The tightness in his arm had turned into a vice and enveloped his torso. Julius clutched impotently at his chest as if he could take hold of the feeling and rip it away. The pain was immense and just when he thought he wouldn’t be able to take it any-more, that he would simply erupt like a volcano and spew the pain around himself, it faded. His eyes had been clamped tightly shut, something he only realised as he felt his jaw relax from it’s clenched position. His awareness spread out from himself, no longer a narrow focus inwards on the pain. A cool breeze blew across his sweat soaked skin. Julius let out a sigh of relief and opened his eyes finding himself staring up into the hooded gaze of a man kneeling over him, silhouetted by a cloudy blue sky.

“Wha ….what?” Julius stuttered out.

A grin broke out across the hooded man's face.

“Hey you. You’re finally awake.” he said in an accent that was oddly familiar to Julius, something about those words resonated with him too.

“I’ve cleared the camp of bandits, including their leader in the mine back there. The rest is up to you now.” The accent had been dropped, something he had put on apparently. With that the man stood up and strode out of view.

Julius craned his head up, turning it to follow the man, intending to shout out, to get his attention and have him explain what the hell was going on. When he turned his head, the man was no where to be found having completely vanished from sight. The area around was clear in all directions, there was no where he could have possibly gone in the time it had taken to move his head.

The man had vanished.

Letting his head slump back onto the ground Julius closed his eyes tight again. ‘What the fuck is going on?!!’ he thought. His breathing picking up as anxiety and adrenaline surged through his body. He rose to his feet and took his first look around at what was most definitely not his living room. Ahead of him was a dirt path that led to a door built into the side of a rock outcrop. Behind it thin layer of pine trees swayed slowly in the breeze. The sky was clear behind them and he could see the tops of other trees lower down in the distance indicating he was some distance up. To the right of the … mine entrance, the man had said mine earlier hadn’t he? To the right of the mine was a small hand cart. The anxiety edged towards panic. Continuing on further right was a smelter. Julius was not blacksmith. Really he had no business even knowing what a smelter looked like, he didn’t think he’d even been around one in real life. His blood roared like thunder in his ears as his anxiety stopped flirting with panic and fully committed to the tranformation. But he recognised this one. Next to the smelter was a forge setup in another familiar and all too recognisable configuration.

Somehow his brain had split itself into two separate entities. One part was making observations and forming obvious conclusions. The other part was belligerently denying those conclusions and starting to get a bit abusive towards the first part. Julius let them argue with each other as his head continued its slow rotation right. In any other setting, place, or time he was sure that the sight of swords and gauntlets would have enraptured him and tickled that ‘oh cool’ part of him. But those parts were all busy arguing with each other. Instead the part that came forward was dread. We always have room for more horror apparently. His skin prickled and erupted into goosebumps, the hair on his arms rose and rippled up his arms, across his shoulders and then split to travel up his neck and down his back causing a violent shiver. It was the helmet that did it. The two entities his brain was pretending to be shattered and ceased to exist. He couldn’t really fail to recognise the iron helmet with two horns coming out of the sides. Rams horns he supposed.

He turned his body looked out over the horizon. The sun was setting and perfectly highlighted an enormous mountain. Julius could see buildings clearly visible and outlined jutting out of it.

‘That’s High Hrothgar, this is Tamriel and I’m in fucking Skyrim.’

All of a sudden he felt quite faint. There was a bedroll next to him, but further on was a table and a chair on some kind of balcony. Julius stumbled over and collapsed into it gratefully. Elbows on knees and head in hands he gazed sightlessly over the drop. His mind was blank and the roaring of his blood has been replaced with a ringing noise. The view over the drop started to resolve itself, merging into blurry outlines and then into focus. Three bodies lay face down on the ground, their weapons strewn around them. There was a pool of blood around each one and Julius idly noted that their skin was green.

‘Probably Orcs then’ he thought.

Then Julius threw up.

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He’d been sat there gazing dumbly down at the bodies as the sun had set. It had begun getting cold once night had fallen, yet still he had sat there, unmoving and uncaring, ignoring the cold, burrowing deeper into his fugue state refusing to come back to reality.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

The wind picked up and blew over Julius’s bare arms, creating the tipping point that finally broke him out of his shock induced stupor. He shivered involuntarily and the spell was broken. With a resigned breath in followed by a deep exhale he stood and turned away from the drop. In front of him was a lean-to with a bedroll, a chest, and a barrel. On top of the barrel a lantern burned, it’s flame seeming to dance merrily with complete disregard for the three lifeless bodies a few dozen metres away. The wind blew again, more harshly this time and he hunched in on himself beginning to shiver. He tried the chest but it was locked and he quickly snatched up the lantern before hurrying over to the mine entrance. He hesitated at the door remembering the words of the man from earlier.

“I’ve cleared the camp of bandits, including their leader in the mine back there.”

There was another body in here. Julius considered sleeping on the bedroll when a wolf howled. He’d never heard a wolf howl before. The sound sent a jolt of fear and adrenaline coursing through him, but he thought he felt the whisper of fatigue there too. ‘There’s been far too much of that today Julius’ it seemed to say. ‘Why don’t you go inside, have a nice lie down, and we’ll deal with all of this tomorrow aye?’

He steeled himself and entered the mine.

Inside it was dark and dank. He could see flickers of light at the bottom of a steep decline that went down from the entrance. There were two strings with what he knew to be bones hanging from the ceiling, having played the game enough to recognise the primitive yet annoyingly effective alarm system. He gathered his resolve and made his way down. Each step allowed him to see a little more around the corner and once he’d reached the bottom, a journey which had been far too quick, he was standing next to, and looking down and the Orc bandit leader. He was massive, just bulging with muscle. Existentialism began to creep up on him. This Orc was dead. That had been a person. He was a person, so he too could become dead. Like the Orc in front of him, who was dead. Round and round it went.

Julius yawned. Something vaguely resembling clarity returned to him. Perhaps it was lucky he was too tired, too emotionally strung out to be overly affected right now. Looking ahead, he could see a flat boulder with some pots on it, and the edge of a table. He stepped over the body and made his way to the table. To the left of the table was another bedroll. He stared at it longingly before reluctantly turning back to the body.

‘There’s no way I can sleep with that ... him lying just a few feet away.’

There was a small handcart filled with shovels at the bottom of the entrance decline he remembered and walked over to it, emptied it of its contents and pulled it over to the corpse. It had raised sides around it but was open at the back. He tilted the cart so the handles were in the air. His plan was to sit the corpse up, lever the edge of the cart so that it was just under the bodies butt, lean it back against the cart bottom, and then simple lift the edge of the cart up, using the wheels as a pivot which would take more and more of the bodies weight until the cart was resting entirely upon the wheels and handles. It was a good plan Julius thought, but it did have one little problem which was that he couldn’t bring himself to touch the body, let alone grip, hold, and generally manhandle it.

‘C’mon you son of a bitch, you gotta do this, it’s just dead meat, you’ve handled plenty of meat.’ That particular avenue of thought wasn’t working. If anything it was making him feel worse, imagining and reducing the Orc in front of him to meat, which he ate.

‘Nopenopenope.’ Julius switched his internal voice.

‘Look we can’t sleep next to it so let’s just get it done. We’re in Skyrim now so there’s gonna be a lot more of this type of thing coming and if we want to survive then this is just part of life now.’ That helped actually.

‘This is part of the new normal now buddy, I know it’s not ideal but you can do it, we can adapt and push through. The first bit will be the worst but let’s get it over with, get the body out of the mine, and then go to sleep yea?’

‘Yea’ Julius thought ‘Let’s do that.’

Having gone through his internal meditations Julius reached out and took hold of the bandits wrist. Julius having built himself up for the task ahead of him immediately let go of the bandits wrist and jumped back in horror. The wrist was cold and clammy and not at all what a persons wrist should feel like at all. He felt an instinctual horror similar to the horror you feel looking at the faces of robots that looked human but were off in oh so ever so slight ways. It was called the Uncanny Valley he remembered and thought it fit, translated to his sense of touch. But he’d done it now. He’d felt it, experienced the wrongness of it and felt the primal repulsion at the sensation. He could do this.

Getting the body sitting upright and scooting the carts open back up to it was a bit fiddly but not all together too hard and Julius enacted his plan without too much effort. The next problem came as he wheeled the cart the bottom of the fairly steep incline that led back up to the mines entrance. He couldn’t pull it up, the body would absolutely roll out of the back of it. He figured he’d have to turn the cart, open back facing forward and push it. This might also allow him to rest on the incline with the handles helping to stop the cart rolling back down the hill. With a plan he set out to enact it. The cart helped take the weight of the body, but more of it was transferred to him and the incline got steeper. He had to stop a few times to rest and reset his footing, but the cart handles did help take some of the load. He still had to slightly brace it himself to stop it rolling back down but eventually he was at the top and through the entrance.

Wheeling the cart out, the chill hit him again. He thought about where to dump out the body and settled on just leaving it in the cart, and moving the cart to the opposite end of the ridge? Clearing? The opposite end of the path. He could deal with it, and the others tomorrow morning. He turned and trudged into the mine, down he incline and to the sleeping roll. A few thoughts about hygiene, the man who used to own the bedding, taking his shoes off, and other similar things flitted through his mind. They were collated, assessed and then summarily moved to one side and ignored as he simply lay on top of the bedroll and passed out gratefully.