We saw things were were not supposed to see. I can't say it happened fast, but it did happy crazily. The view lost its way, his head trying to swing down but reacting to the shockwave of impact as my great big barbarian staggered backward. To his credit, my mountain of a man did not fall over.

  Lightning tendrils of red lashed inwards across the viewport glass, blooming sunspots and surging physical disruption echoing purple and yellow in the senseless, patternless coloration of pain. The floor rumbled beneath the auditorium. The glass, if it was indeed glass, buzzed in a sound that was painful to experience, rattling my teeth along with it. This was the exact reason I never turned my music up in the car.

  Food began rolling off the table, which itself became mobile from the vibrations, traveling in the way that a supposedly silent cell phone will move across your nightstand when you get a call. Fine salted roe splatted. Cabbage unspooled in a deeply graphic way.

  "What is it?" came a strained woman's voice from behind me. We both turned. Connie leaned on one of the hallway entrances, still drawing her right arm into her core and leaning over it. With her other hand, she dragged something. She wore two solid plate greaves that reached from her telephone pole ankles to the bare knees just visible beneath her ragged canvas and fabric robes.

  "Emergency," said Strength, turning toward a big arched entrance on the ground floor, wider to accommodate a grand entrance by--what, two people at maximum? "Stay there." She didn't. She limped down the stadium steps between seating, her burden spilling from step to step noisily, a jangling tangle of big plates of the same dark metal of her greaves. There was only a little blood staining the stomach. How you get blood stains to disappear was a trick I couldn't wrap my brain around. This didn’t seem like the kind of place that had a washing machine, but who was I to say?

  "Are you okay?" I asked.

  She pursed her lips, but did not stop. "Aren't you sweet? I'll be fine once the big guy is."

  I had to assume she meant Arthrem. "Can I help you with that?"

  "No," she said, a little too fast, almost turning back to me, almost yelling. "I'm good, hon." She limped and dragged into the big overflow exit that Strength had gone through.

  "I thought he said to stay here?"

  She did turn back before she disappeared into the hallway beyond. She gave me a look that said that she knew what was good for him, even if he didn't. Yes, there is a look for that. I concede that it's highly specific.

  Risking another look at the screen, I saw Arthrem's hands, making his usual claw-shape, drawing away from the wound and into the view again. Blood pooled in the palm, slathered across three of five fingers, and hovered in chaotic orbs in the air, not yet ready to fall.

  I swore, out loud, but I can't remember which profanity I chose at that exact moment. I turned toward the hallway.

  The lights in the great big, wide tunnel evoked those field-side exits football players might spill out of, the first couple bursting through a team banner and hyping the crowd. I can't say; I've never been on a football team, but the movies or clips from movies I've seen came to mind as I plunged through the wide arch and into that stoney exit. There were more light orbs here, but desynchronized from one another, pulsating the emergency red illumination at different frequencies, which made the tunnel seem to writhe. I heard the scraping of armor against stone and followed the noise to a short shunt of a hall opening to midday light.

  I'll do my best to describe what I saw.

  We were much higher than I thought. Strength gripped a half-wall, a barrier of imperfect but tight dressed stone. Constitution stared out over the landscape, which, yes, there was a landscape.

  This must be Arthrem, I thought. I suppose that I had thought I was going down a checklist, doing paperwork, filling in the blanks when I had constructed my barbarian. Two arms, two legs, two eyes--well, one and a half, I suppose. Up to his ears in muscles.

  I did not know then what had sprung from my flippant act of creation. Mountains towered on the far side of an expanse of tumultuous waters, roiling around hideous anomalies of rock, jagged and jutting. At their bases planks and ropes and shredded sails rose and fell, the gore of great ships ground to bits by their overconfidence. Lightning flashed, showing a whole city sprawling up the side of the distant mountain, lined with flickering pyres and beacon flames, rows of streets and buildings zig-zagging up the seaward face and crowned with a jagged, untamed summit.

  But that was not what demanded my eye. A dire red glow seeped from the largest ship I have ever seen, its irreconcilable bulk broken against one of the jagged rocks protruding from the ocean. There were fires, plumes of smoke, and a cloud of circling vultures and monstrous gulls.

  "The Barbaric." It was Constitution who had spoken. But she did not look at the colossal ship for long. She looked to the sky above it.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  The stars blazed. There was no other word for it. Not flashed, not strobed--they just bloomed, surging in intensity and portence. Five... six... One by one they lit, cycling in the way that stars do through every color. To call it a twinkle would be to downplay that sudden intolerable omen. They shone into my soul, declaring something really bad.

  "Seven," said Constitution. She was buckling on her armor, each plate of which looked like a shield in and of itself. Dark gouges marred her breastplate, deep enough to run a finger through. She jerked a leather strip which squeezed the whole thing tight against her body.

  "I will get clubs," said Strength.

  He spun and walked back into the half-tunnel. I would have liked to see more of the tower.

  "So, what, we're the rescue team? You don't have emergency services here?"

  Constitution shrugged on her rear plate armor, almost completing her metamorphosis into an early WWI-era tank with legs. She no longer had to drag her burden behind her, a dense, dark bulb of a helmet now pinned between her elbow and the rib-like striations at her side. She left the sparse netting there on the floor. "I'll get that later," she assured me, as though it mattered in the slightest.

  "Can you answer a question?"

  "Walk with me, hon," she said. Every step echoed harshly, a deep rhythm strung together by creaking leather and hard plates shifting over one another.

  I had to scamper to keep up, two hurried strides for each one of hers. "How does this make any sense?"

  She looked down at me, her nearly bald scalp reflecting the red emergency lighting, deep crimson shadows beneath sculpted cheekbones.

  "Something happens out there," she said, "and something happens in here." She gestured with the helmet, a beveled beetle-headed bulb. "If it's bad there, it's bad here. I couldn't stand by if I tried." I could hear her shrug, a strident shriek of unoiled iron. "It's kind of my thing. His wellbeing."

  "Strength's?"

  She shook her head and waved at sort of everything. "Him. Our great big boy."

  "All these lands are him?" I asked, once again without control over my mouth's doings. She didn't nod yes, but she didn't say no either. "So, what, it's like an Osmosis Jones thing? Are the oceans blood? Is this tower his spinal column?"

  It sounded feasible to my newly forming sense of local logic, but it was a shot in the dark. The air stirred around me, some electromagnetic aura I could not decipher. The same sensation of a magnet that's right on the cusp of pulling in another piece of metal flat against it. A micrometer closer, and...

  "Well, you're Wisdom," she said. "What do you think?"

  "I think I'm in too deep," I said. It was more literal than she knew. I shouldn't have been inside Arthrem, I should have been him. What the hell had brought me here? Had Teo stumbled onto a certain combination of words sent me too far into the game?

  "It's going to get deeper," said Connie, "if we don’t get to into ship before it sinks. Bundle up, okay?"

  With what?

  We came to a chamber with a familiar feeling. There were six compartments from which protruded gear and weapons, in the same way that the prison in the outer world had contained, right next to the exit, right before the bolt.

  I flinched. There was no hallway here, but rather the great big oval mirror frame standing hingeless on an ornate dais. Again, it was empty of an actual glass.

  Strength drew the huge angular cudgel and the thorny wood mace from the compartment and stepped onto the dais. Constitution retrieved a murky glass vial of some liquid, and squirreled it away somewhere in an one of the gaps in her armor. She pulled the dark beetle-helmet over her head, a T-shaped slit showing her bright eyes and a narrow rectangle of her lips, pursed with concern.

  "What weapon do you take?" I asked. Constitution.

  She folded dark, plated fingers into an iron clump, and struck her other armored palm with her fist twice. The effect was closer to a battleship's deck guns than the classic bully's threat from old movies.

  "Ah." She rolled her shoulders, the great pauldrons rising and rotating, limbering up for what was to come. Another compartment overflowed with bunched papers, thick-pressed parchments in rolls, uneven stacks, and crumpled to fit. Styluses and wooden pens stuck out, balanced on the edge and ready to fall. Another contained a straight dagger with no quillons. Its blade was bare, and it actually protruded from the chipped grouting in the wall rather than lying flat, as though thrown. Yet another had an open compact mirror, clamshell style, which movies have led me to believe all women own, but which I've never seen in the wild. A sixth compartment was totally empty.

  "I'd say gear up, but..." Constitution shrugged.

  "You know, I have just come to the realization," I said, noticing that they both turned quickly to give me their attention, "that I'm going to sit this one out."

  Strength reverse-snorted, and ceased noticing me altogether. The empty mirror became bright with starlight once more, its radiance filling the room. I wondered, perhaps idly, how much energy it took to stitch together two separate locations. That seemed like the kind of thing Teo would have an answer for, a mad scientist rabbit hole that he would expend notebooks on, just to have a proper answer in case anyone asked.

  Strength approached the mirror, and was enveloped in light so strong that he was no longer there. A heavy, gleaming hand weighed down my shoulder, cold against the skin left open by my saffron robe.

  "Sweetie," boomed Constitution. "Everybody gets the jitters the first time."

  "Really? Even Strength?"

  The beetle-helm tilted side to side, reconsidering. "No. Not Strength."

  "But... you did?"

  "Me? Not really. I'm just saying, it's perfectly normal to be afraid to walk through the big glowing light, but you get used to it."

  "Okay, but if neither of y-" The hand propelled me forward, and light surrounded me. It embraced me, like what I had always imagined death would do. There was a stomach-turning, bowel-voiding moment of the absence of gravity and anchoring direction. For the space of three seconds, I was certain i was lost in whatever the empty mirror actually was. Then the light began to fade.