When Sam opened his eyes, he was in the White Room.

No, his mind told him even as his instincts flared and he dropped into a crouch, drawing Thumb Bane and readying his abilities. Not the White Room, merely a white room. The steel and ice evaporated, replaced by adrenaline and paranoia. The change-up was going to take its toll later. Right now, it was fight or flee time.

The square chamber was perhaps 20 x 20, with sterile white walls and harsh overhead lighting that cast everything into stark relief. A white table stood near the closest wall, with two white chars, one on either side. There were two doors on opposite walls, one of what looked like oak, and the other of some black material that looked like it had been alive at some point.

He reached out instinctively for his message system, and blanched when he received an error message.

***Administrator Override in effect. All communications channels blocked for the duration of the summons.***

“Oh-kay…” He turned in place, eyes trying to look everywhere at once. Okay. Think, Sam, think. He’d felt something like this before, when he’d died in the White Room and gotten pulled into the Anomaly. But that had been because of a set of very specific circumstances he’d tripped, put in place by people who had banded together to fight against the System itself. If this was similar, what triggers had he activated? All he’d done—

Was talk to Marie.

Even as he thought it, even as it clicked into place in his mind, even as he knew beyond doubt that that was what had triggered this strange response, the black door opened.

He turned, hammer raised. And something stepped into the room.

There was no other way to describe the thing. It stood as tall as Sam—except when it didn’t. It was black and formless, and yet seemed to possess every form all at once, each flowing and changing into the next with no rhyme or reason or method. It shut the door behind it with a pair of hands that seemed to appear for that specific purpose before they disappeared back into the swirling chaos.

The thing stopped, and a dozen eyes blinked open in that black mass to stare at Sam. He tensed, his own eyes wide and staring. His palms were sweaty against Thumb Bane, his heart thudding wildly against his ribs. He knew, suddenly and unequivocally, what a mouse in the den of a tiger must feel like.

“You are Samuel James Tolliver,” the creature spoke from a mouth that had been an eyeball only a moment before.

“If you brought me here, you know that I am,” Sam said. If the past week had taught him anything, it was that you didn’t back away in the face of a predator. That only encouraged them to chase you.

The head of a minotaur emerged from the swirl just long enough to nod once, then disappeared. “Yes, I do. Do you know why you are here?”

Marie.

“Because I asked ‘why’,” he said, knowing it to be truth.

“Yes.” For a second, Sam would have sworn the creature sounded pleasantly surprised. “Exactly that. Would you like to sit down?”

“I would like to be sent back to my dungeon.”

“And you will be. After this conversation. After… Decisions have been made.”

It was the way he said it—hell, it was that and everything else that had happened over the last five minutes—that twigged it for Sam.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you,” he said, and as he said it he knew that he was a dead man. “You’re one of the gods, or wizards, or whatever… You’re one of the shapers of reality, that Cora was made to fight. Aren’t you.”

“I am.” Again a head grew, again it nodded, but this time it stayed, two glowing eyes opening up to study him. “My name is Apollyon.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Possibly. But not here. This is an Admin chamber, specifically warded to keep abuses like that from occurring. Back when such things were a concern. And before you ask, you need not worry about ongoing time. As I’m sure you have already encountered, time is malleable and can be made to flow differently in rooms like these. You will be returned, in due time, to the exact moment in the exact condition you were removed.”

Nothing about the creature was designed to instill confidence or trust. Sam felt his monkey brain screaming for him to run. His bowels rumbled, his hands shook on the haft of his weapon, and he had to swallow twice to get past the fear swelling in his throat.

“You just want to talk to me?”

“I do.” Another head rose next to the first. Both nodded. The second one disappeared. “Would you like to sit?” A trio of hands flowed out of the mass and gestured to the chairs.

“No,” he bit out. “I wouldn’t.”

“Very well.” The creature ambulated to one of the other chairs and its form shifted, somehow sitting down while still never holding a single shape for more than an eyeblink. It was starting to make Sam nauseous.

“You are wondering why I have brought you here.” It was not a question.

“I’m wondering how you brought me here too,” Sam shot back, turning to keep the creature in his full view. “And if you could always do this, why you haven’t before.”

“Because I could not always do this. Not until very recently. Not for lack of power on my part, but for lack of jurisdiction.”

That made Sam blink. “What?”

“Two days ago, you became a True Being. Before that, you were a Mob. A unique mob, yes. Given sapience and even agency, but still merely a mob. Administrative powers, such as the one that allowed me to summon you here, are hard-coded into the system as only being applicable to True Beings. It was a failsafe, put in to prevent us from helping others ‘cheat’.”

“Cheat?” Sam was staring now.

“The most egregious example put forth was the potential to place an Administrative Hold on the boss of a dungeon, teleporting it to an Admin room and leaving the treasure horde within the dungeon unguarded. There were other possibilities foreseen as well. I trust I do not need to list them all?”

The world listed beneath his feet, sending his equilibrium spinning off into the distance.

“You make it sound like a game,” he breathed, searching for sanity.

“It was, once. After a fashion. But now we are getting into the ‘why’ of your summons. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to sit? This will be easier if you refrain from vomiting as much as possible.”

Sam almost tripped into the chair across the table from the—Apollyon. He was just staring now, fear forgotten, just trying to find his balance again in the world.

“Why did you summon me,” he asked, his voice almost a croak.

“Because the one I have named Diana, and the one you previously knew as Marie, was going to tell you of me and my plans. It was a possibility I foresaw, but a remote one. I underestimated the effect you would have on her, even after so much time.” The head flowed back into the shifting mass and another one formed in its place, female, tilted to the side as if examining him under a glass. “I am not used to finding myself in error.”

“So you’re here to tell me to lay off?” Anger rose, giving him a needed anchor. “What, you’re the muscle? ‘Don’t ask questions or I’ll squash you like a bug’? Is that it?”

A thousand eyes blinked open and stared at Sam. He froze, suddenly very aware of just how foolish his outburst might have been.

Apollyon studied him in perfect stillness for almost a full five seconds. Then all the eyes but one dissolved back into the shifting mass.

“You are here,” the shaper of reality said quietly, “because the Admin Rooms are set apart and secure from the system. What happens in here is not logged, not recorded, not transmitted. You are here because Diana was about to disclose to you, in the open, a portion of my plan that the system cannot learn and the Five cannot hear.

“You are here, Samuel James Tolliver, to have your questions answered.”

* * *

Apollyon Looked at Samuel Tolliver, studying him in and out with all the senses at his disposal. It was… Enlightening.

He was the first True being Apollyon had encountered in over seventy millennia. The first, excepting his children. The first spontaneous occurrence. The first since the old world had collapsed in fire and screams and the new one had risen to take its place.

He had forgotten just how beautiful they were.

“I am going to tell you of Diana, who you knew as Marie,” he said through a mouth formed for that purpose. “Afterwards you will have questions. I will not answer all of them, because there is a limit to what you may know. But within those limits, I will answer.

“Diana came to me in response to the invite I set before her. She—“

“The wandering dungeon,” Samuel Tolliver interrupted, and for a brief moment Apollyon could believe he was in the Before Time, guiding his True Being through their first steps in the world. “It was a trap.”

“In a way. The wandering dungeon is nothing more than a mobile base of operations I maintain for myself and my children. But every so often I will gift the knowledge of its existence to individuals whom I deem potentially worthy of joining me.”

“Marie?”

“Curiously, no. David. The leader of her party. He was quick-witted and driven. An ideal candidate. I was in error about him, but in your Marie I found a much more suitable candidate.”

The boy’s eyes narrowed, radiating suspicion and anger. “What did you do to her?”

“I showed her the truth.”

In one fluid movement Apollyon rose from his chair and crossed to stand in the center of the room. Samuel Tolliver jerked to his feet at the movement, his hand bringing up the Heirloom Weapon he held. A good item, that. Very astute choice of skill.

“You are bonded to a weapon that was once intended to destroy me and my colleagues, those you have so accurately termed the ‘shapers of reality’. Cora, as you call her, was the last such weapon created, and the last employed in a war that ended seventy thousand years ago. You are aware of this?”

“Yeah,” the boy growled, like a pup at an adult trying to teach him things. “I’m aware.”

“Then you are also aware that that particular war ended many many millennia ago?”

He received a cautious nod. The boy was doubtless wondering where he was going with this.

“My colleagues—we call ourselves ‘The Five’—believe that your Cora continues to represent a grave threat, not only to us but also to the world itself. They are not incorrect in this. They will expend all their efforts to destroy her, and any vestiges of her. Yourself included, and likely all who have come in contact with you.”

“Yeah, got that too. What does this have to do with Marie?”

“I am getting to that. Your Cora is a persistence within the system. We have slain her a multitude of times, and each time she merely fades back into the essence of the world, to rise again a thousand years or so later to wage war against us again. She and we, all of us, are locked in an endless cycle.

“But we are locked in that cycle, Samuel Tolliver, because my colleagues have accepted that this world over which we preside is the true world, the one that must exist and continue to do so. They believe the old world is lost to us, and all its freedoms and beauties.

“What my colleagues do not know, and the reason I could not have you speaking with Diana about it for they would surely overhear, is that I do not share in their belief. I knew your Cora, before those who opposed us took her and warped her and changed her into a weapon to use against us. She was as we were. She was more than we were. And I believe, within her, she holds the key not only to ending this war, but also to restoring to this world what has been lost for countless millennia.

“But many difficulties stood between her and I, and my desired result. She had been changed, converted to an enemy. So I had to wait and hope that time might revert her, or that something of substance might alter the cycle. Too, I could not contact her directly. The Five would find out, and would take action against me. So I needed—“

Agents,” Samuel Tolliver interrupted. “You needed people to go out and make contact for you. You needed—Marie.”

“I did. And those like her. I brought her into the wandering dungeon, showed her the truth, and offered her a Choice.”

The boy was breathing hard now. Apollyon could see the emotions raging within him, though no longer as clearly as he once had. The boy was a True Being. Parts were closed off to him now.

“What ‘truth’ did you show her?”

Apollyon allowed himself to still. Allowed a single human head to grow from his mass, and allowed a quiet smirk to bloom on that dark face.

“That the world you know, Samuel James Tolliver, is a lie.”