The top of the tower gave me a few moments of nerve-wracking silence. A ring of ancient crenelations, a couple missing, like knocked-out teeth. In the center was a dead jailer, servant, or whatever these people were, in one of the single-shoulder robes. An acolyte, maybe. He was dead, and a thick shaft of wood jutted out from his chest, with pitch-black fletches tousled by the breeze.

  He didn't look upset. He hadn't clawed at the arrow. His hands were beside him, one a flat palm, one a complicated gesture that was some kind of variant on the universal "OK" signal.

  "This feels like a perception check," I said. "Did I pass?" Again, Teo did not answer in any way I could understand.

  There was something beside the tower watchman. I did not know what it was. It looked like a big oval mirror frame like the one I'd seen inside, but much bigger. Instead of shattered glass, there was nothing at all, just empty air.

  The shrieks grew louder. I looked around frantically for anything I could lock the door with. My kingdom for that golden stave of light! I could maybe wedge the door closed with it, hold them off while I thought through a better escape route. Or until morning. Didn't things like these turn to stone at dawn? The thought rang some kind of bell, but I couldn't remember from what.

  I armed myself with the short blade that the tower watchman no longer had use for. This was going to take all the barbaric barbarianism I could muster. It was time to for Arthrem to be, as the esteemed Wu-Tang Clan once so eloquently put it, choppin' heads.

  I flexed my muscles, which weren't quite as voluminous as I might want for a big fight against an army of goblin-like critters with knives and siege engines. I did all the things action stars do before a fight. You know, the stuff that signals that it's time for the real shit to go down. I cracked my knuckles, tilted my head side to side, almost touching ear to shoulder. I even did some jumping jacks and shook my face.

  "Hublubuhblooh!" I decided to howl. Barbarians are known for war-cries, right? I roared, bending my arms in a horseshoe shape, but it didn't sound that impressive, and just made my throat scratchy.

  I don't know what made Teo decide to open this campaign with a last stand. And where were the other two player characters?.

  The door burst open. It literally burst, splintering with the force of these little jerks. They were jostling one another so furiously with their claws and pinchers and things--there wasn't a clear template for these nags, apparently--that they actually hindered their own attack. I used that.

  I started swinging, swiping, thrashing with the shortsword. I connected. There was blood. They connected too. There was more blood. After my first flurry, they recoiled and regrouped. Two nags lay dead, one crawling away helplessly with great gashes across its shoulder, another gripping its stomach and teetering backwards over the edge between the crenelations.

  "Yo Teo, when is the XP going to register?" I knew the answer was probably "when the encounter is over," and thought about how many reinforcements I had coming up the stairs. Already the pale bulb-eyes of the second wave came out into the light, nattering to one another in some insect-shrieking mockery of language and pointing at me with wicked looking blades.

  "Light stave, go!" I said, waving a hand in the air. "I cast magic lantern thingy! And light stave! C'mon, man!"

  They were on top of me before I had time to be mad. Snapping zipper teeth ripped the weapon out of my hand. Claws and tusks and gleaming blades came for me, all at once. Cold hands held my arms down. Points came down at me, into my flesh, triggering a shock of gasping pain, searing my shoulder and penetrating my ribs.

  Holy shit, Teo. Your game hurts.

  I think we all know the trope of going toward the white light when you are at the end of your mortal existence. Well, that happened, coming from my left, bright as a star, hard white light so strong you could feel it. Nags staggered backwards, squealing and clawing their faces. Webbed feet and more buggy leg-ends clicked away from me.

  "No, no," said a voice. It was deeper than humanly possible, like those postgame interviewes with quarterbacks. "This will not do." There was an accent, somewhere between Dutch and Baltic, very thick. Theece wheel nod dew.

  As the light fizzled out behind him, the black silhouette of a giant loomed over me. Shirtless, girt in hides around his waist. Fur lined heavy boots. A braided beard. A crimson mohawk, short and thick like an even brillo-ier brillo pad. One scarred eye. Thighs like tree trunks. Shoulders like boulders. Pecks like whoa.

  I thought of the movie Twins. My mom liked that movie.

  This was him. This was the man I had created, the one I had tried to be. "Arthrem?" I gasped, my chest and arm going cold.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  "Oh," he said, with a glance at me. "Yes. Very much I am Arthrem." Then he waggled a hand in the air above me, fingers like great tubers. "In sort of a sense." Slavic vowels. "Anyway, you are early."

  He splayed his fingers, grabbed handfuls of air, and shouted a real battlecry. Once, I saw a garage punk band I can't remember the name of perform at a venue in town that I also can't remember the name of. It was too small, and they were so loud I had tinnitus for days. This dwarfed that. I could feel my chest vibrate like a wind sock. His shout buzzed in my vocal chords. The sound moved stones.

  It infuriated the nags. They ran for him, those still on their feet. Blades and fangs thrust for him.

  He grabbed one by the throat and attacked the next with it like a weapon. He clobbered three more with his bare hands, caving in faces and breaking limbs. With his hands clasped, he pounded down and sent one of them through the floor into the stairwell below, plowing down a dozen reinforcements waiting to get in.

  The enormous beast of a man leaned over the new hole and waved to the nags. "Hello, stupids! You wait your turn, yes?" He punted a spear-carrying nag off the edge, leaving the spear wedged between stones. He gripped one of the nags by its head and its feet and snapped it in half like a Christmas popper.

  Now that was real barbarian shit. So what had happened to me? Why did my character sheet just... materialize wrong? Who the hell was I here?

  There was a flash of dull steel and a red gash appeared across his arm. He froze, angling the forearm to look at the wound. He made a "tsk" sound, and said, "Is like that today, mm?" His hands disappeared behind the small of his back and came back with a big studded iron cudgel and a nasty thorned mace, a bundle fashioned from a nightmare of brambles and roots. He began swinging.

  The nags charged with everything they had, pouring out of the tower door. It was a meat grinder. His swinging weapons were a blur of motion, converting discreet individual creatures into a sort of heterogeneous paste. He painted the tower top with ropey nag sludge. While this was all very badass, I was unable to appreciate it as I was busy dying on the stone floor.

  "Okay, little friend," he said during a breather when a wave of nags had to negotiate their way through a pile of corpses and wet body parts blocking the door. "I'm afraid your tower is lost. We go."

  My tower? The empty mirror frame rekindled with the tangible white light of stars. Tuber-like fingers wrapped around my arm and pulled me into it, and I gave myself over to the warm blindness of, I presumed, death.

  I won't say I woke up. There was wooziness and light, and the feeling of being dragged across a cold floor and lifted onto a table. All of those feelings ceased.

  The air was cold and still like a doctor's office. The hall beyond was dark, an uneven checkerboard in a palette that included all the colors of limestone: gray, brown, gray-brown, brown-gray, dark gray-brown, and so on. There was a clinical light, diffuse and hiding nothing, coming from some flickering orbs. What powered these things?

  I reclined in a stiff wooden chair, draped over it really, and bled. My stomach and arm had taken the worst of it. The abdominal injury I was afraid to look at. The arm was a a series of four claw-scrapes, ugly and shockingly painful, but not life-threatening. This was my first broken nose, too, but that seemed like a small problem.

  There was a hurried shuffling in the hall, a heavy footfall. She didn't so much darken the doorway as lighten it.

  A great, big woman, ducking to avoid striking her head on the arch of the doorway. She tsked empathetically. "Oh, sweetie."

  She was a bit of a giant. Broad shoulders, not as muscular as the other giant's, but certainly wider and possibly taller. She was a presence that quite literally filled the room, a confusing human mass neither fat nor muscular, what I think we used to call in the real world an "absolute unit." She wore unadorned animal hides slung over one shoulder, layers deep but still not doing much to change her considerable profile.

  "To the table with you," she said, scooping me up with warm arms under my knees and back. She deposited me so gently on what I guess was the operating table that I thought she had set me floating on thin air.

  "Eughughgegh," I said.

  She winced and seemed to feel that. "Oh, I know, hon. Hold tight. I'm going to give you something for the pain."

  Memories of visits to my primary care doc tugged at the corners of my admittedly taxed consciousness. Shouldn't there be, like, medical paraphernalia? Cabinets with thingies with wires and tubes? A sink? A pump for sterilizing gel? A stethoscope seemed like the absolute minimum for this kind of work. Then again, I'm not a doctor in the real world and don't play one in my pen and paper escapism game, as far as I know.

  She put warm hands on my shoulders. I felt the overwhelming desire to curl up and protect my personal space, lest she disturb my insides which were in some danger of becoming my outsides.

  But there was something trustworthy about her. Her skin was scarred and damaged by the elements. Her eyes were kindly. Her hair was... well, it was a red mohawk, buzzed short. Seems like there was a lot of that going around these days.

  The warmth from her hands expanded, spreading through my body like an IV, riding my bloodstream to every extremity and back. The pain wasn't just lessening, it was being crowded out, displaced. It was going somewhere.

  This was not a relaxing thought, but it was a positive one, and I let her work.

  Her eyes squeezed tight, she winced twice, and stepped back, and they fluttered open again. There was a scar over her left eye, but it was old and sort of blended with the other skin damage, dry creases, crows feet and extra folds from smiling.

  I ventured a look at my belly now that she had numbed the pain. My robe was still torn, but there was no sign of the injury. Only smooth, slightly too soft skin beneath the bright fabric.

  "What...?" It occurred to me that I was probing my unharmed belly button and nose with an equally unharmed arm. Not only was the pain gone, but the wounds were gone as well. Utterly vanished.

  But no, not really vanished. She took a step back, sucking air in through her teeth and cradling her own right arm with her left. Mangled skin showed the exact pattern of Nag claw marks there. They seemed much smaller on her tremendous arms. Dark red began to seep through the canvas and hides over her belly. Blood began flowing from both of her nostrils.

  She leaned backward against the stoney wall, panting. "How do you feel, poor thing?"