The inside of the house had been impressive. Unusual but comfortable even without the fires lit. The room above where he had awoken to Selrah dripping wax upon his brow was the only one he wouldn’t be looking forward to returning to. But, stepping outside, a small vegetable garden to the right and the entire house surrounded by a low stone wall Mythril sighed.

This is the house he had always wanted for him and Sarah, this was the world he had wanted to step into time and time again. Every rubbish day at work, every bleak morning and dull evening, busy with people jostling past, speaking too loud into their phones and shouting too loudly at their children.

This was home. This was the simpler life.

“We’ll fix it eventually,” he heard Selrah say, and only then noticed he had been staring at the one place where the wall had a crack creeping up it. “Maybe first we can find the dwarf that did it and put their head on a pike. They’ve given us the notch to shove it into at least.”

A simple life maybe, but a simple life with a maniacal version of his fiancée.

He followed Selrah down the path that was separated from the grass and fluffy leaves of the vegetables by tiny black stones that glinted in the bright sun. She swung back the wooden gate and following behind her his eyes drifted over an all too familiar scene.

Houses close by but far enough apart to provide distance between neighbours, each one he noted after looking over his shoulder and back to the house he just left, built with stone and timber. Some appeared a little larger but all of them followed the basic layout.

It was only a small town that he was looking across, their own home being not too far from where it appeared the road came to an end. A tavern perhaps, he noted, and before that, a tailors from the familiar symbol of thread and a needle swinging on a wooden sign.

“Mythril,” a voice said, starkly different to the one he was becoming accustomed to – in that it was both deep and male and not high and female like Selrah’s. “Ready for tomorrow?”

He looked round to see Selrah waiting and in front of them what could only be described as a gnome stood looking up at him with a huge grin across his lips. His hair was sleek and red and pulled into a pony tail atop his head, the majority of it only showing beneath a black bandana he wore over it. The sword at his waist brought Mythril’s attention to the fact that in his haste to equip clothing he had forgotten to equip a weapon.

In not giving an answer to the gnome, both he and Selrah exchanged confused glances.

“Did I overstep?”

Selrah raised her hand in protest, then swept it towards Mythril.

“Of course not, Widdershins” she said, a slight hint of frustration framing her tone. “Mythril is not himself today.”

This was met with a laugh, and the gnome’s arms were soon crossed across his chest.

“Send him to the wrong side of Olc Talomh again, Selrah?”

She had been about to reply when out of Mythril’s lips, without intention, a drawn out whooshing sound was heard. It had been completely involuntary but given that a griffon followed by two much smaller griffons had just flown above their heads, getting no more than a placement of a hand above her head by Selrah, it had been hard not to react.

A glint of mischief danced across the gnome’s eyes, only further frustrating Selrah.

“There is no right side of Olc Talomh,” she said, her lips lifted in a tight smile. “And, despite what you may enjoy speaking rumours about during your nightly trips to the inn, I have never sent anyone there.”

“Oh I didn’t mean on purpose,” the gnome said, looking to Mythril for comradery, to which he could only shrug. The names meant nothing, the only thing that meant something was that on the other side of the street coming towards them were what looked like two tree people atop an elephant.

“My god,” Mythril said, finally speaking he drew attention to himself from Selrah and Widdershins. “Dryads.”

They followed his gaze but looked back to him without any sign of the same impression the dryads had made on him.

“Maybe you should get him home,” Widdershins said, his previous mischievous glance now shadowed by bushy brows dipping downwards.

“He’s fine,” Selrah replied, her hand on Mythril’s arm, a gesture that hadn’t gone amiss and instinctively he shrugged away. “He was awake far too late making preparations. We need to be going now. I hope I can trust in you to keep your mouth shut about how he has seemed today.”

Widdershins tilted his head to the right, gave Mythril one last cursory glance, then with a puckering of a lips and a nod of his head said, “Why not.”

“Thank you.”

No goodbyes were offered by either party, and like a drunken friend Mythril’s arm was once again being taken in Selrah’s hand as she led him away.

“What is wrong with you?” she hissed once they were out of the gnome’s earshot. “He’ll tell everyone, you know that, right? If you don’t get to go to the raid tomorrow, then neither do I. Please stop this.”

Mythril allowed himself to be led towards the end of the road, a fork in it giving them a second to pause.

“I don’t know what to tell you.” It was true. He didn’t.

Selrah sighed, and brushed a strand of hair from her face. She pulled out her scroll and with a series of quick taps she no longer needed to worry about any more stray strands as it was pushed away from her eyes beneath a gemmed headband.

“I suppose I really did mess up this time, didn’t I?”

Mythril could see that despite her frustrations she was concerned, and despite the wonderment surrounding him he resolved to try and keep as much of his amazement as possible to himself. For his own sake as much as hers. Afterall, he still had no idea what was happening and as such had no interest in drawing attention to himself.

“I don’t think you messed up,” he said, patting her awkwardly on the shoulder. “I think I just need this fresh air also. Let’s go do what we set out to. Which way? Left or right?”

Selrah grinned. “How much of your memory have I erased? We go down.”

At this she continued on forwards, where a tiny jut of the path led out. In front of them was an archway of rocks and ahead of them, Mythril saw with a lurch in his stomach, was the edge of what he now became aware of was a floating island.

“Down,” he said, with a nod of his head. It occurred to him that despite how out of place he may feel, Selrah at least did not seem to think he was incapable of any of his abilities. He suddenly feared that it was going to take casting some sort of spell of flight to get to wherever it was they needed to be. “How do you suppose we’re going to do that?” he asked, after spending more time than would have been advised staring over the ledge.

“One second,” Selrah replied. She was swiping up and down on her scroll until eventually and with what sounded like a sigh of relief a small stone appeared in her hand. “I don’t know why this won’t just log at the top of the scroll like every other key. Got yours?”

“Which one is it again?” Mythril decided to ask, not wanting to sound as hopeless as every other time something had been asked of him.

“The one that’s not at the top of the scroll. See you down there.”

Before he could object, Selrah pushed the stone against the archway and in a ripple of greens and whites stepped through and vanished.

“Oh, great,” Mythril exclaimed. In the way that signals what he was experiencing wasn’t great at all. After longer than it should have taken to find the scroll in his satchel, and pushing the lip of it down in a way that seemed he was angry at it for being so big and useful, he was soon swiping up and down what was listed as a miscellaneous tab on his scroll.

Selrah had said it was the one not at the top, which was as much help as leaving without him. There was so much junk in the tab and he would have blamed himself if he had played the game for longer than the couple of months that he did.

With this though came a realization, and staring off into the distance you’d have thought it had been written in the clouds. No, it had been across his arm, in the house, upon hearing the name he was called first by Selrah and later by Widdershins. He really was Mythril. The character he had made to join Sarah in the game in the first place.

He had been so fixated on being with his fiancée’s character that the possibility of being his own was only now dawning on him. He felt like a cartoon character, unreal. An urge to see his reflection overcame him, but there was nothing he could think of that he had customized about his appearance like Sarah had. He had been content to be a human. He looked back to his arm, and in seeing the glowing symbols rolled his eyes.

“I’m a blade wielder,” he said as the calling he had been assigned dawned on him. A new confidence overcame him, one that with a shrug of mental ferocity overshadowed the uneasy feeling he felt of being in someone else’s skin – even if it was technically his own.

Mythril scrolled further down the item list, wondering if all of this could have continued to have been accumulated when he was no longer playing the game. He gave thought to the possibility that he could have collected it all, knowing his usual behaviour with games and hoarding, but although he could remember smaller items such as [Elder’s Rock] other items such as [Lore of the Lamented] meant nothing to him, not until he discovered the one key that wasn’t with the rest was positioned below it, that is.

He pushed the dry paper of the scroll and in a second a stone whacked off the back of his hand, teetered and then fell onto the floor. Leaning down to pick the rock from the ground he pushed the scroll back into his satchel and then turned the key over in his hand.

A sigil was etched into the only side that looked to have been polished down. Approaching the archway he pushed the stone in the general area of where he had seen Selrah touch hers.

Nothing happened.

He avoided saying anything in anger but felt himself holding his breath in frustration. Exhaling, he also let out a choice number of words as he ran his fingers over the stones. Nothing, not a single dip that he could feel. He opted to do the only other thing he could think of.

Taking the key in his hand, he began to rub it over the stones of the arch. Bending down and running it upwards, feeling it knock over the edges that jutted out. Despite himself, he felt self-conscious, thinking that anyone that might see would presume he was performing some strange massage ritual with the archway.

A glance over his shoulder to be sure no one was watching and an upwards push of the stone soon turned into the flipping of his stomach as within seconds he was no longer looking back to the small village and instead after a flash of blinding light stood staring at an open field.

“Finally,” he heard and turned to face Selrah seated upon a boulder and pushing her scroll back into her satchel.