My mind felt broken into chunks, floating in the soup of my consciousness. From time to time, two disjointed ideas would collide and try to form a coherent thought. Slowly, bit by bit, the number of collisions increased until finally, my sense of self started solidifying. As I felt my body once more, a bout of giddiness ran through me.

“I am back!” I thought with glee.

I felt around my body for a moment. While I can’t exactly say what I was expecting to find, there weren’t any changes I could immediately point my finger at. No magic core or a phantom repository of knowledge embedded in my mind.

I felt strong, though, maybe as strong as I was in my prime. But I was also stiff and sore, and my head was pounding like a church bell rang by a strongman. Likely from the prolonged lying on the damp, uneven floor underneath.

Propping a shaky elbow beneath me, I pushed myself into a half-seated position. Cold metal tugged at my wrists, and I heard the rattle of chains.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I muttered.

With more effort than it should have taken, I peeled my eyes open. What I saw made my brief bout of giddiness evaporate: I was chained to the wall of a squat, humid, and filthy prison cell.

Irregular in shape, with visible pick marks as if dug out by unskilled labourers forced to build their own prison. Rusty bars covered one side of the cell, floor to ceiling, their jagged edges making it feel like the maw of a man-eating monster. Pained moans reached me from somewhere deeper in its bowels. Three more listless souls chained opposite me were hanging off the wall by their wrists like some kind of grim, broken marionettes.

The heat and humidity of the dungeon made an invasive odour of unwashed bodies, blood, and excrement wafting off them stick to every part of me. Damn, I could almost taste it. I shivered in disgust. Though I knew my own stench wasn’t much less offensive.

Two of my cellmates were gaunt, naked, almost skeletal men, caked in blood and filth. They were unconscious and beaten so badly that if they were in any condition to think, they would have envied my own sorry state.

The last one was a woman, or what’s left of one. Barefoot and wearing nothing but a coarse tunic resembling a gunny sack, she was rail-thin and greasy-haired. The air around her wafted in misery and despair. Buried under the countless marks of abuse and neglect, there was a suggestion that she might have been pretty at some point. Before whatever happened to her in this place. Shivers ran down my spine, thinking about what the poor thing must have gone through.

I shook my head, breaking the line of thought.

I needed to get out of here. And brooding over our collective misfortune won’t get me anywhere fun. I’ll die before I let my second chance of life rot away inside a filthy cell.

I turned my head to my most immediate problem. The grimy, and rusty hunks of metal that were my shackles seemed solid enough to hold someone starved and weakened, like my roommates were. But I suspected they would break if I was to pull on them with my full strength.

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However, before I scraped my skin against them and opened a wound that was bound to get terribly infected, I started checking for weak spots.

As I ran my fingers over the uneven surface of the battered chain-links, I kept my ears strained for footsteps, worried about guard patrols.

Just as my fingers traced a promising seam, almost completely eaten through by rust…

“Leave!” A hiss came from behind my back, making me jump.

I snapped my head in the direction of the noise, terrified of whom I may find there.

It was the girl I noted earlier. She was free. Standing a step away from where she had been shackled only moments before, and pointing at the swirling portal of white energy hovering in the air.

Her posture and bearing were firm, commanding—nothing like what you’d expect from a battered prisoner. She glared at me in irritation, as if my presence disrupted a good thing she had going on here. A stampede of implausible ideas and suggestions rushed through my mind, but none of them made even a little sense. Man, I hope whatever was happening here wasn’t a sex thing.

“If you don’t leave now, you’re welcome to stay forever,” she said with a twisted smile. Her eyes gleaming with disturbing delight at the thought of what might happen to me. The mere second I took to recover from my surprise and take in the dramatically altered scenery seemed a second too long for her liking.

I was about to ask for help to get out of my restraints, but then I spotted the manacles dangling uselessly beside me. Unlocked and open.

There were so many questions I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to test the patience of this unsettling woman. Whatever was happening here was clearly more complex than it first appeared.

I decided to roll the dice and hope the other end of that portal didn’t lead into some place even worse than here. Like a torture chamber or a volcanic crater.

As I stood up, relief flooded through me as my back crackled and popped from lying on the uneven cell floor for who knows how long. However, the coarse, itchy, and foul-smelling gunny sack tunic clinging to my skin reminded me not to get too comfortable.

Shuffling as fast as I could, I hurried through the portal, leaving the hellish cell behind.

…

Passing through the portal didn’t cause dizziness or motion sickness, as I had expected. One moment I was in the dungeon; the next, I luxuriated in the rich, almost decadent smell of old books and aged wood. And my toes were sinking into the shag of a lush carpet of a beautiful study room.

Everything was done in some shade of blue-black. It was as if I had stepped into an opulent museum displaying all the colours of the night. Despite the glowing orbs of light floating above the sconces along the walls, the room maintained an almost sensual darkness, preserving its mystique.

Glancing past the titles of the books on the shelves against the walls made my eyes tear up and my vision blur, as if staring directly at the sun. There had to be some enchantment in place, preventing me from scrutinising the owner’s reading material too closely.

As lovely and luxurious as the study was, I had no intention of waiting for its owner. The room clearly belonged to someone rich and powerful, and dealing with the rich and powerful from a position of weakness was a terrible idea—I would know.

I was about to rush through the doors behind the ornate desk in front of me before I froze in place.

If merely looking at the book covers could blind me, what other defensive measures might I encounter on my mad dash out of here? Images of floors turning into lava and pitfalls leading to vats of acid raced through my mind. The ideas felt fanciful and cartoonish, but what the hell did I know about magical security measures?

A moment later, the decision was taken out of my hands, as footsteps echoed from behind the doors on the far side of the room.

Booted feet thudded against the marble floor, and I could hear muttering, as if someone was arguing with themselves.

The doors opened and a darling girl I wanted to hug to my chest came through.

If I was to judge by her garments alone, I would have said I was in the presence of a powerful mage, here to deliver judgement on me.

Her robes exuded wealth and power, with azure and silver fabric that flowed like the finest silk, adorned by shimmering threads. Intricate patterns along the seams seemed woven from starlight, their runic designs shifting, swirling as if flowing across her body. On her left breast, a crest depicted a black tower akin to a rook chess piece, suggesting that the robes were a part of a uniform or a garment of office.

But the girl inside those robes was two, maybe even three sizes too small for them. The sleeves dangled past her hands, and the hem dragged on the carpet behind her. Even more disarming was her face. She couldn’t have been older than fifteen, with baby fat still softening her chin and cute, puffy cheeks framing soft blue eyes. Despite her attempt at a stern expression, she looked more like an aggrieved child than someone of authority.

She placed her hands on her hips, puffing her modest chest out at me.

“You… are lucky to be alive, you impudent fool,” she said.