I was already running toward the trap door. What other choice would my conscience would permit?

Behind me, I heard Addrion roar and Sorrow Troopers yelp, for humans can yelp just as helplessly as we can if they are sufficiently outclassed. “Look out, love!” warned Helmgarth. The crowd of spectators rioted, the excitement of having seen a real, live Player and experienced the Compendium’s Pause too much for their limited minds. They screamed and laughed and milled, threw half-eaten hot dogs, sprinted in Brownian non-patterns, collided.

Onto the field I ran like a greyhound. If the dark square closed, I might be separated from Commander Zideo forever in a world he understood much better than I.

In my brain I knew the Princess was false. Her eyes flashed green at me, the same green eyes that the fake Helmgarth had looked at me through when I we all first landed on the Shard. I voiced my opinion of that. She teetered back a couple steps on her high heels, drawing the book back away from me and reaching for something at her belt—a scepter of some kind, shaped very much like a fancy chew bone.

I have often thought back to that moment. It was a small victory to see through a trickster’s disguise, but could I have ended it all, then and there? Could I have torn out the throat of the Boss who ruled Platformia? Knowing the trick he had pulled on my Zideo, and possibly killed him, yes—a thousand times.

Could I have gone through with it while the trickster wore the Princess’s appearance? I am not so sure. Maybe a dog who could “turn his brain off” could have attacked just then, a task more suited to that gourd-addled terrier Kristoff from down the street. But not Cormac McBarky. I have seen too much and learned more than any dog should. So I hesitated.

She—he, I should be saying, for it was Xue-Fang—issued a beam of light the color of ice cubes, and missed by a hair. Literally, that is, as freezing ray of energy or magic of some kind sheared off a patch of my fur, deep-freezing one of the Sorrow Troopers running sadly toward us. He fell to the dirt, an icy facsimile of the trooper who had been there seconds ago, both outstretched arms breaking into powder and ice-shards against the track.

Addrion bellowed behind me, and I knew we had no time to delay. I jumped into the opening, and the world was as black as sleep.

Then it was wet. I can swim (You may be aware that we dogs, although not aquatic by nature or purpose, have an entire paddling style of swimming named after us.), but I do not prefer it. I like to be near water, not in it. I kicked against it, hearing the muffled swirl of bubbles, and finally felt a surface above me. I heard, I splashed, I breathed.

I paddled in no direction, hoping to find any kind of surface to cling to and get my bearings. A roughly level stone emerged from the water, and I climbed up onto its slick surface after several unsuccessful attempts. I might as well have climbed onto a greased pig.

Shaking off, I took note. I’d had more than my fill of caves in the previous days, but this was more than a cave—it was an underworld. A realm beneath a realm. The great hollow bulged to either side, constricting into cave passages like ugly, stone throats. Here, no light from the upper world was visible, but there were other sources stingily illuminating a few feet around them. Bioluminescent lichens climbed the walls near the water’s edge. Above, on what was too organically curved and inconsistent to be called a “ceiling,” twinkled a constellation of something glowing like stars, although I could not discern what they were. Perhaps an oddity of the mineral makeup in these parts. They provided the most light, an ambient minimum that let me at least make out the lay of the land, so to speak.

I looked for Zideo. Not far away, a corpse bobbed in the rippling tide I had created during my plunge, shaggy haired and bloated, face down in the murky water.

Like a torpedo, I shot into the water, wondering if mouth-to-mouth resuscitation could be done by a dog. There a stony limestone ridge provided me some traction to scramble up, and I dragged the body by its clothes, hard to make out in the dim light. It flopped over onto its back, and ice clutched at my spine. Dead blue eyes saw nothing, a water-distended belly quivered above a bulbous nose and a mustache. I have never been so happy to see a dead man. It was not my human.

There was no tie-dye shirt here. This man was taller than Zideo, lankier. He wore blue overalls over long, green sleeves. His hands were covered by oddly dainty white gloves, and one of his brown shoes was missing. A hat the same color of his shirt floated upside down in the water.

“Cormac!”

I jumped. Commander Zideo stood behind me in the mouth of a firelit tunnel, dripping water, silt clinging to his shorts and shoes. My excitement made the next moments impossible to recall clearly, but after I was done licking his face I composed myself and shook out the water from my fur.

“Bro, I think I messed up big time,” he said. “That wasn’t the Princess at all, was it? I knew she was sus asf.” He smacked a palm onto his wet forehead. “Oh man. I gave her the Tome.” I did not think it would be tactful to remind him that it was the Compendium, not the Tome, and anyway that was splitting furs.

He forgot me then and there, clawing at his face and mock-screaming to himself. I hate when he indulges in negative self-talk, but at least it gives me a window into what he is thinking about.

We spelunked. There was not much else we could do.

I had never been in a cave in Airy Zone, and certainly never experienced one of this magnitude and capacity. Its breadth and variety seemed almost incredible to me. Chamber after tunnel after shaft seemed to open in anticipation of our arrival, perhaps brought to life by something as mundane as our observing them. Ridiculous, of course. But was it so improbable that we, the consumers of worlds like this one, those for whom entire galaxies had been handmade, could so effortlessly bestow reality?

If the Shard was the reordering of previous worlds, then surely this meant that the Bosses had wrenched creation from the hands of its creator. I’ve mentioned that dogs are not overly religious, because in the end, all dogs go to heaven. But this seemed like a sin of incomprehensible hubris. I thought of the table in the war room beneath Ludopolis tower, imagining Xue-Fang (whatever he really looked like) and S. Man and others divvying up pieces like a jigsaw puzzle.

It is easy to break things, but by what art did they put them back together? Entire new continents and celestial bodies? And how did had that resulted in such a capacious subterranean world?

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Zideo had said “You never start on the ice level.” This implied to me some tried and true convention, a pattern. And patterns are nothing if not similarities repeated, drawn together. I still did not know what the word “genre” meant, but there seemed to be some categorization on a vast scale at play here.

However they had done it, the result was like drawn to like. Perhaps the ground beneath our feet is fiction; a mirror, and an underworld must always reflect its aboveground twin. As above, so below.

One echo of the aboveground was evident: there was always a path. Each step drew the next in the dim light of the caves beneath Platformia. I followed Commander Zideo over hidden hills and beneath wide, cryptic ceilings. We hopped across stones jutting from walls, sometimes fixed in the air and attached to nothing. It was easy to get lost in thought, easier still to be lost in shadow. I kept the shuffle of his Jordan-shoes ever close to my nose, until a vast open chamber opened before us. A dark mere rippled, recently disturbed. It was then that I noticed the bobbing of a dead man with green sleeves on limestone shore.

“Fuck,” said Zideo, “ME.” Dozens of other Zideos returned his profane salute, each more distant than the last. “We’re going in circles.” It seemed that the force of his shout had dislocated a sizable boulder far above, as something splooshed mightily in the middle of the mere, not far from where I reckoned we both had landed previously. But boulder did not sink, but swore and spat water, splashing in a panic.

“Buy me dinner first, love! Pbhbpblbht.”

“Helmgarth!” Zideo dropped down the cave wall to the limestone shore from earlier, but Helmgarth was making better progress than anticipated. The seneschal must have been getting used to being hauled up by his backpack by now.

Another splash sounded behind him, small and streamlined like an Olympic diver. Green lights blinked beneath the surface, and Addrion surfaced moments later, lifting herself easily up onto more solid ground. She unsealed her visor, and the powered joints extended a green gauntlet finger at Zideo.

“You.”

“Listen,” said Zideo. “Mistakes were made. In my defense, he looked just like the Princess.”

She shook her head. “Unbelievable. You really never cease to amaze.”

“So did you get him, or what?”

“We did not get him,” snapped Addrion, her voice dripping poison. “We just ran down the hole to save you.” She looked around, made a W-shape of her arms, then dropped them loudly to her sides with a tink against armor.

“Well,” he said, “this is probably the Purple Deeps. But I assumed I’d have the Radian from the Golden Plains before getting here. Dammit, I would have had it.”

“Wrong on that account, too,” said Addrion. “Let’s walk and talk, idiot.”

Helmgarth had torches, but they were waterlogged and would not light. Helmgarth did most of the talking, telling Addrion about the Shlomp that had carried them halfway across the zone before filling in Zideo on the conversation with DuChamp.

“So he really was one of them,” said Zideo.

“I suppose that’s what made him a good disguise for Xue-Fang,” speculated Helmgarth. “He knew he wasn’t in Ludopolis at the time.”

They debated whether this or was not one of the zones, Helmgarth noting a distinct lack of purple in the dark environs. We walked and climbed, but exploring caves was Addrion’s territory, she being quite used to it in her own gameworld, or so I gathered. Soon she was far ahead of us, zipping up tough inclines and mantling over chest-high obstructions. We struggled to keep up, all three of us having to help the other in numerous instances. Even I had to be hoisted once, and helped pull up Helmgarth in turn, in order to clear a thick cluster of stalactites like a stone porcupine embedded in the ground.

Soon we were lost, and there was much irritable debate between Addrion and Zideo about which way to go. The disagreement became heated. The exterminator felt she was in the right, basing her wayfinding on the sensory capabilities of her suit, while Zideo claimed that he was following the “critical path,” which of the two of them only he could truly see. His reminding her that he was the player and she merely playable did not assuage her mood.

I halted their verbal tug-of-war by heading off ahead of them both, sniffing the ground. I was drawn by a powerful scent of an impossibility, unable to stop my paws from following it down. Squeezing through low holes connecting irregular chambers, wriggling between stalactites.

We’re not big gawkers, dogs, but even I could not but stare. I heard the scrabbling of the boots and hands of my comrades behind me, and Helmgarth whispered, “Albja protect us…!”

Addrion unsealed her visor. Zideo was silent. A great shaft of light fell from above, spilling over the unspeakable obscenity that rose from unknown depths farther below: a literal mountain of bodies. Some humanoid, but few were human-human, if you follow. Others were creatures, but with the exaggerated eyes and humanoid features I have observed and recorded previously.

“What… am I looking at?” asked Zideo, after some time. His looked up toward the origin of the shaft of light.

“Look,” said Helmgarth, suddenly very dry-mouthed. “It’s Nereus.” The body he indicated wore a white sheet that covered one shoulder and was tied at his pudgy waist by a cord. His head was bald, but a luxurious beard bloomed from his chin, marshmallow-white.

“Yeah,” said Zideo also pointing. “So’s that… and that.” He was right–a second version of the corpse named Nereus lay further up the great mound. I feel like one of Zideo’s unsung talents is pattern recognition. He angled his pointer finger in short jerking motions. “And is that… yeah! That’s a dead,” and then he said someone’s name that my human lawyers have strongly advised I not print. It was a red-hatted man with a pot belly who looked similar to the green-sleeved body in the mere. And there were several dozen of him, some right next to one another.

“There are like… a bunch of my favorite childhood characters’ corpses here,” said Zideo. “I am seriously going to be scarred for life. What happened here?”

All eyes looked upward now, toward the shaft of light, except for mine. I sniffed the air and noticed that, while it was stale with dried sweat and grit, I did not smell an excess of blood, and no decomposition whatsoever. The bodies refused to rot. What that could mean, I could not say.

“Oh god,” said Zideo. He gestured to a company of–we will have to call it a navy-hued porcupine, in various unnatural positions of repose.

Helmgarth spoke. “But… loves, this is a good sign.”

Addrion looked at him like he had a screw loose. “You must have had some bad jerky.”

“On the contrary. It’s just as the lad says. Look at who they all are.”

Zideo broke the silence. “Right. Yeah! Platformer main characters.”

“Quite,” said Helmgarth. “This is the bottom of a pit. You know. One of those great falls that takes a few tries to get across.”

“These are… all the Nereuses that didn’t make it?” said Zideo, catching up.

“They must be. And that may mean the real one is still out there somewhere.”

“Or down here,” said Addrion.

Zideo stared up toward the light’s origin, but none of us could make it out. “Can we climb up?”

She made a face. “Can you climb on the underside of ceilings?”

Zideo stared out for a little longer.

“No,” he said. “No I cannot.”

We stood together and observed a little longer. I think we all saw it at the same time. Across the pit, just visible on the far ridge past the peak of the sweat-stinking corpse mountain, knelt a skeleton wearing a football helmet.