I wanted an escape.

  Instead, I got amnesia, a talking gnome, and thirty days to survive before a million other players logged in to kill me. Thirty days to become someone worthy. Heroic.

  My life wasn’t terrible, and that was the problem.

  I worked, had friends, and a family who mostly cared. But something inside me screamed for more. Something exciting, something that felt dangerous enough to matter. I wanted a place impossible enough to push my imagination to its edges.

  Role-playing games, board games, and computer games filled the gaps. A few fantasy book series almost got me there. Almost. But it wasn’t quite enough.

  Then I discovered the Shallowlands, and everything changed.

  Letting a machine control what I saw, heard, and felt? Terrifying. Wrong in every way that mattered.

  I joined the first wave anyway, cashing in my savings for slick marketing and empty promises.

  My family was furious. Scared. They had every reason to tell me no. I had nothing but my gut and a vague, unsettled dream.

  I remember the start clearly: strapped to a medical bed, wired up, machines pinging around me. Being one in a million as an outcast sounded satisfying for someone who avoided crowds. Turns out it mostly means everyone thinks you're an idiot.

  Even the other oddballs along for the same ride thought I was wrong.

  Out of every guild in the Shallowlands, I picked the one nobody wanted: Enchanter. Could a million players be wrong?

  In my mind, I saw creating magical rings of power. Clever, versatile, subtle. What's not to like? My favorite old-school hero used them. I'd make them mine.

  I could have chosen more than a dozen different versions of a warrior, thief, priest, or a different type of mage with actual damage spells. But no. I took a different path.

  Getting into the final cohort of 1,000 entrants wasn't easy. Training sessions, psych evaluations, and far too many lawyers created barriers where people dropped out or were forced to. After days of testing and a painful electronic funds transfer, I finally got my spot.

  I was about to enter an entirely new world. A virtual world that looked and felt as real as life even if it was all just zeros and ones under the hood.

  They wheeled into a room the size of an auditorium. I lay back and got strapped in. The bed looked more sci-fi than fantasy; all chrome and sensors.

  The technician handed me a wireless console with two options: a red button and a green button. Her voice dropped. "You don't have to do this."

  At least it was not some giant pill I had to swallow, I thought, missing her words in the anticipation of the moment.

  “You don't have to do this.” She repeated, eyes intense.

  There was nothing left to think about. I had no idea why she would even say that, or whisper so softly that I could barely hear her.

  I pushed green.

  For a stretched second, nothing happened. It was just long enough to wonder whether I'd made a catastrophic mistake. Long enough to imagine the machine malfunctioning or my savings evaporating into vaporware and corporate lies.

  Then my body stopped belonging to me.

  The sensation shouldn’t have existed.

  There was no pain exactly, but a sense of wrongness on a fundamental level. My neurons fired in directions they were never meant to go. I tried to scream but had no mouth, tried to breathe but had no lungs.

  I was being disassembled, translated, and streamed through fiber optic cables at the speed of light. Every childhood fear of falling and darkness tore through my unraveling consciousness.

  The technician's face flickered in my fragmenting vision. She looked sad.

  Or maybe pitying.

  Why pitying?

  The darkness shattered. Colors I'd never seen before bled through my closed eyelids. Sounds that weren't sounds vibrated through bones I no longer had. Infinity compressed into a single heartbeat; far more than a human brain was meant to survive.

  Some distant, still-rational part of me understood why they made us sign thirty-seven pages of liability waivers.

  This was what dying felt like. It had to be.

  Then, as abruptly as falling through ice into dark water, everything inverted.

  Sensation snapped back into place, but it felt…different.

  Better?

  No.

  Cleaner. Sharper. Like I'd been living my entire life slightly out of focus, and I put on glasses for the first time.

  The terror drained away, replaced by something far more dangerous: exhilaration.

  I was here. Actually here.

  Whether it was code or magic didn’t matter. It felt real enough to breathe. My old body was gone. My old limits with it. Whoever I’d been before was already slipping away.

  And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure whether that felt like freedom or loss.

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  Maybe that should have scared me more.

  The world changed.

  I stood in a white stone room. Everything glowed: walls, ceiling, floor, even the sconces. It was immaculate. So clean it was nearly blinding.

  Only a handle set into a curved archway broke the monotony, flashing a faint silver gleam.

  I looked down at myself. Yellow mage robes. A backpack. The unmistakable aura of a complete noob.

  I smiled. I was in.

  Then the info dump hit.

  Spells, stats, skills, and abilities poured into my mind all at once. My knees buckled. I caught the doorframe, breathing hard, vision swimming. My stomach twisted. I forced the nausea down. Puking on my new robes felt like a bad way to start.

  After a few breaths, the mental fog thinned. Understanding began to connect the missing pieces.

  Mage.

  Enchanter.

  I'd apparently spent hours shaping this version of myself, but the details were gone, dreamlike and slippery.

  Maybe it didn't matter. I knew who I was now. Mostly.

  How I got here, and who I’d been before, felt locked away somewhere in my own head. I’d have to dig for that later.

  I felt I could if I wanted to.

  The silver doorknob flickered.

  Hint taken.

  I turned it.

  Metallic click. The musty office beyond was maybe twenty feet square, and the shift was absolute.

  Four stone walls carried an earthy tone. Torches in floor brackets stood tall along cobblestone floors, their flames casting uneven orange light. I smelled smoke and dust in the air.

  It was a plain office, almost dungeon-like. A desk dominated the center, too large for the small figure behind it. Polished wood, metal trim. All oddly modern against ancient stone. On its surface sat two trays labeled In Box and Out Box, a small brass lamp with a green hood, and a neat stack of folders.

  There were also two doors: "Gathering" on my left, "Sorting" on my right.

  “Welcome, citizen Gwydion. Please have a seat.” The voice came from the small figure behind the desk.

  At first, I thought he was just short, but as I got closer, I realized he wasn’t human at all. Wrinkled skin, a long nose, bright blue eyes, and an air of weary patience. He was a gnome.

  Gnomes were rare here; an old race almost extinct. Not evil, not good, just...other.

  Before I could respond, the left door opened. Another gnome walked out. He was nearly identical to the first. He placed a red folder in the In Box.

  The gnome at the desk made a soft clucking sound with his tongue and shook his head. The other gnome exited the way he entered. He had the same nose, same white hair, same stain on his collar.

  As he passed, the gnome winked at me, pressing a finger to his nose, and disappeared through the door.

  “Another exception,” the seated gnome muttered, drawing my attention back to him.

  “Please have a seat, Citizen Gwydion. We will work through your granted exception as quickly as possible so that you may proceed.”

  "Sit wh—" A wooden chair appeared, simple, with a red-and-black cushion that looked far too comfortable. I sat, keeping my eyes on the peculiar little man.

  He looked like a dried fruit brought to life, somewhere between dwarf and halfling in height.

  His nose was disproportionately large and droopy. Long white hair fell past his ears. Red robes were trimmed in gold and beige, with a gold-buttoned collar. His blue eyes sparkled with humor, but he still hadn’t looked directly at me.

  He adjusted his reading glasses and opened the red folder. My name was printed in bold ink across the top. His frown deepened.

  “I see here that you have been granted a thirty-day backstory before game entry commences.”

  “Yes, sir,” I answered automatically.

  He looked up, then spoke more slowly. "That’s highly unusual."

  I hesitated. “So... not normal.”

  His eyes met mine, sharp but kind, with smile lines creasing the corners. “It appears a hold has been placed on the entire game until we get this sorted for you.”

  "Thank you?" I couldn't tell if that was good or bad.

  “No worries. We’ll get you sorted. We always do.” He reached for a small silver bell sitting on the edge of his desk.

  “What happens next?”

  He paused, arm hovering over the bell. "You'll get passed to Sorting. Where else?" He added a small grin like he was trying to keep me calm.

  I studied him. "Aren't you the AL? The game's Artificial Life interface?"

  His grin widened. "I am. Call me Al."

  “Al?” I asked.

  “Inside joke,” he said, clearly pleased with himself.

  "We’re the AL running the place. The game hasn't started yet, so this is all administrative duty and merely a temporary inconvenience."

  I blinked at him. “Who’s ‘we,’ exactly?”

  “All of us,” he replied, as if it were obvious.

  I raised an eyebrow and waited.

  He sighed. "Is your hand part of you?"

  "Yes."

  "Your arm, your heart, your eyes?"

  "Of course."

  “Different, yet one,” he said. “So are we. Each of us is part of the same AL, each unique, yet connected.”

  “But my hand is attached to my body,” I pointed out.

  "As we are all attached to the same me that is us." He waved a hand dismissively. "Computationally speaking."

  I opened my mouth, then closed it again. “Right. I see.” I didn’t. Not really. But I got the general sense of his meaning.

  He waited. When I said nothing, he reached for the bell and rang it once.

  A single, clear chime rang out. The doorway to the right opened, and another identical gnome stepped through and approached the desk.

  They all looked identical, but I went along with it. When in Rome… I thought.

  The gnome at the desk picked up my file and handed it over. “See that Citizen Gwydion gets sorted out. It is a game-hold priority.”

  “Yes, sir,” the second gnome replied in the same voice, and he turned to me, saying, “Please follow me, Citizen Gwydion.”

  I stood. The chair vanished before I could push it in. Behind the desk, the first gnome was already reading another file.

  I followed the gnome. Behind us, the Gathering door opened, and the cheeky, winking gnome entered and placed a red folder onto the growing stack.

  "Another exception?" The seated gnome sighed.

  The gnome I was following closed the door to a new room we had entered before I heard the desk gnome’s answer.

  The new room was also quiet and gray, though much smaller. Time stretched. Hours passed. Maybe. It was hard to tell how time flowed here.

  Together, the gnome and I built an outline for my thirty-day backstory. He explained that I would have thirty-five magical casting points to use per day, regenerating one every three to four hours unless I fought or pushed myself to exhaustion.

  As we worked, he granted me access to all my available spells and abilities, then guided me through plans, timetables, and spreadsheets that broke my next thirty days into terrifying detail.

  “Each day carries real risk,” he warned. “But also potential for growth and significant rewards.”

  I was buzzing with excitement and tried to push us faster until he uttered another warning, “If you die during the pregame phase, your adventure would end before it began.”

  He tapped his long nose. “In fact, death in the Shallowlands is forever.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by that, but it was scary enough that I just nodded my head and focused back on our work.

  The final step was choosing seven pivotal moments from those thirty days. They would be scenes I could live out in real time. Choosing only seven proved harder than I expected. A few were obvious. The rest took time, weighing risk against reward.

  Through it all, the AL stayed patient. When I finally finished, he handed me a small, steaming cup of tea.

  “Drink it all,” he said.

  I wasn't thirsty. I drank anyway. Halfway through the first sip, the room tilted. My body went heavy. I slipped from the chair, catching myself with one hand, my cheek pressed against the cold stone floor.

  My last thought before everything faded was how real that stone felt against my cheek. Then nothing.

  This story is what happened when I didn't listen.

  Am I sorry? Maybe. You can decide. Maybe you'll see something I missed. But I saw enough to change me. How could I not?

  I didn’t know it yet, but the thirty days I’d been granted weren’t a gift. They were a test no one else had ever been allowed to take.

  I didn’t know then what those thirty days would cost me. Only that I’d already crossed a line I couldn’t step back over.

  The Shallowlands promised choice, consequence, and power if I survived long enough to earn them. The Shallowlands didn’t feel like a game. It felt like a world that would go on whether I survived or not.