It was Berin’s turn to watch Linosa’s obelisk, and he was beginning to wonder if the stranger he’d attempted to heal would ever emerge. He’d heard of very few challenge attempts that took longer than the customary three days to complete, and he knew from his own zeroth floor challenge that that was the time it took for the strange healing well to empty.

Of course, he'd never compared his experiences to others. Every time he'd tried, he'd found that the memories of his challenge were somehow decoupled entirely from his ability to communicate. He’d tried discreet hand signals, winks, even setting himself for unintentional slips – all had failed.

As far as he knew, even mind mages failed to break the memory block. It pained him, as he'd watched countless prospective reborn embark on the challenge, clad in expensive but useless gear and beset with foolish dreams of power. It was like torture, where he could offer nothing to help them. The ones that hurt him the most were the ones who had reappeared outside the obelisk as corpses, or mindless husks.

The theory was that the memory restriction was imposed on one’s soul immediately following its creation and as such was embedded irrevocably into it in a way which couldn't be replicated or reversed afterwards. The irony was that the experience of having his body remade by the gods was something he’d never forget, and nor was that damn trial of wisdom. Berin shuddered. The things he’d seen in there had left scars which had pushed him into the healer class – that and the inspiration of the golden well. He knew other reborn might recognise its healing energy in his skills, but he’d never even seen so much as a flicker of recognition externally.

He stood by the obelisk thinking… because it was all he had to do, really. He was a bit bored. It was his third rotation watching the floating stone, himself and the other fifteen guilders currently in Linosa rotating three-hour shifts. This close to the autumn solstice the days were much longer than the nights, which meant that only two unlucky guilders would have to complete their watch in darkness daily.

They’d all only agreed to it because they thought it would be one night at most, and the roster was random. Plus, the guildmistress was scary, even before you even considered her penchant for electrocuting things she disagreed with.

Well, it was almost the end of Berin’s shift. The three-day mark had passed an hour or two ago, and the market stalls were just beginning to open. In a bright point in his morning, the farmer Trevia had brought him a delicious breakfast free of charge earlier. It had seemed she was grateful that he’d obliged to her request to heal the youth when he’d first fallen from the sky days ago. He’d smiled and thanked her for the meal, insisting that he would have done it anyway.

He probably would have, too. Being this close to the obelisk meant his mana only took a couple of hours to recharge from empty, and was enjoying the luxury of it all, even performing minor healings for those who offered a small fee. Not all his food came free, after all, and he’d left most of his gold back at the clinic.

Berin glanced down at the wooden bowl next to him, Trevia’s delicious breakfast long gone now. Watch duty wasn’t that bad, he supposed, turning to gaze up at the clear, blue sky. He was so lost in the lovely weather that if not for a brief flash of the glyphs on the obelisk, he’d have actually missed the light thump made by the body hitting the ground behind him.

Edrick almost spilt his jar of ink when he heard the bell ring from the town square. Finally! He’d been waiting for days. He jumped from his desk, wrapped a meaty hand around the haft of his [Blackened-Bone Battle Axe] and yanked it along with him. He briefly considered leaping through his large window and out into the square, but for the second time this week, reconsidered. The town hall might be an obelisk-summoned structure, but the glass window would take an inconvenient amount of mana to regenerate.

So like the responsible mayor he was, Edrick took the stairs, his comically large frame filling the staircase and forcing an unlucky clerk to jump out of his way.

“Sorry, Jefrin!”

Edrick burst through the open doors of the building, noting that Eleanor had somehow managing to exit her guildhouse at the exact same time. He glanced at his window, wondering if the repair cost would have been worth outpacing the annoying guildmistress. Probably not, but it would have been funny.

Eleanor was followed by a flock of guilders, almost all of those present in Linosa. No doubt being forced to rotate watch had piqued their curiosity, and even those who’d arrived in town in the days after the initial event had become intrigued. It wasn’t often that the gods pulled nonsense like this, and with good reason. A new tale of their machinations might pop up every couple of years, and the only consistent theme between stories being entertainment value. The very worst tales ended in inversions and tragedy, while the few best ended with treasure.

Edrick suspected that this one would end with a headache regardless of any other outcomes.

“Alive?” he shouted at Berin, who appeared to have been the one to ring the small but loud hand-held bell.

“Yep!” came the reply. “And look at this – his clothes are different!”

That was weird. Ordinarily, participants would reappear wearing the clothes and supplies they’d entered the challenge with, all in the exact same state they’d entered in. Even the dead ones. This stranger was wearing a simple white robe.

“Shit. Something’s up.” Edrick muttered under his breath. His gaze darted around as he looked for the local divination expert, a guilder named Eliza.

“Eliza! Scan. Now.”

The slightly pudgy woman in her middle years emerged from the crowd. “Are you sure?” She tentatively glanced at her guildmistress for confirmation, and found Eleanor glaring right back, nodding furiously. “The robe or the man?”

Edrick paused. Everyone gathered knew that the robe was an odd occurrence, and there were tales of challengers emerging from the zeroth floor with rare, even epic, treasures that usually wouldn’t appear until far deeper in the depths. He made his decision, reasoning that there was a chance that the man would detect Eliza’s low-skill mental probes if she tried them. He should be level zero, but it paid to be careful.

“The robe,” he muttered to the diviner.

So as the stranger began to sit up, the (low level) diviner held her hand out and imbued her quietly muttered words with power as she invoked a skill: [Lesser Identification], focused on the man’s robe. Her fifth-floor skill, and the source of most of her income during delves. The woman was otherwise shy, useless in combat, and (reasonably) suspected of using her scrying skill to perve on select men in her locality. Edrick didn’t like her at all, but the local reborn were Eleanor’s jurisdiction as much as they were his, and the guildmistress tolerated the woman.

“Not enchanted at all,” Eliza muttered, just as the strange man began to climb to his feet. “Should I check his scores?”

This time, she didn’t even say it softly enough for the white-robed stranger not to hear it. Edrick cast an disbelieving glance at Eleanor, who shrugged, eschewing responsibility. So Edrick simply turned back and glared levelly at Eliza, his features as stormy as he could make them.

“All right, all right. I know it’s rude. I just wanted to be sure!” She scampered back into the ranks of reborn guilders ringing the obelisk, as if attempting to hide behind them. Her usual strategy on the delves was being applied above-ground, it seemed.

Frankly, Edrick wasn’t above a little rudeness, especially when the circumstances merited it. That wasn’t what had stopped him. No, what had stopped him was that the moment that Eliza had activated her skill on his robe, the stranger’s gaze had snapped directly to her.

Alex stood up slowly, rubbing his eyes and taking in his surroundings.

And they didn’t even have the decency to teleport me out of there right-side-up!

He didn’t know it, but he’d arrived back in Linosa Town in the exact same position he’d left it… only without anyone holding him up this time. The combined disorientation of the teleportation, the sudden daylight, and the loud bell noises had simply caused him to flop all the way over.

But so welcome was the freshness of the air and the blueness of the clear sky that he’d laid there on the ground for a while, simply taking it all in.

I hadn’t realised how much I missed fresh air.

He almost felt like he was lying in the park back home, perhaps on a date or picnic. But no, there were a few key differences. First, the familiar glyphs and interfaces still floated in his mind. Second, there were two suns in the sky. He vaguely remembered something that the nine – or was it one – strange beings had said to him right before the trial began. There are two suns, you idiot. Finally, some cretin was standing above him ringing a big, brass bell.

Hmmmmm.

His appearance and the bellringing seemed to have created some commotion, and a crowd was forming around him. While it turned out that he couldn’t see with his eyes closed, Alex noticed auras of light pulsing faintly haloing some of the people running toward him. The bellringer had one of gold, reminding him a little of the pool in the atrium.

Is this true sight?

Alex decided to just keep lying there taking it in, especially that fresh, cold morning air.

Ugh. Come on dude, I just got here. Calm it down a little.

Really, he was just happy to see people. What’s more, the auras around him were laughably weak compared to those he’d just witnessed in the void. In most cases, they barely extended past a person’s skin. The majority of people in the crowd didn’t even have one. The auras didn’t blind him or obscure his vision at all, which he has grateful for. In fact, they seemed distinctly incorporeal.

There were a couple exceptions – a tall woman with platinum hair and a thin nose, wearing a royal blue set of robes inlaid with silver, seemed to radiate the occasional arc of phantom electricity over an aura that extended a few centimetres around her. A thin man stood near the back of the crowd with a misty-grey aura that floated around him in wisps, like fog. Another held a bow that had a purple glow to it. But most prominently and now right above him in the centre of the crowd, a massive man radiated a vigorous green glow filled with red specks that shifted through it like embers.

He'd just begun to sit up when he noticed a small, white-grey-teal thread appear between his robe and the outstretched hand of an unremarkable-looking woman with a matching aura, positioned to the left of the big man. In fact, the line seemed to extend from her aura itself. It pulsed once, then withdrew from his robe.

What on earth? Alex stared at the woman. The big man seemed angry at her now, and the lightning-woman seemed amused. Well, that’s good, he seems defensive of me.

As Alex levered himself to his feet, he turned his attention to the chatter around him. Initially, he’d mistaken the multitude of conversations for his native English, but now that he focused his attention on individual words, he realised he’d been mistaken. This was a strange, flowing language that sounded incredibly familiar in a way he couldn’t pinpoint.

Frowning, he listened as hard as he could, running the words through his mind. He was still amazed at how clear the sounds were in his head, as if his memory and imagination had gone from the equivalent of 720p video to a 4K resolution. The big man with the green-red aura had just said something to him, but Alex had no clue what it had meant.

“Sorry – I don’t speak your language.” Alex mimed toward his ears and mouth as he replied in English, then made a confused face and shrugged. He hoped that got the point across.

“What -------, possibly ------ ---------- reborn ------ understand?” Came the reply.

Huh? I swear some of the made sense. It reminds me of… those glyphs.

Alex repeated his confused gesture, emphasising his ears with the hope that the big man would repeat himself. The giant was wearing an enormous battle-axe across his back, and the weapon seemed to glow with its own, fiery red aura. Alex definitely did not want to see what would happen if the axe came out.

Diplomacy time! Just have to learn this foreign language first. Easy.

“Can you -------- me? What kind ------ doesn’t speak common? -------------- deaf?” It was getting clearer! Alex focused on the sounds, which felt like a spoken form of the glyphic language from the challenge, the very same tongue used by the cosmically powerful entities running it. This casual expression of it lacked their power, though. As with the glyphs, he felt that the words were imbuing concepts directly into his mind, bypassing the usual mental processes of spoken language.

“Test,” Alex muttered, trying his best to express his own words in the same manner. “Test, test, test. Testing.”

On the last word, something seemed to register on the big man’s face. “Test?” The word was repeated back at him. “Stranger, do you know how to speak common or not?”

I probably should have thought of something cooler to open with.

“Do you understand me?” The man repeated. As Alex tried to wrap his head around the strange, intuitive language, the big man turned to the stern woman with the lightning aura. “Shit Eleanor, I think we’ve got ourselves a broken one. Godsdamned challenge. I don’t know why the gods bother rebuilding them when their brains have stopped working.”

Alex started. “Wait! No, no, I understand you! My brain works fine. Better than ever. I… ummmm… I was disoriented. I still am disoriented. Uhhhhhh… where am I?” He became increasingly less sure of himself with every word.

I have no fucking clue what’s going on right now. Is this a medieval town? What’s up with that? We’re really leaning in on the RPG theme here, aren’t we?

“Oh, good. You are sane after all – I worrying we’d never get any answers. Congratulations on passing your challenge, I suppose.” Several of those in the crowd nodded at those words, even begrudgingly. “Now” – the big man made a light gesture toward the handle of his axe – “My name is Edrick, and I’m the mayor of this town. You’re going to accompany me to my office, and then we’re going to have a bit of a talk.”

The mayor’s office, as it turned out, was just across the square. The lightning-woman that Edrick had called Eleanor hurried after them, having snapped some orders at the crowds around the square.

“Shoo, shoo. I’ll brief you all later. Berin, you join us. Everyone else, scram!” As if to emphasise the point, she muttered something under her breath and a small bolt of lightning shot into the sky above her, the courtyard flashing blue.

The crowd dispersed pretty rapidly after that, including the many aura-less people who had been clamouring a safe distance away from the central action. They reminded Alex of himself before he’d been reborn. Slightly weaker looking, marginally less attractive. And most importantly, they appeared to lack what the beings in the challenge had called a soul.

Is that even the right word? Or just the closest English translation. Soulless does seem a little harsh.

As they continued across the square, Alex noted that some sort of market had been set up; tens of colourful stalls stacked with produce, bottles, and weapons lined the outer perimeter of the courtyard.

What’s with all the weapons? Who needs that many weapons?

Why is that stone pillar thing floating like that?

Can everyone see auras, or is that my true sight?

Alex had a lot of questions.

If it was true sight, this reward might actually be a bit more useful than he'd anticipated. A couple of the reborn (that seemed to be what those with auras were called) tried to follow them into the town hall despite Eleanor’s ire, but Edrick stood blocking the doorway. Once they were all inside, the mayor slammed two tall, wooden doors behind them and barred them. This left just Alex, Edrick, Eleanor, and the man named Berin, whose aura was a soft gold.

The normal intuition from that would be that the man was a healer, just like the pool which had contained similar energies. But the logic simply didn’t connect in Alex’s mind. His memories were there, they just weren’t usable. The cognitive dissonance was tripping him out.

After directing everyone to ascend a short stairwell, Edrick shouted down the corridor for another person, this one named Jenassa, to join them. He strode through one final door and Alex followed him into an office with a lovely view of the courtyard below the town hall. He suspected that he ought to feel anxious at this point, but spending three or four days without human contact had been getting to him. Even though his environment was unfamiliar and weirdly medieval, at least he had people he could talk to. Alex had always considered himself fairly introverted, but at the moment he was revising that assessment.

Edrick rotated the large chair front of his desk so that it faced away from the window and into the room instead. He unequipped his axe and leant it on one of the chair’s arms, then plonked himself down. As he did, a spectacled woman without an aura knocked on the door cursorily before entering.

“You asked for me?”

“Ah, yes. I thought it would be prudent to have you here for this conversation.”

“Edrick, you didn’t even get chairs for the guests. You know the building has a meeting hall, right?”

The big man shrugged. “I like the view up here.”

Eleanor rolled her eyes, while Jenassa just sighed, looking mildly irritated. Berin seemed intent on not reacting at all. Alex couldn’t help but grin a little, although a thought did cross his mind – this mayor guy is a bit of a dick.

The only seat he’d had recently had been made of dirt, and he found himself missing it. That pile had been strangely comfy.

“Alright,” proceeded the mayor, gesturing at Alex. “You. Out with it.”

“Huh?”

“Well? What are you? Where's the spatial mage? What are you doing in my town?”

There was a long pause as something in Alex’s mind ticked over.

“Ummmmm… I’d been hoping you could answer that one.”

The mayor rested his elbows on his knees and his forehead in his hands, groaning. “Ughhh. Fucking gods and their stupid shit.”

“Why don’t we start with his name?” The interjection came from the non-reborn, who Alex presumed was the ‘Jenassa’ that Edrick had summoned earlier.

Edrick was still mumbling profanities about these gods into his palms, so Alex answered her directly. “Alex. My name is Alex.”

Jenassa, who at this point seemed like the sanest person in the room, walked over to Edrick’s desk and appropriated some sheets of what looked like paper from an empty stack. She pulled a quill from a nearby inkpot and started writing.

Parchment. It’s parchment, not paper. And that’s an actual quill. This is crazy. That’s a pretty big quill, actually. I wonder what type of bird it came from.

Well, Alex figured that once he was done here, he could probably make a fortune inventing the paper mill.

Wait. I don’t know how those work. Maybe an engine or something? Hmmmm, five years of engineering and they never actually explained how to build an engine.

Nonetheless, his greed-senses were tingling. He was sure he could figure out how to build something useful to sell. He could rule this world!

He was snapped out of his daydream by Jenassa, who had paused in her note-scribbling. “And where are you from, Alex?”

“Oh – Sydney!”

She seemed confused.

Oh yeah. There are two suns here. And Earth is probably a smoking ruin right now.

“Uhhhhh… I think I’m from another dimension?”

It was his best theory and seemed consistent with the whole rift-in-space thing. He’d had time to think in the atrium and remembered a little from earlier in the week. Crawling toward a black portal, and then… falling?

At this point, Edrick looked up from his hands. “And would you care to explain what you mean by that?”

“Well, where I’m from is… pretty different to here. We have… uhhhh… buildings that touch the clouds, made of steel and glass? And carriages that fly? Machines that think for us?”

The entire scenario was so bizarre that Alex found himself kind of enjoying it. He'd assumed they would have carriages around here... it fit with the aesthetic.

Edrick was disbelieving, but not in the ways Alex had expected. “Steel?! Hah. That’s a level twenty material - at least. Even if you refined it from iron – still level ten, mind you – there wouldn’t be enough for a building that tall in all the world!”

Hmmmm. Maybe an engine is more ambitious than I thought.

“He’s like the tree monk,” Eleanor muttered, ignoring the mayor.

Edrick, Berin, and Jenassa all glanced at her “Eh?”

She looked over at Edrick. “I thought you graduated the Royal Academy, you goon. Didn’t you learn about the tree monk?”

“I skipped the elective in useless tree trash. Or maybe they only started teaching it after I graduated.”

“You graduated three years before me, and the 'elective' was history.”

“I was more into the combat classes.”

“Anyone care to explain it for the mere mortal in the room?” Jenassa interrupted the two, entirely unphased by Eleanor’s simmering lightning aura. “We aren’t all privately educated in here.”

Others mustn’t be able to see the auras. Either that or she’s as insane as the rest of them after all.

Berin seemed to appreciate her sentiment, although he’d kept his mouth shut all meeting and stood unmoving in a corner.

That one’s a bit of a wet blanket.

“There are reports of strange items, objects, monsters, people. Mana traces, memory reads, or even written testimonies from travellers themselves suggesting that they come from other worlds. The prevailing theory is that the gods will randomly pull things through weak points in space in attempts to find something useful or entertaining.”

Edrick frowned. “Even I listened enough in class to know that the gods never agree on anything that significant. That level of action would require an ascension surge.”

Eleanor shook her head. “There hasn’t been an ascension for three centuries, and you know it. They must have agreed to do this. The theory is that they don’t know what they’ll get each time, so they agree to roll the dice in the hopes that the result will benefit one faction or another.”

She frowned and glanced at Alex. “It’s unheard of for a human like us to come through, though. Previous reports of world rifts, though they’re few and far between, usually describe random objects or monsters. The theory is actually one of the most popular explanations for the unbreakable stones of Salierre. If—”

“The what of the where?” Edrick had clearly been following the academic rant only slightly more than Alex had. “Just get to the point, El – is he lying when he says he’s not from here?”

“Please use my full name.” The lightning in her aura flickered slightly, entering the visible spectrum.

Edrick seemed to realise he’d pushed a little too far. “Sorry. That was impatient of me. Eleanor.”

The lightning mage untensed with a sigh, and the sensation of ozone and anger that had been building in the room abated.

“I suspect he’s telling the truth, although we could find someone with a skill to verify it. But there’s a reason I brought Berin here, and it's not just the fact that he appreciates when to keep his mouth shut. Berin, please explain what you noticed when you healed our guest earlier.”

The thin, brown-haired man with the golden aura perked up like a puppy dog who’d finally been thrown a bone. “Well – you see – ummmm… I think his heart was on the wrong side. And he had two kidneys. And a weird thing near his stomach. There was more, too, but I don’t know how to describe it. His blood felt different?”

Eleanor nodded along. “Berin ignored it in the moment, but there were clear physiological differences between Alex and a regular human. [Lesser Restoration] picked up on them.”

Edrick had reached for the handle of his massive axe, and Jenassa backed away a little, clutching her stack of notes. “So he's a monster, then?”

Finally finding his voice, Alex quickly spoke up. “What! No! I’m a human! What do you mean, my heart is on the wrong side?” He pointed at his heart. “It’s right here!”

Edrick’s fingers wrapped around the axe haft. “Yep, definitely the wrong side.”

Eleanor groaned, somehow sounding even more exasperated than she’d managed all morning so far. “Drop the theatrics, you idiot. The challenge admitted him, so he's not a monster. He should be fine. The last recorded living world-traveller ended up as a wandering monk, not a serial killer. Apparently, he was a tall man with pointy ears and solid black eyes; had a thing for trees.”

An elf! Alex perked up a little, asking the question despite himself. “Is he still alive? Does he have descendants?”

For the first time all meeting, Eleanor chuckled, then looked at him. “Kid, he was literally a different species. Even if some weirdo had a thing for that, can you imagine the children that would come out? Even you, and you look like us, have organs in different places.”

Alex’s face fell.

“The tree monk died alone aged one-hundred-and-fifty a couple centuries back, which is impressive given he was never reborn. He left some interesting writings about his home world, but that was it. He wasn’t even regarded as a particularly insightful monk. A bit of a failure, actually.”

So much for elves, I guess.

From the corner of the room, Berin tentatively interrupted. “Um… boss?” He directed the question at Eleanor. “Should we tell him about the summons?”

Edrick had relaxed a little, seemingly satisfied that there was no threat to his town. “Well shit, guildmistress, looks like it’s time to see how quickly you can train a new member!”

He directed his next words at Alex. “Jenassa and I need to discuss a couple of things. Eleanor and the guild will take care of you for now. Don’t make trouble in my town and we’ll get on fine. There’s usually a far more thorough training and vetting process before a challenge, and the paperwork on this is going to be a nightmare. Make this worth my while, boy.”

Alex nodded, and at Eleanor’s direction, began to follow her and Berin out of the room.

The mayor piped up one last time as they left, his voice booming behind the trio. “I sure hope you scored well on the zeroth floor… you’ll need it!” He chuckled and turned his chair back toward the window as he asked Jenassa for her thoughts. He’d have to ask Eleanor what the boy’s numbers were like later.

For now, he absent-mindedly watched through the window as she led this 'Alex' through the doors of the guild.