Have you ever stood under the warm flowing waters of a shower while your delightful brain replayed fights you’ve had in the past? You know how it always likes to point out things you did wrong and what you should have done or said in the moment? Yeah, that’s what was happening now, only I wasn’t standing in a relaxing shower, I was sitting on sharp shards of glass that seemed determined to shred my ass into fleshy ribbons.
I watched as the dead Croc rippled like the surface of a pond before it flashed and turned into a glowing chuck of loot-filled skeleton. I pressed two fingers to the searing agony that was my right cheek. When I hissed and pulled them back they were coated in a thick smear of my blood. In the corner of my field of vision, my health bar mocked me. The Croc had taken three-quarters of it.
Do you want to hear the worst part though? The part that was making my blood boil and reminding me just how fragile I really was? You do, don’t you? Why does my pain bring you so much joy?
The monster in front of me was not some bastard Combustion Croc or even one of the really big ones. It was just some standard everyday Croc like I’d met the day the blinding pillar of purple fire at Joridoon Flats had disappeared and stranded me here.
I was suddenly glad Gabby was in the building next door, probably rugged up and fast asleep. If she’d seen this horrid display of incompetence I’d never hear the end of it.
In my defense, for the beast to be left standing after taking a full backstab and two doses of my poisonous concoctions it must have been a hardy bastard.
Nigel was losing his mind in laughter and for whatever reason, just like his small bearded and pointy-hatted image, his laughter echoed in the hundreds of mirrors that remained whole all around me. Taunting me as the harsh howling of it dug into my ears like some vicious earworm that refused to fuck off.
Frank was less amused. Something or someone was clearly distracting him as he sat inside the mirror world. His head was swinging one way and then the other as he hopped about. I was afraid to wonder exactly what it was that he was listening to. Maybe Cassie was back there somewhere. That was a little disconcerting. There was something about that witch that frightened me a little. Call me weird or a pussy or whatever but that’s just how it is.
“Nigel, could you get your ass out here already?” I snapped over the gnome’s cruel laughter, poking at the weird swollen lump that was my lower lip.
“You… you almost… and with your head being stomped…” The gnome could barely talk. Inside the mirror, he was leaning up against the frame with one hand and clutching at his side with the other. When he’d finally run out of amusement he said, “How the hell are you still alive this far into the game?”
“Like you can talk Mr. All-Powerful-Gnome-Man. At least I’m not the one hiding in a bloody mirror.”
“Please, one flick of my finger and that pathetic beastie would have been turned inside out,” Nigel said, feeling along the inside of the mirror like a mime pretending a wall was in its way.
Frank spread his wings and stepped out of the mirror causing a string of ripples to flow over the glass in his wake. The ripples warped Nigel’s form in the strangest way, making him bulbous and squat one moment and tall and sickly slender the next. With a flap of his wings, Frank positioned himself on my shoulder where he seemed to enjoy being.
Nigel was still having trouble. He was muttering angrily to himself as he walked right through the right-hand side of the mirror and magically appeared in another one just as large halfway up the wall. I lifted a brow at that. The gnome never did things that made sense. Now he was bellowing out nonsense and pounding on the mirror, demanding to be let go.
"What’s wrong all-powerful Hortus Gnome? I thought you were the proudest and most virile of your people.”
“Shut up you fucking drongo,” Nigel called from his place up the wall. “It’s not as easy as it looks with an unspelled mirror.”
“Whatever you say,” I said, resisting the urge to yawn to avoid reopening the slash on my cheek. “Take your time.”
I knelt down beside the glowing Croc and focused on the loot icon. The window flashed up, showing me an unusually well-stocked inventory.
Croc Tooth Dagger of Eviscerate
5 x Green Scale
150 x Gold
Croc Tooth
Half Digested Chicken Carcass
1 x Vial of Crocodilian Oil
For the first time in what might have been the entirety of my life under Melumek’s messed-up influence, I didn’t focus on the ‘loot all’ option. No matter how I considered it, I could not see any use for a Half Digested Chicken Carcass. It wasn’t a craftable item and I don’t care how hungry I got I would rather starve than chow down on a hunk of old uncooked chicken that had been churning away in a Croc’s acidic stomach for who knows how long.
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It took much longer to select each individual object and focus on the loot option. It probably would have been faster to loot all of it and just dump the carcass out of my inventory. I shuddered at the thought of disrespecting my bum bag in that manner though.
Before I could look at the descriptions of my new items the loud sound of glass shattering behind me had me tensing up and slowly spinning. Nigel stood there by the wall, indifferently brushing shards of mirror off his shoulders like it was snow and not aggressively sharp splinters. I sighed as I shifted a foot and the endless sea of shards under my boot grated across the ground. Gabby and I had spent so long filling this room with mirrors and now at least half of them were broken. I could not even imagine how many years of bad luck I’d just had thrust upon me.
“Did you really have to break another one?” I said, rubbing at my temples to soothe the building ache behind them.
“It wouldn’t let me out, what was I supposed to do? It’s your fault anyway. If your boyfriend hadn’t kidnapped me right before bed I would have had my sack of Circino Petals. No point being a Gatekeeper without those bad boys,” Nigel said as he took off a boot and shook out the small splinters of glass that had made their way in there.
Kendrick’s little note echoed inside my head. I leaned against a bare spot of wall, my eyes slowly flicking from mirror to mirror as I asked, “Why are you called a ‘Gatekeeper’ anyway?”
“Duh, ‘cause I’m a Gatekeeper.”
And there it was. The big throbbing headache I’d been trying to avoid had arrived with gusto. I closed my eyes against the pain of it, breathing slowly out my nose. The nap I’d managed in the armchair at the inn had not been enough. Maybe that was why I had done such a poor job of killing the Croc. I was tired. No, not just tired. This feeling went right down to my bones. I’d just about exhausted every ounce of determination I had, leaving me with nothing but overwhelming apathy. I was sick of caring. I was sick of trying. I was sick of failing over and over again.
I don’t know if Nigel took pity on me or if he just got sick of the silence permeating through the room because suddenly he was lecturing me like my old teachers had once tried to do.
“Look, I can’t tell you everything because then the big guys sitting around their pretty quartz table would snuff me out like a candle left burning for too long. Every time some moron tries to burst through the seals and start the ‘Great Cull’, one of my kind gets thrown here.
I’m not a Sentinel or some other bullshit like that. I’m just a conduit for their magic. It travels through the cosmos and comes out here through the gates I open. It’s how they get their little mitts on these worlds.”
My apathy was burned away by a rage I hadn’t felt in a long time. My eyes flew open and without a thought I Blinked across the room, snatching Nigel up by the collar of his shirt and slamming him against the wall as the Blink dissipated.
“So this is all your fault. You brought the magic here. You set this all in motion,” I bellowed.
Nigel glared at me but didn’t try to resist my hold which was odd in itself. “Weren’t you listening you wanker?” the gnome snarled. “I’m forced to come whenever someone tries to break the seals. Do you think this is the first time it has happened? Hell, it isn’t even the first time it happened on this world let alone all the others. Surely you know that much. Without me, there are no Transfer Zones. Without me, your entire species is long dead.”
And he was right. I did know that much. Well, kind of. I could still remember my meeting with the crazy old Toilet Master in the church in this very town. He had been the one who had uttered the words ‘Great Cull’ for the first time. It still made no sense to me. If Melumek was so powerful then why didn’t he just wipe out our entire species with a wave of his hand? Hell, all it would take was some new and deadly virus or a giant asteroid and we’d all be gone. So what was the point of this game?
My wave of anger began to cool and I slowly lowered the little gnome as it did. When he was finally on his own feet again I stepped back, running a hand over my stubbled head.
“You get it now?” Nigel asked giving my leg a good kick. “The Guardians are trying to disrupt Melumek’s plans. Unless you find the Sentinel or somehow manage to destroy every single one of Melumek’s followers, he will succeed. You hear me? There is no other outcome here.”
“Ouch, fuck you,” I barked, rubbing at the sore spot on my leg. It’s not like I didn’t deserve it but damn, the little creature had pointy bloody toes.
“Suck it up Princess, the whole world is against you right now. I shouldn’t even be here at all. I’m only authorized to grant one quest and I’ve already done that.”
I was tired. So tired I’m not sure his words were really sinking in. It felt like the gnome had compressed an entire master's degree worth of information into three or four sentences and tried to force that dense block of knowledge directly through my skull. As a man who’d not even made it through high school, it was a painful experience.
“Help me find a broom, we have to clean this mess up before Gabby sees it,” I said.
Nigel's face grew slack as he eyed the mess covering the floor. “How about you clean it up and I go find a way to get home.”
I glared at the gnome and quipped, “Why don’t you just open a door back to your lighthouse oh powerful Gatekeeper.”
Nigel bared his teeth at me again and snapped, “I told you already, I don’t have my sack of Circino Petals. I swear your brain is as smooth as a koalas.”
“What, do you need to toss around a few pretty flowers just to do your little spells?” I snapped back.
“You have no idea who you’re dealing with boy. Keep your smart-ass comments to yourself or I’ll bite your bloody nose off!”
“Would you just shut up and help me clean? I want to get an hour or two of sleep before the sun comes up you know.”
Nigel held out his hand to me and said, “Give me one hundred gold.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you? Get your own gold,” I snapped.
“Just do it already. One hundred gold and I’ll show you a trick.”
I huffed and shoved a clenched fist against my hip as I dug in my bum bag with my free hand. If I didn’t have plenty of the stuff I would have drop-kicked the little moron over the roof of this building. I imagined doing just that as I dropped the chunks of gold into the gnome's hand. The image of it brought a painful smile to my face.
The gnome painstakingly counted the gold before he beamed and shoved the pieces into the pocket of his green pants. Then he looked at me with something akin to mischief flashing in his eyes and snapped his fingers.
I yelped as shards and slivers of broken glass shot into the air, spiraling around the room like they’d been picked up by a whirlwind.