Zideo was here. Zideo was here. Zideo was here. My brain announced this like a loudspeaker on repeat to my heart and my limbs. I could not contain my elation. At some point, the humans needed to talk, but my entire existence was now dedicated to giving Commander Zideo big licks on his face. I knew then what Peligrosa must have felt when the radiant, red heart icons plopped out of her head, and was conscious that I might do the same. A dog, like a pengoon, is built to need love and share it in kind.

Even when I calmed my body, my tail went on autopilot, waving unceasingly for the rest of the night. Who could blame me? Zideo was back. I could not explain it and I listened as the two humans talked.

“We thought… I thought you were…” Helmgarth glanced over his shoulder involuntarily, where the fissure between the Blue Frost and its neighboring zone whistled and wailed, haunted by ravenous winds. He looked at Zideo. “Were you?”

My human answered only with his eyes. He cast his gaze to the fissure before us, then to his own hands, as if relieved to find his body where he expected it, with all its component pieces. The look he returned to Helmgarth said said that he did not know the answer to the seneschal’s incomplete question.

An errant gust blew out of the fissure and clawed at us with icy talons, igniting my wet fur with chill. I tried to shake it off and the seneschal shivered and crossed his wrists over his chest. “You’re dry,” he said.

Zideo stretched out his tie-dye shirt a swished his palms across his shorts. His poor legs had gooseflesh, and his Jordan-shoes were as pristine white as snow—although the snow around us now was rotten and muddy with sticks, pebbles and other debris.

“We should find shelter,” said Zideo. “You’ll freeze out here.”

Undeterred, Helmgarth pressed: “What was it like? Falling in?”

Zideo made a face that was on the very edge of a sob. “It…” His eyes jumped around in the way humans do when they are stricken by a memory. I have heard this described as “lost in thought,” a mental talent rarely afforded to dogs. “Just… don’t fall in.” He stomped his Jordan-shoes on the ground, perhaps luxuriating in having a firm floor beneath him. “We need to talk. But we need to get out of this wind. Should we build an igloo or something?”

Helmgarth’s face fell. “I lost my ruck-sack,” he said. “Or else I might be able to help.”

“Okay, well, let’s get moving then and try to warm up,” said Zideo. “Just until we find something out of the wind to shelter in.”

Helmgarth shrugged and stared at the ground.

We began to walk, and I trailed the two, wagging so hard that it affected my gait. “HG,” said Zideo as they picked their way over the mess of detritus deposited by the avalanche. “Are you good?”

The dandy looked defeated in the tattered three-piece suit. Shreds and frayed ends of his coat wavered in the breeze, entire flaps of his pants had gone missing during the escape from, and through, the avalanche. His hair was once again disheveled, and a light growth of beard cast a blue hue to cheekbones, which themselves looked a bit higher than they had been before the attack by the assassin in the Ludic Grotto.

“I have broken my oath, m’lord.”

“You’re having an identity crisis,” said Zideo. “Don’t you mean old chap, or something?”

Helmgarth did not seem to hear him. Without his backpack, he seemed to jump with every step, his hamstrings over-calibrated for carrying the heavy load. Not only this, but he seemed to recall his limp about halfway through each jumping step, a favoring of his right leg that he more successfully suppressed under the weight of the pack. The poor guy really was out of sorts.

“I am sworn to carry your burdens,” he mumbled, sounding a big like a sinner in a confession box. (If at any time you think to yourself, “But how does a dog know about this?” I will remind you that Lisa, when no other humans are in the house, is the kind of human who leaves the big glowing rectangle in the living room running all day and much of the night. I believe she prefers the background noise. From this, I gather much about human society and convention, though perhaps I understand too little of it.)

“That’s okay. If I find any more burdens, you can have them.” Seeing that this did not assuage his anxieties, Zideo tried to reason with him. “Look, it’s not like you threw it away. It was taken from you, right?” Silence, but for the crunching snow and the cacophonous wind. “Your backpack isn’t you. Y’know? Sure, it was your job. But it wasn’t you. Besides, something beyond your control took it away from you.” I wondered if we were still talking about Helmgarth. “Took it right out of your hands, and now you’re paying the price. It’s not fair.” He remembered himself. “But we keep going, right?”

“But without the ruck-sack, I am only a drain on this mission. Addrion would shoot me on the spot.” He clawed at his face. “Oh, idiot Helmgarth! Now I’m doing the one thing I can stomach the least: lollygagging!” He kicked a rock, sending it off into the abyss next to us. “Of all the Players I have ever served, I have never—”

“Holup?” said Zideo, halting in the snow. “All the Players?”

Helmgarth now seemed eager to keep walking.

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“You mean in Gleam’Blade (20ǂ1). Right?” Helmgarth took another step forward, stopped just short of waving us over to join him. “Right, Helmgarth?”

The seneschal would not meet his eye. Lacking speech, dogs are unable to create a fabrication outright, but we lie in other ways. We hide the things we steal, if we are clever. That headcase terrier down the street, Kristoff, a rescue, is a kleptomaniac and an atavist. Although he cannot control his impulse to steal food and other items when his humans are not looking, he cannot make himself remember to hide the ever-loving things. Nothing calls down the wrath of a human like a shredded bag of shredded wheat in the center of the den.

Rest assured that the refusal to make eye contact is part of our toolkit to escape trouble, handy when “puppy dog eyes” fails to extricate us from the situation. I recognized this instantly in Helmgarth, who was in many ways becoming more canine by the day. I did not appreciate his hiding something from my human, but I could not help but relate.

“What is that?” said Helmgarth, and walked a few steps away from us. He knelt down and pulled something out of the snow, sloughing clumps of ice off its sides like the discarded shell of a hatching egg. A cylinder of polished wood shone through with a nub on one side. “My canteen!” he said. “Lucky find.”

Zideo shrugged, but clearly did not want to rain on Helmgarth’s parade. “That’s great.”

“I wonder if any other cargo survived?” Helmgarth now lead the way, scanning the ground with his eyes. We followed, and I smelled the scent of cold, salted meat even before the seneschal found it protruding from the dirty ground. It was unwrapped and filthy, and neither human wanted it. I was not offended that they offered it to me—as Ma used to say, “God made dirt, and dirt don’t hurt.”

Besides, let’s be honest. I’ve eaten worse.

Our eyes were on the ground as we pressed along the ridge, the cold stinging my eyes and gnawing at my paw pads. Strangely, I was the only one who did not locate any other debris. Helmgarth discovered a rope tangled in the branches of a tree that was half-wrenched out of the ground, with protruding roots like the avaricious tentacles of some monster from the depths of the ocean. He was able to free the rope from the branches, bare but for snow and dangling over the edge of the cliff, by whipping one end back and forth, and nearly lost it to the wind. It was waterlogged by now and freezing fast, but Helmgarth said that was better than nothing, though I doubted it.

Not seeing Zideo, I turned and found him hunched over something in high snow. He seemed to be rolling up a snowball, but his back was turned to us both. “What have you found, mate?” Helmgarth called, his words barely carrying over the raging wind.

Zideo turned his head only, then went back to what he was doing. There was a sort of crunching sound, though I did not think it was the sound of snow. He abandoned whatever it was, and I saw but disturbed snow where he had crouched.

“Nothing,” said Zideo. What he gained to hide from a friend as loyal as Helmgarth, I could not imagine.

The path began to make itself clear once again, at least to me, and I think to Zideo. Between our heightened pace and the growing pre-dawn light, I began to feel the slightest semblance of warmth. We had made it through the night, surviving the cold as well as an avalanche–most of us, anyway. Zideo halted in a muddy stretch of rock, an idea written across his face.

“Hey, book!” he said out loud. “What is this place and how do we get across?”

Trees stopped creaking. Wind stopped whistling. My tail refused to wag. The Compendium made itself known, materializing above the cliffside.

* Entry: Big Ol’ Pit O’ Darkness

* Description: Have you ever wondered what you’re jumping over in platformer games? What’s at the bottom of those things? Who made them and how? The B.O.P.O.D. is the unsatisfying answer to all of those questions. If you fall in, we hope you brought something to read.

* Tip: There are two ways to cross the B.O.P.O.D.: The Hard Way, and the Harder Way. If you’re trying to decide which one to take, don’t. Turn around and go home.

“We who?” asked Zideo, after sending the book away. “Who wrote this thing?”

Helmgarth shook his head. “My… friend,” he said, “Platforming games are known for difficult physical challenges and dangerous obstacle courses… but also for second chances. Please, I must know. Did you fall to your death back there?”

Zideo’s hair waved like an anemone. “Maybe” was all we got out of him on the subject. “How many do you think I have left?”

Helmgarth laughed. “You tell me, old sport!”

“Yeah, well,” said Zideo. He looked northward, or a direction that felt very north-like. Something glinted there, and he pointed. “Look!” A crystal thread stretched across the Big Ol’ Pit O’ Darkness.

The three of us trudged without another word. The shining thread turned out to be the Harder Way, a decrepit series of ice blocks made of more gaps than expanses. It plunged in a crooked line out over the ridge, and did not reach all the way to the end. The Hard Way preceded it by only a few dozen feet, a footbridge of wood and rope that grinned from the Blue Frost to whatever waited on the other side. Perhaps a quarter of its planks dangled from a thread, and easily another quarter were missing. It jounced and waved, tortured by wind that never let it rest.

I liked neither, but knew there was little hope of any of us surviving the ice challenge course. Coins glimmered there, revolving slowly above the ice, showing the ideal path. It terminated too soon, not nearly close enough to make it to the opposite ridge, where dry and snowless foothills obscured a land beyond glowing with the aura of morning light. My bones ached to be there. In Airy Zone, I have never seen a place so cold give way to one so warm(-looking) in such a short distance.

We stood between the two paths–or, I should say, the one sane path and the other a trailhead leading to certain death. Nevertheless, Commander Zideo’s head swiveled between the two as though he were trying to make a decision.

“So… since we are obviously going across the bridge,” said Helmgarth, his pupils tiny dots inside spherical eyes, “why don’t you go first and lead the way? It looks warm on the other side.”

“Yeah…” said Zideo. Helmgarth and I gathered at the first steps fo the bridge. It whined and shifted, and yet still felt like the safe option to myself and Helmgarth. The only option. I prayed my human, whom I had never known to say no to a challenge, would not say the word that I nonetheless knew he would say: “Buuuuut…”

I hung my head. I could not abandon him. But I also could not survive a few sparse floating ice blocks hovering over a windy chasm.

“What do you think that is?” he asked. Beyond the ice platforms, translucent and refracting light like prisms, beyond the spinning coins, at the very end, an insubstantial rune floated in the air, the same as had been inscribed on the side of the power-up block in S. Man’s cellar: “?”