You’re not here to read about my sad life before I became a legend. You want to know how my friends and I saved everything that is and ever will be. How Barney the Just, Bloody Sonja, Constantine Trueheart, Mad Stephen, and me, General Mace Phoenix, picked a fight with the greatest evil in existence and yelled with one collective voice, “You shall not pass!”

I paraphrase, but that’s basically what we did. Every kid beyond the Flat Earth knows those names, but those weren’t the ones we were born with. This is the story of how we got them.

So as things usually start with me, the story begins with me screaming.

My eyes were closed. Strong hands suddenly gripped my arms and shook me, which made me scream all the more.

“Mace!” came a woman’s voice behind my closed eyes. “For God’s sake, wake up!”

Who the hell is Mace?

My name was Chris Able. I was about to play a new RPG game with my closest friends in a cabin in the north Georgia mountains. Barney brought The Tomb of Angelus home from a gaming convention in Eastern Europe and said it would “blow our minds.” Alec Bryson, Tom Ameda, Melony Hahn, and I were just happy to get together for the first time in months and agreed to let Barney GM his new game for us.

Did I pass out? I hadn’t even finished my first beer, damn it!

And then I remembered who Mace was. That was the name of the character I’d chosen to play.

“Mace, open your eyes,” the woman said. “We got a situation!” Her grip tightened on my arms, and she gave me a couple of good shakes.

“Chris Able, open your goddamn eyes!”

My eyes flew open. A strange woman was holding my arms, but she looked vaguely familiar. Behind her was a dark, circular room with smooth stone blocks for walls and marbled columns arranged equidistant from each other. Every other column held an ensconced candle, and each cast a flickering orange light on the entire room.

A commotion came from my right. Two men struggled to place log bars on a thick wooden door. Someone—or something—was pounding on the door, and I heard guttural screams and curses coming from the other side.

Given that I had literally blinked my eyes in a cabin and then opened them to a different room without my friends, I went into mindless fight-or-flight mode. I just acted on instinct. I head-butted the woman in her nose and felt it shatter against my forehead. Her grip on my arms fell away as she cursed and stumbled backward. Her hands went up to her nose, and blood spurted through her fingers. She bumped a stone pedestal in the center of the room that looked like a birdbath with a large red jewel in the middle.

“Goddamn it, Mace,” she yelled, “it’s Sonja—I mean Melony!”

Melony? This woman wasn’t Melony, my friend and old college crush! She was about as tall as me and had long red hair tied into a single braid down her back. She wore hard, leather armor over her torso and chest, and leather bracers on her forearms. Her shoulders and upper arms were bare, and, my God, they had the popping veins of a bodybuilder. My Melony had dark brown hair and was about six inches shorter than me. She had always had the body of someone who ate right and exercised daily, but nothing like the comic book superhero in front of me.

“You’re not Melony!” I growled and then almost screamed again.

The voice that came out of my mouth was not my voice. It was much lower than mine and had a vaguely aristocratic accent.

“What’s happening?” I cried. “What’s wrong with my voice?”

“This door won’t hold for long,” yelled one of the men at the door. He had black, greasy, neck-length hair and a scraggly black beard. He wore a long robe that seemed patched together from differently colored burlap sacks. He was gaunt, had hollow eyes, and looked like a beggar from the 13th century. A rope belt circled his waist, where multiple leather sacks dangled and swayed with his movement. The one thing on his belt that drew my attention was a slotted case like a phone protector holding a small leather-bound book.

The other guy was about two feet shorter than the beggar. He had bushy gray hair poking out from under a steel helmet and a thick gray beard on his ruddy face. He wore a tattered white cloak with golden fringes, and on his back was a bronze shield with an image of the sun.

I swallowed once. Is that a… dwarf?

“The door only has a 1 Strength,” said the beggar as he slammed the last two-by-four bar into a horizontal slot. “All it’ll take is a—”

A large, black spearhead exploded through the door, causing the beggar and dwarf to dive to either side. Inhuman, green fingers with claws poked through the hole in the door and started pulling pieces away. The beggar took daggers from the sheathes on his belt and slashed at the fingers. Whatever was trying to get through issued a guttural scream and pulled them back.

“Sergar’s balls!” the dwarf cursed and drew a heavy mace that was swinging on his belt.

“Constantine,” Sonja growled with a nasal tone due to her broken nose, “give me some healing before I choke on my own blood!”

The dwarf gathered his wits—

Constantine, oh God, the name my friend Tom chose for the character he wanted to play in our RPG. This can’t be happening.

—and hurried over to the woman—Melony?—and placed his right hand over her nose. Blood covered her face, and her nose was about the size of a golf ball. She winced but didn’t pull away. Constantine’s left hand grasped the golden medallion swinging from the pendant around his neck. He closed his eyes, muttered some words that I couldn’t understand, and then a golden shimmer surrounded his hand over Sonja’s—Melony’s!—nose. When the dwarf pulled his hand away, fresh blood still covered her face, but her nose looked normal.

“Did he just… was that magic?” I asked the room. All I could do was stare at this woman who claimed to be Melony, whose nose I’d smashed just a moment ago and was now perfectly healed.

“Chris, look at me,” she said. She sounded nothing like Melony, but there was a sudden tone or cadence in her voice that did sound like Melony. It got my attention.

“I can’t explain everything now. It’s Melony, but call me Sonja; it’ll be less confusing for everyone. Just use your sword and follow your instincts. Everything will be fine.”

“My sword?” I muttered.

She nodded toward the longsword strapped to my belt. I also got a good look at my hands. They had leather gloves, and hard leather bracers covered the outside of my forearms. I could see the skin of my inner forearms beneath the straps and, well, I had bodybuilder muscles myself. My forearms were broad, and their veins popped like I’d just lifted hundred-pound dumbbells. I never had those kinds of muscles in my life, not even when I graduated from the police academy.

And if that weren’t strange enough, I saw a list with numbers tattooed in black ink on my forearm. When I looked a little closer, the breath left my lungs in a shocked burst. The tattoos were the stats I’d just rolled up for my paladin character a few minutes ago.

NAMES

Character Name: Mace

Player Name: Chris Able

TRAITS

Positive: Disciplined, Honorable, Merciful

Negative: Stubborn

CHARACTER STATS

Rank: Apprentice

Strength: (1) 3

Toughness: (1) 2

Dexterity: (1) 3

Intelligence: (1)

Charisma: (1)

Hit Points: 12/12

Magic Points: 3/3

SKILLS

Defense: You are experienced in the art of blocking and dodging attacks. +2 to your Dexterity.

SPELLS

Healing Touch: You can tap your Ancestral Blood to heal yourself or another living creature you can touch. Heal 10% of total Hit Points. Costs 2 Magic Points.

Ancestral Smite: You can tap your Ancestral Blood to deal additional damage to creatures you hit. Add 10% extra damage to a single hit. Costs 1 Magic Point.

EQUIPMENT:

Ancestral Longsword (+2 to Strength when used to attack): A two-sided blade with a worn, pearl hilt and steel crossguard.

Leather Armor (+1 to Toughness): A breastplate and bracers made of hardened leather.

“Stephen, Constantine, get behind us!” Sonja shouted.

Her frenzied yells pulled me away from staring at my tattooed arm.

The beggar, Stephen, and the dwarf, Constantine, hurried behind Sonja and me.

Stephen muttered some words. An oily black mist formed around his hands which he aimed at the door. The hairs on my body stood straight when I gazed at that strange dark mist, and I felt bile rise in the back of my throat. I didn’t know if this reaction came from my terror or Stephen’s magic.

Constantine pulled the shield off his back and brandished his heavy mace. He muttered some words of his own, but all I could understand was the word “Sergar” again. Once he finished, a golden shimmer surrounded his entire body, and the anger that had distorted his face a moment ago turned to intense resolve.

Sonja picked her ax up from the ground, took on a battle stance, and, I swear to God, twirled it like freakin’ Conan before letting it settle in both hands. A feral grin spread across her blood-streaked face as she stared at the door that those green, clawed fingers were viciously trying to pull apart. Screeches and guttural speech that could not have come from a human throat tore their way from the other side.

A billion and one questions floated through my mind, but one jumped to the top of my consciousness:

If these are my friends, how do they know what they’re doing and I haven’t a clue?

I figured that question would take time, so I went with something more immediate.

“Are those, uh, orcs?”

Sonja snorted. “I wish.” She twirled her ax again and gave it a fond look. “Mourner will taste more monster blood today.”

Another spearhead smashed through the bottom of the door, turning one of the slats to splinters. The guttural screeches from the other side got louder and more fevered.

“Mace, draw your sword,” Sonja said over the terrifying sounds, “it’s almost through.”

“I don’t know how to use a sword!”

“Do it! And don’t die again!”

“What?”

She didn’t elaborate but stared at the splintering door.

This is insane, I thought. Beyond insane. This has to be a dream. But I drew my longsword anyway. It pulled free from the scabbard with a metallic shing, and its blade gleamed in the meager candlelight.

And just like that, I felt…different.

I was still more scared and confused than I’d ever been, but those feelings faded into the background. What I mostly felt was anger. And not the kind where someone cuts you off in traffic or when your favorite baseball team loses a playoff series. No, this was an anger born of righteousness directed at whatever was clawing its way through that door. Those monsters stood against everything that I ever believed in or held dear. Honor, mercy, and discipline were the complete opposite of what those creatures were. They preyed on the innocent, reveled in their blood, laughed at their pleas for mercy. They did not deserve the gift of life, for they did everything in their power to snuff it out.

It was my duty to end them with my Ancestral Longsword.

The top of the door buckled inward and then exploded into shards around the bars that had held it closed. The door’s jagged bottom flew halfway across the room and slid to a stop in front of Sonja and me. Beyond the door was complete darkness, but I could see shadows flitting about in it. All was quiet, and then several long green arms with yellowed talons grabbed the two bars off their slots and threw them into the room.

My first battle had begun.