One moment, I was wrapped in my wife’s embrace, breathing in the familiar fragrance of her perfume, soaking in the momentousness of my victory, my left arm raised high in a victorious V for all to see. The next, I was somewhere else. Somewhere cold and damp. Shirtless, with only a ragged pair of breeches to protect my modesty.
Darkness reigned in this new world, a thick curtain of waking unconsciousness that obscured all senses, all sights, and all sounds. It was like being enveloped by a sea of ink—blind, disoriented, with no idea what lay ahead. And I was so tired. It felt as though I had been roofied. My head throbbed, a dull, relentless ache, and my body felt numb, foreign, as if it didn’t belong to me.
Tremendous pain wracked me, spiking through my body all at once. Ice. Everything felt like steaming, thawing ice, crackling and breaking under the natural heat of my body. A chill surged through me, slushed blood rolling through my veins—a sensation I had never known before. My scattered thoughts began to align, igniting a strange warmth at the tips of my horns, flowing inward toward my core.
Horns? I sensed them vaguely, standing curved from my head, their weight somehow familiar and bearable. A wave of liquid energy rippled through me, flooding my mind and grinding my thoughts into sand. It felt like rising from the dead, my body now numb and motionless, as if it had been in slumber for a millennium. Even the base of my newly appeared horns felt aged and worn, pried at, and cracked. I tried to lift a hand to check them and heard the metallic clink of chains.
Only then did I realize my confinement. The reality of it hit me like a sledgehammer. I wasn’t free. I was trapped.
The air around me reverberated with words, hissing and clipped—a guttural sound born deep within those who spoke. The growled syllables mixed with the terrifying darkness of something infernal, a language foreign to me yet resonating with an uncomfortable familiarity.
“Help,” I croaked. The word barely made it past my lips, but the sound of it was enough to stir the sensation of bubbles rippling through my veins as I felt my being thaw. It was a hot pain that seared yet soothed all at the same time.
“Help,” I repeated, the word gaining strength as my mind began to awaken, fighting against the tug of dreams and slumber. The air was thick with the smell of sweat and smoke. Chants echoed around me, a low, rhythmic drone. I was shackled in chains—my hands, legs, and even my head immobile.
My dreams had become a nightmare in one fantastically horrible instant.
Finally, I forced one eye open, then the other. My surroundings began to take shape, and I sighed. This wasn’t a bed, and I wasn’t waking up from some horrid after-party, alcohol-induced nightmare.
I was upright, my arms chained above and legs chained below, strapped into place on a sturdy oaken rack. The wood bit into my skin, rough and unyielding. Around me, the sound of dripping water echoed in the darkness, the air damp and heavy. The chanting grew louder, a twisted hymn that seemed to resonate with the very stones of the chamber.
Not really the celebration I’d expected after winning the tournament. Something in my mind clicked, a voice whispered unintelligible nothings, and suddenly, I could see more.
Infravision. Somehow, I’d just turned on infravision. The world around me lit up in shades of red and blue, revealing the room in sharp, eerie detail. Candles flickered in a circle around me, their heat tiny stars in the thermal glow of my night vision. Beyond this circle knelt humanoid figures, the radiance of their heat glowing a dull orange from their knees and bowed heads. They were the chanters, their words merging into a collective, fearful moan that spoke only of horrid things to come.
The chamber was vast, the ceiling lost in the shadows above. The walls were lined with strange symbols and glyphs, glowing faintly with an unnatural light. I gritted my teeth, anger welling up inside me. I wasn’t going to be this night’s sacrifice.
As it all was going now, I was certain of just one thing. Whatever the hell had happened to me, I was going to find out who was responsible, and I was going to tear his head from his body.
A force stirred hungrily inside of me, the faint sound of waves lolling through my ears. Through my mind flashed an image—numbers, letters, garbled words and symbols. The room around me seemed to fade as my consciousness was pulled into a vision.
The waves grew louder, more defined, and a voice echoed within my mind. Welcome to our realm, vaunted one. The sound was internal, inside my brain, and I groaned to think of what that meant. You and I are to be partners in glory.
I closed my eyes, trying to shut out the voice, but that just made things worse. An image of a being, ten feet tall and blue-skinned, stood before me. Its eyes gleamed like ice, and its two curved horns shined a brilliant translucence that was more like crystal than bone. Its two arms were incredibly large, swollen with muscles admired at gyms all through the world.
Topping the beast off were scales, shimmering with iridescent colors, creating a mesmerizing pattern that extended from its chin to its ankles. It grinned at me, showing off wicked fangs that could easily gnash and tear the toughest of cube steaks.
Looking deep into its eyes, I felt an even greater shiver rack my body than I had felt upon waking. This being, this is what I was now.
The monster cocked its head. Things could be worse, eh? You could have been tele-merged with a mouse.
I opened my mouth to respond, but the words caught in my throat. Instead, I felt the clink of the chains as I shrugged. “What the hell is going on around here?” I asked aloud, my voice shaky.
The monster laughed, the sound reverberating through the chamber. The Hells, not Hell. I was drawn from a beautiful place of ice and snow, where the tormented of the Heklan are exposed for an eternity as punishment for their sins against the Triarchy. You should check it out sometime.
A crystal-clear vision of an iced vista expanded to consume me. Within this place, the moon glittered in a frosty sky, slopes of mountain rising well higher than sight in every direction. A frozen lake stretched out beneath me, and I could see a thousand effervescent things moving through its crystal freshness.
It would have been a truly blessed sight, if not for the screaming of a million tormented souls. The sound was almost deafening. My chains rattled dimly in some other reality as I lifted my arms to cover my ears.
And then, as suddenly as it had come, the vision was gone.
The Goblin Empire sacrificed a hundred thousand slaves, a member of the royal Gharagian bloodline, and a couple of dragons to boot. All to summon the greatest champion of the Prime Material worlds.
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Another vision swarmed over me, pulling me away from the icy wasteland. High up in the sky, I saw a world without the grinding, whirling smoke of automated factories or the artificial shrine of chrome and waxed automobile bodies rolling through the world on tails of dirty exhaust. Instead, it looked like Earth from some thousand years ago. The lands were flat and grassy, with villages and fields splayed out in every direction. The light tan of trodden trails and dead-grass roads rounded through it all, connecting this hub to that.
I was falling now, seeing greater and greater detail as the wind whistled past my ears. There, beneath me, was a large city—the largest of all the cities I had seen, in fact. A mob of beings gathered below. Some human, like me, but many were of other fantastical species, like some scene from a gaming convention. Most corresponded to something traditional, like the squatted crimson-cloaked figures of goblins. But others were far more outlandish, like the three-armed, four-legged, many-eyed tower that clambered about in absolute sapience despite its rather constructed appearance.
My plummet halted, my body bouncing off of a forcefield unseen and simply holding there, stuck like a bug in flypaper. What I was shown horrified me. Being after being was pulled, bound, up the steps of a triangular pyramid, words screamed into the sky before their throats were cut and their bodies were kicked out of the way for the next in line. Clouds of red darkness steamed from the building, undulating in waves, crackling with lightning and thunder. Farther in the distance, I saw the dead bodies of what must have been two draconic younglings. Dragons, like those seen in European artworks, but dog-sized like the infamous one from the painting of Saint George the Dragon Slayer.
I can’t say I ever had love for dragons one way or the other, but the sight of them dead at such a tiny size gave me a small piece of sadness. It didn’t seem fair.
Fair is subjective. Your soul has been brought here to fight for the goblins, but they couldn’t well use you without you having a body. And they wanted you to be strong and powerful right off, so they infused you into the body of an ice infernal.
The words turned all of this into a greater and more horrid realization.
Yep. You have possessed me, the mighty Ice Lord Jeldorain, against my will. Our purpose is to give the goblins the rest of the continent in a contest of iron and blood. Talk about fair. Before all this happened, I was about to get married to my 37th wife.
The world snapped again, and this time I saw a brightly lit version of where I was, as seen from a fly on the wall perspective. I saw my captors. They were cowled, wearing robes of brown and red that ran all the way down to the floor, like old-timey monks from a French monastery. I got the sense that they were laughing at me, even though they were kneeling, their faces pointed towards the floor.
A surge of anger tore through me, and I watched, mystified, as an image of myself tore those faces from their skulls, and chewed their flesh. The taste was magnificent.
I recoiled in horror, the vision snapping away as reality reasserted itself. The cold, damp chamber came back into focus, the weight of my chains grounding me in the here and now.
Oh, get used to it. There’s perks to having my body—the tremendous taste of sapient pain and suffering is one of them. Be sure to dig in whenever you get a chance.
“I’ll have to take your word for it,” I muttered. I opened my eyes, taking in the chamber around me once more. The infravision still painted everything in that eerie glow. “If I close my eyes, can you make it entirely clear for me like you did for that vision? I think I want to try to get out of here, and this thermal vision is just a mess.”
You’ll get used to it, but yes. For some mana, I can cast a spell that allows you to see the clear reality of everything for a brief time.
“Mana?” I asked, the word catching in my throat. Things were starting to get weird again.
There are no mana points in your world?
The absurdity of it hit me like a ton of bricks. I pictured myself sitting in an asylum, rocking back and forth, chanting “mana points” repeatedly. I laughed out loud, the sound echoing off the stone walls.
A deep, raspy voice cut through my laughter, dragging me back to the grim reality. “Awake, are you?” There was amusement in the tone, tinged with an undertone of promised malice.
I closed my eyes, allowing the vision to clear once more. I was the ice infernal, in chains that glowed with magic, bound hand and foot to great pillars on either side of me. The man who was striding towards me was tall and broad-shouldered, wearing spiked plated armor, a crimson cloak hanging limply from his back. His unhelmeted head was shorn of hair, and a cruel grin rode his face, just begging for a beatdown.
On his armor, glyphs and runes shimmered, not much different from the druidic ones I’d seen in documentaries on TV. Seeing them put a damper on my current plan of escape.
Plan? Jeldorain mocked, cackling from within my soul.
He was right. I needed a plan. Something quick that I could run at a moment’s notice. “Who are you?” I asked, giving myself more time to think.
The man laughed, a sound that echoed through the damp chamber. “Who am I? I am your summoner, your lord and master. I am he who has bound you, infernal, and you, great general. And you are my promotion,” he leered. “Once, of course, you have been brought to heel.”
I chuckled, no mirth in my tone. “You just sucked the most stubborn man on his planet away from his body, put him into a supernatural killing machine, and you expect him to be your slave? Who in the hells approved this plan?”
“Pah,” he answered, waving his hand dismissively. “All break when the right measures are used. And it isn’t as if this arrangement won’t benefit you. Serve the armies well, and you yourself can be a lord someday.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What do you want from me?” I asked, each word laced with barely restrained fury.
The man smiled, baring his teeth. “What do I want from you? I want everything. I want your brilliant mind to lead the armies of the Goblin Empire to victory over all the nations of the world. I want your strength, your speed, your endurance, and your skills to keep you alive as you do this. I want you to be my champion, my enforcer, my weapon. I want you to kill, to conquer, to dominate, to level up, and become the greatest scourge to our enemies.”
He paused, placing a single finger to the corner of his mouth. “That’s not too much to ask, is it?”
A vision swept through my mind, this one more real than the others. I saw my body, comatose, sprawled on the floor of the gaming lobby. My wife Casey screaming frantically for help while my children cried, and people freaked out in the crowd. It didn’t look like much time had passed, and my heart filled with rage.
You got this, kid. I believe in you, Jeldorain said.
There was a flash of light, and all my chains stopped glowing. With a roar, I tore my body away from them, shattering them into a variety of snakelike loops at my feet.
The man’s eyes widened in shock. “How did you—”
His throat was in my hand, his body raised off the ground, in seconds. “Don’t know. Doesn’t matter.” Squeezing as hard as I could, I felt his windpipe pinch shut, his entire neck collapsing into bloody mulch.
Lick it off your fingers.
The urge was gross yet powerful, and a frosty-crimson haze covered my vision. But the monks were off the floor, and they had weapons in their hands. I’d deal with that, and everything else, later.
Bellowing in rage, I charged their massed number, a rush of death. The first two I broke with my fists, shattering their chests and collapsing their hearts. But the air thickened as I pushed forward, the space around me sparkling blue and white, images that I couldn’t quite perceive flashing on and off throughout the aura.
Men in black robes stepped out, blasting cones of murky power into my body. I managed to reach out and tear the arm off another of the cultists, turning and using it to bludgeon the head off a fourth. But a slow despair was creeping into my anger.
This was too much. I wasn’t ready for them.
Pain seared through my body as I was blasted again and again with magic. Some of it, I noticed, faded into wisps of nothing, barely touching me at all. But enough came through to do me harm, and I fell to the ground. The earth beneath me cracked open and sprouted tentacles of chain. They glowed a spectral white, looking quite pretty as they ensnared me. I could feel my strength fading, my vision blurring.
“Sleep,” the man commanded, his voice echoing in the chamber. I fought against the wave of exhaustion that swept over me, but it was too strong. My eyelids felt heavy, and I could no longer keep them open.
As the darkness swallowed me, I thought again of my family in the lobby. I was going to get back to them. And I would destroy anyone who got in the way of me doing it.