The Gilded Gorge had never been quiet, but tonight, it was trying its best.

  The usual din of shouting, clanking mugs, and old man Tavers arguing about card rules had been replaced by a low, exhausted murmur. The tavern smelled of smoke, sweat, cheap stew, and the faint burn of magic, like rubber cement in the microwave.

  Everyone who could walk and wasn’t on watch had drifted here. They slumped at tables and along the walls, bowls and mugs in hand, faces hollow but alive.

  Outside, Blucliffe creaked and settled around them.

  The shadows were gone from the square. The mayor’s fountain was now just a cracked basin with half a statue sticking out like a drowned assclown. The air tasted like rainwater and ash instead of metal and fear. The sky overhead was clear enough to see stars between the faint lines of invisible chains, still there if you knew how to look.

  Inside, Greg shoved another spoonful of stew into his mouth and tried very hard not to think about how close it had all come to ending. How close he’d just come to dying.

  A notification had been waiting in his menu for a while, the ! still blinking incessantly like a nagging spouse.

  MAIN QUEST: THE QUEST OF LEGEND

  Sub-quest Complete: Defend Blucliffe from Annihilation

  Result: Success!

  Rewards:

  -New Quests

  -More Problems

  -Complicated Feelings!

  He pushed the notification away.

  At his table, Elowen sat with her hands around a mug of something herbal and probably terrible. The golden script along her skin had faded to a faint afterimage, like ink left out in the sun. The sun-disc behind her head was gone, but sometimes when she moved the lantern light caught her differently.

  Violet had fallen asleep with her cheek on a pile of notes and a half-finished bottle of experimental booze, occasionally twitching and muttering “merge it, fuck the tests” into the wood.

  Nars sat with his back to the wall, boots up on a chair, looking like he was about two minutes away from either a nap or a bad life choice. Doran methodically cleaned his axe with a rag that had been hadn’t been white since before Greg was born.

  The four of them had a table to themselves. It wasn’t that the rest of the tavern was avoiding them; it was more like a circle of “don’t disturb the heroes” had formed without anyone saying so.

  “Yorkegost,” Nars said, out of nowhere. “Still thinking about it?”

  Doran grunted. “Bigger settlement. More work. Fewer gates to Hell underneath the town square, last I checked.”

  “You say that now,” Violet mumbled into her notes. “Give it a week, you’ll find a sewer cult. You two are magnets.”

  Nars considered this. “He really has checked, though. That wasn’t him joking.”

  Greg swallowed the stew and leaned back. “So that’s it? I can’t believe it but… I’ll be sorry to see you go, Doran. You sure you won’t reconsider?”

  Doran shrugged. “We’re mercenaries. This was the job. The job’s done.”

  “I notice you didn’t include me,” Nars grinned and then quickly faked a pained expression.

  “No, yeah, I meant to also say: you can fuck straight off, Nars. And thanks for everything,” Greg added with the lightest touch of sincerity that he could manage. A moment of bro-hood passed between them that neither deigned to acknowledge.

  “Back to work for me,” Violet said, pushing herself upright with a groan. Her goggles left a red line across her forehead. “There’s still a hell of a lot of data I could pull out of this mess. But Blucliffe doesn’t have a proper lab, and I don’t trust anyone else not to lick the samples. So, yes, back to ‘business as usual’… downgraded from ‘apocalypse triage’ to ‘ongoing disaster research’.”

  Nars tipped an imaginary hat toward Greg. “Besides, this place already has a hero now. Two, if you count Shelly. Maybe three, if Greg’s stench doesn’t run Elowen off.”

  “I am not abandoning anyone,” Elowen said. She sounded tired, but steady. Greg needed to talk to her, badly. But not here, he needed to find a way to get her alone that wasn’t suspicious or creepy.

  “I am,” Nars said cheerfully. “First emotionally, here in a little bit, then physically, at sunrise tomorrow, as is my tradition.”

  Doran rolled his eyes but didn’t contradict him.

  Greg stared into his bowl.

  Blucliffe. He’d nearly destroyed it. He’d nearly destroyed everything. And now everyone was looking at him like he was… what, exactly? Their savior? The drunk idiot who ran the car off the road and then steered it out of a skid at the last second?

  He scraped up another spoonful of stew and decided that was Future Greg’s problem, the poor bastard.

  “What about you?” Violet asked, squinting at him over her notes. “You really plan on staying in Blucliffe now that you’re… so big?” her lightning-fast mind seemed to be stuck buffering for a moment as her eyes settled on his muscles. “You could wear this town like a coat.”

  Greg sighed, trying not to laugh from picturing that. “I’m thinking… I stay. Out there… I’d probably just find trouble. Or make some. Here, I can protect people. And if anyone should help these people rebuild, it’s me. I owe them that much, at least.”

  Nars nodded. “Greg the Barbarian: Protector of Blucliffe. Has a ring to it. Little provincial, but hey, franchises grow.”

  Violet snorted. “And you’ll have me, whether you deserve me or not. Someone has to supervise your attempts at heroism. And I have a backlog of chemical outrage to work through.”

  The idea that Violet might stay too made something unclench in his chest. He hadn’t realized he’d been bracing for everyone to walk away at once.

  He glanced at Elowen.

  She was watching the lantern flame, not him.

  “Do we get to ask now?” she said quietly. “What happened. When you and Petar’l fell.”

  Four pairs of eyes landed on him at once.

  The stew in his stomach turned heavy.

  Greg rubbed his thumb along the edge of his bowl. “I… fought him,” he said. “Obviously. He talked. A lot. Obviously. He cheated, obviously.” He tried to smile. It didn’t quite make it. “He’s… he was, from the same place I came from.”

  Violet’s head came up properly at that. Nars straightened. Doran paused halfway through a swipe on his axe.

  Elowen’s fingers tightened around her mug.

  “What does that mean?” Nars asked slowly. “Where exactly did you come from, Greg?”

  Violet’s eyebrows could barely be restrained by gravity. She didn’t say a word, but she didn’t have to. The question in her eyes might as well have been written in the sky.

  Yeah, Greg. Where DID you come from?

  Greg inhaled and let it out in a long breath. The words he wanted felt big and weird in his mouth. Too many late-night forum posts and conspiracy threads, not enough tavern talk.

  “Fuck…” he started, then gathered himself. “Can we… talk somewhere that doesn’t have an audience?” He flicked his eyes toward the rest of the room. There were ears everywhere. He wasn’t sure what the fallout of this would be. They might believe him, because they knew him. But the rest of village would think he was insane, best-case scenario. Worst case scenario, they’d string him up like an alien witch.

  Stolen story; please report.

  Elowen understood first. She set her mug down and stood up. “Come,” she said. “The balcony. The air is better there.”

  Greg followed her upstairs, leaving the other three to trade looks and presumably place bets on whether he would manage to ruin everything again inside of ten minutes.

  The balcony outside the Gorge’s upper floor looked over the square.

  Blucliffe, in all its post-Boss Fight bliss.

  Lanterns swung from makeshift posts, throwing warm circles of light over broken stone. The melted gate had been knocked down entirely; a new barricade of carts and scrap wood was going up in its place. The fountain was still cracked, but water bubbled weakly in the basin now, clear instead of oily with shadows. Shelly’s forge glowed in the distance, the sound of hammer on metal rhythmic and oddly reassuring.

  The sky overhead was quiet. The faint shimmer of chains was still there if you tilted your head and squinted, but something about their angle felt… looser. Less strangling. Or maybe that was wishful thinking.

  Elowen rested her hands on the rail, looking out over the town they’d nearly watched die. Greg leaned beside her, leaving a few inches between them.

  For a moment they just listened: to the hammer, the low hum of voices, the crackle of rebuilding.

  “So,” Elowen said at last. “Tell me, Greg.”

  Greg stared at his hands, wracking his brain for where the hell to start. “I’m not from here,” he said slowly, “and I don’t mean, I came from another town, or another country, or another continent. I came here from another world, entirely. A world you can’t imagine, and I don’t even know how to begin to describe. It sucked, though.”

  “And Petar’l?” Elowen asked.

  “Yeah, him too,” Greg said. “We actually knew each other, kind of. Not really, though, and I didn’t even realize who he was, or where he was from, until at the end. He said something only someone from my world would know to say. Before I killed him, he admitted it. He told me… well, not everything. But enough.”

  Elowen was quiet a long moment.

  “What?” she asked. “What did he tell you?”

  Greg opened his mouth. Closed it.

  Fuck. He was off to a fairly good start all things considered, he thought, but he had infinitely less than zero ideas how the fuck to explain the rest of it. It didn’t help that he still had no goddamn idea, himself.

  “My world… knows about your world,” he said finally. “Actually, we sort of created it. As a joke. No! For fun. That’s not… no. It… it wasn’t supposed to be real. I don’t know, Elowen, I really don’t fucking get it. In my world, this place, Aegis, Blucliffe, all of it… it’s like, an imaginary story. A made-up story book world. It’s not supposed to be real. When I woke up here, I thought I was hallucinating.”

  Elowen’s mouth twitched. “I’m fairly certain you’re not,” she said, “and I’m quite certain I’m real.”

  “Yes, you are,” Greg said. “I mean, I know that. I still don’t know how I got here but, thanks to Peter, I’m… starting to understand why, maybe.”

  Silence fell again, heavier, but not suffocating.

  “Your world created this world,” Elowen said, taking the notion seriously. “Does that mean, Totth and Velyun, are they from your world also? Did you ‘kinda know’ them too?”

  Greg winced. “Yeah, no. I mean, shit, I don’t think so? I would say more like we created them, also, when we created the world.”

  She turned to face him fully. The lantern light caught the faded sun-script on her cheek. “As a joke.”

  “No!” he protested. “For fun! As a game. A world full of magic and heroes and fantastic adventure… and y’know, beautiful elven maidens to rescue. I’m not doing better, am I?”

  “Greg,” she said. “Honestly, you sound insane and I have no reason at all to believe this is anything but a head injury talking… but you risked a lot today. These past few days. Maybe everything, and more than once. I don’t want to believe you. But I want to trust you. I think I can trust you.”

  He waited for the “but.” It hovered in the air between them like a tooltip.

  “So,” Elowen said, “tell me why you think you’re here.”

  He flinched. He had no idea what to tell her. What would help, what she wanted to hear, what was even true. “Like the mural down in the Vault said, I guess: TB-fuckin’-D. But it’s for something big.”

  “I know this all sounds crazy,” he continued. “I get that. Believe it or not, it’s even crazier from where I’m standing.” His eyes searched her face. “And maybe this is crazy too, but… I love you, Elowen.”

  There. He’d said it. And she’d barely formed a micro-expression in response before he wanted to throw himself off the balcony (and would have if he thought it would actually kill him).

  “Greg, what you feel right now… it is as much about who you think I am as who I actually am. About what I represent. But I’m a cleric with a mission, not a damsel in distress and I’m certainly not... you don’t get to love me just because you beat up some bad guys and saved the day. You barely know me. I’m not a prize to be won… and if that’s the only reason you did all of this, you’re not the hero I think you are.”

  Greg swallowed. The stew sat like a rock in his gut.

  “I don’t…” He rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know how to do this right. Any of it. I’m trying to speedrun some emotional growth and, yeah. I thought if I saved the day hard enough, the rest would… work itself out.”

  Elowen huffed something like a laugh. “That tracks.”

  “Listen,” he said. “I am a good man, but I’m a man in the way that a tomato is a fruit. I’m not sure what that means. But I’m sure how I feel about you, Elowen. I don’t expect anything. You don’t owe me anything. But, if you stick around, I think you’ll see: I say what I mean, and I mean what I say.”

  She leaned on the rail again, shoulder a little closer to his than before.

  “And if you ever wake up one day and realize what a stud I am, just give me a heads up,” he said. “And slight addendum, I know I said you don’t owe me anything, but I did kinda save your ass, so, you do owe me for that. As a friend.”

  “You do remember I brought you back from the dead, right?”

  He opened his mouth to protest, then shut it. She was right and they both knew it.

  “I would like to stay,” Elowen went on, “I would like to walk with you a while longer and see what Greg the Barbarian is truly capable of.”

  His chest did something uncomfortable and stupid.

  “But I also have work,” she said. “What happened in the Vault… what Petar’l said… the chains in the sky. Totth is not the only power involved in this.” Her gaze drifted up toward the faint glimmering lines overhead. “There will be consequences. Someone has to go out and see what they are. Talk to other temples. Other cities. Other… people.” She hesitated on that last word in a way that suggested she wasn’t just thinking of humans and elves.

  “You’re leaving,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Soon. Not tonight. But soon.”

  He nodded. The expected ache didn’t swallow him whole. It just sat there, a dull weight with a shape he could understand.

  “Am I allowed to be sad about that?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “As long as you don’t pout so hard it activates your Rage and you turn into a huge dickhead.”

  “Fair,” he said. “Very fair.”

  She reached out and, very gently, put her hand over his on the rail.

  “Start here,” she said. “Protect this town. Take responsibility for something that isn’t about your guilt, but about your care. Let that be the beginning of whatever story you write next.”

  He squeezed her fingers once. “Yes, ma’am.”

  The system stirred, like it had been listening in.

  Elowen liked that +5

  Relationship Status Updated:

  “It’s Complicated”

  “Come on,” she said after a moment. “The others are waiting. You need to tell them what you told me.”

  “No way,” Greg muttered. “I’m pretty sure Nars already has the hots for me.”

  She rolled her eyes, but only to keep herself from smiling. “I meant the part where you’re from another world

  - - - (；☉_☉) - - -

  Back downstairs, the tavern had thinned a little. Some people had gone to relieve the watch. Others had passed out on benches. The core of the party had stayed.

  Violet seemed to have switched from downers to uppers and was the first to notice they were back. Nars had acquired another drink and a stray cat. Doran looked exactly the same as he had an hour ago,

  They looked up as Greg and Elowen returned.

  “Well?” Violet demanded. “Is he an alien? A god? Did you kiss? Do I get to dissect him?”

  “No,” Elowen said. “To at least three of those.”

  Greg dragged a chair around so he could sit facing all of them. Elowen took the seat beside him, not quite touching.

  Greg started, “So… this is going to sound crazy, and you’re not going to believe me, but… the truth of the matter is—"

  The tavern door slammed open, cutting the conversation off abruptly and leaving Greg standing there looking dumb with his mouth hanging open. The anxiety of the surprise was almost negated by the relief at having his attempted explanation interrupted.

  A figure stood in the doorway, framed by lantern light and the dim glow of the square. For a second, Greg thought it was just another survivor, late back to the Gilded Gorge, but something about the way the shadows bent around him made his skin prickle.

  He wore armor, but not like Doran’s. It was sleek, layered leather and metal in odd angles, half-practical, half overdesigned in the way Greg associated with AAA video game concept art. A gnarled wooden sap hung at one hip. A crossbow, both ancient looking and advanced, hung on the other. A cloak wrapped around his shoulders, lined with symbols Greg half-recognized from high-school sketchbooks.

  His face was human. Late twenties, maybe. Black skin and dark hair in a collapsing pile of dreadlocks on his head, a few days of stubble, the tired, sharp-eyed look of experienced hunter. The figure’s gaze swept the room once, taking in the barricaded windows, the huddled villagers, the little knot of heroes at the central table. Then his eyes landed on Greg.

  Weirdly, he smiled.

  “Is that you, Greg?” he said. His voice had the flat vowels of somewhere Greg’s brain tagged as “home.” “Holy shit, it is. You actually fucking did it.”

  Nars’ hand went to his bow. Doran’s fingers tightened on his axe. Violet was already reaching for a vial.

  Elowen stood up very slowly.

  Greg stared.

  “Cody?” he said.

  The newcomer gave him finger guns. “In the high-definition flesh.”

  CODINIUS

  Race: Human

  Class: Ranger

  Subclass: Murder Hobo

  Level: 5

  Vitality: 125 (125)

  Essence: 200 (200)

  Might: 20

  Agility: 20

  Fortitude: 30

  Intellect: 20

  Cunning: 40

  Willpower: 40

  Charisma: 30

  Manipulation: 20

  Appearance: 30

  A dirt-smeared, half-feral survivalist who’s spent five levels learning the only spell that really matters: never get into a fight that you didn’t start (and start every fight by crippling your opponent).

  He walked in like he owned the place, ignoring the way every eye tracked him, and stopped at their table. When he spoke again, his voice dropped to a level only they could hear.

  “Okay,” Cody said. “Good news: you broke the scenario. The bad news: they noticed. The next patch is coming, and it’s not a balance update. We need to move. Now.”

  The system chimed, once. Then Greg’s screen went black.