It was interesting, how people reacted to seeing words floating before them; to the windows that had popped open into existence in front of every set of eyes on the planet.

In that one moment, the world as they knew it had ended. Most of them would take too long to realize it and longer to accept it but--

The Earth died that day.

A lot of them laughed, not having any clue how else to respond. Others panicked, prayed, got angry, started shouting.

Some of them read the message again and again; two times, three, trying to understand what this message meant and why it was here.

People like that who never saw their death coming.

--

On the day the world died, Bayler Shrike dreamed of a forest. It was an ancient place, a gloomy and desolate wood so old the trees had sunk down into the earth and calcified, becoming standing, shaggy pillars of stone.

Their gray trunks glittered, crusted over with blood-red crystals, the remains of minerals pressed out of the wood as it petrified over centuries. Overhead, their branches wove together into a ceiling of stone, plunging root-tangled earth into a subterranean darkness where glowing insects flitted through the air.

At the center of the forest he found a hospital bed, a half-dead man, and a gray lady.

The man lay in the bed like a corpse, a mummy wrapped in antiseptic-teal sheets. Its skin was a wax-colored leather, the face gaunt and hollow-cheeked, but the eyes were still wide, living eyes staring out from a death mask.

Hovering above those eyes was a window of blue light.

The lady was bizarre and beautiful. Shaggy, ash-colored fur covered parts of her body, and others were made of smooth, dark armor, like someone had made a woman out of an insect’s parts, half-moth and half-spider.

Her face was as rigid as a mask, mouthless, only crossed lines of faint pink where lips should be. Against the complete grey of her face that hint of color was shocking.

“Who…” Bayler stepped forward into the clearing, discovering his voice was dry and rasping, the sounds scraping at his throat. How long had it been since he spoke?

“My name is Enniac,” she replied, and reached down, her fingers passing into the man’s chest with a ripple, like it was water, drawing out a tiny blue flame. It flickered in her palm, as if it was on the verge of going out.

“Are you death?” It seemed like the obvious thing to ask.

“No, Bayler Shrike, I’m not a death, nor even one of their servants.”

“Are you safe?”

She shook with laughter, an alien sound -- and that cross on her face split open, revealing a four-fold mouth that unhinged like a blossoming flower, each ‘petal’ ending in a hooked fang.

He stepped back sharply, and his face must have been hilarious, because she laughed at him again, quieter this time, the mouth closing back to a barely visible seam in her unchanging mask of a face.

“I didn’t say I was human. Come forward. Don’t be shy. Tell me what you see.” Voice still trilling with giggles, she waved her free hand towards the bed.

There was nothing in the world Bayler wanted to do less than take a single step towards the mummified half-corpse lying there. It seemed to physically repulse him, to make every instinct scream to turn and run, but with the courage of someone who knew he was dreaming, Bayler took one step after another towards the bed, staring down those unblinking eyes, until, with a nauseating lurch, he spotted a scar across the forehead he knew.

-- it was him.

The ‘corpse’ - the dead man with living eyes - was him. Withered away until he could hardly recognize himself, but undeniably, it was him.

“Listen carefully, because we don’t have much time. You are barely alive, lingering on the edge of death for who knows how many years in a coma. And while you slept, your world has fallen into grave danger. Right now, the nurses that fed you and kept you living all these years are running for their lives, or already dead. You have only survived because your life fire is too weak for the hunters to detect-”

As she spoke, Bayler Shrike thought of and discarded at least a dozen questions, all of them useless. Either this was a dream, and none of it mattered, or it was real and what mattered most was to listen carefully to every word.

“But if you can wake up, and you can touch the window above you, you will have a chance. In fact, you will have power beyond anything you can imagine. Wake up, Bayler Shrike.”

And she brought the flame up to her mouth, blowing on it, making it rise from a flickering blue spark into a long ribbon of brilliant fire. The world - the forest - shattered as she shoved it down into his chest.

Wake up.

He lifted up from the sheets with a gasp, and then crashed back down a second later, his whole body trembling from the effort of just sitting up. Everything ached. His skin creaked as he moved, dry as old leather. His strength was vanishing even as he breathed, a plastic pipe running over his tongue and down his throat, pumping stale, foul-tasting air into his lungs.

And above him, a window floated in the air.

So it was real. It was impossible, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore.

For the first time in three years, Bayler Shrike’s heart raced. If this was real, he wasn’t just a broken wreck of a human stuck in a hospital bed. She had promised him power. And all he needed to do was-

His hand trembled and fell halfway to the announcement, the limb shriveled to a stick-figure of skin draped over jutting, angular bones. The muscle had simply evaporated as he lay in bed, doing nothing. He could barely even lift his own hand.

With a growl, he reached up again, his fingers almost brushing the panel of light before they began to shake and refuse to move, slowly falling down again.

He groaned in frustration, pushing himself back up against the headboard. The window moved with him, fixed in the air at the center of his gaze. Which meant-

A manic grin appeared on Bayler Shrike’s face, the face of a dead man. He might not be able to reach up and touch the screen. But he could let gravity do the work. He could fall into it.

With a lurch, he threw himself with all his featherweight strength towards the edge of the bed, managing to roll himself a few degrees onto his side. And again. And again. The sheets spooled around his legs, making him look like a particularly distressed caterpillar halfway out of its cocoon.

But inch by inch, he made it to the edge of the bed, maneuvering himself so that his hand hung over the gap, swinging down towards the floor. With a turn of his head, he made the window follow his gaze to meet his dangling fingertips.

It burst apart into scattering motes of light, vanishing into the air. Another formed to take its place.

Mortal. It didn’t sound like much, but Bayler Shrike had no delusions of getting out of this bed on his own power. With a grimace, he swung his arm, brushing his fingertips through the window of light. It rippled like water and broke into motes again, but this time they didn’t dissipate. Instead, the shards of light flew into a spiral around his arm, orienting themselves, a constellation of tiny stars.

And then they plunged into his skin with a sensation like cold fire. His fingers curled.

Strength was pouring back into his body, and it took everything not to scream as searing, frigid pain lanced through his veins, filling him up, moving through him. In agonizing detail, he felt it roll through his arm, spiderwebbing out. He saw burning designs, spirals and circles, blaze just underneath the skin.

In the distance, somebody did scream, shockingly loud. There was a kind of pure, throat-breaking terror that was unmistakable; it was the sound of a human being about to become a lump of meat.

It was cut short with a wet crunch.

The light flickered, and his eyes suddenly focused on the doorway.

A shadow blotted out the light coming from the gap in the door, and Bayler could feel the presence on the other side; the smell of blood, a soft and steady dripping; the stink of unwashed fur and a chillingly low jungle-cat growl behind the door.

Every bit of concentration Bayler had was spent holding back the groan of agony trying to force its way from his own lips as the pain stretched on and on, becoming an eternity.

Hunters. She had said there were hunters.

The door bumped, and time, already slowed to a crawl, came to a halt entirely. It could have been a thousand years later when he finally felt sure enough the creature was gone to let out the breath he was holding.

The pain had stopped, or rather, shrunk, the fire receding from filling his entire body to concentrating into a single design, a flowing pattern, on the inside of his right arm. As he watched, the last of the light faded and left the pattern seared into his flesh.

He stretched his hand out, splaying his fingers and curling them back into a fist. It was suddenly easy. The fatigue and weakness had simply been burned out of him. If there wasn’t a plastic breathing tube down his throat, he would have laughed.

And there was not a chance he was staying in bed for a single second longer. The sheer joy of motion called to him, his limbs aching to be used after spending so long wasting away.

Danger or no, he was getting out of this room.

He peeled the tubes out of his wrists and his throat, coughing, laughing, losing his caution as the simple power to move his own hands overtook him.

“What are you?” He wondered aloud, staring at the flower-like symbol on his forearm. To his surprise, the design flowed and reformed, into a web of diamonds connected by lines. A web. Something anyone who’d played a game would recognize as a talent tree, the first node already lit up, the three connected to it a waiting light grey.

As soon as he focused on the unlocked node, words flowed into his head.

|| Will Made Flesh - Iron - The energy of Mortal Will fills your body, overwhelming all weaknesses with indomitable determination. So long as the mind persists, the flesh will too. Only vital organ damage can kill you, negating all lesser wounds and any non-magical conditions at Iron or less. ||

Being half-dead apparently counted as a ‘condition’ and Bayler was in no mood to argue. The three grayed out nodes before the wall of black, locked options called to him. Everything so far was starting to feel bizzarely familiar to him, from the announcement windows to this.

One unlock had given him back his life. As he focused on the three open to him, letting their descriptions flood into his head as phantom words, he grinned.

“That’s what you are. A game.”