I feel aware of my surroundings, but my eyes are closed. There is an unplaceable chorus of chattering voices playing in one of my ears, quiet enough that I could easily ignore it and go back to sleep.

Part of me wishes that I could. But a larger part of me recognizes I have a role to play, that we're all trying to figure out how to get back to our own worlds. And I'm certainly no use to anyone if I'm just laying around in bed!

I sit up and open my eyes, then flinch away at the unexpected blinding light of the window.

Then, I remember with dread another role I have to play… a promise to the Book I must fulfill. I don't know the girl's name. I wish I never find out, but I know that once it's all over, I will know a lot more about this girl than just her name.

I feel a comforting feeling… and a brief moment of happiness. For a moment, it numbs the sensation of dread.

"It will be easier if you don't resist me so much," the Book insists, with benevolence that nearly feels genuine.

But I resist it, drawing from seemingly emotionless memories of morality. Then the dread returns.

I slide my legs off the bed and shove aside the faded quilt blanket. Now, where the heck are those voices coming from?

A made bed, a sealed door, and two flights of stairs later, and it seems the source of the commotion was just the inn's dining area. I quickly recognize Kay and Tyron chatting at one of the tables, with Steve, Jennifer, and the others sitting there too. Jeez, I must have overslept!

I sit at the empty end of their bench and find myself sitting across from the quirky magical boy who calls himself Warnado. That's a hard name to forget. But the girl I dread to see is sitting right next to him. I try not to think about that.

"Would you like some soup?" Warnado asks. "It's on me"

"Sure, Warnado."

Warnado stands up and walks away. Dreading the idea of engaging in conversation with the girl I'm supposedly about to enslave, I turn toward the rest of the table and see Kay's friend sitting next to me, turned away, in what appears to be a very engaging conversation with Kay and Tyron. Seeing no good way of entering their conversation, and knowing how strange it would look to stand up from the table and find other company, I decide that the only reasonable way to counter the Book's sole presence is to talk with the girl herself.

"You never did tell me your name," I remark to the girl.

"Amanda," she says, "and I actually don't know your name either."

"Fristad Heltz," I tell her, "from Veridale of the Farlands. I'm an animal farmer." I decide to talk longer, to stall until Warnado comes back. "I have a farming partner named Jonas. He's an enderman halfblood, believe it or not. And my best friend. Aside from that, I've had a pretty ordinary life. Perhaps too ordinary, for some." I motion to the motley group sitting with us. "Although I guess there are some aspects of my world that aren't so ordinary to people from other worlds. Even something as simple as the food I eat. It seems people from other worlds have fundamentally different ways of cooking!"

Warnado returns and places a bowl of soup and a spoon in front of me. The smell is unusual, but still makes my mouth water.

"Thank you, Warnado," I tell him, before immediately diving my spoon into the soup, only to spit the first spoonful out as I realize it's very, very hot.

Amanda bursts out laughing.

"See?" I tell her, pointing at the soup, "like that!"

"Is there something wrong with the soup?" Warnado asks.

"Depends. Is it normal in this world for soup to be this hot?"

"...Probably?"

"We have to go, Fristad," someone says to me. I look up, and it's Jennifer.

"What do you mean?" I ask.

"Everyone's leaving the inn because of someone called 'The Prophet.' It seems important. It might tell us something important about this world."

I resist the urge to sigh, and stand up from the bench, momentarily glancing at the unfinished soup before following the others out of the inn.

"The Prophet speaks again!" someone proclaims ahead, just audible through the din of an excited village crowd. "An era of darkness is upon us!"

I look at Jennifer with confusion, and she responds with a sympathetic nod.

Steve walks up to her. "It's not far from here," he tells her. "I think we should visit this prophet, and see what he's all about."

"I agree," says Jennifer.

"Warnado's found a carriage that can take us."

We maneuver through the crowd to a carriage at the edge of town, one of many. As carriages load up and depart, some people run toward the moving carriages and climb onto them, while many others travel on foot.

Just ahead of us, Warnado hands the driver of a large carriage a sum of coins, and opens the carriage door.

I climb into the carriage just behind Jennifer. Destiny and Tyron sit across from me. A couple townspeople enter behind Warnado before the door is closed and the town drifts off behind the edges of the carriage windows.

"So… who exactly is this 'Prophet'?" Steve inquires from the townsperson sitting across from him.

The townsperson, a man wearing a thick, coarse-fibered vest, with a goatee in need of trimming, turns his gaze toward Steve. "No one truly knows who the Prophet is or where he came from. All I know is that he speaks the truth, as handed down from the gods of many worlds."

"Gods of many worlds?" the other townsperson replies skeptically. "I don't think I've heard that explanation before."

"How else can it be explained?" the goatee townsman responds rhetorically. "We all come from different worlds, each worshipping our own gods, and now our people and our worlds have been brought together. Surely that must be the will of the gods."

"So that's why there are such abrupt changes in terrain…" Steve responds with realization.

"What about this 'era of darkness' that the Prophet is predicting?" I ask. "Any idea what that's all about?"

"It could be anything," the other townsperson says. "That's why I want to hear more of what he has to say."

"Let's not beat around the bush. An era of darkness is never good news," says the goatee townsman. "The wrath of the gods, certainly, but beyond that I don't know. This combined world is new. There cannot have been enough sins to justify the punishment of the gods. Perhaps this future of darkness is the work of evil gods who have taken control."

I try to make myself more comfortable in my armor, despite the jerking movements of the carriage over bumpy terrain. I really wish there was some way I could take it off.

"Do we know if this era of darkness is connected with the champion?" the other townsperson asks.

"What? The one who will command the forces of life and death?" says the man with the goatee.

"Yes, that one."

The man strokes his goatee and thinks for a moment. "You may be on to something."

"I certainly hope it's the case. If something bad is about to happen to our world, I hope there would be someone who could stop it."

I find the man's theories distinctly unsatisfying. Another hero's prophecy? All predicted by some man that no one knows, who answers to gods engaged in some unknown battle for good and evil? There has to be a more concrete explanation. Gods don't give hints when they want something that badly from mortals. At least… my gods don't.

As the carriage continues onward, Kay engages liberally in conversation with his fellow riders, his mage friend following suit. Every once in a while the mage's eyes lock with mine before he turns away his gaze a moment too soon in discomfort. It seems that whatever feelings Kay has about me have been passed on to his friend. The Book brushes across my mind a sense of intrigue and suspicion toward the mage, feelings that I do not disagree with.

The sound of echoing voices begins to come in through the carriage windows. The voices grow louder until the carriage starts to slow.

Then, the voices suddenly go silent. And in the place of all the voices which went silent, the cry of a single voice is barely audible.

I leave the carriage with the others and find myself at the back of an incredibly large crowd on the side of a rocky hill, with a small but dense forest around it. At the top of the hill stand two people, seemingly the source of the single voice crying out.

I have to focus in order to hear the words of the lone voice, and even then they are not completely audible. One moment, I hear bits and pieces of a story of brothers and sisters engaged in a feud. Another moment, I hear a broken analogy of throwing different sized stones against a wall. Yet later, I hear a story about a creature - what kind exactly I cannot say - laying still at the base of a waterfall. On and on the voice rambles stories, with seemingly no connection between them. There is something almost anxiety-ridden to the voice's pitch, as if at any moment its speaker could collapse dead on the ground. But over time, I develop a hunch, a guess, to the voice's distant and uncertain words. It revolves around a single theme, and that theme is… "sleep."

Not all the stories seemed to be connected to it. As far as I could tell, they were almost all detached moral proverbs. But every once in a while, I would catch a word that stood out of context, which I could not identify at the time. "Rest." "Death." "Sleep." "Dream." And then every once in a while, I would catch pieces of a story that did not seem to have a happy ending. Natural disasters and murder, generally. These stories would usually end abruptly. The voice would then pause for a moment… and then return to the proverbs.

I look toward the furry green man standing next to me, who calls himself Tyron, and give him a look of confusion. I do not want to disturb the crowd of people in front of me by talking over the distant voice, but I hope I can get some assurance that I'm not the only one who hears something dark and disturbing from that voice on top of the hill.

Tyron notices me a moment later and nods toward me, his annoyed face seemingly saying, "Tell me about it."

Eventually my mind starts to drift and lose focus from the distant voice. Why are we all at this hill, anyway? More importantly, why are we all here, people from many different worlds, in the same world? Is this a common occurrence? No, it can't be normal. That wouldn't explain the abrupt changes in terrain that Steve mentioned earlier.

Which leads me back to the same existential questions: Why here? Why now?

Could the Book be somehow connected to all this? No, that can't be the case. Steve and Jennifer seemed surprised when I told them about the Book, and they seem like honest people.

That just leaves that one mysterious criminal stronghold we escaped from, with an unexplained interest in the artifacts possessed by Steve, Kay, and Jennifer… and an unexplained desire to establish contact with other worlds…

If the prophet is right about an era of darkness coming upon us, could it not be the work of the gods at all? Could that criminal organization really be powerful enough to attract the attention of the gods? And the gods brought us all here to fight it? No, that's ridiculous. That would imply that the gods are too weak to handle their problems themselves.

After I disengage myself from my thoughts and listen closely to the words of the distant voice again, the words eventually trail off into silence. The crowd begins to dissipate and echo with indistinct chatter. I follow Tyron and the others back to the carriage, where we encounter a pair of unfamiliar visitors.

One is tall and covered in formidable, sleek black armor from head to toe. The other, about half the size, wears a black robe clinging closely to its form. Long, straight white hair hangs out of its hood. Its skin, just visible beneath the hood, is nearly the same shade of black as its robe, and its eyes glow red. And the creature, despite its size relative to the tall armored one, stands with confidence, with a hardness to its gaze that could almost be perceived as a subtle sense of superiority.

"Can I help you?" Kay asks the two black figures cordially.

"Hello Kay, I wondered when I'd run into you again," says the figure wearing the heavy black armor.

"So soon?" says Kay, "and you aren't immediately threatening to kill me or arrest me? Not that I'm complaining, of course. I'm more than willing to discuss our differences peacefully in spite of what happened at the Tower."

"Oh, you must think I'm one of the endermen from the tower. Sorry about that. This should help you recognize me."

With that, the armored figure lifts the helmet off their head to reveal a white-haired, scaled black face with red eyes. I recognize him as the enderman hybrid who gave me that painful healing potion and sat at the table during the conversation with the tower's crime leaders.

"Fire!" proclaims Kay. "You took your time! Oh who am I kidding? By bloody Notch it's a relief to see you again." He reached over to clap a hand on his shoulder, but could only reach his forearm. "Who's your robe-wearing friend?"

"That's Shadow, she's my sister." He pauses, seemingly remembering something. "I went on a voyage through different worlds back to my own in order to get some supplies, she decided to come along."

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Shadow. I must admit I'm a little jealous you get to come here of your own accord. Enjoying the scenery?"

With a smile Shadow replies: "Oh, the scenery is interesting, if a bit abrupt at times. The ambient magic is also a lot stronger than I'm used to."

"Oh, so you must be a wizard of some kind?"

Fire answers instead of Shadow: "I told you about her before we met Warnado, remember?"

"Of course, I apologize. It is a bit difficult to keep track of everyone given all the interesting characters we've met lately. Which reminds me…" Kay pauses for a moment. "David didn't make it. Wait, I don't believe you've met him. Don't bring it up around Destiny. But yes, to make a long story short, we met a few people in the Tower, and on the way out… things got a bit chaotic. There may still be some unsavory characters searching for us."

"I guess we have some catching up to do," surmises Fire.

"We all do."

With two more members added to our motley group, we each step up into the carriage. Fire looks around intently, evidently intrigued by all the unfamiliar faces.

"That was definitely a thought-provoking speech," the more skeptical villager chimes in.

"I'll say," I tell them. "Subtle references to sleep? Random stories of earthquakes and homicide? All hidden within a cryptic series of religious proverbs? No wonder everyone's crazy about this guy. I really hope he's wrong."

"The Prophet is rarely wrong," insists the speculative villager.

"How can you know that?" asks Steve.

Shadow chimes in: "The longer you listen the more becomes clear, at first you notice words and concepts, with time it's entire sentences that are quite often relevant to someone in the congregation."

"I'm guessing you've met with a good fraction of all the people who came to this congregation and asked them about it?" I question sarcastically.

Again, Shadow smiles. "I have spoken to most people who come here regularly, I have ways of being in more than one place at once. Though, none of them have yet figured out the grand revelation behind the words."

I raise my brows in intrigue and perhaps a bit of fear. "I guess I'll take your word on that."

"You have the grand revelation then?" Kay smiles wistfully.

Shadow replies: "I never said that, I have not spent a great amount of time here after all. It might also be that we're missing some critical pieces of information."

Kay stares at the sun shining partially through the window of the carriage: "We Thaums have a tradition called the Generational Story. Different generations of the same family continue the same story with faint alterations. Genuinely, you reach a major plot point, and it switches generations and the major plot point we just saw is recontextualised. That speech is probably tripe, much like most Generationals, but could we consider the proverbs are all linked in some way? At the very least there must be a common theme or motif?"

Fire explains: "Multiple in fact, you already know about 'sleep', which seems to be the most common one, other ones are 'growth' or 'twilight' for example. The Prophet never repeats anything he says so there will be a point where enough of whatever he knows is revealed to piece everything together."

"Is that so?" I say mildly.

Despite my skepticism, I can't help but notice how Fire and Shadow seem so sure of themselves when they talk about the Prophet, despite being only briefly familiar with his existence. It's as if they know something that I don't, and I want to find out what that is.

"Pardon me for being skeptical," I continue, "but how can you be so certain that the Prophet is telling the truth?"

Shadow says: "Normally we wouldn't be so quick to trust but the Prophet is the only existing source of any information about this world, as far as we can tell there are no natives, at least none that we've met. It also strikes me odd that some of the prophecies do happen as foretold, in a frequency that can't just be random chance."

The speculative villager interjects. "It happened to me once. How did it go exactly? Ah, yes! The Prophet said, 'large will crush small, and the small will shatter like a raining sky.' Just a few days after his fortelling, the very thing happened after I fell a tree. It got stuck perched over a group of shorter trees, and when I freed it, it broke them under its weight and the sky rained with their splinters! If you want I can tell you about a few more that happened to some friends of mine if that wasn't enough."

"One is fine," I reply, feeling somewhat frustrated with it all. Whatever knowledge Fire and Shadow have, they aren't going to share it so easily. But that knowledge isn't enough. We still wouldn't know how we got here, or how to get out. And I'm still stuck with the Book.

Even as I remember it, its presence flashes briefly across my mind, reminding me of my dangerous duty to take control of Amanda. Her face is just one of many riding in the carriage. How long would it take for people to notice?