The chimes from the ornate grandfather clock signaled midnight, and Asher found himself once again face-to-face with the decaying corpse of an elderly man. The man in question had been dumped unceremoniously upon the large table, and his glassy eyes seemed to penetrate Asher’s very soul as the dead man stared unblinking up at him.

  “God damn it, Tyler! You were supposed to have the eye caps placed on Mr. Royar and be finished preparing him by now!” Asher called out, his voice echoing throughout the empty funeral home. Knowing he wouldn’t get a response from the new hire, Asher sighed and carefully returned Mr. Royar’s body to the freezer before it could start decaying even further.

  Taking off his protective equipment and washing his hands, Asher stepped out of the embalming room and rubbed his weary eyes. After working as a mortician’s apprentice for the last three years, it would take a lot more than an unexpected corpse left out for him to stumble upon to bother him. No, it was the constant late night shifts he seemed to keep getting assigned along with their newest hire that were rapidly doing him in. This was his third night shift in a row, and Asher was pretty much dead on his feet at his point.

  It didn’t take him long to find his deadbeat coworker. Rather than performing his duties like he was supposed to, Tyler was lounging on a couch in the waiting room and texting on his phone. He briefly glanced up and nodded as Asher walked over.

  “Hey man, what’s up?” Tyler asked, his eyes going right back to his phone screen as he mentally dismissed Asher entirely.

  “Tyler, disregarding the fact that you’ve barely even started on the duties that were assigned to you this shift, even you should know by now not to leave a body out of the freezers!” Knowing Tyler reacted poorly to anything that sounded even remotely like anger or criticism, Asher did his best to keep his tone neutral. But it took a special kind of stupid to leave a dead body out at room temperature.

  “Yeah, my bad.” Tyler waved a hand at him, his eyes yet to leave his phone. “Must have forgotten. No biggie, that dude’s got like a single person attending his funeral, right?”

  “Yes. His grieving widow. Who we can assume would want us to treat and prepare her deceased husband with the utmost of respect.”

  “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her man, chill out.”

  Taking a deep breath, Asher slowly let his fists unclench as he stared at his uncaring coworker. Despite never having been in a fight in his life, the urge to slug Tyler in the jaw seemed to grow with every shift he was forced to work with the lazy man. Unfortunately for him, Tyler was his mentor’s nephew, and his otherwise excellent mentor refused to fire or discipline Tyler in any way. Asher would have already quit out of principle after seeing the way Tyler disrespected the dead they worked with, but his apprenticeship was nearly complete. He could handle a few more months of dealing with this idiot if it meant he wouldn’t have to find a new mentor to finish his apprenticeship under.

  Resigning himself to another late night of completing Tyler’s assigned tasks on top of his own, Asher turned to head back to the freezers.

  Then the room exploded.

  Searing, shifting light flickering from one color to the next pierced his eyes, blinding him even as he reflexively tried to keep them squeezed shut. Simultaneously feeling as though he were both falling through the floor and being shot into the sky, Asher’s body seemed to twist and bend in every direction all at once. He realized he was screaming as the world both collapsed and expanded all around him. Yet just before his life could end with the rest of the world, he felt a strange pulse of energy blast through him, and with a sudden ‘pop,’ everything went still.

  Groaning, Asher realized he was lying face down on what felt like rough stone, only the sounds of dripping water and the crackling of fire able to be heard. His mind still whirling from whatever the hell he’d just experienced, he chose to lay there for a few seconds, not in any rush to get up and experience that wild ride a second time. It was only the thought of his mentor clocking in first thing in the morning and finding his best apprentice lying on the ground that finally gave him the push to start moving.

  “Tyler, I swear if you laced my water with LSD or something, I am going to shove my embalming tools so far up your…” Asher’s threat died in his throat as he lifted his head and came face to face with his second surprise corpse of the day.

  Only this one was standing only a few feet away, and staring at him with its head cocked.

  “How peculiar. You certainly don’t look like an eldritch abomination.”

  Asher stared at the dead body looking curiously at him like he was a middle school science experiment. The corpse wore a dark purple robe and leaned heavily on a gnarled wooden staff with a giant glowing gem inlaid at the top. The robe covered most of its body, but from the horribly emaciated skin clinging to the speaker’s exposed head and the distinct lack of muscle or flesh, Asher was either speaking with someone that had somehow managed to live past 150, or a dead body.

  And based on the tiny purple fires burning in the skull’s sockets where eyes should be, he was beginning to think there was something strange about the talking dead body.

  Blinking slowly, Asher took in his surroundings, trying to see if he could spot a one-way mirror or any hidden cameras. Unfortunately, he quickly ruled out having been kidnapped and put on a prank show when the only thing of note he could find inside the cold stone room other than the talking corpse was the complicated glowing rune he was currently sitting on.

  Turning back toward the corpse still carefully examining him, Asher coughed delicately, clearing his throat. He’d heard that staying up so many nights in a row could result in hallucinations and confusion, but this seemed a bit extreme in his opinion.

  “Hello there. I don’t suppose you could tell me what’s going on, could you?”

  “It’s even retained the ability to speak. Fascinating,” the corpse muttered, ignoring Asher’s question completely. Its voice was raspy like a chain smoker, and the fires burning in its skull seemed to grow smaller and brighter, as though it were squinting at him.

  Realizing he wasn’t going to get any information from the expensive Halloween decoration, Asher shrugged and pushed himself to his feet, attempting to leave the glowing runes he stood on. But when he tried to step off them, he smacked his face into some sort of invisible barrier, causing him to stumble back into the center.

  “What the hell?” He asked, rubbing his bruised nose and reaching out to run his hands along the invisible wall. Sure enough, while he couldn’t see the barrier surrounding him in the slightest, there was something there that prevented him from leaving the circle.

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  Well, if the fiery-eyed, talking corpse wasn’t enough proof, I think the invisible barrier is good enough for me. My own hallucinations shouldn’t be able to hurt me after all. Magic is real, and that weird sensation of the world exploding around me and my body being put through a pasta machine wasn’t an acid trip but some sort of spell Mr. Bones here cast that yanked me from our world to his.

  Asher knew this conclusion was insane, but he prided himself on being a fairly logical person, and it was hard to argue with the talking dead body dressed in wizard cosplay right in front of him. He’d always been a fan of the multiverse theory, so until a group of people jumped out from behind a bush and shouted ‘surprise!’ at him, he’d just have to grit his teeth and do something he honestly knew he didn’t do all that well.

  Go with the flow.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Wizard? Did you need something specific from me? I don’t have any magic beans or enchanted lamps, but maybe I can help you in some other way?”

  “Dimensional travel seems to have damaged its mental facilities,” the corpse said, still talking to itself and ignoring Asher completely. Before Asher could argue about his mental facilities being fully intact, the corpse tapped its staff on the ground, causing the gemstone sitting on top to flash and Asher to recoil at the sudden light.

  “Strange. The body appears healthy, but miniscule fragments of an unknown material embedded all throughout the body support the hypothesis that the subject was in fact taken from a different realm that houses human life. This requires further study and should be brought up to the council.”

  Material embedded throughout the body? Is it talking about microplastics?

  By the time Asher had rubbed the spots from his eyes, the corpse had vanished, leaving him alone in the damp stone room.

  “Well… that was strange.”

  Leaning against the invisible barrier, Asher tried to figure out what to do. Unless he was terribly mistaken, he’d been kidnapped by some sort of undead wizard, and based on how he’d been treated as nothing more than a fascinating test subject, he could only assume that his future held little more than being subjected to whatever horrifying tests the corpse could come up with.

  I guess that means step one is getting out of this invisible goldfish tank and putting as much distance between me and Mr. Bones as possible. Then when I’m not at risk of being magically vivisected, I can think about how on Earth I’m going to get home.

  Now how do I make that happen…

  Asher didn’t see any magical crowbar conveniently left behind by the corpse within his invisible cage, which meant he was stuck working with only what he’d been carrying on his person when he’d been taken.

  Alright, the tools I have at my disposal to defeat an undead wizard are… a slightly crushed up granola bar, and a pen.

  Survival is looking bleak.

  Sighing, Asher slid down the invisible wall, taking a seat on the rough floor as he rubbed his bleary eyes. Not only did he get kidnapped by a seemingly evil wizard, but he was utterly exhausted from working so many consecutive night shifts. He was fatigued to the point that he was pretty sure if he chose to curl up and close his eyes, he’d be asleep within seconds, regardless of everything that was happening. Hell, the extreme sleep deprivation was probably why he wasn’t freaking out right about now. He doubted his body could conjure up the adrenaline needed to panic even if he asked it to.

  Forcing his eyes open once more through sheer willpower, he blinked as he found himself staring at a few lines of floating text.

  Name: Asher Stone

  Class: None

  Element: Spatial

  Ability: Astral Dip - lvl 1

  Ability: (Locked)

  Ability: (Locked)

  Ability: (Locked)

  Ability: (Locked)

  Element: (Empty)

  Ability: (Locked)

  Ability: (Locked)

  Ability: (Locked)

  Ability: (Locked)

  Ability: (Locked)

  Element: (Empty)

  Ability: (Locked)

  Ability: (Locked)

  Ability: (Locked)

  Ability: (Locked)

  Ability: (Locked)

  Resistances: None

  Shards: 0

  Great, now I’m seeing things. Maybe magic isn’t real, and I’ve just gone crazy. Turning this way and that, Asher watched as the text seemed to always remain directly in the center of his vision, though he quickly discovered he could push the text off to the side of his vision or will it away entirely. Similarly, a simple thought was all it took to bring the floating text back up.

  Okay, that’s my name at the top, which would lead me to believe that this information is about me, like you’d see in an RPG. But where are the stats?

  No matter how hard he willed them to appear, Asher couldn’t conjure forth anything related to ‘strength,’ or ‘dexterity,’ or the like. Giving up on his short lived dream of doing a thousand push ups and punching his way out of here, he instead focused on the only things he did have under his name, pleased when he received a bit of new information.

  Element: Spatial - The Spatial element provides its users with abilities that alter space itself. Bend the very fabric of the world to your whims and let nothing restrain you from your freedom.

  Astral Dip (active) - Lvl 1 - Temporarily slip into the Astral Realm.

  “Alright, now we’re talking!” Grinning at the floating explanation for the spatial element he seemed to have for some reason, Asher reread the text again just to be safe. The part about freedom sounded rather promising for his current situation, and it looked like he may have gotten lucky for once. The one ability he did have unlocked sounded like just what he needed.

  “Okay, so how does this work? Do I just think about it, or-”

  The moment he thought about activating his lone ability, his surroundings changed. It was as though God had fiddled with the color display of the entire world, and Asher looked in wonder around the pale room. The dark, gray stone making up the walls and floor was now a pale, light gray, and the glowing red runes he was trapped within were closer to a faded pink. Even the flickering torches lighting the room had been dulled, and were now almost pastel like. It was as though the entire world had been bleached, and a quick glance downward showed that only Asher and the clothes he was wearing were still their regular colors.

  “Weird…” he muttered, noticing how his voice seemed to warble within the strange, bleached world, almost as if he were talking underwater.

  Asher soon realized that while activating his ability was easy, holding himself within the astral realm was akin to keeping every muscle in his body tensed at the same time. Despite his best efforts, he wasn’t able to stay within the strange pale world for more than a few seconds, and he quickly found himself panting on the normal stone floor once more, the world’s colors having been returned to it.

  Once he’d recovered, Asher got to his feet and placed his hands on the invisible wall keeping him trapped. He had no idea if this would work, but it was the only idea he had.

  One more time! Taking a deep breath, he slipped into the astral realm once again. Just as he’d hoped, he found the invisible barrier didn’t exist in this realm, and he quickly took a few steps forward before his body could give out on him.

  Gasping for air, he returned to the regular world and looked down, confirming that he was no longer standing within the glowing red runes. Wiping a few beads of sweat from his brow, he couldn't help but grin at his first successful use of magic.

  Now he just had to escape the rest of the wizard’s tower.