Somewhere in the real world, in a hospital bed nobody has thought to check on in a while, Takehiro Tomiyasu is still in danger, and he doesn't know that either.
My earliest memories are of my grandfather: a white haired, wrinkled old man with big, strong hands and a smile that seemed nailed to his face no matter what was happening around it. He smelled of pipe tobacco and cut hay, and he never once raised his voice at me, not even the year I broke four of my grandmother's good plates trying to teach myself to juggle turnips. Everything before him is fog.
Every night after dinner, once the fire had settled into its lazy orange crackle, he'd tell me about the good old days: riding at the back of a harvest cart into Hallowmere town, listening to his brother spin increasingly impossible stories the whole way in, the market square humming from dawn to dusk with buyers coming from three counties over for what we grew with our own blood and sweat. He always said it like a fact everyone already knew, the way you'd say the sun rises in the east.
Hallowmere today is not that town. The farmers and honest traders packed up and left years ago, and what's left behind are the liars and swindlers who'll pick your pocket while wishing you a good morning. My grandfather went into town once, a few months before all this started, to sell what little we had left and buy medicine for my grandmother.
He came home beaten bloody, his coin purse gone. There was no medicine after that. My grandmother died of the fever a week later, and Gramps hasn't been the same since.
Some nights I'd find him at his window, staring at nothing, his whole face gone slack, like the part of him that used to fill it out had gotten up and left with everyone else in town. Besides Abigail, the servant girl who looked after him when I couldn't, I was the only one left to run what remained of the farm.
You might be wondering about my father. He's not dead, just alive in the specific way a man can be alive and still be a complete mess, which I'll get to. My great grandfather passed our land down to my grandfather, who meant to pass it down to my father in turn, and that plan held together right up until the day the travellers showed up and knocked over every careful arrangement anyone in Hallowmere had ever made.
That's what we call them here. Travellers: people from somewhere else who appear out of thin air with powers straight out of a bard's exaggeration, strong enough to walk into a dungeon full of monsters and walk back out again carrying the monster's teeth as a trophy. I was nine, maybe ten, playing knights and robbers on the road into town, when three of them blinked into existence a stone's throw away without so much as a puff of smoke to announce themselves: a tall, handsome blond man, a short, stocky brute built like a barrel with legs, and the most beautiful dark haired woman I had ever laid eyes on in my short life (present company excepted, but that's a story for later).
Where the monsters came from in the first place is the better question, and it's one nobody in Hallowmere seems interested in asking anymore. Except me. The popular theory around here is that the gods, having sat quietly in their temples doing nothing for the last several thousand years, got bored, carved dungeons into the earth like a child carves initials into a desk, stocked them with monsters, and summoned heroes from another world to clear them out for their own amusement.
If that's really what happened, the gods in question must have a truly baffling idea of what fun looks like. Reading works fine for me. And here's the part nobody tells you in the stories: once the monster's dead, its treasure simply appears on the ground where it died, clean and gleaming, like the universe itself is embarrassed by the mess and wants to skip straight to the reward.
I've seen it happen.
The impact on my little corner of the world came in three parts. First, because some of the travellers turned out to be frighteningly strong and frighteningly beautiful both, the local farmers and shepherds started worshipping them the way you'd worship anyone who could flatten a dungeon boss before lunch. I will admit, with the specific shame reserved for things you did as a child and still secretly enjoyed, that I kept straw figurines of Theresa the healer, Corvin Ashe the sword king, and Fyodor the grand mage tucked under my bed.
Noble families fell over themselves offering up sons and daughters, and a fair number of travellers ended up crowned as kings, queens, or generals, simply because nobody in this world had the raw power to say no to them.
Second, the sheer profit sitting in those dungeon drops reshaped the entire economy overnight, like someone tipped the whole continent on its side and shook it until everything settled into new pockets. Farmers, fishermen, and hunters became miners, chasing whatever glittered in the cleared-out dungeons, which is where my mother and father went. My mother left first.
Gramps told me she was beautiful, smoky eyed, an Earl's educated daughter who'd dreamed of seeing the wider world since she was a girl, right up until she got pregnant with a farmer's son (that would be me) and figured her dreaming days were over. When the age of wonders opened up a way out, she took it without looking back twice. Word has it she's a successful merchant somewhere down south now.
My father, apparently gutted by watching her go, followed her example not long after and headed south himself to dig in the dungeons, hoping he might strike it rich enough to win her back.
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In the year 2027, most of humanity spends its waking hours plugged into Aftermath, an alternate reality game so complete that the people inside it stop calling it a game and start calling it the place they live. Takehiro Tomiyasu, the man who built it, tries to copy his own mind into the world he made. Something goes wrong during the transfer.
He is wounded, and slips into a coma before the upload finishes, and the character that wakes up wearing his soul on the other side has no idea any of that happened to him. He thinks he was born there. He thinks his name is Jon.