The Ochre Carpet of the Throne

Eloy bolted up the stairs before the second jolt could throw him flat against the steps.

The rigid plastic of the chainmail battered his flanks with every stride, a harsh and dry friction that gave no quarter against the fabric of his T-shirt. On the landing of the upper floor, the air changed abruptly: a lukewarm gust carrying that unmistakable cheap chemical stench of bargain flea shampoo mixed with the reek of an overheating motherboard. It smelled of a blown transistor, of afternoons locked in the bedroom, and of a soaked dog drying itself against the radiator.

As he rounded the final corner, his feet skidded.

"Brake, you knucklehead!" roared Grandma Consuelo.

The old woman appeared out of nowhere, hovering on her wooden stool with her knitting needles frozen in mid-air. With a metallic chime, a pale blue band covered Eloy's field of vision, freezing dead in their tracks the motes of dust and gray fragments falling from the ceiling.

"Have you even looked at how your laces are?" she snapped at him, pointing at his left sneaker with the sharp tip of a knitting needle. "You're going to break your neck before the chore even starts. Imagine if your mother saw you walking into places like this..."

Eloy planted his knee on the polygonal floor, puffed out a breath, and yanked at the frayed slipknot until he tightened it with anger. He shoved his hand into his jacket pocket looking for some air, but only brushed against three wafer cookies turned into sawdust and lint.

"It's fine, Grandma. Ready. Unfreeze this, my leg is falling asleep."

"Don't come crying to me later if you get bounced back."

The blue frame vanished with a sharp hum and the world abruptly recovered its weight and volume.

In front of them opened up an immense chamber carpeted by a worn ochre rug, identical to the one that covered his parents' living room in 1999, featuring the exact same frayed edges where chair legs always got caught. At the far end, blocking a portal of white light vibrating with a dull fifty-hertz hum, stood an irregular pyramid. They weren't stones: they were hundreds of bones made of pressed leather, chewed on, slobbered over, and dried again, piled up like war trophies.

Atop the mountain, silhouetted against the pixelated glow, Cork waited.

The mixed-breed dog was the size of a robust calf. His cinnamon coat, rendered in harsh planes that fit together with visible seams, bristled along his spine while his square jaws let out a low, rhythmic growl that made the floor vibrate beneath Eloy's soles.

"Cork..." whispered the boy, taking a hesitant step forward.

[Object detected in right hand: {Pine wood sword (Level 1) - Durability: 12/12. Hit damage: 3-5. Description: Roughly sharpened branch whittled with a pocketknife during summer camp.}]

The hollow crunch of a leather bone snapping under his sole broke the rhythm.

Cork raised his pointy ears, fixed two dark eyes on him without definable pupils, and let out a bark that sounded like two sheets of iron clashing at full speed. He leaped from the top of the pile without losing his balance and landed on all fours onto the ochre rug, kicking up a cloud of dust that smelled of backyard dirt and old rain.

"He's not going to give you his paw, Eloy," Consuelo said from behind, swinging her legs over the stool without letting go of the ball of yarn. "He recognizes you, yes, but here you're an invader in cheap armor. To him, you're just a dummy that makes noise."

"He has the Penn tennis ball," Eloy replied without taking his eyes off the animal. "The screaming yellow one he lost under the woodshed the winter of the deep freezes."

"You know what you're doing with that stick. But I warn you of one thing: you can't level up by tearing apart the only thing waiting for you awake in the dimness of the hallway."

Eloy lowered the tip of the branch barely two centimeters. Among the chewed bones peeked a piece of black electrical tape stuck to a faded milk carton. A stupid leftover from when Cork used to sneak into the kitchen to steal garbage while nobody was looking, hoping someone would pretend to get mad just to chase him down the hallway with a raised sneaker.

Silence.

The dog took three sideways steps, calculating the distance. His short, docked tail lashed dryly against the air.

Eloy gripped the splintered wooden hilt. He remembered perfectly that wheezing breath in the kitchen, the walks under the drizzle when nobody else in the house wanted to hold the leash, the brush of that rough snout against the table while he finished his math homework at all hours of the dawn.

Cork flexed his hindquarters.

"Watch out for the box!" shouted Consuelo.

The animal catapulted forward like a cinnamon projectile. The air whistled in his wake. Eloy raised the sword instinctively, half-closing his eyes and waiting for the devastating impact against his chest.

But the clash never came.

Barely half a meter from the tip of the wood, the mutt's claws skidded across the ochre rug with the screech of burnt rubber. He braked dead, planted his snout against the floor and, with a clumsy and familiar movement, let his flank drop to one side until he ended up completely belly-up among the crushed bones.

Over his polygonal chest, floating in the air with an intermittent blink of critical alert, his status bar glowed in an incandescent red, empty of violence, waiting with a static tremor for a caress or the coup de grâce.

Consuelo let her hands drop into her lap and the ball of yarn rolled a couple of palms across the ochre rug until it stopped right next to one of Eloy's sneakers. The pine sword suddenly weighed twice as much, not because of game physics, but due to the absurd certainty that any clumsy decision was going to be etched into the disk forever.