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When she looked again, the gnome had vanished.

Meg retrieved her car and set off the way the gnome had pointed. The road: a double yellow line and two lanes of black asphalt, bordered by sidewalks. She drove. Skyscrapers and then suburbs fell away behind her. She passed clusters of thatched-roof cottages. Men farmed and cows grazed and windmills turned. Sometimes ancient oaks pressed in close to the road. Sometimes she saw castles on distant hills.

The needle on her gas gauge sank, and she hoped to find a station, but there were none. Finally, the engine died. She left her car and set off down the sidewalk.

Twilight came. Then the long line of streetlamps lit up, casting eerie white splotches on the darkened street and creating a tableau somehow dreamlike and unreal. She thought of how Devon and Brant would sometimes smoke pot and then get into long, rambling discourses on the nature of existence. During one such conversation, Devon had said, “Do you know anything about quantum mechanics?”

“Not really,” Brant had replied.

So Devon said, “Well, in the everyday world, things exist. If I leave a book on this table, I know for sure that it’s there. But when you get down to the subatomic level, things don’t exist in the same way. They only exist as
probabilities
, until directly observed. How do you explain that?”

Brant countered, “How do
you
explain it?”

Devon smirked. “Like this: Our world isn’t real. It’s a
simulation
. An incredibly sophisticated one, but not without limits. It can keep track of every molecule, but not every last subatomic particle. So it estimates, and only starts figuring out where specific particles are when someone goes looking for them.”

“That’s so weird,” Brant had said.

Meg heard a vehicle approaching from behind. Then its headlights lit the street. She glanced back into the glare, then kept walking. The vehicle slowed. It followed, in a way she didn’t like. Finally, it pulled even with her. A black SUV, its windows open. From the darkness came a rasping, lascivious voice, “Hey, where you going?”

She ignored it, walked.

“Need a ride?” The voice waited. “Hey, I’m talking to you.” A long pause. “What, you too good to talk to us?” When Meg didn’t answer, the voice hissed, “Bitch,” and the driver gunned the engine. The truck sped off.

Meg watched it go, then watched its taillights flare a sudden red challenge, watched it swing around, its headlights sweeping the trees, watched it come on, two coronas of searing white. Cackles rose from its windows. Meg drew her sword and stepped into the street. The car horn shrieked.

She slashed upward, between the lights, and the truck split. Its two halves swept past on either side. Its right half sped into a tree. Its left half flipped over and rolled thirty yards along the pavement.

Meg followed after. She neared the wreckage. A scraggly vermillion arm reached up through one window, then a face appeared—hairless, dark-eyed, ears like rotting carrots. A goblin. He squirmed free and dropped to the ground. A second goblin crawled from beneath the wreck.

The first drew a long, wavy dagger. “Look what you did to my truck!”

But before he could start forward, the second grabbed him and leaned in close. “It’s
her
. The Facilitator.”

The first goblin studied Meg, and his eyes widened. He sheathed his dagger. “So it is.” He touched two knuckles to his gnarled red brow. “I apologize, my lady. We owe you much.”

The goblins edged around her, then hurried over to the other half of their vehicle. They dragged out two more goblins, who were seriously injured, and departed together.

And then they were gone. But their words stayed with Meg, and perplexed her, and troubled her greatly.

She had other adventures, vanquished other foes, and the road led ever on. Finally, she came to the peak of a rocky prominence and looked out over a mile-long crater. The street ran downhill until it reached the gates of a dark and forbidding fortress. She knew that this must be the Citadel of Power and that Devon must be within. She hiked down to it.

The drawbridge had been lowered. She eased across, sword in her right hand, Wand of Reification in her left. The portcullis was up and the gate lay open. She slipped into the yard.

Empty. She crept sideways, keeping the wall at her back. She held her breath, heard nothing.

She peeked into the central yard and saw a grand stone altar. She crept closer. An object lay upon it. A wand.

The Wand of Reification.

She glanced at her left hand, which still held
her
wand. She’d thought it unique. She already had a Wand of Reification, and hadn’t even used it. She shrugged, took the second wand and tucked it in her belt, then moved on.

She searched bedchambers, kitchens, a great hall, a cavernous ballroom, all empty. She entered an ancient armory. Crossbows, shields, pikes—

Wands.

Rack after rack of wands. Hundreds of wands. A thousand? Wands of Reification all, she felt sure. She didn’t understand.

She went outside and crossed the yard again. The sky had begun to dim, and now she saw faint light in a tower window. She ran toward it.

Which hall? Which way? She dashed through rooms and under arches and up spiral stairs. Finally she found it—a door, shut, wan light spilling from beneath. She hurled herself against the door, and burst into the room with her sword raised.

A bedchamber. Posters on the walls. Devon’s posters, from his old dorm room.

Light from a computer monitor. Someone sat before it. He turned. Devon.

He smiled and said, “Meg. Hey!”

She ran to him, enfolded him in her arms along with sword and wand and everything, and said, “Are you all right? I was so worried.”

“I’m fine.” He squeezed her and chuckled. “Everything’s fine.” He pulled back, brushed aside a lock of her hair, and kissed her. He was so tall and handsome, tawny-haired and emerald-eyed. He wore a gold medallion over a purple doublet with dagged sleeves. “Come on. You’re exhausted.” He led her to the bed, and they sat down together. He took her sword and wand and laid them on the nightstand.

She rested her cheek against his shoulder. She stared at the familiar posters (the nearest was an Edmund Leighton print) and whispered, “Aren’t you in trouble? I thought you were. Devon, I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“Shhh.” He stroked her hair. “Just relax, okay? I’ll explain everything.”

He said that the real world was just a simulation, like a game. He didn’t know who’d made it, but whoever they were they didn’t seem to show themselves or ever interfere. Like any game, it had bugs. Many of these involved
Realms of Eldritch
, which was itself a new, fairly sophisticated simulation, and sometimes things got confused, and an item from the game got dumped into the real world. That’s how he’d gotten the Wand of Reification, which could be used to alter almost anything. With it he’d set things in motion. He said, “Do you understand so far?”

She nodded, tentatively. It was all so strange.

He said that since the wand could only be used three times, he’d had to go looking for another bug, some way to duplicate the wand. Fortunately, there
was
one. But it was very specific: if a female warrior set out to rescue a man she loved, and was given the wand by the gnome, the game set a quest tag wrong and let her acquire the wand again at the Citadel of Power, leaving her with two. Devon said, “Ah, speak of the devil.” Meg raised her head.

The gnome, his head canted so that his mysterious blue eye watched her. Devon reached toward the nightstand, took the wand, and handed it to the gnome.

Meg murmured, “Why are you giving it to him?”

Devon said, “So he can give it to you again.”

The gnome stuck the wand in his sleeve, gave a curt nod, and hobbled from the room.

Meg was mystified. “You said this bug creates an extra wand?”

“Yes.”

She thought of the armory. “But you have
hundreds
of wands.”

“Over a thousand,” Devon said. He took the spare wand from her belt and placed it on the bed. “One for each time you’ve come here. One thousand two hundred and seventy-four wands.”

She was stunned. “But…I don’t remember…”

He told her, somewhat cryptically, “When you restart a quest, you lose all your progress.”

Meg stood, pulling from his embrace. “Devon, you
lied
to me. You said you were trapped here.”

He stood too. “I’m sorry. I had to. You had to be on a quest to save me, otherwise it wouldn’t work.”

She fumed. “I was in danger. I was attacked!”

He held back a smile. “And what happened?”

“I…” She hesitated. “I beat them.”

“Of course. Meg, you’re level sixty. You have the most powerful sword in the game. Nothing can harm you. There was never any danger. Didn’t you get my prophecy?”

“
Your
prophecy?”

“That’s why I wrote it,” he said. “That’s why I made the gnome recite it. So you wouldn’t be afraid.”

She paced to the window and looked out. This was all too much. “So now you’ve got a thousand wands. Why? What are you planning to do?”

He came and put his arm around her, and said softly, “To remake the world. To make it what it should have been all along—a place of wonder and adventure, without old age or disease. A place where death is only temporary—like in the game.”

“You’re going to make the game real,” she said.

“Yes.”

She felt apprehension. “I don’t know, Devon. Maybe you shouldn’t be messing around with this. I like the world just fine the way it is.”

“Meg.” His tone was affectionate. “You always say that.”

She felt a sudden alarm. “What?”

Again, he suppressed a smile. “It’s already begun. Ages ago. You think the world always had goblins and giant spiders and a gnome running around handing out magic items? That’s all from the game.
I
made that happen.”

She felt adrift. “I…don’t remember.”

“No one does,” he said. “The wand makes things real. Not just physical, but
real
. Only
I
know that things used to be different, and now so do you.”

And the goblins, Meg thought. They knew.

Devon kept going. “That’s what’s so funny, Meg. No matter what I do, no matter what crazy, incongruous reality I create, you always want things to stay exactly the way they are. That’s just your personality. But we can’t stop now. There’s still so much to do. And you’ll love it when I’m done, you’ll see. You have to trust me.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I…need to think about it.”

“Of course,” Devon replied. “Take all the time you need.”

So she stayed with Devon at the Citadel of Power, and they ate meals together in the dining hall and danced together in the grand ballroom, and after that first night they slept together again too. She was still in love with him. She always had been. Even the game knew it.

They hiked together around the crater’s rim, and he told her of the world as it
had
been, when there’d been no magic at all, and humans were the only race that could speak, and adventure was something that most people only dreamt of. It sounded dismal, and yet Meg wondered, “Could you reverse the process? Put everything back the way it was?”

Devon was silent a while. “It would take a long time. But yes, I could. Is that what you want?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

That night, Devon told her, “I want to show you something.” He led her to their tower chamber and turned on his computer. Meg was suddenly nervous. The monitor flickered. Icons appeared. Devon said softly, “Look at my background.”

It showed two students sitting on a couch at a party. Meg didn’t know them. The girl was pear-shaped and frizzy-haired and wore thick glasses. The guy wore glasses too, and was gangly, with thin lank hair and blotchy skin. The two of them looked happy together, in a pathetic sort of way. Meg said, “Who are they?”

Devon said, “That’s the night we met.”

Meg was horrified. She looked again, and suddenly she
did
recognize traces of themselves in the features of those strangers on the couch.

Devon explained, “I used the wand on us. Nothing drastic. I could do a lot more. I could make us anything we want. But you need to understand, Meg, when you talk about putting things back the way they were, exactly what you’re saying.”

Meg could accept the way she looked now—merely a pale shadow of Leena. But to think that she might not even be pretty, might be
that
girl…

“I thought you should know,” Devon said, apologetic.

The next day at lunch, Meg asked him, “What is it you want me to do?”

He lowered his utensils. “Start the quest over.”

“How?”

He nodded in the direction of the tower. “On my computer. I can show you.”

“So that you’ll get another wand?” she said.

“Yes.”

“And I won’t remember any of this?”

“No,” he said.

She leaned back in her seat. “How many more times, Devon? My God, how many more wands?”

“As many as it takes,” he said, without equivocation.

She stood up from the table, and said, “I need to think. Alone.” He nodded. She went and paced the castle walls.

Devon wanted his new world more than anything. If she went along, then together they could have immortality and adventure and opulence and wonder. What had the old world offered? Crappy jobs and student loans, illness and death. What kind of a choice was that? She’d been here before, even if she didn’t remember, and had sided with Devon one thousand two hundred and seventy-four times. Who was she now, to doubt the wisdom of all her past choices?

He was still sitting there when she returned and said, “Fine. Show me.”

He led her to the tower and loaded the game. He selected a character named Meg, who looked exactly like her. The character was level 60, and carried a Sword of Ultimate Cleaving +100. Devon clicked through a few menus, then stood. “Okay,
you
have to do it.”

Meg sat down at the computer. A box on the screen said: “Citadel of Power—Are you sure you want to start this quest over from the beginning?” The mouse pointer hovered over “Yes.”