The Mage Returns

[Amadeusz]

The first thing Alex noticed was the cold, which was strange because his bedroom was always too warm in summer, but here the air bit through his skin with the kind of chill that suggested snow or mountains or both.

The second thing he noticed was that he was standing, which was also strange because the last thing he remembered was lying in bed scrolling through patch notes for the new expansion that was never coming, the servers having shut down three months ago after the final raid.

The third thing he noticed was the notification hanging in his vision.

[Welcome, Veyloris the Calamity]

Alex blinked, which did nothing to dismiss the translucent blue window floating approximately two feet from his face.

He tried waving his hand through it, which also did nothing except make him realize his hand was wrong.

Too pale, too long-fingered, with nails that looked like they'd been filed to points by someone with a concerning amount of free time.

"What," he said aloud, and his voice came out wrong too, deeper and smoother than the cracking tenor he'd been stuck with for the past year.

"Okay, this is either a very elaborate dream or I've finally snapped from exam stress."

The notification blinked once, then expanded.

[Status Window]

Name: Veyloris
Title: The Calamity (Legendary)
Level: 999
Class: Demon-Mage (Mythic)
HP: 847,392/847,392
MP: 1,203,847/1,203,847
STR: 8,847 | DEX: 7,392 | INT: 12,847 | WIS: 10,293 | CHA: 6,847
Skills: [Collapsed - 847 Total]
Titles: [Collapsed - 93 Total]
Equipment: [Collapsed - Full Set Equipped]

Alex stared at the numbers, which were very much the numbers he'd spent three years optimizing, min-maxing, and arguing about on forums with people who had far too many opinions about stat allocation.

These were his numbers, from his character, from a game that had shut down and should not currently be displaying itself in what appeared to be actual reality.

"This is fine," he said, which was a lie, but sometimes you had to start with small lies before working your way up to the bigger ones like 'I am not currently having a mental breakdown in what appears to be a medieval forest.'

He looked down at himself properly for the first time.

Black robes that seemed to drink in the light, embroidered with patterns that hurt to look at directly.

Boots that came up to his knees and probably cost more than his entire real-world wardrobe.

Rings on six of his fingers, each one glowing faintly with enchantments he could somehow name without thinking: Mana Regeneration V, Spell Power VIII, Cooldown Reduction IV.

A staff leaned against a nearby tree, black wood wound with silver wire, topped with a crystal that pulsed with a sickly purple light.

He knew that staff.

He'd spent four months farming the materials for it, another two weeks arguing with his guild about who got to use the crafting station first, and approximately six hours customizing its appearance because the default skin was, in his words at the time, "aggressively ugly."

Alex reached for the staff, and it came to his hand like it had been waiting.

The moment his fingers touched the wood, information flooded his mind: every enchantment, every modification, every painstaking upgrade he'd applied over hundreds of hours of gameplay.

[Voidcaller's Reach - Mythic Staff]
+2,847 Spell Power
+40% Cast Speed
+60% Mana Efficiency
Special: Void Spells ignore 50% Magic Resistance
Special: Spells cast through this staff leave lingering Void zones

"Right," Alex said, gripping the staff harder than necessary.

"So either I'm in a coma and this is a very specific anxiety dream about not finishing my summer reading, or something has gone catastrophically wrong with reality."

A growl answered him, low and wet and far too close.

Alex spun, staff raised, and found himself face-to-face with something that looked like a wolf had been left in a radiation zone for several years and developed opinions about personal space.

It was easily the size of a small car, with matted fur that glowed faintly green, too many eyes, and teeth that suggested its dental plan was 'murder everything.'

[Blighted Wolf - Level 47]
HP: 18,493/18,493
Status: Hostile | Hungry | Diseased

The wolf lunged.

Alex's body moved before his brain caught up, muscle memory from a thousand raid nights taking over.

He sidestepped, staff coming up in a guard position that was completely unnecessary because he wasn't actually holding a physical weapon, he was holding a spell focus, but his hands remembered the motion anyway.

"Void Bolt," he said, which was stupid because you didn't need to say spell names out loud, that was just something people did in the early levels before they learned better, but apparently his mouth hadn't gotten the memo.

Purple-black energy erupted from the staff's crystal, crossing the distance between him and the wolf in a fraction of a second.

The spell hit the creature in the chest, and what happened next was less "combat" and more "physics having a small crisis."

The wolf exploded.

Not metaphorically, not in the game-y sense of falling over with a damage number, but actually exploded, chunks of corrupted flesh and bone spraying outward in a radius that suggested Alex had perhaps used slightly more force than necessary for a level 47 enemy.

[Blighted Wolf defeated - 847 XP gained]
[Level difference penalty: -95% XP]
[Actual XP gained: 42]

Alex stared at the crater where the wolf had been, then at his staff, then at his hands, which weren't shaking despite the fact that he'd just killed something that probably qualified as an endangered species.

"Okay," he said slowly.

"So the power is real. The stats are real. Which means..."

He pulled up his status window again, scrolling past the numbers to the bottom where the system information usually lived.

"Which means I need to figure out what the hell is going on."

The window flickered, and new text appeared.

[System Notice]
Welcome to the World of Aethermoor
Current Date: 1247 Post-Cataclysm
Location: Thornwood Forest, Northern Reaches
Warning: You are in a Level 40-60 zone
Warning: Hostile entities detected in area
Warning: [ERROR - TEMPORAL SIGNATURE MISMATCH]
Warning: [ERROR - IDENTITY VERIFICATION FAILED]
Warning: [ERROR - HISTORICAL RECORDS CONFLICT DETECTED]

"That's not ominous at all," Alex muttered, dismissing the window with a thought.

The errors were new.

The game had never thrown errors like that, never questioned identity or temporal signatures or whatever 'historical records conflict' meant.

He looked around properly for the first time.

The forest was dense, old-growth trees that blocked most of the sunlight, with underbrush thick enough to hide a dozen more wolves if they felt like it.

In the distance, he could see mountains, their peaks covered in snow that glowed faintly in the afternoon light.

Those mountains were familiar.

He'd climbed them in-game, back during the level 80 questline, fighting ice elementals and collecting rare herbs for the alchemy grind.

Which meant if this was the Thornwood Forest, and those were the Frostspine Mountains, then the nearest settlement should be...

Alex pulled up his map interface, which appeared as another translucent window showing a bird's-eye view of the surrounding area.

Most of it was greyed out, unexplored territory that would fill in as he moved, but there was a marker approximately three miles to the south-east: a small icon of a town with the name "Millhaven" underneath.

"Millhaven," he said, testing the name.

It wasn't a town he remembered from the game, which either meant it was new, added in an expansion he'd never played, or this wasn't exactly the game world he remembered.

The third option, which he was trying very hard not to think about, was that this was the game world but changed, aged, moved forward in time without him.

He started walking, staff in hand, keeping to what looked like a game trail through the underbrush.

The forest was quiet except for the sound of his boots on the dirt path and the occasional rustle of something small and hopefully non-hostile moving through the undergrowth.

After about twenty minutes of walking, during which he encountered two more wolves (both of which exploded in similarly excessive fashion) and what appeared to be a very confused deer that fled before he could check its level, Alex found the road.

It was more of a dirt track than a proper road, two ruts worn by wagon wheels with grass growing up the middle, but it was clearly maintained and clearly led somewhere.

He turned south-east, following the map marker, and tried to organize his thoughts into something resembling a coherent plan.

Plan A: This was a dream, in which case he should probably try to wake up.

Plan B: This was real, in which case he needed to figure out where he was, when he was, and why he was currently inhabiting his max-level game character.

Plan C: This was some kind of VR experiment gone wrong, in which case someone was getting sued.

Plan D: He'd actually died in his sleep and this was either heaven, hell, or some kind of cosmic joke.

None of the options were particularly appealing.

The road wound through the forest for another mile before the trees started to thin, giving way to farmland.

Fields of wheat or barley or something grain-adjacent stretched out on either side of the road, with a few farmers visible in the distance, small figures bent over their work.

Alex slowed, suddenly aware that he was walking around in legendary-tier equipment that probably glowed in the dark, carrying a staff that screamed 'dangerous magic user,' looking like every dark lord stereotype that had ever graced a fantasy novel.

"Right," he muttered.

"So maybe walking into town like this is a bad idea."

He pulled up his equipment menu, scrolling through the absurd number of items in his inventory.

Somewhere in here, he should have... yes, there it was.

A set of common traveler's clothes he'd picked up years ago for a stealth quest and never bothered to delete.

[Equipped: Traveler's Clothes (Common)]
[Equipped: Simple Walking Staff (Common)]
[Warning: Current equipment provides 0.003% of your normal defensive values]
[Warning: Current weapon provides 0.001% of your normal offensive values]

"I'll take my chances," Alex said, watching his appearance shift.

The black robes vanished, replaced by simple brown pants, a white shirt, and a travel cloak that had seen better days.

The staff became a plain wooden pole that looked like something you'd use for hiking, not obliterating wildlife.

He kept the rings on, but willed them to stop glowing, which worked after a moment of concentration.

The system seemed to respond to intent as much as explicit commands, which was either very convenient or very dangerous depending on how you looked at it.

The town of Millhaven appeared around a bend in the road, and Alex stopped to stare.

It was small, maybe two hundred buildings clustered around a central square, with a wooden palisade wall that suggested the local wildlife was more dangerous than the farmers could handle alone.

Smoke rose from chimneys, and he could hear the distant sound of a blacksmith's hammer, the kind of ambient noise that the game had always done well.

What made him stop, though, was the statue in the town square.

Even from a distance, even through the gap in the palisade gate, he could see it clearly: a figure in flowing robes, staff raised, face set in an expression of grim determination.

The statue was easily twenty feet tall, carved from dark stone that seemed to absorb the light, and at its base was a plaque with text he couldn't quite read from here.

Alex walked closer, trying to look casual, trying to look like someone who definitely belonged here and wasn't having an existential crisis about the nature of reality.

The guards at the gate, two men in leather armor with spears that had seen better days, barely glanced at him as he passed.

One of them was in the middle of a story about someone's daughter and someone else's son, and the other was laughing, and neither of them seemed to think a lone traveler was worth interrupting their conversation.

The town was busy in the way small towns were busy, people going about their daily business with the kind of practiced efficiency that came from doing the same tasks for years.

A woman was haggling with a merchant over the price of cloth.

A group of children were playing some kind of game involving a ball and a lot of shouting.

An old man sat on a bench, watching the world go by with the patient expression of someone who had seen it all before.

Alex walked toward the statue, trying not to stare, trying not to draw attention, trying not to think about what it meant that there was a statue here, in this town, of a figure that looked remarkably like his character.

The plaque at the base was weathered, the letters worn by time and weather, but still readable.

[In Memory of Veyloris the Calamity]
[Who Gave His Life to Seal the Seventh Cataclysm]
[Year 1147 Post-Cataclysm]
[May His Sacrifice Never Be Forgotten]

Alex read the plaque three times, each time hoping the words would change, would make sense, would be anything other than what they were.

1147 Post-Cataclysm.

The current date, according to his system, was 1247 Post-Cataclysm.

One hundred years.

He'd been dead for one hundred years.

Or rather, Veyloris had been dead for one hundred years, which meant this world had continued without him, had moved on, had built statues and written histories and apparently decided that he was a hero who'd sacrificed himself to save everyone.

"Excuse me," a voice said, and Alex nearly jumped out of his skin.

A woman stood next to him, maybe in her fifties, with grey hair tied back in a practical bun and the kind of weathered face that suggested a life spent outdoors.

She was holding a basket of vegetables and looking at him with mild curiosity.

"Sorry," Alex said, trying to sound normal, trying to sound like someone who hadn't just learned they were supposed to be a century dead.

"I was just... admiring the statue."

"Beautiful work, isn't it?" the woman said, smiling.

"My grandfather helped carve it, back when I was just a girl. He used to tell stories about the Calamity, about how he saved us all from the demons."

"Did he?" Alex managed.

"Oh yes. Terrible times, those were. The demons came through the rifts, burning everything, killing everyone. They say half the world died before the heroes stopped them."

She looked up at the statue with something like reverence.

"And Veyloris was the greatest of them all. They say he could level mountains with a word, that his magic was so powerful it scared even the other heroes."

"Scared them?" Alex asked, because apparently his mouth was determined to make this situation worse.

"Well, you know how it is with power like that," the woman said, lowering her voice conspiratorially.

"Dangerous. Unpredictable. They say toward the end, some people wanted to seal him away too, thought he was as much a threat as the demons. But he proved them wrong, didn't he? Gave his life to close the last rift."

She patted the statue's base affectionately, like it was an old friend, then nodded to Alex and continued on her way, leaving him standing there with a growing sense of dread.

Dangerous. Unpredictable. A threat.

The game had never framed Veyloris like that.

In the game, he'd been a hero, one of the legendary figures who'd fought in the final raid, who'd helped seal the demon lord and save the world.

The class had been powerful, sure, arguably overpowered, but that was just game balance.

It didn't mean anything.

Except apparently here, in this world, it meant everything.

Alex pulled up his status window again, scrolling down to the section he'd ignored before.

[Titles]
The Calamity (Legendary) - All stats +10%. Reputation with most factions: Terrified
Demon-Mage (Mythic) - Void spells cost 50% less mana. Reputation with holy factions: Hostile
Riftwalker (Legendary) - Can sense and manipulate dimensional boundaries. Reputation with mages: Suspicious
[+90 more titles - Collapsed]

Reputation: Terrified.

Reputation: Hostile.

Reputation: Suspicious.

"Oh," Alex said quietly.

"Oh, this is bad."

A notification appeared, red text flashing urgently.

[System Alert]
Warning: Identity exposure risk detected
Warning: Historical records indicate "Veyloris the Calamity" is deceased
Warning: Resurrection of mythic-tier entities typically triggers continental-level response
Recommendation: Maintain cover identity
Recommendation: Avoid using high-tier magic in populated areas
Recommendation: Do not reveal true nature to local authorities

[New Quest Available]
"The Hundred-Year Secret"
Objective: Survive in a world that believes you are dead
Reward: ???
Failure Condition: Identity exposure
Accept? Y/N

Alex stared at the quest notification, then at the statue, then at the peaceful town going about its business, completely unaware that the legendary hero they'd memorialized was currently standing in their town square having a crisis.

He thought about the woman's words.

Dangerous. Unpredictable. A threat.

He thought about his power, about the wolf that had exploded from a basic spell, about the fact that he was walking around with stats that could probably level this entire town if he sneezed wrong.

He thought about the errors in his system, about the temporal mismatch, about the fact that something had brought him here, to this time, in this body, for reasons he didn't understand.

"Accept," he said quietly.

[Quest Accepted: "The Hundred-Year Secret"]

A new notification appeared immediately, this one in a different color, a sickly green that made his stomach turn.

[System Warning]
Anomalous energy signature detected
Source: Unknown
Classification: Cataclysm-tier
Distance: 847 kilometers, bearing north-west
Threat level: Extreme
Historical match: 94% similarity to Eighth Cataclysm energy signature
Note: Historical records indicate Eighth Cataclysm was never sealed
Note: Historical records indicate Eighth Cataclysm was never predicted
Note: You are reading this message 100 years after it should have appeared

Alex's blood ran cold.

The Eighth Cataclysm.

In the game, there had only been seven.

The final raid, the last boss, the end of the story.

There was no eighth, no continuation, no sequel planned.

But this wasn't the game anymore.

This was real, or as real as anything could be when you were inhabiting your video game character in a world that had aged a century without you, and somewhere out there, 847 kilometers away, something was happening that the system classified as a Cataclysm-tier threat.

The statue of Veyloris loomed over him, stone face frozen in determination, and Alex wondered if whoever had carved it had known, had suspected, that the story wasn't over.

That the Calamity would return.

That one hundred years later, the world would need him again, whether it wanted him or not.

"Well," Alex said to the statue, to himself, to the universe that had apparently decided he was the solution to a problem he didn't understand.

"I guess we're doing this."

The notification pulsed once more, then faded, leaving him standing in the town square with a secret that could get him killed and a threat he had no idea how to stop.

Somewhere in the distance, beyond the mountains, beyond the horizon, the Eighth Cataclysm was waiting.

And Alex, who'd been a seventeen-year-old gamer less than an hour ago, was apparently the only one who could do anything about it.