“I’m not trapped anywhere,” James said. “I’m just here to get you.”
“How do you expect to get me and get out?” Moishe said.
James could not think what to say for a moment. He felt slightly confused. Did Moishe mean that he thought they were trapped in this dream? Or was this environment based on a real place Moishe had felt trapped? That seemed more likely. But what exactly was going on? And, if Moishe was unaware this was a dream, would it be too cruel to tell him?
Moishe might still be stuck in this place, even after he knew it was a dream, if James couldn’t find a way to get him out. James imagined that might be more difficult than merely thinking he was in a survival situation.
Unfortunately, Moishe seemed to take James’s silence as a sort of mute declaration of guilt.
“Man, don’t tell me, after everything, that you’re one of Cyrus’s people now,” Moishe said. He sounded disgusted by the idea, like it was something he fervently did not want to believe.
James didn’t blame Moishe for being paranoid. James guessed Cyrus had betrayed him in some way, Moishe was clearly dehydrated, and now James had appeared out of nowhere, fresh and healthy.
“Far from it,” James said. “I killed Cyrus.”
Moishe looked shocked and confused.
“No, Cyrus is—he was just—how? Why did you kill him? Did you know about, um, this?” Moishe sounded confused and disoriented, and he looked around at the cliffs to either side of them as if he was starting to remember that this was a place he had left already.
James imagined himself using water magic to create water, and he also imagined that he had a large glass with him. Then he held up the glass and allowed the water to drop into it.
“Here, drink this,” James said. “It’ll help clear your head.”
He hoped he was right.
Moishe walked toward James cautiously, looking to the sides as if expecting a trap—but unable to resist the lure of fresh water. Since his Class and Job were both essentially non-magical, Moishe would have had no way of securing fresh water for himself unless there were some supplies nearby—which James had seen no sign of.
“It’s amazing you survived this place for so long,” James said as Moishe took the glass from him. He had only the vaguest idea of how long Moishe had been in this space, but he guessed from the dehydration and the fact that Moishe had not managed to come to the Fisher Kingdom until just now that he had been trapped for several weeks. Maybe ever since the return to Earth.
“It wasn’t easy,” Moishe said, shaking his head and taking a sip from the glass.
“Sir.” Hester’s voice whispered in James’s ear. She was still invisible, so James had lost track of her exact position. “I think you need to tell him this is a dream, or you’re not going to get anywhere.”
It could really mess him up if he recognizes this is a dream, and I can’t get him out of it, though.
But Hester was probably right. James was just wasting time, delaying peeling this bandaid off.
“Moishe, I want to explain why I’m able to visit you here,” James said.
The Assassin nodded with a serious expression and waited for the explanation.
“This is a dream,” James said. “I’m gathering from our conversation that you were trapped in this place in reality at some point, but you actually escaped. That’s why I’m able to visit you, even though I’ve never been to this place in real life.”
Moishe’s body slumped as tension visibly flooded out of him, and a look of realization hit his face. It reminded James strangely of a person waking up from a dream.
“Thank goodness,” he said. “I thought I was going to be trapped in this place until I died.”
“What is this place?” James asked. “It left you pretty messed up. I want to understand why.”
“If this is a dream, it’s my memories, right?” asked Moishe.
James nodded. “That’s more or less my understanding, though obviously deviations are possible.”
“Like you being here,” Moishe said.
“Right,” James said. “And Hester is here too.”
The spider popped into existence, human-sized, next to James, and Moishe startled at the sight of her before quickly calming and then laughing out loud.
“Right, this is definitely a fucking dream. Great! So I did manage to escape. It’s starting to come back to me.” He looked down and gritted his teeth as if at a painful memory, then met James’s eyes. “Let me try and take you back.”
The world around James, Moishe, and Hester vibrated, and the air seemed to develop a distortion to it as if it were under extreme, sudden heat.
But James recognized something that felt like the beginnings of a cinematic flashback.
He restrained his natural inclination to try to stay grounded in the present moment and allowed himself to be carried back.
James and Hester found themselves floating above the canyon, looking down on a group of people lined up within the narrow path they had dropped into when they first appeared here. James recognized that most of the people he saw had been members of Cyrus’s group of loyalists, which meant they were now dead.
On a fast forward loop, he and Hester watched the next few days as the group fought their way through a Dungeon. This place was apparently called the Valley of the Shadow of Death—the memory slowed near the beginning and allowed them to see the alerts Moishe received—but its monsters were not as dangerous as the name of the location implied.
A single Camouflage Iguana—a creature that could turn itself invisible by blending into the canyon walls—was bold enough to attack the group, but after Moishe killed it, any other specimens refused to make themselves known. That was how Moishe had acquired the color-changing cloak—similar to an item James had—that he’d been using when they met him.
The other threat came out at night. The Deathly Bark Scorpions, monsters the size of humans, killed a couple of the people James had not recognized before one of the other members of the group raised the alarm. From then on, the group slept all clustered together, so that no one would be in the shadow of the fire. The monsters returned each night that they were there, but no one else fell to their venom.
The antlered rabbits—officially called the Common Jackalope—were more of a food source than a real threat, although they were unfortunately much scarcer than the Deathly Bark Scorpions. Only Moishe had any success in hunting them, using his unusual Stealth, magic daggers, and Assassin Skills.
The group sent a couple of people to scout the clifftops, including Moishe, to see if that was the way out of the Dungeon. That expedition ended in failure, as the elevated area above the valley was a barren wasteland, flat for miles in some directions, with no exit in sight.
The scouts returned to ground level with the rest of the explorers.
After several days of travel in the valley, the group finally made their way to what appeared to be an exit to the area—that distant place where Hester had seen the angel waiting.
Up close, it appeared to James to be the same angel that he and Anansi had faced when they struggled with Cyrus—or at least an angel created to the same design specifications. Without a real face to look at, it was impossible to be certain.
“Come forth and be tested,” commanded the angel.
Most of the members of Cyrus’s group were intimidated, including Moishe. All took a step back, except Cyrus and Christopher Smith beside him.
Cyrus advanced, alone, until he drew close enough to the angel to speak to it.
Though the creature hovered in the air ten feet above Cyrus, he was able to speak to it quietly, and the angel seemed to hear him.
James and Hester—and presumably Moishe, since this was his memory—could not hear what Cyrus said.
They only heard the angel respond, “Your understanding is correct.”
Then Cyrus turned back and yelled to everyone else, “Don’t be afraid of the Dungeon’s guardian. It’s an angel! It only wants to test our character. If you are a righteous person, you will be fine.”
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Saying this, he passed directly underneath the angel. A curtain of flame came down from the fiery entity above, but Cyrus kept walking through it. The fire seemed to have no effect on him.
After a minute of walking, he passed all the way through to the other side of the field of fire, and the flames disappeared as if they had never been real.
“Come on!” Cyrus shouted. He had to yell at the top of his lungs just to be heard from the distance he had created between himself and the others. He stood near what appeared to be the end of the valley now.
“What’s over there?” Moishe yelled back.
Cyrus looked taken aback by the question. Then he walked further away, as if to investigate. He stepped out of view of Moishe and the others, but James saw where he wound up—perhaps indicating that this was a place Moishe would see eventually.
In one direction, set against a valley wall, there was an opening in space that James was fairly certain was the exit to the dungeon.
Cyrus walked past that.
Just beyond the dungeon’s exit, there was a grove of trees. Somehow, they grew out of the dry and dead earth that the Valley of the Shadow of Death had presented so far. Despite the fact that James was fairly certain that they needed different climates and types of soil, he saw dozens of different varieties of fruit-bearing trees. At the edge of the grove was a ring of bushes that grew heavy with berries of many kinds.
Cyrus looked very pleased with what he saw, and he filled his pockets and then his arms with fruits.
When he walked back to the exit of the valley, everyone could see what Cyrus had in his arms.
“This is what’s over there!” Cyrus shouted, waving an apple at the group.
Christopher Smith was the first to follow him through the curtain of fire.
Then others came, rushing toward the apparent bounty of food.
Still, Moishe hung back.
“I’ve never thought of myself as a righteous or religious man, and there was something about Cyrus and the way he handled the situation that felt a little too familiar, by this point, if you know what I mean,” Moishe said by way of explanation.
James heard the Assassin’s voice in his ear, though he did not see Moishe, except for the version that existed in the memory, standing far below James’s vantage point, keeping his distance from the angel and its test.
“Yeah, I get what you mean by familiar,” James said. As he spoke, he was watching events down below. They had taken a drastic turn for the worse.
About half of the group had made it through the curtain of flame when the first person caught on fire.
“What the hell?”
The man looked down at his burning flesh, horrified. He began tearing his clothes off, trying to get the burning garments away from him, but that only allowed the flames around him easier access to his skin. In a few seconds, he was reduced to crawling, screaming, begging for help.
“God! Someone! Heal me! Please, Jesus!”
A few of those who the flames had not harmed looked back and seemed to be on the verge of helping the man, when Cyrus spoke up again.
“Don’t help him!” Cyrus shouted. “The angel is testing our righteousness. This man failed. Don’t you understand what that means?”
The others standing in the flames hesitated a moment, then looked at each other. Then they turned back to Cyrus. They allowed the man to finish burning to death. In a few seconds, he was reduced to a blackened husk. Over the next few minutes, his body was completely cremated by the flames. By then, everyone who had gone through the flames was safely on the other side now, either staring back at the burning man or advancing into the grove to eat fruit.
With no one alive within its field of activity, the curtain of flames vanished again.
The other half of the group, still on the wrong side of the angel’s barrier, looked on hesitantly, eyes drifting back and forth between the people who they could see and hear eating in the distance and the ashes of their former companion, quickly scattering in the wind.
“Could you bring us some food?” one of them yelled.
“Come through the fiery test, if you are a righteous man,” Cyrus shouted back immediately. “Otherwise, we have nothing more to do with you!”
The next several minutes—they must have been hours in real time, but the memory fast-forwarded again—were difficult to watch.
Almost all of those around Moishe ultimately continued through the flaming curtain despite the fact that a man had burned to death in it. That seemed to be the only way to escape this Dungeon and survive the inhospitable environment.
They worked up their courage and went together.
This time, almost half of those who proceeded through the flames burned to death. The rest were completely unaffected by the fire and continued walking toward Cyrus—and food. There was no longer any talk of helping those who burst into flame from the others.
From the way the survivors behaved once they had reached Cyrus and his companions, James had the sense that this experience had bonded the group together far more closely.
No one was angry that Cyrus had chosen not to march back through the flames and take them food. Rather, they were happy to allow Cyrus, Christopher, and the others who had stepped through the fire earlier to tease them about their hesitation.
The latecomers became just as smug about their survival as Cyrus had been.
“Come on,” they shouted at those who were still left behind, a handful of people by then. “What are you afraid of? If you’re a good person…”
There were, mingled into these taunts, some slanders of the dead, which made the Moishe in the memory wince.
One more person tried to cross through the fire. She burst into flames almost as soon as she stepped in, and Moishe quickly reached in and pulled her toward him.
His clothes caught fire as he did, but then the two of them were rolling on the sandy ground until they had put the flames out.
Both had managed to escape with only light burns, but the lucky ones on the other side were not happy about it.
Some of those who had crossed started picking up rocks and throwing them at Moishe and the girl. None of them, James observed, were willing to cross back through the flames and try to get at them at closer range, though.
Moishe barked an order at the others who had remained on the unlucky side of the angel’s barrier, and two of them helped him and the woman walk away from the stone throwers.
The flashback fast forwarded again.
The group spent the next several days trying to survive in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The natural hazards picked them off slowly, one by one. Hunger, thirst, and the quick-acting venom of the Deathly Bark Scorpions killed all but Moishe himself and one other man, named Ahmed.
The woman Moishe had saved from the flames was sadly the first to die. Slowed down by her burns, she was easy prey for a scorpion on the first night.
After their comrades had died, Moishe and his fellow survivor Looted the bodies for usable equipment.
It was on the day after the last of their allies had died that they ran into another group of Dungeon participants.
Moishe and the other survivor were shocked to meet with people who were stuck in the same place as them, although the people they ran into looked much fresher than them. The interactions were fast forwarded through, though, so James had little idea what happened except that Moishe and his ally separated from this large group rather than going with them.
“What’s up with that, Moishe?” James asked out loud.
“This is a group that I had actually run into before,” Moishe said. “This is when I realized Cyrus was not to be trusted at all. Before, I thought he was just sanctimonious. When I ran into this group, though—they were led by a guy Cyrus knew—it became obvious to me that Cyrus and his allies were deliberately leading people into this horrible Dungeon.”
“What?” James asked. “Why?!”
“They were recruiting followers,” Moishe replied bitterly.
“This was their way of testing people for righteousness,” Hester added quietly so that only James could hear her.
James shuddered. Out of all the tyrannies that had existed in all of history, none had ever managed to infiltrate the last stronghold of human freedom: the mind.
The mind was its own place. One’s secret thoughts and feelings were a secret from the world. Certainly, some monarchs and dictators in history had forced people to take loyalty oaths—as James himself did.
But wise rulers, like Queen Elizabeth I, made it a motto to “not open windows into men’s souls.” There was no productive value in trying to persecute people for what they believed, as opposed to what they did.
Any sane leader knew that people might be thinking anything on the inside, and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it except punish wrongthink if it was expressed.
Until now.
“This is a perfect way to recruit followers,” James muttered. “If you’re willing to turn completely evil as a way to get there.”
But from Cyrus’s point of view, it was probably righteous.
It was interesting to him that the angel had helped Cyrus in this way, by ensuring that he included only the “righteous” among his flock. He wondered what the “righteous” criterion really meant.
Was it the genuinely morally good? Somehow, given the stone-throwing at the end, that seemed unlikely.
Was it only those who tested as sincere followers of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam? James had seen from the religious pendants that some wore that there were members of all three groups among Cyrus’s survivors.
Or, perhaps the worst possibility of all, was it random? Giving the survivors a sense of unearned virtue, while killing people who had not done anything to fail the angel’s test except have bad luck.
“Yeah, you can’t make an omelet without scorching a few eggs and mocking them as they burn,” Moishe replied bitterly.
The vision continued on fast-forward again, with Moishe and his companion, Ahmed, continuing to hunt the Valley of the Shadow of Death, looking for food and any sign of water or plants that could be eaten. But they had little luck.
James noticed they were trailing the group they had run into, and he asked why.
“Honestly, it was mainly so that we could Loot if any of them died,” Moishe admitted. He fast-forwarded to a scene where a Deathly Bark Scorpion had killed a member of the new group, and Ahmed Looted the corpse.
He and Moishe rushed away with the items the dead person had been holding, and when they were a safe distance away, they rejoiced. The dead man had been carrying a half full plastic bottle of water. Judging by the look of Moishe and Ahmed, this find saved them from dying of dehydration.
Wow. You guys got pretty desperate.
“Did you ever try warning any of them?” James asked, trying to keep his tone non-judgmental. It was marvelous that Moishe had somehow survived this place himself, but James was beginning to suspect that aside from the people aligned with Cyrus, no one had survived this place.
“Just keep watching,” Moishe said, his voice hollow. “I’ve remembered everything now. I know what happens, and I know how this ends… but you need to see it.”