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“Get out of the way!”

A dragon chef shouts at me while holding a pan of boiling oil. I do what he says. I run up the service stairs as fast as I can. These aren’t in the game, so the party won’t know about them.

I throw myself into Ornix’s bedroom and bolt the door behind me.

“What are you doing out of your cage?” He asks the question almost indulgently. Ornix was not in bed. He was standing by the window, fully dressed in armor. Almost like he never took it off. Almost as if he has been waiting for things to go sideways.

“They’re coming to fucking kill you!”

He raises his brows. “Are they now?”

“They broke out of the dungeon in seconds once they decided to go. They’ll have gotten their gear. They know spells. They understand all your potential attacks!”

Even though he is no longer here, Equinox is performing an assassination.

“They are human,” he says. “They may have gear, but they are not in a game. They are in a world that contains magic Equinox never accounted for. Do not worry.”

“I am very worried. I am very, very worried. If they come through that door, they will kill you.”

“They will not,” he says. “I assure you, they will not. It has been several hundred years, but this is not the first time humans have tried to kill me.”

I can hear them coming up the stairs, yelling at one another, preparing for what they think is just a game. But it’s not a fucking game. It’s my life. My world. My fucking man.

Ornix is not prepared. He thinks he is, because the last time humans came for him they had little more than spears and swords. These guys are going to have run through the forest and left it a bloodbath.

They hit the door.

I know the bolt won’t hold. I know they’ll use a spell to…

Boom!

The thing comes off its hinges as it explodes into a thousand shards. The last defense against their incursion just turned into a million toothpicks.

The humans rush through the door, weapons drawn. The tanks are in front, heavily armored and shining with protection spells. I can see cloth-clad mages in the back, their hands glowing with power. This is it. The moment I have been so terrified of all this time. He won’t understand their…

“No!” I run toward them, trying to block them from getting to Ornix.

“No!” My wings expand, and the sound that comes out of my mouth following that word is nothing I have ever heard before. It’s not a scream, or a word I know. It is a sound drawn from the very fabric of existence itself. I can almost feel atoms realigning themselves in response to the command that rips its way out of me.

They stop. All of them. Immediately. They don’t just stop. They freeze. They don’t quiver. They don’t blink. When I look closely, I realize that they are not even breathing. They are just standing there, absolutely frozen.

I look around behind me. Ornix has not moved. He has not tried to defend himself at all. He is standing by a window, entirely relaxed, maybe slightly amused, or proud. His expression is hard to read.

“I told you. They cannot harm me, no more than a fly could harm you. Humans are so far below me they barely count as sentient.”

“But what did you do?”

“What didyoudo, is the question,” he smiles. “You froze them in time.”

“I, uh, what?”

“They will stay in that state as long as you like. A year, perhaps. A hundred, if you become forgetful.”

“I really did that?”

“My love, you once opened a portal to hell itself. You blew open the side of the dungeon. You performed a damn near biblical miracle in the human world with the sky bread. Of course you did it.”

I step forward and touch one of the gamers. They feel like warm rock. “What else can I do?”