I don't remember the walk down the mountain.
I remember fragments. The crunch of gravel under my feet. Han's voice, saying something I couldn't parse. The sky shifting from blue to orange to black. Trees. Rocks. A river. My arm, which had stopped being a separate source of pain and had become simply a fact of existence, like gravity or the bad lighting.
The poison had reached my chest.
I knew this because I could feel it moving — a slow, cold crawl under my skin, branching outward, exploring new territory. It wasn't painful anymore. It was numb. That was worse. Pain meant my body was still fighting. Numb meant my body had given up and was letting the poison take whatever it wanted.
"Caelan. Stay with me."
Han's voice. Close. I was on the ground. When had I gotten on the ground? The gravel was sharp against my cheek. I could see individual stones, each one perfectly rendered, each one a tiny polygon instead of a real rock.
"Up. Come on. Up."
Hands under my arms. Lifting. The world swayed. I was walking again, or being walked. My legs were participating but I wasn't sure they were listening to me. They moved because Han was moving, my body following his lead like a puppet with tangled strings.
"Just a little further. There's a hunting shack. I saw it from the ridge."
"Mm."
"Don't 'mm' me. Keep walking."
The shack appeared through the trees. Small. One room. Wooden walls with gaps between the planks where the cold leaked in. A door that hung crooked on its hinges. Han kicked it open and carried me inside.
The interior was dark. A dirt floor. A pile of straw in the corner that was probably meant to be a bed. A rusted stove that had not been used in years. Han laid me down on the straw and it crunched beneath me like old bones. Dust rose in a cloud, settling on my face and clothes.
"Stay here."
"Wasn't planning on going anywhere."
"I'm going to find water. Clean water. For the wound."
"Great."
"I'll be back."
"Sure."
He left. The door closed behind him, swinging shut with a creak that echoed in the small space. The shack was dark and cold and smelled like old dust and animal droppings. A single beam of moonlight fell through a crack in the roof, illuminating a circle of dirt floor.
I closed my eyes.
The inside of my eyelids was bright.
I was standing in an endless white void. Lines of code stretched in every direction, forming structures that looked like buildings, trees, people — if people were made of text and variables and unclosed parentheses. The ground beneath my feet was a grid of numbers, constantly recalculating, the digits shifting and changing as I watched.
A figure stood in front of me. It was me. No — it was my character sheet, rendered as a humanoid shape, text scrolling across its surface like a ticker tape. Its face was a blank space where features should be, filled instead with lines of code.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
[NAME: CAELAN MACGREGOR] [CLASS: GLITCH ENTITY] [HP: N/A] [STATUS: POISONED (UNSUPPORTED DAMAGE TYPE)] [WORTH: TBD BY SECTOR 9-C AUDIT]
The figure opened its mouth and spoke in my voice, but flat, mechanical, each word perfectly enunciated: "BACKSTORY INCOMPLETE. MEMORY FRAGMENTS DETECTED. PLEASE PROVIDE ADDITIONAL NARRATIVE INPUT."
"I don't have additional narrative input."
"RECOMMENDED: CHILDHOOD TRAUMA. LOST LOVE. TRAGIC ORIGIN. ALL PROTAGONISTS REQUIRE A TRAGIC ORIGIN."
"I don't have one."
"ERROR. PROTAGONIST INCOMPLETE. SUGGESTED FIX: GENERATE TRAGIC BACKSTORY AUTOMATICALLY?"
"No."
"WARNING. CONTINUED OPERATION WITHOUT COMPLETE CHARACTER DATA MAY RESULT IN—"
The figure's head snapped to the side, text scattering like startled birds. A cursor — a blinking vertical line, white and insistent — hovered where its ear should be. It was editing something. Modifying the file. Changing me without permission.
The cursor moved down to the [BACKSTORY] and blinked once. Twice.
Then it started typing.
Office worker. B-minus in Business Administration. Si— "Stop"
The cursor paused.
"Stop. I don't want you to fill in the blanks."
The cursor blinked. Waiting. It had all the time in the world.
I woke up.
Han was back. He had a wet cloth and was pressing it to my forehead. The cloth was cold. My skin was not. I felt like I was burning from the inside out.
"Your fever spiked," he said.
"I noticed."
"You were talking in your sleep."
"What did I say?"
" You can't auto-generate my childhood trauma. And then, Stop typing in my ears."
"Sounds about right."
"The wound is getting worse."
"I know."
"I'm going to have to carry you."
"Han. You can't carry me all the way to—"
"Watch me."
His voice was flat. Final. I opened my mouth to argue and he cut me off.
"You saved my life in that tavern. You saved me before that — in the sect, when I was still speaking like a broken scroll and couldn't even ask for help. You pulled me out of a world where I was nothing and gave me a logbook and a purpose. Now it's my turn."
"The poison doesn't—"
"I don't care what the poison does. I care about what I do."
I looked at him. In the dim light of the shack, he looked different. He was still wearing the same worn robes, the same crooked glasses, the same look of perpetual mild concern. But there was something in his stance now that hadn't been there when we met. A rootedness. A refusal to bend.
The beaten errand boy was gone.
"I don't know what's going to happen when we reach civilization," he said. "I don't know if there's a real healer in this world or if everyone's just another scammer in a cave with painted beads. But I know I'm not letting you die in a hunting shack in the middle of nowhere with a logbook entry that reads 'died of poisoning from a Patriarch's stray attack.' That's a terrible entry. I'm not writing it."
"Then what are you going to write?"
"I'll figure it out when we get there."
He stood up and pulled me to my feet. The world swam. My legs protested. The poison had spread into my chest now — I could feel it pressing against my lungs, making every breath a little shallower. My vision flickered at the edges, dark spots swimming like fish in murky water.
Han put my good arm over his shoulder and half-carried me to the door.
"Ready?"
"No."
"Good. Let's go."
He pushed the door open.
The night air hit me like a wall. Cold. Sharp. I blinked, trying to focus. The forest was dark, the sky a mess of pixelated stars arranged in constellations I didn't recognize — probably because the author had copy-pasted a random star chart without checking if it made sense. Somewhere in the distance, an animal howled. It was too regular to be real, the same pitch, the same duration, repeating on a timer.
I took a step. Then another. Han's shoulder was solid under my arm. The forest closed around us, dark and cold and full of sounds that might have been animals or might have been rendering glitches.
We made it about twenty feet before I heard something that wasn't a sound effect.
Footsteps.
Not Han's. Not mine. Someone else's. Coming from the treeline ahead. Steady and measured, each footfall deliberate. The crunch of dry leaves, the snap of a twig, the soft thud of a boot meeting packed earth.
Han stopped. His hand went to his shovel. He didn't let go of me, but I felt his body shift into a defensive stance.
"Who's there?" he called.
No answer. But the footsteps kept coming. Steady. Unhurried. The sound of someone who knew exactly where they were going and had no reason to be afraid of what they might find.
A figure emerged from the shadow of the trees.
Moonlight caught white robes. Long black hair that fell past the waist. A sword at the hip, the blade faintly glowing with an internal light, casting pale blue reflections on the surrounding snow.
A woman. Young — or at least, young-looking. Her face was smooth, composed, unreadable. She stopped at the edge of the clearing and looked at us with the calm, assessing gaze of someone who had seen everything and was no longer surprised by any of it.
She spoke.
Her voice was cool, precise, formal. Like a calligraphy brush on expensive paper.
"This one detected demonic aura in the area and came to investigate. This one did not expect to find two men bleeding in a hunting shack in the middle of the night."
I stared at her. The world was swimming. The dark spots were getting bigger. But I could still hear her voice, still see the way the moonlight caught the frost patterns on her robes, still register the absolute certainty in her stance.
"You talk weird," I said.
Then I passed out.