Three days passed, or what I assumed were three days. Time felt strange in the Frozen Spire, flowing differently than it should. The tower had no windows, no sun to mark the hours, only the perpetual blue twilight of ice and magic.
I'd spent those days exploring, learning what it meant to be Glaciana.
The discovery that I didn't need to eat or sleep had been disturbing. I'd felt hungry that first day, my stomach growling with familiar urgency, but nothing in the tower resembled food. Eventually, the hunger simply... faded. Replaced by something else. A different kind of sustenance that I pulled from the cold itself, from the ambient magic saturating every molecule of ice in this place.
It felt wrong. Deeply, fundamentally wrong, like my body was running on the wrong type of fuel. But it worked.
I'd also learned that I wasn't entirely alone.
"Mistress," a voice like breaking icicles said behind me.
I turned to find one of my frost servants. A humanoid figure made entirely of animated ice, faceless except for two glowing blue points where eyes should be. I'd been startled the first time one appeared, but Glaciana's memories had quickly supplied context. These were extensions of the tower itself, manifestations of my will given semi-autonomous form.
"Report," I said, the word coming automatically. Glaciana's instincts were getting stronger, or maybe I was just getting used to wearing her skin.
"The intruders have been eliminated. They fell to the Ice Drake on the thirty-fourth floor, as you predicted."
I nodded, trying to ignore the spike of guilt in my chest. They weren't dead-dead. They'd respawn. That's how the game worked. They'd wake up at the last shrine they'd touched, missing some experience points and probably some gold, but alive.
At least, that's what I kept telling myself.
"Any others approaching?"
"None, Mistress. The tower stands uncontested."
The servant dissolved back into mist, leaving me alone in my throne room. I'd started thinking of it that way, not the boss chamber, but a throne room. The distinction felt important somehow, a way of maintaining my sanity. Sarah fought bosses in boss chambers. Glaciana ruled from her throne room.
I walked to the throne itself, a massive seat carved from a single piece of ancient ice, and sat down carefully. It fit me perfectly, conforming to my body, and the moment I settled into it, the tower's awareness expanded in my mind.
This was the part that scared me most.
When I sat here, I could feel everything. Every adventurer who set foot on tower grounds. Every monster patrolling the halls and I knew, instinctively, that I could command them. Could send the ice golems to crush intruders on floor fifteen, or order the frost wyrm on floor sixty to incinerate a party before they even saw it coming.
Glaciana's memories whispered that this was natural. This was my purpose. I was the tower's heart, its queen, its ultimate defense. Adventurers were prey. Resources. Sources of equipment and experience that would make me stronger.
But Sarah's memories screamed that these were people. Players who'd paid money for this game, who had lives and jobs and probably ate too much pizza while raiding, just like I had. They weren't NPCs to be slaughtered. They were real.
Weren't they?
That was the thought that kept me awake during the long hours when I should have been sleeping but couldn't. Were they real? In my old world, Realm of Eternity had been a game, lines of code and rendered graphics. But I was here now, breathing and thinking and definitely not made of polygons. The ice beneath my fingers was real. The cold in my veins was real.
So what did that make the players?
A chime echoed through the throne room, a sound I'd learned meant someone had entered the tower's base. I focused my awareness downward and felt them: three figures, moving cautiously through the entrance hall.
Level fifty-two, fifty-four, and fifty-six. A balanced party: tank, healer, damage dealer. Well-equipped from what I could sense. Experienced.
They might make it to floor forty. Maybe fifty if they were lucky and skilled.
But not to me. Not yet.
I watched them through the tower's senses as they engaged the first group of ice elementals. The tank held aggro perfectly while the damage dealer—a mage specializing in fire magic, I noted with amusement—melted through the elementals' defenses. The healer kept everyone topped off with practiced efficiency.
"You're good," I murmured, surprised to find myself genuinely impressed. "But you're going to hit the wall soon."
Floor forty-five had the Glacial Sentinel, an ice golem twice the size of normal ones with an area-of-effect freeze attack that could wipe an unprepared party. I'd died to it four times back when I was Sarah, before I'd learned to—
I stopped myself. I couldn't think like that. Couldn't give them hints, even mentally. I was Glaciana now. They were the enemy.
Except they weren't. They were just players trying to beat a dungeon, probably laughing on voice chat, maybe eating snacks between pulls, completely unaware that the boss they were working toward was a trapped office worker who just wanted to go home.
The mage threw a massive fireball that splashed against an ice wall, melting a hole clean through. I felt it like a distant ache, the tower's pain registering faintly in my consciousness.
"Sorry," I whispered to the tower, then immediately felt ridiculous for apologizing to a building.
But the tower responded. I felt it clearly, a pulse of acknowledgment, almost like reassurance. The ice was already reforming, the damage healing. The tower was alive in its own way, and I was part of it now.
I pulled my awareness back from the adventurers and looked down at my hands. Frost crystals were forming on my fingertips, responding to my agitation. With a conscious effort, I calmed myself, and the crystals faded.
I needed a plan. I couldn't just sit here forever, waiting and hoping that dying would send me home. That was passive. That was giving up.
But what could I do? I was bound to the tower, unable to leave. I couldn't exactly walk out and find a way back to my world. And even if I could leave, where would I go? This wasn't just the game anymore, if it ever had been. This was a real place, with real magic, real consequences.
A scream echoed up from floor twenty-three. The adventuring party had triggered a trap—spears of ice erupting from the walls. The healer managed to save the tank, but it was close.
They pressed on anyway. Of course they did. That's what adventurers did.
And I would be waiting, when they finally reached me. Because that's what bosses did.
I slumped back in my throne and stared at the ceiling, watching frost patterns shift and swirl.
"I just want to go home," I said to the empty room.
The tower's only answer was the eternal whisper of wind through ice.