“What you did back there was amazing,” I whispered. “All of Weswara will be protected now. Because of you.”

  “Until Woden strikes me down.”

  “If he hasn’t yet, he won’t.”

  She didn’t seem convinced, but a grin fought through her fatigue. She kissed me, and her breath on my face, her lips on mine—that felt warm too.

  When we broke apart, she whispered, “I want to learn all of the writing you know. The words of your world. The words of all lands, all people.”

  I smiled, though it broke my heart to know what came next.

  “You,” I whispered, “are the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me. Thank you for being amazing.”

  “Well, you have misled me,” she said. “You’re not the lowest of aelvs, are you, Runian?”

  “No,” I said. “No, I’m not.”

  And I believed it.

  “In fact,” I said, “I’m pretty incredible. Good with women, you know. It’s always been one of my talents.”

  Her smile widened. “Oh, look,” she said. “Normal clouds. How nice.”

  I took her by the chin, gently tipping her head back down to meet my eyes. Then I kissed her again.

  “Not that I mind,” a voice said behind us. “In fact, I enjoy watching. But you two really should be more respectful in my presence. It’s traditional.”

  We spun to find Thokk—Logna—standing on the dock. Still in the form of a short old woman with a bundle of sticks on her back.

  We scrambled to our feet. “Goddess,” Sefawynn said—but didn’t bow or show subservience. “How is Ealstan?”

  “Still breathing,” she said. “He will likely continue that way for a while. I haven’t broken it to him yet that Ulric killed the earl. He’ll take it hard.”

  “We’ll need a new earl, then,” Sefawynn said.

  “Fortunately, you have a good candidate.”

  Sefawynn hesitated, and glanced at me. I slowly grinned.

  “I meant Ealstan, you aers!” Logna said.

  “Oh,” Sefawynn said. “Of course.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Much better choice.”

  “You’re both idiots,” Logna said. “But I suppose you’re my idiots.”

  “Pardon, Goddess,” Sefawynn said, her chin still up. “But we are our own idiots.”

  Logna grunted. “Go check on Ealstan, child,” she said to Sefawynn. “And get some food. I need to talk to the aelv.”

  Sefawynn looked at me.

  “Go,” I said. “With my love.”

  She grinned, kissed me, then walked up the steps to the city. A powerful glow shimmered in the center of town—the new runestone, inscribed with liquid-looking letters Sefawynn had carved.

  I watched her until she vanished into the city. The docks had been mostly cleaned of blood. It was peaceful here, with the sun setting out in the west, the waters shivering softly over the sea.

  “I know why Woden discarded this people,” I said to Logna.

  “Oh, so you’ve gotten smart all of a sudden?”

  I nodded. “He wanted to use this city—this people—as an example. He’s been doing it for years. Beating them down, so others who worship him would be afraid of what he might do to them.”

  Woden was basically Ulric with a priesthood.

  “Guess you are a little smart,” she said. “I’m not going to do your bidding anymore, by the way. That was a temporary thing, so I could hide myself from prying eyes. Your aura has an interesting effect on my kind.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “I won’t be here to hurt you much longer anyway.”

  I looked back over the ocean. With my nanites at dangerously low levels, they wouldn’t be able to activate the antisuicide protocols or keep me alive once the water filled my lungs.

  Not being able to swim was a bonus, this time. But I couldn’t wait until the system came back. Time to follow through.

  “Thunders,” Logna said. “What idiocy are you contemplating, Runian?”

  “My kind ruins the protections on this land,” I whispered. “My existence unravels Sefawynn’s magic. If I stay, this land dies. And with it, everyone I love. So…thank you. For helping me find myself. It was nice to know him for a few days.”

  I stepped off the dock.

  Then sat up a moment later.

  “It’s only about two feet deep here,” Logna said. “Dullard. You realize that’s why the wooden pier extends so far out, right? You’d need to walk out much farther to get to the deep part.”

  “Right, then,” I said, standing up. I turned toward the ocean to start walking.

  “That’s very brave of you,” Logna said. “So brave. Stupidly, amazingly, ridiculously brave.”

  I turned and glared at her. “Can’t you let me do this with dignity?”

  “You tried to drown yourself in knee-deep water,” she said. “The chance for dignity has passed.”

  I sighed. Why had I ended up in the dimension with the annoying gods?

  “You’re right, though,” Logna said. “Your poison…your substance…will work against the power of the boasts. It will ferment and undo the runes in any place you remain. For longer than about a month.”

  I hesitated. “A month?”

  “Yup,” she said. “That’s how long Ulric stayed here, which is what prevented me from doing anything about him. Stay in one place too long, and sure, you’ll poison the land. Keep moving, and it won’t really matter. You’re only one man. But off with you. Noble death. Very warrior-like. Too bad Sefawynn won’t have your protection anymore.”

  “Wait. My protection?”

  “Sure,” Logna said. “You think I can stand up to Woden by myself? Kid, if I could do that, I’d have stepped in ages ago. It was only when you people arrived and disrupted his power that I saw an opening.

  “If you keep her close, you should be able to keep him from touching her. My brother hates being reminded that—despite being a god—he’ll someday die. Pain drives him away, and the pain your presence causes is just enough.

  “If you were to, say, keep moving—traveling from town to town—you could protect Sefawynn with your presence and prevent your poison from killing any wights or disrupting the runes. But then there’d be no noble warrior’s death for you. So, off with you! When my skops tell the story, we’ll leave out the part where you belly flopped into a puddle.”

  I glared at her. Then felt an almost electric warmth.

  I could stay?

  I could STAY!

  She offered her hand, and had a surprisingly firm grip as she hauled me out of the water. Guess that was part of the whole god thing.

  “Thank you,” I said to her.

  “Eh,” she said. “I’m just in it for the stories. You have no idea how boring eternity gets. Particularly when your remaining kin are idiots. Have you heard about the thing with the tree?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Then you know the kind of geniuses I’m dealing with,” she said. “Go, Runian. Get some food, have a feast, and stop being so glum. Kiss the girl. You did something great here. With help. You deserve to enjoy being a person you like—for longer than a few days, at least.”

  I grinned. “What are they fixing for dinner anyway?”

  “Fish.”

  “I think I’ll…seize a few, eh?”

  She actually grinned at that. As if it were actually funny. Well hot damn. I turned back toward the city, and my mind—being the ridiculous piece of work it was—searched for a rating I could give this entire experience.

  I settled on no rating. The whole point of those had been to figure out what I wanted in life. Now that I had it, well, maybe I would need to rethink the system entirely.

  (...Five out of five. You served me well, rating system. Enjoy your retirement.)

  With a whoop of joy, I ran to meet up with Sefawynn and Ealstan. Turns out, even a coward can save the world. So long as you leave him with no other options.

  The End of Part Four

  A few months later, Logna watched—unseen—as the skop and her outlander husband spun the tale of the defense of Maelport to the people of Treewall. Sefawynn spoke the words, and Runian acted it out through something he called a puppet show.

  Logna approved. Not only were there ample amounts of silly voices, Woden’s puppet was cross-eyed. At first, many of the people in this town were uncertain, hostile. Yet, over the course of the story, they began to lean forward. They began to understand. They began to believe.

  Sefawynn was not as good of a storyteller as Logna, mind you, but one did not earn a recitation from a goddess without great merit. Technically, saving the world counted—but they hadn’t asked, so that was that. Either way, she was pleased to have an acolyte with some modicum of skill. Logna had spent decades hunting for a skop with the spine to stand up to Woden. To have one finally do it, and to have the woman actually know how to spin a boast…

  Well, it would do.

  Her kin would regret abandoning these people. Woden could keep his Hordamen. He always had been too easily infatuated with shiny new toys. But it was the builders, not just the takers, who changed the world. Logna knew that for certain now.

  Runian made the Woden puppet hide in tandem with Sefawynn’s words. He used his strange abilities to create sound effects, so Logna didn’t need to add any thunder or anything. That was nice. Thunder wasn’t really her thing. She did flare the fire when her part in the story came up again.

  He, she thought to herself, was a particularly good choice.

  Not that she’d chosen him, really. She’d sent numbers to him when he’d come looking. A…beacon, one might say. Wyrd affected even gods. She hadn’t known who he was, or what it would do, or even that her interference would make him enter the world where he did. She’d only known that these were actions she’d needed to take. That was enough.

  She did know the codes for his platings. He’d messed that part up. He should have asked for a wight to choose the right symbols, rather than typing them himself. Perhaps she’d deliver them to him someday. If he was nice.

  As the story neared its end, the people grew excited, encouraged. Yes, this was the part that got them all. The story of the brave new earl, the aelv-slayer. Logna hadn’t mentioned how she’d briefly disrupted the little machines in the blood of the outlanders he’d fought at the doorway. It hadn’t been easy. She’d been sick for weeks after that.

  But Ealstan had earned his victory, nonetheless. He’d been properly out-numbered and out-weaponed. She’d simply slipped a little grain onto the scales to help them balance.

  She could see the people discarding their worries. They would let Sefawynn restore their runestone, then perhaps send a daughter or two—or some sons, Logna wasn’t as picky as people thought—to Maelport for training as skops.

  Soon, talk of Woden would change. From their hero to the god of their enemies. Which was fair. He had always been their enemy.

  Logna slipped into the private chamber the people had given Runian and Sefawynn to use during their stay in the village. Here, the two had set up bedrolls and a few curious items. Wires trailed down from the solar panels on the roof to the laptop they’d recovered from the equipment Ryan left in the woods.

  On the device, Runian was writing his memoirs. She checked on his progress each day to make certain he was representing her part well. He hadn’t been able to open any of the encrypted files Ryan had left, as he didn’t know the passwords. Logna did, of course. She could steal any word. It was one of her things. One of those files was a full textual encyclopedia Ryan had downloaded before going on his mission. No big deal. It was only the sum total of human knowledge in his realm.

  She formed herself a body—a slender young man, this time—and settled back with the laptop. She could vaguely remember a time before… Coming to this land from deep, deep, deep beyond. From the depths of distant places—other beyonds, other times, other realities. Swimming upstream as far as they could go, to this place. But then, a wall of pain. They could go no farther.

  At least, so far as any of them knew.

  She opened the locked files, wincing as the touch of the machine burned her fingertips. She pressed on, however, and picked up reading where she’d stopped the night before.

  In a section titled “Dimensional Portals: Mechanical Schematics and Repairs.”

  The End

  POSTSCRIPT

  So where on earth did this book come from?

  This is the odd man out in the group of secret projects I wrote in 2020 and 2021. It’s not in the Cosmere, it’s in first person, and it’s more science fiction than fantasy.

  I can trace the original idea back to a story I told myself at night sometime in 2019. You see, as I’m going to bed each night, I tend to imagine a story. Like telling myself a bedtime story. This is how my brain works. If I close my eyes, movies start playing. The one I told myself then wasn’t what you’re holding—but it was similar. It was the story of someone on a game show where you go back in time and try to stop the Titanic from sinking.

  I kind of loved the idea, particularly since I hit on the concept of an alternate dimension rather than actual time travel. This let me play with how going “back in time” wouldn’t change the future, and how you could actually have a game show that did this—even with multiple seasons and different groups of contestants. That spun me onto the idea of purchasing an alternate dimension.

  The fake author of the book, Cecil G. Bagsworth III, is a character that has shown up before in books I’ve written. (He’s the in-world editor of the Alcatraz series.) He’s shared by me and my friend Dan Wells, as we dreamed him up back in college: an interdimensional adventurer and writer. Like Indiana Jones if he worked in publishing instead of archaeology. He looks, by pure coincidence, exactly like my brother Jordan. (Jordan is now officially a professional model: We licensed his likeness for the picture of Cecil in the book.) As I first started noodling on the idea of writing this book, it involved Cecil in some capacity.

  Back in the early 2010s, I’d actually come up with a cool-sounding title: The Frugal Wizard’s Guide to London. It felt a tad too Harry Potter, so I shelved it, but as I started getting serious about this book I realized having inserts from the guide would be a fun way to do worldbuilding and insert some levity into what could be a dreary story if handled differently.

  I changed it from the Titanic because I felt that was, first, a little overplayed, and second, a historical event I don’t actually know that much about. Since these secret projects were primarily written for me and my wife, I wanted to have fun with them—and I’m a big fan of Anglo-Saxon England. (It’s a mark of pride to me that Michael Livingston, my historical expert, didn’t have to change too much to get me straight on a lot of the facts. The ones I didn’t make up, that is.)

  The last piece to fall into place was making this what I call a white-room story, where a character wakes up with no memory and has to figure out who they are along with the reader. I’ve never done one of these in novel form, and I’ve always wanted to, ever since I read The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum long, long ago. (Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir is another excellent example of this trope done brilliantly—and it certainly had an influence on my decision to use the concept in this book.)

  All of that together, stirred up in a pot, became the book you’ve just read!

  Brandon Sanderson

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Brandon Sanderson grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. He lives in Utah with his wife and children and teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University. In addition to completing Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, he is the author of such bestsellers as the Mistborn saga, Warbreaker‚ the Stormlight Archive series beginning with The Way of Kings, The Rithmatist, the Skyward series, the Reckoners series beginning with Steelheart, and the Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians series. He won the Hugo Award for The Emperor’s Soul, a novella set in the world of his acclaimed first novel‚ Elantris. For behind-the-scenes information on all his books, visit brandonsanderson.com.

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Steve Argyle is an artist whose work is found in film, video games, books, card games, and more—anywhere awesome things are brought to life. Steve encourages everyone to actively create, and he espouses the philosophy that art makes life better. He and his wife are frequently seen in the wild, traveling together for events and adventure.

  ALSO BY BRANDON SANDERSON

  WORLDS OF THE COSMERE®

  * items with an asterisk are contained in Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere Collection.

  SEL

  Elantris

  The Emperor’s Soul *

  The Hope of Elantris *

  SCADRIAL

  The Mistborn® Saga

  The Eleventh Metal *

  The Original Trilogy

  Mistborn: The Final Empire

  The Well of Ascension

  The Hero of Ages

  Mistborn: Secret History *

  The Wax and Wayne Series

  The Alloy of Law

  Shadows of Self

  The Bands of Mourning

  The Lost Metal

  Allomancer Jak and the Pits of Eltania *

  NALTHIS

  Warbreaker

  TALDAIN

  White Sand

  THRENODY

  Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell *

  FIRST OF THE SUN

  Sixth of the Dusk *

  ROSHAR

  The Stormlight Archive®

  The Way of Kings

  Words of Radiance

  Oathbringer

  Rhythm of War