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I stare, stunned, shocked, and unable to respond in any way as the creature rapidly shrinks upon landing, and a tall raven-haired man steps toward me.

Ornix.

I don’t know whether to be relieved or horrified, surrounded by the charred debris of my mistakes.

He is wearing scaled armor from head to toe, shining bright in the clearing made by the destruction of his dragon fire. Every stride seems to bring him many, many feet closer to me, like the world moves under him when he walks, and not the other way around.

He grips me by the chin.

“You do not run,” he says. “To run in this world is to invite death. Do you know how close you were to being shot with arrows that would have torn you to pieces, hacked to death by kobolds? Even burned by a stray flame catching the wind the wrong way? You almost died three separate times today even as I tried to save you from mortality itself. Do you have a wish for oblivion? Do you desire to be cast into the underworld? Consumed by the soul eater? Is your essence destined to be snuffed out?”

“I killed someone,” I sob. “I think I might deserve to die.”

“As a greater man than me once said, there are those who do not deserve life who have it, and there are many who deserve it who do not, so it does not matter.”

“I don’t think that’s what he said. Not even close.”

“Well. Regardless. I do not care what you think you deserve, you will stay alive because I will it, if nothing else. You are mine. Your life belongs to me. Your body belongs to me. As does your happiness, which you will rediscover one day, but not today. Today you will atone for daring to deprive me of what I own.”

I tremble in his grasp, and under the weight of his words. He means every single one of them. He truly believes I belong to him. I suppose I should have realized that already, but hearing him declare it so completely and emphatically makes it sink into my bones.

He is not done with his lectures. In fact, he is only just beginning. He keeps my head tilted up toward him, but he continues to speak.

“What did you think you were doing? Stealing a horse, coming to this dangerous forest? Killing the inhabitants who never did you any harm? What kind of a little monster are you?”

Tears leak out of my eyes, running down my face. There’s some version of this story where he swoops in to comfort me, tells me that it doesn’t matter that I ineptly slaughtered a kobold, he doesn’t care about anything as long as I am safe. But that’s a delusional version. This, again, is starting to bite in a very real way.

“I thought it would be easier to kill him. I thought it would hurt less. I thought it would be cleaner. I thought I was supposed to. That’s usually what you have to do when you start the game.”

I feel his grip tighten just a fraction.

“This is not a game, Melissa. This is more real than the world you left. The human realm is small, a little bauble hanging in space. It is limited in so many respects, run by petty small men with cruel intentions. It has limited natural resources, and it is choking on its own waste. You have been brought to a world that runs on entirely different systems. Where magic is real, where you have been chosen as the mate of the highest in the land, and you run off to murder innocent woodland creatures because you’ve been taught that’s what a human does? I will teach you again, little human. I will give you the lessons you needed to learn a long time ago, and I will make sure they stick. Let’s start with killing. If you want to kill cleanly, you have to practice. What kind of practice have you engaged in?”

“Well, I played the…” I’m scared to even say the word ‘game,’ since it seems to infuriate him so much.

“Oh, yes, you clicked a button and you thought it meant something. But it doesn’t, does it. It’s a hollow shell of reality. It diminishes it by tricking your mind into thinking something is being achieved when in reality, nothing is being achieved.”

I’ve heard all these arguments against games before, but they’re not actually arguments against games. They’re arguments against pretending real life is a game.

“What do you think I should do with you?”

“Me?” I squeak the word. “What do I think?”

“Yes. You told me not five minutes ago that you think you deserve death. I will always preserve your life at all costs. So tell me what else you think you deserve. Nothing so melodramatic asan execution, but something that will teach you what you need to learn.”

I look into his eyes and I know for sure he already has his intention set for me. He’s going to punish me, and I can either make it better or worse by saying the right thing.

“Tell me. What should happen to you?”

“I don’t know,” I whimper as his eyes bore into mine. “You’re scary.”

“Am I? Am I more frightening than an arrow between the shoulder blades? Or a rusty hatchet through the skull?”

“I know I fucked up. I get it.”

“I suspect you’ve said some variant of that a hundred times or more,” he says. “Don’t forget, I saw your permanent record.”

“You did? I didn’t know those were actually real. Permanent records, I mean.”