“Who the fuck is this guy?” the one with the bloody sword shouted, straightening up and pointing it at me. “How’d he get in—hey, you!”

“He musta been with the peddler,” said the other one, who looked more nervous. “How come you didn’t see him come in?”

“You were supposed to be watching—you know what, never mind, doesn’t really matter.”

“What’s that…hey, what kinda animal is that?”

Biribo darted around behind my head, which I ignored, my attention being on the apparent murderer, who now started around the table toward me with a determined expression I did not like at all. I looked at him, at his companion’s slightly more uncertain face, at the freshly-slain corpse, and found my mind was a complete white blank. Never in my life had I even imagined being in a situation like this.

So I can’t explain what happened next, and I certainly won’t take the blame for it.

“HALT!” I thundered, my voice echoing almost painfully in the cramped stone chamber. Drawing myself up to my full height, I threw out one hand in a dramatic gesture, ignoring the jibbering voice in the back of my head demanded what I thought I was doing. “Insolent swine! You dare raise a weapon to the Champion of Virya? Kneel before the Dark Lord, and perhaps you shall find me…merciful.”

They both stopped, staring. I must say I’ve always had a good stage presence, even when I don’t know what the hell is going on.

“Aw, Kasser, he’s just a crazy guy,” the nervous thug said, reaching over to pull his companion’s sleeve. “Do we really have to…”

“A rich crazy guy,” Kasser retorted, eyeing me up and down. Rich? I didn’t know where he was getting that; I was still in my store uniform. “It doesn’t matter. Rocco said no intruders.”

“But—”

“You know this is why we’re always stuck on guard duty?” Kasser burst out, rounding on him. “You know that, right? You and your bleeding heart!”

The second guy frowned reproachfully. “You always said you liked that about me.”

“I like it, but you know what the gang’s like about weakness! What if Rocco decides to make some kind of example out of you and I’m not there, huh?”

“You guys seem like you’re in the middle of something,” I heard myself say. “Sorry, was this a bad time? My mistake, I’ll just come back later.”

They both turned on me again.

“Uh, boss, what’re you doing?” Biribo hissed in my ear.

Good fucking question.

“We’ll talk about this later, Harold,” Kasser said, drawing in a deep breath and stepping toward me again, bloody sword at the ready.

I did the only thing I could come up with and kicked a chair toward him—not the one with a body in it. Unfortunately that worked out poorly for both of us. The room contained the table (currently strewn with scrolls of paper and a spreading bloodstain) and two chairs, all of which I’d taken for wood at first glance. It was not wood. I had expected it to bounce toward Kasser and hopefully tangle his legs; instead the thing rocked forward abruptly, being much heavier than I’d expected. Its back tipped to catch him in the stomach, which doubled him over with a whoof as the breath was driven from his lungs. I didn’t come out of it much better, yelping and limping backward with a foot suddenly throbbing with pain.

Was that thing made of stone? No, it wasn’t that heavy, not quite. I didn’t have any time to mull the question, being fully occupied with retreating on a foot that I was only mostly sure wasn’t broken.

The room had two doors, I saw upon frantically looking about for them. Maybe a more experienced Dark Lord would have cased his exits immediately on arrival, but I’d been pretty distracted what with one thing and another. One door was past the two thugs, the table, and the corpse—the other, behind me up a short flight of stairs which followed the arc of the curved wall. My injured foot throbbed harder at the prospect of climbing that at speed, but I didn’t hesitate; getting past them wasn’t really an option.

Fortunately Harold stopped to make sure his friend was all right before chasing me, so I made it to the top before either started after me again. His distraction was the only reason I managed it; quite apart from the fresh pain in my right foot, I discovered my entire body still ached too much from Virya’s recent handling to climb stairs in a hurry. All my joints screamed in protest and my entire back, which had been flexed far more than it was meant to bend, sent twinges of pain through every part of me with every step. I may have emitted an undignified sound as I climbed, but I climbed anyway. It was that, or get murdered.

The steps curved up the side of the rounded wall with no railing and terminated at a door which I’d first taken for wood and learned to my regret was the same heavier-than-wood-but-lighter-than-stone material as the furniture when I rammed into it with my shoulder. It opened, allowing me to stumble through, but I gained a fresh bruise for my trouble.

I slammed the door behind me, turned to take stock of my new surroundings, and had to pause and stare.

It was a fortress. A medieval stone structure that could’ve been plucked from anywhere in Europe. It was also falling apart, the stonework broken and cracked in multiple places, the crenelations on the wall right next to me worn down to rounded nubs. I’d just come from a squat corner tower and was standing now on an outer wall of the fortress, with exterior stairs down to a courtyard below on my left and a door into what looked like the central keep just a few meters straight ahead. The courtyard was strewn with junk—piles of hay in the corners, parts of two broken wagons, various detritus I didn’t take in too clearly because most of my attention was in the other direction. To my right, outside the fortress, was a forest.

Sort of.

There was nothing green. There were no leaves, no trees. Staring out across a panorama of multicolored nonsense I felt a wave of vertigo that had nothing to do with being on top of a wall; for a second my brain couldn’t make sense of the shapes I was seeing, but then perspective snapped into place and I realized that this “forest” resembled nothing so much as a coral reef. I could see segmented dome-like structures covered in pulsating growths, colossal upright plates and fins of some hard material whose edges trailed feathery fronds that swayed too languorously to be propelled by the wind, branching structures of spikes and blunt curves which also had growths of living tissue emerging from strategic apertures… It wasn’t coral, obviously, as most of these things were bigger than trees and weren’t underwater, but that was a closer analogue than a forest of wood and leaves. The colors preponderated toward blue and violet, with accents of yellow, green, and pink, and a heavy mixture of enormous spiky vines of vivid red that looked thicker around than I was twining over a lot of the other structures.

The fortress…I could sort of place. Virya had talked about a game; this ruin in fact looked exactly like something out of Skyrim. That forest, though. I might be on another world, but it clearly wasn’t going to be a run-of-the-mill quasi-European medieval fantasy. This world was alien.

“Uh, boss?” Biribo prompted, buzzing in front of my face and blocking the view. “It’s scenic and all, but maybe you should keep running?”

“Shit,” I agreed, then turned to bolt way too fast and almost fell over because my foot was still in agony and basically all my joints were at the very least excruciatingly sore. Way to start your champion off right, Virya.

At the other end of this short stretch of wall was a door into what looked like the main keep, so that was where I went, limping as expeditiously as I could manage. It was a lot closer and less exposed than trying to descend the worn steps to the courtyard, and I was already hearing angry shouts approach from behind. I made it to the door and hauled it open, hurling myself through and tugging it shut behind—like the other door, it was made of long planks of something that was heavier than wood but lighter than stone, and I thought it might be a grayish color but it was a little hard to tell due to the weird quality of the light. So far I’d either been in a dimly torchlit tower, outdoors under an oddly pinkish sky, or now in a dark corridor barely lit by arrow loop windows opening onto said sky.

This place might as well be a labyrinth for all I knew of the layout. I wasted a precious second frozen in indecision between trying to hide in one of the rooms behind the doors lining one side of the hall, or heading for the far end and whatever lay beyond. The downside to the first option was that I could very easily corner myself in a dead end, having no idea what lay behind those doors, but on the other hand, I wasn’t at all sure I could limp all the way down the corridor before my pursuers caught up.

Splitting the difference, I set off down the corridor as fast as my screaming legs could propel me; may as well not lose precious seconds while coming to a decision. It was eerie how clear and alert my mind felt, but then again my life had never been in physical danger before. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug.

“In here, Boss!” Biribo shouted, zipping past me and diving to pull at the handle of one of the doors, the one nearest the end. He apparently wasn’t strong enough to turn it, but I caught up in moments and got myself through, shutting the door scarcely a second before I heard the one down at the end of the hall open. Kasser’s outraged cursing was only slightly muffled by the door behind me.

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This was another corridor; I set off stumbling down it as quietly as I could. There were more doors down near the end, leading to who knew what.

“I’m open to suggestions,” I hissed. “Aren’t you supposed to be helpful? Get me out of this!”

“We gotta get you set up with some skills, Boss,” Biribo whispered, hovering right next to my ear. “Fortunately the goddess dropped you right where you can start with some magic! Obvious choice, what with you bein’ specialized for it and all.”

“I don’t know any fucking magic!”

“Right, not yet. You learn spells from magic scrolls, and we landed right on top of a starter set! That’s what was all over that table back there, with the dead guy.”

Despite the urgency of the situation, I had to pause and turn an incredulous stare on him, my hand on the latch of the next door which I’d chosen at random.

“And…it didn’t occur to you to mention this before we left that room?”

“Hey, it was a tense situation! I’m pretty sure you made the right call getting the hell away from the guys trying to murder you. Not that one, you’ll get cornered in there. Door on the left.”

I released the latch and grabbed the one he’d indicated, slipping inside and shutting the door after me as quietly as possible; I could still hear the footsteps and grunting of my pursuers—or at least one of them—and couldn’t tell how close they were due to the echoes and intervening walls.

We were now on a small porch-like structure overlooking some kind of dining hall, identifiable by the tables and benches. There were dishes with the remains of food on several of them, and paths through the detritus on the floor to indicate this room was actively used, though nobody was here at the moment. Whoever lived here did so in squalor, though. What looked like squashed tumbleweeds were strewn across the floor, there was broken furniture piled in one corner, moss and vines climbed the walls and from the rafters hung weird trailing things like tattered lace in shades of black and purple. If that was what the local cobwebs looked like, I was not looking forward to meeting this planet’s spiders.

This position felt painfully exposed, so I limped forward, trying to balance speed and stealth around the pain in my foot and legs. I had to brace myself with one hand along the wall, where the lichen that lived in this room had been rubbed away by people doing exactly that.

“Okay, then I guess we need to double back,” I muttered as I descended. “Shit. Can you guide me another way to that tower?”

“Risky, Boss,” Biribo objected, buzzing in a complete circle around my head. “Gotta either go across the courtyard or back through the upper halls where they’re actively lookin’ for us.”

“I fucking know it’s risky, but it’s either that or escape outta here into Hell Forest and get eaten by a xenomorph!”

“What’s a—never mind, I got another idea. I can’t pick up much, but I can carry magic scrolls, one at a time. If you cut across the mess hall through that door you’ll come to the stables. Should be easy to hide in there an’ they probably won’t expect you made it this far down. Most intruders won’t have a familiar guiding ‘em!”

“One spell at a time, huh,” I grunted. “All right, fine, get me the most powerful spell in the batch, then.”

“Comin’ right up!” he chirped, then swooped off—toward an upper window, I noted, not the door through which we’d come.

I limped across the mess hall, suddenly alone, and fortunately with the presence of mind to try to walk through the established paths rather than leave a trail by disarranging the plant matter strewn all around. What I’d taken for tumbleweeds were actually slim branches with fluffy, feathery brown leaves, spread all over the floor.

I had to depart from the cleared path to reach the door Biribo had indicated, because the dusty state of the tables and floor suggested nobody came over here. Fortunately that meant there were no branches near the wall itself; there was some moss growing up over the door, but hopefully opening it wouldn’t disarrange that too visibly. The handle was stiff, the hinges rusted, and the door partially blocked by something beyond. I cringed as I dug my heels in and forced it open, both because of the noise and what this did to my recently-tortured body.

Beyond was darkness and a truly incredible stench, which I ignored while turning to push the door shut again. Only once the room was secured did I pause to get my bearings, which I immediately regretted.

This being a stable would account for the smell, which was a blend of rot, manure, and rotted manure. It was also virtually pitch black, with the only light being from the front, which opened onto the courtyard. Either Ephemera’s sun was farther away than Earth’s or it was evening, because the dimness outside did nothing to illuminate the stable more than a meter or two inside. Worse, once I was shut into the darkness, there were sounds.

Sourceless, inscrutable skittering sounds. Rustling, eerie little squeaks that didn’t resemble any rodent I’d ever heard… Abortive rushes of frantic tapping that made me envision a centipede the size of a cat, wearing horseshoes. You’d expect rats and spiders in a disused stable, but remembering my glimpse of the alien forest outside I was excruciatingly aware that I had no idea what kind of creepy-crawlies would live here. After a few seconds of this, I became aware that the only thing I could hear besides the pitter-patter of tiny horrors was my own labored breathing.

It was the first moment I’d had to catch my breath since landing on this ridiculous hell planet; it figured all I had to breathe was ancient stable funk. Adrenaline thrummed in my body, muting the pain and urging me to move, to do something, despite the fact that what I needed to do right now was stay put and hide. I began creeping forward toward the open front doors, stepping as carefully as I could in the darkness and wincing at every crunch and rustle underfoot, mostly just to keep in motion. Adrenaline was a great thing while it was up, but once it faded the crash could reduce a person to a helpless, blubbering wreck. I’d only read about that and was not looking forward to the firsthand experience.

The courtyard outside was mostly as I remembered it from my previous brief glimpse, I observed as I crept closer. Dim, strewn with trash… I hesitated, pressing myself against the wall next to the door, listening. I could hear Kasser and Harold stomping and shouting…somewhere? I had no sense of the layout and the echoes were confusing. Another thought intruded: my hand was pressed against the wall and it felt weird. It wasn’t wood, or stone. Now that I thought about it, I’d not been paying much attention to the architecture for obvious reasons but I had vague impressions of the walls and rafters of the areas I’d passed through being oddly colored. The doors and furniture were made of something that resembled wood at a glance but was heavier. What the hell were these people building with?

“Boss!”

To my abject embarrassment, I shrieked like a girl when Biribo zipped around the corner and almost smacked me in the face. He dropped the scroll he’d been holding and by sheer reflex I grabbed it, fumbling and nearly dropping it into the muck at my feet before getting a grip.

“Yo, maybe keep the volume down?” he suggested, flittering back around the door frame to check outside. “We’re sorta tryin’ to be discreet, here.”

“Thanks for the tip, asshole,” I growled, holding up the scroll. It was a simple roll of what looked like parchment, bound with a thin red ribbon. In the darkness of the stable, though, I noticed a faint lightness about it, a glow which hadn’t been visible in the tower. Or maybe I’d just been too distracted then to take note; it was pretty subtle. “Okay, how’s this thing work? How do I get the magic out?”

“You’ve got the Blessing of Magic, so all you gotta do is read it to learn the spell.”

I reached for the ribbon but before I could touch it, the red strip suddenly came undone, allowing the scroll to partially unfurl and causing me to hesitate, but only for a moment. Automatic opening? Made sense for a magic scroll, but I could hear my pursuers approaching and didn’t have the luxury of thinking this through step by step. I yanked the scroll fully open, almost hard enough to tear it, and beheld lines of text in shimmering ink set against a faintly luminous surface.

I didn’t have a chance to start reading; the words immediately lifted straight up off the parchment, glowing brighter, and the scroll itself disintegrated under my fingers into motes of light. The text seemed to loom huge in my vision, as if my consciousness were narrowed down to a pinpoint focused upon it, and I felt a strange pressure inside my head. All around me existence lit up, as the filthy stable vanished and for one brief moment I was alone inside a world of light, cocooned within a sphere of radiance upon which were meticulously arranged symbols I couldn’t read, obviously forming some intricate message or recipe. Even if I wasn’t able to consciously parse the text, I could sense its purpose, the crucial part of it burned directly into my mind so that when the entire thing vanished a second later, leaving me blinking in the dark, stinky stable, with a brand new magic spell lodged in my consciousness:

Heal.

I turned incredulously to Biribo, blinking. “Are you fucking serious? A healing spell?”

His tongue flickered out. “You asked for the most powerful spell in the batch, boss. That was it. By, like, several orders of magnitude.”

“What the fuck am I supposed to do with a healing spell?!”

“Is…” He tasted the air again. “Is that a trick question?”

Here we are, getting chased by armed bandits, and instead of fireballs or lightning bolts, this idiot brings me a scroll of Heal. Of all the… Well, on second thought, it wasn’t like I didn’t have a use for it.

“Ugh, fine. How am I supposed to cast it?”

“Oh, it’s super easy once you’ve learned the spell!” he said, now darting back and forth in enthusiasm. “Just takes focus! Focus on your target and focus on the spell in your mind, and the rest is magic! Most Blessed will say the name of the spell out loud to cast it, vocalization helps with concentration. As the Dark Lord you should be powerful enough to cast mentally, but verbalizing’s a good practice to start with till you’ve got the hang of it.”

This felt idiotic, but it wasn’t like I had many options. And I could focus on it better than I would’ve expected; the spell had a weight in my mind that felt distinct from my own thoughts. All I had to do was think about it and it was there. I suspected this would remain constant, unlike normal memories which degrade every time you recall them. Concentrating on my own aching body and the foreign presence of the spell inside my brain, I could feel it pushing at me. Something wanted to break through, to bridge the connection. I gave it a final shove.

“Heal!”

Vivid pink light burst around me, regrettably illuminating the squalor of my decomposing surroundings and causing a horde of alarmingly multi-limbed shapes to scamper away back to the shadows, but this time I wasn’t paying any attention to that.

I was actually sort of amazed that it worked.

There was a rush of cool, tingling sensations, concentrating on my back, my joints, my heavily bruised foot and other areas that had recently been abused, and then…nothing. No pain. In fact, I felt really good, though at least part of that was probably the adrenaline still buzzing in my system. Apparently Heal didn’t get rid of that.

“All right,” I said aloud, invigorated despite myself. I rolled my shoulders and flexed both my hands. “Now we’re talking.”

“See? Tolja that was a great spell,” Biribo enthused, doing a complete loop around my head.

I snatched him out of the air and clamped my other hand over his face, listening to noises from behind us. It was muffled by the intervening not-stone wall, but as it drew closer the shouts became more distinct.

“…like it came from over there!”

“The old stables?”

“Shit,” I muttered, tossing Biribo outside and dashing after him, on legs that suddenly worked perfectly. Fixing the damage Virya had done to my body improved the odds, but I was still stuck in this moldering castle with bandits trying to kill me. I was still unarmed, completely ignorant of everything on this planet, and possessing only one Ephemera-related skill, with zero offensive utility. The only real advantage I had was that casting magic was stupidly easy, now that I had the trick. If I could Heal anything, instantly… As long as they didn’t manage to lop my head off in one blow, then if nothing else I could stay alive and outlast them.

“Well,” I said aloud as I jogged toward a tower which I hoped was the one with the spell scrolls in it, “I guess I know what I’ll be doing for the entire rest of the day.”