The ogre did not release its grip. The pressure against my likely shattered ribs grew.

Any fantastical hope I might have had about surviving such a massive fall was dashed to pieces as the monster rotated its body mid-air and held its hands – me included – forward in front of it.

Wind whistled past my ear and for a brief, weightless moment I felt like I was sinking into the beauty of the valley below. And it was beautiful. Glittering white dew blanketed the forest in every direction. Vibrant green beneath stretched out, promising to catch me in a soft leafy embrace.

And then we were falling in truth and my vision was engulfed with the white spray of water.

I closed my eyes and thought about other things.

The sound of meat impacting wood was the last thing I heard before blackness overtook me.

***

I dreamt of red and black and cold.

It wasn’t a dream of images and stories so much as color and pain.

It blended and swam and pulsed and froze.

And after an indeterminate amount of time – I woke up.

Numbly, I realized I was alive.

I couldn’t decide whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.

My body throbbed in sore, broken agony and I decided it was probably a bad thing.

The roar of the waterfall re-introduced itself to my ears and I felt my body flinch in unprocessed terror. A fresh wave of pain swept through me as my legs fell into open air.

I opened my eyes in time to see my body slip from red fingers and fall to a wet forest floor few feet below me.

My legs felt a numb impact before my arms and back slammed into dirt and my vision tunneled into blinking, nauseating pinpricks.

I breathed, shallowly, for a few minutes. The smell of earth beneath me helped the nausea recede. The unfiltered pain of a thoroughly broken body was not so easily ignored, but my brain was probably releasing chemicals of the “about to die” level so it felt somewhat distanced.

Something wet dripped onto my exposed back. I wondered where my shirt was.

The dripping continued and an acrid smell filled my nostrils. Blood.

I pushed myself onto my back using my single working arm and stared up into red gore.

The ogre had impaled itself onto a tree – sliding halfway down its entire length as the thick branches tore through its chest and neck. Red colored leaves and less resilient branches littered the area along with bits of flesh and bone.

A single arm hung limply against the side of the tree, the other a gory mess at the base.

I stared at the macabre crucifixion in grim fascination before bile started rising in my throat.

I fell on my side and retched.

The smell of coffee briefly interrupted the stench of blood.

I lay on my side, exhausted, broken, and dying. My vision blurred.

A wet thump and the splash of liquid against my face refocused my vision in front of me.

My phone, cracked and stained with red, glowed brightly in front of me. Its time read 2:32 PM at 20% charge.

The flashlight was still on.

A small laugh bubbled up from my broken chest.

“Hey Google.” I rasped wetly.

The screen glowed brighter.

“Flashlight off.”

The glow dimmed and the screen fell to darkness. I reached out an unbroken hand and grasped the glossy phone. A comforting warmth spread through my palm.

It wasn’t exactly the touch of a loved one, but it would suffice. It might even be fitting considering I spent more time with my technology than any singular human.

My laptop would have been a more fitting death bed partner, but beggars can’t be choosers.

The thought of my missing aluminum partner returned my thoughts to the events of the day. My body was broken and unmoving, but my brain still worked. What else was I to do except reminisce?

So, I hadn’t just been displaced to another state. This was bona fide transmigration. New world, new…fauna. I glanced back at the red ogre.

New physics too if its eyeball regeneration tactic was anything to go by.

I looked down at my own reddened body and wondered if I couldn’t get some magical regeneration as well.

The ogre’s methodology had looked and sounded rather biblical. I wasn’t sure whether that was a promising adjective, but it at the very least implied the possibility of divine intervention. Unfortunately I didn’t see any stray goats wandering around to be used as a sacrifice.

Maybe prayer would suffice? The thought felt less surreal than I would have expected.

I thought back to the sounds the ogre had made and considered. And then considered again. Maybe just maybe I shouldn’t get involved with a higher power that a sadistic monster had sacrificed a live goat to.

But maybe one higher power implied others?

I thought about that for a second and wondered if I should be getting involved with any higher powers. I had no idea what the consequences of such dealings might be.

I coughed wetly.

I suppose the risks of a possible higher power were unknown, the risks of doing nothing were very certain. Barring proof of an eternal soul and damnation it would probably be more logical to put my faith in divine intervention.

Well, I guess there were worse reasons to pray.

“Dear…god. Please…help.”

My words felt muted behind the weakness of my voice and the crash of the waterfall in the background.

I lay there for a few minutes, breathing shallowly, anxiously awaiting a sign of divinity.

Nothing happened.

Fuck. I probably couldn’t draw a conclusion from the absence of a response, but considering I was assuming at least one higher power existed and had done nothing it foreshadowed an uncompassionate existence.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Or perhaps just a language barrier.

I sighed and it turned into another wet cough that wracked my body with spasms of broken pain. My vision flickered slightly.

Even if there was a language barrier the existence of at least one higher power and the simultaneous existence of my suffering implied a few things about the powers and moral inclinations of divinity.

I thought about elaborating on that thought and decided I was being stupid. I knew what I had to do and anything other than that was a waste of precious breath.

I thought back to what I had heard the ogre say. I couldn’t remember the preamble, but the finale had been seared into my brain.

“Avadon.”

And I felt it, immediate and all-encompassing. The gaze of a being I could not see or hear. It was a predatory feeling, like something stalking me just beyond my field of vision.

It was not inspiring, but I had already made my decision.

“Avadon.” I held up my phone in obeisance. It’s not like I had much else to offer. Who knows, maybe the goat hating deity would get a kick out of a social media connection.

The presence deepened and the sounds of water became muted. My heartbeat thrummed in my chest and a resonant pounding filled the forest.

“AVADON.”

The name consumed any remaining sounds of forest and water. It was a disquieting feeling, to know that I had formed the noise, but it had taken on something entirely different as it escaped my mouth.

For a moment, nothing happened.

And then the air thrummed with a singular pulse, a culmination of focus and energy that manifested as a literal warp in the fabric of reality right above my phone.

The phone blipped once, and then was consumed by void.

Pause. The world held its breath.

My vision fractured into a thousand pieces, and I blacked out.

***

My sensual continuity resumed an indeterminate amount of time later.

The first thing I noticed was that I was no longer in pain.

The observation came with a heavenly feeling of relief as my body relaxed into itself and spread out upon foamy earth.

Muscles flexed, blood pumped, and bones…lay still – like they were supposed to.

An unconscious smile framed my face.

The smell of blood dragged my thoughts back to reality.

I opened my eyes to the familiar scene of forest and gore and felt a dry retching in my stomach. With the return of bodily autonomy and health came a sensitivity to existence I wasn’t quite sure how to process.

I started by rubbing my eyes to remove the searing image of red from my brain.

It didn’t work.

In fact, the red started to grow and expand across my vision. Pooling out from literal puddles of blood like a water across paper.

Words the color of bone swam up from deep red.

Compatible tribute accepted.

Mediator rewarded.

System initializing…

1%...2%...3%...

The red background faded into transparency as I read the…prompt. By the time I saw the loading messages reach five percent the text faded. A simple loading bar stretched itself across my lower left vision.

The numbers slowly increased.

And my sense of surrealism with it.

What the hell was this? Some kind of video game?

Existential dread invaded my gut as thoughts of a distant future resurrecting my consciousness to live through simulated reality pressed in.

Maybe that’s what had happened, sufficiently advanced technology and all that. Maybe I’d suffered a fatal stroke and a future civilization had rebuilt me inside a digital reality. Maybe I’d lived a full life, dying old and surrounded by family, only to be mind wiped and put into the matrix with memories of a younger me.

Maybe I never existed to begin with, my memories complete fabrication.

The thought felt distant enough to be reasoned with, but nothing was coming to mind in terms of counter arguments.

I tried closing my eyes and breathing.

The loading bar stuck out against the background of my eyelids like white on black.

20%...21%

I stuck to just focusing on the breathing.

It helped, as it always does. The sense of bodily autonomy striking back against uncontrolled experience. My chest rising and falling. The scent of acrid forest air. The feel of moist dirt beneath me.

I knew, on multiple levels now, that I was somewhere different. Somewhere violent, somewhere dangerous, somewhere magical.

Maybe I could find something wonderful too.

50%...

The loading bar stopped halfway.

I noticed it instantly. My internal timer for loading bars picked up on the asymmetry of progress. This would be around the time in a modern world where I would refresh the page, or maybe check the network tab on the inspector tool.

Here I simply kept breathing in. And started to wonder if I should move from this place before I attracted any other…monsters.

Initialization encountered a fatal error and must be restarted.

ERROR_CODE 45: MEMORY_NEXUS_OVERLOAD

1%...2%...3%...

You’ve got to be kidding me.

I couldn’t tell whether this was a point for or against being in a simulation.

I guess if I was in one, it was a buggy one. There’s a certainty if ever there was one. I wondered if there was an escalation process. I never let an event retry more than three times before trying something else.

Except for that one time when encountering deadlocks happened just as often as standard transactions. I shuddered at the memory of increasing the retries to nine before escalating to a DBA and queuing a process hunter killer.

The familiarity of memory helped with the breathing.

As did trying to figure out what a memory nexus overload was. Sounded like someone forgot to download more RAM.

I chuckled drily to myself and stood up slowly. The technical jargon faded into transparency against my vision before disappearing completely. The loading bar continued to tick across my vision.

With my vision clear –

Right, magical creature crime scene. The existential dread somehow made it easier to process now. Too many problems and worries to be present in the red gibbets of flesh and viscera.

Well, simulation or not, I was stuck in the wilderness in a foreign…place. I should look for shelter and water. I glanced at the ogre tree kebab and wondered if I should check it for…loot?

I fought down the revulsion that nucleated in my stomach.

I turned by gaze to the club that had fallen to the forest floor.

It looked crafted, in a primitive kind of way. Carved to fit the large meaty hands of my aggressor. A rough lacquer gave it a dull burnish.

I wondered, with some trepidation, if this monster didn’t have some form of community behind it. A mate?

I hoped not, for my sake.

Nothing else of note stuck out to me. Or maybe I was just growing tired of looking at death.

The roar of the waterfall reentered my senses. Water, check.

I started trudging towards the sound, maybe I could get a drink and wash myself of the smell of blood.

40%

***

Initialization encountered a fatal error and must be restarted.

ERROR_CODE 45: MEMORY_NEXUS_OVERLOAD

1%...2%...3%...

I sighed as the error message popped up again and I almost tripped over an exposed tree root. Talk about poor UX. My Earthly design team would have had words with whoever…whatever created this system.

I stood still while the message faded into nothing before moving on. No need to risk breaking my neck on a fall on top of being eaten by wildlife. Or maybe it was a risk worth taking?

I reached the waterfalls termination point with anxiety on my mind.

The roar of water helped brush away errant thoughts and refocus me on the current situation.

Namely, trying to understand what I was currently looking at.

Was that a tree? Growing out of the waterfall?

I blinked and looked closer. There was a tree, as thick around as I was tall, growing from the churning pool formed by the waterfall’s touchdown. The tree speared up a good third of the cliff face through roaring water. It looked like most of the branches had been sheared off, but the trunk was an unyielding pillar. The few branches I did see looked strong and thick, slicing out from beneath white water and creating their own miniature offshoot waterfalls. One green branch neatly split the waterfall near the base of the tree, exposing the waterlogged roots beneath.

The pool itself was violently white, preventing any observation of depth or contents.

For a minute or so I just stood there, taking in the sight of what would have been some kind of natural monument on Earth.

I wondered how much force the tree was enduring. An entire river’s worth of gravitational potential energy dropped across such a height reminded me of a high school physics equation. Well, it reminded me that there was an equation, I couldn’t exactly remember the contents of the top of my head. m*g*h? Was there a ½ somewhere in there? I think I was getting the kinetic and potential equations mixed up.

I stared up at the roaring water and sighed. It was a lot of energy. There would have been no way that a sapling could withstand the punch of an entire waterfall. This tree would have had to already been a giant.

I wondered at the geological history that would have allowed such a thing. Maybe the tree has grown prior to the bore that had formed on the cliff face? I could vaguely see that constricting the output of water up there might move the waterfall forward and into the path of the tree…but that hole in the cliff face would have taken hundreds if not thousands of years to form naturally.

I looked behind the tree to see if I could find any evidence for a swiftly moving waterfall and failed – there was too much white between the tree and what I assumed was the cliff face to see much of anything.

Well, a mystery for another time I suppose.

I knelt to take a drink of water and froze.

Was that a skull?