In an instant everything changed, and I stumbled over smooth white ground. When I looked up there was ambient white light all around me with no obvious source, and nothing in any direction except a bearded man in jeans and a hoodie. He was looking at me expectantly. The hoodie said “Loading the Dice” and showed a disembodied hand putting a d20 into a revolver. It was a terrible pun.

  “Hey,” he said. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to meet like this.”

  I looked around for zombies, and found none. “Uh,” I said. “Am I safe right now? Is this like … a time out situation?”

  “Sure, you can think of it like that,” he said. “You won’t be going back to Comfort though.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s … kind of not a place I wanted to be going back to.” I looked around. “Is this heaven?”

  “Nah,” he said. “This is a place outside of time, just for us to talk. Look, I wasn’t supposed to show up right now, but I have to let you know: this isn’t the canon timeline.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “So it’s … the non-canon timeline? What does that mean?”

  “It means that there’s a discontinuity here,” he said. “When we’re done, you’ll be pushed ahead. Things will have happened. It won’t make any sense.”

  “Uh,” I said. “Sorry, and you are … ?”

  “I’m the Dungeon Master,” he said. “I’m the one running the show.”

  “So you decided on this … discontinuity?” I asked.

  “In a manner of speaking, yes,” he said. “I take responsibility for it, at any rate.”

  “And you’re responsible for all of this? Me being in another world?” I asked.

  “We’ll have that conversation later,” he said. “But the short answer is yes.” He clasped his hands together. “When you return to Aerb, your memory of this time will be wiped, and you’ll have new abilities, and memories of things that didn’t happen, but were supposed to have happened.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You’re going to wipe my memory?” I asked. “Then you’re going to give me memories as though I had done some things that I was supposed to do? And … everyone is going to act the same? Like we’re just skipping forward in time?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “You got it, great.”

  “But what’s the point of that?” I asked. “You’re saying that there will be some amount of time that’s skipped over, but from everyone’s perspective it’ll be like it actually happened? And I won’t even know that it’s happened?”

  “The skip will only happen from a certain perspective,” he said. “That’s what we’re here for.”

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  “That … perspective?” I asked. I looked around us. It was featureless white as far as the eye could see. On impulse I took off running, sticking my arms out in front of me just in case there was a wall I couldn’t see, but I made it a hundred feet and then started to feel more confident that we weren’t just in a small box.

  When I looked back at the Dungeon Master, he was just standing there, waiting for me. I trudged back to him, slightly out of breath.

  “Done?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Are we?”

  “Usually you have more questions,” he said. “All the questions, really.”

  “Oh,” I said. “We’ve done this before?”

  “Sort of,” he replied.

  “Then tell me … tell me what happens,” I said.

  “You won’t remember,” he replied.

  “Still, you should tell me,” I said.

  “I don’t want to spoil things,” he said. “For the outside perspective, you see.”

  I looked around again. There was no one around us. “Is this a Truman Show thing?” I asked.

  “Yes,” replied the Dungeon Master with a patronizing smile. “You got it exactly, good job.”

  “Is Cypress going to be okay?” I asked.

  “Her name is Amaryllis,” he replied.

  “It’s not what she told me,” I said, folding my arms. “So until she says otherwise, it’s Cypress. Will she be okay?”

  “I can’t say,” he replied, looking a little annoyed with me. “Some stuff happens. There are some rats in a sewer, a fight with a porcupine, a few tattoos, a dwarf, a half-elf, an encounter with a unicorn … look, if I list it out, it’s kind of a lot, but I’m not giving you the blow by blow.”

  I squinted at him. “A traditional unicorn, or one of my unicorns?” I asked.

  “Part of the fun is finding out,” he said with a smile. When I didn’t respond, he clapped his hands. “Well, I’m sending you back, you’ll be skipping over a fair chunk of time.”

  “Wait,” I said. “I have more questions.”

  “You always do,” he replied. “But sure, one more.”

  “A request, more,” I said. “I don’t want my life to be in danger when I go through the time skip.”

  “You won’t remember this,” he said. “It’ll be like it never happened.”

  “Still,” I said. “If you can, I want to be somewhere safe.”

  He gave me a brief frown. “In bed with a beautiful woman, does that work?”

  “That —” I began.

  He snapped his fingers and I disappeared.

  But he remained, and I narrated on.

  “Alright,” he said. “This is your last chance. The next chapter is chapter 43. Jumping across forty chapters and picking things up from context won’t make sense. You have to buy the book or read it on Kindle Unlimited. I cannot physically stop you from skipping ahead, but I promise the first book has a lot of great stuff in it.”

  He turned away, took a step, then turned back. “None of this is canon. This isn’t even its own continuity. So don’t expect another of these when you get to the stub for Book 2.”

  He turned away a second time, and this time disappeared after his second step, leaving only the featureless white plain, and me, the narrator.

  I tried to move my viewpoint to sync up with Juniper, or with Amaryllis, or even Fenn, though she hadn’t been introduced yet, but found that I was stuck in the null space. I was the only thing keeping it all alive, just a viewpoint, nothing more, and I felt the perverse urge to keep going, to pen the whole of Book 1 inside a notice about a stub.

  But I laid the pen down and let our non-canon announcement come to an end.