The cold hit me first.
Not the gentle chill of air conditioning or the bite of winter wind, but a bone-deep, crystalline cold that felt like it was freezing my blood from the inside out. I gasped, or tried to, and my breath came out in a cloud of white vapor that hung in the air like a ghost.
My eyes snapped open.
Above me stretched a ceiling of pure ice, so clear I could see straight through to dark stone beyond. Intricate patterns of frost spiraled across its surface, forming shapes that almost looked like words in a language I couldn't quite read. Pale blue light emanated from somewhere, casting everything in an ethereal glow.
I sat up too quickly, and my head spun. My hand reached out to steady myself against the floor and met smooth, frigid ice. I looked down at myself and froze for an entirely different reason.
This wasn't my body.
Gone were the soft hands that had spent too many hours gripping a game controller. In their place were elegant fingers with skin so pale it was almost translucent, with faint blue tracery visible beneath like frozen rivers. I wore a gown of what looked like woven frost. A gown so impossibly delicate, never quite melting despite conforming perfectly to a figure that was decidedly not the one I'd gone to sleep with.
Long strands of platinum hair fell past my shoulders when I moved, and when I grabbed a fistful in disbelief, it felt like silk that had been left outside on a winter night.
"What the hell?" My voice came out wrong—melodious and cold, with a faint echo that shouldn't have been possible.
I scrambled to my feet, my movements strangely graceful despite my panic. The room around me was circular, walls made entirely of ice that ranged from clear as glass to opaque as clouds. The floor beneath my bare feet should have been agonizing, but I felt only a distant awareness of the cold, as if it were happening to someone else.
Then the memories hit me.
Not my memories.
Her memories.
Fragments at first, then flooding in like a broken dam. I was Glaciana, the Eternal Frost Queen, S-Class Monster, Terror of the Northern Wastes, Guardian of the Frozen Spire. I had ruled this tower for three hundred years, freezing heroes who dared challenge me, collecting their equipment, growing stronger with each passing decade.
But beneath those memories, I could feel my real ones struggling to surface. My name was Sarah. I was twenty-six. I worked in marketing. I'd been playing "Realm of Eternity" until three in the morning because I couldn't put down the new expansion, and then I'd fallen asleep with my laptop still—
Oh no.
Oh no.
This was the Frozen Spire. This was Glaciana's boss chamber. I knew this place intimately because I'd died here fourteen times trying to beat her, memorizing every attack pattern, every phase transition. Glaciana was the final boss of the Northern Campaign, and she was supposed to be impossible to defeat until you were at least level seventy with a full party and legendary gear.
I was inside the game. Inside the boss I'd been trying to kill.
My breathing quickened, sending more clouds of frost into the air. I pressed my hands to my face and tried not to hyperventilate. Think, Sarah. Think.
In Realm of Eternity, major boss monsters were bound to their lairs. Glaciana couldn't leave the Frozen Spire. According to the lore, she was cursed to remain until a hero defeated her and freed her soul. I'd always thought it was just typical video game nonsense, an excuse for why raid bosses didn't just walk down and destroy the starting villages.
But if the curse was real...
"I'm trapped here," I whispered to the empty room. "I can't leave until someone kills me."
The weight of that realization settled over me like a shroud. In the game, Glaciana was a brutal fight. Players spent weeks learning her mechanics, wiping over and over. But they always came back. Always tried again. Because that's what players did.
And now I was the one who would have to kill them.
I walked to the nearest wall and pressed my palm against the ice. It responded to my touch, the surface rippling like water, and suddenly I could feel the entire tower. Ninety-nine floors of frozen corridors, trapped adventurers suspended in ice like insects in amber, frost elementals patrolling hallways, ice golems standing sentinel at key chokepoints. My dungeon. My prison.
At the base of the tower, I sensed movement. Players. A party of five, currently fighting through the tenth floor. I could feel their warmth like pinpricks of heat in the cold, could almost taste their determination.
They wouldn't make it to me. Not today. They were only level forty-three, undergeared, uncoordinated. They'd die on floor thirty-five to the Ice Drake, respawn in town, and maybe try again in a few weeks.
But eventually, someone would make it. Someone always did. That was how these games worked. Players got stronger, learned the patterns, optimized their builds. It was only a matter of time.
I slumped against the wall, my breath creating frost patterns on the ice.
I was going to have to live as Glaciana, fight as Glaciana, kill as Glaciana—all while waiting for the day some hero strong enough to end me finally arrived. And I had no idea if dying here would send me home or just... end me.
The cold didn't bother me anymore. I barely noticed it.
I had bigger problems now.