Usually I am a pretty light sleeper. Guarding the house is a dog’s duty, after all, and while my brain rests, my ears listen.

This was not the case when I awoke in Ludopolis. Although I heard the shuffling of feet, my eyes resisted opening. I felt I slept under a blanket of fatigue. Candlelight did its best to coax me back to sleep. Who was moving?

I forced my eyelids open enough to see Commander Zideo curled up on the stone floor, hands crossed over his chest and palms against his tattooed upper arms, as though he had fallen asleep shivering.

Helmgarth, who, if memory served, was dead, leaned over him. Zideo’s different colored eyes opened and searched the room. He convulsed at the sight of Helmgarth, and crawled backward, out of his shadow. Helmgarth smiled broadly.

“M’lord returned,” he said.

Zideo’s mouth gaped open at him. “You’re awake,” he said. “You’re… alive, and awake?”

Helmgarth held up the unopened potion, a small vial of red liquid sealed with a cork which I longed to gnaw. “Where did m’lord find this?”

Zideo got to his feet. Helmgarth’s blood stained both of their shirts. I felt it crusted on my ear.

“I ran to your house,” said Zideo. “Uh, your roof. Bud, it was bonkers out there. Goat masks and fireworks and… everything!” Helmgarth’s face was patience itself. “I got caught up in a parade. Somebody tried to pick my pocket, but there wasn’t anything.” He ran the events back in his mind. “I finally got to your, y’know. I opened the door to the roof and, bud, you have a problem.”

Helmgarth blinked. “Indeed?”

“Most deffo. I don’t know how this happened, but it’s a mess up there. It’s just piles and piles of cheese wheels and sweet rolls.”

“In…deed.” Helmgarth touched his lip.

“Is that normal? They just started rolling through the door. They were falling off the sides of your roof. Like a dang… ocean of cheese and pastries. I was knee deep in them looking for a potion.”

Helmgarth said nothing.

“I actually couldn’t find one, but I remembered seeing a couple potion seller carts near the tent yesterday morning. Where all the… new arrivals were.”

“M’lord ran all the way to the south gate?”

“No, no,” said Zideo. “I actually found another one, closer. Y’all love y’all’s potions, huh?” He shrugged. “Good thing I can just, like, make money appear out of nowhere now. I guess everyone can do that here? Y’all don’t believe in wallets?”

Helmgarth sat down and began unbuckling his pack. “Not everyone,” he said.

“Anyway, what happened to you? You were in bad shape last night, and you just….” Zideo looked at the ground, and I saw his eyes trace the paintbrush path of rust-red blood to the floor by the statue of the faceless Cozy diety.

Helmgarth patted the blood-encrusted jerkin, but did not recoil. He took the hem, such as it was, between finger and thumb, and raised it out of the way. His skin was hairy, but unblemished. Not even a scar remained. He dropped the hem, and the torn and blood-soaked jerkin hung back in place, his healed flesh visible through the hole.

He knelt down in front of the behoodied goddess, and mumbled quietly for what felt like a long time, and when he finally stood, he asked my human for a couple of coins. Zideo was only too happy to oblige, as he did not understand how the trick was accomplished but enjoyed doing it. The warden placed the coins on the ground beside the candles, which, although they continued to drip wax onto the floor, seemed no lower than the night before.

Helmgarth hoisted the pack and began fastening the buckles and buttons, a very involved process that took a few minutes start to finish. He gathered his trowel and tucked it back into his belt.

My bladder bulged. I began to sniff around the grotto for a place to relieve myself after a night spent guarding and sleeping. Zideo noticed, and explained the situation to Helmgarth in relation to the event the morning before that had caused so much distress and confusion for Addrion and himself. It was decided that Zideo and I would address our needs in the graveyard, as it provided the only soil suitable and permeable enough—some distance away from the nearest marked graves, for fear of offending or confusing the skeletons who slept there. After everything that had happened, I was glad to depart the Ludic Grotto. The last glimpse of I caught as we left that morning was that of the Gentlemen Over All Things, hoofed and headless, standing in a shaft of light that found its way through the rocky roof hanging over us.

Bleary-eyed revelers wandered in twos and threes through the streets where spent fireworks littered the middle of narrow streets. Members of a sports team, whose jerseys were too bright and flesh too shiny and featureless, slept in the open, huddled in disused waterways and draped across front stoops. A white ball with black pentagons lay unattended at the foot of a statue of some kind of spiky-backed creature with his hands on his hips.

Soon stragglers emerged from domiciles, dragging their feet after a long night and short sleep, if any.

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A grim man with faded jeans and a drawn handgun and many knives and gear on his belt rubbed his eyes with the base of his wrists, and checked his gear, smudging the cartoonish mustache and genitalia that had been drawn on his face in marker.

“Somebody fell asleep first,” Zideo chuckled under his breath.

The man turned to a bony, bat-winged monster whose elongated head brimmed with jagged teeth, and who was scratching its own head awkwardly. “Call me?” said the monster, whose carapace was colored in a sickly lilac, its tail rippling hopefully. The man’s eyes went wide as, I presume, he recalled the events of the previous night.

Others appeared in doorways or sitting up from ditches, drawing themselves up from wherever they had expired the night before. Younger beings shouted and laughed; older ones winced and touched their heads and tripped over discarded goat masks, or became tangled in half-fallen streamers. A man with an eyepatch and a vest covered in grenade cannisters still continued to drink from a large brown jug. With his free hand, he rummaged through an unattended vendor cart, an impulse I understood implicitly as a dog. “Top o’ the mornin’, lads,” he greeted us in a brogue I did could not identify, possibly because his mouth was full. He raised his jug politely.

“Uh… cheers,” returned Zideo, who winced in the morning sunlight when it fell across his face between residences.

A small group of the two-dimensional beings who seemed contained within their own flat rectangles, a plane they brought with them wherever they went but which did not prevent their mobility, began to swarm out of a cottage. They looked alert, but for the dark lines beneath their eyes, depicted in two or three pixels each.

“I’m gonna need some food,” said Zideo. “For me and Cormac.”

We picked our way straight across the rubble of the fallen tower. “The Fête of Fate begins today, as soon as the Princess’s address concludes.

“Okay,” said Zideo. “But I’m hungry and I have to feed my dog.”

Helmgarth eyed him. “Fête means ‘feast,’ as m’lord knows.”

Zideo frowned as he scaled a section of fallen wall. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure. Who doesn’t know that?”

We walked in silence, until Zideo broke it. “Although, what is it, German? French?”

Helmgarth shook his head—the words were meaningless to him.

“Do you even have France here?” asked Zideo.

“It sounds familiar,” said Helmgarth. “Perhaps one of the many factions of the Strategikon.” We entered a road where foot traffic was picking up. I smelled food, some distance away—prepared humanish meals, maybe. I felt the recovering partygoers were right to head toward it, and awarded a Dog Point to them all for the wisdom of following their noses. It felt like it emanated from the direction of the tower, which rose before us some ways off.

“Does her majesty celebrate Fate’s Eve?” asked Zideo.

“Indeed not,” said Helmgarth, amused at the idea. “She is too busy.”

“Busy doing what? Seems like she was just standing around in a tower when we saw her yesterday.”

“For shame, m’lord,” Helmgarth tsked. “Her majesty devotes all her days to getting us out of the crisis.”

“What, reading old books?”

“The history of the realm is deeper than m’lord credits,” said the warden.

Zideo kept staring at him, but let it go.

“I’m just looking forward to food,” he said.

Zideo walked some way, wondering out loud about how food worked in this realm, before he noticed Helmgarth was no longer with us. When he did, he spun around in the street and almost knocked over a florist in a pink dress and braids. I am sure he expected the warden and I were testing him again, but Helmgarth had stopped a couple dozen steps back. He looked startled.

“HG?” said Zideo, returning to him. Helmgarth patted his pockets again, and at first I believed he was looking for something. But he was feeling his own body, assuring himself of its presence.

“M’lord said that my home was filled with foodstuffs, yes?” he asked.

“Uh, yeah?” said Zideo. “Are… you good?”

Helmgarth felt his face, his shoulders, his knees. His eyes darted frantically. I saw an animal fear in them, the need to escape against the lack of options. “M’lord…” He reached a hand out to Zideo, who clasped it.

“What is it? What’s going on?”

“Stay… stay with me.”

“Ow?” said Zideo. Helmgarth gripped his hand such that the fingers swelled. “I said… ow. HG, you are crushing my fingies.”

Helmgarth did not release him. His body quaked. He lurched forward and back. “Are you crumping?” asked Zideo. “Wait no. This is a new one. I saw this on TikTok.” Zideo attempted to match what he believed was a dance, imitating Helmgarth’s convulsions. “This is hard to keep up—hey!” Helmgarth jerked him around, sending him spinning into the street. Still, this did not cause my sense of danger, only puzzlement. Helmgarth’s face contorted, his arms and hands tensing.

“Not now,” he said. “Not… again…”

In the broad light of day, he transformed.

The browns and grays of his rustic, worn garments vanished, replaced with a night-black vest and coat with polished buttons. Cufflinks sparkled at his wrists. His hair whipped in an unseen, unfelt wind, flattened backward upon his pate, and shone as though wet. His boots no longer had holes—in fact, he no longer had boots, but glossy black footwear that rode low on his ankle. His greasy pants disappeared as well, replaced by slacks that defined his form a little better. A circular glass emerged into being on his nose and immediately fell out. A hat appeared, a tall cylindrical thing with a short broom.

“M’lord…” he pleaded, and reached his hand out. A long stick appeared there—a black cane topped with crystal. A bowtie, much nicer than my own and unstained by dog food and dander, popped audibly into reality at his collar.

Helmgarth stopped straining, and raised the lens to his eye to examine the cane more closely. A new man stood before us.

“Helmgarth?” said Zideo. A question hung in his voice.

“Yes m’lord,” said Helmgarth. The voice resonated from within his chest, his spine straight and his shoulders back. “Only… I feel I should rather address you as… good sir.”

Zideo shaped the beginning of various words on his lips, but none found there way out.

“I did warn you, good sir,” he said, “about the mods.” He seemed to be in good spirits, a better disposition in general. His eyes looked toward something unseen. “I feel as though I… why yes, I have come into possession of a vast sum of coins, old chap.” He threw up his palm and snapped a spread of large coins, shiny and fresh from the mint. The Princess’s profile graced them.

“Who… is modding you?”

A smarmy smile spread on Helmgarth’s face. It was what I have heard humans describe as a “punchable face,” as though a chuckle at someone’s expense was always hanging in the rafters. “Someone, somewhere, like yourself, my good man.” He tossed the cane up into the air, then hooked his arm swiftly around to snatch it at the height of its arc. “Anyhow, why question a good thing? Let us be off to the fête, shall we?”

The only recognizable feature was his tremendous ruck-sack. Commander Zideo’s mouth gaped at him as he marched down the road toward the center of the city, twirling the cane like a drum major at the head of a marching band, pausing only to doff his hat to an angular belly dancer with purple hair and elfin ears, who blushed.