Prologue: Arcadia

"His face was that of one who has undergone a long journey."

― The Epic of Gilgamesh

And I said:

"How can he be dead?"

Outside, the acid rain drummed down. It ate everything; Stone, tiles, brick, steel, skin.

I'd come right from the office, from a double-shift of data entry. Row after row of figures, so many that your fingers cramped, that your legs grew numb in the seat as they swam before your eyes - And always more, faster than you could sort them, the clack-clack-clack of keys in the identical cubicles on all sides slowly wearing your nerves raw.

The going rate was eight cents for each completed form, and I had been lucky to get that. Those around me had known it, too. I could smell the fear-sweat in the air, the acid stench of halitosis, and knew that some of it was my own.

And I had come home, to the two-room hab in the lower floors of the arcology, and they had told me he was dead.

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

Once upon a time, these levels had never meant to be permanent. They were mass-produced, churned out according to the same template, driven into the sinking ground like piles.

Until the situation is resolved, the Spherion megacorporation had beamed, soothingly, on every viewscreen and public broadcast. New housing credits will be provided.

All is well. All is well.

And then - like so many other housing projects - the Bishop Park habitat had fallen into slump. Without maintenance, the summit levels had succumbed to decay; the scouring sand-winds, fires generated by lightning strikes, vandalism.

Then there was the rain, of course. The burning rain that smelled of sulfur and tasted like tears. It was a constant in our lives, wearing away at all things - Dripping from the roofs, eating the flooring into soft pulp.

We had been lucky.

The floors above us had long-since been abandoned. There was no power, no amenities, no plumbing - No protection from the lethal assault of the rain. Where the great storm-shields failed to meet, the high-altitude gales could get strong enough to fling people to their deaths, or rupture them from the pressure difference.

For six years, that had been our lives.

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

They wheeled the shapeless bodybag past me, as I stood in the corridor outside. Graffiti, bright and obscene, scarred the walls; Never mind the two-year Compulsory Reduction Sentence, it was the artistic equivalent of a primal scream.

"How," I said, light-headed, but cold and strangely clear, "-How is that possible?"

The Salvager gave me a weary look, as he pulled the gauze mask down from his grimacing mouth.

"He threw himself from the stack," he said, standing back as the last of his colleagues - in the white fatigues and the red cross that must have meant something, forever ago - exited my half of the room. They were frowning, conferring in low voices. No intact body meant nothing to salvage, which meant they had a quota to make.

"He must have disabled the hab-field…" His voice trailed off, as if the rest was better left unsaid. "It would have been very quick," he said, reassuringly. Then, cursed by his honest nature, he added:

"There may have been some pain, at the end."

"Some…*pain*?"

He saw the look in my eyes, and stiffened. A gloved hand dropped to the grip of his state-issued weapon, a scarred gunmetal-grey ingot of a gun.

"Take it up with the Admedistration," he said. "I'm sorry for your loss, citizen. That's all."

I stood back. Breathed the red away. Looked on, as they wheeled their empty cargo away, oddly forlorn.

And I thought:

How can he be dead?

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

For the longest time, my brother had been my rock. Two years older, with strength and height to match, he'd always protected me. Even after our mother had died from epidermal cancer, he'd never flinched.

And then came the accident. What Kuroka Corp. had been manufacturing - what they'd been filling their munitions with - they'd never revealed. Only that it had been some kind of nerve agent, and my brother had taken a lungful after the containment tanks had ruptured.

Close to sixty workers had died that day. Twice that number had been scarred for life. My brother was one of the latter.

The irony was, the pension they paid him was more than anything he'd ever earned, working in the munitions plant. If they'd wanted him to stay quiet, they needn't have bothered-

After all, he didn't talk much. Not anymore.

Like a pale shadow of himself, he'd wasted away. Nerve damage had been inevitable, and the hospice was far above our pay grade; It was all I could do to keep him clean and fed, his insensate form slumped beneath the weight of his nerve-induction helm.

Sometimes, I wondered what he dreamed about.

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

There wasn't much in his room - Or rather, in his half of the house. Dust had scoured the windows, in the eyeblink when the hab-field had fallen. Just long enough for a man to stagger to the joke of a balcony, and hurl himself off the edge.

I wonder where he'd found the strength.

But his smell - that stale, overripe smell, like curdled thoughts and faded hopes - hung in the air, lingering after he was gone.

I wasn't sure what I was looking for, not really. I cast my gaze over empty pill bottles with worn labels, with exotic names like Pyrholidon, Astra, Meperidine hydrochloride and Preptide, as if they held the answer.

And, at last, I sat down in his chair.

Oh, Gabriel, I thought. Gabriel, what do I do now?

None of it felt real. Not yet. As if everything that had led up to this point was a dream - not a nightmare, but a surreal vision that would vanish upon waking.

I sat in the empty hab, staring at nothing in particular. For endless minutes, my mind blank like a cathode-ray tube boiling with electronic snow. I didn't hear the commotion outside the apartment, the troubled voices, the relentless moan of the wind.

The fringe of fray at the cuff of my sleeve, darkened by the rain-

A random scrawl of scarring in the material of the tabletop before me-

That was all I could focus on. All I could look at, without allowing my mind to wander.

Without starting to shake.

But it couldn't last. Nothing ever did.

I was dehydrated, stiff. My stomach empty, a sucked-in sense of defeat radiating through me. And, though I never wanted to move again, I limped into the tiny shared kitchen. Rifled through the boxes, coming up with a freeze-dried packet of protein squares and a can of fruit cocktail, neither of which seemed particularly appealing at the moment.

And then I saw it. The helmet was right where Gabriel had left it: on my desk, the black plastic surface scarred and slightly scuffed, a doodle of light idling in the polarized visor. No explanation, nothing, just one last mystery - Why?

It weighed less than nothing in my hands. Built to last, like all the older-model devices were.

I stared down at the induction helm for a long, long time. The chair creaked, just once, as I settled myself in it.

Then, at last, I put it on.

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

I'll be the first to admit: I wasn't much of a gamer. It wasn't that I particularly disliked games - Rather, everything else had simply fallen by the wayside, over the course of the daily grind. The tedium of work, of twelve-to-fourteen-hour shifts, left little time for anything else.

Treading water, just to stay in place.

As the visor slid over my eyes, light flared. It slowly resolved into simple shapes: lines, squares, circles, gradually gaining depth and solidity as the helmet's feedback circuits monitored the flow-patterns of my brain activity, adjusting the inducers to fit my individual characteristics.

The simple bell tone that began faintly in my ears split into chiming melodies, that gradually swelled into shimmering cords, into a Gothic chorus - Like walking into a movie, the world faded into the slow cross-dissolve of a scene already in progress.

[Welcome back, GABRIEL ASHER], a flickering prompt informed me. For a moment, a bewildering confusion of pop-up windows and messages and submenus hovered in my field of vision - Informing me that I was Level 100, that my Health and Mana were full, that I belonged to no Guild, a million things begging for my attention all at once, as I waved a hand to banish them-

"-Ah."

Above, a fat gibbous moon; Swollen, corpulent, and odd. The great crimson flowers of distant fireworks blossomed against the face of that gleaming disc, their distant thunder like the echo of someone else's war.

On all sides around me, the ground fell away. No railing, just a gentle slope of metal - A rising spire, plated in lustrous white metal, gleaming as if freshly polished. A simple flight of stairs ended behind me, their spiral concluded on this, the highest level-

My cloak whipped in the strong wind, as I turned. Looked down-

Saw an intricate scale model of a city - speckled with pinpricks of firelight - stretching away far, far below. The sudden shift in perspective punched the breath from my lungs, as momentary vertigo whirled in my brain. I was at least a thousand feet up, enough to turn the rest of the world - far, far below - into children's toys.

With a blast of trumpets, my location announced itself:

The Platinum Spire. Scrolling script. Gold-bordered windows, with the faintest hint of a numinous glow. Enough to let you know you were somewhere sacred. Somewhere holy.

And, at last, I realized where I was.

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

Arcadia Online.

First and grandest of the great VRMMORPGs. A world of epic, sprawling fantasy vistas. Swords and sorcery, dragons and dungeons and all that had come with it.

Even in passing, I had heard of it - A rotting colossus of a game, held together by desperate patches, gutted by the relentless passage of time and by a shrinking support staff. A diminishing playerbase fleeing the servers like rats from a sinking ship, the last stubborn holdouts determined to see things to the bitter end.

I'd played it before. Everyone had, back then. Before life had become the trudge from work to hab, before adult anxieties had swollen to consume all else. The digital shade of my Dwarf Monk lingered on some distant server, a ghost in the machine waiting to be called forth.

This was where Gabriel had come to escape.

And the realization came a dizzying sense of unreality; The game had still been running, when Gabriel had died. One of his last acts had been to remove his induction helmet, place it on my desk - I was in the form he'd taken, the avatar he'd chosen, night by haunted night.

This was tantamount to wearing his clothes, to sharing his form.

I would have recoiled, if I could.

Instead, all I felt was a kind of dull pity.

Gabriel, I thought. What did you want me to see?

His boots - my boots, now - echoed hollowly against the metal below. Step by slow step.

It was then, and only then, that I gradually became aware of the kinesthetics of the body I wore. Wiry - Strong but not muscular, very fit; Sheathed in armor of starkly brushed and oiled carbon steel, or something very much like it. A golden sunburst-and-sword inlaid upon the cuirass, the points marked with rubies-

Not steel, I thought. Remembering a fragment from some long-ago manual. Something rarer, something lighter, with a faintly silver sheen. Mythril.

As I looked down into the palm of one gleaming gauntlet, I saw my face at last: Pale, dark-haired, dark-eyed, resolute. Not quite Gabriel's features, but close - the resemblance, looking sadly back at me from the mirror surface of the mythril glove, enough to check my stride.

Was this how he saw himself? How he'd wanted to be, in his most secret heart of hearts?

I would never know.

Before me stood a waist-high extrusion of metal sloping up out of the general flooring, smooth on top, gently sloped, maybe twenty inches wide and a couple of feet long. An anvil, perhaps-

No. An altar.

Something stuck out from it, at an angle. A long handle, like the hilt of a bastard sword wrapped in wire. The only part of the tower that wasn't made of that same lustrous metal - I could see a hint of golden filigree, etchings of a tree, a garden, figures around it...

My hand closed around the hilt, and I pulled.

With a shriek, the sword cut free of the stone. Some animation must have taken over, because I found myself raising it with a flourish - Thrusting it, triumphantly, at the sky. The blue-steel blade was as flawless as an obsidian mirror, a silver sliver that made the air keen from the razor-sharpness slicing through it-

[ DIVINE ITEM ACQUIRED: THE INTERFECTOR ]

I blinked away the subwindow that emerged. I didn't need to know the bonuses it gave to strength, or magic, or virtue. I knew enough that it had the sense of something truly significant, the kind of once-in-a-lifetime experience that makes for a game's climax.

Which was why I was only mostly surprised when the blade burst into flame.

Fire. A great gout of rippling blue flame, consuming the blade - billowing upwards, into the skies. Like lighting a bonfire, or a great torch. After that first, explosive burst, it settled to a steady burn, writhing up the blade to the tip where it spilled away into nothingness.

He'd brought me here, for a reason. Left this sword, this Divine Item, for me to find.

I swept it through the air, leaving a contrail of rushing flame. It was so light, so well-balanced, it felt like it could swing itself; It had a weight to it, a significance, one that somehow made everything else less real.

And I thought: Why?

Gabriel had come all this way. Climbed this tower, all the way to the top - Alone, which told of both dedication and bone-grinding effort. (For like all VRMMOs, Arcadia Online was ultimately a guild-based game. The strength of the wolf, as they said, is in the pack.)

Then, just when he'd been about to claim his prize, he'd-

It made no sense, as I lowered the hissing, spitting blade - the point flaring with a thermite glow as it kissed the flawless metal underfoot. Why do all this, and then…?

A chime echoed in my ears, unbidden. A brief crescendo of music, and then the wanderings of a mournful flute. A great, sad music, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

"Thank you for playing Arcadia Online."

"We regret to inform you that Arcadia Online will be ceasing all operations at 23:59:59. Unfortunately, after that time, the game will no longer be available for download or play."

"We are incredibly thankful for the support you have given us. Without you, none of this would have existed."

"Thank you all, and may we meet again someday, in a better world."

At my unspoken command, the timer shimmered into existence - 23:55:42, read the plain white letters. Less than five minutes, now.

I felt my shoulders slump. The strength drained from my legs, as I slid down against the side of the altar. Even as the Interfector's flames sputtered out, I rested the hilt against my shoulder.

At last, I had my answer.

Gabriel's world was about to end, and so he'd chosen to end with it.

"So stupid," I murmured, feeling my throat tighten - My eyes stung, unbidden, though I knew there was no allowance for it here. There would be other games, other worlds than this…

-Except there wouldn't be.

This was the last of the old-school VRMMOs, the kind that used direct neural impulse controls, compared to the smoother and less invasive haptics of the new models. In any other world but this, he would have been a cripple, too.

I looked out across the sparkling city below, the rolling plains that would never see another dawn. Already, it seemed like another world entirely - Even like another life, not my own anymore.

Beneath me, across the uncounted levels of the Platinum Spire, the monsters and dark angels and holy demons would continue their mindless existences. Elsewhere, players said their goodbyes, or holed up to await the end.

23:58:30

And so I sat there, and waited for the end of the world.

23:59:12

Some rebel impulse told me to descend the steps, sword in hand. Another told me to fling my brother's avatar from the edge of the Platinum Spire, and that thought made my gut roil with momentary nausea.

23:59:27

I supposed, in some way, this ending was as good as any. The lone knight had reached the very roof of the world, and found the object of his life's quest. All that remained was for the curtain to fall.

23:59:43

I felt like I should say something. Something significant, to mark the passing of a world.

23:59:50

Instead, all I said was - "Good-bye."

23:59:56

Just like I used to.

Like Gabriel never did.

0:00:00

And everything went dark.

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

It began with a sound, a wordless murmur breathing through the infinite blackness. A pale light, welling forth from the nothing-colored darkness.

A faint, atonal moaning-

A sense of falling, falling, a lurching descent-

A roar in my ears, like the sea coming in. Light spilled around me, grey as fog.

Sensation returned.

It began with an absence. A realization, that the aches and pains deep in my muscles, deep in my gut - present for so long they'd become part of me - were gone. With that realization came strength, wholeness, as if my dumb limbs had cast off their weights. Like fading embers, fanned into a roaring blaze.

I felt ten years younger. Twenty.

As if I'd been wearing ill-fitting spectacles my entire life, and they'd just been removed.

Beneath my feet: Black stone, gilded with images of serpents and angels. The pungent undertone of incense. An impression of a vast space, of stone walls scored with the graven images of long-forgotten gods. Empty-eyed statues, staring mournfully down at all they behold-

A temple, I thought, remembering a faded image on a long-ago book. I remembered Gabriel holding it out, like a trophy.

A great brazen idol with glittering gemstone eyes-

I heard...chanting. The same syllables, over and over. The sound made the stone itself resonate, a vibration that thrummed up around me, shivering the arches of the high-vaulted chamber I found myself in as the sound ran up the pillars.

Smoke, fuming from the ember-glow of braziers.

The stench of cooking meat.

Fear-sweat. Unwashed clothes. The pungent reek of incense.

Blood.

And I thought, with the lucidity that one only finds in a dream: This can't be. This isn't possible.

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

In dreams there's always some super-important task, some quest, that can never be accomplished.

Find her. Call her. Work things out. It's still not too late even though it's been years.

But there was no dream distortion, wherever I was. It remained steady in its chosen reality, refusing to shift on some bizarre internal logic. There was none of that, here and now.

Already, I'd done all the things you'd expect. To try and log-out - to call for help - to wake from the dream, and be elsewhere.

Nothing.

No way out, except through.

Behind me - the churning grey light of a portal, framed by an arch of gleaming obsidian. Wicked runes squirmed across the surface, gold against the black. The eerie, writhing radiance glinted across cruder glyphs marked out across the polished tiles, with something too dark and thick to be merely paint.

The vast room – a chapel, perhaps – was full.

People, two dozen – maybe more – dull-eyed and terrified, shackled together in groups a half-dozen strong. Their chains were looped through iron rings set into the chapel's capacious marble floor, each group of prisoners guarded by robed overseers armed with implements of sacrifice. Long, serrated knives, bronze lances, spiked goads and ugly chopping swords like pointed cleavers.

Some of the overseers – cultists – swaggered among the prisoners, carrying flails and smoldering censers. Others were chanting, in thick, guttural voices, contributing to that atonal moaning-

No. Not prisoners. Sacrifices.

I had a nasty feeling that – very soon – the chant was about to reach a crescendo.

It was then that I realized: They were all looking at me.

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

Imagine their faces. Pale in the twitching light, jaws slack. Staring, as if mesmerized. Clothes ripped, torn, hanging off them like ribbons - But I glimpsed the faint gleam of metal, fragments of armor stark against what might have once been blue-and-white cloth.

I saw her first. A girl, a woman, in the remnants of what might have once been gleaming plate, but was now scuffed and dented. On her knees, her wrists shackled together and chained to the iron ring before her, her brown eyes so very, very wide as she stared directly at me-

Hawklike, even in confusion. Darker than her hair, sharp as a blade.

And – As if my mind has blotted out the disturbing elements until I simply couldn't deny it any longer – I realized that none of the worshipers were human.

I saw...Hooves. Curving ram's-horns. A nest of tentacles where a hand should be. A three-fingered claw gripping a stave. A warped wolf's-muzzle, contorted in a perpetual snarl. Hunched, warped, crammed full of muscle. Legs that bent the wrong way, a profusion of mismatched eyes. An endless confusion of form.

Something with a too-wide mouth crammed full of clear, clattering quills, with a hyena's curved spine and sickle-bladed talons-

"Now is the hour! Now is the moment!"

The brutal utterances of some language beyond name resolved itself into words, the meaning imparted directly into my brain. A tall, almost painfully drawn figure in filthy golden robes stands with its back to me, arms upthrust in victory.

It was, quite simply, the most terrifying thing I had ever seen in my entire life.

Skin dusted ghost-white with ash. Trophy rings, crude iron jewellery, rattling around spindly arms. A three-horned bull-mask – and I felt instinctive revulsion twisting in my gut, when I realized that the horns were not ornamentation – with a gaping maw for the mouth.

And the piercings. Shell-beads and bone-shards hanging from hooks driven into the figure's back, as if to pin those stained robes – the rustling hem still dark with blood and unspeakable fluids – to the thing's form. I could see the hands, and they were missing the middle fingers, the outer two fused together like a bird's hinged claws.

"Kurm the Venomous returns! Chosen of the Gorger Lords, Harbringer of the End, He walks the world once more! Your flesh is their sustenance, your blood their wine!"

A withered hand raised a staff – viciously bladed and baroque, adorned by what may have been a whirlpool or a great burning eye hammered in bronze – that crackled with hissing green flame. There were things lashed to it – unspeakable totems, spattered with gore – that writhed and shuddered as corposant engulfed them.

"Our wait is over. The Folk rule All Places again from today. Our god lives, and he is eternal."

Thunder, alarmingly, rolled. Something was out there.

Something was listening.

An answering roar arose from below. Some of the captives – hollow-eyed men in the tatters of drab clothing, women in ragged peasant dresses turned shrouds – were openly weeping in terror. But the sacrifices-to-be at the very front – the ones in the stained blue-and-white uniform vestiges – are different. I could sense their palpable confusion, as more faces turned towards me.

"Bow before him, flesh! Bow before the herald of the Shrouded Prophet, and beg for the mercy of de-"

The horned apostle fell silent. His scepter crackled and shuddered with gusts of emerald flame as he stopped, mid-sentence.

He – It – turned. It was a hunched thing, like a monstrous vulture, spindly and scrawny but reeking of sour magicks. Yellow eyes – sickly, vile – widened within that hideous helm.

And I heard it rasp out one croaking word:

"Impossible."

Things began to happen very, very fast.

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

In that moment, there were many things that I knew.

This was no dream. This was real, as real as everything that would come next.

This was beyond Gabriel, now. Beyond me. Even then, I knew - my mind still reeling with confusion, with grief - that nothing would matter if I did not survive what was to come.

And, most of all-

There was a sword sheathed at my hip.

I drew. One motion. The blade flashed, like a thing suddenly become electric. A cold, living thing that defined the line between life and death.

And then it burst into arc-welder flame.

I held it ready to strike, with both hands gripped around the hilt as they should be. Ready for the single, ripping slash that felt so right. As though I'd been trained a thousand million times to execute only such and in only this fashion.

Those yellow eyes went wide as saucers. There was the sharp hiss of an inhalation.

The horned and bull-helmed priest wrenched its malformed head around. It jerked, flinching back as I took a step forward. Another. Flame danced across the Interfector's edge, a fell and terrible shadow falling across that warped form.

"Protect me!" it gurgled out, piping voice rising to a shriek. "Slay him! Slay the-"

And then I cut it in half.

It was instinctive, without thought. The Interfector swept down, in a scything cut. In a gesture of desperate self-defense, the hunched priest raised that staff to parry, or simply as a talisman-

The Interfector went through the staff.

And then it went through him.

The blade simply did not stop, as it cut the priest right across – Carving it, in that single terrible stroke. There was a massive eruption of blood, like a fountain being abruptly turned on. The spray superheated where it meets the Interfector's blade, and the bastard sword tore out the other side trailing a slipstream of boiling blood mist.

The gurgling screech abruptly cut out, as half of that misshapen form tumbled down the altar's steps.

And I thought: Did I just do that?

There was a howl. A howl of fury and despair from the cultists, a braying cacophony from mismatched throats.

Pandemonium erupted.

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

The first of them came surging up the stairs, their harsh barks and patchwork armor rattling the walls. A snarling jackal-man – flecks of rage spraying from its muzzle, foaming canines biting – charged in, chopping with a curved sword. I took the thing's misshapen head off with one blow, and the corpse fell against the side of the altar, dead before it could strike.

A mace whistled at me, torchlight gleaming on an unreal, hideous hyena face. Gleaming yellow canines snarl and bark, the great overhead blow swinging towards my skull-

The Interfector carved air. Then it carved flesh. A howl of pain, as the maimed figure topples back into the press, crushed beneath the furious press of attackers as blue flame engulfed them all in a napalm-hot burst. Something with the head of a fly lunged at me, brass lance leading – I jerked clear, and the long blade shattered the railing.

From the corner of my vision, a flash like fire-

I wove the Interfector before me, like a fan. Smooth, effortless.

A blot of midnight flame spewed toward me. Terrible heat. Rushing heat. It slammed into the whirling wall of the Interfector's flaming blade - chopping around with a propeller's lethal velocity - and broke around it. The dark fire gushed past on either side, and the far wall burst into flame; I could smell stone burning, as the hungry fire began to eat into it.

But I was unharmed.

The fire churned around me, crackling, roaring, and found no purchase. I heard - distantly - a snarl, as the survivors staggered back from the blaze, for all unclean things feared fire. Even this pitch-black, lightless inferno that came from nowhere good.

It didn't save them, anyway.

My boot cracked into the nearest creature's chest, and I returned the favor with a savage slash as it reeled back. Entrails spilled from the thing's ruptured form, and it died trying to hold itself together, trying to stop those clots of dark meat from tumbling forth.

But not all of them were charging. Not all of them rushed to the attack.

One of the cultists – in the front row, next to the line of prisoners – raises the spike of its dagger, ready to plunge it into the first cringing victim's heart. I glimpsed black fur bristling from a four-fingered hand, the twisted blade about to spear home-

And then the brunette was on her feet. In all the confusion, she'd struggled to her feet, hauling the chain back to give herself as much yield as possible.

It was enough.

The rattling black links cracked into the wolf-headed face. It staggered back, howling–

It staggered within reach.

Desperate hands reached out, dragging it into a quagmire of clutching fingers, the crowd falling on it from all sides, clawing and grappling. It went down under their weight, bones cracking and snapping as frantic men and women kicked at it, stamping on that contorted form-

All hell broke loose. The prisoners surged forward as one entity, and new notes joined the symphony – howls of astonished horror. Shouts of fury. There was shouting, screaming, screeches of agony.

An axe clanged off my greaves. A club splintered against my back – It didn't hurt, not really, but the impact sent me stumbling forward, momentarily off-balance. I could see more twisted half-beast things closing in on me with curved swords and bladed whips, eerie light dancing around something blind and apelike as scourging power gathered-

I whipped the Interfector around in a flaming arc, just to give them something to think about. Fire sprayed, igniting fur, burning flesh, searing robes. In the moment that bought me, I vaulted the altar with a leap.

With their howls – thwarted, furious – at my back, I sprinted towards the captives. Some of them were freshly splattered in blood, from the overseer they'd wrenched down and mauled, their chains raking back and forth against the iron rings. A broad-shouldered warrior with a face marked with bruises scrabbled at the corpse for the keys, muttering curses under his breath as he fought to reach it-

But it was the brunette who saw me coming, first. Her brown eyes were wide, as she drew the chain taut, holding herself achingly still-

The Interfector sheared through the black links with an acid blue flare, and she was free. A single glance at me, and she was scrambling towards the others, barking orders:

"Caius, Leontes – Get their weapons – Raynault, move-"

Something with features like melted wax raised a spiked goad to threaten me, and I hacked it down almost in passing. A grey-haired, gaunt man snatched up the goad. He put it to use a heartbeat later, swinging it with singular force into a goat-headed monster's face, before it could bring the dagger it held to bear.

There was a grim, singular fury in his expression as he leapt on it, seemingly oblivious to all else. His thumbs pressed down on its windpipe, fingers sinking into stinking flesh as he began to throttle it to death-

"He's-"

"-kill them, kill-"

"-run-"

The captives scattered. Some hurled themselves onto their tormentors, with a strength born of desperation. Those who couldn't fight scrambled for cover, or flung themselves flat onto the ground as the savage, point-blank battle raged.

But the creatures were retreating, too – I found myself face-to-face with something dog-headed, with blind, cloudy eyes. It wet itself in terror, the stench as real as a slap in the face, and turned to flee the Interfector's burning edge...

There was the flat whack of a crossbow firing. It lurched two more steps, then pitched down on its hideous face.

"Don't let them get away!" the woman was shouting. "Take them – Take them all!"

A roar – ragged, bloodthirsty, furious – went up. It was a singular sound, a sound of wrath. I could see monsters being forced down and hacked to pieces by their own weapons, others vanishing beneath fists and stomping feet. The smell should have twisted my guts into knots, brought nausea to my throat, but-

-But it was as if I could hear a steely voice, a voice that said: Later. Later for that.

A voice that sounded very much like Gabriel's.

Something with clattering mandibles tried for a desperate lunge, and the Interfector split its many-eyed head in two. It went down as if poleaxed, twitching in death as a mace thumped down from an unclenching hand. The weapon – flanged head still clean – was snatched up by the brunette, as she flung down the curved sword she'd been using, the blade bent almost at a right angle now...

And then – a scream. A high scream that cut through the press.

One of the surviving beast-men. Twisted wolf-face, the nubs of horns pushing from the temples. Right hand soaked in blood, gripping a pointed cleaver.

Left hand around the throat of the terrified child it had snatched up as a shield.

It snarled, snapping. It brought the serrated edge of the cleaver against the boy's throat, drool foaming down its robes as the cultist backed against a pillar. There were three men covering it, with knives and lances and swords snatched from the dead; I saw a woman who might have been the boy's mother, her stained dress in tatters as she raised a crude crossbow to her cheek.

The look in her eyes was part hatred, part anguish.

"Drop him!" one of the men – Caius, was it? - boomed. He held his spear like he knew what to do with it, proficient, murderous. "Drop the boy!"

I saw his gaze dart to the crossbow, as if he wished he was holding that instead.

The beast-man growled, in answer. Eyes bright with fear, like a cornered animal. The sound was inarticulate, barely speech at all, but I understood their meaning anyway:

Harm me. This dies.

"Back!" the brunette snapped out. "Move back!"

"Commander Adoniera, we should-"

"I know," she hissed. "I know."

There was no good angle. The creature had its back against a wall, misshapen limbs bunched with tension. I could smell the sour stench of adrenaline.

I felt eyes turn to me. Imploring, hoping, as the crowd held its breath like a single entity.

"We can't let him go," I heard the other one (Leontes?) murmur, just at the edge of audibility. "There's a whole camp of them, out there-"

"It's a child," Caius answered. "Like my daughter-"

The boy's mother gripped the stock of her crossbow tighter. The point wavered. I could see her gaze, bright with hatred. "My son," she said, her voice cracking. "Let him go-"

The monster muttered something, something guttural and sharp. Stained teeth flashed, each time it spoke.

"Others go away. Go away now. You no need sword. Put sword down."

The child squirmed in its grasp. It snarled, fists bunching – the dark hair on the backs of its hands thick, like fur. The sight of that knife in its hands was like a blade being gripped in a predator's maw.

There was a rapt silence. There were many ways this could play out, all terrible.

"Put sword down!" the snarl became a toothy smile, all the worse on that distorted face. "No hurt flesh. Gorakk want talk you."

A murmur circled the crowd. They'd heard that name before. And I could tell that they loathed it.

"You're dead, you shit-" One of the men spat, a hooked blade in his hands. "-I'll gut you like-"

"Others come. Others."

I was aware - achingly aware - of time ticking away, one second at a time.

I turned my gaze to the boy instead. He was small – Maybe ten – with blue eyes that were wide with terror. It was a wonder he hadn't gone catatonic yet, his gaze following the tip of the blade that pressed into his flesh, the claws that dug bruises into his skin.

I wasn't a gamer. I might have Gabriel's character, but I didn't know his capabilities. The menus and options had vanished, in their totality; It had been almost a full decade since I'd played Arcadia Online. All I had was intuition, a fever-dream awareness of cause and effect.

And I said:

"Boy. Do you trust me?"

They were the first words I'd spoken since I'd arrived. My voice sounded different, somehow - Subtly so. How, I couldn't place.

His eyes flicked to me. They were unfocused, almost dazed by slow strangulation. For a moment, everything hung on a precipice.

And then – He nodded.

The Interfector blazed to furious life in my hand. Brighter than before, tendrils of blue flame snapping and crackling like fronds of electricity.

The monster snarled, flinched away from the light. It pulled the knife back, raising it either defensively or for the deep, rending cut to follow...

Two long strides took me forward. I raised the sword, and swung.

The mother screamed, just once. The blade seared across the distance. It intersected the beast-man's twisted form, the boy it held like a shield, in a blue-flame blaze.

But only one was cut.

Gore splattered the wall. The predator-beast stayed locked in place, unmoving – that distorted face freezing up, in a rictus.

And then the thing's upper half – Cut away diagonally – simply sheared off and slid to the side, like two halves of a landslip. The other arm was rigid, still clinging to the boy, as its head and most of its torso fell away, legs still standing for a grotesque moment before they buckled-

I could see the gouge through the pillar behind it, die-straight and singular, flames licking in the scar.

But the child was unharmed. He had a moment to realize he wasn't dead, that he was still alive-

That was when he started screaming in pure, unalloyed, belated terror.

I caught him, as the beast-man's remaining arm spasmed open, that robed corpse sliding down in a slick of blood. For a moment, he struggled – the wild struggle of an animal caught in a trap – before he subsided, clutching at me in blank relief.

"Thank you-" I said. The words stuck in my throat, but I forced them out anyway.

"Thank you for trusting me. You were so very brave."

So different from the voice I knew, so different from the hoarse, gravelly rasp that came from inadequate mask filters, from breathing in air distinguished only by its escalating toxin count.

It'd been a flash of inspiration, a flicker of thought - The Interfector had been resting at the foremost height of a platinum tower, a monument to purity. It was a holy sword; And what kind of holy sword would cut innocence?

But I hadn't been sure, not really.

Ultimately, I'd guessed. And hoped.

The boy sniffled, nodded solemnly. He was calming, now, though still beyond words – On all sides, I could hear the murmurs of wonder as weapons were lowered at last, the tension draining away like a spring unwinding.

"Elias!" the boy's mother – worn, new streaks of grey in her hair – let her crossbow clatter to the ground, rushing forward. When I handed him over to her – when her trembling arms closed around him, reassuring herself that he was still alive, as safe as anyone here could be, she burst into tears.

Relief or terror – You can't tell.

"Thank you, Sir Knight – Thank you," she said over and over again – Looking up at me with something like awe, stroking his hair as she clutched him close. Another man guided them both away, back towards the others – But not without a murmured but heartfelt thanks of his own, his hand pressed over his heart.

It took me a moment to clean the Interfector, by rushing it through the air – And then the blade was sheathed at my hip, a gesture as fluid as it was automatic.

The mere act, standing there in the torchlit gloom, was a brief moment of not thinking.

Not trying to understand. Not even being constantly amazed or terrified at what I was experiencing, or passing through.

And somehow, it was an adventure. The mundane act of flicking the blade clean was incredibly calming to me: Once the blade was free of ichor and black blood, I felt as though I'd packaged the whole of the battle away, so it would not trouble me the way the leering, twisted faces of the half-beasts did.

As if the cleaning of the blade was just as much a ceremony as using it to deal out death and slaughter.

And all around-

In the blank aftermath of violence, there was a kind of confusion – the once-prisoners milling, tending to the wounded, gathered in ragged knots. They gave me a wide berth, but not from fear; It was more that they didn't know what to make of me.

I looked around. The brunette was tending to a grey-faced man propped against the wall – a rough bandage over a chest wound, clutching the stump of his wrist just above a wad of stained cloth that served him for a tourniquet – another, in his stained vest and once-fine clothes hovering close. Her eyes were closed, her lips moving in something like a prayer; I sensed more than saw the beginnings of a radiance around her hands, like flecks of gold leaf borne on the breeze-

The light spread across him, into his wounds. His breathing eased; Some of the pallor left his face, his chin slumping to his chest as he sank into coma or sleep.

The brunette – Commander Adoniera, was it? - lowered her hand, at last. Her eyes came fully open, and I could see the new weariness that blossomed in them before the firm pressure of her gaze turned to me.

She saluted – fist-to-chest – coming to attention with an effort of will.

"Commander Sabrine Adoniera, of the Holy Order," she said. Her eyes met mine, and something flickered in them; a flame, kindled higher. "I – thank you for coming to our aid."

It was strange to hear her speak. It was like all of them had an odd accent with softer r's and an emphasis on the i's, something that wasn't quite English-

...But why would it be English that I was hearing now?

"If not for you...I doubt any of us would have survived. The demihumans meant to sacrifice us, in the name of their dark gods-"

"Madness," Leontes muttered, approaching. He made a quick gesture – Palm forward, thumb extended, fingers parted between the middle and ring finger - "...Unholy madness, no less."

She glanced at him – Brief, searching – before her attention returned to me.

"-if you hadn't arrived." Sabrine made herself smile, and I could hear the gratitude in her voice – but I could sense the worry in it too, lurking beneath the surface. "It was a valiant effort. A most timely intervention."

"But-" she canted her head to the side - "...Forgive me, but – Who are you? How did you come to be here? Those symbols – they're not the mark of any Order I've ever seen..."

Her gaze dropped to the sunburst-and-sword insignia, more profound than any flag. Sabrine's brow furrowed slightly - as if she was struggling to remember something, something she might only have heard of once before. Chestnut-brown bangs swayed, her hair gathered back from her forehead by a white hairband, one that had somehow survived all this.

And in that moment, I wanted to tell her the truth: That it didn't mean anything. That it was some design a developer had thought up, something that had been placed on an item in a game somewhere. That - like the flaming sword - it was an impossibility, a fantasy transposed onto the here and now.

But, as I looked across the floor, I knew one thing-

This was no game.

I paused for the slimmest of moments before replying.

"-Gabriel," I said, at last. "Gabriel, of Arcadia."

Nothing. Not even a flicker of recognition.

But she reached out, to shake my gloved hand. "It is an honor to meet you, Sir Gabriel," Sabrine said. Gravely, like a benediction.

We clasped hands, and - in that single gesture - the new order of things began to take shape.

Next: The Ashen Templar