I sat under a tree in a field near the farmhouse, the shade doing more for my nerves than it did for the heat. The field itself hadn’t been prepped for crops or livestock for reasons I couldn’t guess, and it was mostly short grass broken up by a few stubborn weeds that had clearly won whatever argument had once been had about removing them.

  In the distance, past a rough fence that looked more like a suggestion than an actual boundary, I could see Silas and Bibi working the next field over. Bibi was harnessed to a massive metal plow that looked nothing like the ones I’d seen on television. Those were usually a single blade with handles for a farmer to steer. This thing had six blades set along the bottom, wooden wheels on either side, and a seat bolted on top where Silas perched like this was the most normal setup in the world. The whole contraption was roughly the size of a lifted redneck F-150 and probably weighed about as much too.

  To Bibi’s credit, he followed Silas’s shouted directions perfectly and pulled the entire monstrosity at a pace that made my eyebrows slowly creep upward. If I had to guess, they were moving somewhere between fifteen and twenty miles per hour, which felt excessive for plowing a field by any reasonable standard. At that speed they were going to finish the whole thing in no time, assuming nothing broke, snapped, or catastrophically failed along the way.

  Mathilde jogged behind them, occasionally flicking her hands and sending short bursts of flame into the ground behind the plow. I watched for a bit, trying to puzzle out what purpose that served, until she shot me a glance sharp enough even from that distance that I immediately felt caught in the act of staring.

  I looked away just as fast, like a kid who’d been caught looking at something he absolutely was not supposed to.

  After the surprise kiss and… other stuff, I’d gathered my things and stepped outside, needing air and distance in equal measure. Silas had just finished eating by then and had risen from the table, drifting toward Bibi with that same quiet focus he always seemed to have, while Ephraim had already headed off toward the barn, clearly moving on to whatever his next task was without a second thought.

  Silas had paused near the door, standing completely still and staring straight ahead at absolutely nothing.

  After a long moment, he blurted out, “There’s a well on the other side of the house. We use it to wash clothes.”

  Then he walked over to Bibi, and the two of them headed out toward the fields together, leaving me standing there processing the fact that he’d just done something thoughtful in the only way he seemed to know how.

  I looked down at the bundle of stuff in my hands and finally took proper stock of myself, and the results weren’t great. My clothes were filthy, everything carrying a brownish tint that I now realized was probably leftover from the animal corpse lake, layered with sweat from wearing the same outfit for far too many days in a row. Around my shirt collar, darker stains caught my eye, and with a sinking feeling I recognized them as sap and blood from the matriarch.

  I let out a slow sigh.

  Seemed like Silas was being helpful in his own way.

  Maybe he liked me.

  Or maybe he just didn’t want someone dirty near him.

  I still wasn’t sure what to make of Silas in general. There was something off about him, though not in a bad way, just different like his brain ran on a track slightly to the left of everyone else’s. I wasn’t a doctor or anything, but he gave off strong autism vibes. The kind where if he ever had access to TikTok his algorithm would be nothing but trains, cat videos, and extremely specific niche facts delivered with absolute confidence.

  Part of me wanted to run, to put as much distance as possible between myself and this farm and everything that came with it. Instead, I forced myself to take a breath and walk around to the other side of the house, slowing down before my thoughts could spiral too far.

  The well was exactly what I expected, the kind of stone-ringed setup that would have made an ideal wishing well if this world were even slightly whimsical. There were no surprises. I washed my clothes as best I could by hand, scrubbing until my fingers ached and the bucket water turned murky, then pulled everything back on while it was still damp. I didn’t bother trying to hide while I changed. At this point everyone had seen everything, and whatever sense of modesty I’d brought with me into this world had died somewhere between the goblins and the barn.

  Once I was dressed, I spotted the tree again and wandered over, spreading the blanket out beneath it like a makeshift picnic mat before sitting down. I needed to think. Properly think. If I didn’t, I had a feeling I was going to scream, and that seemed like it would only create more problems than it solved.

  And annoyingly, the first thing my brain latched onto wasn’t immortality, or wars, or gods, or the system.

  It was the kiss.

  And the very much unconsented touch that came with it.

  Normally, something like that would send me straight down an emotional rabbit hole. The kind where I’d spend days replaying the moment on a loop, picking apart every interaction leading up to it. Just wondering what signals I’d missed, what I’d done wrong, and how I could respond in the most honest, transparent, and polite way possible without somehow making everything worse.

  It wasn’t even the first time it had happened. Not even close. People seem so used to kindness being transactional that they instinctively search for the hidden motive behind it, like there has to be some angle they’re missing if someone is just being decent for no obvious reason.

  The last time had been an after-work thing, a casual group trip to a bar, nothing I would have flagged as risky going in. I’d been having what I thought was a genuinely pleasant conversation about hiking with a coworker when she suddenly started petting my arm and told me she was looking forward to screaming my name later completely out of nowhere, wearing what I think she believed was a seductive look.

  I’d responded on pure instinct.

  “Oh. No thank you.”

  She threw her drink in my face.

  To be fair, she’d had a few drinks in her, and I wasn’t exactly out about being asexual. Most people just assumed I was a normal cis white guy and filled in the rest of the details themselves. It’s a hard thing to navigate in general, and even harder when it comes up without warning, especially since it’s not something most people understand in the first place. Explaining it over and over again gets exhausting fast, and sometimes it feels easier to just quietly opt out and hope the world lets you.

  Sitting under that tree, in a magic-filled world that did not seem inclined to let anyone quietly opt out of anything, I wasn’t sure how much longer that approach was going to work.

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  I don’t usually get into where I fall under the asexual umbrella unless someone is genuinely interested in understanding it, which almost never happens, because just saying “asexual” tends to get used as a simple catch-all for people who aren’t interested in sexual or romantic relationships even though it barely begins to describe the reality. There’s asexual, aromantic, graysexual, demisexual, and a long list of other labels that try to map out different combinations of sexual attraction, romantic attraction, intensity, frequency, and the very specific situations where any of that might actually show up.

  While it sounds complicated, that’s because it is. Sexuality itself is a ridiculously wide spectrum, and forcing it into neat, tidy categories has always felt like a losing fight to me.

  When someone does push and actually wants details, I usually explain it the same way every time, mostly because it’s the shortest version that still feels accurate. I’m an aromantic asexual. Aromantic means I don’t feel romantic attraction. Asexual means I don’t feel sexual attraction. There’s no longing, no spark, no missing piece hiding underneath it all, just a quiet absence where other people seem to have a lot of noise. When it comes to sex itself, I’m pretty neutral about it. I’ve experienced it, I didn’t enjoy it, but I wasn’t repulsed either. It just sort of… existed.

  The old asexual joke fits well enough. Sex is fine, but I’d just rather have cake.

  I’m also not that big of a fan of cake.

  It’s a whole thing, and one I usually avoid talking about because explaining it takes time, energy, and emotional effort that I honestly don’t feel like spending most days, especially when it so often turns into a debate or a lecture instead of a conversation. Most of the time, it’s easier to keep it to myself, let people make their assumptions, and move on.

  Anyway, focusing back on the kitchen kiss situation, what surprised me most as I sat under that tree was how little I actually cared in that moment.

  I wasn’t angry, or spiraling, or even particularly upset so much as I was exhausted in a way that went deeper than physical tiredness, the kind that leaves you with no spare mental bandwidth to process one more complicated situation. Between being dropped into another world, nearly dying more times than felt reasonable, learning I was apparently immortal, and trying to wrap my head around gods, wars, and systems, I just didn’t have anything left to unpack one more messy human interaction layered on top of it all.

  I just wanted the craziness to stop.

  I didn’t know what the relationship between the warrior and the mage actually was, but I was fairly certain it was romantic, or at least complicated in a way I had no interest in understanding, and Silas felt like some kind of adopted ward or long-term responsibility that I wasn’t confident enough to define. Whatever their dynamic was, I wanted to be as far from the center of it as possible, especially considering the warrior could probably cave my skull in with his pinky if he ever felt like it.

  So the plan was simple, even if everything else wasn’t. Avoid Mathilde. Don’t mention anything. Don’t stir the pot. Gather my things and get out of here as fast as possible, because this had all the ingredients of reality-show-level drama and I wanted absolutely no part of it.

  Okay. That was settled.

  On to the next part of the big think.

  There was a lot to process, and I knew from experience that if I didn’t get my thoughts organized somehow they were going to keep bouncing around my head until I made a bad decision. It was a little lame, but whenever I’d been sent somewhere new for work on a big project, I always wrote things down, even if it was just a rough list of priorities. If there was ever a situation that called for figuring out what actually mattered, this was it.

  I didn’t have any paper or anything to write with, and my default would have been to use my phone’s notes app, but my phone was almost dead.

  I did, however, have my solar-powered charger.

  I stared at it for a moment, turning it over in my hands, and debated whether I really wanted to expose that it existed at all. Charging a phone in a world that definitely did not have phones felt like the kind of detail that could spiral into questions I wasn’t ready to answer.

  Then I hit a point of emotional exhaustion best described as “I genuinely do not care anymore.”

  So I pulled out the solar charger, set it up under the tree, plugged in my phone, and let it start charging, consequences to be dealt with later.

  After about two hours of sitting there under the tree, I’d managed to accumulate an impressive number of questions. Ephraim seemed genuinely nice, and Mathilde seemed… like a person. When it came down to it, I was starting to suspect that neither of them were particularly great at explaining things. That wasn’t really a fault so much as a limitation. They were doing the best they could with what they knew, but every answer they gave seemed to open up three new holes somewhere else.

  It left me with the uncomfortable sense that I was missing context I didn’t even know how to ask for yet.

  Sadly, my phone battery was somehow lower than when I’d started. Pro tip for future interdimensional survival situations: hiking solar chargers suck. They technically work, but only in the most grudging, barely functional way possible. The amount of power they took in was so low that it didn’t even keep up with the drain from actively using the phone, even with airplane mode turned on and the screen dimmed as low as it would go. Watching the battery percentage tick down while plugged into the charger felt almost insulting.

  Still, over those two hours I’d managed to type out a decent list of things I needed to ask. Writing it all down helped more than I expected. It forced me to slow down and actually think through what I knew, what I didn’t, and what felt important versus what was just noise.

  I even experimented a little.

  The whole new-language-in-my-head thing was still bothering me, especially since I’d realized I was thinking and speaking in it without noticing. That alone was unsettling. I tried to consciously think in English and found that I could, but it took effort, like reaching for a language I hadn’t used in years. It reminded me uncomfortably of trying to speak Spanish back in high school, when the words were technically there but buried under hesitation and second-guessing.

  It worked, but it didn’t feel natural anymore.

  That thought alone probably deserved more attention than I gave it.

  I was scrolling through my notes, rereading what I’d written, when Ephraim wandered over and stopped a few steps away, hands resting on his hips as he looked down at me.

  He held out my mouth dagger, which at the moment looked like nothing more than an ordinary dagger. “Figured you’d want this back,” he said. “Grabbed it from the barn.”

  I took it and thanked him, feeling oddly reassured by the familiar weight of it in my hand, even if I still wasn’t sure how useful it really was in most situations.

  He nodded, then asked, almost casually, “You still up for helping me with that task I mentioned earlier?”

  I looked up at him. “What task?”

  He laughed, like this was the most normal thing in the world. “Oh. I need a second pair of hands to go clean out a dungeon.”

  I stared at him.

  “Sorry,” I said slowly. “What?”

  He smiled, like that alone should have made everything clearer. “I’ll explain more on the way,” he said, already sounding like the decision had been made, “but it’s where those goblins came from. Needs to be cleaned out proper so we don’t end up with the same problem again, a whole pack deciding to come knocking.”

  I hesitated, then asked, “Is it safe and why aren’t you asking Mathilde or Silas instead?”

  He snorted. “It’s safe enough,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on you. You’ll walk away with some experience points at the least. We’ll sell whatever we pull out in town, and you’ll get a portion of that too. Should help you get on your feet.”

  That part definitely got my attention.

  “As for Math and Silas,” he continued, “Silas avoids dungeons and fighting whenever he can. It upsets him. Always has. We try to make sure someone stays on the farm with him when things get rough.”

  He paused, then added more quietly, “That’s why Mathilde was so cross the other day. She’d gone to town, and I decided to chase after Bibi when he wandered. Left Silas alone. That one’s on me.”

  That explained more than a few things, including the fire and the yelling.

  He rubbed his beard, looking thoughtful. “Truth is, that’s why I haven’t cleared this dungeon out sooner. It’s a two-person job, and we just haven’t had a spare set of hands in a while.”

  I looked at him, then back at the farm, then down at myself, still feeling like I was barely holding things together. “I mean,” I said carefully, “I did have a list of questions I wanted to ask before… anything else.”

  He smiled again, this time more relaxed. “Perfect,” he said. “Plenty of time to talk while we’re walking.”

  Then he turned and started off without waiting to see if I was following.

  “Come on,” he called back. “Wait till you see the cart we’ll be using. I built it myself.”

  I sat there for another second, weighing my options, then cursed quietly, stuffed my phone and charger away, slung my pack over my shoulder, and hurried after him.

  “Wait,” I said as I caught up. “A cart?”

  For some reason, that worried me more than the dungeon.

  kind of asexual he is.