“Listen,” Gyl shouted through the wind, “can we start over?”

  Reeve, who had been staring down at the snow through which she was wading so as to avoid the blinding brightness of the overcast but omni-reflective white world around them, stopped and turned to Gyl. Ahead of her, Dawn turned to look back at the two.

  “You want to start over?” Reeve yelled back.

  “Yes.”

  “Now? We need to do this now?”

  “Yes.”

  Reeve frowned but shuffled through the snow to Gyl. Dawn watched, her eyebrows knit.

  “Once we do this,” Gyl said, “we’re committed, OK? No more exceptions.”

  “For you either,” Reeve said.

  “Hundred percent,” Gyl said.

  Reeve nodded.

  Gyl extended her bare, pale, shivering hand to Reeve. Reeve took it.

  “Hi, I’m Gyl. Sounds like G-U-I-L-E, and, don’t get me wrong, I’m sly, but it’s G-Y-L.” Gyl straightened to stand tall in the face of the biting wind. Her black robe whipped about her, and her red braid flailed behind her like a writhing snake. “My pronouns are they, them, theirs. I’m a caster from Milanthross, as you may have guessed from the green skin, but recently I’ve been campaigning in South Zahhar.” She squeezed Reeve’s hand.

  “Reavyr. R-E-A-V-Y-R. Daughter of Reavyr Two, stylized as R-E-A-V-Y-R open-parenthesis, Roman numeral two, close-parenthesis, he who is also called Wurmslayer by the misguided. If it gets confusing when he’s around, you can shorten my name and just call me Reeve. Technically, I don’t know what pronouns are, since I’m a barely literate, half-orc-half-human Ranger who’s spent most of my life in the woods, but you can go with she, her, hers.” Reeve squeezed Gyl’s hand.

  Gyl smiled.

  “It is entirely unclear to me what just happened,” Dawn shouted through the wind, “but if you are sufficiently pleased with the completion of your seemingly unnecessary naming ritual, perhaps I can add a celebratory flourish, and then we will continue, yes?” She gestured impatiently in the direction they had been heading.

  Gyl and Reavyr exchanged a glance and then both nodded.

  “Very well,” Dawn said. She fashioned a short meliá and then raised her palms to face Gyl and Reavyr before dropping both hands to her sides.

  Gyl and Reavyr looked at each other, uncertain what had just happened. They both did a double-take. They each now wore a set of cream-colored leather armor under a fur-lined, ice-blue cloak.

  In unison, they turned to Dawn with matching expressions of disbelief.

  “To your liking, I assume,” Dawn said. “Very well, let us carry on.”

  “You could have just conjured us these bad-bass warm cloaks the whole time?” Gyl said.

  “But,” Reavyr said, “you let us freaking wade through snow up to our c—“

  Dawn had raised a gloved palm, and Reavyr bit her tongue.

  “If both of you have spent your lives in our world surrounded by automatons with no inner life,” Dawn shouted to be heard, “I cannot blame you for this, and you well might not know you are doing it, but you and your kind,” she looked pointedly at Reavyr then at Gyl, “often treat the people of these lands—myself, Dusk, and our companions included—as furniture. You only pay us mind or ask us for help when it seems it would be convenient to you and otherwise expect us to stay out of your way.”

  Reavyr frowned. “I don’t think that’s fair.”

  “You now give us more respect than when you first rescued us from the kobolds, it is true, but do you not still feel and act as though you are the centerpiece of this world?”

  Reavyr’s frown deepened. “Well…”

  “Don’t say it,” Gyl said, her voice raised only high enough for Reavyr to hear over the wind.

  “…I kind of am. This is my story-mode world.”

  “You lasted thirty seconds!” Gyl shouted.

  Dawn smiled dryly. “At least you are honest, Reeve, whatever your other faults may be.” She waved them forward. “Come, there is an abandoned outpost ahead where I have weathered storms worse than this.”

  Fighting the wind and the rolling, uneven terrain hidden beneath the thick snowy blanket, it took them another hour to reach the outpost, which Reavyr and Gyl could not see until Dawn had guided them within feet of the partially collapsed entrance. Neither Reavyr nor Gyl could make out much more of the structure than the crumbling stone arch through which Dawn led them. The hall within was nearly completely blocked by snow for the first half-dozen yards, and they had to use both hands and feet to climb through and over the snow and what felt like piles of debris beneath.

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  Only after a dozen yards of awkward half-climb, half-crawl were they able to slide down a last small drift to find a relatively clear stone floor. The hall continued with little further obstruction, though loose stones fallen from the ceiling were scattered intermittently down its length.

  Gyl pulled back her hood and dusted snow from her cloak. “Uh. How are we seeing in here?”

  Reavyr looked down the hall and then back in the direction they’d come, both of which were amply illuminated. But by what, she couldn’t tell.

  “Already you have forgotten that I am a melióδin?” Dawn said, eyebrows half raised.

  “No,” Gyl said. “Of course not. I’ve just never seen this kind of magic before in this ga—“

  The flat of Reavyr’s hand hit the back of Gyl’s head in a glancing blow that, while not meant to hurt, was sufficiently sharp to stop Gyl’s statement and leave the caster staring straight ahead, lips puckered, for several seconds.

  “—world.” Gyl finished. She looked at Reavyr and nodded acceptance of the rebuke.

  Reavyr, for her part, said nothing as she mentally ran back through all the games she knew—both VR and old-school flat-screen games, including some of the earliest 2D worlds she’d played in—in which certain gear or spells would produce the equivalent of daylight-levels of illumination in a player’s immediate surroundings. But, Gyl was right, Reavyr had never seen that mechanic in this game. In this world, even illumination spells involved a point source from which the light originated, usually one that the caster could carry, assign to a piece of gear, or even affix to a position in space.

  “If we are to travel together,” Dawn said, weariness creeping into her voice, “you best rethink your expectations, or it will become tiresome for both of us every time you encounter a new meliá.” With a softer tone, she said, “But, perhaps this illumination meliá is the first I will try teaching you.”

  Dawn turned her back and continued deeper into the outpost, as Gyl and Reavyr looked at each other.

  Gyl’s eyes were wide and her hands raised close to her chest in fists that shook almost imperceptibly.

  “Yes,” Reavyr said, “she said she’s going to try to teach you a meliá.”

  “O. M. G.” Gyl mouthed.

  Reavyr rolled her eyes. “Come on, melióδin wannabe,” she put her calloused hand on the small of Gyl’s back and guided her to follow Dawn, “we don’t even know if you’ll be able to cast that kind of magic.”

  They caught up with Dawn as she turned left into a new hallway, the first they’d encountered since entering. They followed her down an ensuing series of hallways, through several more intersections, and Reavyr began to wonder what the outpost’s backstory was. Then she wondered if she should still be thinking in terms of backstory. If Viv had rebuilt this world from scratch at the moment she also inhabited it with AIs that were sapient—at least some of them—then it wasn’t their backstory, it was their history. And, she realized, that history might have changed who knew how much from that of the vanilla story mode.

  A low sound rumbled through the otherwise silent outpost, and the three paused.

  “Sounded like a big gong,” Gyl whispered. “Lotta gongs up in here?”

  Dawn shook her head and then resumed walking, her pace increasing. She turned right into a narrower hallway, and Gyl and then Reavyr followed. Turning another corner, Dawn stopped suddenly, and Gyl nearly ran into her.

  “Gods,” Dawn said quietly.

  “What?” Gyl whispered.

  Reavyr took a step and then leaned forward to peer around the corner past Dawn. A large black door stood at the end of the hallway. It appeared to Reavyr to be made of iron. It looked old but extremely strong. And it was bowed toward them from the other side.

  “That’d take some serious force to do,” Gyl said quietly.

  “You weren’t expecting company?” Reavyr whispered to Dawn.

  Dawn shook her head. “I have never known anyone to visit this please save me. Not since I cleared it off its original inhabitants.”

  “Unsettling statement,” Gyl said.

  “And I had warded the room. None should have been able to enter.”

  “They apparently didn’t have trouble entering,” Reavyr said. “Though they may have had some trouble getting out.”

  The door shuddered and bowed further into the hall, the deep sound they’d heard a moment earlier echoing past them and back the way they’d come.

  “Verb tense,” Gyl said. “They may be having some trouble getting out.”

  From where Gyl and Reavyr stood, they saw Dawn’s head dip forward for a few seconds.

  “Not they,” she said finally. There is but one entity within that room.”

  “You know this how?” Reavyr said.

  Dawn turned to look over her shoulder at Reavyr.

  “Meliá,” Gyl said.

  Dawn nodded.

  “I cannot wait to start learning!” Gyl whispered.

  Another impact to the door caused them to turn back as dust and fragments of mortar fell from the ceiling of the passage.

  “We really need to go in there?” Gyl said.

  Dawn nodded.

  Reavyr opened her UI. “Wait. I was going to check to see where our spawn currently is, but it’s in that room.” She pointed toward the bowed door, as if there could be any confusion about the room of which she spoke. “It just updated recently.”

  Dawn nodded again. “That would make sense. I have made some modifications to this building and that room in particular.”

  The door shuddered and one of the hinges separated from the wall.

  “I don’t think I want my spawn point to be in that room,” Reavyr said.

  “At least you can respawn,” Dawn said, staring at the door. “But much of my research is in that room. We must retake it, now, before anything is lost.”

  “Maybe first—“, Reavyr said, but Dawn started walking purposefully toward the door.

  “Oh,” Reavyr said, “you really meant ‘now’ now.”

  Gyl started after Dawn, but Reavyr stepped forward past the corner to lay a hand on Gyl’s black sleeve. “Hold up, she knows this place better than we do. And you’re not going to help anyone in melee range. I’ll back her up.”

  Gyl frowned at Reavyr but did not pull away, so Reavyr stepped past the caster and followed Dawn.

  Dawn reached the door, ran both hands over its curved surface in a series of sigil-like patterns, took a quiet breath, looked over her shoulder to give Gyl and Reavyr a quick nod, and then pulled on the door’s thick handle. As the door began to swing toward them, the remaining hinges gave way and Dawn scrambled backward a few steps. The door fell safely, if very loudly, onto the stone floor of the passage, where it rocked on its recently acquired curvature.

  The three companions stood frozen, peering at the dark doorway.

  A roar erupted from the room, and a huge leather-booted foot—its sole almost half Reavyr’s height—drove itself through the empty doorway and straight into Dawn’s chest.