Alright, that may be an exaggeration. But the sudden failing of the light had a profound effect on the sentient beings of the city, so recently harried by the invasive tower. Some ran without destinations, colliding into one another. A man in a white gi and red headband rubbed his forehead, dazed, as small yellow chicks circled around his head.

It wasn’t like the city had never been dark before, as it was every night. Although I did not grasp the cosmological absolutes (what revolved around what?), the citizens were coming to this realization as well. After a time, confusion replaced chaos. Looting attempts stalled. A hungry, opportunistic being who seemed no than a cheese wheel with a missing slice when viewed from the side was shamed for trying to gulp down as much of the arranged feast.

“Man, whatever,” said Commander Zideo. “I’m hungry.” He walked off.

“Wait up, old chum,” protested Helmgarth, and hurried after him. Of course I followed.

Citizens pushed demanded answers from one another, answers that no one seemed to have. “Will it be like this forever?” “How am I going to know when to get up in the morning?” “What about the crops?” “Who pinched me?!”

A starlight-sashed woman in a stylish, retro space suit hurried through the crowd with a flint and tinder, igniting the gas lamps. Citizens gathered in those thin auras to eat and argue and fret—but it the fact that they were coming together to do so was not lost on me. The woman, whose long, blue pigtails extended out of hair-ports in her visor and reached her ankles, puzzled over one lamp that wouldn’t turn on. In fact, the entire lamp seemed to be missing. “Oh, darn!” she said, stamping the stone helplessly. “That’s the third one tonight. Err, this morning.”

Helmgarth lifted his hat to her courteously as we passed. She stabbed a finger at the headless iron rod protruding from the ground. “If you find out who is stealing these things, you let the Irregulars know, okay?”

We crossed one of the foot bridges connecting the tower to the city. The mad rush had fizzled itself out; those who were hungry enough to eat during a cataclysmic event—in the dark, no less—were desperate, or experienced bachelors. Indeed, a stern man with a patch eye and a full tuxedo snarled bestially at us when we came near to a table he had claimed, and we moved on.

Helmgarth tore the flesh from a leg of roast mutton. “Just like Eldra made them,” he said, exulting in some food memory. Zideo found a slice of pizza that he did not entirely trust, but was warm enough for his satisfaction. He struggled with the jagged straw of a purple soda, one of the many items in the world that was without its third dimension. Like many of the short novels Lisa read on her couch, it lacked depth.

“Where do you,” he muttered, smooching the air as he tried to map his physical lips to the blocky geometry of the straw. “I don’t know how to, mwuh. Mmm!” He caught it, and his eyes lit up. He belched. “This pixel stuff isn’t half bad!” Zideo dropped a slice of pizza down to me—not my first choice, but I knew I stood a good chance of appropriating something better in the dark and distraction. “Try this,” he said of the pizza. “I think it’s euro-jank.” I ate it in a rush—it was filling, but there was something off about the texture. He wobbled his head back and forth indecisively as he chewed it. “Maybe Gee Tee Eh?”

“I am concerned about her majesty,” said Helmgarth, glancing upward.

“It’s fine,” said Zideo, chewing. “She didn’t get kidnapped.”

“Well… no,” said Helmgarth, gesticulating with his mutton leg, “but the Irregulars are too few in number to handle this crisis. She may need us.”

Zideo downed his pizza, shaking his head. “What she needs is to get her best wizard on the horn,” he said, swallowing, “and open me up a portal back to my bedroom.”

Helmgarth stopped chewing and stared. His eyes narrowed.

“What?” he said around a bite of mutton.

“What, what?” asked Zideo.

“Surely m’lord… my good man is not thinking of fleeing,” said Helmgarth. He waved his mutton haunch at the sky, and a couple of morsels shook loose. They quickly found their way into my belly.

“Fleeing?” said Zideo, his head reeling backward. “Fleeing what? I’m in jail, remember? I’m not supposed to be here, remember?” He swept all of the city around him into his gesture. “None of this is happening. Or else, it’s not supposed to be. Or like… it’s supposed to be happening to someone else. Not me. I’m sitting in front of my computer. Hell, I don’t even know if I’m still there or not, and this is a dream. Maybe I’m still streaming, just staring into the camera! The clips are gonna be awful, man!”

Helmgarth’s features dropped under the gravity of frustration. “But… but m’lord!” He barely knew where to start. “They have taken the water! They have taken the sun right out of the sky!”

“Yes, and that sucks,” said Zideo. I knew the tone of his voice, because it was a shepherding instinct—trying to read where someone was going, head them off, and ensure they knew not to go there. “But you don’t need a powerless human to help you. You’re surrounded by main characters… ask one of them! Ask all of them! Make an army of OP people and fight, bro!”

They were glaring at one another when a familiar voice carried over to us from across one of the stinking, empty river channels. Both heads turned. A small crowd was gathering around a man in a long leather coat, a hood draped over his head. “Okay, awright,” he exhorted them. “Please, one at a time! You people ever heard of a line?” It was the merchant, illuminated in the middle of a small swarm of mostly humanoids. It must have been hard for the humans to see what was happening through the crowd, although my eyes had long adjusted to this familiar dark. Coins flashed and clinked, and someone jogged away from him holding a lantern high. A lantern the same hue and luminosity of the city’s gas lamps. This only increased the urgency of the encircling crowd, who pressed their coins toward our former co-escapee.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Helmgarth and Zideo looked back at one another and tacitly agreed to continue their dispute later. The three of us made our way across, and muscled through the gathering people.

“One at a time,” repeated Kriegsgeswinner, offering and displaying a lantern to his antsy customers while simultaneously pulling it out of their reach until they had paid.

“Just thirteen gold a piece,” he said.

“Thirteen?” asked a voice. “Did you say thirteen, or thirty?”

He looked at them a moment. “I said thirty,” he decided. “Just thirty gold pieces and you, too, can have a source of infinite light during this trying ti-!”

A sharp swish of air cut him off, and his customers stepped back. A triad of blades hovered in front of his neck. “Good morn… eveni… hello, officer,” said Kriegsgeswinnler.

Luciano, the Irregular from the gate, stood sideways, extending his arm toward the merchant’s neck. “Citizen,” he said, not even looking at Kriegsgeswinnler. “You stand accused of theft and destruction of property. How do you pl… wait. You. Halt.” He noticed Zideo. “Come here,” he said. I was certain the guardsman was going to get the wrong idea. My hackles raised.

“You are needed,” he said. “Or at least, your friend is. Where is he?”

“Who?”

“The serf,” he said. “Helmgarth.”

“Well I never!” snapped Helmgarth. He brandished the crystal-topped cane at Luciano. “I say! I ought to give a piece of my-”

“Helmgarth?”

“Well, certainly, if that is what it takes!” He waggled the cane at him. “You should learn some courtesy!”

Luciano squinted at Helmgarth as the warden-seneschal-dandy compulsively dusted off his evening jacket. “Oh,” he said. “Mods again?”

Helmgarth muttered viciously to himself and crossed his arms.

“Anyway,” cooed the smooth voice of the fighter, “you are summoned. You and the, this guy, whatever he is.” His blades drew a zigzag toward my human. The ignorance of Zideo’s greatness struck me as crass and bone-headed, but as usual, I kept my thoughts to myself.

“Summoned… where?”

“To your mom’s house, where do you think?” said Luciano, irritably. Then he made a motion that implied touching his forehead, which he dared not do for fear of lobotomizing himself. “Sorry. A little trash talk, there. FGC habits die hard.” Luciano nodded toward the tower. “Do I have to say it?”

“O…kay,” said Zideo. He turned to Helmgarth. “I guess we’re summoned.” The well-dressed warden stuck his thumbs beneath his backpack straps and heaved it higher on his shoulders. He glared at Zideo, then at Luciano, then harrumphed mightily and stalked away.

“You, merchant,” said Luciano, not even turning his head toward Kriegsgeswinnler, who had begun to back away into the crowd. “You’re coming with me. You have the right to remain silent.”

He looked expectant, and he tucked one of the lamps back into his jacket, where it disappeared or was assimilated without leaving the slightest bulge. “Aren’t you gonna read me the rest of my rights?”

“No,” said Luciano, whose eyes barely looked open. “I was just hoping you’d be silent.” Whether he brought him to some precinct station or prison, I never saw.

Beyond the archways beneath the tower, dignitaries and courtly attendants argued in loud whispers and grand gestures. Although the tower of Ludopolis was regularly dark within, I had not seen it at night up to that point. Its architecture complained as it swayed, emitting its own low conversation of ghastly creaks and shudders, drips and drafts. It struck me as a remarkably unwelcoming place, and one I despaired to enter again—nothing like the warm cushions of Lisa’s couch, Zideo’s bed, or the blanketed (and defensible) crate I often slept in. I longed for those comforts in this land of chaos and night.

The spiky-haired youth was not watching the foot of the dark stairwell; and I figured they were somewhere attending to the Princess, having seen them briefly ahead of the address. Although the tower always seemed one stray breath away from toppling under our feet, there was an added atmosphere of uncertainty.

“The candles are unlit,” observed Helmgarth.

“Why would they be?” scoffed Zideo. “It’s like nine-thirty A.M. or something.” But I knew the Irregulars had seen to the lamps in the city already. Helmgarth drew his trowel.

There was no moonlight to spill in through the archer slots or the damaged walls, and Zideo stumbled on a few abnormal steps. Helmgarth knew them through, presumably, repeated ascent and descent, and I could see the outlines just fine.

When we reached the switchover, as I now thought of the short hallway where the stairs halted and continued a few feet away, we discovered that we were held at gunpoint. Zideo shouted, “Watch it!” and shoved both myself and Helmgarth to either side. The intruder was the color of ice, a dim blue-white, and shaped exactly like Addrion, aiming her energy weapon arm down the hallway at us. She said nothing.

After cowering behind his raised hands for a moment, Zideo said, “Well?” No reply came, but neither did any energy blasts.

“I say,” said Helmgarth, walking toward what now seemed to be a statue carved of ice. My initial observation was quite right—its shapes were Addrion’s precise likeness, visor sealed shut, eyes gleaming within. She knelt on one knee to steady her shot. She seemed to anticipate some invisible danger from the stairwell from which we had so recently issued, or rather, to see it. She was, as it were, “locked on.” A thin mist rose from her shoulders and head; droplets precipitated on her weapon. She was roughly translucent, her interior full of sparkling crystals like an ice cube that Lisa sometimes dropped for me. She glowed so faintly I was not sure if the humans discerned it. “Addrion?” Helmgarth asked the question on all our minds. What was her image doing here? And where was she?

I was the first to investigate closely. I sniffed her armor, but detected little more than the smell of fresh, pure water. Even in the dark, I could make out the distorted shapes of the sconces and stones on the other side of her, distorted beyond recognition.

It was Helmgarth who touched her arm, then drew it back with a hiss of breath, shaking his finger. “Cold,” he said. I knew better than to touch and stuck to what sensory information I could gather. Wanting to see for himself, or perhaps out of the habit of experimentation, Zideo touched her shoulder armor as well.

Sometimes when Lisa is unwilling to wait for her hot morning beverage to cool to an acceptable temperature to drink, she will add ice cubes to the cup. These make a very specific sound, a sound like a frozen lake at the end of winter, a crinkling, cracking sound. I heard that exact sound, and the pauldron touched by my human’s hand became green once more. The crystal peeled away—but not exactly, as it did not so much cover our comrade but rather replaced her. Rather, she thawed into existence before us, decrystallizing and shivering, crinkling to life. Water droplets fell to the carpet below us as color returned down the length of her weapon arm, moving from shoulder toward the barrel of the gun.

“Addrion?” asked Zideo, repeating his warden. “That you? What happened here?”

A flash blinded us, and oxygen burned. We flattened ourselves against the wall as her weapon arm recoiled and she fell back a step. Stones charred and shattered at the end of the hall, and stars peered in.

Addrion regained traction, and took aim at Zideo. I barked. Helmgarth waved his trowel and shouted. There was shouting and untellable commotion, and after a tense moment, she lowered the weapon toward the floor. Her eyes went from the new hole in the wall (which I thought could not be promising for the structural integrity of the tower) to us, then to the hallway behind her.

She unsealed her visor, and it disappeared into her suit. “What are you…?” she began to say, then came to a realization visible in her wide eyes. “Her majesty!” She turned and ran up the stairs into the dark.