Our World Is Now A Dungeon World

Last Orders

The glass in Riley's hand was still half full when the sky broke.

 

He'd been mid-sentence, something about the Sumerians and their obsession with celestial record-keeping, when Miko kicked him under the table and told him he was boring everyone to death. Arianna had laughed so hard she'd snorted into her cider, and Amber had quietly passed her a napkin while pretending not to stare at the way Arianna's nose crinkled.

 

A normal Thursday evening. The King's Arms on a corner of Southwark, with its sticky floors and yellow lighting and the particular smell of stale hops that Riley had come to associate with the best hours of his week. These three people, this booth, these drinks. The only place he ever let his guard down.

 

"I'm just saying," Riley continued, ignoring the bruise forming on his shin, "if the Sumerians had modern telescopes, half of what we call mythology would be classified as astronomy."

 

"And I'm just saying," Miko replied, leaning forward with that look she got when she was about to dismantle him, "that you've been talking about dead civilisations for twenty minutes and my drink is empty. Priorities, Riley."

 

Her blue eyes caught the light. He held her gaze a beat too long.

 

"Fine. Next round's on me." He stood, fishing for his wallet.

 

That was when the window exploded inward.

 

Not shattered—exploded, as if the air pressure outside had quadrupled in a single heartbeat. Glass sprayed across the pub in a glittering wave, and Riley threw himself sideways over the booth, instinct pushing him across Arianna and Miko before his brain could catch up. Amber was already moving, her tall frame rising to shield the others, one arm raised against the debris.

 

The screaming started immediately. Not just inside the pub—outside, from the street, from what sounded like every direction at once. A sound so vast and layered it didn't seem human.

 

Riley lifted his head. Through the ruined window frame, the sky over London was wrong.

 

It had cracked. There was no other word for it. The evening clouds had split along a jagged seam that ran from horizon to horizon, and through that seam poured light—not sunlight, not any light he could name. It was violet and silver and it pulsed, rhythmic as a heartbeat, and where it touched the buildings across the street, the brick seemed to shiver.

 

"What the hell," Arianna whispered beneath him. Her voice was steady, but her hand gripped his jacket hard enough to whiten her knuckles.

 

"Everyone up. Now." Riley pulled himself off the booth and hauled Arianna to her feet. Miko was already standing, a shard of glass in her hand like she'd picked it up on pure reflex. Amber had positioned herself between their group and the door, her jaw set.

 

The pub had dissolved into chaos. People scrambling over chairs, a bartender shouting into a dead phone, someone bleeding from their forehead and not seeming to notice. Riley blocked it all out. He looked at his three friends and felt the familiar walls slot into place—the ones that divided the world into them and everyone else.

 

"Back door," he said. "The alley leads to the river path. Less crowd."

 

"You don't know what's out there," Amber said.

 

"I don't know what's in here either. Move."

 

They pushed through the kitchen, past a cook who stood frozen staring at the ceiling as cracks threaded through the plaster like veins. The back door opened onto a narrow alley, and the air hit Riley like a wall of static. It tasted metallic, charged, alive. The violet light was stronger here, washing everything in a bruised twilight, and the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees.

 

The Thames was fifty metres ahead. They ran.

 

Halfway down the alley, a tree that had been growing through a crack in the concrete lurched. Riley stopped so abruptly Miko collided with his back. The tree—a stunted, half-dead thing he'd walked past a hundred times—was growing. Its trunk thickened with a sound like snapping tendons. Branches erupted outward, bark darkening to a colour like old blood, and thorns the length of his forearm punched through the wood in spiralling rows.

 

One branch whipped toward them. Miko seized Riley's collar and yanked him sideways as it carved a groove in the brickwork where his head had been.

 

"Run faster," she suggested, and shoved him forward.

 

They reached the river path. The Thames looked black under the alien sky, its surface too still, as though something beneath it was holding its breath. Across the water, the London Eye stood half-lit, its pods dark, and as Riley watched, something moved along its rim—something far too large to be a person.

 

His phone buzzed. All four of their phones buzzed simultaneously.

 

Riley looked down. The screen had gone white. Text appeared, not from any app, not from any notification he recognised. Black letters on white, clean and absolute:

 

DUNGEON DESCENT INITIATED. TERRITORIAL ZONE: ENGLAND. ALL ORGANIC ENTITIES WITHIN THE ZONE HAVE BEEN REGISTERED.

 

A pause. Then more text, addressed to him alone:

 

SYSTEM ASSIGNED. CLASS: LUNAMANCER. SYNCHRONISATION WILL BEGIN AT MOONRISE.

 

"What the hell is a Beast Master?" Arianna said, staring at her own screen.

 

Miko held hers up silently. SWORDSWOMAN. Amber's read PALADIN.

 

Riley looked up from his phone. Above the fractured sky, through the pulsing light and the spreading dark, the moon was rising early. It was enormous—twice its normal size, bone-white, close enough that he imagined he could see its craters in perfect detail.

 

And it was looking at him. He couldn't explain the sensation any other way. The moonlight fell on his skin and it recognised him, settled into him like a word he'd always known but never spoken.

 

Something howled in the distance. Not a dog. Not anything that belonged in London.

 

"We need to get off the street," Amber said quietly.

 

Riley closed his phone. The moonlight clung to his fingers for half a second before dissolving. He stared at his hand, then looked at his friends—Arianna's jaw tight with fear she'd never admit, Miko gripping her glass shard like a sword, Amber standing tall with her shoulders squared against whatever came next.

 

"Yeah," Riley said. "We do."