Your spirit swirling to meet you

It was violent and sudden, like missing a step in the dark, but so brief it melted out of memory instantly. Then a great reversal, like the place had been inhaling since she stepped down the staircase, and now exhaled, expelling everything away from itself.

She could no longer feel her Avatar, and reached out for that dream knowledge that had poured out of the maze, to tell her if she was even still on Arthel, and found nothing but silence. The dreamsense of danger and terror that had guided her through the maze was gone, and the calm, mundane peace waited somewhere in front of her, down a long softly lit hallway that ended in a softly lit wall.

She turned and looked behind her, and saw the most unsurprising thing she had ever seen in her life. A physical manifestation of the distance she felt. Receding gradient glowing void. The smooth faintly matte floor on which she stood faded seamlessly into the humming endless far-away.

She reached back in memory for the route that had taken her to this moment, but found a great distance severing her from it, as if every step she had taken was compressed to a distant point, so far away and so small as to be almost without size, the distance un bridgeable even by thought. Like waking up from a violent dream and forgetting it instantly as the unviolence of waking life flooded in. This place was so calm, so still and unreactive, she couldn’t even imagine the world of action. It felt like she had dropped out of time, become severed from cause and effect.

This all lasted for a few seconds. Maybe it had just been the shock of the sudden shift. When her more perceptive mind caught up with the whiplash, she realized what she was experiencing.

It was the same kind of liminal space that she and every other Hardworlder might use to sever the spirit from the self. What use could the makers of the gameworld have for such a place?

Because it looks cool, idiot. This is a maze designed to dazzle the bored, something special for the players that have done everything. I probably just found it early.

No, this doesn’t feel like a game.

Of course not that’s the point! Do haunted houses look like trailers full of costumed teenagers? No, they try and convince you the danger is real!

It doesn’t matter. I can’t go back now anyway.

Silence, for a moment. She stared out at the void as fear rolled over from that revelation. She could only go forward now. The void was as endless as—

Wait, what the fuck? This is a god damned Game world Lindsey! I can leave any time I want!

She held out a hand to summon a door in the air in front of her, but stopped.

If I leave, I know that I wont ever be able to come back. My avatar might be locked in this mountain forever and Ill have to reroll and—

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And more importantly, she had come this far, and despite some impressive fragment making, this place couldn’t hurt her. She let her hand fall to the side and scoffed at the void.

Almost had me.

She turned and marched down the hallway at a pace just below a jog, smiling at her own gullibility, trying to forget what had really stopped her from leaving.

If she had tried to summon an exit, and the door hadn’t come, she would have gone insane.

The hallway turned to the left at the wall, then curved, then curved again, and she knew for sure that she was walking a spiral.

This is definitely a Fragment. There shouldn’t be a fragment in a Gameworld.

Why not? The Spirits that made this place were master makers. They probably stumbled upon the same truths that Hardworlders did, the same techniques for separating the Spirit, but used them for this instead. Some of them might have even been Hardworlders themselves.

Or Demons.

She tried to cut the thought off there by studying the hallway. The walls were the same off white as every apartment, trailer and renthouse she had ever lived in, and somehow was the sum and average of their shades. The floor was a soft carpet, somewhere between the pounded thin dirt clogged skin of her first house, and the springy coffee cake colored flooring of her office in the Real.

Her mind tried to fly, pulled in separate directions by the twin memories, and thrown into a subtle worry by the realization that this spiral seemed to be made of her memory. It had been a year since Lucy had walked Lindsey through her own life, dissecting and categorizing, but that was something she would never forget, and the similarities were undeniable.

Or,

She stopped mid step. The life she had unfolded for Lucy floated out beyond her focus, and so did Lucy herself, and all the rest of it. For a moment, she couldn’t tell which way the déjà vu flowed. Did she go to Lucy first, and now this spiral kicked up her memory, or was Lucy and her mind stripper just a fantasy spawned from the disoriented nostalgia of this place?

For a moment, she couldn’t tell, and all her memories floated out of place, not as a line behind her, but as a fog around her.

Then it passed, and her memories were oriented just as they had always been, but her confidence in them wavered anxiously.

She rushed forward and took the next curve in a jog. Unfortunately, her mind caught up with her, and it brought a memory with it.

She had once been told that many of the traps created by the Demons had never been found, and since nothing degrades in the Otherworld, they might still be out there, waiting…

She put her hand on the wall and screamed inside her head.

DOOR! DOOR!

Nothing happened. Her blood became ice. Her breath caught in her throat like a vacuum had formed in her lungs.

She tried again, but realized the fear was getting in the way of her focus.

That’s how they work. They make you terrified, unable to focus enough to push on the Otherworld, and unable to leave. That’s how the Demons trap you.

She ran. The fear chased her. The walls blurred past her and the curved smoothed into a steady constant turn, like walking the inside of a ring in zero g.

She tried to remember. She tried to wake up. She knew that if she simply imagined her realm, and summoned a door, she could leave. She knew that she had forgotten her real life. She knew she was dreaming. She knew she was still inside Arthel. She knew this was a Demon trap. She knew it wasn’t. She knew that she didn’t.

She remembered her life. She remembered a dream. She remembered a Lindsey. She remembered a thousand.

She ran. She floated.

A voice asked, what do you want?

She screamed. She ran.

A voice sobbed, I want to go home. It was the same voice. It was her own voice.

Ok, the voice said.

She opened the door without stopping and almost shouldered it off the hinges. She skipped to a stop on the grass. The screen door banged closed behind her.

She stood there dumbfounded, staring at the backyard. Her backyard, trying to remember where she had been.