Once inside his partially collapsed shelter, which had required him to scramble through a jagged crevice where there had once been a corner, John found the remnants of a camp. A circle of stones formed a crude firepit, resting in the center of the intact half of the structure that still had both corners and a roof. Near the firepit were long dried-out sticks, frayed strips of colorless cloth and what looked like a scattering of ancient chicken bones. Whoever was last here, it had been a long time ago.

Thinking only of warmth, John gathered the sticks with numb, shaking fingers and piled them into the pit, trying but failing to form the teepee-style configuration he had learned in cub scouts. When they refused to catch, he added the strips of old cloth beneath them as “kindling,” at least he thought that was the term, and held his torch against them again. Like a switch had been flipped, they flared to life.

All pretense of dignity gone, John lay down and curled around the fire like a fetus inside a womb. He tried to focus on the warmth slowly thawing his front rather than the stone bleeding cold into his side. Even as a measure of relief seeped in, so too did the reality of his situation. This fire would not last. The cold would continue its assault, and without proper clothing to insulate him from it, he would have to find more fuel for the fire to survive. In other words, he would have to go back outside.

As he lay there on the hard, freezing floor of that ruined building, lost and alone, he allowed his imagination to carry him away. He imagined the soft warmth of his couch beneath him. He imagined his head cradled on a filthy throw pillow, his television playing some sitcom or another as soothing background noise. He held a freshly rolled joint to his mouth, and with a spark of his lighter drew a deep, satisfying pull, blotting away the unwanted thoughts and feelings that so often plagued him.

John lost all sense of time as he immersed himself in the fantasy. Eventually, noticing his growing hunger, Fantasy-John casually considered to-go dinner options, then pulled out his phone to order Chinese…

His phone.

Jolted back to the present, John shoved his tingling, slightly-less-numb fingers into his pocket and found to his surprise he still had the phone. When he tried to turn it on, however, he couldn’t find the power button. He couldn’t find any buttons. The size and shape were what he expected, but the object he held was not a Samsung Galaxy smartphone. It appeared to be a rectangular block of obsidian-like rock, smooth and polished like glass. It was free from any embellishments or blemishes. He could even see his reflection in it, though he quickly shifted the angle away.

You are one ugly son of a bitch.

Like his lighter and his mother’s binder, his phone too had apparently been transformed by the journey through the portal to wherever this was. Now, it was just a fancy rock.

Remembering the binder, John scanned for it. He spotted it near the wall where he had apparently dropped it, except, as he expected, it was not a three-ring-binder anymore. It was a large, leather tome, and rather than blocky, printed letters, the words on the front were now burned into it with an elaborate cursive script. They no longer said Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Depression. They said Way of the Balanced Mind.

John pocketed the phone, trying and failing to cling to some of the hope that had just sprung up, and rose to his feet. The flames of his fire had already diminished to one-third their initial strength. Wanting to be somewhere else would not change that. As something within him whined and complained at the indignity of his circumstances, John stumbled to the crumbled-away corner of the structure, then climbed back out into the elements.

By the time he struggled back inside, the bundle in his arms shedding sticks as it knocked against the borders of his makeshift entrance, his fire was a glorified candle flame. When he dumped his frozen sticks atop it, it went out completely. After a brief moment of panic he remembered the egg-shaped stone, which produced sparks upon collision just as it had before. It took a few bangs of the stone against the pile of sticks before the sparks caught, but caught they did, and soon the fire burned higher than ever.

He would survive another hour, it seemed.

For some time, John fell into a mindless rhythm. He curled around the fire, fantasized about the safety and warmth of his apartment until the flames died down, then rose to gather more snow-buried sticks he could pile atop the flames to begin the cycle anew. Eventually, when he had warmed enough to think properly, it occurred to him he could add sticks to the fire one at a time to keep a more consistent intensity. It was obvious, of course, but obvious had never been John’s strong suit.

You don’t have a strong suit, loser.

Though he had to range further from his shelter each time, John managed in three subsequent trips to collect enough wood to keep the fire going for a few hours. Things were looking up in other ways, as well. Despite a corner and a fifth of the roof having long crumbled away from the abandoned house, the space within had grown noticeably warmer since John’s arrival, enough that he felt genuine relief when he last entered.

His anxiety having eased at the promise of a few, uninterrupted hours of warmth, John sat heavily against the stone wall and stared into the flames.

John was here. He was in Uldwyld forest, but not playing a video game on his couch, actually here in the freezing-his-balls-off flesh. Somehow, he was inside the game Nordic Runes. A fast travel portal had appeared in his living room, sucked him inside and left him here in the middle of the dark, freezing forest.

It was impossible, of course. John had probably had a psychotic break and gone insane, or maybe he had died and this was the afterlife, or who knew. It was probably better to not think about it. Luckily, if John excelled at anything, it was not thinking about the things he did not want to think about.

An oddity on the floor drew his attention. When he tried to look it flitted away, clinging to the bottom of the wall. When he tried to look at it there, however, it moved higher up the wall, as though anticipating him. It seemed that any time John tried to look at the strange, blue light, it darted away into his peripheral vision. Frustrated, John jerked his head around as quickly as he could, following the light wherever it went, but it got him nowhere.

Steadying himself with a slow, frosting breath, John went still and tried to look at the light without actually looking at the light. To his utter shock, it floated to the center of his vision and hovered there. It was a list of words.

Soul

Inventory

Abilities

Map

It was like computer text floating in the air, perhaps half a meter from John’s nose. It glowed a neon sky blue, in a font John associated with the game Nordic Runes. It was simple, yet bold, like a Wall Street Journal headline. When John focused on the word “Soul” it flashed and emboldened as the other three words vanished, then it rose to make room for a new column of text, becoming its header.

Soul:

Name: John Robbie

Age: 22

Class: Unknown

Class Rank: 0 Stars

Path Rank and Affinity:

Erudite: Beginner

Affinity: High

Nature: Beginner

Affinity: Moderate-Low

Social: Beginner

Affinity: Low

Artisan: Beginner

Affinity: Very-High

War: Beginner

Affinity: Exceptional

John instantly recognized the format of a video game “Character” screen, but this seemed to be his Character screen. Mostly, it tracked with the game Nordic Runes. In that game, “Class” was a character’s specialty, like “Cleric” or “Assassin” - or, in the case of John’s character, Polaris, “Frost Mage.” “Class Rank,” which went from one to five, indicated more or less how strong the Character was, since all Abilities were connected to Class. Since John apparently didn’t have a class, it made sense he was unranked at zero stars.

Zero makes sense for someone who is completely worthless.

The “Paths” were definitely a feature of Nordic Runes as well. A Path was basically a skill set that grew over time the more its skills were practiced. “Nature,” for example, meant outdoor-type activities like hunting, fishing, horticulture and survivial skills like building a camp. Erudite meant academic skills like scholarship and magic, Artisan meant crafting and creative skills, social meant interpersonal skill and navigating groups and War meant exactly what it looked like. So far, for being a psychotic hallucination, everything here made a certain kind of sense.

Paths ranked up as you developed their related skills, going from the lowest level “Beginner” to the highest level “Master.” John had no skills of any kind, so “Beginner” in every Path seemed right.

From there though, it got a little weird. “Affinity” was obvious in its meaning, but that was never a part of Nordic Runes. The game never showed a character’s potential in any of the Paths. In the game, you chose a Class for your character, and that class was connected to two of the five Paths, one of which became your character’s Primary Path and the other their Secondary Path. The Ice Mage class, for example, was Primary Path Erudite and Secondary Path Nature. John could still develop Polaris’s skills in every Path, and he did, but growth was much faster in those two.

John could accept the concept of Path Affinities, but the Affinities listed for him seemed off. Only the first three made sense. After all, John was in his elementary school gifted program, and he always scored 99th percentile on standardized tests. Even without any real academic accomplishments, “High” Erudite Path affinity seemed about right. Nature Path Affinity was “Moderate-Low,” which tracked with John’s recent fire-building performance, and Social Path might have even been overestimated at a bottom scraping “Low.” Those three more or less fit with how John saw himself.

The other two Affinities, however, could not be his. His Artisan Path affinity was “Very-High,” suggesting he had some sort of artistic potential, but John had never created anything worthwhile in his entire life. John consumed. Prodigiously. He didn’t create.

The “Exceptional ” War Path Affinity was even stranger, though. John had never even been in a fistfight, unless you counted the time is sister, Vanessa, slugged him in the shoulder for saying hamburgers were delicious and he didn’t care about the plight of cows. Conflict of any kind made John’s insides fetal up into a quivering ball. As far as John was concerned, his War Affinity should have been negative.

After a few attempts, he managed to focus on the “Soul” header and collapse its screen, returning the strange interface to its original four items.

Soul

Inventory

Abilities

Map

Finding the interface did not interfere with his vision much, John chose a suitable stick and added it to the fire before checking his next “menu.” The “Inventory” screen listed each article of his clothing, a “spark stone,” a “Refinement Manual,” seventeen sticks and one labeled as “item unknown,” presumably the black rock that used to be his phone. John figured the sticks were listed because he had gathered them himself and they were nearby, making them still within his possession, even if there weren’t technically on his person.

His next stop, the “Abilities” screen, was entirely blank, and the “Map” screen only showed three words.

No Available Maps

After more trial and error, John figured out how to minimize the text entirely, returning it to its original location in the bottom corner of his visual field. It kind of bugged him down there, like a neon blue housefly that wouldn’t fuck off. He tried his best to ignore it. Eventually, he assumed, he wouldn’t even notice it. A detached part of John marveled at how easily he had accepted this amazing, virtual-reality-esque interface power he inexplicably possessed, but at this point, he was too exhausted to give it much thought.

Right now, there were much more pressing concerns than what was impossible and what was not.

Arms inside his sleeves and his teeth chattering like a joke shop skull, John surveyed his new, partially collapsed home. He noted the errant snowflakes whirling across his floor and the campfire smoke escaping upward into the night through the missing portion of roof. The jagged portion of sky beyond bristled with twinkling, alien stars. One thing had become abundantly clear.

Tomorrow morning, John needed to do some serious winter clothes shopping.