I didn’t know how much time had passed before I found myself on my back in something cold. Really cold. Frostbite-to-your-toes-and-tits cold.

  It was also wet. Because why not, really? I sat up, snapping up at the waist, and gasped. This, finally, was a landscape. The wind was screaming past my ears. I was on wet, crunching snow. More was falling, thick and fast.

  Green pine trees sprouted around me, and there was a mess of brittle-looking underbrush with dangerous-looking branches, spindly and grasping.

  I pushed myself up into a stand. The screeching gale felt like getting slapped in the face. My feet sunk deep into the snow. My shovel hadn’t disappeared, though it hung on a belt by my side, clanging into my leg. Metal on metal.

  I glanced down. Armor. I was in…some kind of armor. Flexible steel. Knightly-looking stuff. There were gauntlets on my hands. I had a breast plate that had curved pieces that extended over the sides of my upper thighs. Furthermore, I had a set of gauntlets, a set of greaves, and a heavy cloak with a hood. The cloak was sunflower yellow, and it wasn’t heavy enough.

  God, I was cold. A sort of cold I’d never felt before.

  Could this dream be over, now? None of this made any goddamn sense, and I pinched myself--hard.

  The pain was brief, but real.

  Was I not dreaming?

  Y’know what? Problem for another day, Teddy. That is for the Teddy of Tomorrow, not the Teddy of Now. The Teddy of Now was gonna freeze so badly that no one would ever find her, and--real or not, dream or not--I wasn’t gonna just sit here and shiver to death.

  I’d already burned to…something. Delusional nightmares, at best. I didn’t need to freeze and descend even farther.

  But if I had to perish twice…the line from Robert Frost’s good ol’ “Fire and Ice” poem thrust its way to the forefront of my memory. Let’s not do that.

  I didn’t feel dead now. That was all that mattered, and if I didn’t feel dead now, then I could keep going.

  Orange text flickered in the bottom left of my vision. I focused on it.

  QUEST GRANTED: FIND THE INN

  Now was also not the time to process whatever that was. The important bit was that there was an inn, and I could find it.

  “Well?” I asked whatever was making the orange text. “Got a map? Please?”

  The text flickered again, and vanished.

  Quest accepted, huh? Find the inn. No map. I could do that. My feet were sinking deep into the snow with every step, the sun was setting, and I was in armor.

  I could do it.

  It felt like a century had passed as I wandered the snowy forest, but it couldn’t have been that long. I’d have frozen to death by then. Though, in retrospect, nothing that had happened recently had made a lick of goddamn sense. Either way, the cold had sunk in so deep that it felt like my marrow was slowly turning from spongy flesh to frozen delicacy.

  “Dunno why you’d pick ice the second time around, Robert,” I muttered to myself. “Fire sucked, definitely. I can confirm it’s a horrible way to go, but this is just…awful.”

  The orange text in the bottom left corner of my vision flickered again. HP, it said, 19/20.

  Didn’t know what that meant, either, but I could guess that it wasn’t a good thing.

  I took a deep breath. “No more talking to dead poets,” I said. “We’re getting out of here. We’re going to find the inn.”

  I couldn’t allow myself to think otherwise.

  “The first death is doubt,” I said. “That’s what Grams used to say. The first death is doubt. Every time you die after, that shit’s inevitable if you doubt. So we’re getting out of here, and we’re going to find the inn.”

  “Is my ultimate lesson to be the nature of crushing disappointment?” I heard a cultured, peculiar voice speaking in an accent that sounded hideously old-fashioned to my ears. It reminded me of the sort you’d hear in early movies and radio, upper-class and snobbish.

  Transatlantic. That was the term. It sounded transatlantic.

  My head snapped towards the voice. It’d come from my blind side.

  There was a man. In the snow. He was tall. Narrow. Hooked nose, white hair--long white hair, that went well past his shoulders. Couldn’t see where it ended. He had slim, square-looking spectacles and gold eyes, of all fucking things. He was in a high-necked, black tunic, with a dark purple undershirt. Both were trimmed in gold and embroidered. Unlike me, he didn’t have a cloak. He wore boots, but had flat, wide snowshoes on them, made from wood and some kind of netting, and as a result, wasn’t sinking.

  “I can assure you,” the man continued, “that this entire charade has schooled me entirely in disappointment. The further enlightenment via your presence was not required.”

  Who the hell was this guy? “Can you help?” I said instead.

  My big shivers had become the small, tiny ones, where it felt I was shuddering my teeth right out of my skull.

  “Crass, ugly, and an idiot.” He cocked his head and narrowed his eyes at me. “It is a wonder you have managed to refrain from freezing to death. Was the System trying to doom me from the outset?”

  Maybe I was hallucinating. Following hallucinations, or talking to them, was probably a bad thing. Maybe it’d started because I began talking out loud. Dumb of me. I knew better than that.

  Nothing ever good came of talking. Just doing.

  Just needed to do…something. I stumbled, lurching away from him.

  “Where do you think you are going?” the hallucination man demanded. “Are you so eager to sally forth to your inevitable demise, the total annihilation of your very soul?”

  Dramatic bitch, wasn’t he? I blinked, bleary. No thinking. Just doing.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “You will not only fail to progress due to being in armor in the snow without snowshoes. Night is falling, little fool.”

  As he spoke, I stepped forward and sank to my waist. Cold. I was so, so cold. I gritted my chattering teeth and shoved myself forward, pushing my lower body through the snow.

  The man was standing in front of me. I waved a hand at him. He was in my way.

  “Are you attempting to dismiss me?” The man demanded. He crouched. His face was close. His lip curled. His spectacles’ frames looked like they were made of iron. They were really old-looking in style, like medieval era-sorta glasses. I frowned at him. Why’d I give a medieval guy a transatlantic accent?

  “You’re in my way,” I finally said. Maybe I had to talk to the hallucination a bit.

  “If I did not need you, you would perish here for the final time, woman, and there would be nothing that ailed me as to the nature of it. Alas, I do need you.”

  Right, so this man had definitely been born with a silver spoon lodged solidly up his ass.

  “So you’ve never dug holes?” I asked him. God, Teddy, that was going to make zero fucking sense to the man. Well done. No, wait, he was a hallucination. No point getting embarrassed by a figment of my imagination.

  He stared at me. “Have you no concept of logical conversation?” He finally said. “One must speak in a manner relating to the prior topic--” He clicked his tongue, abrupt, and sneered. “I waste my time.”

  He hooked his hands beneath my armpits.

  “Huh--” I made a noise instead of an actual word. One moment, I was buried waist deep in the snow.

  The next, he had pulled me up, my feet dangling above the ground. It had been accomplished in a single, smooth motion, like he was picking up a cardboard box, or something equally light and fluffy.

  I was a stocky woman in iron armor with a large shovel. I was many things, but not light and fluffy.

  “Holy shit,” I said, staring at him. I wiggled my feet. Still floating.

  The white-hair man looked at me like I was a pile of dogshit that had been laid in the center of his pristine, power washed sidewalk. No, wait, this man wouldn’t have sidewalks. What did wealthy people have for driveways? Bricks? Marble? That didn’t seem practical.

  “I am the closest thing to holy that you shall ever encounter, correct. The rest of your exclamation is repulsive. I would inquire if you truly lacked other ways of expressing your surprise, but considering the conversational prowess you exhibited earlier, I suspect such gifts are beyond you.”

  Good lord, he was wordy. And he’d definitely just called himself holy. I don’t think I was imagining that. Wait, what was I telling myself? I definitely hoped I was imagining all of this.

  “Have you nothing to say for yourself? You were entirely talkative earlier. Some nonsense about doubt and death and your grandmother.”

  Well, okay, I’d been alone then, Chatty-Kathy. I shuddered violently in his grip. His eyes narrowed at me.

  “Nevermind, do refrain from straining yourself excessively. Your health points, what number are you currently residing at?”

  I squinted at him, still dangling. “Dunno what those are.”

  “I can not--the heads up display that occasionally materializes in your visual awareness.”

  “Orange text?” I clarified. “It just…shows up.”

  White-hair only sneered harder. “Think about seeing the orange text, and it will materialize accordingly.”

  Okay. I wanted to see the orange text--

  It flickered to life in my vision.

  HP: 9/20 sat in the bottom left corner. On the top right I saw ACTIVE QUEST: FIND THE INN.

  There didn’t seem to be much else.

  “Nine out of twenty,” I said. Hanging by my armpits was beginning to hurt. Exhaustion was sneaking in. Maybe this dream was almost over

  The orange text flashed. 8/20 it said.

  “Eight out of twenty.” I told White-hair. “Probably bad, huh?”

  “Your powers of observation are impressive.” The scorn was laid on so thick I could’ve used it to butter toast. Scorn-toast. Bet it would taste like spicy disappointment.

  I flexed my fingers. I didn’t want to go back to the snow, but the dangling was--I was, very abruptly, on my back on the snow again. I grunted and blinked my one good eye up at the sky. It was definitely dark now, stars beginning to flicker in.

  There were a lot of stars. Bright, and piercing, and judgmental. I’d always felt they were judgmental, little spears of light that impaled me wherever I stood. I didn’t really know why I had that opinion. My grandmother had always made it clear she thought it was funny and ridiculous.

  I looked for the north star. Probably should’ve started with that in my Inn quest, now that I thought about it.

  My sabaton on my right foot was dragged upwards. I craned my chin down to see that the man had pulled a pair of snowshoes from somewhere. I’d no idea where he’d been carrying them. He had a small leather bag slung over his shoulder and at his hip, but it wasn’t big enough for those snowshoes.

  “Do you intend to just lie there, vacant-eyed and voiceless?” he snapped as he finished snapping the ties. He reached into his bag, and, sure enough, pulled out a snowshoe.

  I squinted. It wasn’t the weirdest thing I’d seen in the last hour, I suppose?

  He placed my foot down. Though the limb was slightly elevated because the tail end of it was pushing the sabaton up out of the snow.

  “Raise your other leg,” he told me. “I am not a servant, eager to indulge your every possible whim. How many stacks is the status effect currently at?”

  I raised my left leg and squinted at him further. “…Status effect?”

  “Your health is trending downwards, and even to my eye, you seem hazy and dreamlike, as if you struggle to grasp the reality of the world around you. You are freezing to death, woman. In your heads-up display, you should see--in the top right corner--an icon denoting the current effects upon your person. There will be a number assigned to it.”

  I thought about the orange text again. There was a little icon next to the Quest, but I’d thought it was part of the quests. It was a little snowflake.

  I prodded it. Mentally, I mean. Like my thoughts were a mouse cursor.

  A little text box popped up. It said FREEZING - Lose 1 HP Point Every Three Minutes. At the bottom corner of the snowflake, I saw a 3.

  “Says three,” I said.

  “So you lose a health point every minute. Truly, it is a testament to your complete incompetence that you have been here for, at most, half an hour, and you are utterly lost and half buried in a snow-made crypt.” White-hair tightened the straps, then extended a gloved hand above my chest.

  The snow swirled around his hand, going from random patterns to a small, oddly-precise tornado. The air around his hand glowed purple, blue, and black, yet somehow pixelated, flecked with white. Rotating purple circles above my chest appeared, with tiny writing I didn't get to read, because the circles vanished.

  Before I could react, I glowed purplish-blue-white. I went see-through. My vision turned to static, the world sliding away from me in different directions.

  I’d played a video game a few times with my youngest brother. My laptop was ancient, and it couldn’t run the new Windows 10 OS that had released last fall. Anyway, the game had struggled to run on the hardware, and had instead glitched out completely. All the textures flickered from their normal colors to this blue-purple-white abomination, before abruptly crashing.

  That’s what it felt like. Like I was the one glitching, and that the world was struggling to run me. The static rippled. I could see hard outlines, I could see deep into the earth, I could see a depthless sky. I was falling, I was standing still, I walked a thousand miles in a single step, I sat upside down in the air. I was living, and I was dead, and that panic that I’d managed to delay came rushing back in, my heart hammering inside my chest and in my hands and floating next to my ears, half fleshy organ and half static--

  And then it all snapped back. The world was normal colors, green trees, white snow, dark blue sky flecked with silver. I was on my back in the snow, and the scream I was sure I was howling wasn’t happening at all. White-hair looked at me, a thin-lipped, smug smile stretched across his face. “Do inform me what your heads-up display has deigned to tell you.”

  I sat up, pushed him away from me with one hand, twisted my torso so my palms braced against the earth, opened my mouth, and vomited.