"Well, that was quite the temper tantrum, wasn't it?"

I was suddenly enveloped by the most powerful sense of déjà vu I'd ever had. One moment, I was stomping through the grand finale of the Maker's self-important morality labyrinth, veins full of defiance and lungs full of big, brave rejections of my destiny. And the next… well, it seemed I was somewhere else entirely.

I was back at Halfway Hold.

Only, this wasn't the most recent version I'd been, terminally, forced to leave behind. This wasn't the abandoned husk of a cottage, stripped of all its vibrancy and left to moulder and rot. No, this was my Aunt's cottage in what I thought of its golden age. From when I was little, and with the hum of energy everywhere. Voices echoing up staircases. Doors slamming. Someone was yelling about their shoes going missing, and someone else was laughing because they'd hidden them.

And there, standing in the middle of the kitchen holding a plate of biscuits my way, was Aunt M. Like she'd never died, standing barefoot on the flagstones in her faded 'Physics Is Just Applied Curiosity'.

"Fancy a jammy dodger?" Aunt M asked.

My brain gave up, stalled and rebooted. There are only so many responses available to a person when confronted by their recently deceased loved one offering them biscuits in a version of a kitchen that no longer existed. I took one.

It felt real. Crumbly. Slightly sticky around the jam. I bit into it. It definitely tasted real.

"You should see your face," Aunt M said. "Like someone just told you Schrödinger's cat voted Leave. Come on, grab yourself a seat and I'll put the kettle on."

On autopilot, I made my way to the big oak table, the same one where she'd hosted birthdays, Christmases, and that one disastrous D&D campaign where Uncle Richard tried to seduce a dragon. Ten rough wooden chairs, all stained by decades of hurried breakfasts and midnight confessions. I touched the grain. So familiar.

"You've got the dopiest look on your face," Aunt M said, flipping the tap on."Honestly, you'd think this was your first time in a pocket dimension."

"A pocket…?"

"Yes, yes," she waved a hand. "We'll get to all that. Have another biscuit. I had to make your transfer here sharpish, and you look pale. Low blood sugar's no joke when you've been thrown through the metaphysical cheese grater. Much as I enjoy your company, lad, I don't think either of us wants you to die and be stuck here with me forever. So. Eat the biscuit. Just in case."

I took another.

Aunt M was stalking around the place like she always had. A force of nature fast enough to make you think she didn't care, but slow enough to know she did. I watched her fill the kettle and wondered, not for the first time, what rules were being bent to let the two of us be here together. The last time we'd properly met – back in Sablewyn – it had been with her giving off some real undercover squirrel vibes.

Now she was buttering toast like both of our deaths in this house were just minor details to be sorted after elevenses.

"I thought you said you weren't allowed to help me," I said.

"I'm not. I'm absolutely not. Both of my wrists, backside and sense of dignity have been royally slapped by at least twelve committees and one Phase Emperor for doing even the little I can to help you thus far. Poor Forsyth has been put on gardening leave, and even Sunbeam had to make a formal declaration of sorrow and pay a fine of his weight in weregild"

"Sunbeam?"

"Yes. Big guy. Funny accent. Gave you your morningstar. Come on, keep up, love."

Ah. The Ogrin. "And his name is 'Sunbeam?'"

"Well, no. Obviously not. Actually, probably best you don't call him that if you cross paths again. He might not find it quite so amusing coming from you." She turned and peered at me, pulled a pair of massive glasses from her apron and stared at me through them. "-3 Charisma already? Oh dear. Yes, definitely don't call him Sunbeam. Now, where was I? Oh yes. This isn't technically help. This is a tea break. Completely different category of metaphysical interference."

I looked around at this memory of Halfway Hold. If you'd told me this was the early 2000s, I would have believed you. Right down to the myriad of Robbie Williams posters covering the walls. Aunt M always did love his solo work.

"Sorry, I'm having a bit of headspin here. This is now right? I haven't, I don't know, gone back in time. I'm dead, you're dead, and the whole Guardian of the Threshold thing is still happening, right? Or is this, I don't know, maybe a dream?"

Aunt M gave me a look. "Eli. You've been shot, forcibly portalled to a new realm, trialled by a cosmic bureaucracy, and assigned a Class so unsuited to your personality it practically counts as abuse. You're talking to your dead aunt in a perfectly rendered kitchen from your childhood that you last saw three existential crises ago. And your takeaway from all this is 'maybe it's a dream?'"

"Well, I'm not ruling it out at this stage."

"Ah, Eli. Still temperamentally allergic to commitment, I see."

I wanted to laugh. I also wanted to cry. Instead, I sat and watched the steam rise from the kettle, clinging to the one place I still remembered feeling safe.

"I meant what I said to the Maker," I said. "About not wanting to do any of this anymore. About not wanting to play his game."

"I know you did, lovely. And it was a very well-delivered speech, too. Just the right amount of righteous fury, and you really leant into all that teenage angst you still have sloshing around. If I hadn't pretty much raised you myself, I'd have assumed you were channelling some particularly tormented bard."

"I wasn't performing, Aunt M. I was telling the truth."

She placed a mug in front of me. Builder's tea, white, three sugars. How I'd always taken it back then.

"But here's the thing, Eli. If you ever want to be the Guardian of the Threshold, you need to realise that everything is a performance. Just because you don't know they're watching, doesn't mean you don't have a very interested audience indeed."

I looked up at her. She smiled sadly. "In case you haven't noticed, you're not the old you anymore, Eli. And this - this little pause in proceedings for me to give you a pep-talk - is not to give you an opportunity to dodge something hard. We're doing this so I can make sure you understand what comes next."

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"Oh, I absolutely get it!" I didn't raise my voice - I never raised my voice to Aunt M - but I put a whole bunch of feeling into my words. "Both you and the Maker want me to play my part. I've got to be the Tank. Big. Loud. Visible. Responsible."

"You make it sound like a punishment."

"It certainly feels like one!"

She sat opposite me, cradling her own mug. "Okay. That's probably fair. But only because you don't really understand things yet. And that's on me. I thought I had more time to get you used to the idea. Of course, the fact I haven't so much as had a postcard from you in a decade is very much on you."

Yeah. That stung. And it deserved to. "I know. And I'm sorry for that. It's just I was involved with so many bad people… I didn't want anyone to hurt you because they wanted to get to me."

Aunt M spat out a stream of tea in a very unladylike manner, then waved a hand to make the liquid vanish in a puff of air. "Well, isn't that sweet of you! Somehow, in between crushing Veilbeasts between my thighs and playing cosmic chess with He Who Dwells, I think I probably could have handled a couple of spotty hoodlums from Watford."

Surprisingly, I didn't have much to say about that.

"Look," she said. "My plan was always to hand the reins of this over to you. I'd hoped you'd come to it naturally, but you ended up being too good at being a Rogue, didn't you? You never quite realised that being invisible only gets you so far. You see, eventually, someone has to stand in front."

"But why me?"

"I mean, mostly because I said so and, even in death, your Aunt M had plenty of pull. But also because you never let anyone take the fall for you. Because even at your worst, you always noticed when someone else was drowning. And because deep down, under all that self-deprecating nonsense and snark, you absolutely hate watching people get hurt. That's what the two of us have the most in common."

I didn't answer, and then she started reciting, the words appearing in the air between us.

"He that is down needs fear no fall, He that is low, no pride; He that is humble ever shall Have God to be his guide."

"Bunyan," I said. "You used to read that to me when I was sick."

"I did. And it wasn't to frighten you. It was to try to teach you that humble doesn't mean hidden. Sometimes the lowest place is the strongest one, because it's where you plant your feet."

I looked down at the table. The biscuit had crumbled in my hand. Somehow, I hadn't noticed.

"You're saying you want me to do this. To become the Guardian of the Threshold."

"Ha. Don't get ahead of yourself, boy. You are barely being a halfway adequate Warden right now. But what I am saying is that, by any measure, you will be able to fill that role. Self-indulgent temper tantrums in dungeons aside. And, in case it isn't abundantly clear to you yet, all of the realms need someone to step into that particular breach. You think it's bad on Earth and Bayterran? Ha! Wait until you see the shambles that's going on in the real Wild West. The Maker is chickenfeed compared to some of the real Big Bads."

I didn't reply.

"Okay. Look, this isn't a sales pitch or anything. This is me telling you it's absolutely fine that you told the Maker where to stick it. Good for you. Have a lollipop. However, this is also me telling you that sometimes you need to suck it up for the greater good. The Well of Ascension isn't my favourite dungeon, but it's a useful one for a baby Warden to run in order to work out where they stand in the grand scheme of things. You've finished it, and as a reward, you get to pick a subclass."

I started to protest, but she reached out and tapped me lightly on the nose. The way she did when I was six and had released a family of frogs in the living room. "Hush. If you're going to have any chance of surviving, you will need a subclass. What did you get offered?"

Without me doing anything, my notifications appeared above my head, and Aunt M began sorting through them. It was a rather uncomfortable experience.

"Hmmm. Okay. Yes, I can see why you weren't exactly overawed by the potential here. I tell you, I put in so many formal complaints about the naming conventions. Lodestone of Regret? I mean, who thinks of these things? Right." She dismissed the notifications and looked me hard in my eyes. "Do you trust me, Eli?"

"Of course!"

"No. I don't mean that in a 'do you love me,' kind of way. I know you do, sweet boy, and that's why I get to bring you over here to my little fragment of heaven for a chat. I mean, do you trust me? Like trust, trust me?"

I looked at the woman who had pretty much raised me. Well, this version of her, anyway. The kooky, chaotic, funny Aunt whose home had always been a refuge for me. Sure, I loved her. But did I trust her? Did I actually even know her?

"I don't know."

"Ouch. Well, I guess I asked for that, didn't I? Okay, let's try a slightly less weighty question. Do you trust me to do the best for you?"

"Yes," that one I answered without hesitation.

I got a big grin in reply. The kind that always made me nervous, some serious shenanigans were about to go down. "Excellent. Okay. So, here's how this is going to play. There are rules to this game. Tedious, complicated, and very much immutable rules. Woven straight into the substrate of Systemic causation. You completed the Well of Ascension, ergo you get to pick your subclass. That's not philosophy, that's thermodynamic inevitability. All actions must express resolution along one of the designated narrative lines, unless, of course, someone were to, I don't know, redraw the lines."

Aunt M beamed at me like this was a perfectly normal thing to say over tea and biscuits.

"In case I've not been clear on things, you're absolutely going to need a subclass. Now, there's no denying the Maker's trying to do you dirty in these options. Two of them don't even grant new Abilities, they just [Enhance] existing ones. And 'enhancement' is just a fancy word for budget cuts, and I, for one, did not spend forty years bribing Quantum Entities and proofreading Runic matrices for this sort of corner-cutting when it comes to my favourite nephew."

She stood and bustled back to the kitchen counter, rummaging through a drawer full of tangled teabags, chalk fragments, and what looked suspiciously like a Klein bottle converted into a biscuit tin.

"Now," she said, returning with her hands full of various bits and bobs and sitting down. "As I think I have made clear, I am very limited in what I can and cannot do. Even here. I am, for example, absolutely forbidden to generate any mana. Something something necro-reactivity clause, blah blah violation of entropy locks. Honestly, the System has less imagination than a lecturer in algebra during Freshers' Week."

She gave me a sly wink, the kind I remembered from childhood. Usually, it meant she'd smuggled a copy of New Scientist into the school nativity and was about to replace the Star of Bethlehem with a hand-calibrated model of Betelgeuse.

"But!" she said triumphantly. "There is absolutely nothing in the rules that says I can't have a little fiddle with existing lattice points. A twist here, a transposition there—shuffle the energetic framing just a smidge, and suddenly, well… the appeal gets maximised."

"I don't understand a single word you are saying!"

She waved the chalk around happily. "Of course not. Not yet, anyway. But don't worry. You will. Eventually. Assuming you don't die. And to avoid that happening, you will need a useful subclass!"

Then she leaned over the oak table and began to draw.

There was no dramatic chanting and no esoteric flashes of light. Just messy lines of chalk etched in slow, looping arcs across the table. Some were geometric, and some were far more abstract. Sigils bloomed across the surface like frost spreading on glass, glowing faintly. I watched in fascination and increasing concern as she murmured to herself in a mixture of Latin, Old High Runic, and what I thought might have been the lyrics to a David Bowie song.

"Annoyingly, there's going to be all sorts of power wastage here," she said, still scribbling. "Reweaving option-threads causes friction. And friction burns away potential. Think of it like trying to stabilise a collapsing probability curve using kinetic theory. So, we're going to have to make some big compromises. No more three options for you, I'm afraid. If you really want, I can, maybe, try to squeeze out two to pick from, but it'll leave things flimsy. You know, like a second-hand poncho in a hurricane."

She looked up at me, eyes gleaming behind her oversized glasses. "What's your pleasure?"

"I honestly have no idea what you're talking about."

"Keep up, Eli! I'm going to make you a new subclass, my dear!" she said, and then promptly blew on the chalk as though it were soup.

The table glowed, reality twitched, and somewhere in the background of my mind, I swear I heard a whole host of oncoming System Errors sigh.

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