The road after the rain was nothing but mud.

  It was always like this in the slums. Every step squelched and splashed filth up your ankles. Rainwater had flushed the usual refuse from the alley corners -- dung, kitchen waste, things best left unidentified -- and the air reeked with a permanent, cloying stench. Row upon row of low-roofed shacks pressed together like rotten teeth, and between them moved people with blank, numbed faces, already busy with repairs. Roofs had to be patched before they could hurry to the docks in search of backbreaking labor. Every rainy season brought leaks, and now and then a collapse -- and with it, a small, unremarked tragedy.

  Soren walked the foul, muddy road with the old dog's body cradled in his arms. The corpse was already ice-cold. Vivian held his hand and followed in silence, her face dark with grief.

  Hiss was dead.

  The old dog who had been at her side since the day she was born had finally reached the end of his road.

  They were going to bury him. Properly -- the way you would bury a person.

  He deserved that much.

  "Soren! ..."

  "That's Soren! ... He's awake! ..."

  "Oh, this ought to be good."

  Whispers rippled through the slum as they passed, and Soren caught the undercurrent of awe beneath them. The people here remembered what he was -- a thief skilled enough to drop three or five grown men without breaking a sweat. There was a rumor he'd once pinned a fly to a wall with a thrown dagger. Two local thugs named Balas and Canopo had been circling Vivian ever since Soren fell unconscious, and word was they'd already taken a deposit from the slaver Sossia. They'd warned the neighbors more than once not to interfere.

  The slums were lawless ground.

  No one had been willing to stand up for one helpless little girl. They feared the thugs, and they had no power to oppose them.

  "Brother," Vivian said quietly. "Where are we going?"

  She wore a threadbare dress -- cheap linen, crudely stitched, the kind of garment only slum dwellers would touch. Soren had been a talented thief, but he'd had a gang boss above him. Most of what he stole went up the chain. What remained barely kept the two of them alive.

  The margins had their own rules.

  Even the most gifted newcomer couldn't challenge them.

  "The cemetery," Soren said. "Hiss should be buried there."

  He gazed at the streets around him -- familiar and foreign at once. Fragments of memory overlapped with what he saw, and the name Amber City stirred something deep. He'd heard it before, in the game. But by then the epic storyline had already begun: a terrifying force erupted within the chaotic spacetime, and every god in the pantheon lost their divine power. They were forced to descend to the mortal world as avatars. It was a period of extraordinary chaos. Deities returned to reclaim their realms. Mortals slew gods. Players were part of it all -- though a small and largely insignificant part.

  In Battle of the Gods, players only had three lives. Each death and resurrection permanently reduced their physical attributes by three points, and when those ran out, there was nothing left but to surrender your soul to the underworld for reincarnation.

  Powerful players rose during that era. They fell just as fast.

  The stage belonged to everyone.

  The turmoil didn't end until the gods managed to return to the Pantheon. Only then was the epic catastrophe finally brought to a close.

  A full third of the gods perished.

  Even the mightiest among them -- the Goddess of Magic, the Lord of Order, the Lady of Night, the Master of Shadows, the Demon King of Fear -- all fell in the chaos.

  And then an even grander chapter began.

  The divine thrones tumbled from the heavens. Countless god-realms collapsed and crashed into the mortal world, each one crystallizing into a unique planar existence.

  The Realms of Gods.

  Only those players who survived the long ordeal earned the right to explore them. Everyone else -- the powerful and the legendary alike who had already perished -- had to start over from nothing. At a minimum, they needed to reach the advanced tier before they could set foot in even the weakest treasure vault: the divine realm of the kobold god Glorsha.

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  Chaotic memories surfaced, one after another.

  The familiar sights before his eyes told Soren exactly what kind of world this would become.

  The avatars of the gods would tear the earth apart, shattering more than a dozen lower-planar continental plates. Three entire lower planes would be consumed -- by fire, by ice, by death. Infernal projections would spread across the land, whispering corruption into mortal hearts, igniting massacre after massacre. Even players weren't immune to their influence. Abyssal demons would rip open the sky and descend in a tide of blood. On the first day of the Abyss's awakening alone, twelve cities of over a hundred thousand souls were slaughtered to the last.

  Players called it the Twilight Era.

  The twilight of the gods. The twilight of the players. The twilight of everyone.

  In a cataclysm that engulfed the entire cosmic planar system, every soul died at least once. Soren included -- he'd perished completely, his soul forced into reincarnation in the underworld.

  No one escaped it.

  Not even players born with the innate hero template. They could be crushed like ants just as easily as anyone else.

  It was the Age of Avatars. The age of the gods. The final revelry of heaven's divine host.

  And when the catastrophe ended, a new age would dawn -- the age of mortals. Endless divine realms awaited exploration, and within the treasure vaults of the gods lay everything a soul could desire: power, wealth, and the eternal life that all living things craved.

  The cemetery was not in the slums.

  The slums only had a mass grave -- a pit where bodies were dumped every few days. Scavengers would strip them bare and wait for the wild dogs to come sniffing at midnight. Some corpses vanished entirely, spirited away by rogue spellcasters. No one asked what became of them. No one wanted to know.

  Hiss couldn't be buried there.

  Soren had already seen the hunger in people's eyes as he passed. When they looked at the old dog, they weren't seeing a loyal companion. They were seeing a pot of fresh meat.

  If he buried Hiss in the mass grave, someone would dig him up before nightfall. They'd skin him, butcher him, and boil the lot.

  This was the slums.

  Most of the people here lived on the edge of starvation. They wanted meat. If eating human flesh didn't damn your soul to the deepest pits of hell, some of the more desperate vagrants would have done the unthinkable long ago.

  Soren still remembered when he'd first entered the game.

  Back then, none of them could have imagined just how brutal it would be. No gleaming equipment. No beautiful landscapes. No easy fights to blow off steam. There was only the desperate, split-second violence of life-or-death combat. Filthy, chaotic slums. Garbage and human waste in every alley. Evil and darkness lurking around every corner. Even a decent meal or a baseline weapon could cost you your head.

  The sheer depravity of it had shaken many new players to their core. For a while, a surprising number of them chose the paladin class.

  They swore grand oaths to change this dark and fallen world.

  In the end, the world changed them instead. They simply didn't have the power to rewrite its rules.

  The world does not bend to good intentions.

  Every player who entered Battle of the Gods went through a period of agonizing choices. In an age of darkness beyond anything modern civilization could conceive, they witnessed and experienced things they'd never dared imagine -- things both unspeakably cruel and achingly sacred.

  In that virtual world, everyone had to choose their own path, willing or not.

  And that was precisely why, for many, Battle of the Gods became a second life.

  The Cemetery.

  It was a quiet, peaceful place.

  The temple of the Daughter of Hades stood at its heart, and under her aegis, this was hallowed ground -- a resting place for the dead, watched over by priests and temple guards who ensured no soul at rest would be disturbed. But not everyone had the right to rest here. Entry required payment. The Goddess of Wealth had once declared that everything in existence could be measured in coin.

  It was an age of rampant greed and sin.

  Soren stood before the temple in silence, the old dog's body in his arms. When an elderly priest emerged, Soren bowed his head, and Vivian followed suit. He'd still harbored a faint suspicion that he might be inside the game -- but when he looked into the eyes of living, breathing people, each with their own spark of independent consciousness, he knew. This was real. He had come to a world that truly existed.

  Besides, Vivian had told him as much during their walk. The people of this world had never heard of attributes. They didn't know what stats were.

  He didn't understand why.

  But unbidden, the image of the magic circle at the bottom of his game pod surfaced in his mind. It had looked like decoration -- an ornate, vaguely unsettling pattern etched into the base of the capsule. Most buyers had it removed. It gave off an eerie feel.

  Soren had been bolder than most. He'd kept his.

  Later, the game company apparently listened to player feedback. After the very first production run, the strange design never appeared again.

  "You're certain you want it buried here?" the old priest asked.

  He'd seen plenty of nobles bring aged pets to the cemetery for a proper rest. He had never seen a pauper do the same. The state of their clothes, the mud caking their bare feet -- everything about them screamed that these two were the lowest of the low.

  Soren inclined his head. "Yes."

  "This is an offering to the temple, for the burial."

  He produced a silver Daler and held it out respectfully. He was a born thief, and the walk here had been long enough to earn his first bit of income.

  As long as no one noticed.

  It was a gleaming silver Daler -- currency minted by the followers of the Goddess of Wealth, legal tender even in hell.

  The old priest studied him for a long moment. Then he raised a hand and pointed to a wooden box by the entrance. "It must have been a loyal hound," he said quietly. "For you to do this."

  "Child."

  "Come with me. It will have a place to rest."

  Soren dropped the silver Daler into the offering box and carried Hiss's body through the temple, into the cemetery beyond.

  A small, unremarkable corner.

  They dug the grave together, and when the last of the earth was packed down, Vivian -- who had been staring blankly the entire time -- finally wept.

  "Hiss ..."

  The little girl crouched before the humble mound and whispered a few words too quiet for anyone else to hear. Then she stood, her expression hardening into something fierce and resolute, and wrapped her small fingers around one of Soren's.

  Hiss was just an old dog. An unremarkable old dog.

  He had no right to a tombstone. Only a small, unmarked grave.

  In the farthest corner of the cemetery.