Oz POV

  Oz stared at the ceiling, trying to work out what exactly had gone wrong. Not a lot went right for Oz, but this was a new low. Waking up on the floor of a bleak, cube-shaped room of dark dungeon stone, with no idea how he’d got here.

  Things only got worse as he tried to move. He was pretty certain your soul wasn’t meant to pulse in pain. Or that you should be able to feel it.

  The only time he could remember feeling worse was the hangover he’d got from that time his dad had got his hands on some proper dwarven whisky. Remembering that had only added to his pain. Closing off that memory, he tried to think through what had happened, and from that point he realised he had a bigger problem.

  Oz was lying on the floor thinking! Oz was not really a thinker by nature. He prided himself on being a doer. With the exception of runes, and avoiding whatever traps his father had rigged the toilet with, Oz didn’t spend too much time thinking about what was next. He’d found that no matter the challenge, do enough and most things ended up done. True, his straightforward nature frequently left him with more to do and a fresh collection of cuts and bruises, but that could be solved with even more doing. Thinking about the problem was rarely part of the process.

  This unfamiliar thinking had given rise to a fresh problem. Somewhat reasonably, he’d tried to work out how he got here. His last memories were going to bed in his empty house, after double-checking he had everything ready for his enlistment. He doubted that this was part of enlisting in the Ranger Corps. They were known as mavericks, but this was a step too far.

  Failing to find an explanation for his relocation, he turned to working out who might have cause to knock him out and drag him here. That started a cascade of memories and a rapidly expanding list of names that led him to a single conclusion.

  He was a total slagheap of a person.

  Oz did not shy away from solving his problems with violence. In fairness, he never started any of the feuds that had dominated his school life and small-town drama. Yet as he explored his memories of his enemies, he couldn’t ignore the assorted thuggery on display. It was a slideshow of violence and loneliness. Oz of the past had wanted to be left alone and lashed out at anyone who came near, and only now, in this cell, could he see beyond his fists — at the scared faces, understand the damage he’d done with every hit.

  There were people who deserved it, but there were plenty who’d only accidentally poked and prodded the bear, and never truly deserved an introduction to his claws.

  He'd fought a lot of people, he'd upset a lot of other people. He broke stuff, and what he didn't break he made worse. And, up until this moment, he’d not noticed. He’d just been aware he got what he wanted — a path out of the Scablands.

  He tried to sit up, groaning as the pounding of his soul intensified. His head hurt. It couldn't decide what to be mortified by first. It was like waking up the night after a bender, discovering someone had made a documentary about all those terrible decisions, and being sat down to watch it. All while thoroughly hungover. It was, in other words, torture.

  Was this the room doing this to him? Had he died? This certainly felt like the perfect way to punish a soul — forcing empathy on them and then just leaving them to tear themselves apart. He was snapped out of his personal purgatory as something crackled. He felt a thrum of power on his chest.

  “Well, piss on my forge, what in slag is this?” Someone had dressed him in a fancy suit — lots of black and brass, cut to a military style. He had a crisp white shirt that definitely wasn't his. His ability to ‘do’ had never included ironing. The floofy red and blue tie-like thing — a cravat! The word hit his brain like a posh insult. Why the hell did he know that?

  Oz frowned. Given he’d come from a town where formal wear was your least dirty work clothes, he was relatively certain he’d never seen or heard of a cravat before. The headache pulsed and he grit his teeth. Deciding not to question it, he instead focused on the rest of the outfit. The cravat added a burst of colour to his chest that was otherwise dominated by a black blazer with brass buttons. The only other notable feature was a bronze crest that tugged at his memories.

  "He's still totally out of it. Look, he's still dribbling. I told you you should've made him a higher-ranked minion." A voice hummed out of a golden pin that held together the cravat. It sounded vaguely familiar.

  "No, I think I heard him speak. He's awake, the soul… repair must just be taking it out of him." The second voice sounded shifty. Soul repair sounded bad.

  "Hello?" Oz said, as he dragged himself into a sitting position. Looking down, he saw it was shaped like the crest on his chest. It was a shield with a diamond dungeon core above a thicket of different weapons. He also noticed, beyond his black suit trousers and shiny military-style boots, a door out of his cell.

  Oz had heard the phrase dread portal but had never been able to picture what that might mean. This door, with the gargoyle-like mouth stretched around its frame, and black metal-studded wood, was a great contender. Perhaps he had gone to hell?

  Wait — what was hell exactly? The word and following images gave him a headache. He winced and focused instead on getting up.

  "Ah brilliant, you're not dead. Can you tell us your name?" the second voice asked.

  "Oz. I'm Oz Grimbrow. I think? I'm feeling like I dropped down a mineshaft. And did I hear you say soul repair?" He was Oz, but he also felt like he wasn't. Like a different name had confidently rushed to his lips, only to be whisked away at the last moment. It was like that time he was on mushrooms.

  His headache got worse, as the undeniably alien thought ran through him. Oz didn’t do drugs. He barely drank. He took fitness far too seriously to waste time with it. His body was a temple. It was a pity that it was the kind of temple that sent his limbs out on regular crusades. Yet despite his care, some heretic had snuck in and was now spouting blasphemy from the pulpits about cravats and what a terrible person he was.

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  He stood up, trying to get some kind of control over things. "I'm not sure what's going on. Why am I here? There're thoughts in my head that don't feel right."

  "Please expand on that?" The studious voice continued, and Oz could hear the rustle of a notepad.

  "Why do I know what a cravat is? Why am I wearing one? What's going on?"

  "So, long story short — you slightly blew up your soul. We've added a patch to bring it back together by making sure you've got an E-grade class, which we’re hoping has patched you up," the first voice — female, if he had to guess from the softer tones — bluntly stated the situation.

  "Ven—V, please don’t confuse him. Try and take it slow, young man."

  "Wait, I've got an E-grade class?" That blasted through his confusion. Hearing he had a class — a proper one, not an F-grade ‘starter’ — had his fingers twitching. The excitement overrode the whole ‘stitched your soul back together’. His body immediately dipped into the meditative state needed to view his soul space and explore his newfound power. An E-grade class! That was beyond anything he'd ever hoped for.

  "WAIT, WAIT!" The second voice was too late. Oz was a doer, and while he definitely lacked inner peace, that wasn't because he couldn't meditate. It was, after all, just another thing to do. He closed his eyes, Oz becoming dead to the world.

  "Well this is going terribly. Venna, please just try and have a bedside manner."

  "I don't know why you're looking at me. Hey, don’t drink the entire bottle!"

  A soul space was how the brain interpreted the magic of the Weave. The residents of the Rift Realms worked on a different system to the mortal realms, with their blue boxes and levels. They'd kept an older, more stable version. It required more upkeep, was more personalised to the user, and overall had fewer bugs.

  The blue box admins had argued for a universal approach, only shutting up after one early tester took over an entire world by exploiting a series of bugs that started with distracting their opponents with the default ding of a system notification, and ended with blinding them with pop-up messages. The admins let the Rift Realms keep their older UI design while moaning about scalability and modernisation — but they were mostly tuned out.

  Their main complaint was that each soul space was unique, taking on aspects of what the soul expected to see. It could be influenced by culture, personal experience, and desire.

  Some might find a library, with books explaining their skills, their attributes and class. Others might instead be more abstract — an alchemist’s lab, what potions brewed, the stage of each concoction indicating their development, and the brew’s effect telling them the nature of their skill.

  Oz's soul space used to be a gym. A series of exercises and tasks waiting for him told him all he needed to know about his development. The weights rack told him of Physique, the heavy ropes were his Deftness, and his Willpower attribute was the leg press. He hated the leg press.

  Now it looked like the gym had been the victim of a brutal earthquake, the room being sliced in half and the bedroom of the quiet guy who wore a fedora and liked to share his ‘humble opinions’ about imaginary sword fights and proper maid etiquette had been slammed in place. The ‘bedroom’ had colourful posters on the wall. A glass cabinet had a load of figures in it. The men had haircuts with far too much spiked hair, and the women had entirely too little clothing. On the wall hung a sword with so many spikes around the handle it was a wonder the owner didn't cut themselves to ribbons before turning it on an enemy.

  Oz didn't know why, but he was certain the sword was named something unhelpful like Bloodmoon or something.

  Oz was worried. Soul spaces could change, but not like this. He remembered when it had been an art gallery — that was when he'd first accessed it, years ago. That was when he was still painting and sketching, before it was just him and his dad, and long before the soul corruption twisted his father into someone else.

  His mum had been so pleased with him. It was a sunny memory tainted by her absence. She'd have been horrified by how it looked now. Even with only a passing grade in Soul Theory, he was pretty sure that a soul space shouldn't look like two rooms slammed together and thrown down a mountain. His gym was familiar, his space where he felt most comfortable — a place where he could just work out and drown out everything else.

  The rest of the room was alien. The cream-painted walls had posters with more colour than he'd ever seen. He was briefly fascinated by them, the artistry speaking to parts of him desiccated and buried by the artistic desert that was the Scablands. A cupboard lay open, spilling out clothes that looked like something a spoilt rich kid from one of the big cities might wear. There was a bed that was nowhere near wide enough for his frame to sleep in. It looked rickety, like someone had knocked it all together. Cheap flat-pack furniture.

  That was not an Oz thought, and his brain struggled to reject the following string of information that came with it. He did not want or need to know what IKEA was, or what a bed had to do with meatballs. He looked at the wrong side of his soul space. They'd used the words patching, but that rather suggested something minor — not replacing between a third to half of his soul, if he took the amount of alien room as his measure. It was pretty close to being less Oz than… whatever, or whoever this was.

  What did it even mean to have so much of your soul be so unfamiliar? Oz was, for a moment, glad he'd paid so little attention to soul theory. He’d tuned out the second he got the practical bits down. Something was definitely broken, and knowing exactly how broken wasn't going to help.

  He was getting distracted. Maybe his class would help? He tried to make sense of it all, but everything was out of place. He couldn't intuit it. Then he spotted something — a flashing light. Just where the two halves of his soul fused, there was an oddity. His punching bag hung from the ceiling, supporting half a desk. On approach, he found that, with no respect for its duty to absorb punches, a pane of illusion glass was embedded into the surface.

  [Anomaly detected. Weave version preference: multiple. Deploying variant render, Integrated Interface Prototype X5]

  Oz decided to ignore that, even as the voice in his head — the voice of stupid swords and fancy clothes — demanded he pay attention. To compromise, he decided to commit it to memory. The other voice could think about it later. What was important was his class.

  Somehow he knew this was his new Weave. On that glass would be his future, and it was already brighter than he could’ve hoped. After being told so many times his life would be spent as some F-grade miner for Fizzick, he was already beyond that. Even the Ranger Corps, which he’d set his hopes on, would’ve taken years to get him up to E-grade.

  He could see his square-headed face reflected in the black mirror of the illusion glass. Eyes stared back under a thick hooded brow — ‘Grimbrow’ by name and nature. A feature he'd inherited from his father. It fit the man he was unable to deny he was. Even as part of him — the cream-walled, fancy-clothed part — insisted that something was very wrong.

  To drown out the alien thoughts, he started to read. The text was flickering across the screen, made out of lots of white squares of light. Pixels, his brain added, but he pushed the alien thought down and tried to read what kind of class he'd earned. He read it once, read it twice, and frowned.