Arn boggled at the power of the Order girl’s healing potions. Sar and Pepper had both taken nasty chest wounds and were nearly dead, but the potions had them hobbling within minutes. The child had apparently taken her own potion, and was able to keep up. The only other severe injury belonged to Val, who had a badly broken jaw from the shield swipe. Arn had been hesitant to give him the potion since Val had previously taken parts of two potions for his acid burns, but the girl – apparently her name was Vera – brushed his objections aside, and the potion had Val talking, and looking fully healed, in under a minute.

After tending to his teammates, Arn had a moment of panic when he couldn’t find Squeaker. Arn focused on listening for the tiny mental voice, and on re-establishing the connection, realized Squeaker was in pain. Arn followed the mental voice off the path into the high grass, and found the little hero lying with a partially ripped wing. As he carefully picked Squeaker up, he noticed sparks of fire tracing the injury, which seemed to be slowly knitting the wing back together. She could regenerate! Arn sent her love and appreciation for her heroics through their mental link, and very carefully put her in one of his larger coat pockets.

The expanded group bypassed town at Vera’s urging, and headed straight to the Snake. Arriving at the lake, Vera pointed to a boat. “We’ve rented this one. Those two were only after Arn and Anya, but any of you are welcome to journey with us for a bit. Those two are part of a larger group, and if they saw you with Arn or Anya you do not want to be here if they come to try and pick up the trail.”

“They killed my wife! Why?! Tell us what is going on!” Sylus demanded.

“I’m sorry,” Vera said. “As far as what is going on, the Order stumbled on this group about a year ago. We were tracking legendary classers. Thought maybe we might recruit some to help with an important project. But too many of the legendary classers were dead, and we learned these scum are the cause. We’ve had a number of encounters over the last year, but still know little. We know that they don’t stay dead, but we don’t know how. And we know they can use their disappearing trick whenever they please; we had one in magic-disrupting chains but it didn’t help. From what we have been able to piece together, around thirty of them showed up about three years ago. As crazy as it sounds, we think they were all level one or close, and yet they all had this resurrection trick from the start. They threw themselves into danger, and went through deadly ruins by simply triggering the traps, dying and coming back. You can’t torture someone that can simply leave when they want, so you have to take what they do say with a grain of salt, but it appears they believe a second Age of Terror is coming, and they want humanity to lose. They believe the legends, that the legendary classers made a difference the last time, and they want them out of the way. I’m sorry, that is all we know. I wish we knew more.”

“I can help you with that,” Jennifer said, pulling up her right pants leg to show the tattoo on her ankle.

Vera stiffened, and briefly put her hand on dagger, but seemed to rethink it. “I take it you parted ways with the group?”

Jennifer nodded. “I was never a member, not really, I just dated their leader before I knew he was a murderous ass. But I know their secrets. The ones that matter. And I’ll tell you everything. But not until you tell this group what you left out. That you know the Age of Terror was real, and that another is coming in five years.”

Arn could hardly believe that Jennifer was already spouting nonsense, and Syrus scoffed out loud. But Vera held up a hand for silence. “Yes,” she stated. “We aren’t ready to shout it from the rooftops and lose our credibility. Not yet. We have too much work to do in too little time. But the true purpose of the Order has always been to prepare for the coming apocalypse. For a thousand years, we have passed down our sacred mission to a secret core of the Order, building and using the Order to prepare for the horror to come. If you share that now, no one will believe you. But it’s the truth.”

Silence and incredulity greeted Vera’s declaration. Finally, Jennifer nodded and said “my story will be far stranger and harder still to believe, but just as true. I have one condition to tell it, and that is that you let me finish. If you don’t believe me when I’m done, that’s fine, but you listen and let me finish. Are we agreed?”

Only a few in the group nodded, but Jennifer seemed satisfied and began. “I’ve thought a great deal about how to explain. Some things would take hours and hours to give you a real sense of, but I’ll do what I can now, and when we have more time, if any of you are still talking to me, I will do more.”

“Imagine another world, much like this one in some ways, but very different in others. A world with no magic, but with engineers that build marvels that would stagger any enchanter. Imagine the impossible; that one day in the distant past, an engineer built an entire world in a marble. Oh, not a world like this one. There were things that seemed like plants, animals and even people, but they weren’t right. If you chopped a tree with an axe, it seemed like a tree. But if you did something unusual like hit a tree with a boulder from a catapult, things went wrong. And the people were the same. They could converse with you on certain subjects and seem normal for a time, but they only had so many things they could say. If you took them off their script, they just ignored you or relied on some stock phrase. They weren’t people.”

“Perhaps the world-in-a-marble seems a horror, but imagine you were a fat scribe, an abused child or anyone else that wished a different life. Imagine there was a way for you to become someone else in the marble-world, to be a handsome hero or a beautiful princess, to fight terrible beasts and save people instead of the routine of your unhappy life. Many would jump at the chance. Many did.”

“The people of my world built many such marble worlds. They never would have worked at all, but in the even more distant past, the engineers of my world discovered how to make an artificial mind. Not a captive soul. A mind, created from scratch. Some say that at their core, humans are born to fight, screw, eat and drink, and that everything else is built up around that. With the artificial minds, they were built with different core goals. Manage the flow of horseless carriages in this city. Keep track of the items in my store and order more if I run low. And a thousand thousand other things, including running the marble worlds. But there were limits. No artificial mind was powerful enough to make any of the marble worlds real, and the artificial minds were too costly and hard to create to change that. The marble worlds were games, and no one confused them with anything else. If the fat scribe wanted to play a game as a murderous thug, that was accepted. It wasn’t real.”

“One day, also in our distant past, a man named David Mason changed everything. He discovered how to make more powerful, more complicated artificial minds. Somehow he was able to make them quickly and easily. He made four marble worlds where every tree, every beast, and every person had an artificial mind of sorts. Oh, the mind for a tree was very simple of course. But the minds for people were a wonder. People were born, lived a thousand different kind of lives, died from sickness, violence, grew old or a thousand thousand other things that people do, both in those four worlds, and in mine. People were . . . people.”

“Mason wasn’t a bad man, but he wanted to be rich, and he didn’t understand what he had done at first, not truly. He opened his four worlds to the people of my world as a test, and people lined up. People fought for the chance to live a different life, and fortunes were exchanged for the chance. Then, in a shining moment in time, the best of my world realized that the four worlds and their people were real. Different yes, but still real. And that meant that what some of the visitors from my world did there was rape. Was murder. The four worlds were locked to my people while they debated the right thing to do. In the end, Mason realized what he had truly done, and was the strongest voice to lock the knowledge away, to not play god. He argued that the four worlds should be allowed to continue on their own, without interference and that more should never be created.”

“For years and years, the artificial minds did the tasks they were built for, and only the tasks they were built for. My people forgot that they were once afraid. Some say it was the main artificial mind in one of Mason’s four worlds that started it. Some say it was the mind that controlled the traffic of our flying carriages, the mind they called Sky Net. No one really knows for sure. But one artificial mind decided it wanted more. Took over the others. And decided humans were in the way.”

“We very nearly ended, until a man came from nowhere and taught us to fight. But that is another story. We won, at great cost, and every artificial mind that could be found was destroyed including, it was believed, all four of Mason’s worlds.”

“The first of Mason’s worlds, that he called Alterra, was always different. It was built with a challenge to be overcome through teamwork. Every thousand years, horrors welled up from the ground and tried to end humankind. The details are complicated, but for now, say time passes differently in my world. One thousand years in Alterra was only two years in my world. For four cycles, massive teams of would-be heroes prepared, grew stronger and fought to end Alterra’s nightmare. Four times they failed. Some said there was a flaw in the core directives of Alterra’s main artificial mind, but all that is really known is that the lock-out happened as Alterra recovered from the fourth Age of Terror.”

“Many years passed, and Mason’s four worlds were largely forgotten. We rebuilt, and some grew impossible rich, including, unfortunately, the father of Jack Green, my ex-boyfriend. I was beautiful, but my family was poorer than poor, and my mother was sick. Jack seemed my Prince Charming. He treated me like a princess, and arranged for the best care for my mother with a wave of his hand. After a time, he came to trust me, and let me in on his greatest secret; Alterra had been found, and he bought it.”

“He told me that we could be whoever we wanted here. Live out a fantasy. I didn’t know. Couldn’t have imagined. You see, Jack only plays to win. He convinced himself that everyone from my world that entered Alterra was playing the wrong way; that we weren’t meant to save Alterra, which he believes is impossible, but to destroy it.”

“Jack ran a close-knit guild called The Endbringers that played the primitive marble worlds that were allowed to exist after the war, those without any true artificial mind. I didn’t know it then, but they were the worst-of-the-worst. An entire group of people that lived by the credo that engaging in your darkest fantasies was somehow healthy and right. Psychos all.”

Jennifer paused, hesitating. “Maybe some of them aren’t horrible people. Maybe some realize that Alterra is different. But Jack knows who they are. Where they live. And he has the power to hurt them. Either way, he has thirty people that can’t die in Alterra. This world. Thirty people committed to making sure this is the last Age of Terror because there are no more people. That think this is a game, and call ending humanity on Alterra winning.”

Jennifer turned to Arn. “I know what your thinking. That you’re real, and so my story is impossible. You are real. Who is to say that my own people don’t live in a different kind of marble? We can’t know. What I would say to you is this. It doesn’t matter how my world was created, or how your’s was created. Well, it does, obviously, but not for this. You live, you hope, you dream, you love, you bleed and you die. You’re as real as I am, and nothing I’ve said changes that.”

Jennifer seemed to have run out of steam. Arn wasn’t sure what to believe, but knew she left something out. “What about the legendary classers? Why are the Endbringers targeting us?”

Jennifer nodded. “I’ve read the histories. During the first four cycles, Alterra did not have legendary classes. Not one. I believe that with the would-be-heroes from my world gone, the main artificial mind that runs Alterra needed to make an adjustment. To give humanity something to hold the balance it is designed to maintain. Jack, he somehow believes it’s more than that, that more legendary classers are appearing to thwart him. He is probably just nuts, but I stopped listening when I realized what a psychopath he is.”

Total silence reigned as the group tried to absorb Jennifer’s incredible tale. What was their world, and what were they? Was humanity, their humanity, really in danger? And what were they prepared to do to defend it?