“You’re pretty fucked up… that’s what I reckon. Fucked up,” Pod mumbled from some distance behind them.

  Tiller snapped his head from Pod to Maeve and back to the pool. He touched his face with a trembling hand, dragging his fingers through the thick beard that was several shades too dark. He pawed at the jaw that was too square, the nose that was too broad.

  He stood up with a start, feeling his chest and stomach with frantic movements. “I’m not this lean. I’m not this fucking big! What in the fuck is happening?”

  Maeve cast a worried look back at Pod, then returned her attention to Tiller. “You’ve been through a lot, haven’t you? It’s only natural your head wouldn’t be your own. I think a little lie down would do you the world of good.”

  Tiller stayed standing, looking at her with disbelief.

  Maeve spoke in a gentle tone, as if he were a lost and frightened child. “Everything will be much better after a little lie down. Much better.”

  It was as she said this that he expanded his attention again. The vague ramblings of the narrator had been tuned out for a time. He had enough on his mind. Where was he? What had happened to his body? Were his family safe? If it wasn’t enough that he seemed to have been transported into a different body in a different world, with no explanation at all, he suddenly had to contend with the warped reality that his story was being narrated and that he could hear every word.

  He cast an eye to the sky again, continuing to display his strange and senseless intuition that narrators live in the sky. His face trembled. He quite looked as though he was on the verge of total mental collapse.

  “I am not…” he murmured, speaking low as if Maeve wouldn’t hear him.

  “Not what, love?” she said.

  Maybe it was a dream. Maybe that was the best and easiest explanation.

  He nodded, agreeing with the narrator that he probably imagined someone lived on a cloud and watched the world like a vaguely bored god. “Maybe it is a dream…”

  Maeve latched onto this, eager to convince the poor man to rest himself a minute. “Aye, maybe it is, love. Well, why don’t you lie down here on this grass, just for a minute, and maybe if you drift off everything will be all right when you wake up.”

  He nodded, smiling idiotically, still shaking. “Yes… yes, maybe it will. Ha. Of course it’s a dream. Dinosaurs aren’t real. Leprechauns aren’t real…”

  Pod barked, “Oy! That’s more of it is what that is!”

  Tiller rambled on, letting Maeve guide him to a lying position. “It’s like a typical isekai… that’s totally mad. I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming, that’s what’s happening. I’ll lie down here and go to sleep and when I wake up Lisa will be there and she’ll tell me I was tossing and turning and having nightmares.”

  Of course, when he woke up, nothing was better.

  He shot up with a start, no sense of how much time had passed. The blue leprechauns were nowhere to be seen, but sadly that did not mean his world had turned back to normal. He could see the endless white stretching away beyond this little island of earth. He could feel the wrongness of his body. He could hear the narrator blathering on, an endless stream of words that came with his every action.

  “Who… are you?” he said, seeming on the verge of tears.

  He added quickly, “I’m not on the verge of tears!”

  He was clearly on the verge of tears.

  Angrily, “Who are you?”

  Well… I’m the narrator.

  “Am I in a fucking story?”

  Everyone’s in a story, aren’t they?

  “Not everyone’s got a fucking narrator machine-gunning words into their head! A narrator nobody else can hear!”

  I guess some people do. Schizophrenics? Delusional people? Shit, I bet I could name a few…

  He screamed then, “WHERE THE HELL AM I?”

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  You’re in the Scape… listen, this isn’t going to work. It messes up the flow. My job is to tell the story, yours is to be the story, okay? We’ll never get anywhere if you’re going to be flapping gums at me all day. Flap your gums at your new leprechaun friends and get some answers out of them the organic way!

  At that moment he heard the scurrying of feet. Maeve arrived, looking alarmed and concerned, probably summoned by his girlish scream.

  “It wasn’t girlish.”

  Maeve watched him warily. “What wasn’t girlish?”

  And then he asked her where he was.

  No, in fact, then he just stared at her as though he was seeing a leprechaun for the first time. For the love of pacing, would you just ask her where you are and get on with it! Come on!

  “Where… where am I? Where is this?”

  Maeve said, “The Barren, love. Where were you before? Come from Medley, did you maybe?”

  Tiller looked around, at the vast unformed whiteness. He lifted a hand and gestured to it, “This… this place is the Barren?”

  “Yes, love.”

  He spread his arms wider, encompassing the world. “But where is this? Where am I?”

  She bobbed her head slowly, feigning an understanding and starting to regret showing this maniac kindness. “The… Barren, love…”

  Tiller slumped. He couldn’t know she was a bumpkin who had no concept of her world. Well, he couldn’t before, but listening to the narration he came to understand it.

  Maeve said, “It’s odd. Mighty strange for a Stonie to be out here. There’s nothing worth nothing for miles.”

  “A Stonie?”

  “Call ’em something else where you come from, do you, love?”

  He still stared at her with an expression of utter loss.

  She pointed to his bracket, “Ah, love, it’s not that hard, is it? You’re a Stone rank. Stonie? See?”

  “What… what’s the significance of that?”

  “Of being a Stonie? Ol’ Ripper must have bumped your head even harder than I thought!”

  Maeve seemed to consider how to continue. It seemed patronizing to explain ranks, but she had plans for this wanderer and it might calm him or ground him a little to go through the basics. She held her clay bracelet up for him to see. “Most folks are Muddy, yeah? Me, Pod, even ol’ Ripper over there was a Muddy. I’d call it normal, but a Stonie like you might call it the bottom of the stack.”

  He looked down at the shining stone on his wrist. “It’s like a level?”

  “Aye, love. It’s sort of like that.”

  “How high does it go?”

  “How high? I don’t… I don’t rightly know for sure… Let me see. Well, it goes Muddy, Clay is the proper word for it, then Stone, then Iron, then… How can you be after forgetting all this?”

  “Please, just… just humor me.”

  She shrugged. “Well, after that you’ve Bronze, then Silver and Gold. That makes sense, doesn’t it? I think there’s a little more but I don’t know for sure. Never matters much. Don’t see many Stonies, let alone Iron bands.”

  Tiller looked down at his band. Those glowing orbs held his attention. “And these?”

  “Your sigils? Well, you know how they work. They’re what let you do things?”

  “Like skills?”

  “Yes, love! Exactly! I knew you couldn’t have forgotten all of it!”

  When he asked another question that seemed inane her enthusiasm waned again. He said, “Where did I… how do you get skills?”

  “Well, you know how it goes, you must. You start with ’em. Or you buy ’em, or you win ’em. You’ve three, so you must surely have scored at least one of them. And your Earth sigil is Cinder, so you must have a lot of practice with that!”

  “They… they get stronger when you use them?” He considered the duller glow of his shovel and farming sigils.

  Maeve said, “Really starting to worry about you, love. Yes, they do. Look here, I’ve two. Cooking and stitching, both Ash. Just like your other two.”

  “And you can buy… you can buy skills?”

  She nodded with a pained and pitying expression. Maybe this one wouldn’t be what she’d hoped. “Aye, love. Or trade ’em, or find ’em, or take ’em from a kill. Ol’ Ripper left one of his behind when you stuck him. Pod was all for taking it, but he was your kill. Why don’t you go have a look?”

  Tiller rose uncertainly and walked towards the dead dinosaur. He did it with some small residual dread. The beast certainly seemed dead, but nature painted him primordial fear.

  As he moved away from Maeve, who continued to sit by the pool and watch him, he thought he could risk annoying the narrator who was really far too busy telling a story to be bothered with engaging with POV characters.

  “I’m… listen, I’m crazy, right? You said I was dreaming before but that was just fucking with me.”

  I wasn’t fucking with you. I wanted you to get back to moving the story along. We’re in Chapter 3 and you still haven’t met the Shopkeeper yet.

  “I’ve been thinking… this is mad, obviously, but if there’s even a ghost of a chance that this is all real then I need to get into it. I need to get back to Lisa and the kids. Or if they’re here too I need to find them. I need to figure things out. And fast.”

  Good, fast, like the sound of that. A little less starry-eyed terror and a little more affirmative action. You’re speaking my language now, bucko!

  He stopped by the dead dinosaur and saw a single marble hovering above the ground.

  “Did he have more of these? Maeve has two, I’ve got three. She said kills usually leave one…”

  Yes, just to keep you fucking moving along, yes. A kill leaves one random sigil behind. If you had a full band of five and somebody put you out of my misery so I could find a more compelling and action-oriented protagonist, you’d still just drop one at random.

  “What happened to the rest of them?”

  Poof.

  “Oh.”

  He reached out tentatively and picked up the sigil. He touched it gingerly at first. It had the same dull glow, Ash, as his lower two, and it looked like it would be hot. It was cool to the touch. Not demonstrating an act of awe-inducing mental agility, he did the obvious and placed the marble against one of the two vacant recesses in his band and it popped in like a magnet.

  He only had a moment to inspect the symbol on the sigil. A coiled leg nestled against an upward arrow. Before he could consider that this was clearly some kind of leaping skill, something else caught his eye.

  A wagon rolled across the Barren towards their little island.

  Pod’s voice came from nearby, where he’d been sitting and coveting Ripper’s sigil. “That’s the Shopkeeper.”

  The awe and dread in the old man’s voice said this was something far greater than a peddler of wares.