content warnings
  • discussions of death and dying
  • hospitals
1 The last thing he remembered was the machines. Some beeped. The one that held saline dripped every second, a metronome to his body's slow decomposition of itself. The worst of it all was the electric hum which underpinned every second of his life. It was never silent, never peaceful, like everyone had told him dying should be; like the movies he had watched before showed it to be.

It was the silence which told him something had changed. He had begun to hear the noises of the hospital even when he slept- the beeping, the dripping, the hum, even the low murmurs of the nurses and other patients out in the ward. When he woke, however, there was nothing at all.

His eyes opened, then, to a dark, craggy ceiling, a sharp cone of sunlight streaming in from a natural skylight which illuminated him. He blinked up at it, waiting for it to change, to shift in front of him as his dreams so often did. The noise of the hospital did not reappear and the sight in front of him remained the same.

Simon looked down at his arms, not daring to sit up yet as there were only so many times one did so as a reflex only to fall back down or black out before you learned your lesson. They were covered in simple linen sleeves, but were devoid of the tubes which kept him alive. Stranger still, beyond his arms he saw the sea, deep green and blue with the white crests of gentle waves butting against the shallow cliff which made up the floor to the sea-side cavern he now lay in.

Slowly, he realised he did not lay in silence: The gentle sound of the ocean, the far-off calls of birds. He closed his eyes again, attempting to make sense of this sudden change, to fill in the blanks between the hospital and here, between dying and this strange new place. There was nothing.

Testing his limits, he sat up. For the first time in a long time no dizziness overcame here, no black spots encroached in the corner of his vision. His hands braced himself on the soft canvas of a bedroll. Not a modern sleeping bag, a proper padded bedroll. The remains of a fire sat to his right at a safe distance. A sword lay on his left.

His voice wasn't hoarse when he spoke, despite the fact he could hardly speak above a whisper yesterday and had long since forgotten what he sounded like before. It was loud and clear as he spoke out-loud:

"What the actual fuck."

The question soon became how to leave this cave- if he was even able to. Were he dreaming, it would be best to take advantage of it all, a rare reprieve from his usual nightmares and from the hospital and his condition both.

He carefully tried to get up and found it no trouble at all. He bent down to grab the sword, an item he had never once held in his life, and found he lifted it easily. Unfortunately, it seemed that did not translate to grace, as he attempted to put it in the sheath at his belt and struggled before clumsily managing to do so.

Simon looked up from his side to see an interface in front of him, floating there and semi-translucent. Beyond it, the sea was cast in de-saturated colours, the words and two-dimension graphics floating there mid-air:



A sinking feeling arose in his stomach. He grasped at his neck and, sure enough, there was a chain around it, made of thin gold. Pulling it out of his shirt, the rough medallion at the end of it showed the eternity symbol hammered into the metal.

Fool was a webnovel he had been reading when he had the energy- a story about a fantasy kingdom embroiled in a war of succession which tore the country in two. On one side, a princess, a fierce warrior, recently returned from a neighbouring empire where she had been married to secure an alliance. Her husband had died before her father, making her the rightful ruler of both kingdoms. Fearing this would cause chaos, her cousin also laid claim on the throne, backed by wealthy merchants who would see the price of their goods decrease without the tariffs they could impose when exporting their goods. It was a complicated story, following both the highborn claimants, several of their soldiers, and even two peasant families impacting by the ongoing civil war.

Simon had enjoyed the complexity. It gave him something to think about even when he didn't have the energy to read; but living it, even through a dream, was something different. If this even was a dream. It didn't feel like any he had ever had.

Many of the main characters, citizens of a country called Llynress, carried necklaces with small medallions hammered with the symbol of their gods. The infinity symbol around his marked him as a follower of The Fool, one of the deities of the world and the namesake for the webnovel itself.

As he was thinking, another interface appeared, and the previous graphics disappeared. This one looked much more modern, but still very retro for what it was.

'WELCOME! This interface will help guide you through the new world of FOOL. You have been assigned the character: CECIL DE LOUVAINE, of HOUSE TORREAL.'

Simon's eyebrows knit together, trying to remember this character in particular out of Fool’s impressive roster. There were so many characters that people online often complained of having to create charts just to be able to understand the plot. Simon had always enjoyed having to store and recall all of them and the complex web the author weaved.

The House Torreal was a pretty minor one, and he faintly remembered they had two sons. If he remembered correctly the whole family had been involved in a minor scheme to double cross the Queen. It came back to him suddenly because he remembered in the last chapter he had read they had all been executed after she had come back into power.

"Fuck."

As if the interface could hear him it beeped, the screen changing:

'MISSION ONE: successfully attend the BEUSJOURE ball and obtain the STATE SECRET from ?????'

"From who?" He asked, feeling less stupid than he thought he would yelling at something he was most definitely hallucinating. Could you even hallucinate in a dream?

Simon put aside the uncomfortable feeling at the thought, as the interface replied:

'???? has not been met yet. For a list of all those you have met, please access the CONTACT LIST'

At least now he knew it was probably, most definitely, a dream. A contact list?

Just with the thought, the error message was replaced by a new screen. This one had various black rectangles with question marks under them. As he looked through the identical rectangles, the list seemed to scroll when he got nearer to the bottom.

Simon groaned, falling back to land on the comfortable bedroll, and the interface disappeared. His sheathed sword clanked awkwardly next to him.

What the hell was this?