Monday morning could not get here fast enough. I've heard all the jokes about how everyone hates Mondays, having to go back to work and all that. But this job is literally the whole reason I'm here, and getting back to it was a welcome change from the insanity that had permeated the weekend.

So of course I only got about half an hour of it.

I got in, started looking through my æmails, then pulled up the project's issue tracker and started browsing for something to work on, when Nick the HR guy dropped by my desk and told me I needed to go over to room 215 right away for an important meeting.

Well, that's not ominous or anything. "Do I need to bring anything?"

"Just yourself," Nick said. Since I didn't really know the building yet, Nick walked with me and pointed out the door. It was right next to the boardroom, and looked to be just as large. The door was open, and I could see Joanna seated inside, talking to someone.

With a bit of trepidation I walked up, then stepped inside and saw who the other person was: a silver-haired older gentleman in a very expensive-looking suit, seated behind a solid, polished wooden desk. But it wasn't his physical appearance that caught my attention; it was the power I could feel palpably radiating off of him. Felicity had apparently had some way of sensing my power level; was this what it felt like to her?

"Ah, young Mister Webb," the man that I was growing increasingly certain was not actually a man said as I stepped inside. "Please, have a seat. Feel free to shut the door behind you." His voice was quiet, gentle, cultured, but there was a definite strength underlying his peaceful tone. "Do you know who I am?"

I definitely had my suspicions. "Are you the CEO, sir?" I asked, closing the door and taking a seat next to it, across from Joanna.

He gave a nod. "Dyralist, founder of this enterprise. Do you know why you're here?"

"Me, Joanna, and nobody else? You heard about what happened on Saturday." I glanced over at Joanna and, to my surprise, she appeared totally at ease, nowhere near as nervous as I would have expected from her.

"I have heard the merest overview," he said. "I understand that two talented enchanters in my employ were put in danger under truly exceptional circumstances, and I do not know why. Such ignorance..." he paused, as if searching for the proper word. "...irritates me, and I would fain be cured of it."

Fain?

Joanna looked between me and him, then spoke. "We had just finished the dungeon and were on the way out. There had been a few minor tremors before, but just as we were leaving, a larger earthquake hit, and part of the wall crumbled. Both of us fell through, into a deeper dungeon. Then our healer, an LFG paladin we'd picked up, jumped in after us.

"This one seemed to be themed around giant bugs and vermin. We fought a few, but got separated by teleport traps. I ended up alone, and hunkered down until the rest of our party showed up, escorted by a few delver cops. We headed in, joined back up with the paladin, and then met Brad on his way up and got back out of there." No mention of Gareth. I couldn't help but wonder if she even remembered he'd been there?

I nodded. "When I got separated from Joanna, I ended up at the bottom of the dungeon. Stumbled into the boss room, and only survived because I was able to cheese it by using an enchanting trick, dropping some stalactites on its head without it ever recognizing that I was taking any hostile action against it.

"This was actually my first time in a dungeon, but I understood from the one above us that the thing to do at the end is to go and touch the Core, but the Core was shattered into a thousand shards. Kayla's theory when she heard was that the earthquakes had done it. I tried to make my way back up, and linked up with the rest of the party quickly enough."

Dyralist listened in silence as the two of us made our reports. "Yes," he said finally. "That does sound like the report I heard, if slightly more detailed. Now, what is the part you have did not told anybody?" he asked, his tone hardening slightly.

Crap. What did he know? "Please, sir," I said, "I understand you're a very powerful being, but I'd really prefer not to have any compulsions used on me?"

Dyralist gave me a reassuring little smile. "Oh, fear not such things from me. I fully understand how illegal your society considers such methods, and I respect their laws. But in turn I ask for your understanding and respect. I flew here all the way from Drimni last night, on short notice, for the sole purpose of interviewing those who had found this strange dungeon. It was quite tiring, and I hope not to have to leave here empty-handed, as it were."

I nodded, thinking about what to say and how I could say it, when Joanna unexpectedly spoke up. "We weren't the only party in that dungeon."

Wait, what?

"I hunkered down in there for a bit, until a strange woman approached me. She was wearing a cloak, but there was a big bulge there; I think she might have been a Celestial hiding her wings. She was a sorceress, said she'd been separated from her party too, and we stuck together to try and link back up with Brad and our paladin. I have no idea how there was another team down there, though; no one came in before us because the hole in the wall wasn't there.

"We fought a few monsters together, cleared the second floor, and were about to proceed downward when she suddenly looked all worried, and said she had to go. And the she was just... gone, leaving me all alone again until the rest of the party found me."

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Dyralist listened, then looked at me for a long moment, then back at her. "Thank you, Miss Cooper. You may go."

I was sitting right by the door. I braced myself as she walked past, but somehow I didn't feel a thing. Was her succubus aura somehow being smothered by the boss's dragon juju?

Once she had left, closing the door behind her, Dyralist turned to me. "And how is it that you found a dungeon boss docile, with no living Core to keep it under control?"

"...I take it that's not something that's supposed to happen?"

"Please do not play games of words with me," the old man sighed. "It is not a thing that does happen. I wish to know, what is it you did not want your coworker to hear? Perhaps you met up with the celestial's party? But then what?"

That was uncomfortably close to the truth. "It wasn't much of a party; just one guy. Another sorcerer, earth and protective magic. He tried to order me around, command me to help him kill the boss."

"And you did?" he asked, cocking his head to the side slightly, eyes narrowing just a tiny bit.

"I..." I shook my head. "I couldn't. His strategy was to use a quake spell to try and drop the ceiling on the boss, but he said he'd never been able to keep his shields up long enough to fully charge the spells. So he'd caused the quakes from earlier. I tried to talk him out of it, said that a bigger quake could level the town and cause massive harm, but he wouldn't listen. Said none of that was important."

Dyralist watched me intently as I spoke. "I note that the town has not, in fact, been leveled," he said in his quiet, gentle, but somehow intense voice.

"I..."

"Go on. What you say does not leave this room."

Somehow I found that probably less reassuring than he seemed to intend it. "I did the only thing I could."

"You stopped him?"

"Shot in the back with an ice spike. He never saw it coming. I..." I closed my eyes, fighting back tears of anger, at myself for having done such a thing, at Terenaþ for making me do it. "I wish I hadn't."

"No," the dragon-in-human-form said quietly. "You did the right thing."

"What?"

"Outsiders are barred from the Prime Material Plane for good reason. Even the ones we typically consider compatible with life and existence as we know it have alien minds and motivations. The Fast Keys are imperfect, sadly, but in sending that one home you did us all a service." Us? He referred to the Empire earlier as something distinct from himself, so who was he talking about now? All of Mundus? "And then... what of the Core? There are muddled reports of one final person that no one has mentioned yet."

So he knew about that. "The core wasn't quite shattered when I got there," I said. "Badly cracked, though. And when I touched it, that's when it broke. It... it was trapping someone. Sealing them away, sealing them inside of itself, I'm not exactly sure. Just, suddenly there was a man there."

Dyralist leaned forward slightly, resting an elbow on the desk, his head in his hand, pinching at the bridge of his nose as if to rub away a headache. "That... is not a good sign."

"You know about that? About whatever's going on there?"

The old man shook his head. "Not nearly as much as I wish to, particularly at this moment," he said. "And how much have you managed to work out?"

And how much could I trust a dragon with? "He called himself Gareth Meranas. Claimed to have been a general in the Chaos War, which he seemed to think was still ongoing. I checked afterwards. History has no record of such a person existing."

"And who do you think he was?" he asked. Something in the way he posed the question made me think he already knew the answer, at least to some degree.

"In all honesty, I'm not certain. But I think he has some connection to the god Meþas. At first I thought he was Meþas, or at least his avatar, that maybe the reason no one's heard from him personally in so long was because he's locked away in there. But now, I'm not so sure."

Dyralist gave a slow nod. "You have heard it said that, at the end of the Chaos War, reality itself became fractured? Have you ever stopped to wonder what that means?"

"...not really?"

"What can I compare this to, that you may understand? I was actually there, and I myself still have trouble comprehending the experience of those last few days. Let me think. You. You are here, speaking with me. You are not at your desk working, as you would be had I not called you to speak with me. You are not at your home, doing whatever it is you would have done had you chosen not to come to work today. Only one of those three can be true, and the truth is that you are here."

"All right?"

"Imagine if all three were true at once."

"I... what? How could I be in three places at once?"

"Not just three places," he said. "Three completely different choices, different causalities. All mutually exclusive, all mutually true nonetheless. Now imagine confronting not three such absurd truths, but three hundred. Three thousand."

"How is that even possible?"

"It's not," he said bluntly. "And yet it happened. We believe there was a weapon involved, a great and terrible device that should never have existed, unleashed upon Mundus for an insane, unfathomable purpose of Chaos. For twenty days and twenty nights it happened, madness reigning supreme until the greatest heroes of an Age somehow brought it to a close. Every last one of them, excepting only Saint Valaminaþ himself, dead or driven mad, sacrificing themselves to restore sanity and order to our world.

"But it is my understanding that, when the world was put back together, there were some... fragments, bits left over that could not be arranged. Orphaned shards of possibility. I did not know exactly what became of them, and truth be told I still do not. But I believe now I may be a step closer to that understanding.

"Do you know what became of the man, this Gareth Meranas?"

"He had nowhere to stay, so I brought him home with me for the night. Next morning he left, said he didn't feel right imposing on my hospitality. I tried to find him but... you know how big Sharliya is."

"Approximately a hundred and ten thousand kith," he said. I hadn't expected an actual answer. "A big enough crowd to lose oneself in." He gave me a very serious look. "As I said before, what is spoken here does not leave this room. I would have your oath."

"I... can I at least share what you just said with the paladin, Felicity? She already knows a lot of what happened, she's a Meþasite, and she's taken a serious interest in finding Meranas. Knowing this stuff might help her."

The boss let out a low sigh. "The contamination of this broken knowledge spreads already," he said, more to himself than to me. "No. Do not speak of this with her... but you may bring her to meet with me tomorrow, if she is willing. Wednesday I have other engagements. Have I your oath?"

Well, it's not like I really wanted to go sharing this stuff around anyway! "I so swear," I said. "I will share this knowledge of fractured reality, and your theory of Meranas's origins, with no one outside this room."

"Very well," Dyralist said. "And... thank you. Your news was most unwelcome, but still it is better to know the truth, however unpleasant, than to remain in ignorance. You may go."

So I did. Went back to my desk, found an issue to work on.

Somehow I found it impossible to take any sort of pleasure or relief from the normalcy of getting back to my routine, though.