Descend to ascend

Dark rain flowed off the cliff face down the arch, washing the dirt off the stone and revealing designs and ribbons of murals. Lightning flashed, showing them briefly before they faded back into subtle shadows. She got her nightsight monocle on and the etchings glowed with a subtle infrared. A nice touch.

The designs were mostly of the expected kind, pseudo ancient cave painting styles, pre perspective 2d orientation, depicting the false history of Arthel. Figures casting spells; fireball and teleport other, wielding weapons well known from the Gameworlds cannon; The Double Dragon Zweihander, Juriah’s Halberd of Mercy, Orgead’s Hammer. She had seen murals like these on other “ruins”, like the cracked throne room of Gloria. Most were well known, made by the original designers and makers over 20 years ago. Like every player, she had heard rumors of lost ones, hidden ruins that held secret powerful items or gave access to locked spells. Her heartbeat quickened and she tasted adrenaline.

This was by far the most eventful day she had ever had in Arthel.

Her eyes wove their way to the edge of the murals, winding like a spiraled banner around the arch, to what she had thought was the edge, a thick border of lines and runes, and started to come back towards the center for another look over, when a big chunk of mud clogged vines dropped down in the flow and revealed more mural beyond the border.

It took her a few seconds to realize what she was looking at, and when she did, she almost screamed.

Beyond the thick band, (which was shaped like a half circle with the dark arch in the middle like a slim dragons pupil) the murals depicted space and stars. But not the constellations projected on the high firmament that let the players navigate across the orb and tell the seasons, but other celestial bodies she was far more familiar with.

The Allworld, obvious from the towers and fake sun. Gunmaze, depicted with oversized figures holding assault rifles and laser cannons inside the orb. Jericho, a cluster of cartoonish doors around a masked Savior holding a staff.

She looked around to see if anyone was watching, but there was only the storm.

Holy shit.

Mentions of anything outside Arthel were against the rules, and the mods were known to be very strict about it. Anyone caught toeing the line, making characters or plot lines or even emblem designs that strayed too close to anything from pop culture, religions, or even the rest of the Otherworld, could expect a suspension and possibly even a total ban. Breaking the fourth wall was something everyone did in one way or another, besides the hardcore role players, but talking about the Allworld or yelling movie lines in battle was one thing, carving those infringements directly into the fabric of Arthel was another.

And here was a ruin, clearly made by the same hands as all the others she had seen in every major hub or capital on the planet, which directly referenced the wider world.

And the door was wide open.

As if on cue, the archway lightened, and a blue glow descended down revealing a stairway.

She knew she could turn around, activate a report beacon, and continue the rest of the way to the rendezvous point, where she would be greeted not only as one of the masterminds of a successful ambush and a daring mage killer, but also as the survivor of two dragon attacks, one of which had been flown by her own personal pay to slay simp. J-Slash would definitely be able to make her a new name out of that one. They would all have a good laugh, and the mods would probably send her a hefty reward for reporting something that definitely should not be there.

But every second passed and she stayed where she was. Her feet didn’t move, and she just kept staring at the dark bottom of the staircase where the glow died. Moment by moment the obvious became inescapable. It felt, in a way, like realizing she had been trapped.

There was not a snowballs chance in hell that she was going to do any of that. She was going to go down this staircase and the only question now was how long she was going to waste sitting here trying to talk herself out of it before she did.

All right then.

She stepped down slowly at first, then as thunder cracked behind her pace quickened. The passage hummed gently around her, and the stormsounds melded into white noise.

The bottom of the stairwell was a square of darkness that ran from her, immune to even her nightsight monacle. After a minute or ten, it was hard to tell, the staircase turned slightly, then the turn tightened and she was stepping down a spiral staircase, the darkness almost close enough to touch.

For a moment, she thought it would continue like that forever, that it was some kind of trap, until she stepped onto a landing glowing under the blueish light and found herself at the end of a long hallway extending into a tall rectangle of darkness.

She looked behind her, and of course the staircase disappeared in darkness. Instantly, it reminded her of something. Exiting the dreamworlds. What her old boss had called the chutes and Michael called the hallways. It had the same feeling, of being separated from where you were before, from anywhere you’ve ever been. This place, whatever it was, felt unlike any other part of Arthel, and something about it felt unlike anything else in the Other, but she couldn’t put her finger on what.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The only way to find out was to go deeper.

A torch on the wall rolled with blue flame. She took it out of its holder and stepped down the hall. The walls rolled past her and darkness stood before her like an unmoving monolith. She rested her non torched hand on her dagger, but the gesture felt useless. Somehow, she knew there would be no monsters here, at least nothing that could be fought with weapons or magic. Dream knowledge. The place was speaking to her, and not in the “here’s my stats” way that weapons or armor spoke to you in Arthel, but subtly, smoother than the most well-crafted sims she had ever experienced. This realization, coupled with the idea that dangers beyond combat waited somewhere in the dark, sparked a real fear in her. Not the worry of losing items or costing her team the battle that she was accustomed to in this world, but a real primal fear usually reserved for the Hardworlds.

The torch flared up suddenly and a flat wall faced her, with two hallways stretching into darkness on either side of her.

She faced the one on her left and stared into the darkness. It sat there immobile, like a dark corner of a storage closet. She turned to the path on the right, towards an identical block of darkness and almost dropped the torch.

The darkness seethed. It breathed and whispered and was a thing crouching to pounce. The light at its edges battled and withered and screamed, dying with every flick of the torch just before another wave of doomed light threw itself against the black.

The fear was liquid, being fed to her, thrown at her. She turned back to the left passage, and the fear abated. There was only the darkness left when light has gone. A drowsy nonthing.

It was painfully obvious which way was the right one, just as it was now becoming clear that this place was built during an alien time of Arthel’s history, for a completely different class of player.

She marched down the righthand path and her torch sputtered and the fear flared up, a primal sense that she could feel on her skin. It reminded her of turning off the lights and running down the hall as a kid, away from that dark room in her grandparents house, but was closer to what it might have felt like to run into the darkness instead.

She knew many things as she walked through the dark. It screamed them at her.

The makers and game masters could not hear her here. To even step foot in this place is punishable by a lifetime ban. Anything that happened to her here would be her own fault, and the army of Arthel makers and investors would make sure that no one would see her as a victim, but as someone who had tried to break the game and had it backfire.

She wondered, briefly, if there were others out there, Spirits who had found the hard edges and dangerous places of the Otherworld, and had their story smothered into silence, lest it keep the general population from spending everything they had to indulge in the gameworlds and the rest of it.

Another wall jumped in front of her, and she screamed.

This time there were three paths. Again, the darkness shined like a light. Fear and menace boiled out of the far-right doorway, while the darkness in the door to her left seemed about to break into the soft glow of dawn. Although the correct path was obvious to her mind, it was now a question of convincing the rest of her.

What if I’m wrong? What if the real test is whether or not I subject myself to pain just because I think there’s a reward in it? Wouldn’t it be best to at least try the easy doors first, just to be sure?

Under a constant stream of doubts, she shuffled towards the door with the gentlest darkness.

Immediately, the fear fell away, replaced by a peace, like the first breath after a long swim. A banal subtle comfort. The darkness was like a blacked out bedroom after a long weekend sleep. All she had to do was wish it, and the lights would turn on, and she would find herself on the precipice of the best day of her life, an ultimate Saturday.

She took another step and lifted her hand. Her fingers found the dappled surface of a wall. Her feet fell on soft carpet. She knew the switch was inches away.

A single thought, given in dream knowledge, rang out in the back of her mind. Not an emotion, but a simple dead statement of fact, almost lost beneath the electrifying excitement for the oncoming day.

This was the door she had come from. If she took another step, the place behind her would be lost to her forever.

She shifted her weight and placed her raised foot behind her. Immediately, fear jolted up her spine, as if a font of it had opened at her back. With a sigh that cracked into a moan, she turned around and faced the room again.

The doorways shivered. The slab of darkness at the far right felt like an open gateway to a void. Everything screamed that if she went through it, she would be falling forever. The other doors spoke in dream knowledge too, and for a moment, she considered stepping through the slightly less terrifying door, but pushed herself past it at the last second and shuffled into the void door.

“This isn’t real. Nothing here can really hurt me.” The words fell flat in her head. This place was as far from the structured world of Arthel as anything she’d ever seen in the Other, and she was certain there was every chance of real Spiritual danger.

She came to another room with five doors. Then another with eight, the doors so close that there seemed more darkness than glowing stone. The supreme door of the eight felt like liquid death. Stepping through it felt like suicide. Three times she stepped up to it, heard it laugh and knew it was going to rip her spirit apart, and stepped back.

She stood there crying for a second, then got ahold of herself. What was she doing this for? Some reward in a game? Some fake fucking swords or imaginary magic scrolls? She didn’t have anything to prove to anyone! This gameworld and everything in it was beneath her, a plaything she used to pass the time between Hardworld missions. She was a fucking Hardworlder! She didn’t owe this place shit!

One of the eight doors lightened, and she knew it would take her out. Good. She was done being harassed by some nerd’s vision of a fantasy.

But she didn’t move. Now with the exit there, now that the dark doorway was not the only way out, but only a choice, it felt less hateful. She realized it was the powerlessness that had really gotten to her.

Whatever this place was, its makers had no idea how strong a Spirit could be. She had thrown herself into alternate lives and destroyed herself in gunfire a hundred times over. This goofy labyrinth was nothing.

She stepped through the dark door and felt the world collapse.