I woke up in the middle of a ritual circle that looked like a crime scene designed by lunatics on mescaline. Pentagrams scrawled in something suspiciously red (I refuse to believe it was ketchup) pulsed on stone floors slick with incense smoke and the faint whiff of goat hair. Candles the size of small children leaned precariously on their wax foundations, dripping molten tears like the eyes of guilty priests.
There were people—or things that resembled people—chanting. Their voices sounded like a choir of dying lawnmowers choking on wet gasoline. I tried to sit up, but my body was still vibrating from whatever cosmic blender had spat me into this nightmare. My limbs twitched, my teeth rattled, and the back of my brain felt like someone had sandblasted it with crushed glass and LSD.
"Behold, the summoned hero!" one of the robed bastards declared. He had a voice like a second-rate carnival barker who'd sold his soul for a free megaphone.
Hero? Christ. The last time someone called me a hero, it was a highway patrol officer sarcastically congratulating me for not wrapping my car around a cactus outside Barstow. Now here I was, naked, hungover, and apparently drafted into whatever medieval soap opera these people were running.
The crowd pressed closer. Their faces blurred together in the haze, some human, others stretched too long, noses where eyes should be, teeth growing out of their foreheads. I couldn't tell if the summoning had warped them or if this was just the local gene pool doing its worst. Either way, they looked at me with the kind of worship you usually only see at tent revivals or Grateful Dead concerts.
I tried to stand. My knees buckled like damp cardboard, but adrenaline—or terror—kept me upright. "Listen," I croaked, "I think there's been some mistake. I'm no goddamn hero. I'm just a journalist. A professional liar with a typewriter. I don't fight wars, I document them, usually while chemically impaired. So whatever demon deal you're cooking up here, count me out."
But they didn't listen. They never do.
The high priest—or whatever his job title was—raised a staff carved from something that looked suspiciously like a femur. It hummed with purple light, and the floor quaked. "Chosen one," he intoned, "you shall deliver us from the Tyrant King, whose armies scourge our lands!"
"Deliver you? Christ almighty, I can barely deliver myself to the liquor store without incident."
At this point, the walls began to bend. Literally bend. Architecture twisting like it had been built from rubber and peyote visions. Somewhere deep in my gut, I realized: this wasn't a dream, wasn't a trip, wasn't even one of those long desert benders where reality thins out around the edges. This was another world.
The proof came in the form of a creature slithering through the open archway behind the priests. Imagine a horse, a lizard, and a meth-crazed Doberman welded together, dipped in oil, and set loose with too many teeth. Its eyes burned like sulfur lamps, and it howled—a wet, unholy sound that rattled my ribs.
The cultists panicked, scattering like cockroaches under a kitchen light. The beast charged straight at me, the so-called "hero," as if summoned monsters had a cosmic GPS app that zeroed in on the poor bastard least qualified to handle them.
I did the only reasonable thing: grabbed the nearest candle stand and swung it like a Louisville slugger. The iron smashed into the beast's jaw with a clang that jarred every bone in my body. Sparks flew. The creature reeled back, shrieking.
"See?!" the priest shouted, pointing. "The hero wields holy might!"
Holy might, my ass. It was pure, stupid survival instinct. The kind that makes a man wrestle alligators when cornered in Florida motels. But perception is everything, and these freaks had already decided I was their messiah.
The beast lunged again. This time I sidestepped, adrenaline tearing through the last of the hangover fog. The thing's claws ripped through stone like drywall. My mind screamed: You are going to die in a basement, eaten by a fantasy reject. No Pulitzer for this story. Just teeth and blood.
I hurled the candle stand into its face and dove behind a toppled altar. The monster thrashed, roaring loud enough to rattle the air. And then—like divine intervention or dumb luck—a spear shot from the shadows, skewering the beast through its neck.
It collapsed in a heap of steaming ichor. The chamber filled with the stench of rotting metal and burned flesh.
From the shadows stepped a figure: not human, not entirely. Tall, armored in blackened steel, face hidden behind a mask shaped like a bird's skull. The cultists fell to their knees, gibbering.
The figure looked at me. Something about that gaze pierced deeper than the LSD flashbacks I used to get in Vegas motel bathrooms. "So this is the hero?" it said, voice low, distorted, echoing as if carried on the wind through a graveyard.
I laughed—a harsh, cracked bark that felt insane even to me. "Hero? No. Journalist. Professional witness to madness. But if you people insist on dragging me into your apocalypse, you'd better pray I've got enough ink and bourbon to survive it."
The masked figure tilted its head, as if considering whether to kill me or knight me. After a moment, it turned away. "Then let us hope," it murmured, "that words are weapons enough."
The cultists cheered. The candles guttered. The beast's corpse smoked like a bad barbecue. And me? I realized I was well and truly fucked.
Because in this world—whatever ungodly carnival it was—the rules had changed. I wasn't in Nevada anymore. The sky outside the broken temple glowed with twin moons, and mountains floated in the distance like colossal, drifting icebergs.
A new world. A hostile, alien, magical world.
And somehow, I was expected to save it.