He wasn't falling anymore. Was he dead? Was this the afterlife? He hadn't believed in the afterlife. Was that going to haunt him? Was he doomed for all eternity? Alex tried to collect himself. What were the facts? He could work with facts. A sinkhole opened up beneath him. He started falling, and now he wasn't falling anymore. If he wasn't falling anymore, then what was he? Sitting down, he's sitting down. He could feel a hard floor underneath his ass and thighs. His thighs? He was sitting cross-legged, something he hadn't been able to do since he was sixteen. His skin felt bare, too bare, but panic drowned the rest out.

  Slowly, Alex opened his eyes, afraid some divine white light would blind him. Instead, everything around him was black—no, not black, just dark. A faint light came from somewhere. The light came from within his hands. He was holding something, something smooth. The light was coming from whatever he was holding. Was it his soul? The round object was warm to the touch, and a faint golden light was coming from it.

  Alex tried looking around. His chest tightened; he couldn't breathe. No, he could breathe, but something clung to him, something thick and clammy, like a thin layer of slime, but he could breathe through it. Aside from the layer of slime, something else also seemed to surround him, trapping him, blocking outside light from coming in.

  He tried moving his arms, pressing against whatever was trapping him with his elbows. His cage was both hard and soft at the same time. It felt like fabric, like it could break with a simple poke, but it didn't. It was tough, tougher than it felt. Alex was about to attempt to break it when he heard something moving outside. He stopped, but whatever it was, it must have heard him.

  "Did it work?" a deep, raspy voice said from outside his cage.

  "I don't know, Rhasthar," a second, nasally voice followed, "We followed the master's instructions, but the apostle should have come out by now."

  "You must have messed it up," the raspy voice said. "I knew there was no way you could have managed to get a firenewt's tongue. You must have replaced it with something else."

  "Did not," the nasally voice protested, "I got it from my contact."

  "Your contact? You mean that sleazebag Hrothar? He swindled you, you idiot."

  "He did not! He assured me the firenewt was freshly captured in the Saltplanes."

  "The Saltplanes? There are no firenewts in the Saltplanes. Firenewts require a humid environment."

  "But they're FIRE newts."

  "Yes, newts, as in amphibians, which require water, something the Saltplanes are famous for lacking. The ritual requires precision, the right ingredients. Too much starsalt and the vessel curdles..."

  "Starsalt was too expensive. Hrothar said moonsalt would be just good."

  "Moonsalt? There's no such thing as moonsalt."

  The two voices continued to argue with each other for what felt like at least fifteen minutes. All the while Alex sat there, as still as he could be. What was happening? Rhasthar? Hrothar? He had never heard names like that before. Did they call him an apostle? This didn't sound like any afterlife he had heard about before. Was every religion wrong? He didn't believe in any, nevertheless; it felt like if there was an afterlife, at least one religion in the world must be right. For a heartbeat, something flickered in the darkness. Alex's head suddenly burst with pain.

  Initializing... 1%

  Just as quickly as the pain came, it went again. Was that a voice in the back of his mind? No, that couldn't be. He must have imagined it. Alex suddenly realized everything outside was quiet. When had they stopped arguing? Were they gone? He hadn't heard them leave, but then again he had stopped paying attention to what they were saying when they had started to just insult each other. Was it safe to come out now? He sat there for what felt like another minute, just to make sure they weren't still around. When he heard nothing, Alex tried pressing his elbow against the strange material trapping him again. With a bit of force, the fabric-like cage gave way.

  Even outside of Alex's fabric-like cage, the world around him was dark, safe from the few simple torches hanging on what looked to be a cave wall. While he would have loved to look around his new surroundings, there was one thing that immediately grabbed Alex's attention. A few feet away from him stood a tall man dressed almost entirely in black. Some kind of black bandana or shawl hid the lower half of his face. Even his hair and eyes were black. The man would have blended right into the dark cave shadows if it weren't for the faint glint coming from his pitch-black dagger.

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  The dagger, that was what caught Alex's eye. Even though it was as black as the night, it still had that recognizable glint of light reflecting off metal. Some kind of dark liquid covered the edge of the blade, and as Alex followed a drip of the liquid to the ground, he realized what it was. What could only be described as an overgrown, bipedal lizard with green scales and wearing some kind of leather armor lay on the ground at the man's feet. A large pool of the dark liquid had collected around the lizard's head and still streamed from a deep gash in its neck.

  Alex's eyes darted back up to the man's face in horror. What was going on? Was the man one of the people he had heard arguing earlier? Or was the lizard thing one of them? Before Alex could ask the man a question, a dark whirlwind of shadows surrounded the mysterious man. As they dissipated, the man was gone. Alex's head swiveled left and right, looking around the room for where the man might have gone. The cold touch of metal against his throat revealed the man's location.

  "Who, or rather what, are you?" a whispered voice spoke from behind Alex. "Why was the cult of Praxthar trying to summon you? And what kind of Power Pearl are you holding?"

  The stranger's breathing was steady, no hesitation in his voice. It was clear this wasn't his first time holding a blade to someone's throat. Aside from his voice and breath, the man seemed to make no noise, no rustling of his clothes, no shuffling of his feet. It was almost as if he were only partly there.

  Alex took a deep gulp and felt the blade rasp over his Adam's apple, drawing a small trickle of blood. "I'm Alex. I'm human. I have no idea what the cult of Praxthar or a Power Pearl is," he tried to answer as short and clear as he could, not wanting to anger the man with a knife to his throat. Alex hadn't immediately registered it, but his voice sounded different, higher than before.

  "You do look human, aside from the eyes," the hushed voice said, and Alex could feel the man's grip on the knife around his neck loosen slightly.

  His eyes? Alex wondered why his green eyes didn't look human. His entire family had green eyes; plenty of his coworkers had green eyes; even his landlord had green eyes. That was when he spotted a broken mirror hanging from the cave wall on his right. His eyes grew wide in shock as he looked at his reflection, and he knew it was his since he could also see the black-clad man and the blade pressed against his throat.

  His eyes weren't the green he had been looking at every day since he had been born anymore. Now his eyes were a deep shade of purple. However, that wasn't the most shocking thing about his reflection. His entire body had changed. He didn't look like an early thirty-year-old who should have taken better care of his skin anymore. No, right now he looked no older than sixteen. While his hair was still the same shade of sandy blond and it did somewhat resemble his own sixteen-year-old body, there were also some clear differences, aside from the eyes. For one, his nose was way smaller than he remembered. He had always had a big nose, something his bullies at high school were quick to pick up on.

  "The cult of Praxthar," the low voice of the man said, bringing him back to the present, "any idea why they would have summoned you?"

  "No, like I said, I have no idea who or what the cult of Praxthar is," Alex answered, looking at and seeing the lips of his reflection move. The sixteen-year-old boy was definitely him. As he answered, he felt a wave of cold air coming from behind him.

  "Hmm, you don't seem to be lying," the hushed voice said, moving the black knife away from Alex's throat in a swift motion.

  As soon as the knife was gone, Alex moved forward and away from the man. When he turned to look at where the man had been standing, he was once again gone without a trace. Alex scanned every inch of the room he was standing in, searching for where the man might have gone, but there was nothing, not a single hint of where the man might be hiding. The room itself looked like a glorified cave, with the only light coming from the four wooden torches hanging on the walls around the room. Most of the cave was bare, with the only two things of note in the room being a large table full of items Alex didn't recognize with the broken mirror hanging on the wall near the table, and in the center of the room was whatever was keeping him trapped earlier.

  He moved closer to his former cage to look at what had trapped him. There was no structure there, nothing that could have kept him caged. The only thing there was something that looked like a large bedroll. As he touched it, the soft fabric slightly clung to his fingers. The closest thing Alex could compare it to was the cocoon of some kind of insect. Underneath the cocoon was some kind of drawing on the floor in what looked like dried-up blood. What had happened to him?

  Alex slowly backed away from what looked eerily similar to a summoning circle in some cheap horror movie, tripping over something and tumbling to the ground. His arm hit the ground with a hard thud, leaving him with a nasty scrape. A horrified look crept onto his face as he noticed what he had fallen over, the corpse of another of the lizard things. That meant those were the ones he had heard speaking earlier. Which meant they were sentient beings. The man hadn't killed monsters; he had killed living, thinking people.

  What horrified Alex even more on a personal matter was that he was apparently completely naked during their entire interaction. The man hadn't batted an eye as he had held a sharp blade to the throat of a naked sixteen-year-old. How could he have done that? Did he have no empathy? Alex needed to get out of here. At that moment, he didn't care that he was still naked. He needed to run before that monster reappeared.

  There was only one exit to the cave, something that both terrified and relieved him. He wouldn't need to find his way out of some kind of maze, but that also meant it had been the only way the murderous man could have gone. Alex jumped to his feet and made a sprint for it. Just as he was about to exit the room, the dark-clothed man reappeared beside him in a whirlwind of shadows.

  "You shouldn't have run," he heard the man say before the back of the black knife hit his head and he tumbled to the ground. The glowing orb rolled out of his hand. Alex hadn't realized he had held onto it the entire time. His head hit the hard cave floor, and everything went black.