Eldren Pendergast jumped from the top of the rampart toward the courtyard below. But, instead of down, He first shot upwards, thanks to his spell.

Double Jump - Level 1 Spell

This spell allows the medium-sized creatures or smaller to jump unnaturally high. An initial jump of ten meters straight up is followed by a second jump of 5 meters when the caster begins to descend.

As he peaked, he began to flip his body over and begin a dive. It was a risk — but a well-calculated one. He hadn’t become the youngest wizard to ever graduate from the Tolemic Academy by playing things safely.

He plummeted downward. As he did, he rotated his body and brought his hands above his head. He smiled, knowing that Ori would give him hell later for his unnecessary ostentatiousness. He began to spin and plummet downward, closing his eyes to focus. The air around him began to ripple as if heated, despite it being midwinter. As the ground rapidly grew closer, he abruptly stopped and hovered in midair above the battlefield.

Invisible Pillow- Level 12 Spell

This spell allows the user to create an invisible force field five meters below them. The force field exerts upward pressure that directly counteracts the force of gravity, making it useful for emergency soft landings.

Below, in the courtyard, things were getting dire for his party. Gelmor was drenched in blood, hacking away at a band of snarling gnolls. The hyena-like creatures had backed the barbarian into one of the stone alcoves along the castle walls. Eldren watched Gelmor lash out with his great axe, cleaving off one of their long snouts. Blood and fur splattered into the air but their numbers still threatened to overwhelm him.

Eldren tried to find his arcane focus again. He closed his eyes, willing himself to suppress his anxieties about his friend’s situation. His hands came together in front of him mechanically, from muscle memory, with his palms pressing flat against one another. After a pause, he burst into motion, flinging his arms suddenly outward with his open palms aimed at the horde of gnolls. A line of bright, blue fire burst from his hands and slammed into the monsters, engulfing six of them.

Cerulean Blaze - Level 19 Spell

This spell conjures a molten firebolt of azure flames. Unlike ordinary fire, the flames are attracted to moisture. They will stick to most biomatter and organic beings and are nearly impossible to extinguish by non-magical means.

The gnolls' snarls immediately changed to ear-piercing shrieks and howls as they scattered and broke formation, wreathed in tongues of blue and white flames. They forgot about Gelmor.

He didn’t wait to see Gelmor take advantage of his fiery diversion to slaughter them. Eldren instead turned his attention to where Ori was engaged with their primary foe. Across the courtyard, she was perched atop the thatched roof of the castle stables, her bow strung and an arrow nocked. The towering cyclops she was engaged with stumbled toward her position, its singular purple eye locked on her position. It swung a massive and deadly club, as thick as a tree trunk, embedded with crooked iron spikes and the earth shook each time one of its warted feet thundered into the dirt.

Eldren dismissed his air cushion spell and landed deftly on his feet. Twisting his hands he began to prepare another spell. He was so focused he almost didn’t see that one of the gnolls had slipped away from the fight with Gelmor. Out of seemingly nowhere, a wickedly hooked scimitar slashed into his peripheral vision. He instinctively dodged, his concentration broken and the spell fizzling as he fell out of the reach of the blade, deftly turning his momentum into a controlled tumble. As he rolled up onto a knee, he heard Ori scream. He looked up to see the stables smashed to pieces. Ori had fallen inward and lay trapped among broken wooden boards and thatching. The cyclops towered over her, its mouth twisting into a wicked smile as it raised its spiked club.

* * *

“And that, friends, is where we’ll leave tonight’s session.” Mikey slammed shut his game master’s book for added effect. He offered the group seated around the table a sly smile.

“Ahhh!” Krista screamed and pushed her chair back from the table, knocking over a soda.

“Woah, watch it!” Tristan jumped up to snatch the maps and character sheets away from the caramel-colored fizzy flood.

“Sorry, sorry,” Krista said, helping pick things up. “But we can’t just leave it at that! Ori’s going to wait all week to get stomped by the cyclops?! And we need to finish the quest!”

“Ori’s body will be there longer than a week if we don’t help you,” Tristan said. He sat back down and twirled a pencil in his hand, poised over his character sheet. “How much gold did the gnolls have, by the way, if I loot them?” he asked Mikey.

“Shut it, Tristan,” she replied. “Gelmor owes Ori his life after that business with a banshee in Frenast Village. And you can’t loot them in the middle of the fight.”

“Hey, hey,” Mikey interjected. Cam sat back, much quieter in reality than his ostentatious game character, Eldren. He knew that Mikey not-so-secretly got a kick out of leaving their game sessions on these big, melodramatic notes.

“We’ll resolve it all next week. It gives you time to think over what you’ll do—or not do. Plus, the store is closing and Steve needs to get out of here.” Mikey nodded to the front counter where an elderly gray-haired man with glasses was seated, head tilted back and snoring away in an oversized armchair by the cash register.

Cam looked down at his watch. Nearly midnight.

“Damn, we played pretty late,” he said. “Work is going to be rough tomorrow morning.” They used to play on Saturdays but had switched to Thursday nights when Tristan’s daughter had been born last year. They had been happy to accommodate Tristan’s newfound need to be with his family on weekends but it made Fridays tougher at Cam’s job. He taught physics and chemistry at the local high school — the same one their tabletop group had all attended together almost a decade ago.

Tristan yawned. “Just pop in a movie, Cam,” he said. “Kids don’t remember chemistry after high school anyway. Plus, you’ll be the cool teacher. I loved when Mr. Anderson always let us watch Star Wars.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“Whether it’s movie day or we’re smashing atoms, I still have to be at school at six-thirty.” Cam sighed and began to load up his backpack.

“Don’t forget to grab the new campaign guidebook before you go,” Mikey reminded him.

“Oh, right. Thanks Mikey!” It was going to be Cam’s turn to run their next adventure in a few weeks and he was planning to use a new Gothic horror book that had recently been released. He stood and stretched, arching his back and twisting. Against his will, he let out a yawn. It crossed his mind that they had once been able to stay up until two or three playing with no issues when they had been in college.

“I’ll grab it now. I think Steve has it in the back.”

Cam slung his bag over his shoulder as Krista snapped a picture of the battle map with her phone so that they could recreate it for next week's session. Cam made his way to the back of the store, passing through the aisles of plastic-wrapped board games, miniature figurines, and bottles of colorful hobby paints to an old shelf where Steve set aside reserved orders for regular customers. He had asked to reserve a copy last week when the shipment came in.

A few other items were on the shelf, including a large ice-dragon figurine Mikey had asked Steve to set aside with a post-it note. Maybe that was their final boss in a couple of weeks. He smiled to himself. Eldren can take an ice dragon, he thought. He scanned the shelf and saw his new book up top.

As he went to grab it, however, something else caught his attention. A different, large, and very worn leather-bound book was propped at an angle against the side of the shelf below it. It was nearly twice the size of their standard game books, which made it almost unwieldy. Cam couldn’t remember seeing anything like it in the store before.

He turned, about to shout up front and ask Steve about the strange book, but thought better of waking him. Instead, standing on his tip-toes, he reached up and grabbed the old book, hauling it carefully down to examine it. It was heavy.

His curiosity was piqued. “What game is this for?” he wondered.

Cam carried the book over to a small table nearby. He could hear Tristan, Mikey, and Krista laughing up at the front of the store. He ignored them and opened the book on the table. Thumbing through the thick pages, he was disappointed. They were all blank.

As the paper rippled past his thumb, he stopped and turned back. Wait. There was writing on one page, near the front. Large, neat cursive lettering in wispy trails of ink. Definitely an old book, he thought. Nobody under thirty had learned cursive — his students barely learned handwriting at all. Still, he was amused by what was written.

The signatory below accepts the terms of the temporary employment assignment and acknowledges voluntary acceptance of all risks, possible rewards, and penalties for any breach of these terms.

X ______________________________________

“Cam, are you coming?” Krista called into the back room.

“Yeah, one sec,” he shouted. “What a funny thing for someone to leave in a journal,” he muttered. It reminded him of the messages and warnings to one another that he and his sister had written in their notebooks as kids. Cam smiled and pulled a Sharpie out of his backpack, uncapping it between his teeth. Cam the hard-nosed teacher would never get a thrill out of graffiti-ing someone else’s book. But Eldren? After all, the page asked to be signed.

He ceremoniously scribbled in the book on the signature line.

Eldren Pendergast

He slammed the book shut and capped the marker. He slung his bag over his shoulder and picked up the book to return it to the shelf and grab the one he had reserved. As he took a step toward the shelf, however, things began to happen. Things that should not happen. First, his sneakers seemed stuck to the carpet. He almost tumbled forward, suddenly top-heavy and off balance. His back foot was stuck too. “What the—” He began to shout, but before the words could leave his mouth, the room began to move. Or— he began to move. He couldn’t tell and adrenaline began to course through his body.

What is happening? Did I have a stroke? An aneurysm? Am I dead?

His vision swirled and he became disoriented despite feeling as if he was standing still. The game shelves began to slide around and some floated up and away. Were they flying? Or falling over? Light flickered out at the edges of his peripheral vision and the walls began to quiver and shake. Was this an earthquake? He needed to get to a doorway for protection but he couldn’t move. He began to panic when suddenly, everything stopped and the lights sputtered out for good. He was now in complete darkness.

Oh, God. I’m dead. I died in the backroom of the Watchman’s Keep on a Thursday night, alone.

Suddenly, he could lift his feet. He could walk. Maybe he wasn’t dead? Did the power go out? It must have been an earthquake, he thought. It had knocked out the power and toppled the store’s shelves. Were his friends okay?

“Tristan! Krista! Mikey?” he called out. Each name became more of a question, the panic rising in his voice. No responses came.

Cam stumbled forward. He was still holding the huge leather book, but he instinctively held his other arm out in front of him to feel for—and to stop himself from colliding with—the debris around him. The reserved bookshelf should be about eight feet directly in front of him. Once he grabbed it, he could feel his way back around to the front of the store and find the others.

There was no bookshelf. He kept walking forward, slowly and carefully, step by step. Maybe he had estimated the distance wrong? Another step with no bookshelf. Surely it wasn’t this far? Another step. No bookshelf.

To his right, a flicker of light caught his attention. It was small and seemed far away. Was that a car headlight outside? He shifted his direction and started making his way toward the light. He kept his arm out, knowing that there were tons of obstacles still in the store. He seemed, by a stroke of luck, to avoid all the shelves and aisle displays and the light grew brighter and larger. Finally, he stepped forward and could fully see it. It was insanely bright, almost as if sunlight was streaming into the store at midnight.

Sunlight was streaming into the store. At midnight.

“What is this?” he thought. His legs were still numb and his brain in shock but now the oddities were stacking up and he was, once again, quite sure he must have died suddenly in the store and this was the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. At the very least, it didn’t seem to Cam like he was in hell. That was a positive. A poor consolation for dying but a consolation nonetheless.

The light source, it turned out, was an open archway, like a hole carved directly out of the pitch-black air itself. On the other side, the sun was shining and as he approached the opening, Cam could see grass- a full meadow of green grass and small purple and yellow wildflowers. And trees, beyond the grass. The colors were so vibrant and sharp that they seemed almost painted.

Still in shock and not thinking quite clearly, Cam stepped through with one foot and then the other. It was the only place to go, after all, unless he wanted to stay in the dark and a bright meadow seemed a far better place than the inky blackness behind him. As he emerged, he winced and shielded his face. His pupils contracted rapidly and painfully to the sudden and extreme change in light. As his eyes adjusted, he looked around and stared. From the meadow side of the archway, the darkness appeared to be a hole in the air— a doorway to nothing. The meadow and forest extended in every direction, including behind the archway, the sun beaming overhead and birds chirping cheerily.

Cam slowly paced around the dark doorway, circling to get a view of the back of it. His brain hurt trying to think about the physics of what his eyes were seeing. When he got around behind the door, he simply couldn’t see it anymore. He saw through it to the forest beyond. The hole was apparently two-dimensional but only from one side. Can something be one-dimensional? Cam wondered. Does that even make sense? Where was he? He supposed that this must be heaven. He didn’t have a firm belief about the afterlife but had been swayed by TV depictions that always included fluffy clouds and blue skies and a big golden gate. A forest and field of flowers seemed better, now that he was experiencing it. But what was he supposed to do next? Live here? Build a house? Wait for someone or something to come get him? I hope they clarify how I died, he thought. I think I’d like to at least know.

“Oy!”

Cam whipped his head around at the sound. A woman was quickly rushing across the field. An angel maybe? Although her attire was strange for what he thought of as angelic. She was dressed head to toe in full, bronze armor plate mail like she was going to battle. Her auburn hair tumbled over her shoulder in a long and intricate braid, shining like copper in the sunlight. She furrowed her brow as she got closer and her amber eyes narrowed.

“Wizard!”

“What?” he stuttered. Is she talking to me? He looked around. He was the only one in the meadow.

“You!” She jabbed her finger out and pointed at him.

“Me?”

“You. You’re late.”