The entire premises of the fort were in an uproar. And not just the kind of uproar appropriate to when the trash truck is driving by, or an Amazon deliverer places a package in the driveway, or a food delivery person is waiting at the front door, although dog readers will consider those “red alert” moments of chaos. Fort Weepus had lost control. Or rather, the empire was in danger of losing control of Fort Weepus. Soldiers ran, Street Toughs emoted wildly at one another. For no reason that I could discern, one of the parked ground transport vehicles exploded. I presumed that this was all due to various chains of events that could be traced back to the jailbreak of my human.

“Wow,” said Commander Zideo. “We really set off a foofaraw.” (Another word that sounded like it was borrowed from dog.)

The green robot straddled a brown and white stallion that knickered under its weight. The robot’s head split suddenly down the center, the two halves drawn into the enormous and vaguely axe-shaped pauldrons. A very human-looking woman’s face was revealed. (Although, you never can be sure. On Lisa’s big glowing rectangle in the living room, I once saw a tale recounted of a machine person wearing the skin of a human person. In this tale, only dogs were able to immediately tell whether someone harbored a machine skeleton beneath their skin.) With it, a burst of human scent—while I have covered Helmgarth’s at sufficient length, Addrion’s signature smells were less complex but more confusing. It was the same powerful funk that Commander Zideo came back from the gym emitting, but with an inextricable lacing of wiring and rubber tubes. With every beating of her heart, she pumped out waves of a cautious anxiety, an aura of protective and territorial consideration. This was curious to me and I made a mental note to investigate further, should I survive riding on the back of a horse.

She had green eyes, and green hair, too. As you know, I have the utmost respect for humans who transcend the standard palettes of color allotted them by nature. I didn’t always—before I met Commander Zideo, whose sense of style is unmatched (and I suspect sets trends for most or all other humans), I considered it unnatural. “The gate,” she said, pointing past them. “Go!”

The pack rode. Although I doubted that anyone other than Helmgarth had any training in animal husbandry—and even that was a matter of doubt—we urged our horses easily down the courtyard of

Fort Weepus, toward the gate. It did not seem to matter that we had never done such a thing before. Our steeds obeyed us; or else, they followed suit with Commander Zideo’s mare, which obeyed him unerringly.

The chaotic sickness of the fort seemed to spread in a way that words fail me to describe. Soldiers tripped over one another, dropped crates that splintered and weapons that backfired. Loose energies toppled the guard towers, and some manner of backdraft blew out the doors and windows of a garrison structure. A frustrated Street Tough wearing sunglasses at night waved his arms, screaming, “What is even happening?”

“I don’t know!” the be-trenchcoated man shouted back to him.

“Hey um,” shouted Zideo. “I think the gate is closed!” The great reinforced doors were shut and barred.

“Heads down!” said Addrion. The helmet snapped closed back over her head, collecting her hair and pulling it inside conveniently. She pointed her arm toward it, over the head of her stallion. The arm blurred and changed shape, and her weapon appeared there, firing bolts of gold-white energy even as it materialized. The flashes punched black-rimmed holes through the metal and caught the lumber components on fire. The locking mechanism, a heavy wooden beam that was a tree trunk stripped down to fit into the hooks, roared with flame and broke in half. She fired another shot, and one of the huge doors jerked against its hinges but still barred our path.

“Again!” shouted the leather coated man, reining his horse in.

“Something’s happening,” said Zideo. He had to pull his horse back as well to keep from barreling into the flaming doors. He looked at Helmgarth, who was already staring at him in awe. “What’s happening? It feels… like something…”

I felt it too. Cause and effect logic was running wild. Fort Weepus roiled with improbable activity as every single potential point of failure began to break down simultaneously. Even I felt like it was a bit much. Helmgarth nodded. “A cutscene, m’lord!”

“Back!” snapped Addrion’s voice, and she pulled her reins clumsily, nearly causing her horse to fold himself in half.

Bright orange flashed, and a transport cart completely engulfed in flame sped down the path toward the gate. Helmgarth did not move from his side of the footpath. He stood there, reigning in his horse, smiling broadly across the path at Commander Zideo. Zideo himself looked at Helmgarth, then the fiery cart, then the door, then at the cart, then at Helmgarth, then at Addrion, then at the door. He smelled nervous, and I could see the goosebumps on the back of his neck.

“I don’t think you’re worried enough right now, HG,” said my human.

The fiery cart hissed down the path between them, its wheels drawing charcoal trails in the dirt. The flame briefly cast Helmgarth’s face in firelight. He did not flinch and his smile did not waver, giving him the unhinged sort of look of a human that has made a decision.

“We are very fortunate to have met, m’lord.”

“Why’s that?” The cart, laden with metallic components, streaked into the gate and slammed the left door open, yanking the flimsy remains of the right door off its hinges. I winced at the sound, but Helmgarth’s countenance now reflected a sort of angelic calm, although his little porcupine shrieked and fled to some pocket within his enormous travel pack.

“Whatever happens now is fated. Cutscenes only happen in moments of great importance, when the attention of destiny is upon us. It only happens to—”

Weapons spoke behind us, and the red light energy of the Ohmpressors flashed. The purple cowboy disintegrated atop his horse, his remains only purple embers of light that gusted over us. One of those armored suits waddled down the path towards us, its imprisoned creature writhing behind the smokey glass in its torso. Still, I noticed, Helmgarth did not move. He grinned, but did not finish his sentence.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Cowboy!” shouted the leather-coated stranger with the chemical scent. “Or cowgirl! Cow-person! I actually didn’t have much of a read on—”

“Let’s go!” said Zideo. The horses obeyed as one. We fled down the hill through the fields of running Sorrow Troopers, some trying to put out their out of control campfires, others with their masked faces in their hands, sobbing like children. Scroblins swore nastily at one another and the universe. Bolts of flame from who-knew-what streaked out of the fort.

We rode hard through the field of vehicles, swerving around inert flying machines and others with wheels or treads. “What about the other prisoners?” asked Zideo. Addrion said nothing, so he looked to Helmgarth. He stared back at Zideo.

“They cannot be helped,” he said. “Yet. We could not turn back even if we wanted to. But thanks to you, we have a chance.”

“You don’t what you’re talking about,” said Addrion.

“I don’t know what we’re talking about,” said Zideo.

“It’s them!” came a voice that we barely noticed. Two Sorrow Troopers were sullenly running back into the ramp of one of the fat stingrays with propellers, possibly the same transport that had brought the three of us in. Zideo spared one look for them and gave his horse a prod with his heels. The mare rocketed across the premises toward the edge of the camp—toward the vast, hilly frontier of night before us. Soon, the transport lifted into the air behind us.

With no treeline for cover, we plunged into a scrubby expanse of the outland.

The great buzzing machine rained down bolts of death around us, snapping stones in half and gouging fresh craters in the land. Addrion returned fire, but Helmgarth did not seem concerned. The other human screamed a lot and covered his head. My horse neighed loudly, furious at the conditions it was having to work under—loud danger to its life, and a dog on its back. I could smell its humiliation, and although I felt embarrassed to put another creature through such an ordeal, I felt I had little choice in the matter.

Whatever a cutscene was, it was spectacular. Our horses dodged bolt after bolt, swerving and charging through dislodged sod and falling grit. Faced with a deep gap, our steeds charged ahead and did not hesitate to leap. There was a moment in the air that felt eternal, as though time slowed to allow us a moment to relish in the improbability of it all. For no reason that was obvious to me, the transport exploded.

The night lit as though it were dawn. Hunks of superheated metal tomahawked end-over-end outward from the detonation and scored the ground as our horses’ hooves made landfall on the other side of the gap. A propeller blade whizzed into the mere feet between Zideo and myself, embedding like a knife thrown by a titan.

Hooves flogged the ground over thickets and across meadows, along great stony ridges. Horses are odd beasts, and have never embraced laziness and inertia as survival instincts. Their hooves were furious and voracious, consuming the distance as eagerly as I would consume an unattended burger patty.

The aura of certitude, the feeling of grim determinism passed. My pack, whose names I did not know but that was fine because I knew their smells, slowed to a halt at the top of a rocky hill. The humans turned back to observe.

Although the world of Airy Zone was said to be a giant ball, as round as the rubber thing I would happily chase for hours in the back yard if only Lisa had the energy to throw it for that long, it never appeared as one to the naked canine eye. Perhaps humans have a better sense for this, but I don’t think so. On one of the rare occasions that Commander Zideo had emerged from his sleeping office to share a meal with Lisa (an incomprehensible practice during which numerous humans eat apportioned food and senselessly ignore the bounties in front of others), I recalled a debate over the world’s flatness or roundness. Lisa had removed her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose with her fingers, and informed her son that he was “way too online sometimes.” Commander Zideo, whom I may have mentioned is the the most excellently amazing human being among all historical or future human beings, replied that he “was waiting for more of the science to come in” and that all he was saying was that a “you-tuber” had “made some excellent logical points” that “drew established theories [of planetary roundness] into question.” Lisa laid her head onto the table and nobody said much after that.

Here, from the rocky outcrop on which our horses stamped and snorted, the world seemed remarkably flat. I could see the horizon in all directions, and it was close. I knew from my experience at Fort Weepus that there was a cliff into nothingness that surrounded us, but what was beyond or beneath that I could not say.

The Shards revolved silently, incalculably big. They looked, in a way, like they were facing us, parked all around our big earthy plate.

Fort Weepus glowed in the distance, numerous fires being put out as we watched. I could just make out the silhouette of the ballista dominating its peak. The firelight did not seem to reach the Shard that loomed over it.

Commander Zideo dismounted, staring at the place from which we had escaped. Humans often need to reflect on things after they have been subjected to stressful activity—they have not yet learned, as dogs have, the art of sleeping off any stressor or energy expenditure. Addrion split back her helmet, her green hair waving in the breeze at this altitude, and seemed about to speak when all of the horses disappeared and everyone fell to the ground on their butts, except myself who (I venture to boast) landed on all fours.

“What did you say it was called, again?” asked Zideo, helping up Helmgarth, who, with his heavy burden strapped to his back, was as helpless as an overturned beetle.

“The Shard?” asked Helmgarth, rising to his feet. “Platformia.”

Commander Zideo sat in silence for a moment. Addrion’s green eyes watched him closely. For all her humanity, a disciplined and animal violence lie within her, ready to summon up at any sign of danger, for which she was perpetually scanning. The protective urges in her scent were unnatural—she did not want to be on the defensive, and this was all going against her plan and her instincts.

“That’s a weird and stupid name,” said Zideo. “Why is it called that?”

The others exchanged a sad and knowing look that I could not interpret at the time.

“What about the one beside it?” asked Zideo, pointing into the distance.

Helmgarth seemed eager to answer his questions, although I was surprised that the ghostly book did not appear.

“Which side?”

Zideo shrugged and laughed, nervously. “Either.”

Helmgarth pointed to the Shard to the left of Platformia, a broad arrowhead of a planetoid pointed directly at us. “The Survival Zone.”

“What?” asked Zideo.

Helmgarth pointed to the other side, to a jagged spear of a world-piece, at once spacious and dense with competing textures. “Open World World,” said Helmgarth.

“Bro,” said Zideo. But he did not seem to know what words to actually say. “You… you know these sound like…”

Helmgarth went around the dark horizon, pointing one by one and enumerating the Shards. “Isthmus of Mobile. The Strategikon. Actionadventureville. The Federated Planet of Shooters, or FPS if you prefer. The Fight Yards. Ememmos, and beyond it, the Puzzle. The Simulator Wastes. Moba Island.” There were others, but the words were beyond meaningless to me and failed to find purchase in my mind.

“You… your whole world…” stammered Zideo.

A silence hung over them all, one that felt like everyone knew something and nobody was saying it. No one helped my human find the words, which felt like a big etiquette breach to me—but with humans, who knows?

“Game types,” Helmgarth finally offered, but his voice faltered.

Behind him, in the distance, a crooked spike rose above circular walls like an obstinate weed.