Chapter One
Am I dead?
The last thing Ethan Vale saw before he died was a semicolon.
It was sitting in the wrong place at the end of line 4,847 of the Aethoria event-handler script, small and smug and somehow surviving three code reviews and a full quality check to blow up the game's live economy servers like a tiny, stupid bomb.
Players across four time zones were losing their minds over duplicated currency and broken respawn timers.
Ethan had been awake for thirty-one hours when he found it.
He fixed the semicolon, pushed the patch, and leaned back in his chair with the slow exhale of a man whose soul was leaving his body through his nostrils.
He pressed both palms over his eyes until the darkness behind them turned red and geometric, and for a moment he just stayed there, listening to the hum of the servers and the sound of rain splashing against his office window.
One more check, he told himself. He always told himself one more check, and he always meant it, and it always led to another hour gone.
He leaned forward toward the monitor and the room tilted sideways in a way that rooms were not supposed to tilt, and then it tilted further, and a cold feeling moved through his chest that had nothing to do with tiredness.
The feeling was sharp and final, as if a switch was thrown somewhere deep inside him, and then the floor came up and the light went out and the last sound he heard was the rain, still falling gently.
He opened his eyes to trees.
The trees he saw were not the carefully counted, distance-adjusted, and performance-friendly trees of Athoria's Ridgewood biome that he had personally signed off on during a late-night review session with cold coffee and a headache.
These trees were huge and old, their roots pushing out of dark soil, and their branches reaching so high that the afternoon light had to fight its way down through layers of leaves before it could be seen in what looked like ribbons of gold.
Everywhere smelled like rain and pine and something earthy that no screen had ever managed to replicate.
Ethan sat up slowly and looked at his hands. They were his hands, the same slightly-too-pale hands he had owned his whole life, but they felt present in a way he was not used to.
When he was alive, he had blurry vision, hence his use of thick recommended glasses.
And whenever he didn't have his glasses on, his eyes ached so bad he always thought they would fall off. But here in this moment, he saw more clearly than ever before.
There was no ache behind his eyes, no floaters drifting across his vision, no sense that he was operating a body from somewhere slightly behind it.
He felt, in the most unsettling way possible, completely fine. And that was its own kind of frightening, because a person who had just hit a floor in a dark office should not feel fine. A person who had felt that cold thing move through their chest should not feel anything at all.
"Good morning," said a voice about six inches from his left ear, delivered in the cheerful tone of someone who had been waiting a while and was very pleased with themselves.
Ethan did not scream. He moved sideways very quickly and made a weird sound, and collided with a tree root. Then he and sat there on the ground staring at the thing that had spoken to him.
It was a small fox made of light, or something very close to light, floating at the level of his eyes with a dangerously calm confidence.
Its fur was the pale blue-grey of a loading screen, its three tails curling at the tips like the end of a scroll, and its eyes were the exact amber color that Ethan had used for low-battery warning icons during a UI update two years ago because he thought it looked warm.
The creature looked at him the way a teacher looks at a student who has just given a wrong answer that was at least entertainingly wrong.
"You made a noise," it said.
"I made a sound. There is a difference." Ethan pressed two fingers to his temple and tried to arrange his thoughts.
"Where am I?"
The chime that played then was a sound he knew better than his own ringtone. It was the interface initialization chime, the one that played every time Athoria loaded for a new player.
He had listened to it approximately ten thousand times in testing and had once spent an entire afternoon arguing that it needed to be half a tone warmer. Text appeared in the air in front of him, glowing a soft gold that was somehow easy on the eyes.
WELCOME TO ATHORIA
The Living World
Player: Ethan Vale
Level: 1
Class: Unassigned
Status: Newly Spawned
Ethan looked at it for a long time without speaking. He reached out and touched the edge of the panel and it responded exactly the way he had designed it to.
It responded with the resistance of a haptic layer that his team had spent three weeks fine-tuning so that it felt like touching something real without feeling like touching glass.
It worked perfectly. Of course it did. He had written it.
"No," he said.
"Yes," said the fox.
"This is my game."
"Technically it is a game," the fox said, tilting its head in a way that suggested it found the distinction genuinely interesting. "Whether you still own it is a question for another time, because there are wolves."
"What?"
A howl rolled through the trees, deep and close, followed by two more that overlapped it from slightly different directions.
The small undergrowth to the northeast shifted and cracked under something heavy moving not too fast. It was moving the way things move when they are not being chased and are not afraid of anything.
The UI filled in a threat indicator automatically, three red chevrons pointing northeast and closing. His health bar sat at the top of his vision, full and green and reading a number that made him feel suddenly terrified about his situation.
HP: 80 out of 80.
He was Level 1 in his own game. He, the person who had written the lore bible and designed the magic system.
He who had personally lobbied for six months to get dual-element spell combinations included in the base game, was standing in the Ridgewood with eighty hit points and a knife.
The knife in question was the size of a letter opener that he found at the bottom of the starter satchel next to a piece of bread that smelled so shockingly real.
"I need you to answer something," he said, backing up against the tree with the knife. He held the knife in a way that probably looked more confused than threatening.
"Am I dead?"
"That is unclear," the fox said, drifting sideways through the air with no apparent concern for the howling.
"You are here and here is real, and what happened to the place you were before is not something I am certain about. I am Vex, your System Familiar, and my purpose is to make sure you survive the next thirty seconds, which is now closer to twenty."
The first wolf came through the treeline at a walk that became a run between one breath and the next, and Ethan had just enough time to register that the texture work on its fur was still a little too uniform around the haunches before it lowered its head and locked eyes with him.
At that moment, everything in his brain that was still thinking like a developer went quiet.
It was a Ridgewood Timber Wolf, Level 4, the name tag floating above it in clean white text, and he knew everything about it.
He knew its aggro range and its attack patterns and the two-second window it needed to recover after a missed lunge, and he knew that there was a weak point at the back of its neck that dealt triple damage because he had pushed for that mechanic specifically so that players would feel smart when they found it.
He needed to feel smart right now.
The wolf lunged and he stepped into it rather than away from it, which was either very clever or very stupid, and he pushed the knife up and forward and found the weak point with a combination of instinct he did not know he had and developer knowledge that practically lived in his bones.
The number that appeared and hung in the air above the wolf was satisfying.
CRITICAL HIT! 47 damage.
The wolf stumbled and snarled and the other two behind it slowed down, reassessing, the way animals do when something behaves in a way they did not expect. Ethan was breathing so hard that he had begun to grind his teeth together without realizing it.
"Six out of ten," Vex announced from somewhere above all the chaos that had just happened. "Your footwork was terribly poor but your instinct was interesting."
"The pack leader," Ethan said, breathing heavily, keeping his eyes on the wolf that had gone still and watchful ten feet away. "If the alpha backs down the others follow."
"That is correct."
He looked at the alpha wolf. The alpha looked back. And then Ethan took one step forward, knife raised, probably looking like a man who had nothing reasonable left to lose, and made the sound that a person makes when they are
For a moment, he reflected on his situation again. He was thirty-one hours into no sleep and standing in a world he built from scratch and had about four minutes to accept the situation.
Did he die at his desk, out of dehydration? Or had he simply passed out. He desperately hoped it was the latter. Nothing mattered now more than moving forward anyway, and that was what he intended to focus on.
The alpha flinched. The pack held for one long moment and then, with the gentle surrender of animals who have decided this particular meal is not worth the trouble, they turned and disappeared back into the trees.
Ethan stood in the silence they left behind, His chest rising and falling relentlessly. Meanwhile, the UI stacked up notifications in the corner of his vision like unread emails.
Quest Unlocked: Survive the Ridgewood.
Plus fifteen experience points.
Vex has joined your party.
He looked at the fox. The fox looked at him with an expression that sat somewhere between respect and amusement, which was, he had to admit, exactly how he had designed good companion characters to look at the player after their first real win.
"Okay," he said, picking up the satchel and brushing dirt off his knees. "Where is the nearest town?"
Vex smiled, and foxes were not supposed to be able to smile the way this one did, warm and knowing, and just a little too pleased about everything.
"Follow the road," it said, turning in the air and drifting forward between the trees. "And please try not to die, because we are actually unsure whether you respawn, and that would make the rest of this very short."
Ethan followed the fox into the gold-looking light of the forest, the rise and fall of his chest quickening it's pace.
Six years he had built this world. He had never imagined standing inside it. He didn't know yet if he was dead or dreaming or something else entirely, but he was determined to make it out alive, no matter what he had to do.