Nearby, in a hole in the ground, there lived a little blue man. And his wife.

  He lay there with the weight of the dead monster pressing down on him, restricting his breathing, constantly reminding him of the madness he had walked into. The blood, sticky and so terribly hot against his bare skin, was dripping and pooling in his navel.

  Once the shock passed, the revulsion arrived to claim him, and he shoved and wrestled with the corpse, tossing it aside. As he did so, his head kept frantically casting about, as though he could hear something without seeing the source.

  “Who is that? Who’s there?”

  He staggered to his feet, escaping the weight of the corpse. He barely registered that the beast too had a bracelet, not unlike his own. This one seemed to be made of baked clay, unlike the polished stone of his piece. Marbles glowed in recesses, just like his. His eyes lingered as the clay began to disintegrate and faint wisps of black smoke poured out of the cracks.

  Still, his attention seemed to be diverted, his eyes pulling away from the bizarre spectacle. It would be hard to say if the bizarreness was the dead dinosaur, the bracelet on said dinosaur, or the strange spectral decay of that bracelet. But spectacle or no, his face kept snapping, looking around, seeking some sound. But the clearing was silent.

  “Who the fuck is talking? What the hell are you doing? Are you narrating me? What kind of sick shit is this? I just want to go home.”

  Oh… weird. Could he possibly have been listening to the narration that described this, the first of the long train of terrible ordeals he would face.

  “Yes! I can fucking hear you! What do you mean a long train of ordeals? Shit… please, just show yourself. I want to go home.”

  So… you can hear me?

  “Sure as shit! How could I not?”

  He didn’t have time to conduct this strange conversation any further. Movement rustled in the bushes behind him, and he spun to face it. Whether he himself was alerted by the noise or by the narrator’s identification of the sound was hard to say.

  Under his breath, he muttered, “I heard it myself, dickhead.”

  Considering that the only other living being he had met thus far had been a dinosaur intent on devouring his flesh, the man was not confident that he would be delighted by whatever was causing the long grass to shake. He grabbed for the handle of the shovel, but the head was trapped in the body cavity of the monster. He put a foot on the corpse, straining for leverage, pulling with a new and frantic urgency, his eyes fixed on the rustling sound.

  A face emerged from the long grass. Not a human face. The skin was blue, the features bulbous. His first reaction was to consider the being what might be produced by the successful copulation and reproduction between Papa Smurf and Gimli the Dwarf.

  A second face appeared beside the first. It was of the same species, clearly. This one, though, was female. The male had the classic weathering of a homeless boozehound. The female was herself marked by a hard life.

  The male said, “Who… Who are you talking to?”

  The man was frozen, gawping openly at the creatures. To be honest, it was quite rude of him given that they’d shown no signs of hostility.

  He glanced to the sky, “Rude… they’re blue, goddamn goblins…”

  “Oy!” the male creature shouted crossly, rising to his full height of maybe four feet on a good day, with an agreeable measuring tape.

  The little man-like creature was dressed in dreadfully tattered and obviously filthy robes. “Who are you calling a blue goblin? Do these look like goblin ears? Eh?”

  The man peered at the little man, still glancing with foreboding at the sky as though the voice of the narrator was floating above him. The little blue man did not have pointed ears. His ears were very much human shaped, though outlandishly larger and somewhat floppy.

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  The little man squared himself up and puffed out his chest. Our hero looked on, a little slack-jawed. He was beginning to wonder if he had gotten high on something or if he had had a stroke. Or maybe he was dreaming. Dreaming would be a fine explanation for most of this. He was absolutely struggling with the reality that he was speaking to a little pot-bellied blue man while the dinosaur he had just slain with a shovel lay at his feet.

  The little blue man said, “I am a plains Leprechaun, that’s what I am.”

  Our hero blurted, quite without thinking, “Leprechauns are green…”

  The little blue man started, his mouth pumping wordlessly, his eyes going wide. When he found his words they came tumbling out, dripping with offense and disbelief. “That’s stereotyping, that is! Green? Maeve, this one here thinks all leprechauns are green! No! You know what, that’s racist! You sir, are a racist!”

  The man’s hands flew up in defense. As bizarre as this moment and reality might have been, long-trained instinct activated and he instantly rose to his own defense, “No! I just didn’t know… I’m…”

  He struggled to contain the emotions that tumbled through him. Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes and his lungs threatened to spasm with panic.

  A finger jabbed him in the thigh and he looked down. The little female stood before him.

  Maeve said, “Don’t mind Pod, sweetie. He’s always given out about something. But… could you tell us who you were talking to? Hmmm?”

  The man said, “I… can’t you… can’t you hear it?”

  Maeve cocked one of her large floppy ears in the silence; Pod did likewise behind her. The man watched them, terrified that they couldn’t hear these very words as they were uttered. He realized that the words he was hearing were only for him. Whether they were real or a product of his clearly dissolving mental state was something he couldn’t say. He decided not to converse further with the narrator, as in this guy, until he was alone.

  Maeve looked at him with concern or pity, or perhaps a blend of the two. “You bumped your head, lad, when the raptor jumped on you. Come here and sit down a minute.”

  “It might be good to sit down. Just for a minute.”

  He let her guide him by the hand and planted his posterior in the grass by the base of a large tree. He couldn’t see Pod produce a short vicious-looking knife and gesture to him. He missed Maeve’s wordless admonishment of the notion. Pod looked forlorn as he tucked the knife back into his disgusting robes.

  “What’s your name, sweetie?”

  The man screwed up his face as though something was escaping him. After a moment he spoke in a concerned tone. “I… I think my name is Tiller. But… I know that’s not right. I know that’s not my name… it’s all that will come to me…”

  Maeve patted his arm. “Well, that’s alright. It’ll come back to you. And Tiller is a fine name for now, isn’t it, Pod?”

  Pod grumbled, “Bit on the nose for a fella with a shovel sigil and a farming sigil… just what I think, is all.”

  The man looked confused. “Sigil?” But without prompting, he looked down at his bracelet. There were three marbles embedded in the stone and two recesses that could clearly fit two more. One of the marbles, the one he had seen glow while he killed the raptor, bore the symbol of a shovel on a dull red background. The next, showing a symbol of a three-leaved plant emerging from the ground with a tangle of roots below it, was also set against a dull red. The third showed a cube of what might be earth, topped with a representation of grass sod. This third was set against a dull orange.

  Maeve’s eyebrows went up. “Oh! You’ve a cinder sigil, do you? My, my, it’s been a long time since we had a Stone class around these parts, let alone someone with a cinder! It is mighty fine to meet you, Tiller!”

  Tiller looked at Maeve with an expression of defeat. There was too much happening and too much strangeness. Yes, he had played enough video games and read enough progression fiction to grasp that there was a structure in place here. What he couldn’t do in that moment was accept that he was in a reality where such structure existed.

  “What brings you here?” Maeve asked. “Not that we mind. Ol’ Ripper over there has been ruining our lives for longer than I care to remember, and we’re mighty glad you put paid to that nasty bugger. But I can’t imagine why you’d be out here with a rank like Stone and sigils like that, wearing so little as well, I might add.”

  Tiller looked down at his swimming trunks and shook his head, despairing to find an explanation.

  There was a snuffling behind him and he glanced to see Pod’s nose hovering above his shoulder.

  Pod said, “And what’s that smell?”

  Tiller sniffed his own forearm and muttered, “Chlorine…”

  Maeve slapped Pod, not that softly, across the forehead. “Pod, mind your manners! It doesn’t matter what the poor fella smells like. What matters is that he’s done us an awful big favor killing Ripper, and he’s clearly in a state of needing some help himself!”

  Pod said, “He just smells funny is all I’m saying…”

  “Don’t mind him. I told you already, pay no mind to him at all. Come over here and get yourself a little water, might be what ails you walking around in the open wearing nothing at all.”

  Tiller let Maeve guide him by the hand. They walked through the grass further into the strange island of grass that rose from the endless white blankness. A little pool lay in a recess beneath the trees.

  “There now, get yourself a drink.”

  Tiller knelt by the water, looking into the perfectly undisturbed mirror surface. He staggered back almost straight away. After a moment of frightened hesitation he crept forward again to stare down into the pool.

  The face that looked back on him from the surface of the water was rugged, bearded. He could see his chest and shoulders were leaner and more muscled than he expected. He glanced down at his own body and for the first time noticed the absence of his little beer belly.

  Maeve said, “What’s wrong, love? Looks like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Tiller shuddered. “That’s… that’s not my face.”