Prologue
Prologue
Blood winding from the piled corpses formed thin creeks, and the dirt those creeks soaked through had turned to clinging muck.
Far overhead, against a sky swallowed by distance, a murder of crows wheeled down with eyes glinting.
At the center of that slaughterhouse landscape, a man sat on a body.
He wore a black cloak over serviceable armor and stared wordlessly into the empty air.
His fingers brushed at that emptiness, as if something hung there.
Anyone watching would have called it madness, but he only fixed his gaze on what he alone could see.
What floated before his eyes was, by his own measure, a game interface—a quest window.
Down the middle of that quest window stretched a list long enough to make the scroll drag on endlessly.
His finger pressed against its center.
[Completed Sub-Quests]
[ ! Sweeping the Nechagni Battlefield]
[Mountain Troll Hunt]
[Black Dagger Gang Extermination]
······
·········
The unfolded list ran deep. Hundreds of entries, at least.
The man narrowed his eyes at the list. What clung to the corners of them was resignation.
His teal eyes drifted upward.
Another list waited above.
A terribly brief one.
[Active Main Quests]
[None]
[Completed Main Quests]
[None]
When the game he had loved and enjoyed became reality—
he had been bewildered, but he had let himself hope.
He believed that one day he would leave this place and remember it as a story from the past. He trusted that once he cleared every main quest, he would be sent home.
The world, however, was not nearly so accommodating.
Twelve years since he had entered the game—Eternal Dominion.
He was still Aslan, the character he had built with his own hands.