“Can we talk about this for a second?” said Jayson. The ogyr was still looking at him with pained astonishment. He strolled anti-clockwise around the ogyr as he talked to it, heading towards the gateway to the sky. He patted some small clouds of dust from his coat.

“Look, you and I got off to a bad start. I get that,” Jayson continued, keeping the ogyr’s attention on him as he moved. “But that’s all in the past now. We should let bygones be bygones and… forgive and forget?”

Jayson paused. A few vault drones flew in closer to better pick up what he was saying. It was strange to hear his own voice echo back against the noise of the arena. But the small talk had a purpose. The ogyr’s whole body had swollen so absurdly large by now that it would surely have trouble processing his words. The ogyr stumbled towards him and looked like it was considering breaking into a run. Its mouth yawned open as it prepared to wail.

“Wait!” Jayson shouted, putting a hand up, and silencing the ogyr pre-scream. He breathed a small sigh of relief as the ogyr paused before continuing its forward stumble. So it was listening at least. He was grateful that an ogyr so enormous was even capable of that. As if in concert with the ogyr, the roar of the arena audience had also dropped to a low thrum.

“Look, you win,” Jayson began. He was drawing nearer to the arch now, and the ogyr was following only a few yards away. It was going to be a close thing. Now he just had to confuse it, befuddle it, get inside its head a little. Fortunately, Jayson knew the words that would confuse anyone on TreArkh, even an ogyr that had inflated its muscles to such an improbable size.

“But before you kill me, I have just one question for you. One question.” The ogyr kept walking, trance-like, towards him. Jayson glanced right as he passed the blue-green sky, but kept stepping backwards.

“Tell me, what’s the last thing you remember, before all the fighting and the dying? Do you remember anything? Can you remember the Life Before?” The ogyr lumbered onward, drawing closer to the archway, but he saw its brow furrow as the words sunk in.

“Why?” Jayson raised his voice and his hand, making the ogyr pause again. “What is this place? Think about it. Why are you here? Why are any of us here?” He saw the ogyr’s eyes glaze over as the thought connected, and for a long moment the ogyr stopped dead in its tracks, immobile. The arena fell silent.

Why are we here?

It was like magic, every time. A punch to every brain but his own. Jayson seized the moment and swung his right arm down to the floor diagonally behind him.

Jayson fired off a measure of percussive force into the sand behind him, turning as he left the ground. The force lifted him off the sands to curve through the air towards the ogyr’s right-hand side. The world around him sharpened as he concentrated. He watched as the ogyr’s blood and sand coated head turned to follow his path through the air and waited until he could see it framed by the blue-green sky behind.

Only a few feet from the ogyr, he fired both palms full blast into the creature’s chest, sending it and himself tumbling in opposite directions. Even before he hit the floor he was clapping again, and landed in a backwards roll before jumping upright to see if his plan had worked. The ogyr was still there, teetering near the edge of the stonework.

“Come on, I can do this,” Jayson said under his breath. willing himself forward. “I can do this!”

Jayson ran at it, clapping furiously all the while, in one last desperate bid to push the monster through the arch. He raised his arms upwards at the ogyr’s gut and fired. The force was small compared to the previous blast, but strong enough to throw Jayson violently to the floor. Time seemed to slow. The ogyr’s flesh rippled as it left the floor, floating upwards through the open arch. Jayson saw the ogyr’s eyes unglaze, and watched the shock pass over the creature’s face when it realised it had passed beyond the stonework. Only a few feet away from the edge of the arena, he had a perfect view to watch the creature in its inexorable descent to the killing mist below. To watch as it…

Jayson’s face fell. The ogyr’s face was lit up by fury, and it had twisted around and raised its arm to land one final desperate strike. The ogyr’s eyes bulged and somehow it inflated its musculature even further, tearing open the skin on its arm, revealing the raw pink flesh underneath. With unnatural speed for its size, and a guttural scream that threw up the sand on the arena floor like the beat of a drum, the ogyr brought its gargantuan fist crashing down where Jayson stood.

Jayson flinched, closed his eyes, and brought his arm up in front of him in reflex, for all the good that would do. He was already dead. It was as good a time as any to test the theory, he supposed. He just hoped it wouldn’t be too painful.

There was a long silence. Jayson peered out under his arm to see a cloud of dust, and a huge gash in the red earth just in front of him. No ogyr, just the open archway with marbled sky beyond. By some strange miracle, the ogyr had missed. He sighed in relief, and flopped backwards onto the sand. That was the closest to death he had been in a long time. He laughed out loud. Somehow, impossibly, he had survived.

Then the ground fell away.

An entire section of the arena around the gate began falling from its suspension above the clouds. Jayson watched as the bricks and stone and sand cracked and drifted apart all around him. The strange winds of TreArkh began to blow him and the rubble in every direction, at random speeds. he reached out, but there was nothing to grab onto. He opened his mouth, but the wind snatched away his breath before he could call out. It whipped at his cloak and his hair, his body twisting in the tumult. Far beneath him, Jayson saw a dark smudge that could have been the ogyr before it was swallowed by a cloud.

“Not yet!” he shouted helplessly into the wind. First day he’d left the cellar in weeks, and he’d already gone and died. “No, not yet!” he repeated, but suddenly he began to laugh at the absurdity of it all as he was blown amidst the chaos of stone, rubble and sand.

Jayson barely remembered how he had died in the life before: a stark white room, a warm hand against his ice cold skin, faces he couldn’t recall staring down at him. After that, he had ended up here: TreArkh, this strange afterlife full of magic, mystery and a myriad undying warriors. Just when he thought he was finally going to get some answers, he was going to die. And the voice had told him he wouldn’t come back. Was that true? Or would he return from death again? Here, or somewhere else? Or disappear into oblivion, as if he had never existed?

All questions, no answers. No point wrestling with them. Jayson closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable fall into the deadly killing mists.