Infernos

Ok, I lied again. I am still flying through the air. I am really just looking forward to getting there. You can expect the rest of the chapters until we get there to end similarly, like "Now, I'll be seeing this new world" or "Finally, the flight through the air ends". But really, no guarantees. I've been here for-EEVVVEERR, and I can't see anything. I might just be flying through space indefinitely. My life might just end from starvation! Oh gods!

Should I turn around? I don't even have anyone to talk to. I'm bored. Maybe I should have an existential crisis or something? Yeah, that sounds good. So, is this a dream or what? Was I sent to another world, or did I just fabricate memories of this one? It's crazy! Maybe I'm just a fictional character. But I don't FEEL fictional. But any fictional character would say that. And man, this would be bad storytelling, breaking the fourth wall and pointing out all the confusion in the story so directly. And what kind of story is just 1 person flying through space? I've never heard of a story with just 1 character. Plus, it's unrealistic. Shouldn't I be thinking about how much my wounds hurt? Bleeding out and dying? Instead, all I can see is white, and I don't feel a thing, besides the ground that I'm laying on.

It's uncomfortably warm. Moving my fingers around, I note that the parts of the ground I'm not on are almost scaldingly hot, implying that I've been laying here for quite a while. A blazing sun hits my upper body. The lower part seems to be under some shade. I presume I passed out, but the brightness is making it hard to stay in a coma. The pain starts to come back, though it's dulled a bit. How long have I been laying here? I feel the shade move up my body at a fairly decent pace, bringing some coolness with it. When it covers my eyes, I open them.

The stoic face of an eyeless horror are inches from my face.

"AHHHH!!!" I scream, terrified.

"EEKKKEKEKEKE!!!" It screams, terrified, as it disappears.

The sun's light goes straight into my eyes. I don't like things that disappear. It looked like something from a nightmare. Considering it's interest in my body, it must've been some kind of demonic scavenging animal off to eat my soul. I would prefer not dying here…

I squint under the sun. Why is there a sun? Am I not in a tower? I can see a wall. It's so huge that even as it curves out of my sight, I can only see maybe 50 degrees of it. The land here is overwhelmingly flat, but black shadow blocks obscure much of my vision. Some are short, but most are several times my height. Of course, none compare to the tower. I don't see any creatures nearby, but the walls block out a lot of my sight. I walk up to a rather large one and touch it. It's frighteningly cold, and my hand sinks into it like air. Scary.

I get a bit of confidence worked up and poke my head through. Pitch dark. Welp, I'm not going in there. Especially not with those horrors floating around.

I walk around a bit more, but nothing is interesting. I'm tempted to try a bit more. I find a nice thin block. I could jump through it in one easy leap. Taking a few steps back, I jump through. For a moment, everything is pitch black, but directly after, light comes back.

However, the world has completely changed. It's cooler, and I seem to be on the interior of some cavern. The walls glow a luminescent red, which reflects off of the gold scattered everywhere to create a rather pleasing color. Gold… my instinct tells me that it's a worthless metal, but has a nice aesthetic. Why's there so much in one place?

"Kch. Seems like my hideout has been found." It was a mildly childish tone of voice, refreshing after so many people and things with the capacity and intent to destroy me. I turned around to see it's owner.

A gleaming blue dragon. It had a volume of 6 me's, sending my dream of someone weaker than me crashing underground. I quickly switched into diplomacy mode. After all, it had worked last time, with Markus. Kinda.

"Err, not on purpose! Look, I won't tell anyone, yeah?"

"Hmm, but I don't like it that you know, either. Nobody is allowed to know."

"Ah, well, we can be friends, right? Then it's ok, because, ah, friends know each other's hideout!" I slowly started sneaking back to the wall to leave.

"Friends? I… I'm so flattered. It's so hard to make friends, but I did it! Woo! I was worried that you were going to try to kill me!" The dragon… blushed? Did it blush? Can dragons blush?

"What? No way, I would never do that to you, Mr. Dragon."

"I'm female." The dragon's voice turned flat.

"HAHAHAHA, well, you know, err, it's hard to tell because you're a different species..." I trailed off as the dragon looked at me suspiciously. This was the second time I had screwed gender up since I got here, too. "Like, I bet you don't know what gender I am, right?"

"Very obviously Male."

"Nope, actually, I'm female!" The lie seemed to quell the dragon's rage, and it - I mean, she went back on track to friendship.

"Oh, really? I guess you just can't tell these days. Anyways, what's your name?"

"I'm Okei. What about you?" I was glad to get back on track.

"I didn't ask if you were ok, I asked what your name was."

"My name is Okei. As in, O-K-E-I."

"Are you making fun of me?" The dragon seemed very unaware of how much it was making fun of my name, but I was not going to point that out.

"No! That's my real name, okay?" I was somewhat proud of the pun.

"And it's just a COINCIDENCE that it's exactly the same name as that of the chaos lord Okei?"

"Yes"

"Okay, Okei. My name is DRAGON. People call me this because, when I talk, conversations drag on and on and on. Conversations with me could fill a whole page, and there would be no description or anything, just us talking."

"So both of our names are puns. See, what a great friendship. I bet there's some kind of chaos lord named dragon somewhere out there, too."

"Maybe. I don't think so." DRAGON didn't seem so convinced. But it was good enough.

"Okay, I'll leave now, see you later!" I am at the portal.

"Wait! Don't you want to spar before you go?"

"I would, but I don't want to die."

"Alright, fine. I'll give you another option. Show me what kind of magic you can do."

I would be relieved, but, I can't do magic. At least, I think I can't. To be fair, I haven't spent much time trying. Actually, maybe… no, the dragon's nose doesn't look at all like my thumb, and there aren't any cards on hand. What other magic do I know?

"Look, the truth is, I don't know any magic."

"Haha… do you know how many people I've killed?" The tone became menacing.

"Sure I do. If you take the number of people you've killed, and sum the digits of that number, and then sum the digits of the resultant number, continuing until you get a number that is only a single digit, then the final number will be equal to the remainder of the number of people you've killed after division by 9."

The dragon stared for a long, looong, looooong time. Long enough for me to realize that this would actually give the wrong answer if the dragon had killed a nonzero number of people divisible by 9, or if dragons didn't use base 10. I hoped greatly that neither were not the case.

"That's… correct." I breathed a breath of relief. "But what kind of magic allowed you to know! I've stolen the magic of the last 76 organisms to wander into my trap without fail, but somehow, your mind reading magic completely slipped under the radar." So, it was a trap. We didn't really become friends. Unfortunate, but I had managed to avoid the trap, which was good.

"Hahaha, my magic is not something so easily stolen," I bragged. "It's a special art that takes years of development to procure, but in exchange, it can't be taken from me!"

"You… must be lying. Yes, luck, that's it. That must be it! You don't know how many scales I have!"

"ON THE CONTRARY! If we call that value S, then S is precisely equal to the sum of its prime factors, multiplied by six, divided by zero!"

"HOW CAN IT BE? YOU CANNOT KNOW THE SHOCK THAT I FEEL!"

"BUT I DO! THE CROSS PRODUCT OF THE DIGITS OF THE SHOCK THAT YOU FEEL WITH THE ZETHEROS FEYLINE IS NOTHING BUT TWICE YOUR FAVORITE SONG!"

"AGGGGHHHHHHHH! The dragon screamed as it died, turning into a shiny magic crystal.

I found myself drawn towards the crystal. Err, not because it was pretty. Because it was magic, and magic has a pull. Interested, I went towards the crystal, and picked it up. A massive zolch of power went through me, and the world spun around me. I felt capable of casting any spell. I didn't really KNOW any spells, though. The world spun faster, and faster, until I ended up in a town, in front of a sign which indicated that my lack of knowledge was about to change.

"Welcome to Windslore, the city of Magic!"