One moment I was wrapped in my wife’s embrace, breathing in the fragrance of her perfume and soaking in the momentousness of my victory, my left arm in the air, a victorious V raised high for all to see.
The next, I was somewhere else. Somewhere cold and damp. Shirtless with only a ragged pair of breeches to hide my modesty.
Darkness reigned in my world, a thick curtain of waking unconsciousness that obscured all senses, all sights, and all sounds. It was akin to being enveloped by a sea of ink, blind, with no idea what lay ahead.
And I was so tired. It was as if I had been roofied. My head ached so badly; my body felt numb. Different. Foreign.
Tremendous pain wracked me, spiking through everything all at once. Ice. Everything felt like steaming, thawing ice, crackling and breaking under the natural heat of my body. A chill surged through me, slushed blood rolling through my veins. It was a sensation I had never known before.
My scattered thoughts began to align, igniting the tips of my horns and flowing towards my core.
My horns? I sensed them vaguely, standing curved from my head, their weight somehow familiar and bearable.
All through me, liquid energy rippled and flooded my mind, grinding my gray matter into sand. It felt like rising from the dead, my body now numb and motionless, as if it had been in slumber for a millennium. Even the base of my newly appeared horns felt aged and worn, pried at, and cracked. I tried to lift a hand to check them and heard the metallic clink of chains.
Only then did I realize my confinement.
The air reverberated with words, hissing and clipped. A guttural sound that was born deep within those who spoke. The growled syllables mixed with the terrifying darkness of something infernal. It was a language foreign to me.
“Help,” I croaked. A sensation of bubbles rippled through my veins as I felt my being thaw. It was a hot pain that seared yet soothed all at the same time.
“Help,” I repeated, the words gaining strength as my mind began to awaken, fighting against the tug of dreams and slumber. The air was thick with the smell of sweat and smoke. Chants echoed around me. I was shackled in chains. My hands, legs, and even my head were immobile.
My dreams had become a nightmare in one fantastically horrible instant.
Finally able to open one eye, and then the other, I surveyed my surroundings and sighed.
I wasn’t in bed, waking up from some horrid after-party, alcohol-induced nightmare.
I was upright, my arms chained above and legs chained below, a sturdy oaken rack strapping me into place.
Not really the celebration I’d expected to have after winning the tournament. Something in my mind clicked, a voice whispered unintelligible nothings, and suddenly, I could see more.
Infravision. Somehow I’d just turned on infravision. It looked much the same as when you used thermals, but without all the tech. Just a simple let there be light, and there it was.
I peered around the place, ignoring the drips of stagnant water and the insane chanting. A ring of candles surrounded me. That was a bit of a shock since I hadn’t seen them with my normal vision. They apparently gave no light, but their heat appeared as tiny stars in the thermal glow of my night vision.
Beyond this circle knelt humanoid figures, the radiance of their heat glowing a dull orange from their knees and bowed heads. They were the chanters, their words merging into a collective, fearful moan that spoke only of horrid things to come.
I gritted my teeth, wondering if I was this night’s sacrifice.
As it all was going now, I was really certain of just one thing. Whatever the hell had happened to me, I was going to find out who was responsible, and I was going to tear his head from his body.
A force stirred hungrily inside of me, the faint sound of waves lolling through my ears. Through my mind flashed an image. Numbers, letters, garbled words and symbols.
And a piercing fear that I might be absolutely losing my mind. The sound of waves became crisper and more defined.
Welcome to our realm, vaunted one. The sound was internal, inside my brain, and I groaned to think of what that meant. You and I are to be partners in glory.
I closed my eyes, gritting my teeth. But that just made things worse. The image of a being, ten feet tall, and blue-skinned, stood before me. Its eyes gleamed like ice, and its two curved horns shined a brilliant translucence that was more like crystal than bone. Its two arms were incredibly large, a swollness admired at gyms all through the world.
Topping the beast off was its scales, which shimmered with iridescent colors, creating a mesmerizing pattern that extended from its chin to its ankles. It grinned at me, showing off wicked fangs that could easily gnash and tear the toughest of cube steaks.
Looking deep into its eyes, I felt an even greater shiver rack my body than I had felt upon waking. This being, this is what I was now.
The monster cocked its head.
Things could be worse, eh. You could have been tele-merged with a mouse.
I shrugged, feeling the clink of the chains. “What the hell is going on around here?” I asked.
The monster laughed. The Hells, not Hell. I was drawn from a beautiful place of ice and snow, where the tormented of the Heklan are exposed for an eternity as punishment for their sins against the Triarchy. You should check it out sometime.
A crystal-clear vision of iced vista expanded to consume me. Within this place, the moon glittered in a frosty sky, slopes of mountain rising well higher than sight in every direction. A frozen lake expanded beneath me, and I could see a thousand effervescent things moving through its crystal freshness.
It would have been a truly blessed sight, if not for the screaming of a million tormented souls. It was almost deafening. My chains rattled dimly in some other reality as I lifted my arms to cover my ears.
And the vision was gone.
The Goblin Empire sacrificed a hundred thousand slaves, a member of the royal Gharagian bloodline, and a couple of dragons to boot. All to summon the greatest champion of the Prime Material worlds.
Another vision swarmed over me. High up in the sky, I saw a world without the grinding, whirling smoke of automated factories or the artificial shine of chrome and waxed automobile bodies rolling through the world on tails of dirty exhaust. Instead, it looked like Earth from some thousand years ago. The lands were flat and grassy, with villages and fields splayed out in every direction. The light tan of trodden trails and dead-grass roads rounded through it all, connecting this hub to that.
And I was falling, seeing greater and greater detail as the wind whistled past my ears. There, underneath me, was a large city. The largest of all the cities I had seen, in fact. A mob of beings were gathered here. Some human, like me, but many were of other fantastical species, like some scene from a gaming convention. Most corresponded to something traditional, like the squatted crimson-cloaked figures of goblins. But others were far more outlandish, like the three-armed, four-legged, many-eyed tower that clambered about in absolute sapience despite its rather constructed appearance.
My plummet halted, my body bouncing off of a forcefield unseen and simply holding there, stuck like a bug in fly paper. And what I was shown horrified me. Being after being was pulled, bound, up the steps of a triangular pyramid, words screamed into the sky before their throats were cut and their bodies were kicked out of the way for the next in line. Clouds of red darkness steamed from the building, undulating in waves, crackling with lightning and thunder. Farther in the distance I saw the dead bodies of what must have been two draconic younglings. Dragons like those seen in European artworks, but dog-sized like the infamous one from the painting of Saint George the Dragon Slayer.
I can’t say I ever had love for dragons one way or the other, but the sight of them dead at such a tiny size gave me a small piece of sadness. It didn’t seem fair.
Fair is subjective. Your soul has been brought here to fight for the goblins, but they couldn’t well use you without you having a body. And they wanted you to be strong and powerful right off, so they infused you into the body of an ice infernal.
I gaped, the words turning all of this into a greater and more horrid realization.
Yep. You have possessed me, the mighty Ice Lord Jeldorain, against my will. Our purpose is to give the goblins the rest of the continent in a contest of iron and blood. Talk about fair. Before all this happened, I was about to get married to my 37th wife.
The world snapped again, and this time I saw a brightly lit version of where I was, as seen from a fly on the wall perspective. I saw my captors. They were cowled, wearing robes of brown and red that ran all the way down to the floor, like old-timey monks from a French monastery. I got the sense that they were laughing at me, even though they were kneeling, their faces pointed towards the floor.
A surge of anger tore through me, and I watched, mystified, as an image of myself tore those faces from their skulls, and chewed their flesh. The taste was magnificent.
I recoiled in horror.
Oh get used to it. There’s perks to having my body—the tremendous taste of sapient pain and suffering is one of them. Be sure to dig in whenever you get a chance.
“I’ll have to take your word for it,” I said. I opened my eyes and saw the world around me again. “If I close my eyes, can you make it entirely clear for me like you did for that vision? I think I want to try to get out of here and this thermal vision is just a mess.”
You’ll get used to it, but yes. For some mana I can cast a spell that allows you to see the clear reality of everything for a brief time.
“Mana?” I asked. Things were starting to get weird again.
There are no mana points in your world?
My own visions of myself sitting in an asylum, rocking back and forth chanting “mana points” over and over again came over me. I laughed out loud.
And a deep, raspy voice broke my daydream. “Awake are you?” There was amusement there, tinged with an undertone of promised malice.
I closed my eyes, allowing the clear vision of the scenario developing before me. I was the ice infernal, in chains that glowed with magic and bound me hand and foot to great pillars on either side of me. The man who was striding towards me was tall and broad-shouldered, wearing spiked plated armor, a crimson cloak hanging limply from his back. His unhelmeted head was shorn of hair, and a cruel grin rode his face, just begging for a beat down.
On his armor shined glyphs and runes, not much different from the druidic ones I’d observed in documentaries on TV. Seeing them put a damper on my current plan of escape.
Plan? Jeldorain mocked, cackling from within my soul.
He was right. I needed a plan. Something quick that I could run at a moment’s notice. “Who are you?” I asked, giving myself more time to think.
The man laughed, a sound that echoed through the damp chamber. “Who am I? I am your summoner, your lord and master. I am he who has bound you, infernal, and you, great general. And you are my promotion,” he leered. “Once, of course, you have been brought to heel.”
I chuckled, no mirth in my tone. “You just sucked the most stubborn man on his planet away from his body to put him into a supernatural killing machine, and you expect him to be your slave? Who the hell approved this plan?”
In the hells, Jeldorain corrected.
“Pah,” he answered, waving his hand. “All break when the right measures are used. And it isn’t as if this arrangement won’t benefit you. Serve the armies well, and you yourself can be a lord someday.
I narrowed my eyes. “What do you want from me?” I asked.
The man smiled, showing his teeth. “What do I want from you? I want everything. I want your brilliant mind to lead the armies of the Goblin Empire to victory over all the nations of the world. I want your strength, your speed, your endurance, and your skills to keep you alive as you do this. I want you to be my champion, my enforcer, my weapon. I want you to kill, to conquer, to dominate, to level up and become the greatest scourge to our enemies.”
He paused, putting a single finger to the corner of his mouth.
“That’s not too much to ask, is it?”
A vision swept through my mind. I saw my body, lifeless, sprawled over the floor of the gaming lobby. My wife Casey screaming frantically for help while my children cried and people freaked out in the crowd. It didn’t look like much time had passed, and my heart filled over with rage.
You got this kid. I believe in you, Jeldorain said.
There was a flash of light, and all of my chains stopped glowing. With a roar, I tore my body away from them, shattering them into a variety of snakelike loops at my feet.
The man’s eyes widened in shock. “How did you—”
His throat was in my hand, his body raised off the ground, in seconds. “Don’t know. Doesn’t matter.” Squeezing as hard as I could, I felt his windpipe pinch shut, his entire neck collapsing into bloody mulch.
Lick it off your fingers.
The urge was gross yet powerful, and a frosty-crimson haze covered my vision. But the monks were off the floor and they had weapons in their hands. I’d deal with that, and everything else later.
Bellowing in rage, I charged their massed number, a rush of death. The first two I broke with my fists, shattering their chests and collapsing their hearts. But the air thickened as I pushed forward, the space around me sparkling blue and white, images that I couldn’t quite perceive flashing on and off throughout the aura.
Men in black robes stepped out, blasting cones of murky power into my body. I managed to reach out and tear the arm off of another of the cultists, turning and using it to bludgeon the head off of a fourth. But a slow despair was creeping into my anger.
This was too much. I wasn’t ready for them.
Pain seared through my body as I was blasted again and again with magic. Some of it, I noticed, faded into wisps of nothing, barely touching me at all. But enough came through to do me harm that I fell to the ground. A ground which cracked open and sprouted tentacles of chain. They glowed a spectral white, looking quite pretty as they ensnared me. I could feel my strength fading, my vision blurring.
“Sleep,” the man commanded, his voice echoing in the chamber. I fought against the wave of exhaustion that swept over me, but it was too strong. My eyelids felt heavy, and I could no longer keep them open.
As the darkness swallowed me, I thought again of my family in the lobby. I was going to get back to them. And I would destroy anyone who got in the way of me to do it.
