Well, there I was on the top of the wall watching the man cease to be a man and become something else. When he finished that dreadful howl, his mouth elongated and became a snout that ended in a point like a bird's beak and his flesh opened up, giving birth to two new eyes, small and black like a robin's. Yes, he was like a bird, but one spat out of a nightmare.

It wasn’t necessary to be a genius to realise that this was not an ordinary monster, but a Fallen one. I felt a tremendous urge to leap down the wall and hack it to a pulp, but I said to myself, "If I fight, I may die".

I was stunned as I watched the guard's body swell up like a balloon. So much, so much, so much that the armour he was wearing burst into a thousand pieces. The legs lengthened and twisted and in the end ended up looking like the legs of a frog.

“I hope they don't help him jump in here,” I said, because if that happened it would be a bit of a problem.

All around me, the faceless voices of the city's citizens: full of fear, with none of the previous enthusiasm. People began to flee, running down the stairs on either side of the city's entrance gate.

I still hesitated whether to fight the Fallen or run away. I looked for my axe, but it was not hanging on my belt and, in fact, when I woke up in the Healing House it was not in the clothes left on the chair.

I am ashamed to say that I was relieved I didn't have to eat my head off because fighting without a weapon was suicide.

“Hey, aren't you one of those adventurers? What are you waiting for to finish off that monster?” asked the man with the smile, who had previously been so sure that the knights would win.

“Me... adventurer?” I said to say something; behind him was also the woman, the one who was so pale.

She was white as the moon and her hair was as black as a starless night. She wore a fringe over a grey gaze and her mouth was frozen in a gesture of terror, I suppose the reason was that the frog monster was approaching the wall.

“Yes, adventurer, of course! You've got a wooden sun, and besides.... What else have you got that axe for, to chop down trees or what? Hurry up and fight the monster once and for all!” she ordered me, with an air of superiority that I didn't like at all.

“Axe? What do you mean!” I said, and no sooner had I blurted out the words than I realised that my dear old weapon was hanging from my belt.

That was quite strange because the axe was not with the clothes when I woke up from my blackout. But I didn't have much time to think about it, a quick shadow crossed my gaze and the man disappeared without a trace.

I looked at the pale woman, her eyes fixed on one of the buildings in the city. As I followed her glance, I discovered that the Fallen had jumped over the entire city wall and had swarmed the poor man, carrying him on top of a nearby house.

The blond was dead as a doornail, lying there on the roof, and his face was half anger, half surprise. The corpse slid down, as if the roof were a slide, and was about to fall to the street, but the frog-bird creature was agile enough to close its jaws on the wretched man's arm.

It positioned him neatly on top of the roof and plunged its snout beak into the blond man’s guts. It began to chew, to eat as if it were a plate of spaghetti and not the belly of a human being.

“My God... But... Is that...? Is that for real?!” she screamed and took a step backwards and then another and then another and then another and then she hit her backside against the railing of the wall so unluckily that she went the other way and almost fell over, but I caught her by the wrist saving her life.

“Can you tell me what's going on here? Where are we? Who are you? What is that thing? I don't understand anything!” she shouted and put her hands on his head.

The beast sank its beak into the blond man’s guts and ate, making wet noises, but those three eyes on the side of its face didn’t stop looking at us perhaps thinking of us as the second course and dessert. I grabbed the strange woman by the wrist and ran downstairs, praying the creature wouldn't follow me.

So we ran up the main street towards the square where the statue of the first hero, Xoan de Ningures, was. The idea was to go straight to the barracks to see if there were any more adventurers and my plans finished there, let others think about what to do. Mulling things is not one of my specialities.

“Stop... for God's sake... stop at once! I'm dying...” That's what she was shouting and I looked up at the rooftops: no sign of the Fallen, so I stopped to let her catch her breath.

She was in a state of exhaustion, panting like a dog, almost incapable of standing up. And yet we had only run a few metres.... I could still see the stairs where we had come down from the walls.

“Are you OK or not? I don't want that monster to come to us, maybe he's still hungry” I said, always scanning the rooftops.

“I'm light years away from being fine!!!! Where am I!!!? What was that thing!!? What on the hell is going on here!!!?” roared the pale woman.

I sank my hand into my fire-looking hair. That always helped me to concentrate because it was soft, cool, shiny... Thanks to that, I was able to put my thoughts in order and answer the lady with a minimum of sense:

“Let's see... You're in Nebula, that thing was a monster called Fallen and right now we're running away from it so it doesn't eat us.”

“There's no such thing as monsters! And what's this about Nebula? What ting is a Fallen, for God's sake? I must be dreaming... One of those lucid dreams... Or drugged...”-the woman muttered and pinched herself hard on the arm.

“Hey, why don't you tell me who you are?”

“Me? My name is Laura and I'm an art history teacher...”

“Art history teacher?” I had no idea that was a real occupation.

“Yes, yes! At the Fragas do Eume High School!”

“The what from where?”

“Fragas do Eume! In Pontedeume.”

“What?”

“A Coruña!”

“Hey, that's not helping me at all...” I said, thinking the whole situation was driving her mad as a March hare.

“Galicia! Spain! Europe! Earth! Universe! Reality!” Laura shrieked, and then the light bulb lit up.

“Hey! You're one of those people from another world who die and come back to life in a world that isn't their own!”

Laura turned even paler, as difficult as that seemed:

“What...? Me...? Dead...? That's not possible... that's not... Oh, holy shit...” she muttered as her eyes widened a lot and she put her hands to her cheeks.

“I remember now... We had a dinner party... all the teachers... I was drinking a bottle of coffee liquor by myself... Afterwards neither Ramon nor the others wanted me to drive away, but I ran, and when I'm drunk I run a lot.... I guess I managed to start the car... Or alcoholic coma... Shit... Fucking shit...” He hid his face in his hands and I thought he was going to cry, but he didn't, because as soon as he did, as soon as he pulled them away and looked at me harshly.

“Hey, you... What's this about being resurrected in a new world?”

I shrugged, what I knew wasn't much:

“Nobody knows why it happens, but it does. People die in your world and then they show up here.”

“What are you telling me, girl?”

“I'm Sabela... and I suppose you'll have a lot of questions about this resurrection thing, but we'd better leave them for later...”

“No, not for later... Now” Laura demanded.

“Yeah, but if you don't want to go back to the grave, the best thing to do is to keep moving the legs,” I said and pointed to the roof of a fishmonger’s: there was the frog-bird monster that I mentally baptised Gustavo.

We walked to the square and in no time we were near the statue of the brave Xoan de Ningures. I rushed to the headquarters of the Sons of the Sun to find help and went inside.

Well, I tried to get in because the door was locked and it didn't open and I smashed my face so hard against the glass that my face was left with a mark: my lips and nose, stuck there showing a sign of my clumsiness.

In spite of the situation, I was quite amused.

“Hey, you, Laura, look at this!”

“You better watch this...” she said in a trembling voice.

I turned around to find a man, the same idiot who had tried to shoot me in the head an hour before. I recognised him by his horse's head, it was quite distinctive. Well, the important thing is that he was pointing a gun at me again.

“Bad news! It's bad news, isn't it? Or is he a friend of yours?” Laura asked, grabbing my arm.

“What do you think?”

“Did you think you could get away from me, you bitch?” said the horse-face man

“But it was you who escaped...” I answered him.

“PUUUEEEHHH! I didn't run away! I had to take my friend to be cured... and then come back for you. The cowards are the others! They're all running away from the city because they're afraid of the Nation! But I'm not leaving Nebula until you're dead” he said, pointing his gun at me.

The best thing to do was not to think and act, so I threw the axe at him and the blade plunged into his head. He let out a high-pitched scream and fell to the ground; I really didn't expect the throw to go so well.

I approached the horse's face man and kicked it, it looked like it was completely dead and I felt things in my stomach: it wasn't like killing a monster, it was quite different. The corpse just lay there with an expression of empty stupidity on its face.

Yes, it was quite different, really, and I didn't feel quite right after killing the horse-face man. I pulled the axe from his face and when I touched the handle I felt again that pulsation that was like the beating of a heart.

I looked at Laura, she was trembling as she looked at Gustavo, who was on the roof of the barracks and staring at us with his six eyes. The only thing I could think of was to run away, after killing that man I didn't feel like fighting any more.

I couldn't make up my mind to leave and the reason was the asshole who I killed. I felt worse and worse, a horrible feeling in my gut; as if I had a hole or something dark that was sucking all the energy out of me.

“Danm...” I said, realising what I had to do to erase the guilt from me.

I must die and go back to the start of the fight, so I could indirectly resurrect the horse-faced idiot. Only then could I stop feeling like a used nappy. I started walking in the direction of Gustavo.

“What the hell are you doing, you animal!” Laura roared.

“Simple. I'll let that frog bug kill me and then I'll go back to the beginning of the fight and this time I won't throw the axe in his face.... To a leg or an arm, if you get hit there you don't die.”

“What?” Laura asked me with her mouth wide open, she didn't understand anything, but I wasn't going to explain it to her either. Besides, I only told her about my power because I was going to die.

Gustavo was watching me from the roof with his black eyes blinking at the same time.

“Come down at once, you animal!” I shouted at him.

Gustavo didn't come down to kill me but stayed up there doing nothing. He let out a lazy yawn and his eyes began to close, as if he was about to fall asleep.

“Come on, I'm waiting for you! Fight me if you have balls!” I shouted at him.

Then Gustavo left through the back of the building.

“You... You... You saved me? Did you scare the monster away from eating me alive?” asked a voice behind me, and when I turned around I discovered that my horse's face man was not dead. Although he looked like he was about to go to the other side, as he had an axe stuck all over his face.

“Well...” I said, because first I had hit him full in the face with an axe.

Horseface fainted and Laura put some fingers on his neck and said:

“It's still beating, but I don't think it will last long...”

“I know where we can take him... To get him patched up and so on, if we leave him like that he'll die,” I said and Laura nodded.

Well, between the two of us, we carried our horseface to Menta's House of Healing. Luckily for us, she had not yet left the city, and she could attend to the unfortunate man with the axe in his head. So, in the end, Laura and I ended up in the waiting room of the House of Healing. When we entered, we discovered that there were two people there: Melinda and Rodolfo. When Rodolfo saw Laura, his mouth dropped open and he approached her.

“You... It's you!” he exclaimed with a big smile on his face.

“Who...?” asked Laura.

“The woman of my dreams, we met at the foot of the Blue Mountain!” said Rodolfo.

“Is that how they flirt in your world, Sabela?” she asked and I shrugged: I didn't know much about flirting.

“You really don't know who I am?” asked Rodolfo, looking disappointed.

“No, I've never seen you in my life,” Laura replied.

“I guess... I guess I've got the wrong person,” said Rodolfo sadly.

“I thought you’ve already left," I said.

“Yes, maybe that would have been the smart thing to do,” Rodolfo commented.

“And the woman you thought you knew, but it turns out she's not, is Laura. She died and resurrected in our world,” I explained.

“Is that true? I think it's the first time in my life I've met someone who has successfully defied death,” said Rodolfo.

“Ha!” I laughed unconsciously.

In the end, as I said before, we all ended up in the waiting room, waiting to see if our horse's face would come out of the operation well or go straight to the grave to breed worms. The silence was marked by the ticking of the clock, as nobody opened their mouths to say a single word.

A few chairs to my right, was Rodolfo with a magazine in his hand, one of those heart magazines: Celebrity Love. There wasn't much to choose from: on top of a small table there was a pile of magazines with white denture guys on the cover, some children's books, an ashtray full of cigarette butts and a plant that seemed to be praying for someone to water it.

I noticed Melinda, the wizard girl, killing time by picking her nose for gold and staring at the ceiling. Lastly, there was Laura, the resurrected one who came from a place called Galicia, but more important than that was a painting above her head: a clown, again the same hideous clown who was looking at me as if he were really looking at me.

“Do any of you know how I can get back to my world?” Laura asked.

“I'm very sorry, Laura. But unfortunately I'm afraid I've never heard the story of a resurrected person who has managed to return to their world,” said Rodolfo.

Laura jumped up from her chair.

“Fuck, perfect! You're telling me I'm stuck in this hole forever? I'm going to have to live my life in this shitty world?” she shouted and I kind of felt a bit offended by that comment.

“Hey, the Moor isn't so bad.”

Laura glared at me.

“I've seen more death and misery today than in my thirty-five years of life.”

“And what do you have in your world that you want to go back to so badly?” I asked her.

“My cats!” she blurted out, with all the conviction in the world.

“Your cats? Just your cats?”

She shook her head:

“No, not only... I also have my job. I'm an art teacher and I like... I only have three students; it's a paradise really... And my parents. Oh! And I'm engaged! I forgot Roberto... In my world I had a life, it might not have been the best of all, but I was happy...” She sighed, losing all his strength and falling back into his seat.

“And now what do I have...?”

“One circumstance that is common to all resurrected people is that when they are resurrected –forgive the repetition- in our world, they acquire some rather powerful ability, that is to say: they become Marked,” explained Rodolfo.

“Ability like what?” asked Laura and Rodolfo was quick to answer:

“It varies depending on the person.”

Suddenly, a screech pierced my skull: it was Melinda.

“I know, I know! Now you can be a great magician, like me!”

“A wizard? Casting spells and stuff like that? But... How do you know that?” Laura asked.

“That's really easy,” shouted the girl, jumping up on the glass bedside table and raising her hands above her head, “You just have to put a lot of super emotion into what you say and shout fireball!” And no sooner had she said that than a fireball shot out of her hand and smashed into a poor, dying plant in the corner. Fortunately, it didn't go any further: between me and Rodolfo we put out the fire, while the little pyromaniac looked at her hands with her mouth open:

“Oh, shit! This magic thing is kind of dangerous, isn't it? I just didn't want to release any fireballs...”

Laura looked at her hands, with a smile on her face.

“Just like that then? That sounds great, that kind of power?” she said and stood up again, with reformed energy, with a long stride she walked to the window and opened it, reached out her hand and shouted, "Fireball!”

Nothing at all happened, and Laura said "Fireball" again, but it was as useless as asking the elm tree for a piece of cake. The third time was already a bit sad because it was very clear that the woman had no magic inside her. The energy evaporated from her body instantly and she collapsed next to Melinda who, compassionate as she was, patted her on the shoulder.

“It's okay...” she said in an attempt to comfort her.

“Maybe you have some fighting talent,” I said to Laura, as I took my axe from my belt. Take this and see if it activates any skills or anything.

I handed her the axe and she took it without any desire, but as soon as she touched the wood of the handle it was as if an electric shock shook her body.

“You... You... Do you know how much this weapon is worth?!”

“I don't think it's worth anything at all, why do you say that?”

“The axe is worth a hundred thousand sols! That's a lot, isn't it?”

“That can't be worth that much, you crazy woman!” I told him, nothing dad could be worth that much.

“Yes, yes, yes, it's true, I can see that!” she said and put the axe to his nose. “Wait a minute... It's the wood that's worth it... the wood is special...”

“How can the wood be special if it's from the Purple Forest? It's a very ordinary place... Well... as far as it goes, I suppose... Not quite.”

Rodolfo went straight to Laura, grinning from ear to ear.

“Perfect! Now we know what's so special about you, Laura!”

“What? What's special about me?” she said, unsure.

“Your power! You have the power of appraisal, maybe the power to identify objects...”

“Oh... That's some disappointing shit...” said Laura.

“Disappointing? I don't think you understand the true beauty and usefulness of a skill like yours. Thanks to it, you can know the exact value of a large number of objects, which is of great use. I mean, many times adventurers come across strange objects on their travels and, without knowing what they are, sell them for half or a third of their true value. However, you can find out the value of any of these objects.”

“That's cool, see how much my hat is worth!” Melinda jumped up and handed it to Laura.

“This... it's worthless...” she replied.

“It's worthless? Oh, my gosh! Does that mean it's priceless?” -said the brat, looking at her wizard's hat with exaggerated admiration.

“No, I mean it has no valour” Laura specified, but it didn't help because Melinda had already got the idea between her brain cells.

“Incalculable!” Melinda said as she put the hat on her head.

It was actually quite ugly: a typical wizard's hat with an embroidered smile and two plastic eyes with a black ball inside that, with every movement, went wildly from one side to the other.

“With a power like yours, it will be easy for you to make a living. I have an idea! Look, what you could do is...”

A loud scream cut the sentence short and I bolted out of the waiting room. I ran through the corridors in pursuit of those female screams that were soon joined by other howls that sounded like a mixture of man and animal.