It looked like a single step. Just half a second to move from one reality, and then I was in another. But it felt like an earthquake, like the ground turned to liquid, like my stomach turned inside out. The blood rushed to my head; I pressed myself to a wall, wretching in the dark.

The noises I had heard through the other side became clear; it was the sound of a baby crying. It still echoed through the wall.

I climbed to my feet by pressing a hand against the wall, turning my head back in time to see the portal to the hells snap shut. There was a sudden, sharp pain in my chest where the heart of my Hellfire engine rested; I suddenly felt empty, full of fumes.

I finally took in the room as my eyes adjusted to the dark.

Stone walls pressed in on me on each side; the room was so small that my finger tips would just barely touch the edges of each wall if I stretched them, but the room was long, like a hallway. On one side, there was a huge stone door. Flickering light penetrated the room from the opening only inches wide at the bottom of it. It danced around a plate loaded with food. On the opposite side of the room was a shelf of stone protruding from the wall to form a bed.

Laying across the bed was a corpse.

“The hells?” I asked, flinching back and sliding to the floor. The baby in the other room stopped crying.

It was a mans body. With a flash of my perspective, my interface activated unbidden, highlighting the weapon on the ground at the mans side and beginning to highlight the patterns of the blood. The symbols flashing across my interface changed to a language I was much more familiar with; the common tongue of my homeland.

[Looks like he died to blood loss. Recommendation: do not get stabbed. Or more accurately, lacerated?]

“Fuck, who is that?” I asked. The words scrolled across my interface but also joined alongside a light, melodic voice reading the words aloud in my mind. “You’re the thing that was in the portal.” I said in realization.

[Correct. I am not powerful enough to unmoor from your spirit. It will likely take me months — or years — to recover. In the mean time, please do not die. I will be staying with you.]

“Where in the hells are we?” I asked.

[This appears to be an isolation cell. Likely formerly belonging to that corpse. The pile of plates in the opposite corner implies that several days have passed since that man was entombed. It is likely that his isolated sentence was due to be up soon. Since there are only a few days of plate and he didn’t return them, we can conclude that this wasn’t a long term residence.]

There was indeed a pile of plates, practically scraped empty of food. Flies buzzed about scraps of food.

My stomach rumbled.

Inspecting the food nearest the exit, I noted that despite it coming from a prison, the food smelled… good, even. It smelled like meat. Picking a fly out of the soup, I leaned down and sniffed.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

The Xyron Empire that I had served in the Hells had treated me as nothing more than an expendable weapon. They had fitted me with warforged Hellfire engines, augmented my body far beyond the level of a baseline

I hadn’t eaten meat in years; the only time the Xyron Dominion fed me the scraps of meat was during celebrations of massive achievement.

“Is this safe to eat?” I asked. My interface lit up, a flash of orange around my neck. The soup flashed with light in my vision.

[Probability of metabolic compatibility: ninety-nine percent.]

With the intent to try a single sip, I took the bowl to my mouth. It was cold, the broth thick, having been here probably for an entire day.

That didn’t stop me from devouring it. I couldn’t even stop myself; it poured over my chin and down my face. I groaned.

It was the finest food I had in years.

----------------------------------------

I had forgotten how long it had been since I used day or night as a schedule. I had pushed the corpse off the bed and was laying on the stone slab. Eventually, the cries of the child from next door resumed. I assumed that it was a neighbor at least, another person in a stone isolation cell.

“I’m going to need a better name to call you than Interface.” I said.

[Interface is fine.]

“I’m going to call you eye. No, wait, that’s confusing. Portal… Porty. Porta porty.”

[Interface is adequate.]

Interface had half a dozen different clocks to present to me. None of them felt exactly right. The measurements and standards it had for hours didn’t seem to line up with any I knew, even as they ticked away in the side of my vision. Interface also fully connected to the Hellfire engine buried in my body, showing several standards and stats that weren’t typically visible to me.

Maybe the Techs could see them; the people who created and managed the magic Artiface. I could see the remaining fuel and current temperature. Distressingly, the fuel was ever so slowly ticking down. The Hells were full of Hellfire, ambient and in the background like air. It was used like a man that also ruined everything it touched, supporting great engines of destruction.

Something moved outside the door. I froze, standing still.

Interface messed with my vision, highlighting the outside of the door.

Gigantic wooden fingers slowly extended under the door. Looking at them made my eyes hurt. There were dozens of them, expanding out like a liquid and scraping against the floor where the tray had been before retracting.

I flinched as two gigantic wooden hands locked onto the bottom of the door.

I called them hands, but they were more like wooden balls that the finger-spikes radiated out of, dozens of sharp points gripping into the door before lifting it ever so slightly. A new tray of food slid in. Then the door dropped with a thunk.

The gigantic hands retracted out of the room.

I stalked towards the food.

“Interface. Is it poisoned?”

[Unlikely. If they wanted to kill you, they would simply not feed you.]

I poked the stew. It was warm this time. Warm, meaty stew.

There was the grinding noise of a different door opening. The baby had stopped crying. Then there was another thunk as another door shut.

The monster was going down a line of doors, opening them. I counted even as I ate the stew — more slowly this time, savouring it.

There were only five other doors. One of them took a long time before thunking shut.

It was the only event of note for hours.

I started counting the days by the meals delivered. Two delivered a day before a long reprieve. There was no light in the cell.

The body started to stink.

Every day, I counted the doors that were opened. Eventually, it was just our cell and one other that were opened and shut every day.

It was another five days before anything worth mentioning happened.

Eventually, the door started to open. But it didn’t stop at a few inches, just enough to slide in more food. Instead, it kept opening. I stared in horror at the monster that propped the door open.