When I woke up that morning, the first sign that something was off was that I still had all my covers.
I slowly raised my aching head from the pillow–God, how much did I drink last night?–and cast my gaze around the bedroom for Lee, the glow of dawn an assault on my eyes. My resident bed bully was nowhere to be seen; I could probably count on one hand the number of times she woke up before sunrise in all the time I’d known her. Still, if she wanted to get an early start on questing and grinding in whatever fantasy RPG had absorbed her life this month, I wasn’t going to complain. It’s not like she would listen to me if I did.
The second sign was so obvious I could hardly believe that it took me so long to notice: I wasn’t in my bedroom. I was in a bedroom, sure, but not one I’d ever seen before. It was small, barely large enough for the cot and bedside table that filled it. The wooden walls and furniture were simple, unadorned, and unfinished, the hempen blanket thin and ratty. An unpleasant musty odor hung in the stale air.
Panic flared up within me, and doubled when my scrambling hands found no sign of my cell phone or wallet. Jesus, had I been kidnapped? Had I gone home with some strange person from the bar? Wait, yesterday was Tuesday, wasn’t it? Why was I at the bar at all?
Wracking my brain, I walked myself through the events of the previous day. I woke up, took my pills, got ready for work, suffered from 9 to 5 at my shitty desk job, all normal and fine. Lee and I had plans to have Dan and Em over for board games, as was our routine, but when I got home from work, I found Lee gaming in our mess of a living room, seemingly unbothered by the mountains of trash on either side of her. I stormed into our bedroom out of frustration, and then–
No. No, that couldn’t have been real. That was impossible. It had to have been a dream. Right?
I nearly fell from the bed in my effort to reach for my pantsuit jacket, which was slumped on the ground in a black puddle of fabric just outside the range of my long arms. My shaking fingers found the small pocket on the inside of the coat, and as they fumbled inside, I desperately hoped that they would come up empty. Instead, my hand closed around the small gemstone I feared I would find there. The little rock that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that my dream from last night was anything but.
My head and heart pounded in time with one another as I beheld the damning object. It was a perfect octahedron about the size of a coin, glowing in the early morning gloom with pearly radiance. Each of its faces carried a sigil like the sun, with rays of light draping from its core like hair. It was meant to be a sign of my so-called divine status or whatever. I’d pocketed the thing instead, much more interested with how I was going to spend the small pouch of gold coins my benefactor provided me with before I woke up and returned to reality.
Everything was coming back to me in a blurry rush. The conversation on the clouds. The fall from Heavyn. The bard, what was his name again? I couldn’t remember. The tavern—I rented a room there, didn’t I? That had to be where I was now—and ale, so much ale. I had stumbled up the stairs, as drunk as I’d ever been, and then promptly passed out without taking my meds.
A prickling sensation started in my gut and crawled up my spine. I didn’t have my meds on me when I came here, so I couldn’t have taken them last night even if I’d been sober. Worse, I couldn’t take them this morning. Or tonight. Or tomorrow, or the next day, or–
Without another thought, I brought the white gem to my lips and whispered, “I accept the mark of the Champion of Light.” The smooth stone dissolved into embers of light, spreading out to fill the space. A gust of wind from nowhere blew through the small room as the motes of energy coalesced a few feet above the bare wooden floor. The radiance grew in magnitude until I was forced to shield my aching eyes from the glare with my hand as a strange sensation burned in my chest. When my eyes finally adjusted to the light and the pain faded, I scowled at the person that appeared at its epicenter.
“Brave hero!” Her voice trumpeted through the bedroom with all the grace of a truck blaring its horn on the freeway. Thin arms encased in pale gold lace reached for the ceiling above. “You have finally accepted your destiny as the Champion of Lenora, Goddess of Light, to save this world from darkness!” The bright expression on her porcelain features faded somewhat, as if she only just noticed where she was. “What foul dungeon have you found yourself in? This place reeks of dark sorcery.”
“Pretty sure that’s just piss,” I replied. “But that’s not why I called you. I need you to send me home.”
Lenora’s glowing, pupilless white eyes widened with surprise. “Have you defeated the Demon Lord Ventalus already? Why, it has not been but a single night since I sent you upon this noble quest.” Her self-satisfied smirk curled her golden lips. “I always knew I made the right selection with you, Jennifer Joyce. I never doubted it for a moment.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “You know, maybe you should’ve. I haven’t defeated anybody. I don’t want to defeat anybody. I want to go home.”
The blinding light in the room dimmed. “You haven’t?”
“Nope.”
The goddess stamped her little foot against the ground. “How am I supposed to send you home, then?”
“I dunno, magic?” I didn’t bother trying to keep the pettiness from my tone. “You’re a goddess, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am! Look at me!” She twirled through the air in front of me, sparkles trailing in her wake. “But Ventalus has been corrupting the Shards of my power throughout the land for their own selfish gain; I grow weaker by the day, far too weak to send you home. If the demon lord isn’t destroyed soon, I will cease to be entirely! Or worse, I could be reduced to something as powerless as a human!”
I threw my hands up in the air. “What the hell is a ‘powerless human’ supposed to do about it, then?”
“You carry my mark,” she replied, gesturing at my chest. “That should be plenty.”
I instinctively covered my neckline with a hand, my fingers scraping against an unfamiliar protrusion. Glancing down, I was greeted by the sight of the crystal from before emerging from my sternum. Panic sent my heart racing; the faint light emanating from the gem dimmed in response.
“What did you do to me?” I screamed. “What is this?”
“I explained everything to you last night,” Lenora sniffed.
“Explained to me? You didn’t explain shit!”
A flush darkened her cheeks. “You leapt off my cloud before I could finish!”
“You kidnapped me!”
“You agreed to help!”
I laughed at that. “Yeah, after you’d already stranded me here! I don’t want a freaky magic piercing or to go on some stupid fantasy adventure or whatever this is. I want to go home!”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” Lenora said with a heavy sigh. “I don’t have the power available to send you home or to choose another champion. Only you can defeat Ventalus and restore my power. You can either stay here and do nothing and let Ventalus destroy this world along with you, or you can defeat the darkness, freeing up my strength to send you home safely. Those are your options.”
Those were hardly any options at all, and the so-called goddess surely knew it. From what little I’d seen of this world so far, there had to be hundreds, if not thousands, of more qualified warriors for Lenora to enlist in her campaign against Ventalus, and instead she chose me? A desk jockey from another world whose sole experience with combat was a couple boxing lessons at a cheap gym? If Ventalus was anything like that punching bag, the demon lord would have me laid out on the ground the second I tried swinging at them. This quest would surely end my life—but then again, so would sitting around doing nothing.
I grudgingly turned back to Lenora, fastening the top button of my blouse to hide the crystal. It wasn’t quite enough to smother its light, but it was better than nothing. “Fine. You win. I’ll defeat the demon lord for you so you can send me home or whatever. But can you please at least bring me my medicine?”
“Medicine?” Her gold curls bounced as she cocked her head at me. “Whatever do you mean?”
“My pills,” I explained lamely. “I take them every morning and night, I need them to, uh, you know, feel like myself. They’re the bottles on my bedside table. If you could just—”
The look on Lenora’s face answered the question before her words even left her mouth. “I’m sorry, Jennifer, but I cannot.”
“They’re tiny!” The same panic from before rose its ugly head in my chest. “It can’t take that much energy; you brought me here for God’s sake!”
“My sake or yours, I can’t,” Lenora protested. “The veil between worlds is too thick. I could only pull you through because you reached out to me first from the other side.”
“I what?!”
The goddess looked away from me, as if fearing she said too much. “Will you die without your medicine?”
“Yes!” I shouted, fear causing my voice to crack.
Lenora shrugged, a disappointed look on her face. “Then I suggest you make for the demon lord’s dungeon with great haste, Jennifer Joyce. Your fate and the fate of this world depend on it.”
“No fucking pressure,” I hissed under my breath, glaring at the gilded goddess before me with disdain.
She met my gaze with a small smile on her lips. “I better be off then, assuming you aren’t in need of immediate rescue?”
“What a load of help you’d be if I was.” Her eye twitched, a hint of dislike poking through the motherly persona she wore like a mask. Satisfaction cut through the anxiety twisting my gut into knots. “I would’ve gotten more value from this gem if I’d sold it for another round.”
“You would trade the power to banish the darkness for a cheap drink,” Lenora muttered under her breath.
I snorted. “Next time, why don't you kidnap someone more willing to believe your bullshit, yeah? You’ll probably get more mileage out of them.”
The facade fell, and for just a moment I saw the true face of the goddess of light—a deep scowl of pure loathing. “Good-bye, Jennifer,” she said in a flat voice. “I’ll see you when the darkness falls, one way or the other.” With a flash of light, Lenora was gone, leaving me alone in the cramped little room.
I stood there silently for a moment, numbly watching the greenish after-image of my “benefactor” fade from my vision. I took another quick peak at the gem embedded in my chest, supposedly the only gift that useless goddess left me with. Its light had gone out completely; the lifeless gray stone stared back at me without even flickering. A heavy breath escaped me, followed by the only word my fried brain could push out my mouth: “Fuck.”
Want to see what happens next? Find the full book at https://a.co/d/07Jk0jj4
Comments