Thresholder

The world I was from, they didn’t really have prisons. They had jails, and I had ended up in those a time or two, usually because I was drunk. A jail is a place you stay for a night, maybe a week if you’re unlucky. It’s a place to hold someone while you figure out what to do with them. So we had plenty of jails. I don’t know what kind of world with cities doesn’t have a place to put people who need to cool off or sober up. And we had madhouses too, places to put people too crazy to function. Orphanages as well, which are sort of like prisons for children.

Here, you’ve got a brig, but it’s not anyone’s permanent home, not on the scale of years. I kind of figure that you need some specific conditions for a prison, some combination of compassion and indifference, a society where they think the guillotine is beyond the pale but where they’re fine with sticking a guy in a cell for three decades. That, or it’s slavery with a veneer.

Slavery is … shit, Perry didn’t explain that to you? I guess it wouldn’t be that relevant. It’s when one person owns another, usually for their labor, but sometimes for other things.

Anyway, this was a prison planet, which is different from a prison world, but for all intents and purposes, all I saw of these people was this one single place, a giant, sprawling prison. And make no mistake about it, we were slaves in all but name, forced to do hard labor that I’m pretty sure they could have automated, because they were people like you, high-tech, traveling through space.

At least, that’s what I thought at the start of it.

I was attacked pretty much right away, before I had any idea what was going on. She was an absolute hellcat, small and red-haired, wearing a dark green uniform, wielding flames in one hand and a club in the other, pink streaks flowing behind her like ribbons of light.

I beat the shit out of her. I got burned in the process, but I broke part of her face. The only thing I can say in Petra’s defense is that she was probably just as surprised by the portal showing up as I was. It wasn’t like Perry, who followed a signal, it was a portal that appeared right in the middle of a public place that she just happened to be in. Attacking me was a panic move on her part, a split-second ‘holy shit how do I deal with this’ type of situation. I guess she had figured that it was best to catch me completely flat-footed.

The thing was, she could have done that at any time, because when I came through, I had no idea what the fuck was going on. All I saw were some people in gray uniforms, and some other people in dark green uniforms, and finally, a third type of uniform on a guy that slipped down out of the air and kept me from stabbing Petra right in her stomach with my sharpest spear. He was all in blue, armored. Maybe she was worried about me getting processed out, or not being able to manipulate the situation, or something like that, but the point was, she attacked first, as fast and as hard as she could.

I tried to fight the giant angry guy who’d saved her, and lost, badly. When I tried to stab him he grabbed the spear like I had handed it to him. Once he’d snapped it over his knee, he proceeded to strip off every single piece of armor, clothing, and equipment I had on me. I fought back, and he handled me like a misbehaving child. He was the only one wearing blue, Blue Boy, not his name, but the name for his kind, the Blue Boys, of which PU2B had only a single one.

Anyway, that whole first day could have been titled, ‘Petra’s fuck up’, but the shame of it was, she managed to screw me pretty hard in the midst of her stupid, ill-fated attack. We were on a prison world, and she was one of the guards, and I had beat the shit out of her while carrying a huge amount of contraband. The flames coming from her hands and the pink trails, I don’t know how those escaped notice, or how she explained it away, but I guess whatever she said was easier to understand than the truth.

The big guy frog-marched me into one of the buildings while everyone looked on. Petra was lifted up by some of the people with the dark green uniforms. I’d find out later that they were guards, like her.

I had a choice, which was whose past to look into, and I looked into the big guy’s, since he was stronger than me and had put up much more of a fight than she had. What I saw scared the shit out of me, and seemed more monstrous than anything that had gone on with the witches. He spent about ninety percent of his time in a tank filled with some thick fluid, and got called out only to deal with breaking up fights or chasing down escapees. Once that was done, he’d return to his tank, submerged and still. The uniform came off only for monthly checks from his doctor, and then he was back in the tank, breathing a thin fluid. Pushing back further into the past, I could see that he’d been built that way, shaped and molded even as a small boy before being exposed to all kinds of shit. He had started human, and had become something else.

So the world was like your own, high-tech, low-magic, and the magic was flavored like tech, if that makes sense to you. It does to me. Personally, I was baffled by everything I was seeing. The guards had these screens that would light up and show them words and images, each one capable of capturing a man’s image or displaying a book or even showing a play that had happened weeks ago. I was so astounded that I almost didn’t realize they were planning to ruin my week.

In a sane world, showing up in the middle of a prison wouldn’t mean that you were imprisoned. Even attacking a guard should mean that I got, I don’t know, a trial or something. The legates of my base world were assholes who were in charge of everything, and you didn’t want to attract their attention, because they definitely didn’t owe you a trial, but for most things, there were judges and guards and ways of handling your day-to-day petty mugging, assault, and adultery.

Unfortunately for me, I had ‘attacked’ a crafty little bitch who had access to all their systems and a fair number of favors to call in. While it took them some time to ‘find’ me in their system, eventually they did. Turns out I had been through all the normal booking processes during the last transport in, two weeks prior. That was a hell of a surprise to me, but I knew how corrupt guards did things. All the technical details were lost on me, but the central thrust of it, that Petra had told lies, dealt bribes, and just generally fucked me, that was clear.

I was shackled, beaten, put in a new gray uniform, and marched under heavy guard to have a meeting with the viswarden. He was the first guy I had seen without a uniform, and I was shackled to a chair in his office. You need to be kind of a bastard to have a place to shackle people in your office.

I got a little speech about the importance of fitting in, which was fucking ridiculous given the circumstances. I tried to explain myself to him, and he threatened to have me sent to the madhouse, so I shut my mouth. I’d have attacked him, but I was worried about the Blue Boy coming back and smashing my brains in. All of my shit that had been stripped off me was confiscated, and I don’t know exactly what happened to it, but I never saw it again. Seemed to me like the nature of it would raise alarm bells, but maybe Petra monkeyed with their systems more than I’d thought.

I got thrown in a cell with a bed, a toilet, a single light bulb that looked nothing like the ones back home, and absolutely nothing to do. They told me it would be a week. There was nothing to do, that is, but look at the viswarden’s past.

I learned basically everything I needed to about the world. There were three hundred million people imprisoned on the planet, and most of them hadn’t come as hardened criminals. Some were debtors, others had done victimless crimes, and a few were there for their personal views on the interstellar republic that everyone was supposed to be a part of. There were people of a particular ethnicity, kinment, that had been rounded up under the pretense of cracking down on drug use, and they were a worry for the viswardens, because they were starting to organize.

It was an insane number of people to be placed in more or less indefinite detention. It was insane even when put in terms of the total population. One in every two hundred of the interstellar population were in prison! It would be like if the Natrix had fifty people locked away. But the sheer numbers meant that we had to be split into groups, and most of this story relates to Penitentiary Unit 2B, which was headed by the viswarden.

Outside the prison infrastructure, which was all spread out across the planet, it was more or less tropical. The planet orbited a blue star, and pretty far from it. Most of the rocks were white, and there was lots of sand, with plenty of beaches, though the prisoners were never allowed to go to them. The plants were all imports, fast-growing species that had spread out across the place as much as they could, eating more and more territory with every year. I saw more of it than the average prisoner, but there were high walls, and our attention was necessarily focused inward.

All the PUs put their prisoners to work somehow, and this particular one was situated right next to a mine that was meant to extract valuable metals from the ground. It wasn’t the sort of work I was trained in, but then, it wasn’t the sort of work that most prisoners were trained in. Given that they had robots, I wondered why they were using people at all. It took a surprising amount of time to see the answer in the warden’s past, given how central it was to the operation of the planet and PU2B.

The answer was that there were some rocks in the ground that needed humans to mine them. They didn’t need humans because they were delicate or complicated, they needed humans because humans — some of them, anyway — responded to the rocks. The machines couldn’t tell them from the normal kind of rocks, and had trouble with processing them, and those rocks were what allowed for things like Blue Boy and interstellar travel.

I was pretty sure that this is what Petra had been chasing, since if she was a threshie, she sure as hell must have done a lot of work to fake her way into being a prison guard. She was new to the prison, having come in from off-planet only two months prior. The warden had two interviews with her, one before she was hired and the other after she had arrived on the planet, but hadn’t interacted with her much.

I turned my attention to the prison and how it functioned. That week in a cell, blocked off from anyone, wasn’t spent in vain. I could also step into my little shelf for a respite from the unblinking light and cold gray walls, but mostly I was rooting around in the warden’s past, sometimes for information, other times to watch plays or movies, or to see him with women.

Yeah, I still had the bauble. No, I won’t tell you how. It’s a strategic advantage thing, you understand. I’m telling you everything, just not everything.

When I came out, I came out with a plan. That plan was mostly to avoid Petra and do my own thing, and I guess she had the same idea, since I didn’t see her for another three weeks after that. I was there for the rocks, hoping to get some power out of them, and my guess was she had the same idea, just long before me and from a position of power.

I got myself put on mining duty right away and ingratiated myself with one of the local gangs. That wasn’t hard to do given that I had access to the warden’s past. I could point out the snitches, for one thing, and I had intel on all of the guards, enough to make some of them bend a bit. Mostly, mining duty was a chance to get up close and personal with the rocks and steal a few with the bauble, not that it ever did me much good.

Everyone was a little bit sensitive to the rocks, but some more than others. Testing was a part of intake, and apparently the fake profile that Petra had set up for me had me as the worst of the worst, which meant that I was supposed to be support for everyone else. Well, me being me, it turned out that I was at the upper end of the spectrum, and once I made a demonstration to my shift supervisor, I was moved to other work in one of the big factories. Turned out that was exactly where I wanted to be.

Once the rocks were up out of the ground, they needed to be purified for use, and that was the work of more prisoners. Under the right conditions, someone with the right sensitivity could make the little grains of crushed material react differently, the stuff they wanted being diverted in a stream or shaken to float into a vent. You held your hand out over the slurry and thought some thoughts. It was hell, basically, trying to think at the rocks, and because we were prisoners, there was a lot of slacking going on, even if there were productivity goals that would get us chits that would get us better food or comfy beds. Everyone hated the chits. You could get shivved for going after them too hard or pretending that they were anything other than a tool of the oppressor.

There were two reasons I had wanted to be transferred to the factory: first, it was the closest that I would get to the refined stuff, and second, it was home to the kinment. That ethnic group that there was a crackdown on? Yeah, that was them. They had a higher sensitivity to the rocks, I guess, so there were a lot of them in the factory, and I had seen through the warden’s past, so I had exactly the right inside scoop to ply their leader with. That, and I could smuggle like no one’s business and pass every kind of check they cared to make, cheeks spread wide.

The refined rocks were worth — I don’t know, what do you have here, gold?

Alright, fine, it was worth more than a fusion reactor. Nah, that doesn’t work. Anyway, it was valuable, so valuable that once the process was over, these little vials of the things were pretty much immediately put under lock and key. It could make something like Blue Boy, so the prisoners couldn’t have it, right?

We stole some, naturally. It was easy enough with my powers, especially once I began combing through the pasts of the guards. It was a combination of knowing their security protocols, their passwords, and having a healthy dose of blackmail. Let me tell you, you don’t wind up as a guard on a prison planet because you have a spotless record of being a morally upstanding citizen.

I had thought that the kinment would be selling some of it away, but they surprised me by having a secret little lab built out below one of the rooms. It must have taken them a hell of a lot of work, all of which could have been undone with just a single close inspection from the wrong guard, but they’d been stealing and planning for decades. They wanted someone who could beat Blue Boy, and while I wasn’t one of their kind, I was a good candidate for a number of reasons, and I had thrown myself behind their cause with enough weight that they trusted me.

What they did nearly killed me, and I got dumped in the exercise yard to die, away from the place they’d been using. I was sent to the medical ward of PU2B, then when they couldn’t do anything for me, or maybe because I had some of the rocks in my veins, I was shuttled off far, far away to almost the other side of the planet, where there was a larger medical facility. It was a little city, in fact, one where lots of guards had their families, and also the home of some of the scientific research and materials processing that didn’t use prison labor.

I was stabilized, then sent from the hospital down into a research wing that I’m pretty sure was violating all kinds of interstellar laws. Maybe there was some legal sanction, I never really found out, but at any rate it was hush-hush.

The doctors and scientists were fascinated by the backyard injection that had been done to me. They were excited by it, but the words they used were in the vein of ‘botched’ and ‘janky’. I was handcuffed to a stretcher that was bolted to the floor, and besides that, there was a robot arm with a gun pointed directly at me. It was that kind of hospital.

Well, long story short, they did their own experiments on me. They were thrilled that I had lived through what was done to me. The purified rocks had bound to me, and there was talk that I might be the key to getting more Blue Boys without the atrocious rejection rate. They tried different injections, some of which they thought had a good chance of killing me, and I endured it as best I could until I finally felt something change inside me. I broke the handcuffs and disappeared into my space before the gun could shoot me.

I stayed in there for a week and tried to treat it like I had treated being confined the last time. I had a scientist’s past to look through this time, and I mapped out the layout of the underground research facility. I got so I could understand their defenses, their patrols, what weapons they’d use against me, how the keycards worked, where I’d run straight into problems. I trained as much as I could, drank some water I had stored, realized that I really should have packed the place with much more food, watched some movies over the shoulder of this scientist, tried not to go mad, and planned what I was going to do once things had died down and I was ready to make my assault.

I took special note of where they kept their test serums, the ones that could kill you or make you incredibly powerful. They depended on having some sensitivity to the rocks, to get them to bind, and worked best if you had a lot of training with moving the rocks around.

I had people in mind for those serums.

I kept peeping out, looking to see whether they were going to keep the room sealed off forever after my escape or if they were going to reuse it. It took time, but eventually they sent someone in to clean so it could be used by the next patient, and that was my moment.

I was strong, though not as strong as I am now. I wasn’t as ripped, but I could fly and punch, and sense where people were. I wasn’t as strong as a Blue Boy, which was the main reason I needed to blast through the facility as quickly as I possibly could. They had five of the guys, and that’s not counting all the ones peppered throughout the city.

I blasted out like a comet, hollering at the top of my lungs, and I screamed across the planet’s mostly empty surface with half a dozen Blue Boys on my tail before I came to the southern ocean. I took a deep breath and smashed down into the water, diving as deep as I could. See, the Blue Boys weren’t really people, they had been stripped down and programmed, more robot than person, and while there was a lot they were trained for, underwater pursuit didn’t come naturally to them. It was a known issue, one that wasn’t supposed to be known to me. I made it five miles underwater before needing to surface for air, because this was back when I needed to breathe. The Blue Boys were nowhere in sight, and I was free — except that I was still on a prison planet.

I went back to PU2B, mostly because I figured that Petra was still there, but also because I had a fistful of serum that had some ready and willing hosts. I landed in one of the camera blind spots, called over a friend, and began mass distribution. When I say a fistful, what I mean is a full cabinet of them, almost two hundred in total, not enough for an army, but enough for a local takeover.

About a tenth of them died in the process, which was a better result than we’d all been expecting.

Then, we started smashing the place up.

Long term, I guess, the kinment wanted to steal a spaceship and get off the planet, then go hide somewhere they had friends and make a stand against the interstellar empire for perceived wrongs. I was more focused on the short-term. Together, three of us killed the Blue Boy when he showed up, then we went through and began murdering all the guards. All this after the communications tower had been taken down, obviously.

Eventually Petra showed up. She had gathered some powers of her own. I targeted her past right away, then ignored that and gave her a gut punch. The flames were still a problem, but they were bothering me less than the first time, more sunburn than charred flesh. I guess you don’t get sunburns here either, but you get the idea.

She tried to give a big speech to us about the need for order and a control of base impulses, which I thought was pretty rich coming from someone who’d faked her way onto the planet. I gave a good speech back to her, one pointing out her hypocrisy and standing up for the kinment and roasting the whole stupid interstellar society and all its arrogance. I wasn’t mad about being held down in the medical research facility, I understood it, it’s exactly what the legates would have done if there was something to gain from it. Still, it was the first time I’d been able to give a big rousing speech like in one of the plays I’d loved so much. I got lots of cheers, but I had also gifted a lot of the audience with the tools of their liberation. They’d have cheered at anything I said. It was great.

I was fighting with weapons pulled from the shelf, but these weren’t things like swords and spears anymore, they were guns and stun batons. She was less fragile than she’d been a month ago though, and gave me a real fight, partly because she fought with the manic energy of a trapped rat. She briefly went five on one, which was impressive, especially given that one of those five was me. Eventually, it became an aerial battle, which none of us had any real experience with. Getting punched in the air hurts a lot less, since you get pushed back.

She was on her last legs when the Blue Boys began to show up. They had been sent in from every other PU on the planet, and the escape attempt was pretty quickly thwarted. One of Petra’s eyes was big and puffy, she was slightly dazed, and her teeth were covered in blood, but she had a smile on her face, because she thought that she had won.

I moved fast and grabbed her, flying us at speed down into the mine, through tunnels that I had gotten to know backward and forward. We fought as we flew, but I had more reserves than she did, and I kept forcing her deeper, pounding her into the walls as we went.

The last phase of the fight happened in one of the large open rooms, just the two of us while the superpowered prison riot was still going on upstairs. She had actual combat powers from the two worlds she’d been to, and I had utility, nothing much more, but I think I got a bit more juice from the serums and experiments. Plus I was just better than her.

The pink streaks she could spit out behind her were almost my undoing. They were like jellyfish stings, sharp and painful, scoring deep wounds across my chest, and I was flagging toward the end. Eventually though, I got her, not because I was stronger, but because I had come better prepared: I flooded the place with gas and slipped on a gas mask from my shelf.

She had no response to that except to try to run, but I grabbed her, held her there, and beat the shit out of her.

My boot was pressed against her skull when the portal opened up. She was flopping around like a fish out of water, weak and gasping for air. I put her out of her misery, and her skull broke like a dry leaf in late autumn.

I’ve got no clue what the results of the prison riot were. I hope they flew up off the planet and then to somewhere safe. It would be a better end for them than getting put down like dogs. But I don’t know if there’s cause for optimism.

~~~~

We’re all out of order, and I’ve already said as much as there is to say about the world with all the vegetarians, but the one before that and after the prison world wasn’t really that much to write home about. If you’re interested, I can tell you, but while it was special in its own way, it was the place where I began to understand there would be some repetition to the worlds, a sameness that came with all of them sharing something in common.

Your planet has a bunch of mountains, terrain that’s hard to move around, rivers and oceans and all kinds of things. The planet I found myself on? It was smooth, hardly any hills to speak of, nothing but neck-deep ocean, except I don’t think it’s really an ocean if it’s that shallow.

The people there were fish, more or less, or maybe frogs, with slick skin and webs between their fingers and toes. They couldn’t spend more than a few minutes up out of the water, but their gills were in their necks, so most of the time they kept their heads sticking out so they could look around. They were primitive in a lot of ways, but pretty advanced in others. Without the water holding them back, maybe they would have been spacefarers too. They had a lot of architecture, some of it underwater in holes that they’d dug, and mostly blocked off for me, but some of it above the water, huge cathedrals that had been built by people whose every material was waterlogged and who couldn’t be up for more than five minutes or so.

They loved me from the very start, because I was different and special, nothing like they’d ever seen before. They gave me gifts and built me a house above the water, and I showed off for them. The first time they saw me glow golden and fly up into the air, there were shouts of joy. It’s the kind of thing that sticks with you, except it’s also the kind of thing that most people will never get to experience in their lives.

So I said that the world was incredibly flat, and I meant that, but for these people, something being up out of the water meant that it was off limits to them. There was an island a few miles wide whose center they had never been to, and after a week of plying me with food, wine, and women, they asked whether I could go sate their curiosity.

I suppose you want to know about the women, who I’ve described as fish or frogs, but — ah, fine, later then, but the short version is that I’d gone the whole last world with only a handful of encounters with the fairer sex, and as inhuman as the frog-fish-women were, it didn’t matter much to me.

My trip onto the island was eventful: I found a dragon coiled up there. I don’t know if you’ve ever fought a dragon, but they fight like demons. I suspect you’ve never fought a demon either. Me, I’m still waiting on a demon fight, maybe it’ll happen in the next world. The dragon was a huge thing, big enough to swallow me whole, and after slashing me across the stomach, I decided that it was better to be down its gullet than chomped in half by its huge teeth.

I don’t know quite what the dragon had been eating, if it hadn’t been slumbering for a few centuries, but it wasn’t prepared for me. It was trying to crush me in its throat, muscles contracting to try to crush my bones, but while that might have worked on a serpent, a fish, or one of the people who lived not more than a few miles away, for me it was just unpleasant.

I sliced it up from the inside, and my knives had soon cut valleys that were drowning me in blood. The dragon tried to hack me up, but I was dug in tight, and used the contractions of its throat to drive blades in deeper.

I was half dead when it stopped moving, and I was barely able to make my way out. I flew, limply, back to the fish people, clouding their water with blood, and when I told them that I had encountered a dragon, they told me to go right back and eat its heart to gain its power.

It wasn’t something that I much wanted to do, but they were in awe of me, and part of being a threshie is doing the dumb shit the locals tell you to do, just in case it’s sensible. It took me the better part of a day to cut through the dragon and actually find its heart. It was a tiny thing, no larger than a sparrow’s — a sparrow is a tiny bird, about yea big — and I swallowed it in a single bite.

Best decision I ever made.

I spent the next month bulking up, which was easier than it had any right to be. It felt like for every pound of fish I ate, I put on two pounds of muscle, and if I had been tough before, I was practically invincible after. You’ve seen, you know.

Well, I did the obvious thing and flew high into the sky, looking for other ‘islands’, which were only islands in the sense that the ground was maybe six feet higher than in the ‘ocean’. I found a few of them, but there were no dragons on them, only the remains of dragons, bleached white bones and once, a corpse that had been mummified by the sun. It wasn’t clear what had killed the dragons, but I assumed they’d been killed for their hearts. The one I’d eaten had replaced my own and grown in size to fill the cavity.

I met with other groups, who had their own lands and customs, and were similarly confined to the shallow water. Some had larger cities, as much as they could without being able to go truly vertical, and they had their own cultures. A few had pumps to get water higher, and once I went to a theater that had flowing water through six levels, giving a good view of the watery stage. It was there I learned to perform, to put on a show of my might and powers, the dragon-hearted alien from another planet. It’s come in handy a few times, and I’ll show your people some, same as Perry has done. Everyone loves a strongman.

I met the other threshie not long after doing my tour of the islands. There were more out there, I was sure, but after two dozen misses, I was starting to get a little bored with the whole thing. Anyway, we butted heads right away, but he was pretty chill once I got to know him, which was mostly through looking into his past.

Gordie was on a quest to become the strongest warrior in the world. He had a long, complicated backstory, and three worlds to his name, same as me, but the upshot was that he’d seen his mother killed in front of him as a child and vowed revenge. Well, he’d gotten his revenge, and that was all well and good, but it left him rootless until he got the shit kicked out of him one day. It hadn’t even been a mugging or anything like that, he’d just gotten into a fight at a tavern, and I guess that was enough for him to dedicate himself to a singular goal: become strong. He was happier with a goal.

After Gordie met me, he was convinced that he needed to kill a dragon of his own, and I said, ‘hey, more power to you, I’m going to keep living it up’. There were plenty of fish in the sea, and I’d seen his fighting style, which left me none too impressed. He was a brute, and seemed to think that he was going to win through sheer grit and determination, as though the thing that would decide it all was who wanted it more.

So I took in the plays, peeped on Gordie’s life, ate the most delicious dishes that the fish people had on offer, took in the sights, fucked my way across an ocean, and eventually got pretty bored with the whole thing. I was craving a new world. I think that most thresholders do, in time. Perry does. You see what a world has to offer, and in the beginning it’s all sunshine and roses — a flower that smells nice — and then you’re yawning because nothing is new anymore, and you’ve seen all the greatest things they have to offer. I had a historian friend, one of the fish people, who told me that all history is fractal, that it’s all detail on detail, always something new when you drill down, interesting things around every corner, and he was probably right in some sense that didn’t matter to me, but wrong when it came to my feelings. The best time in a new world is the first month or so, and then you kind of get the gist of it.

I actually think this place I got the gist of within the first two days or so.

Well, I’m not going to kill everyone here out of boredom. If I kill everyone, there will be a point to it. It’ll be to piss Perry off, or to send a message, or as retribution, I’m not going to just do it for fun. I’m not crazy.

Gordie and I had a nice little fight in the water after he got his dragon. Now I don’t want you to think I’m dumb, I wasn’t letting him go find a dragon to fight out of some sense that we should be evenly matched or something like that. No, it was more that I hadn’t wrung everything there was to wring out of the world before he came. The dragons weren’t the only magic, there were weapons as well, dangerous and precious things, usually no more than one per major city, held by their greatest warrior. Gordie loved that, it appealed to him, gave him a target, but once he started trying to snatch up the ones I hadn’t gotten already, I knew it was time to put him down.

He called me a cur. I pretended that I was coming to the defense of the fish people he was trying to steal from, and we fought a huge battle that put some dents in one of those huge cathedrals. He had this ridiculous way of fighting, calling out his attacks before he made them, grunting like he was about to give himself hemorrhoids, as though straining his entire body was the path to success. And even then …

I said I’d be honest, so I will be: he won. I thought I had him beat, but he picked himself up off the ground with sheer grit and determination, shook off the pain of a broken arm, and went at me. It was idiotic, but I had to give it to him, I didn’t see it coming, and didn’t have the wherewithal to defend for a second round. I had pulled out all the stops, and the only reason he was able to keep going was because of bloody-minded stubbornness.

When he went through the portal, he bowed to me and told me I was a worthy opponent, which he said like it was some kind of high honor. It’s not a compliment that I would have paid to him. I healed up and went through the portal myself, happy to leave the destruction behind and find a place with lakes deeper than a puddle and mountains taller than a barn.

And I think that’s it, at least at the high level. There’s more, of course, so many more stories, but they’re not my stories. I always take my time looking back through the lives of the other thresholders, and Gordie, Marjut, Petra, I saw every world they went to, and in some cases, heard from the people they fought, meeting people secondhand. But those stories are less interesting, because they don’t have me.

Now when’s the meat getting here?