Game Master in Another World

An hour passed, marked by two more rounds of drinks. Slowly, the warm haze began to give way to a nagging sense of worry. Where was Illara?

I pushed myself up from the table. “I’ll go find her. She probably got lost,” I joked, though the humour felt suddenly thin.

Sera laughed gently. “Make sure you tell her off for not being back yet.”

I stepped out into the cool night air and began walking down the narrow, cobblestone paths back toward our lodgings.

As I passed a semi-dark alleyway, a small shape on the ground caught my eye. It was a crudely carved wooden sun pendant, its leather strap snapped in two.

That’s strange. That looks exactly like Illara’s.

A sudden, icy knot formed in my stomach. I took a few hesitant steps into the gloom.

A little further up the alley, a body lay crumpled in the dirt, surrounded by a dark, widening pool. It took a long, agonising moment for my alcohol-fogged brain to process what I was seeing.

It was Illara. She was lying completely unmoving, her dress soaked in entirely too much blood.

A violent, terrifying sobriety crashed over me as I sprinted to her side. Illara’s eyes were staring blankly straight up at the night sky. There was a brutal stab wound in her chest. Her coin purse had been violently cut away.

I dropped to my knees. A guttural, agonising scream tore from my throat as I grabbed her shoulders, shaking her limp body.

“No, no! You can’t die!” I wailed into the empty alley. “I made a promise to protect you! You can’t die like this!”

The sheer, overwhelming weight of the grief broke something fundamental inside me. I physically felt the metaphysical tethers binding my awareness to the world snap, one by one. I completely lost the will to exist.

I felt myself being pulled backward, drifting slowly upward out of Drisnil's flesh. As I floated into the cold air, formless and disembodied once more, I looked down.

Drisnil remained on the ground, but I was no longer piloting her. She was clutching Illara’s bloody chest, her own shoulders shaking as she sobbed uncontrollably into the night.

“Curse you, Geoff!” Drisnil screamed into the dark, her voice shattering with genuine, agonising heartbreak. “Curse you for making me love someone!”

The world around me began to go silent. My vision dimmed at the edges, fading into a deep, endless black, until I ceased to be.

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