The curse enveloped me, it was warm, comforting almost, like an embrace, as it warped around my feeble frame and reached into the core of my being. My vision began to darken at the edges, my energy, the little power I had, slowly draining out of me. All I could think of in the moment was my children, their eyes wide and sparkling as their rough and tumble father hobbled home each day with the little he made from fighting daring, greenhorn adventurers. I just needed to make it back home to them, that’s all.

Suddenly piercing 1s and 0s began streaming into view in front of me, slicing through the darkness, flooding it with white hot light. The warmth grew, stretching from my chest to the tips of my fingers, and a burst of adrenaline coursed through my veins. The rusty little sword I carried to work each day clattered down from my grasp, and my fist lashed out into the abyss of light in front of me, one last pathetic attempt in a pathetic life being a nobody in a nowhere town that better people passed through to do greater things. They wouldn’t write stories about me, nor songs, I’d melt away from the collective consciousness, lost to history as a background character in somebody else’s life…but fuck it if I don’t put up a fight.

My fist connected, and with a flash my vision returned. There in front of me stood this hour’s adventurer, their face would’ve been twisted in confusion and terror if it wasn’t already an indiscernible bloody pulp. He collapsed to the ground with a hollow thud, as I stood dumbfounded, my fist still extended to the point where it had landed on the young man’s face. His body had already turned into a colorful ash and been carried off by a wayward breeze by the time I snapped out of my daze. I glanced around, making sure that another soul hadn’t witnessed this insanity before stumbling home…this time not from weariness and pain, but the sheer amount of loot that had filtered into my inventory upon the adventurer’s demise.

As I continued to covertly put unsuspecting travelers to an early grave and treat my children to the humble riches they dropped, I grasped the sheer extent of my abilities. But I dared not venture out of my little nowhere town, for I knew the kind of danger that accompanied power like this. For now I was content with the ear-to-ear grins on the little faces that greeted me after work each day, excited to see what new trinkets their father brought them to play with. I would never dare to put their innocent joy at risk for my own hubris.

Life went on this way for a while until the day a soft rap at my door and the words “we know” wafting through it ruptured it all. My vision was once more flooded with binary as it seeped in from the cracks in my little wooden home, encasing my skin, burning it like molten metal.

All I could do was scream.