I froze after the flash died down, unsure of what I should do. Before I could arrive at any conclusion, a jolt in the sword almost sent me flying, but I was holding it for dear life, and that was barely enough for me to not be thrown against the wall.

  Slowly, I turned my head. There was the back of a man in red armor where half the blade of Breacher should be. I let go of the sword like it was burning me and took a step back.

  Had I stabbed someone? Where did he come from? Will I be punished for this?

  My mind was spinning.

  “Sir… Sir … Are you alright?” I asked the man with a great sword trespassing his midsection.

  He turned to face me, and the mental image created by the scary stories told by the soldiers and the few survivors from the monster army fitted almost perfectly to the figure in front of me.

  The Armored Sorcerer.

  His stare was intense, like he could set me on flame just by keeping eye contact.

  I was sure he would kill me. During the last days I accepted that I would die in this siege but having it as an abstract thought and facing it for real are two completely different things.

  Instead, he let go an amused laughter distorted by the blood flooding his throat.

  Then he collapsed on his knees and went limp. I looked at him, kind of waiting for him to rise again as villains in stories usually do, but nothing like that happened. A realization slowly dawned on me.

  I had killed the Armored Sorcerer.

  It was an involuntary action, I had not planned nor could have done anything to avoid, but even so I directly killed someone. I had never thought myself capable of killing, this was why this entire situation was so eerie to me.

  I knew he was the reason for all the misery we were facing and was directly responsible for the death of thousands. I should have been jumping from joy, but the truth was that I felt just a dulled guilt. Feelings sometimes made no sense.

  I waited a few seconds so that my heart would slow down enough for my head to stop spinning. I could still hear the commotion, but that was a problem for later.

  It was then that I noticed something that should have been easy for me to spot, if not for the heart-stop surprise followed by the immediate threat to my life. The Armored Sorcerer was using a small stone tablet on his chest, and it had materialized over the blade, although something strange was happening…

  The only way I could describe it was that the sword and the stone slab were flickering, but that was not exactly it. I was like two conflicting outcomes, the sword breaking, or the slab being pierced, were happening simultaneously, and not at all, as two absolute truths facing themselves in contradiction and the universe desperately trying to reconcile both.

  It was mesmerizing, beautiful in an unsettling way. As I looked raptly, I saw something between transitions, too fast to be able to make out what it was. In spite of my best judgement, I got closer to the slate, wanting to take a glimpse of this mysterious image.

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  And whatever the contradiction was, the universe found a compromise and the slate shattered.

  I floated in a void, not as myself, but as an unfeeling, disembodied observer.

  In front of me, there was a wall of text, written over nothing with letters of light, extending in all directions to infinity for as far as I could see. It was an amalgam of assorted styles, from neatly structured prose to mathematical formulations and barely coherent scribes. I could not read, for none of the multiple languages used were ever spoken by mortals.

  It reminded me of an ignited magical circuit, the same way the Sun could relate to a spark from a flint.

  I kept looking as if I was in a trance, the luminosity from the letters becoming brighter, brighter, until there was nothing except light and I could feel my very soul being branded by it.

  The next thing I remember was walking blindly without any notion of how much time had passed. The afterimage of the writings, still imprinted in my field of vision, gradually fading away.

  I recovered my senses and was overwhelmed.

  What the hell had just happened?

  The only explanation that I could think of was that I had hallucinated, completely ignoring the afterimage that I was still seeing.

  I tried to regain my bearings. Where was I? I recognized the place; it was not too far from the alley where Sir Gideon had died. I had not blanked out for long, probably a few minutes. There were intense sounds of metal hitting metal and screams. Very close, no more than a couple of blocks away.

  I needed to get out of there and go back to the ramparts. Thinking of the ramparts as a safe place was a new experience for me. I walked at a fast pace, going along the most direct path I knew. I turned a corner.

  The street in front of me was filled with goblins, blades and spears stained with blood, the bodies of woman, children and a few soldiers scattered on the pavement. How did so many were able to enter the city?

  I halted. Hoping that none of them had spotted me, I quietly backed away. But such was my luck that another pack entered the other side of the street. I was trapped.

  They notice my presence. Emitting the screeching cries that would pass for their language, the one goblin that used metal armor commanded a group to dispatch me, not even bothering to look a second time.

  The group closed in on me, weapons drawn. There was no way to run, and I was not someone that could fight. I panicked, my heart beating so fast that it could burst from my chest, and without thinking I just uselessly begged:

  “Please, no! Go away!”. My voice had the strident quality one would expect from a terrified female, but there was also an odd mismatch that I could not figure out exactly what it was.

  They stopped, they all stopped, the entire band. The goblins looked at me.

  There was a moment of silence, neither I nor the goblins doing anything.

  “When you say “go away” you mean to go away from the city, the country or something else? It is a little vague” one goblin inquired without any screechiness in his voice.

  That came as a shock. I had no idea how to respond to that.

  “I think she means to get away from this street, so we can continue the killing over there” another one suggested.

  “No, no. Going away from the country is fine. No need for more killing.” I quickly replied without understanding anything that was happening.

  They complained among themselves that they would need to cut the fun short, but there was no one talking against my request. It came as another surprise that I could comprehend what they all were saying, as if every goblin had suddenly discovered that their primary language was Imperial.

  The goblin in metal armor shouted: “Ok maggots, we are going home. Call the other grubs and let's get away from here.” He gave me a discrete nod and added “We will be going our way them, sorry if we troubled you, miss.”

  “It was ... not troubled at all.” At this point I was just playing along, hoping that whatever I was doing worked.

  The entire group started to walk back to the center of the city in the disorganized fashion one would expect of a mob of goblins.

  One of them, munching a detached human arm, waved goodbye to me. And I kind of waved back...

  What the hell had just happened?