I was enveloped in mud all the way to my knees. It seeped into every gap of my boots. The gravel it carried chafed against my flesh until I bled. It left me cold and wet. But I trudged through it, even as its soulwater filled me with the many dying thoughts of man.

  There, in a great forest, one close to the Misty Mountains, the trees wafted with cold blue mist. They formed an oppressive canopy and created an impenetrable fog.

  I felt exhausted as I fought through the mud. Though I could phase through it for moments in short skips. I could only skip so fast. I had to go through the mental process of doing it, each time. And I couldn’t stay phased away for too long either. As I stayed as nothing, it became harder to return to reality. The coldness of nothing would cling to me and drag on me like a weight. If I stayed too long, I’d never be able to leave.

  My knife gently shook in my hand. I felt scared in those trees, nervous. I was alone. I never wanted to be here. I never wanted to be hunted. My eyes darted around. I tried to look for the faintest reflections in my halo, in the trees, in my blade. But I found nothing, nothing for many hours.

  A knife darted towards me from out of the mist, pushing some of it aside. I managed to phase away in time. And then there was nothing again. No progress, no enemies for many hours. They would do this every so often. My guess was that it was to harass me, to make sure I had no rest in this forest, and to wait for the opportunity to finally defeat me.

  I had a breaking point. In that awful mud. I will not escape like this. I thought. I took a long, still moment. I waited for their knife. I waited for them. And when it came, I could see its reflection, I could see them, and held mercy no more.

  I phased through the fog and the mud and carried a will of death behind me. I held all my frustration in my blade as I plunged my dagger towards her. She was an angel. And among her were my enemies of the same kind.

  She moved to parry, but I phased through her blade and cut towards her. I overshot very slightly though and most of my knife’s blade disappeared. I’d gotten too close and it had overlapped with her body.

  I grew a crystal blade out of my hand and impaled her with it. That gave her allies enough time to collapse around me though. And they moved to strike me with their sword and spear.

  I’d tried to phase out of the way, but it’d seemed that the one with the spear, flashed his spear faster than I could even see, straight into my heart. And I grew heavy and weak and cold.

  I woke up with a heavy gasp among the angel I’d just impaled. She sat up and stretched her arms into the air and let out a satisfied groan.

  Sariel looked over us both. His eyes glinted with a slight satisfaction, but he said nothing and stepped away.

  I’d watched my life disappear like I was a drop in that rain. I looked at my hands, dazed. I looked to the angel I’d just tried to kill. Her carefree smile. And I stared at Sariel as he walked away.

  I didn’t have an ounce of ranger in me. I didn’t have the will to fight. I didn’t have the sense to navigate a thick fog or to strike where I needed to. But he was prepared to have us die. He was prepared to pull us from the edge of death over and over again. All to kill those things. All to make me a ranger.

  We had been taken out of that cold, horrible forest. But still I shivered.

  Ahaviah snapped her fingers repeatedly in front of my face, “Um… Are you there Mevakiel?”

  My wings twitched as I suddenly came back to reality, “Um… Yes…”

  She tilted her head, “Did you still want to play? You’ve seemed really out of it since your training started. We can still do something else if you’d like.”

  “No no! It’s ok. I was just thinking is all,” I waved my hands.

  “Mmm, ok,” she eyed me suspiciously.

  It was more Dance of the Vortex. More chaos. I had felt no wiser after many games. It felt like every new approach I came up with was more self assurance than anything that worked. I started counting games, keeping track of how I played. While I kept track, I just shot out into the dark over and over again trying to find something that worked.

  “You take this game really seriously, Mevakiel…”

  “I just want to win!”

  Ahaviah giggled a little, “You do though.”

  “You know what I mean! I want to learn to win,” I said. “It doesn’t feel like winning, if I only ever win from luck.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “I’m not sure if it’s one of those games you can learn to win,” she said. “I think it’s more one of those games that’s trying to make a point. And to be for everyone. It’s all very based on chance.”

  The thought of a game that you weren’t meant to improve on made me slightly angry. It was like I’d just been duped. It showed me a challenge just to tell me it was pointless? I couldn’t believe it.

  If that was true, the game itself had to be wrong. I couldn’t believe that chaos wasn’t something I could overcome. I didn’t want to be at the mercy of fate.

  “This game sucks,” I said.

  “So you forfeit?” she asked.

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  I battled amongst mud and water. Sand and storm. Angels and spirits. Demons and fire. Within mountains and among a hundred lakes. I died and faught, over a cycle or more.

  In the sweltering desert, sand danced in the air. There was no great storm, but instead a constant breeze. And every brush with the sand it carried felt like a burn. I fought angels amidst it all. Even as the sands shifted against our movement, exploding into plumes that brought agonous pain. There I died in the sand, as a warrior, as a fool. And always I was dragged to fight once more.

  In the familiar vines of the Dygarlands, I fought against its constant growth. Dying in its weeds. Lost, without sense.

  Among endless ponds they creeped up from the muddy banks. These creatures moved along on thin amphibian legs, they carried jagged blades of bone, and poked floating souls with sadistic glee. I fought them in the hundreds, slaughtering them along their banks. I desired not to kill them. Such pitiful creatures, but did not want to die again.

  But always, there was so much more.

  Waves crawled across an enormous shell as it dragged itself out brackish, black soulwater. It roared with anger in a sound so grating and horrible that broke my vision into tiny fragments.

  I fell to my knees.

  It was a horror beyond me. A being, that within my fractured sight, seemed of endless scope, of endless hatred, and endless time.

  “Kill it,” Sariel said.

  I scoffed, I shook my head, I cried, but I dragged myself to my feet. It was ridiculous.

  “How?” I demanded. “I cannot kill something half its size.”

  He just grinned, his stupid ugly grin, “Learn to.”

  He was useless and evil. I had died endless deaths to his whims. “To learn”, and it was never enough. Never did I feel powerful, never did I feel strong. I was always just forced into another thing beyond me.

  What was the limits of his power? When would I actually be dead? I didn’t know. He did not tell me. I was just expected to give up on being a scout. To do the impossible. To fight more than I ever had. To fight until it killed me over and over again. And for what? There was no kindness in this man. And no kindness in a goddess that would make me do this.

  There was only Ahaviah. Only the smallest bit of home for me. And only the slightest bit of time for it.

  I grit my teeth and leapt into flight.

  I sealed my ears shut with crystal to avoid its awful scream. And in my hands, crystal spikes were materialized to be thrown into wherever I could find vulnerable flesh.

  This only seemed to make it angrier. I doubled the seal around my ear. I could not even stand to look at the creature very long anymore. Its look began to emanate a madness that disorganized my mind.

  I phased through any stomp, any appendage it threw at me.

  I tried different shapes, different angles of attack, spinning blades, and different strategies. I poked at the unknown, trying to play with it, even as this creature tried to torment and end me. I decided that if I were to kill the creature, I would need to dig deep into its flesh. So I settled onto a spear shape that rotated in spirals.

  I could spin it quite fast with the control granted by the spirit, but even that alone wasn’t enough. I could only dig so deep into the creature before I had to move. Although I could phase through its quick swats, It seemed to grow wiser as the fight progressed and would try to occupy the space I was in so that I couldn’t come back without my spot.

  I dug deep into the flesh at every angel I could. And although I couldn’t risk looking at the whole beast anymore because of its increasing madness, it began struggling to swat me away and keep me moving. Slower and slower, until it failed to respond at all, and I could dig deep through its flesh.

  I didn’t really know how many days, how many hours it had taken. But for the first time in a while, I felt satisfied. And I returned to Sariel, and stood before him without feeling any need to say more.

  Game after game with Ahaviah, I won and lost. And over time I’d found a few strange things that seemed to improve my winrate playing as angel in Dance of the Vortex. Seemingly there were certain spots that were more likely to shuffle the angel into favourable positions. It wasn’t a perfect shuffle of the map. It wasn’t significant enough to make me dominate every single one of our games. But it gave me hope. It gave me the kind of hope that I didn’t have to be helpless against fate.

  I could learn and experiment to gain just a little bit of control at a time, even against things that seemed utterly uncontrollable. That was my interpretation of the game at least. That was my hope.

  We stopped playing that game as much though. Ahaviah was nearly healed. And I felt a great melancholy worry that I couldn’t be there for her when she went back to the scouts as a captain. She seemed to feel a similar way, because somewhat naturally, without really noticing, we held each other close. Especially as the days counted down to a single digit, we held each other like we had back in the Dygarlands. Like we’d lose our lives again. Wing over wing. And it was lovely and it was home.