He hauled himself to his feet, taking his time, muscles aching with the strain of moving slowly. The ache in his shoulder receded with every beat of his heart, as if his blood now ran with a painkiller.

He fought to keep his breath under control, feeling almost like he could take on the harpy staring him down with his bare hands, and win. He tried to ignore the feeling, focusing on breathing instead.

The harpies were deadly in the air, but one glance her talons told him that he had exactly one shot to get this right, regardless of whether or not he could somehow magically heal himself a second time. He needed to put steel between himself and the predator.

She shifted as he reached a crouched position, readjusting her weight on the side of the nest and flexing her wings slightly before re-tucking them behind her. He froze at the sudden movement, looking to the side and behind her. Some animals took direct eye contact as a challenge, so he watched her from the periphery of his vision.

He took a step towards the eggs, angling to move past them. As he did so he saw the crack in the egg widen, a little talon breaking through. The egg drew the harpy's attention once more, and as her gaze flicked away he slid his foot to the side, shifting towards the sword.

However intelligent she was, she didn't seem to find him moving towards a weapon to be an active threat. She didn't react, her gaze fixed on the egg.

He took another step. His foot brushed a tibia. No reaction. Another.

With a kind of shuffling slide and without fully standing, he made his way over to the armored torso. When he got there, he allowed himself to take a knee, dropped his hand to the handle of the blade, fumbling around for it without taking his eyes off of the harpy.

He glanced down for a split second, found the hilt, and when he looked up she was looking right at him, locked eyes with him. Her expression seemed fixed, no emotion showing, mouth dangling open. But she was watching him. He closed a fist around the hilt. He reached out and found the scabbard with his other hand, breath frozen in his lungs.

Whoever moved first would have the advantage. But he needed to draw the sword, or that advantage would be pointless.

He waited.

She waited.

He blinked.

She didn't.

Then the egg broke open, a piece of shell falling to the ground to as a talon stretched out from within. A soft sound, almost a coo, came from the harpy's throat as she looked towards it.

He drew the blade from the scabbard and stood in a single fluid movement, fumbling only for a moment at the last second – the blade was much longer than he'd expected – and brought it up in front of him.

There was a moment where the harpy looked over at him, eyes widening, the first expression he'd seen on her face, and they both froze. Then he sprinted at the harpy, screaming wordlessly.

She reacted predictably, launching herself forward at him. Her powerful wings snapped open and swept down, lifting her up, and her talons swept forward.

As the talons closed in on him he swung the sword, awkwardly, like a baseball bat. It was a powerful swing, whistling through the air, and when it connected with one of her dark claws it swept through like it wasn't even there. He felt a minor jolt at the impact and then the talon went flying off out of sight.

She shrieked, a high wounded animal scream, and backpedaled higher, wings pumping. He pressed forward, slashed again, missed, then she was out of range.

In seconds she'd vanished into the mist surrounding them. He froze, listening intently. Around him the mist roiled from the air displaced by her wings.

Rushing wind from behind him. He lunged to the side without turning and swung out and up with the sword where he'd been standing, letting the momentum carry him around. She rushed by him, pulling up, and the tip of the blade scored her left wing deeply, drawing another shriek, sending her careening into the side of the nest.

The makeshift wall shuddered as it absorbed her momentum and then she was on her back, flapping around like an injured bird, talons whipping around in a frenzy.

Oliver adjusted the sword in his hands awkwardly, switching the order of his hands, then carefully moved in, holding it out as far in front of him as he could. It was heavier than it looked.

He had to finish this. He moved in, jumped back as a huge clawed foot swept the air where he'd been standing seconds before.

He raised the sword above his head and lunged forward further, bringing it down with both hands in a great overhead sweep at her body. The sword connected right in the middle of her body, going deep, nearly bisecting her, and as it did he felt a blow to his side that threw him to the ground.

He attempted to stand, the strength rushing out of him, sword in one hand, other at his side finding wetness there. No pain yet. He staggered to his feet, hand held to his side, eyes only for the harpy on the ground.

She was twitching, movements slowing as gouts of blood ran from the gaping wound in her midsection. Her legs went limp and dropped to the ground as he watched. It was a death-wound. With that amount of blood loss she would be unconscious in moments.

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He stumbled back to the other side of the nest, putting ten or so feet – and the pile of eggs – between him and any potential death throes. And then his side was on fire, the pain hitting all at once.

He looked down, saw blood oozing out from between his fingers, through the workers' clothes he wore, running down his leg, and pressed his hand harder against the wound, applying pressure despite the pain. It forced a groan from him that mounted to a scream, and he dropped his sword.

He forced his scream into words, tried to bring his voice under control, "Iusesecondwind!"

Nothing happened. The pain grew. He forced his mouth closed, whimpering, shuddering. He took deep breaths in through his nose until he could talk again, forced out between clenched teeth, slowly, enunciating carefully, "I, use, Second, Wind."

Again, nothing happened. He'd already used Second Wind once. That was the rule, he remembered: you only got one shot between rests.

That was unacceptable. This wasn't a game. This was not Dungeons and Dragons. This was real life, and he was bleeding out, and it was about to be real death.

But he knew he wasn't in a tabletop game. Had known for a long time. He could feel it. Just couldn't accept it.

The construct of the game had been his own creation, a last defense against the impossibility of the world he found himself in, mental crutches that were the only thing keeping his traumatized psyche from falling apart.

It was the final expression of a facade he'd spent his entire life building, a facade that he'd designed to make his life simple, predictable, comfortable.

A facade which had been threatened by his arrival in this place, and which now finally cracked and fell away to reveal a great and terrible truth.

A truth that even in his experiments he'd shied away from, choosing convenient half-truths and partial admissions to focus on instead.

A truth in direct opposition to the great lie humanity tells itself, that it has grown more proficient at telling with each passing eon, that it teaches its children from the moment they can understand speech, the lie that suffering reveals as hollow and that the solemnity of the grave strips away.

The lie that when he left from work, he'd arrive at home. That when he went to bed, he'd wake up in the morning. That the earth would spin on, day after day, that the sun would rise, that, basically, he knew how the world worked.

That when he went to mow the lawn, he would stay in his own reality until it was done.

It was the lie that he had the knowledge, power and control to be the master of his fate.

And it was a lie he could believe no longer.

Oliver grit his teeth against the pain and forced the character sheet to come up. It hung, flickering in and out in his vision. Something was wrong with it.

"You are a lie," he said. And then he made it go away.

A familiar wash of luminous colors played before him, flickering, only this time they didn't fade. They rose before him, swallowing his vision until he could see nothing but shifting luminous hues overwhelming in their intensity, and then he was gone.

–

At first, darkness, for an interminable period of time that could have been a second or an hour.

It was familiar. Reveal yourself, Oliver thought.

A lone twinkle of white light shone in the distance like a star in the depths of space.

He moved towards it, feeling a sense of motion despite his present discorporated state. As he did so it grew in his vision, slowly first and then seeming to disperse into a vast field of lights all at once. They hung about him as he approached like a three-dimensional graph, each node a point of light of varying color and size.

Some were light blue, others green, others a dark, angry red, and there were many other colors besides. Lines of white connected them to each other, forming a web that hung about him. He passed through it, within it, turning about in wonder.

Somewhere his body lay bleeding out in a harpy's nest, but here there was peace.

He found that he could approach a node until it hung before him so large as to obscure all others. He tried this a couple of times before tiring of it.

What were the nodes made of? What did they mean?

Show me, he thought, glided forward until a large, angry red one obscured his vision, then kept gliding forward into it. He seemed to pass into it.

A multitude of distinct images flickered through his mind, hundreds, thousands, too fast and too many to comprehend, people at the center of them, all of them making the same movement, thrusting a hand outward. A class of students dressed in black, training, all performing the same movement. An old man, meditating, face contorted. A woman on a battlefield. Accompanying the images were emotions of rage, hatred, pain, so many that he became overwhelmed and had to back out of the node.

Then, suddenly, the flood of images ceased, leaving him back in the starfield. He had learned nothing from it.

He tried another one. A similar experience, though in this one the images were of people seated in place, eyes closed, all of them, and an overwhelming sense of peace and well-being. He couldn't make out what they were doing. The images changed too quickly, flashed by too fast.

Again, he could glean nothing from the experiences.

He hovered in place, thinking. What was this place? He'd told the Character Sheet interface to go away. Was this what it had been obscuring? Some kind of database of… something?

He needed a way to recover, to use his Second Wind again – no, that was a mistake. It wasn't Second Wind, an ability created for an imagined taxonomy in the game Dungeons and Dragons, it was something more. Something deeper. Something real. Something that the Character Sheet he saw was just a communication medium for. He needed to find it again.

Take me to the ability I used before.

Nothing happened. He remained floating in the void, surrounded by wonder and majesty and mystery, and dying.

Was this simply another layer of abstraction, similar to the Character Sheet? If so, it wasn't useful. He had to go deeper. He had to see the truth.

With that thought in mind he told the graph to go away. It wasn't reality. Just another abstraction his mind was creating to help him deal with the underlying reality. More crutches.

Nothing happened.

He realized that he was still conceptualizing the deeper level in terms of being "not a graph". He didn't know what it was, but his very knowledge was a cage that bound him to what he already knew.

He tried to empty his mind, imagined stilling his breathing, visualized a deeper layer not in relation to this graph, but as… nothing. Everything. Reality.

A pressure grew within him, a sense of unease, of treading on forbidden ground. But what choice did he have? Risk everything here, or die in his own body. A choice between certain death and possible death was no choice at all. He pushed on, forced on.

And then all at once, like the breaking of a dam, his mind was filled with everything. It was the experience of entering a single one of the nodes, but so much more.

A million different sights, sounds, experiences flooded his consciousness, passing by simultaneously.

He felt himself ebbing away, lost in the stream, his sense of self being eroded under the onslaught of being so many things at the same time.

He began to feel that he was this experience, began to forget that he existed individually at all, knew that on some remote level he was not, but that was becoming less and less important.

Some part of him, the part that had once been called Oliver Grace, tried feebly to make it stop, knew that this was its death, that in joining everything it became nothing.

But a larger part said, why stop? To tear itself from this experience was a death as well. To cease to be united to this reality would be an ending all of its own. And the… unity did not wish to end.

And so the Unity hung in a place of nothing and everything, simply being.