“Well, fuck you too, lady.”

Yes, that was the first thing I said to the goddess. I won’t defend it as an intelligent move, but what can I say? I’ve always been kind of a mouth.

Fortunately, she didn’t seem to mind too much.

“And that,” she said with a self-satisfied smirk, “is why I chose you. I’ve had strategic masterminds, cruel tyrants, thuggish bullies… Every manner of villain I could think of to try. But it all gets so rote, you know? Once in a while, I like to shake things up. And so here we are, Seiji: Me, the Goddess of Evil, and you, a rude, pushy, self-centered dick. This is going to be such fun!”

“I’m gonna stop you right there,” I said, holding up one hand. “I see why you might be confused, what with that hopeless dork your friend just picked up, and all these otaku in the station right now, but I am not one of them. Okay? I’m not an…an isekai protagonist. I have a career, goals, and plans, and I know what a vagina feels like. I’ve got a personality. And if you’ll excuse me, I’m just gonna go get back to those. So, good luck with your…whatever it is. I’m sure any one of these socially maladjusted simps would be delighted to sign up, just look for the ones who look like they’ve never seen sunlight. You’ve got a wealth of choices here.”

“Aww, Seiji,” she cooed, squirming closer with an eel-like motion of her whole body that would have been sexy had everything about this situation not been setting off danger signals in the primitive part of my brain. The goddess reached for my face, and I leaned back from her. She kept reaching, and something told me trying to actually run would be a bad idea, so I held still while she gently placed her fingertips under my chin. “But I don’t want any of these other socially maladjusted simps. I want you. And you seem to have misunderstood something.”

In a flash, her hand left my chin and surged forward, seizing me by the throat. For such a dainty-looking thing, she had an amazingly strong grip, and in the next moment I found myself dangling from her grasp, struggling to draw breath and clutching her wrist ineffectually.

“I,” the goddess said sweetly, holding me right up to her face so I had a front-row seat for the most viciously psychotic grin I had ever seen, “was not asking you.”

She held me that way for just a moment longer than necessary to make her point. Just to drive home who was top dog here.

Then she dropped me, hard. I hit the floor, acquiring a painful bruise on my tailbone, coughing and clutching my own squeezed neck.

The goddess floated over me, looking down her nose with a maliciously triumphant expression, just drinking in the sight of me humiliated at her feet.

“You know,” I said, my voice raspy, “you’d actually be pretty cute if you’d stop making yandere faces.”

Again, mouth, but there’s a method to my madness. Bullies want, above all else, to feel they have power over somebody, and I have one simple rule for dealing with them: if you can’t beat them anyway, ruin their satisfaction. When you’re being manhandled by some kind of clearly insane cosmic being, there are basically no victory conditions. If all I could do was spoil her fun, well… That was pretty on-brand for me, anyway.

This time, though, the results weren’t what I expected. The purple-haired goddess only smiled wider, as if my backtalk was exactly what she wanted to hear.

“For someone who professes to hate otaku so much,” she said sweetly, “you sure are up to date on their terminology, Seiji.”

Oh, you bitch.

“And for someone who calls herself the Goddess of Evil, you sure do like to pick on people weaker than you. What, too risky to slap people around if they can slap back?”

That brought a full-throated laugh of apparent delight. “Oooh, we’re going to have such fun together! I knew I was right to pick you. I had a good feeling about you, right off the bat. Allow me to introduce myself!”

She floated backward and upward, positioning herself even higher above me, and rather than bow or do anything remotely polite or normal, spread her arms wide as if inviting me to behold the spectacle that was her.

“I am Virya, the Lady of Malice, the Mistress of the Night, the Paragon of Mischief and She Who Rules the Dark!”

Virya leaned forward, extending one hand in a similar posture to the one the other goddess had used to approach Yoshi. Hers was palm down with the fingers curled, though, as if she expected me to lay a kiss on her knuckles.

“And I am your new Goddess.”

Needless to say, I didn’t reach for her hand.

“I’m an atheist.”

“Of course you are, Seiji,” she said with withering condescension. “It takes someone who only worships at the altar of his own ego to meet a goddess in the flesh and act the way you do. But that’s all right; I don’t require prayers from you. In fact, where you’re going, praying won’t help you.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you, lady.”

“Oh, you are just too precious! Behold!”

Again, she flung her arms wide, this time swiveling in midair to face away from me, and only then did I realize that Akihabara Station was gone. When had that happened? Being choked out and thrown around is surprisingly distracting. I was now sitting on a patch of… It wasn’t the floor of the station. In fact, it looked as if the round circle of light the goddesses had projected there had remained, somehow solid enough to hold me up even with the actual floor gone. All around us was an infinite black void, glittering with stars. I had never seen so many stars, even in the countryside; it was as if there was no black space left between them, and many seemed to have jewel-like colors rather than the plain white dots one could see from Earth’s surface.

At her gesture, though, something appeared in the distance, larger than the stars and standing out from them. It grew rapidly until I could tell it was a sphere. In fact, a planet. Though the starry sky all around didn’t seem to move, the rapid approach of this celestial orb gave an even more terrifying perspective to it all; we’d have to be moving at nearly the speed of light to be nearing it so fast. Somehow, that was even more alarming than apparently being out in space, especially as there was no sense of movement.

But no, surely it was all just some kind of illusion. The time stop effect in the train station had to have been more of the same. I could accept there was some kind of magic at work here, but not that this crazy goddess could possibly have that kind of power over time and space.

“Welcome,” Virya said proudly, “to Ephemera. Our world.”

We had drawn close enough for me to see details, and finally slowed, eventually settling into what I felt would be a low orbit from which I could study the surface of the planet as it slowly turned beneath us. What there was of it, anyway.

There were no oceans, only vast empty spaces where they should be. Of the landmasses, there were none large enough to be called continents, but only sprawling archipelagos, most of the islands connected by a series of land bridges, many of which looked needle-thin from up here. I supposed they had to be pretty massive to be visible from space at all, but they looked tiny in context. I could see some of the colossal stone spires holding up the islands, descending down toward the world’s core, but they vanished into the fog. Most of the world’s surface was just missing, and below it, endlessly swirling mist that seemed not to come up even to sea level. Deep down where its core should be, there was a steady glow illuminating the subterranean clouds, making shifting patterns of crimson and golden light that filtered through the fog. As far as I could tell, despite the shattered state of the planet itself, the surfaces of the surviving islands were not unlike the surface of Earth, complete with green forests and plains, plus areas that looked more purple and blue. Different colored vegetation, maybe? There were snow-capped mountains, lakes and rivers, the latter of which tumbled off the stark edges of the world into the infinite abyss below. It was just…a broken shell of a world, wrapped around a hollow space filled with mist.

“Wow,” I said, unimpressed. “What’d you do? Drop it down the stairs?”

“Oh, you know how it is,” Virya replied with an offhanded shrug. “There was…an incident. I’ll admit, things got a little out of hand in some of our early games.”

“This is your idea of a little out of hand? What the hell kind of game does something like this to an entire planet?”

“Do you have any idea what it is like to be a goddess, Omura Seiji?” she mused, gazing down at Ephemera rather than at me.

“So far it seems bitchier than I would’ve thought.”

“Well, it’s boring!” Virya spun about and lunged at me like a striking moray eel, faster than I could react, and seized me by the shoulders even as I tried to stumble away from her. She clutched me hard enough to leave fingertip-sized bruises, glaring wide-eyed and with bared teeth into my face. “Imagine it, if you can! Absolute power, the ability to do anything you can think of… But only on one world. You can’t leave, can’t explore the cosmos, can’t even die. How long do you think it would take to run out of every possible thing there is to do?”

“I guess that depends on how much imagination you’ve got.”

Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the smartest observation to make under those circumstances, but it was the only thing that came to mind. Fortunately for me, she seemed to agree.

“Exactly!” Grinning, Virya gave me one last squeeze (ow) before releasing me and swirling away. She began to drift horizontally around my little island of light, like a goldfish circling its bowl. “You saw my sister Sanora—she’s all I have, really. Everybody else lives fifty, a hundred years at the most. After a while, there’s just no point in getting attached to them. For all these eons it’s been just Sanora and me, cooped up with only each other and our increasingly stale little world and an ever-changing parade of little people no more significant than mayflies. We’ve had to do something to keep from going insane out of sheer tedium.”

“I don’t think it’s working.”

“So we invented our game.” She didn’t answer me directly, which in hindsight was probably for the best. “Good versus Evil! And you know what, Seiji? It’s actually a lot of fun!”

“I’m happy for you.”

“The game is always in session, you see, in one form or another. All those tiny little people down there, they’re born into it; it’s all they know. They are on the side of Evil or Good, they live, fight each other, make more little people, and die off. It makes an ever-changing selection of game pieces—a wonderful device to keep it interesting!”

“Has anybody ever sat you down and had a conversation about just how fucked up that is?”

“Oh, don’t pretend you care about anybody but yourself,” she chided, grinning at me as she idly swam through space between me and the view of the broken planet. “You, of all people. Ah, but where was I? Even though the game of Good and Evil is eternally ongoing, there are actual sessions, you see. They begin when my dear sister and I choose our key pieces. The Champions of Sanora and Virya, the Hero and the Dark Lord! Our most potent weapons. Do you play chess, Seiji?”

“I prefer shogi.”

Actually I preferred video games—specifically offline ones that didn’t require me to interact with anyone—but I was not in the habit of admitting to any interests that were even otaku-adjacent. Once you get that stink on you, it never comes off.

“Well, Seiji, you can think of yourself as my queen.” She drifted in front of me, planted her elbows on nothing in midair and propped her chin in her hands, smiling sweetly. “My strongest piece, the one which can move with virtually no limits, strike harder than any other, wreak the greatest havoc in my name! But here’s the thing about the queen, my little Dark Lord.” She reached out with one hand to stroke the side of my face, and this time I tolerated it stoically rather than giving her the satisfaction of flinching back. “It’s the king that’s necessary to win the game. I cherish you for the strategic value you bring…but I can still win without you.” Once again, that smile took on a yandere aspect, just a few too many teeth showing, eyes wider than looked healthy, with her pupils shrinking down to dots. “You’d be well-advised to keep that in mind, Seiji.”

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Well, gee, you sure know how to make a guy feel special.”

“So!” She swirled away again, spinning in an exuberant ring above my head. “You’ll be wanting to know the rules of this game!”

“I literally cannot imagine caring less about anything. What I want is to go home.”

“At first, you see, we designed it to be sort of a free-form battle royale kind of thing. We added magic to the world, made it freely available to all people, and just let them go at each other. And…you see what happened.” Virya glided past, gesturing gracefully at the shattered world below. “But it all worked out in the end! Ephemera makes a much better game board as it is now, with nice built-in limits on things like how people can move from one island to another, and how many people can be supported on any one place. It’s all so much more orderly. We learned that lesson on the importance of limitations in a proper game, and put similar strictures on magic. Instead of chaos and everybody doing whatever they can imagine, there’s a system in place now. It has simple rules, keeps anybody from getting too powerful, ensures the game is fair and fun for everybody!”

“Uh huh.” I took out my phone. It worked, but there was no signal. So either this was another world, or her illusion extended to little details like that.

“You may want to pay attention, Seiji. The object of the game is simple: the Dark Lord tries to conquer all of Ephemera, and the Hero tries to stop him…to the death. You—and your little friend from a moment ago—will live and die by the rules of this contest, quite literally.”

“You want me to murder Yoshi?” I demanded. “That poor, tubby nerd-boy your sister’s manipulated into thinking all this bullshit is his fantasy come to life? Fuck you, that kid can’t be more than fifteen. I’m not doing it.”

“You seem awfully confident you’ll have a choice in the matter,” she cooed, swirling around me uncomfortably close, almost like an affectionate cat. “That poor, tubby nerd-boy is getting the same head start you are. And there’s the fact of why she picked him, which you already know: that manchild has spent his whole life hiding from reality and craving the fantasy of being a Hero. Now he is one. Do you really think he’s going to ask questions when the beautiful Goddess who made all his dreams come true tells him to go kill a Dark Lord?”

Virya had practically coiled herself around me—she was amazingly flexible—and now came up with her grinning face right alongside my head.

“Especially since he’s met you, Seiji. Oh, for only a few minutes, yes, but what kind of impression do you think you left? Be honest: if you were in his position, would you question for a moment that Omura Seiji was an evil bastard who needed a sword in the chest?”

For the first time, she’d left me without a ready response. Maybe because it was the first time she was right. If there was one thing I understood, it was that human beings were stupid, selfish, aggressive animals. Especially otaku like Shinonome Yoshi who’d gone their whole lives with barely one toe dipped in actual reality. He wasn’t going to question orders from a pretty goddess who brought his favorite isekai fantasy to life; I vividly remembered the desperate joy on his face when she’d offered him the hero gig. That dumb fatass was gonna come at me with everything he had.

Of course, helpful goddess or no, he was still…Yoshi. I couldn’t imagine any possible suite of isekai cheat powers that would render that boy anything but hopeless. Even if I did end up having to fight him, maybe I didn’t have to go for the kill.

I’d murder Virya in an instant if I could, but I just didn’t have it in me to start planning the death of a stupid teenager whose only crime was being a stupid teenager. Yoshi was as much a victim of this as I was, even if he was too dense to realize it.

“Yes, I thought that might finally get through to you,” she murmured, smugness incarnate. “Now that we’re all on the same page, let me clarify the rules. You—”

“There’s one thing you haven’t taken into account, you know,” I interrupted.

She swam back in front of me and folded her arms, looking no less smug than before. “Oh, do tell. I expect this will be absolutely priceless.”

“Well, it’s just as I said,” I informed her, calmly and with a smile. People who think they’re making a point by getting red in the face and shouting only reveal their ignorance; there is nothing like proper Japanese social graces to emphasize a searing verbal takedown. “As I have already explained to you, I’m not doing it. You set all this up because you’re bored, right? Then you should consider my responses thus far and ask yourself whether a man who’ll criticize you right to your face is going to dance for your amusement. I don’t care about your silly game, I have no interest in your broken wreck of a planet, and I have absolutely no quarrel with Shinonome Yoshi. I’m not about to waste my time conquering people I don’t know in the name of someone I don’t like. My sole emotional stake in this, Virya, is that I think you’re a cunt and if the options are death or being your champion… Well, darling, you aren’t the more attractive prospect between the two.” I smiled more widely, keeping my tone pleasant. “So fuck you, fuck your sister, and fuck the eternal battle of Good and Evil. I’m not doing it. If you want someone to play a living RPG character, you could’ve picked almost anyone else from that train station. And hey, you still can! Really, this isn’t going to work out well for you, so you might as well just send me back to Akihabara and get yourself a better Dark Lord.”

The goddess just gazed down at me in silence when I finished speaking, her expression thoughtful.

“Actually,” I said after a pause, “now that I think of it, you did make me miss my train. So if you could just set me down in Yokohama—”

Virya didn’t move, but something seized my whole body in an inescapable grasp and wrenched me out of place. I broke off with a strangled gasp as I was physically bent over backward, nearly double. I could feel muscles and ligaments stretching beyond their capacity, my spine flexing till the vertebrae ground against each other so hard I swear I could hear them.

And then the force that held me began to twist me to the side. I was fairly proud of the brave face I’d been putting on this long; I’m not ashamed to admit that this wrenched a strangled scream of pain out of me. With my neck bent backward farther than it was meant to go, my windpipe was compressed enough that I could barely breathe even without that.

“Now, Seiji,” the goddess said in a tone of kindly reproof, like a first grade teacher correcting a child, “that’s not how this works. I chose you. It wasn’t an accident, and your opinion was not asked. Really, what do you think the point is of grabbing people from Earth to fill these roles? There are thousands right here on Ephemera who’d love nothing more than to be named a Champion of a Goddess. Bringing in fresh blood who don’t know how things work here is the point. And like I said… I picked you for a reason.”

I found my arms forcibly pulled out to the sides by an unseen grip, and then slowly, inexorably, twisted in opposite directions until I could feel the strain in every joint and was sure my shoulders were about to dislocate. Despite having just learned to conserve air by keeping quiet, I couldn’t completely repress a whimper of pain.

“I promise you, little boy,” Virya crooned, sounding like she was coming closer, “you are going to entertain me. You can either do it by putting up a good fight against the Hero, and have all the fun of gaining fortune, power, and glory in the process… Or, I can just keep you here, let a more amenable Dark Lord do your job, and spend the entire time finding new ways to make you scream. I should warn you, these games tend to go on for several years, at least. Often decades. So if that’s the way you want it, say the word! Just be aware that by the time I allow you the reprieve of death, you will thank me for the mercy.”

My spine cracked audibly, prompting a muffled shriek. With both feet firmly pressed to the floor, I had been bent so far backward that the crown of my head finally came to rest on the ground. Having your limbs bent just a little too far doesn’t sound so terrible, in theory, but I had never experienced pain like that in my life. It takes a lot to shut me up, but she did it.

“Oh, sweetie, I know,” Virya went on, her smirking visage appearing in my vision as she apparently flowed up over the agonized arch of my body. Upside down, she descended till her purple hair pooled on the floor, holding my panicked eyes while she spoke. “You’re just so used to thinking you’re better than everyone else. You, Seiji, with the oh-so-unique backstory that makes all your bullshit justified. The amateur musician saving up to go seek his fortune in California, the child of two cultures caught between them and feeling himself superior to both, the son of a broken family that just…how very sad…doesn’t understand him. And so you walk around sneering at everybody, telling yourself you are surrounded by inferior idiots who don’t deserve your respect. Contriving to despise both your homelands by judging each only from the standards of the other, and carefully not thinking about the stunning hypocrisy of that.”

She grinned, broadly, and reached out to lay a gentle hand against the side of my face, that deceptive tender gesture in contrast to the agony she was wreaking through my entire body by systematically twisting every part of it out of joint. The strangled noise that emerged from my throat was hard to describe; I was simply stretched too far to manage a proper sob. My lungs just didn’t have the necessary room to expand.

“You’re an asshole, Omura Seiji,” Virya informed me. “Oh, I know—you think you’re unique, that you’re different. The only real person in a world of NPCs, justified and entitled to treat everyone the way you do. Because that is exactly what every bog standard asshole thinks.” She leaned in closer, batting her eyelashes prettily. “You. Are. Not. Special.”

She stared at me that way for a few eternally long seconds, the vindictive cruelty she was taking in this peeking through her cheerful facade.

Then, abruptly, the pressure let up and I collapsed onto my back, gasping. The sudden absence of intense, all-over pain was such a relief it took me a few seconds to even notice I’d landed in a really uncomfortable position, with my legs and one arm tucked under myself awkwardly. In carefully straightening myself out, I discovered that having all my joints yanked hard the wrong way and held there was the kind of experience I wouldn’t get over quickly. Everything still hurt. Not nearly as bad, but I was going to be feeling this for days at least. But she’d been careful, apparently; nothing seemed broken.

“Until now,” Virya said softly, gazing down at me with insufferable self-satisfaction. “I have made you special. In Japan, you were a nobody with delusions of grandeur, and you can protest all you like, but you know it was never going to be any different in America. On Ephemera, you are important. You will do what I tell you, Seiji. And in the end? You’ll thank me for this. Maybe not soon, but you will.”

I got carefully to my feet, wincing and flexing my fingers to make sure they were undamaged. Looking up at the smug goddess, I made the decision that if I was going to be some kind of Dark Lord, it wouldn’t be the forces of Good I set out to destroy. I had one enemy on this world, and it wasn’t Shinonome Yoshi.

“Well, smart mouth?” she asked sweetly. “Nothing to say this time?”

I had to clear my throat twice; the recent strain on my neck had made my voice a bit raspy.

“What the hell do you mean, amateur? Bitch, conjure up my guitar and yourself some dry panties, I’m about to rock your universe.”

Virya laughed with almost childlike glee. “It’s not even that I think you’re going to win, Seiji, but oh, what fun this will be! I’ve never had a Dark Lord quite like you. Win or lose, this is going to be a hell of a show! And now, before we put you to work, you should meet your familiar.”

“My what?”

“It was part of those rules you were too cool to listen to. Have it your way, little Dark Lord; now you get to learn as you go. Fortunately, this will help with that.”

She snapped her fingers, producing a shower of sparks and a puff of smoke. When it cleared a second later, there was a little monster hovering before me.

Barely bigger than a rat, it resembled nothing so much as a large black gecko, with the addition of buzzing wasp wings that kept it floating in the air at the level of my shoulder. Its eyes were crimson, which would maybe have looked sinister except that the overall impression the creature gave was… Well, it was cute. For some reason I found that even more exasperating.

“Your familiar will serve as your guide, among other things,” Virya intoned. “As you grow in power, he will gain skills, increasing your ability to gather intelligence about your enemies and providing you a great strategic advantage in your conquest. The bond between you is struck when you give him a name. Now, Seiji, what is your familiar called?”

I gave the little wasp-lizard a sidelong look of disgust. It gazed back, its little tongue darting out to taste the air.

“Ah, ah,” Virya interjected when I opened my mouth, grinning down at me. “I suggest you take this seriously, Seiji. You will be heavily dependent on this little spirit, and there will be no second chance to name him. You’d best pick something you won’t mind hearing every day for the rest of your life.”

That only deepened my antipathy, of course. Fuck, I didn’t care—I didn’t care about any of this. What was a good name for a little fantasy spirit lizard? I don’t even like fantasy.

“I dunno,” I said impatiently. “Bilbo?”

“The bond is struck!” Virya exclaimed gleefully, spinning off on another circuit of the empty space around me.

“And so it is,” the familiar agreed in a squeaky little voice that I already knew was going to get on my nerves the longer I had to hear it. “Pleased to meetcha, boss! By your will, I am called Biribo.”

I glared at him; he tasted the air again and grinned back. I’ve been speaking English since I was four, I do not mangle my L’s and R’s. So that was how it was going to be? I’m stuck with a little helper-demon that intends to give me a hard time?

“Listen here, you little shit—”

“There’s just one final thing you need,” Virya cut me off. “You and Yoshi are both starting with certain advantages, but it’s just no fun if you have the exact same set of powers!”

“Wait, what powers?”

Biribo tasted the air again. “Wait, did you seriously not listen to the rules?”

“He felt it was more important to tell me how ungrateful he was for my generosity,” Virya simpered. “Now, you’ll need one additional power…an extra advantage that will differentiate you from the Hero in style and approach. But what’s your area of expertise, hm? Might, magic, or wisdom?”

Wisdom, obviously. My greatest strength was my understanding of how people worked and how to leverage that. Watching the dark goddess’s pensive expression, I had the disconcerting feeling she could tell what I was thinking, and didn’t agree.

“I think we’ll make you a sorcerer,” she mused, her lips curling up in a smirk. “Yes, I will augment your magical skill. Your Gift of the Goddess shall be… Spell combination!”

“Ooh!” Biribo actually did a little loop-de-loop in excitement. “We haven’t seen that one in forever! Gonna be interesting, boss!”

“And so, you are ready for your adventure to begin,” Virya proclaimed. “Go forth, Lord Seiji, and conquer in my name! Destroy your enemies, subdue your rivals, and above all…” She winked, grinning insufferably. “Be sure to put on a good show for me.”

“I guess it may be a long time before I see you again, Virya,” I said solemnly, “so let me just get this out while I still have the chance: I sincerely hope someone you love survives a protracted battle with bone cancer, only to perish in a gasoline fire. While you watch.”

Biribo made a strangled squeak. “Uh, boss, you know she can…”

“Oh, Seiji,” she giggled, “you should know better. People like you and I don’t love anybody but ourselves. That’s why I like you. Now go knock ‘em dead, tiger.”

Unsurprisingly it was I who was immediately knocked—not dead, at least, but down. A sudden burst of force shoved me straight through whatever invisible surface had been holding me up and I found myself plummeting toward the broken surface of Ephemera at horrifying speed.

I’ll freely admit I screamed and flailed my arms in panic. I’m a musician, not a paratrooper.

“Wheeeeee!” Biribo crowed, which caused me to notice for the first time that he was clinging to my left shoulder with all four clawed limbs, his wasplike wings and tail trailing straight up with the force of our descent. “This is the best part!”

I didn’t actually know how long it should take to descend from orbit to the surface, but we were clearly going much faster than that; the ground loomed up at a speed that meant we’d hit in seconds. We should definitely have been burning from atmospheric friction, but that didn’t happen. With my familiar in tow I plunged straight at one of the larger archipelagos, toward a narrower spray of islands extending north from its main group, and as it drew closer, I could tell we were heading for one smallish island in particular. It raced to meet us, affording me a view of purplish forests, a mountain range at one edge and a town or city amid green plains, and then we were zooming straight into the forest. I just barely had time to get a glimpse of a large stone structure before Biribo and I slammed right into its roof.

Except we didn’t hit the roof, but landed somehow in an interior room. I staggered slightly as my feet touched the floor; it was an awkward landing, but at least it wasn’t the lethal impact I’d expected from that descent.

As traumatic as the fall had been, I immediately had other things on my mind. We were in a dimly-lit stone room, with cobweb-strewn shelves along one wall and a single rough table in the center. There were three men already there, and one of them was dead.

He sat in the only intact chair pulled up next to the table, lolling against its back with his arms hanging limply at his sides and his head leaning backward in a way that made a grotesque spectacle of the still-bleeding slash across his throat. I could see straight down his trachea, and had to immediately suppress the heaving of my stomach.

It wasn’t hard to tell how he’d died, either. The two other men in the room were staring at me in confusion. Both were carrying swords. One was smeared with blood along one edge.

“Yeah,” I said aloud, “this seems about right.”