The Day God Stopped Writing
**Chapter 1
I was on my back looking up at the sky. It took me a minute to realise it was missing the buildings that I had grown accustom to accompanying it. No blocks of flats, no shops, lampposts, anything. The air also felt strange, thinner somehow. I sat up, painfully, and realised I was sitting on something that could very loosely be described as a path.
Perhaps because this path cut through a mountain was why all these changes had happened? That was my guess. My whole left side hurt, but there was far less blood than what I was expecting. Actually, why was I expecting blood? Actually, why am I on a mountain path? I stood up and looked around again. This was some sort of gorge, a crevasse which cut through red-speckled grey rock. This wasn’t anything like my town, my home or the place where I worked. There certainly wasn’t a mountain nearby or even in view from anywhere in my daily life, so I was struggling to figure out how I got here.
I had been walking back home from work; that much was certain. I was still in my office clothes. Black slacks, slightly shiny black shoes, white collar shirt which was fading to grey and a tie. No briefcase however. Maybe the paramedics…Ah, yes, the truck. That’s a relief. I’m dreaming. I’m high as a kite in some hospital bed or ambulance and my brain has morphed the curtains into a gorge. It can’t have been going too fast, perhaps I’ll get a week off work and a few cards. Maybe even a box of chocolates from my team.
I had lucid dreamed before, but I had to admit this one was pretty good all things considered. Presumably, being under so many drugs meant I wasn’t going to accidently wake myself up, so I decided to see where this one led me. Hopefully, I would remember all of this and it would make for some great writing when I got home.
A sound took me from this line of thinking, a rattling sound of wheels on the ground. The noise bounced off the irregular walls and it didn’t take long before the source of the noise, a cart pulled by two horses, came into view. I could make out the people upon it, and snippets of what they were saying. Talk about travel and adventure, about heading to Wolfenwald. What a stupid name that was. Here I was, enjoying a good drug trip and my brain had decided to let me know it thought I had done too much writing for my campaign setting book.
Wolfenwald was just an incredibly generic ‘spooky dark forest’ that I hadn’t even written any real content for. I did a lot of content for tabletop roleplaying games, this one was part of the larger ‘World of Khoros’ series I had been working on for a few years now. Wolfenwald had about a paragraph of text, a line through an abstract blob to signify the road and the forest, and a line saying “1d6, 5+ encounter 1d4 wolves”. It wasn’t exactly the stuff of legends, and it existed almost exclusively for flavour, but I had quite come to like the quest line that it had briefly featured in. Maybe that was why I was dreaming of these people talking about it. “The Woe in Wolfenwald” a working title for now until I could decide what it would be about. Not wolves, that would be too on the nose.
A little cloud of grey dust settled as the cart came to a halt and three of the four occupants stepped off it towards me. Two humans, male and female, armoured and robed respectably, and a dwarf, gender undetermined but also armoured and bearded. The cart had another man, dressed in dark cloth and leathers.
‘Who goes there?’ asked the armoured man with a hand resting on the pommel of his sword.
To hell with it, it’s a dream. ‘I am the great wizard James Clarke, to whom do I speak?’ I put on my most haughty and knowing wizard-voice. The one I used when I ran game sessions for every wizard, regardless of age or skill.
‘I am Falder, and these are my travel companions: Gurtrude of Thalberg,’ the robed woman did a polite but economical curtsy, ‘Mord Thunderhammer,’ the dwarf grunted simply but not rudely, ‘and Terrance Tudor-Pole over there. What are you doing here, sir wizard? If it is not too impolite to ask.’
Actually, what was I doing here? Where even was here? Stupid dream logic, that was the answer. ‘I was studying the rocks,’ I answered, trying to keep the voice going, ‘pray tell, where art thou coming from?’ I immediately regretted trying the whole “ye olde English” schtick. At least to them my office clothes looked weird enough to sell the idea of me being some eccentric wizard. At least asking them would give me an idea as to where I was.
‘From Haldorf, west of here.’
I screwed my eyes shut trying to remember where that was on the world map. It had become very cramped over the years as more places had been added. ‘Then this is the mountain pass to Castel d’Oro?’ I asked.
‘Yes?’ the man looked puzzled at what I had said. He glanced askew at this companions who also had done the same. Wizards in The World of Khoros tended to be a little mad and dangerous.
‘Good, just checking,’ I brushed some of the dust from the side I had been laying down on before continuing, ‘it’s a fair distance from here to the next bit of civilisation, may I join you on your quest?’ It was honestly surprisingly refreshing to meet people who didn’t chuckle at the whole roleplaying thing. By my reckoning it would be something like twelve miles (or two hex grids) to Castel d’Oro. This proposition seemed to be acceptable, after all, who could turn down the help of a wizard?
I was enthralled at the detail of the armour that Falder wore. It was just like the art in the book, except with all the little dings and scratches. I had gone for the more realistic interpretations of equipment for the illustrations. He clinked and clanked a bit as he got back on the cart, but the armour didn’t trouble him much at all. To him, it must have cost a fortune in gold coins, if my core rulebook was to be believed. Even more impressive was how the dwarf, who was mostly beard and chainmail, deftly hopped onto the cart as well.
As I sat down and the cart lurched into motion again. Gurtrude (of Thalberg) sat opposite me and engaged me in conversation immediately. Her grey robes had a leather bandolier of oddities and pouches which she adjusted as we spoke. She was pretty, in that way of someone who more than they were letting on was without giving the game away. ‘Another wizard? How curious,’ she began, lowering her hood to allow her blonde hair to be free. ‘From where do you hail, to wear such odd clothes?’
‘Oh, I’m from west of Voranov.’ That was the joke response I had at my table, an in-joke for when I couldn’t be bothered to name an actual place or forgot. There was nothing west of Voranov, that was the joke. The map ended before that point.
‘My, how far you must have travelled,’ Gurtrude seemed entirely sincere, ‘what brings you this far east to study the rock here?’
‘Well, um-’ I began before she suddenly put a hand to her mouth.
‘Oh! Your supplies! You didn’t bring your pack with you; we should stop and pick it up.’
‘Don’t worry about that, it was nothing important,’ I lied instinctively. I had never been thirsty or hungry in a dream before, and I didn’t want to miss the chance to see where this dream would take me.
‘You seem so young for someone able to travel this far without companions or supplies?’
‘Looks can often be deceiving,’ I was in my thirties, it was almost insulting. ‘I’ll simply barter my services when we get to town.’
‘Are you not cold, however?’
I was actually. I’d never been cold in a dream before, but then again, I had been hit by a truck and was presumably in hospital. ‘I am a little, do you have a spare cloak?’ I asked hopefully.
In the real world, wearing a cloak in public would been seen as incredibly cringeworthy and tantamount to social suicide. Here it would be expected, maybe even a little dashing and respectable! She rummaged around their supplies for one, and produced a simple thing of common green dye. It was heavy and thick and had a string to close it, unlike the cheap things you found online. This was made from proper wool, not a light and transparent single layer of nylon. It probably looked a little strange over my clothes, but who cared? This was a dream and everyone inside it were just constructs of my own brain.
After adjusting it and sitting back down I asked ‘and what is your quest? I should like to know what I have joined.’
‘We hear there are monsters around these parts, so we intend to claim the bounty.’
‘That’s right,’ the dwarf known as Mord Thunderhammer thumped the butt of his axe on the wood for emphasis. ‘Whatever’s out there, having another wizard will be a great benefit.’
‘Honour for the ancestors,’ I said in perfectly fluent dwarfish. I had written the language like everyone else did with a faux-nordic runic script. It all came together to make harsh sounding words that were glued together with hyphens and alcohol. It had been done to death already in several other books, but at this point anything else looked weird to me. I liked dwarves having runes, it fitted them so well. And here my brain had conjured this strikingly realistic specimen for me to speak it to.
‘Glory for the dead,’ the dwarf completed the phrase. It sounded so natural coming from him. They had a lot of those call-and-response litanies, when you roleplayed as a dwarf you often wanted something to shout. Honour and glory, glory and honour. It was catchy. Plus, to everyone else in the cart, it made me look much more wizardly to know how to speak it. Mord certainly had perked up from this little exchange immediately. ‘You speak my tongue well, lanky.’
Lanky was a dwarfish term of endearment for comradery. ‘Thank you. What did you hold mine?’ I asked conversationally.
‘Lead,’ he responded with a half shrug, which due to his stout stature was hard to see.
I tried to remember where his home might be from. I probably named it something very on the nose. ‘Are you from Plumbdepths?’ I asked. It was a terrible name, half-latin, half obvious, very dwarfy.
‘Yes! I am!’ he became elated instantly. The others looked at us both with a fresh round of odd expressions, this time with a twinge of “oh look how well they’re getting on”. ‘Lankies say it makes the finest-’ I lost the trail of his sudden excited babbling. I hadn’t written a full dictionary for dwarfish, only a few smattering phrases.
‘Sorry, in Common?’ I asked apologetically. ‘I’m not that fluent.’ No-one was.
‘I said,’ he started again in regular renamed “Common” English, ‘they make the finest paint with it, I am told. That and things for churches. Windows and such-like. You must be very travelled to have heard of Plumbdepths, James of Clarke.’
I had to stifle a laugh. He said Plumbdepths with as much sincerity as the fake dwarfish. ‘It’s just James Clarke. It has been a long time since I visited.’ It must be coming up to two years since I wrote my last dwarf-centric adventure. Maybe it was time to do so again. I was beginning to take a liking to this one.
We talked for a good while. I didn’t care too much to engage the other humans in conversation, I was having an immersive drug-fuelled soundboard conversation with a fantasy dwarf! Whatever they had me on I hoped I got a prescription for it. Mord was very proud of his equipment and relished my inspection of it. His axe was an over-proportioned variant of one I had seen in a museum back home from an exhibit on the Franks, but whilst that one was rusted and most of the details had eroded away, this example had the fancy bronze inlays and runic inscriptions. Runes that meant things like “stoic” and “immovable”. The craftdwarfship was truly spectacular. No wood involved in its creation at all (obviously), just twists in the handle for grip.
As for the chainmail, again it followed that museum image from the Frankish hauberk I had seen. I had taken a quick photograph of the rusted pile and the artwork that accompanied it, this was far more impressive. Each link wasn’t a circle, but a sharp-edge diamond shape. It probably sucked to make them.
It was after this he even offered me chug of beer from his waterskin. ‘Please, since you’re joining us, and your appreciation for my kin’s craft warms me most heartily,’ he proffered the iconic brown lump which sloshed heavily. How could I refuse? I had never eaten anything in a dream before, or at least nothing that had felt actually substantial. It wasn’t as if I could get drunk.
It smelled amazing somehow. But, of course, it would. Classic fantasy dictated almost by legal decree that dwarves had supernaturally superior booze. I took a swig of liquid beauty. Somehow as potent as vodka, yet smoother and richer than any other drink. Maybe you could get drunk in a dream. I decided against another swig; I wouldn’t want my unconscious body to vomit from a placebo wherever it was. I thanked the dwarf and as the crevasse came to an end.
It opened up into a rolling countryside, exactly as I had written it to be. Forests everywhere, farmer’s fields stitched together like a patchwork quilt, and tiny blobs of villages where nothing interesting happens unless goblins attacked. I had a little chuckle then, if a goblin attacked us I would probably wake up. That would be a shame.
‘How long do you think it will take us to reach the next village?’ I asked as the path began its slow descent towards the forest below.
‘Oh, I should say an hour,’ said Falder. Terrance nodded once to him to confirm from his seat with the reigns.
There were no doubt countless insignificant places I never mapped or named, but had to exist. Whatever this place was, it would be one of them. Writing campaigns meant looking at dry historical statistics from the medieval periods, there were a lot of farms before machines and fertilizers. More sheep, too. No nylon for clothing yet. Hardly any cotton, either.
I watched the view for ten minutes before I started to have a nagging sensation work its way up my spine. In every dream I could remember, every single transition from one scene to the next happened in a seamless blur. But this? This was continuous. Realistic. I had pinched myself under the cloak subtly and not woken up. I had done a lot of other small things, like cough and breath and smell and eat and…
Oh no.
By the time we had reached the bottom of the pass and entered into the nameless forest, a certain real panic had set in. Everything around us loomed and closed in on all sides. Places like this was where wolves existed with goblins. They had to; it made for good adventures.
I was not an adventurer. I was a modern-day human from a conflict free life. I had never held a sword that wasn’t for a costume, worn armour that wasn’t made of foam and cardboard, or even had a shit in the woods without a plumbed toilet more than a minute away. I was not a wizard, or even what these people would call a sage. If I was really lucky, I was considered an average human, because in a game regular humans did manual labour as soon as they could walk. They had to because I had written it to be that way as an extreme parody of how life used to be. I certainly could not do a full day of backbreaking labour; I worked in an office for crying out loud! I walked for leisure, not because I didn’t own a horse.
I touched my side again, where the truck had hit me. It still hurt a bit. Without considering my new companions, I undid the buttons on my shirt and looked at my ribs. A huge bruise was there, already turning grotesque colours as if it had been there for a week.
‘Oh my!’ exclaimed Gurtrude at the sight. ‘What happened to you?’
‘I think I was hit by a truck,’ I said slowly. Had I died? Do people go to books they wrote when they died? What if you had never written a book?
‘A truckle? It must have been very large indeed! Did it come loose from something?’ she asked.
‘What, no, a truck, a van,’ I said and then realised. ‘A, um, large cargo wagon.’
Falder, Gurtrude, and Mord all nodded understandingly at the same time. Presumably each had a run-in with an irresponsible driver themselves at some point.
‘Big cities are like that,’ said Mord, gruffly. ‘Humans swiftly regret barging into me however!’ This got a short laugh from his comrades. It got a nervous one from me.
‘You look pale, sir wizard,’ said Falder.
I couldn’t think of a response. ‘It’s nothing. Travel sickness. I’ll be fine.’ I was concerned about the current state of affairs. If this was forever, what happened if I died again? Could I die again? Would a goblin stab into me and I would carry on forever in this…afterlife…forever in pain? Would I return to the top of that mountain? Another book? And goblins didn’t kill quickly. A lot of things in my adventures didn’t, because that way it would be all grim and dark and comically evil. I knew that real life that the low and high medieval periods had plenty of colour and notions of hygiene, but had chosen to make Khoros pointlessly brown and filthy because it was funny. Everyone I played with liked the idea of dirt farming peasants. You got to feel superior to them and scoff with your modern meta knowledge at their plight.
I knew from research this time period sucked. I liked modern conveniences like clean hot water on demand, electricity, the internet. Working dawn to dusk, having to attend church on threat of excoriation, the literal existence of demons and knowledge that there were no actual gods did not appeal.
The cart suddenly came to a halt. I looked over my shoulder between Falder and Terrance to see a tree had been felled to block the path. This was a classic ambush. The others knew this too and drew their weapons with hisses of steel on leather. Mord thumped his axe into his callused palm a few times. I didn’t have anything and they didn’t see any reason to worry. To them I was this wise wizard who was so worldly I even knew of distance dwarf holds and spoke their language. They probably thought I would lazily flick a finger and explode whatever was laying in wait. I immediately wanted to vomit. The truck had been entirely unforeseen and instant. This was going to take significantly longer.
It was impossible to drive around the blockage; the ground was terrible enough as it was. It would require a fiddly unhitching of horses or something to manoeuvre around over the uneven rocks and roots. It suddenly felt much darker under the canopy of the old trees. I didn’t want to get down from the cart, the planks were the only protection I had right about now. My eyes flitted from shadow to shadow. I saw nothing. What did catch my eye was the giant scratches on the tree. Something with huge claws had raked the bark off.
‘This isn’t goblins,’ I said in a quiet voice.
‘Whatever it is-’ began Falder with a steady tone. He stopped as something large and white flashed like lightning from nowhere. Before anyone could say anything else it had sunk it’s teeth into the side of his neck and a huge spray of blood immediately erupted. I had written these creatures myself, a unique monster of considerable challenge. As it savaged Falder like a dog with a rat, I observed in stunned horror as my creation sprayed its pristine white fur red.
These were wyrren. They took the form of huge and sinuous white-furred ferrets that I had morphed into unsettling humanoid proportions. The artwork I had commissioned had them standing upright on their hind legs, using their long tails for balance, keep their unnaturally elongated bodies upright. Each one had slender and drawn out faces, entirely unlike a real ferret. Where I lived were muntjacs, which had these strange scent glands on their heads, and I had given it to them to make them stranger still. The dark glands traced lines from their foreheads past their eyes. To make them weirder, I had given them short, stubby antlers crown their heads and giant forepaws like a moles for digging with wicked claws. Each one was as wide as a man, but their combined length is put them around twice a man’s height. Even so, their shorter ferret legs put them all only around two heads taller than me.
More came then from every angle. I heard Falder gurgle as his body became incapable of making any other noise. Mord yelled and swung for the creatures, but they easily dodged the angry swings with malicious contempt. Wyrren were not goblins or wolves, they were fey monsters designed for experienced adventurers. I was going to be like Falder in a moment, like a gazelle from a lion documentary.
Terrance finally spoke then, if only to scream in pain. It had his leg, teeth easily ignoring his armour. With an amazing moment of skill he threw a dagger and nicked the creature’s ear, slashing it in two. The other dagger was taken from his grip and I turned away because I saw the creature was going to maul his face.
Gurtrude was dead already. Wyrren weren’t stupid, so they had targeted the obvious magic user. Two of them bit and wrenched at her flesh, which came away with horrible sounds. I had wanted to see magic, actual magic. That would have been nice.
They came closer, unafraid. Once I had sprained my ankle when I was young. Sometimes my back hurt when I woke up. I had accidently sliced a finger on a razor blade when I shaved, and scuffed my knees many times. I was not used to true pain. The next few seconds would be unbridled agony, because I had written it would be.
I covered my face and curled up into a ball, too scared to even shuffle into the corner of the cart, as much help that would actually provide. ‘Please!’ I whimpered. Only a few more seconds before the suffering. Two of them leaned over me. ‘Please!’ I cried out, this time in their language. Their species spoke in a type of pig-latin with more “S” involved. A hissing sibilance to make them more sinister. I tried a lot of words. Parley and surrender, begging and pleading. In English and hissing Wyrren.
The pain didn’t come.
I tentatively opened my eyes between my arms. White shirt fabric gave way to white fur with soulless black eyes looking back. The sneering expressions turned to one another.
‘This one smells odd,’ one of them said to another. ‘I have heard no tale of a human speaking our tongue before.’
‘Say that again, human thing?’ asked the other, its entire front was splattered with gore. Stark against the fur.
Children could speak pig-latin. Unlike dwarfish, I could speak this all day. ‘Please don’t hurt me?’ I asked, from my pathetic position. I had never known the phrase to work in any context, fictional or otherwise.
They looked at each other again. The scent glands on their faces pulsed oddly. ‘How do you speak our tongue?’
You couldn’t lie easily to fey creatures. I was in no state to even hope to try. ‘Because I invented it?’ I ventured. It was the truth and I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Not answering the question might anger them and I had heard how the others – who probably had better pain tolerances – had died.
‘Take him,’ said the gore-coated one. ‘Ransom is always good.’
Huge claws enclosed around my upper arms and hauled me roughly off the cart and onto my feet. ‘Walk, and you live. Run, and you die.’
I saw the scene around me. It stank. It had happened so fast that the horses hadn’t had time to react before being cut down. It voided its bowels then, and the scene smelled even worse. Even so, the worst part for me was seeing a single finger twitch on Gurtrude’s lifeless hand.
Half prodded and half shoved, I was corralled away from the scene. We left the path and marched deeper into the trees, light becoming more and more of a luxury as they became denser and thicker. I scrabbled as best I could over the undergrowth. The wyrren by contrast moved with ease and poise, slinking along, flowing like mist. They carried with them their plunder. Large butchered parts of the horses, limbs from the humans (the dwarf, being mostly beard, would presumably have to be skinned to be edible), and whatever equipment and weapons seemed useful. I had written that wyrren would do all these things, but I didn’t find any satisfaction from seeing them do it.
I wondered about the flora around me. It was all based on what I knew, western European wildlife. I had been on walks through forests a number of times. I wasn’t a shut-in, but I had no clue if these species of trees and shrubs and brambles would have been native to this place in actuality. Forests in my writings didn’t note those details, they just got adjectives like “old” and “spooky”. This one was giving off an “ancient and gnarled” sensation.
It wasn’t too long before they directed me to the entrance to their warrens. I hadn’t been keeping too close of an eye on the distance from here to the path because I wasn’t in the right frame of mind, but it was still closer than I would have liked. The whole road was lethal. They could have attacked from anywhere. There were probably even more horrors. The entrance was cunningly hidden, a sort of optical illusion that meant unless you were right in front of it, you would be hard pressed to see it. It was a simple circular tunnel, the edges dug out by their claws and then worn smooth from an unknown quantity of time’s passing. It was pitch black beyond.
Used to keeping prisoners, the wyrren escorting me simply gripped my shoulder painfully to keep me upright and marched me forward. I didn’t have to duck my head as I entered, though I could have reached up and slapped the ceiling. The air was cool and dry, the floor bereft of loose dust and pebbles. Wyrren warrens are big. A hamlet under the earth, scraped from the rock. The sinister ferret-mole-monsters had their own mini-culture, one with a fey tint to it. No doubt if I could see any of it, it would be quite a sight. For now, only utter blackness was all I could see.
We took turns, passed what I guessed was other wyrren, judging by their hissing voices. They had no clue I could understand them, but they all had the same opinion of me.
‘Weird smelling prisoner.’
‘Someone else can eat him.’
‘Who would pay for this thing?’
I kept my mouth shut to avoid antagonising any of them. But then the air felt different and we stopped. Sound didn’t bounce back as fast wherever we were and things sounded a fraction more distant. Was this some larger chamber?
‘Pray tell my kin, why do you bring a prisoner?’ asked one with a tinge of authority to it.
‘This one claims to speak our tongue, wise one,’ replied the one gripping my shoulder.
‘Does it now? Speak, furless mortal.’
‘I am James Clarke, I know everything there is to know about your race,’ I answered, ‘and I know you can tell if I am lying.’
‘How curious,’ I felt the air move as it stepped closer, ‘either you are very foolish, or unique. Never have I heard of a human of all things speak my native tongue. But then again,’ I heard it sniff the air, with the glands and its nose in alternating huffs, ‘what is that smell about you? It is like sour pitch.’
‘It might be my clothes?’ I guessed. ‘Does it smell artificial? Manufactured?’ I felt it deftly grab my shirt and could feel its form sniffing then pushing it away in disgust.
‘Yes. It is rancid. What is it?’
I decided to ask my own question then. ‘Am I guest here?’
There was a pause then. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘That’s not a “no”. You’re fey, I request my guest rights.’ You couldn’t mess around with the fey, because then it invited them to mess around with you.
The tone of voice that spoke then was surprisingly not even remotely angry, if anything it continued the intrigued amusement. ‘Very well, I am Psamnak. For now, you are welcome to my warren, James Clarke. Let him go.’ The claws ceased biting into my shoulder. ‘Now tell me, James Clarke, how is it you came to know everything about us?’
‘Just James for now. But I am not sure if you’ll like the answer.’
‘I do not like humans, but I do enjoy a puzzle.’
‘Before I do, may you please provide some light?’
‘For my guest? Very well,’ I heard his claws click over each other as his paw did odd gestures. I had my eyes shut as he spoke nonsensical words. Words which were nonsense because they were for a spell. I had never written a single word of magical language, instead having opted to make it all garbled syllables and whatever sounds felt suitable at the moment. But every adventure I had ran had someone make light with magic. I gently opened my eyes to allow them to adjust to the scene around me.
This was a larger room, taller than it was wide, a sort of central chamber with tunnels that branched off of it, along and further down. The floor was worn from centuries of claws scratching at it and the yellow-white nimbus that gently danced around Psamnak’s head threw shadows about in every direction. As my sight became more certain, I was able to pick out more details. The way tree roots had been bent around passages to continue down into the rock for example. There were also aesthetic carvings and embossments on the spaces between, and a larger singular one on the ceiling.
‘There’s a better way to do that,’ I said, nodding my head towards the light.
‘This is one of the simplest spells, even I know your kind teach it as the apprentice example.’
‘Then you won’t mind if I prove it?’
Psamnak’s slender face gave him a naturally superior expression, especially from this angle. Even so, he had detected no lie in me. ‘Leave us, the secrets of magic are not for all. The human knows not to break his guest rights.’
I was led this time to another chamber, deeper still through more passages. As we passed other white-furred wyrren, Psamnak told each one, politely but firmly, that I was a guest and not a prisoner. Each one dipped their heads and touched an antler in response. If I was any judge, it was a personal chamber for Psamnak himself. Various things that had been crafted or plundered were arranged around his abode. Movable furniture like the chair was made from wood, the desks and scroll alcoves were carved into the rock. A merchant cart must have been ransacked for the nice rug that covered most of the floor, and a variety of rustic writing supplies and similar implements were neatly arranged as needed. I had never considered the sleeping situation before now, but it seemed his kind used hammocks, like a pet owner might give a real-life ferret. It made sense, in a strange way.
‘Honoured guest James, please, demonstrate your mastery of the arcane?’ Psamnak gestured to his desk. Wizards of all kinds never shared their knowledge casually. Sure, a master taught his apprentice after years of pointless abuse, but that was the way you prevented players from hopping in for a quick afternoon’s study. Cultural game balance. The idea of freely sharing knowledge was not a thing, because every other wizard was hoping to scam the other. Psamnak clearly thought this was some overconfident idiot who didn’t know any better and I would make a good five minutes entertainment before being killed.
Of course, how magic worked in the game compared to the world building lore of how it worked were two sides of the same coin. All magic was corrupting to use; it tapped into chaotic energies that slowly drove users mad. For game balance, obviously. Couldn’t have people using it all the time. However, what I carefully wrote on the parchment with the slender stick of charcoal was the finest example of the two concepts blended together. For game mechanics, spells were first written as runes, which were then studied by someone who knew magical theory to be able to use it. In essence, you had to know how to play music and also read music. But you also had to be born with the ability to cast magic. Either you could or you couldn’t. It was genetic, typically.
What I wrote upon the sheet was not my own creation. Someone else, someone on an internet forum with far too much time and a better grasp of my own mechanics had carefully concocted this spell as a thought experiment. Simpler was not better. Like an advanced computer sorting algorithm, this was hideously complex and highly efficient. It was why the game mechanics and lore for the magic system were separated, it would have caused too many arguments at the table. It had been left in with the rest of the optional rules at the back of the book.
I showed Psamnak the sprawling rune. Circles linked with triangles, lines crossed with wonky-looking symbols that looked like a toddler had grabbed a crayon and tried to write Shakespeare with their foot. To his credit, he looked at it critically. He murmured under his breath, taking in the maths and steps needed. I had no idea how it would actually work because all that was needed was to prove my mechanics made it so. The room went dark as he dismissed the lights. Then he carefully spoke the words and clicked his claws and the room was lit again, slightly differently with a cold off-white-and-blue glow.
‘That felt different, mortal guest. Cleaner, somehow. Are you some sort of arch-magician?’
‘No.’
‘Then where did you learn this magic?’
‘Because I invented it. All of it. I created all the magic in this world.’
‘So, do I stand in the presence of a deity? Art thou a god then?
‘No, I am just a human.’
‘No human could lay claim to have made all magic, no human lives beyond a century and I have lived that long already. How is it that you are not lying?’ he leant in close then, black eyes level with my own. Deep suspicion ran through his features. It was possible to lie to fey creatures though it was incredibly difficult. But it was also vastly more unlikely that a human wizard knew magic like this, because no-one thought like that in this world. This world had no need for sorting algorithms.
I flinched away from his face, but he kept close, staring deep into my eyes for the smallest trace of deceit in my soul. ‘Do you promise not to hurt me if I tell you the truth?’
‘Oh, certainly, mortal James. Strange clothes and stranger magic, master of all magic. What need you fear from me, your most humble host, when you know such secrets? Could you show me some sorcery of you own, first?’
‘I created all magic, but I can’t use it,’ I admitted, I was pressed against the wall now. The creature was dangerously cunning and now had reason to suspect me capable of anything.
It stopped then, an inch away from my face. Then, Psamnak drew back and laughed once. ‘Tell me about that piece of arcane trickery, how does it truly work?’
Realising I wasn’t in immediate peril, I gingerly took the chair and sat back down in it. My legs had threatened to fold out from under me just then. ‘Your spell is the same one everyone casts. Create and light and self. This spell sends a message to the plane of fire and uses the energy there to open a tiny portal. You don’t create light with it, you just conjure a fire without heat.’
‘And you created this spell why, exactly?’ he didn’t need to question the method, he had just done it himself.
‘I didn’t create it, someone else-’ but I was cut off then.
‘So, there is someone even more knowledgeable than the creator of magic himself? Why are they not here instead of you? Are they a god?’ Psamnak needled, trying to see the greater power than didn’t exist.
‘Yes, but I don’t even know their real name. They’re just another human like me. They just started an argument with me to prove a point, to point out how they would easily break magic and be an annoying player. Where I come from people enjoy pointing out flaws like that. He sat down and read my books and nit-picked at the mechanics until it worked. The spell is something stupid like ninety-nine parts in a hundred efficient.’
‘Stupid? You say that like it is a bad thing. Magic, the chaos, it corrupts the heart and soul,’ he pointed a claw at his long white-furred chest. I knew for a fact that inside his body would be a heart with tiny spider webs of black evil spreading out of it which would slowly grow with each spell he cast. ‘I will live hundreds of more years with this. How can such a thing be “stupid”?’
‘Because none of this should be real! Your whole world is just a game I made! I didn’t…’
Psamnak looked like he was trying to say something. His face contorted as his fey obligations forbade him from harming me. ‘Real? That is a strange word to choose, mortal, even in my tongue. Game even more so. Do you insult me so? Do you toy with my life so easily?’
‘No! No, I swear, it’s the truth. I wrote some books and now I find myself within them! Where I come from magic isn’t real! It doesn’t exist. I’m sorry.’
There was a long pause. Psamnak’s face told me he wanted to kill me and painfully. ‘Say that again,’ he said in a quieter voice.
‘Say what?’
‘That you are sorry. That you ask for forgiveness for these things. I want to hear your voice from your heart, so I may decide what to do with you.’
I looked at him now, a creature that had poisoned himself every day because his creator didn’t want him to succeed without suffering. That all his kind had done so, from the dawn of time. ‘…I’m sorry. For everything. I didn’t intend for any of this.’
Like in most fiction, I had made it so that any of the fey races were written as cunning and cool-headed. They manipulated from the shadows and controlled situations over decades. They did not have emotional outbursts.
‘You have deceived me, James Clarke.’ Psamnak wasn’t angry, but he was annoyed by something.
‘How so?’
‘You have tricked me into accepting a gift I am obliged to repay,’ he held the parchment with the most efficient spell in the world on it. Written by some snot-nosed know-it-all on the internet with too much time on his hands. In the real world, it was nothing. Here, it meant so much. A new way of thinking, a safer way of living. Whenever he wanted light, he paid a day of his life. Now he only had to spare less than fifteen minutes.
‘Are you not…wait, are you not angry about the whole book thing?’
‘It has often been said the gods are cruel, your words change little. What is it that you want?’
What did I want? ‘I don’t know. The first thing that sprung to mind was to go home.’
‘Yet you do not speak those words with much in the way of conviction.’
‘Because I don’t know what would happen if I did. I think I died.’
‘Died? What could kill the god of magic?’
‘I was walking home and I think I got hit by a truck.’
‘It must have been a particularly large one. Do you not wish to return to godhood?’
‘Again, to me this world was a series of books I wrote,’ I glanced around the room and picked a random book up to prove a point. It was written in Common, titled “Herb Primer Volume IV”. I suddenly felt the urge to read it. Unless it was strictly plot relevant, miscellaneous books were never described with any detail. But these places always had many, and they had to be about something. I was curious to see what it said. ‘Like this one. I have only ever been a human.’
‘How many books does it take to write the whole world?’ he asked then, scrutinizing the light spell in his paws one last time in case this was a very elaborate trick.
‘I guess three? One for the core rules, one for the world map and the last one for the creatures.’
‘And are these volumes thusly massive compared to the one in your hands?’
‘No. Mine were only slightly larger than this one.’
‘That makes little sense, unless the text inside of such small scale then?’
‘Not especially. There are pictures, as well. They cost me a lot of money to have drawn.’
‘You can create a whole world, yet cannot draw? A strange god you are.’ He paused then and carefully rolled the parchment up to put it in an alcove. ‘How did my people feature in this book? Did we get our own works of art?’
‘You seem to be taking this conversation much better than I would have done, given the circumstances.’
‘Answer the question, mortal god.’
‘You had one and a half pages of text, and half a page of artwork. You were actually fairly popular online.’ Psamnak and his people really did look like the art come to life. Though in the book they had a more regal and ethereal pose than this more realistic figure.
‘Popular?’ he perked up at this. The fey could be very vain at times.
‘I, uh, don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Why?’ suspicion may its way back on to his face.
‘You might find it disgusting.’
‘I have eaten humans and slain the demon that spilled from the innards of my deceased master, may his soul rest in grand repose, there is nothing you could say which would disgust me.’
I took a deep steadying breath, for him and myself. ‘Alright,’ there was no point delaying the inevitable. I told him. I explained the internet, like an intangible library and public forum. I explained art communities, and the great variety therein. But then I had to explain about the small group of people who had taken a special interest in the humanoid animals I had created.
Psamnak didn’t find it disgusting. He found it bizarre.
Psamnak had the horse meat brought in from the ambush. His was raw, mine had been cooked on a stick over a fire. By who? I could not say. Wyrren kept prisoners to ransom them sometimes, but that had been to enable adventurers to escape them. Whether a captured humanoid or another wyrren had made this was largely immaterial right now. I had never eaten horse before, though I had no qualms with the idea. It was sold in supermarkets in other countries, after all. It was okay, all things considered.
While I hadn’t been outright told I wasn’t allowed to leave the room, I got the feeling from Psamnak that to do so was not in my best interests presently. It was the way he ate the flesh, somehow through the ripping and tearing and the juices he was making a point. Even so, he still had that innate fey grace to it all. He wasn’t a messy eater, he just somehow made it look like the hunk of horse meat was somehow still suffering in his grip.
‘Tell me, faithless author, if you did create all that I have ever beheld and more, why did you create myself and my kin in this form? Did you create myself in specific?’
It was a question I think everyone had wanted to know the answer to.
‘No individual wyrren was made, you mostly got a broad outline. I simply wanted an “elite” threat for adventurers and you had many criteria to fill. You’re shaped the way you are because it makes you look “otherworldly”, you have probably seen mundane animals that resemble you.’
‘Yes, stags and ferrets. Why those things?’ he slowly flensed another string of meat from the whole.
‘I like them, that’s really all there is to it. You are unique though, I don’t recall any other place where your kind exist. Your kind are, without exaggeration, hand crafted. Which is fairly rare.’
This got a smug look on his elongated face. ‘Is that flattery?’
‘More to myself. Your culture is your own, however. I simply wrote that you lived in burrows and preferred ambushes. But to ambush meant you needed intelligence, so I gave your species more than average. By average I mean in comparison to a human.’
This got a different expression, the black eyes frowned with distaste. ‘How very human you are, to measure the whole world against yourselves. Go on.’
‘There’s no reason why I made you long lived; other than the fact it made you more mysterious. Your kind have the potential to cast magic because it made you more dangerous. As for the white fur when you don’t live in the snow, well, I will admit that makes little sense in any capacity. Sorry.’
‘Your apology means little to me. I find it out of place, like you yourself are. Human religions here claim that they are made in their god’s image, but here I learn that the only real god made my kind superior. This pleases me.’ He carefully cleaned his claws with his needle-like teeth. It made little tick tick tick sounds. ‘You took an interest in the carvings on the walls, why is that? Was that not already written?’
‘No, that is what I found strange. Fascinating, if anything. From my point of view, I wrote mostly about your physical attributes and abilities. Your culture is new to me,’ I paused then, a little embarrassed to ask the next question, ‘may I…have another look?’
Psamnak was probably the first of kind since the dawn of creation for another sentient species to ask to see anything of the sort willingly. Captured humans would have been marched past them in the dark, unable to see or even comprehend if they could. It was a whole new world in of itself. He was unsure how to react. ‘Briefly,’ he conceded.
The light spell continued to gently illuminate the area around Psamnak, giving him a cold halo. I was in the central chamber again looking at the art carved into the walls. Their claws meant that they always had the tools available to cut the stone to some capacity. It was very finely done with quite some impressive detailing. Not much in the way of words however, it was primarily one continuous flowing scene. No part of it stood far from the surface – I guessed to avoid snagging fur on it in the dark. It featured mostly a flowing hunting pack of wyrren forever heading somewhere in a loop around the room.
‘Do you have artists? Do they practice before carving something like this?’ I asked, politely avoiding touching the stonework like it was a museum piece.
‘Our young scratch soil, then clay and eventually rock when they grow of age. We all have grown bored and whittled a stone. The stone we dig out for a tunnel is used, and there is plenty of it.’
‘It makes sense, you had some leftover skills allocated…’ I muttered, too engrossed in the scene. It perfectly flowed back on itself around the whole circumference, dancing over the arches of the other passageways like they had always belonged.’
‘You seem to be unsure whether you have made us without care or with a steady hand. What is it that you find so enthralling about this wall? Surely there are objects of immense power which would interest you more?’
‘Where I come from, in the capital city, we have a museum which would give anything for these carvings.’
‘You have not mentioned what the country of gods is like until now.’
I paused my slow sideways crab-walk. How do you even begin to explain, at minimum, 700 years of historical advancement? Supermarkets and how the average person has never stepped foot on farmland. Cars, tarmac roads, petrol stations and everything needed to support it all? Even my clothing smelled weird to them. I was the biggest distributor of microplastics in the whole of Khoros, in their whole universe, and they had no idea what plastic was. The internet was more esoteric than magic, computer chips far more complex than anything in existence. Before now, I could have had some medical expert operate an MRI scanner to see the insides of my own body without any swords being involved.
‘It would take more than every book in this world to even begin to explain it all. There, I had so much. The richest king in this world lives a life worse than the “peasants” of mine. Meat with most every meal, art and entertainment of all kinds and more, education beyond what they could hope to ever acquire with every scholar in the land. You must light a fire to get hot water, I simply needed turn a knob.’ I sighed. No toilet paper either. That meat was going to get its revenge on the way out.
‘If you are of a world and a land with these luxuries you once possessed, why not just bring them forth here? You seemed to know enough to make a world, would it be so difficult to merely recall how those things were made possible?’ It was clear he was already tired of my morose musings as soon as I had started to voice them.
‘It’s not that simple. It would take years, and that would only be for the simplest of things. I’d be dead before any of that could happen.’
‘Then you are just as mewling and weak as the humans here?’
‘More so.’
It was hard to tell, but it looked like Psamnak had just rolled his eyes in mild disgust. ‘So that is the fate of your kind? To trade more strength for luxury? I do not see the appeal. I remember a merchant of your kind we captured, more pig than person in proportion, who nearly froze to death when we took his cloak. With such plenty, why create a world of fantasy, are your people not happy enough, or do you simply crave the idea of suffering?’
‘I prefer not dying of disease or starvation. I liked what I had! So many of the problems every human in this world suffers from every day were solved before I was even born.’
‘And yet,’ Psamnak put on airs of superiority, ‘your kind created new problems to replace the old ones. Before my first winter I had killed my first mouse in the woods. You need others to build your home, but any one of mine could dig their own. The cold is no concern and disease is a mortal problem. You have too many steps between your “hows” and your race has stepped from its path.’
‘Yes, yes, you can stop lording it over me. I get it. Oh human, what will you do without your ox and plough? A little more sympathy for your creator would be nice.’
Psamnak took in and released a sigh. A sigh that conveyed the whole “what am I going to do with you” thing he had been slowly working his way up to. He and I both knew I couldn’t stay in this burrow forever. Quite frankly neither of us wanted to do that. A thought occurred to me then.
‘Psamnak, how do you actually ransom people? It’s not like you can just walk into the nearest town, because then you would be attacked, surely? I never wrote how it worked.’
The wyrren didn’t say anything. He just changed somehow. Nothing physically happened, he didn’t suddenly shapeshift into a charming man or turn invisible, yet everything about him was now altered. It was like some optical illusion where from one direction you saw an old crone and then another a young lady, except he forced you to see whichever he wanted. Before there was Psamnak, a wyrren. Now there was just Psamnak. Much like the memory of a dream, every passing second the notion of evil and malice about him grew more distant. He didn’t become “good”, just all his notable attributes drained out of him. On an intellectual level, I knew he could kill me easily. Instinctively however, he seemed no more socially different than the dwarf who I had met. Different, certainly, but nothing in particular to mention.
‘I suppose that is what I described a glamour to do,’ I was now having to really concentrate to even look directly at him, ‘but it’s another thing when it’s happening to me.’ It was almost a violating experience – some “other” thing had control of parts of my brain.
He stopped doing it, and it seemed like it took no effort in either direction. The malice, the cruelty and the fey superiority rushed back in like air in a vacuum.
‘Strange you are not immune,’ he mused, claw on furred chin.
‘I never wrote that I would be. That would be unfair.’
Psamnak tittered in a way very much like how a giant ferret would, if that ferret could do so at someone else’s expense. ‘Finally, something you think is fair.’
‘And why does that, of all things, make you laugh?’
‘I am sure you know that all mortals try and bargain with the fey. Then, they scheme to escape the deal and cry and call it unjust. To hear one proclaim his own suffering fair is somewhat of a rare vintage to my ears. Perhaps there is hope for you yet.’
‘Then no doubt you’ll find utterly hilarious when the next hazard I wrote down the road kills me.’
‘Certainly,’ Psamnak paused mid-turn before returning once more to looking at me with distant dissatisfaction. ‘What is the next major event?’
‘I suppose that depends what today’s date is?’ I had written a lot of history, pre-history, and implied history. The date system was purposefully not based on my own world’s, but instead something like a bad understanding of what China did. Dynasties, but “Western”.
‘It is the late spring of the eighth year of Emperor Farbaden III.’
That felt weird coming from his mouth. Not the words, but the fact that he had used the “human” means of determining it. I could only guess that after many centuries of interacting with humans and their cultures, they had just adopted their means of tracking the date. Fey were intended to be functionally immortal outside of a violent end, what need had they for accurate dates?
But, what the date really told me was I had been dumped at the end of the last book I had published, which had been an adventure in some swampy hellscape far away from here. Which meant…
‘If I am right, then the events of what would have been my next book will happen: “The Crown of Midnight”. Cultists find an ancient obsidian crown to give their demon master a new body. Which means another big event in about three months.’ I sighed and put my head into my hands. They smelled of horse meat. ‘It’s meant for higher levels. No-one will be able to stop him. We’ll all be dead by autumn.’
I hadn’t seen or even truck the truck. If the wyrren had killed me it would have lasted only a minute. Waiting three months for an even slower and even more horrible end would be torture. The truck had killed me. I had died and this was hell.
‘If you are the architect of this doom, why not then go forth and smother it in its crib? Do not tell me you are that pitiless and weak.’
‘With what resources? Its in a tomb, in a mountain, behind traps! I don’t even have a weapon or even proper clothes.’
Psamnak gave me a clip around the back of the head, like an angry parent with poor impulse control. Air hissed through the claws past my ears as he deftly ensured the blunter parts of his appended struck me.
‘Enough of your whining, James Clarke. I will go, and you will accompany me. You will locate this crown and disarm the traps for me. I will pay my debt to you by saving your furless hide. I will not have my creator’s complaints be the downfall of my people.’
I was hauled to my feet by my collar and evicted from the chair as Psamnak grabbed things about his study. Scrolls and oddities were being assembled in the centre of his table. A backpack, deeper and more tube-like in proportion to what a regular humanoid of unstretched physiology might possess was rapidly being prepared.
‘Wait, right now?’