“So,” the man said in English, the man scrawled into his book as he continued smiling awkwardly at Alexios. “What brings you to the writer’s cave?”

  “What?” Alexios said. “Is that what this place is?”

  The man laughed, the man wrote (and did (and did (and wrote (in an infinite series of reflections, like two mirrors turned toward one another)))). “I’m the reason you’re here. I’m the reason you exist. The others know they shouldn’t come here. Didn’t you see the warning at the entrance? Anyone who enters this place vanishes forever.”

  “What are you talking about?” Alexios said.

  “‘What are you talking about?’” the writer imitated. “How many times have you used those exact words in that exact way?” The writer licked his thumb and flipped through his massive book. “Thanks, Alexios, now I have to go back and search through two thousand pages to make sure you don’t utter that exact phrase more than a few times, or else my readers are going to accuse me of being lazy and unoriginal and I’ll have to go back to work pushing paper in some office somewhere, assuming anyone will even hire me after all the crazy shit I’ve done.”

  Alexios stared.

  The writer put his hand on his chin. “Then again, I’m not supposed to care too much about what critics think. It supposedly makes your writing worse if you respond to them before they even say anything. And if you respond to them after they complain about your work, then yeah, that tends to look pretty pathetic. The best thing is to adopt the Crichton method: in your next book, introduce a minor character with a suspiciously similar name to a critic you despise, and repeatedly describe him as having a small penis. In fact, always describe him as specifically having a small penis. ‘Critic A, with his tiny penis, approached our hero.’ Not to be ableist, of course. Not to body shame. But it’s always easier to criticize than to actually create, wouldn’t you say? Man, I hope I don’t end up deleting this entire passage. ‘Our hero encounters his most terrifying foe yet—the writer.’ But honestly, yeah, although I myself am a writer, I find writers tend to be pretty annoying. Not all, but most. I’ve taken a few creative writing courses in my day but didn’t like them. Two creative writing teachers threw me out of their classes because I had either been cracking, or laughing at, ridiculous jokes. I don’t know. The writers in those places always seemed like they had so much to prove but so little to say, so little of an understanding of what makes for a good story. Actually, none of them were good storytellers. Nobody ever came up to them and asked them to tell a story. I knew other people who weren’t writers but who were good storytellers. People couldn’t get enough of their stories. So I ended up gravitating more toward literature and history courses in college. Not sure that helped.”

  Alexios gaped, unable to move.

  “Now that’s what I call a captive audience!” the writer said. “This is going great, this is taking up so much space, and it’s pretty entertaining, not to toot my own horn, so it’s really a win-win, you know? Writers have no problem whining about writing. We can go on like this forever. No need to whip us while crying out for more content. But as much as we complain about writing, we actually love it. Nobody’s telling us to do it, especially if you’re as unknown as I am. The pressure to get a ‘real job’—hawking carburetors, for instance—it’s always there. But what’s the point of having a society without art? Is it even desirable, let alone possible? What soldier would want to go into battle without being able to take a break now and then with some video games? What billionaire would want to squeeze his workers without being able to look forward to some alone time with a number of suspiciously young escorts who have spent an hour putting on their makeup at the behest of their pimps?”

  Alexios almost repeated his previous question, but he was overcome by so much dizziness, he stumbled and even needed to sit down.

  “‘What are you talking about?’” the writer imitated. “’What are you talking about? What are you talking about? What are you talking about?’ Well guess what: you can’t ask me that question. Either say something interesting or shut up.”

  Alexios responded with silence.

  The writer had been writing all these words the whole time.

  “That’s more like it,” the writer said. “It’s nice to finally meet you, by the way. All these italics are hurting my eyes.”

  “How,” Alexios began. “What…?”

  “I was running out of ideas,” the writer said. “This story is a LitRPG play on historical fiction fantasy. A mix of different genres. Something for everyone. Even your sweet little grannie. Anyway, it’s been awhile since you’ve run into any monsters—and the story needs monsters—so I started wondering what kind of unique beast I could throw your way, once I managed to get you to a safe distance from Adarnase and let you catch your breath. I still have trouble spelling that guy’s name, by the way. I have to take a few seconds to think about it every time. Is it Adarnase, or Adarnarse? Or Adarnasty? So I searched the internet for unique monsters, ‘monsters of the Caucasus’—Caucasian monsters, in other words. You know how terrible Caucasians can be.” The writer chuckled. “Nothing really stood out, though, so I figured: what could be more horrifying than a writer? And what could be more horrifying than the writer who is literally writing your own story right in front of you?”

  Alexios felt like he was going to pass out.

  The writer laughed. “Never faced a foe like this one, have you? One who can control everything you say and do? One who created you two years ago? It’s the writer’s dream! And everyone else’s nightmare!”

  “What,” Alexios said. “What do you want?”

  “You need to do something to entertain me,” the writer said. “Since if I’m entertained, hopefully a bunch of other people will be, too.”

  “I’m not an actor,” Alexios said. “I’m not here to put on a show…”

  “There’s where you’re wrong. You are actually here to put on a show. I need you to entertain my readers so I don’t have to find a job selling carburetors.”

  “What’s a carburetor? Why do you keep talking about carburetors?”

  “It’s a funny word. But it’s also ‘a device in an internal combustion engine for mixing air with a fine spray of liquid fuel,’ according to the dictionary. I just looked it up.”

  “I didn’t see you look anything up.”

  “I did it mentally.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Anything’s possible when you’re a writer. I almost feel like I should dance and sing a song about it.” The writer leaped to his feet, and was suddenly wearing a top hat and a nineteenth century suit. Clutching a cane and smiling and clicking his shiny shoes, which were made for tap-dancing, he danced and sang in front of a giant red curtain to the accompaniment of an enormous orchestra which had appeared out of nowhere. As the writer did this, his quill continued to write in his book by itself, making loud scrawling noises.

  “There’s no business like the writing business!” the writer sang, as bright lights shone on him. “There’s no business I knoooow!”

  “Please stop.” Alexios stood and backed away.

  The orchestra vanished and went silent, the lights and curtain faded, and the writer frowned. “You don’t like it?”

  “It’s kind of derivative,” Alexios said. “The rhythm and rhyme doesn’t quite work.”

  “Everyone’s a critic.”

  “Theater kids can also be kind of annoying,” Alexios added.

  “You got a problem with theater kids?” The writer was now speaking with a ridiculously heavy Italian accent, sitting in a comfortable green leather chair behind a gleaming mahogany table in a dimly lit yet tasteful home office from 1940s New York. He wore a heavy suit, his beard was gone, he was now in his sixties, and his jowls were unearthly, impossible, gargantuan. Catchy yet eerie Mediterranean folk music sounded from the orchestra, which was now out of sight.

  “You wanna repeat what you just told me?” the writer said. “You wanna say that again to my face?”

  “I guess I don’t have a huge problem with the theater kids, now that I think about it,” Alexios said. “They can just be kind of annoying. They’re almost as bad politically as the football players. They don’t have a problem with the status quo as long as—”

  The writer held up a finger, and the tasteful home office vanished, and the orchestra was silent. He had returned to his original form, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, writing with his quill while looking at Alexios. He was also no longer Italian.

  “Let me stop you there,” the writer said. “Every time anyone mentions anything political in my books, I get a bunch of one-star reviews saying things like ‘I don’t like politics in my existence, everyone knows that everything good is impossible, everything has always been exactly the same in every time and place.’ The more clever reviewers will complain vaguely about issues with plot or character, and then only drop the slightest hint that their real problem with the book is its politics. These days the kinds of people who have the money to buy and read books are pretty sensitive about any kind of reminder that their precious, beloved, beautiful America is collapsing like the twin towers.”

  “Did you just make a 9/11 joke?”

  The writer nodded. “I did. Now listen—”

  “No thanks.”

  “Nabokov and Orwell can whine all they like about how Stalin ate all the grain in Ukraine with his comically large spoon, but if you even hint that capitalism, which began five hundred years ago during the English enclosures, isn’t necessarily human nature, and that the concept of private property did not exist during hundreds of thousands of years of human prehistory, your goose is cooked! The CIA invented creative writing programs back in the ‘50s—just look it up—and told writers repeatedly: ‘Show, don’t tell. Don’t get political in your writing. Never provide socioeconomic context. Focus only on individuals.’ In other words, kid, if you bring up politics, it threatens my bread and butter!”

  “Politics, politics, politics!” Alexios said.

  “Shut up! It takes the reader out of the story! People read novels to escape the shitty world, not to be reminded of the world’s shittiness!”

  “Politics, politics, politics!”

  “Quiet!”

  Alexios was silent.

  The writer sighed with relief and even wiped the sweat from his brow. “Whew. That was close. Now get to work, kid. I have deadlines. I need to write at least ten pages a day if I’m going to have any shot of making it in this business. You have no idea how hard it’s been. Sometimes I felt like I was climbing Everest, naked on my hands and knees.”

  “How is that my problem?”

  “It’s your problem because I created you, and you only exist because of this!” The writer held up his quill, clutching it in ink-stained fingers.

  Alexios was silent and still.

  The writer went back to writing. “You can’t do anything when I stop writing. Don’t forget—I can even make you disappear!”

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  Before Alexios could react, he had vanished. A moment later, he reappeared.

  “What the hell?” Alexios said.

  “Enough,” the writer said. “We need to start doing cooler things or readers are going to get bored. This entire chapter is already pretty different in tone from the rest of the book. So do something cool. Do something entertaining.”

  “Uh…”

  “Here’s an idea.”

  As the writer wrote, Alexios felt a strange force filling his body. Then, all of a sudden, he did a backflip on the soft carpets. The writer clapped.

  “Always thought that was so cool,” the writer said. “I can never get enough backflips. Every movie, every book should have backflips. And, like, a lot of them, too.”

  “Ow.” Alexios rubbed his back. “You almost broke a few bones…”

  “Not a problem. I can break ‘em just as easily as I can fix ‘em.”

  “Can you send me to Sera?” Alexios said. “With my friends? Can you make the uprising win? Can I meet this dragon I’m supposed to find?”

  The writer shook his head. “It’d be too easy. Who’d want to read that? ‘And Alexios and his friends won and everyone lived happily ever after, the end.’ Lazy! Each chapter needs to be: ‘a person has a problem in a place. They do their best to overcome that problem, but inadvertently make things worse.’ That’s it! For thousands of pages! And if you don’t do that, then the readers stop reading, and the dough stops flowing.”

  “Why do you care so much about money?”

  “Writers have to eat! So get to work, kid!”

  Alexios ran to the chamber wall, and then ran along the wall itself, leaping over the torches, unsheathing his sword and sometimes swinging it into the flames and dousing them, though they flared back to life as soon as he had passed. When Alexios finished, he was standing on the floor again, drenched in sweat, gasping for breath.

  “Nice!” the writer said. “Maybe you should join a carnival or something.”

  “Are you just going to keep making me do athletic feats like this?” Alexios said.

  “Yeah, I guess,” the writer said. “It’s working for the moment, so why stop?”

  “But I have a family,” Alexios said.

  “So do I!” the writer exclaimed. “My wife, my poor wife, she’s a nurse working the night shift, and finishing up as we speak! I will say one thing. It’s definitely annoying to be writing everything in italics like this, especially when you’re doing it by hand. But oh well. I have deadlines.” The writer sang: “‘I been workin’ in a content mine, goin’ down down. Workin’ in a content mine, whoop, and have a slip down!’ That’s how the song goes, right?”

  Now Alexios was holding a pickaxe, which he slammed into the wall. Rocks tumbled out, but these transformed into beautiful women wearing translucent burkas.

  “Too horny, dude,” Alexios said.

  “Quiet!” the writer yelled.

  The beautiful women were followed by giant bat-winged octopuses, and then towering cities lost in the mist. Alexios slammed the pickaxe into the wall again, and this time Roman legionaries fell onto the floor. They picked themselves up and marched across the chamber, singing about Roma, Roma, O Roma! The Arabian women covered their faces with their veils while the giant bat-winged octopuses smashed through the ceiling, giving the cities room to grow.

  “Workin’!” the writer sang over the legionaries’ voices. “Goin’! Workin’! Whoop, and have a slip down!”

  “Can’t…stop!” Alexios shouted.

  He hacked at the wall with his pickaxe. This time the rocks rolling out turned into—nothing. They were just rocks. Dust puffed in the air and covered the writer’s book, though he was still scrawling with his quill dipped in ink.

  “Aw, shit,” the writer said.

  He had run out of ideas. This was never supposed to happen. Writers were supposed to be an infinite well of ideas. But this was obviously impossible. Libraries and warehouses and computers were full of books and movies and TV shows and video games and all kinds of other media that were almost all mediocre. Those writers had run out of ideas and had managed to make a buck or two, so why couldn’t this one?

  “That’s not how it works!” Alexios said. “It’s not just about money! That’s so petty!”

  “Oh, so you think just because I’m a writer, you shouldn’t have to pay me? If you’re such a good writer, why don’t you write a novel, jackass?”

  “That’s not what I meant at all! I meant that you should focus on your art!”

  “What do you think I’m doing?” the writer said. “Now come on, do something interesting!”

  Alexios threw his pickaxe into the chamber wall so hard that it knocked over the entire wall itself. Sunlight blazed through, and an Arcadian landscape glimmered on the other side. Actually, it reminded Alexios a lot of Georgia—the country, not the state—with its rolling green hills, spectacular tall sloping mountains wreathed in clouds, birds flying past forests, the sunlight falling on beds of wildflowers, a stag with huge antlers striding through a pond where a rustic happened to be fishing next to his one-room shack, and on and on. The Roman legionaries marched inside, followed by the Arabian princesses, the giant bat-winged octopus, and even the cities, which migrated into the background.

  In other words, the scene became ridiculous.

  “Another paragraph down. Only ten billion more to go.” The writer checked his watch. “Almost lunch time. Maybe I can take a break. One which ‘accidentally’ lasts until tomorrow morning.”

  “This is kind of like that old movie,” Alexios said, while viewing the Arcadian scene, the sunlit rainwater dripping from the edges of the broken wall. “What was it called—”

  “Shut up! We’re only halfway through this chapter, kid, so get moving!”

  Alexios dropped his pickaxe and ran inside the Arcadian scene. Behind him was an arch of broken brick, through which he could see the torchlit chamber with the writer still sitting cross-legged on the carpets, scrawling these very words into his massive tome.

  Alexios was joined by Isato, Basil, Kassia, Rakhsh, and the three other horses, who were nameless due to the writer’s laziness. The new arrivals were all startled by their sudden, inexplicable teleportation to this place.

  “Wrong genre!” the writer growled. “There’s no teleportation in fantasy! That’s science fiction!”

  Kassia clung to Alexios’s leg, while Basil and Isato asked how they had gotten here—the former addressing him as ‘Alexios,’ the latter addressing him as ‘commoner.’

  “It’s a long story,” Alexios said.

  “We told you not to go into that cave!” Kassia said. “Every single time you go into caves, something bad happens!”

  “What the hell is that?” Basil was staring at the gigantic bat-winged octopus that was floating in the air, and—despite its great altitude—occupying much of the sky.

  “I was reading Lovecraft a few weeks ago!” the writer shouted from behind them. “People love this shit. Don’t they?”

  “Who’s he?” Kassia said, looking at the writer.

  “He’s something more powerful than anything we’ve ever encountered before,” Alexios said, speaking with a grim tone. “A challenge we could never possibly overcome, no matter how hard we try.” He stopped, then looked at the writer. “Hey! That’s your voice, not mine! I don’t sound like that at all!”

  “You do, now!” the writer shouted back. “Now listen. I gotta take a lunch break. I’m not even really that hungry but you know how it goes. I should be back in a few minutes or so. A few hours at most. Maybe like a day or two.”

  “No!” Alexios yelled, gesturing to the writer. “Wait!”

  Everything vanished. There was neither light nor darkness. The universe ceased to exist. Nothingness itself ceased to exist, as did time, and even these words.

  Then, an instantaneous eternity later, the weird Arcadian scene returned, along with Alexios, his family, the horses, and the writer.

  The writer burped. “Much better. Oh, wait. I’m not supposed to put that kind of humor in. Burping and farting is considered childish, and childish is bad, right? We all need to destroy our inner children if we’re going to function in our amazing society. I need more sophisticated humor.”

  “What is he talking about?” Kassia said.

  “I already asked,” Alexios said. “He told me to stop saying ‘what are you talking about.’ His explanations just made everything seem even more confusing.”

  “Here we go,” the writer said. “Here’s something sophisticated.”

  Alexios was standing alone on a stage holding a microphone, dressed in boring plain modern clothes. An audience of thousands of people was watching him in the darkness, though he was unable to see them because of the bright stage lights.

  “But you know what I really hate?” Alexios said into the microphone. “You can’t say anything these days!”

  The audience roared with laughter.

  “I identify as an attack helicopter.” Alexios held up his arms and spun around in circles, making helicopter noises.

  The audience screamed with delight, the members at the front row—the only ones visible, all white men wearing dark t-shirts decorated with gray American flags—clapping so hard their hands were bleeding.

  Alexios, meanwhile, was showered with hundred-dollar bills. They rushed onto the stage like the roses of Heliogabalus, flooding waves of greenbacks rising and crashing—pouring inside so that Alexios worried that he was going to drown in money. But he was soon given neoclassical mansions the size of small countries, fame so profound that even those supposedly uncontacted tribes in the Brazilian rainforest pointed at his picture and exclaimed “Alexios!” He enjoyed endless vacations in amazingly beautiful places few people had even heard of, fawning fans repeating his amazingly creative humor about attack helicopters whenever he made the mistake of venturing into public without a disguise—

  “No,” the writer said, back in the torchlit chamber, which was now out of sight. “This isn’t sophisticated enough. What passes for sophisticated humor these days? What do ‘smart people’ consider funny?”

  Alexios found himself inside a sophisticated comedy film. He was a claymation fox sitting at a table in a kitchen, browsing the real estate section of a newspaper. The camera held still. Every shot was geometric. There was no music. Pastel colors abounded. His wife, also a fox, served him a platter of pancakes. He slurped his steaming coffee.

  “I think it’s time we bought a bigger house,” Alexios said, speaking with a famous actor’s voice.

  (Uproarious laughter from the audience offscreen—sipping wine, wearing cardigans, telling themselves every moment of every day: ‘yes, I am actually a human being! There is absolutely nothing fake about me! I am completely normal and human! Everyone likes me! I am utterly blameless when it comes to the appalling condition of the world! The next generation is certainly not going to perish in hellfire because of the inexcusable things I have spent my life excusing! I am capable of gorging myself on corporate media for hours every day for decades so long as I do so with a critical eye!’)

  Screaming, Alexios woke up in his bed back home in Maine. He was a pudgy, pimply teenager again, and smelled like he needed to change his clothes, take a shower, and brush his teeth—just to start.

  “You already did this,” Alexios said. “Hermes Trismegistos already brought me back to Maine.”

  “Julian?” Alexios’s old world mom yelled from another room, her voice muffled by the door and the walls. “Who are you talking to, honey? You need to get up, or you’ll be late for school!”

  “Shit,” the writer said. He was sitting on a pile of clothes lying in the corner. “You’re right. I’m really running out of ideas. The story’s getting a little repetitive. The monkey can only type so many different words out of the typewriter. But that’s what happens when you have a book that’s thousands of pages long. ‘Life is so hard when you can almost effortlessly write incredibly long fantasy novels!’ Not to humblebrag, of course.”

  “You shouldn’t even use that word. It’ll be dated in a few years, maximum. It’s like saying ‘rad,’ or ‘golly.’”

  “Let me do the writing,” the writer said. “You do the entertaining.”

  “Julian?” Alexios’s old world mom said, knocking on the door. “What’s going on in there?”

  “Send me back where I came from,” Alexios said to the writer. “Make me forget this whole thing ever happened. And make it so I don’t go into that cave again.”

  “Hey, listen, kid. I do the writing here, not you. Your job is to go on entertaining adventures, not write—”

  “Oh really? Who is writing whom, exactly? Am I you, or are you me? What if you see colors differently from the way I do?”

  The writer felt like his head was going to explode. “No, stop it. Don’t—”

  “I’m you and you’re me and you’re me and I’m you! ‘I could not tell where she ended and I began.’”

  “No!” the writer screamed, clutching his head. “Stop!”

  “The anxiety of influence! Death of the writer! Show, don’t tell! No purple prose! No adverbs, unless you are James Joyce, then pack every sentence with twenty adverbs! You get an adverb! And you get an adverb!”

  “Argghh!”

  “No infodumping! Novels can only be about small-town families acting weird, or generational dramas about women escaping the evil see-see-pee (who dared to take away their slaves and do land reform), or flawed but good cops or soldiers, or hero’s journeys! Just write!”

  “Aiiiiiieeeeee!” The writer’s head exploded, and the power was such that Alexios’s old world house burst outward, the flames expanding over his town, melting the snow, incinerating all the pines and birches and oaks, flowering over the ocean and boiling it into steam, melting the mountains to lava, gouging new canyons into entire continents, dumping cities into the sea, until the whole Earth was blasted into searing dust, devouring the solar system, the Milky Way, the local group, the Virgo Supercluster, to the extent that the theory of the great crunch made a comeback—and the entire universe was annihilated. And that was the end. There was nothing more.

  Yet there was, as always, more text.

  Alexios was sitting with Isato, Basil, and Kassia at the campsite in the copse, munching some stale bread.

  “Alexios?” Basil said.

  Alexios looked at him. “Huh?”

  “So are you going to go into that cave?” Basil said. “What are you waiting for?”

  “You know what?” Alexios said. “On second thought, maybe not.”

  “What changed your mind?” Basil said.

  “Not sure,” Alexios said. “There’s probably nothing interesting in there anyway.”

  “You don’t even want to have a look?”

  “No. Kassia’s right. Those kinds of places always lead to trouble.”

  Kassia smiled. “Of course I’m right—as always.”