enemy’s servants brought it directly into the tower without delay….” Addrion looked at the floor. “Well, I would be pleased.” She sighed. “Helmgarth, you are no longer seneschal.”

He stepped back as though a blow had struck him in the chest.

“You are now prison warden. Mind your prisoner closely until I have decided what to do next. Consider this a matter of house arrest. You will be summoned soon.”

“And the dog?” said Helmgarth.

She did not smile. “The dog is of no concern, warden. Now, please leave. All of you.”