Sam dreamed.

He stood atop a mountain of corpses, watching goblins with comically oversized shovels digging into graying flesh and flinging it into a furnace. But the furnace wasn’t a furnace, it was a dragon’s maw. Quentin, eyes burning like the sun, loomed over him a thousand times larger than he had ever been. One great scaled hand came down and plucked Sam up from the ground and brought him up to those eyes.

“You must convince my mistress not to eat you whole. Recite backwards the thirty-fifth paragraph of the Codex Draconis, and I will spare your parents’ lives.”

“What?” Sam struggled, but it was like his limbs were weighed down with lead. He turned, and saw it wasn’t lead, but Rashun, clinging to his hand.

“Why did you kill my daddy?” The boy asked, and before Sam could answer, the boy’s reptilian maw opened and snapped closed, severing Sam’s hand at the wrist. Sam screamed as blood geysered, and the child fell down, down, down into blackness and out of sight.

Heat washed over Sam, and he spun in place to find he was standing in front of the wizened god from the gray room, only the circle containing him was sparking and on fire, dissolving before his eyes.

“Kill you,” the god whispered, face splitting into a wide smile that went past his lips and cheeks and neck and his head fell backwards and rolled out of sight and still that smile lingered in the air. Sam screamed and turned, running through air grown thick and sticky, like gravity itself was fighting him.

The door to the dungeon loomed before him. He reached out and tried to push it open, but it was locked from the other side. He howled, but no sound came out, and he pounded on the metal door, but no one heard. He spun back, and felt ice pierce his stomach as Marie, his Marie, the eighteen year-old woman he’d known four years ago, walked up to him and stabbed her sword into his belly.

“Don’t worry,” she said with that gap-tooth smile. “I’ll come back and make everything better soon.”

“But I don’t want you to come back. I want you to not leave!” The words tumbled half-gibberish from rubbery lips. The cold in his belly spread, chest, neck, loins, legs, until he shivered from it.

“Oh, she won’t come back,” Apollyon’s multiple voices said from somewhere above him. He tilted his head back to see the sky writhing and whorling with shapes and eyes and mouths. “She’s not real. None of this is. You should know that by now. So nothing matters. You’re dying, but you’re not real. Goodbye. We’ll just make a new one of you next time.”

Sam fell to his knees, shivering, pain twisting through his body.

“You really should have seen this coming,” Araxes said, stepping around to peer at him. “Nothing should surprise you anymore, not with the power you hold.”

“I can’t do it all,” Sam gasped.

“You should,” Bugruk said, and Sam had to turn to see the orc walking towards him on his stumps, dragging arms three times longer than they should be behind him. “Who else is going to? I want my legs back.”

“He’s not going to get them back,” Cora said, and Sam was suddenly standing on her old form, the orb, with the glowing gem. Except she was next to him as well, cold and beautiful. “They cost too much. Everything costs too much. You need to budget better.”

“And get laid,” said Sally. “Because bubba, you’re gonna die. Might as well have fun before you do.”

His blood flowed out of his stomach and became a face on the ground. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth. The eyes looked at him, and the mouth became a smile.

“I’m going to kill you.”

“Who are you?” Sam stared.

“I’m you. Didn’t you know that?”

He felt death claim him. His soul lifted from his body. But this time a hand reached out from the sky and grasped his throat, and tore him in half.

“We’re sorry,” a voice said. “Your time is up. Thanks for playing.”

He screamed as more hands came, and ripped him to pieces too small to find ever again.

* * *

Sam sat bolt-upright, Thumb Bane slapping into his hand as he Called for it by instinct. The hands grasped at him, their fingers wormed their way into his flesh, and tore—

The shreds of the nightmare dropped away from him, and he found himself in his room, sweat pouring off him in buckets, soaking his sheets and the mattress underneath.

Nightmare. The thought did little to calm his racing heart. Gods, haven’t had one that bad in a long time.

He glanced at the clock in his display. After midnight. He’d only gotten a few hours of sleep, and none of it restful. He knew, as his heartrate finally stared to subside, that he should just go back to sleep and try to make it up.

An image of Rashun, disappearing into the fanged abyss, shot through his mind.

Or maybe he should go get a snack, something light to steady his nerves, before giving sleep a try again.

He slithered out from under his covers, changed into a light shirt and trousers—tossing his swear-sodden clothes into the hamper at the other end of the room, and left his room. He turned right and headed for the stairs down, and soon wound up in the mess hall. It was all but deserted this time of night, though the mana lamps on the walls still burned with a cheery light.

There was also a strange scent wafting through the room, like burnt popcorn but sharper. Sam frowned as he made his way through the maze of tables towards the front of the room and the kitchen and larder there. The smell grew stronger as he approached. For a moment, he thought something as on fire.

Turns out, he wasn’t wrong. As he rounded the serving counter into the kitchen proper, Araxes poked his head out from behind an oven and his eyeflames darkened and returned to full brightness in a blinking motion. And beyond him, Sam could see one of the stoves was lit and a large pan full of black beans was busy roasting away. The strange burnt smell was coming from those.

“Tolliver?” Araxes came foward, wiping his hands on his apron. “What the devil are you doing in my kitchen at this hour? Don’t you flesh bags need at least eight hours of sleep? Or has that changed since my day?”

“Nightmares,” Sam grunted, then frowned. “Wait. Your kitchen?”

“Do you see anyone else completing a six-day quest to become lord-high chef of this place?” the lich asked acerbically. “No, if I am to be given no domain for myself, I shall take one by virtue of being the only one in this benighted hole in the ground with culinary skills that can serve up something other than old boots with ketchup.”

Sam blinked at that as he hitched up against the serving counter. “I’m sure we all appreciate your sacrifice. But… Why?”

The lich turned back to the pans on the stove. “I used to truly enjoy the taste of good coffee, you know. And I prided myself on knowing, understanding, and being able to perform every part of the process. I’ve picked the beans, husked them, roasted them, ground them, and then drank them. There is something positively religious about that first taste of a brew you’ve nurtured from root to percolator. That’s what this is,” he waved a hand at the pans. “Good coffee requires hand-roasting. Anything else just loses something from the flavor profile.”

Well, that explained the smell at least. “Can you even taste coffee anymore?”

“After a fashion. My tongue left me with the rest of my flesh, but I can still feel the heat upon my molars, and still smell the brew, and feel it slide down my gullet. It is enough to conjure up the memories.”

“Does it always smell this bad when it’s roasting?” Sam asked, wrinkling his nose.

“Oh yes. That’s how you can tell you have a good batch. It’s also why I do it at night when others are all but asleep. No sense in annoying the entire dungeon with unlovely scents.”

Sam nodded slowly, then his sleepy brain kicked him in the shin and muttered something into his ear. “You didn’t answer my question.”

Araxes stilled. “No. I did not.”

“Will you?”

A very dusty sigh. “Tolliver, you are constitutionally incapable of taking a hint, aren’t you?”

“Only after one in the morning.”

Araxes grunted. “Just so. Alright, fine. I do this because I am bored, Tolliver. Does that assuage your burning curiousity?”

Sam blinked. “Bored? We just finished a life-or-death battle against an undead monstrosity. You just got kidnapped. There’s been dragons for crying out loud.”

“Yes, all very amusing distractions for a few moments. But now they are over.”

“You can’t just take a moment to enjoy the quiet?”

Araxes finally turned back, and gave Sam a look.

“Tolliver,” he said in the same tone of voice he might use to address a particularly dumb child. “I am four hundred and thirty-two years old. I do not sleep. And before this accursed episode began, I was the sole monarch of a land I carved from my neighbor’s territories with my own bare hands. My days and nights were filled with policy decisions, court cases, treaties and diplomatic concerns, army logistics, food shortages and windfalls… I had no cabinet, needed no court. I did it all.

“And I’ll bet,” he added, eyeflames narrowing at Sam, “you have never once asked yourself why I did all that.”

"If you give me a mug of that coffee,” Sam said wearily, “and a plate of something hot to eat, I’ll indulge you.”

“This is a fair trade,” Araxes said, deadpan. “Ham and eggs?”

“Sure.”

The lich nodded and moved back into the kitchen for a moment. Sam turned and leaned against the counter, looking out through the serving window at the mess hall. In any other world, this place would have taken months to construct. Sam had done it in thirty minutes. Gods, if they could bottle the construction power in Cora’s strange ruleset, they could sell it and be rich for the rest of their lives.

Ruleset. That’s the word for it, isn’t it?

If Apollyon was telling him the truth—and lord above wasn’t that the biggest ‘if’ he’d ever encountered in his life—then even Cora was bound under unseen machinations that determined who she was and how she acted. Or at least the limits within which she might act.

They all were. Except for Sam, thanks to a quirk of fate and a dumb-luck choice during Creation.

That made his sleepy brain take a new direction. Could he tell the difference? In theory, for the past three days, he’d been utterly free of the rules, of the System’s influence on his decisions and thoughts. He didn’t feel different…

A wooden plate heaped with fluffy egs and charred ham suddenly landed in front of him with a clatter, accompanied by a fork. It was followed by a large pewter mug full of steaming coffee.

“Here,” Araxes said, coming around from behind him, wiping off his phalanges with a dish towel. “Now, I believe you owed me a question?”

Sam took a gulp of the bitter drink, sighing as it hit his bloodstream and somehow both wiped out tiredness and relaxed him all at once.

God damn, how long had it been since he had a good cup?

“Alright,” he said, turning back to the lich. “Why did you set things up so it was just you ruling and doing everything? I assume it was a power thing.”

“For the first year or so, you’d have been right. Cementing my powerbase, establishing my right to rule, crushing dissenters with a merciless hand…” Araxes shrugged. “It was part of the job. But after that?”

The lich gave a dusty sigh and reached up to tap his crown with a fingertip. “I was bored, Tolliver. Do you know what it’s truly like? To live for centuries, to watch the years march on without you? And to not change with them? That’s the thing they don’t tell you about lichdom, you know; you become frozen in time. Your body stops aging, but your mind continues on. Soon, you start seeking new experiences just to keep the ennui at bay.”

“Araxes,” Sam said around a mouthful of ham, giving the lich a look. “Are you trying to make me feel sorry for you?”

“No, young fool,” the lich said amiably. “I am trying to make you understand that I have spent the last 400 years successfully managing an entire kingdom by myself, and now here with you I am so unused that I have taken to serving breakfast and roasting coffee for plebians who wouldn’t understand the perfect blend of acidity to sweetness if it walked up and built a three-story town house in the middle of their idyllic family home.”

Sam blinked. “You want me to give you something to do?”

“I told you once that you would be wise to use me in an advisor position. I say it again, but with more force and less intent to stab you in the back as soon as possible.” The lich leaned forward until his eyeflames were bare inches from Sam’s face. “Give me work, Tolliver. Before I go mad in this place and seek out your pesky fairy for a game of Parcheesi.”

Araxes turned then back to his roasting pans, leaving Sam to contemplate the varied layers to what had just been said over mouthfuls of ham and eggs.

The lich was changing. A week ago, he’d never have even considered making a snack for Sam—Not one that wasn’t poisoned, anyway. That thought set off a glint of suspicion in his tired mind, but a quick check of his status showed no ill status effects, so it was probably fine. Nor would he have been so candid.

In fact, he thought as he cleaned up his plate and set it in the sink, Araxes was changing far quicker than he would have thought possible. At first it had been for his gem, the one that would help him gain at least some measure of power back. Then it had been… What, to be useful? Sam remembered finding him in the guard hut following the battle of Melloram, watching the lich stitch up an injured orc.

“Thanks Araxes,” he called, heading for the door. Already he could feel sleep trying to wrap him up again. “And… I’ll think over what you’ve said. Probably I can find you more stuff to do around here.”

“Do that,” the lich said, focused on his roasting pans. “Rapidly, if you please.”

Changing very fast, Sam thought as he left the room. Almost as if—

He stopped dead in the middle of the hall. His sleep-deprived brain flashed and sparked, calling up half-remembered words.

Or did you believe it natural…?

That goblins were all crazy, that gnomes were all tinkerers, that orcs were all swarthy warriors…

That liches were all evil despots?

And the words of Cora, from almost two weeks back, to when she had first met Araxes and they’d been speculating on the nature of his shadow-copy self.

It is likely that the aberration has been disconnected from the system (words words words).

“I’ll be damned,” Sam breathed as he mounted the stairs. That was it, wasn’t it? He’s changing because he’s outside the system. He lost his connection to it when Cora brought him back as a copy, and now…

What, his real personality was asserting itself?

Or maybe just that the system no longer manipulated him towards the desired outcome.

I am too tired to deal with this tonight.

He made it back to his room, and felt the coffee settling things inside his head. That had always been the way; while Ma or Pop might drink coffee in the middle of the day and it would keep them up all night, for Sam it was always an equalizer, something that calmed his thoughts and helped him balance out. And now it was doing its job, and he felt dreamless sleep beckoning.

What I really need, he thought muzzily as he stripped and crawled back into bed, is a place where I can talk to people about this crap. Without the System being able to hear it. So I can actually tell people what’s going on and bounce ideas off and stuff.

Right. Sure. Just go ahead and build an interdimensional space, like those Admin Room things Apollyon has. And let’s make it a workshop, while I’m at it. And a training place. And since we’re dreaming, let’s make it all outside of time so I can get everything done that I need to without having to worry about getting blindsided by a lich or a dragon or an extra-dimensional entity that wants to eat my soul or something.

Sure. Why not.

He yawned. His eyes slipped shut. He felt his breathing even out, felt sleep creeping up on him, and let himself relax into oblivion.

…

And then his eyes snapped open.